#what if i drew and wrote 1 million scenarios for them. what if

[sproutslog]

.

#sprouts log #my brain is 95% just elliott and dallas right now #and it is KILLING ME #THINKING ABOUT STARDEW VALLEY ISN'T ENOUGH I NEED CRUNCH THEM LIKE POPCORN KERNELS #what if i drew and wrote 1 million scenarios for them. what if

[shipmistress9]

FTLOAP - 42: What If We Rewrite The Stars?

Fandom: HTTYD

Theme: Hiccstrid - Medieval-style AU - Romance - Angst/Hurt/Comfort

Summary: Reduced to little more than a stable boy, Hiccup, despite his noble birth, has few prospects for more in life. But when he meets a girl who came to look at the horses, being a stable boy might not be enough anymore. Together, they have tough choices to make and great risks to navigate if they want to survive and be together.

Rating: Explicit

FF-net  -  AO3 -

Discord-server for discussions and questions

Part 1: Prologue; Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; Chapter 7; Chapter 8; Chapter 9; Chapter 10; Chapter 11;

Part 2: Chapter 12; Chapter 13; Chapter 14; Interlude 1; Chapter 15; Chapter 16; Chapter 17; Chapter 18; Chapter 19; Chapter 20; Chapter 21; Chapter 22; Chapter 23; Chapter 24; Chapter 25; Chapter 26; Interlude 2; Chapter 27: Chapter 28 ; Chapter 29 ; Chapter 30; Chapter 31; Chapter 32; Interlude 3; Bonus 1; Chapter 33

Part 3: Chapter 34; Chapter 35; Chapter 36; Interlude 4; Chapter 37; Chapter 38; Chapter 39; Chapter 40; Interlude 5; Chapter 41

Alpha/Co-author: @athingofvikings

. – * – _ . o O o . _ – * – .

AN: Urgh... I don't know what to think of this chapter. I really wrote a lot in these past two weeks, but barely anything for this story. In times, the words simply flowed down into the document - but only when I wrote something else. On this story, I was entirely blocked. According to my plan, there'd been supposed to be at least twice as much plot in this chapter, maybe even more. Ah, well, but it looks like there might be a few shorter chapters to come instead. *sigh*

Anyway, thanks to the changed content of this chapter, I also had to change the title, since the one I had planned in for such a long time only fits the next part. Thankfully, someone recommended 'Rewrite The Stars' by Zac Efron and Zendaya from the movie Greatest Showman to me a while ago. That song fits these last few chapters perfectly, and I think this quote fits this chapter quite well, too.

. o O o .

Hiccup hoped with all his heart that he wasn’t dreaming again. Her lips were moving with his, he could taste her on his tongue, and he could clearly feel her soft and warm body safely encased in his arms – but it still felt too good to be true. 

He’d been so sure that Astrid’s choice at the ball would seal their fate. Markor’s death had confirmed that he’d really seen a vision and had talked to a Goddess instead of only having made it all up. But to be certain that She had meant more than just holding Astrid during the ride back, Hiccup had thought that Astrid would have to ask him for her dance instead of Eret. Otherwise, the social pressure on her to stick to her choice and not switch to an impecunious squire would have been too great – or so he’d told himself. And for those few moments, when she’d slowly walked through the ballroom with her eyes fixed on his and their bond thrumming like a thousand drums, he’d believed she actually would choose him. For that handful of breaths, all the pain and longing and desperation of the previous weeks had vanished at the prospect of their dream coming true, of them dancing together in front of everyone, not caring what anyone else might think. For that short time, he’d hoped! 

But then she’d turned toward Eret after all, away from him, and everything around Hiccup had fallen apart. She’d made her choice and it wasn’t him. He barely remembered how he’d made it out of the ballroom and into the dark night. Everything had hurt – be it brushing against another guest, his stumbling steps over uneven ground, or even the air itself. It had all hurt like a million shards of glass cutting into his mind, his flesh, his soul. 

At that moment, dying hadn’t felt like such a bad option.

But then she’d suddenly been there. He’d felt her approach, and the sight of her, her closeness, her voice, and her words and promises had been like sweet honey on his hurting soul, and now, everything was perfect again. She was in his arms, and her hand on his skin and her lips against his were all the reassurance he needed. Hot tears of pure relief ran down his cheeks; he hadn’t thought to ever kiss her again, much less hold her with the assurance that nothing could come between them again. He wanted this moment to never end...

Of course, it felt like a dream. But it was one he intended to hold on to with everything he had. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t let go of her again.

“Well, fuck me slowly with Heimdall's mighty horn!” came like a thunderbolt, for all that it was hissed through clenched teeth.

The words cut into their blissful bubble like a knife. Hiccup was reluctant to separate from Astrid and he sensed that she felt the same, but the magic of the moment was gone. She whimpered as he drew back, quietly, barely more than a vibration rippling through her, and buried her face against his chest, unwilling to face their intruders. Despite their silent agreement to not hide but to fight this time, she was still afraid – and Hiccup couldn’t even blame her. All those months of secrecy and hiding had left their mark, and it wouldn’t go away in the blink of an eye. A spark of that fear rose inside him, too, but he forced himself to ignore it as he looked up, stern determination in his eyes as he faced the newcomers. He was ready to fight for her, ready to do whatever it would take. Nobody would be able to separate them again, not after what they’ve been through. If the last two weeks had taught him one thing, then it was that a life without her wasn’t worth it.

When he looked up, his eyes directly landed on Eret, who was at the front of the small group at the edge of the small clearing. For once, though, Hiccup couldn’t pay him the respect he deserved as his knight. This was not about who was the knight and who was the squire. This was about something so much more important, and Hiccup didn’t budge or cower, didn’t avert his eyes and bowed but instead met his cousin’s gaze straight on. However, the expression on Eret’s face didn’t tell him anything. He was calm as he took in what he saw, the woman who’d been meant to become his wife in the arms of his squire, his cousin, his friend. Hiccup had expected – no, feared there would be disappointment, hurt, and anger. But if Eret felt any of that, then he didn’t show it. 

Briefly, Hiccup’s eyes flickered to those standing behind Eret – Dagur, whose disbelieving curse had interrupted them and who now stared at them with his mouth open and his eyes wide, and both of Astrid’s servants – but they didn’t really matter. Right now, everything depended on how Eret would react. Deep inside, Hiccup hoped that what he’d believed before Astrid’s birthday was still true; that Eret wouldn’t mind, would maybe even support them in some way. But since then, many things had changed, especially Eret’s relationship to his little sister, and he had every right to be furious, to demand their separation. Hiccup and Astrid might be ready to stand up for their feelings for each other… but that didn’t change that things would become very difficult if a ducal heir would be their opponent. 

For some endless seconds, their gazes were locked. Hiccup’s arms around Astrid trembled and he swallowed as one scenario after the other flickered through his mind; everything from having to fight his cousin right here and now to getting thrown into the royal dungeon for his boldness within a matter of minutes.

But then, Eret closed his eyes and, letting out a deep sigh, slowly shook his head. “You two,” he snorted into the silence that encircled them all, “are unbelievable, do you know that?”

At first, his words made no sense to Hiccup, and it took for Eret’s face to twitch into something of a soft grimace before their meaning sank in. 

And even then, Dagur was the first to react. “You knew?!” he sputtered, his head whipping from Hiccup and Astrid to Eret and back again at an almost comical speed. “Bu-but I thought he… he said… in that tavern! And...  all this time, you–”

“Oh, be quiet!” Astrid’s warder, Tuff, hissed as he threw up his arms in exasperation. “Or do you want to draw even more attention? It’s bad enough already as it is...”

“And you knew too?” Dagur went on, though in a quieter hissing voice now as he turned to look at the twins in disbelieve. They both gave identical shrugs and nods, and Dagur groaned. “Great! So I was the only stupid one around here?”

“Isn’t that how it always is?” Tuff threw back, a mischievous grin on his face.

But their bantering got lost in the background as Ruff pushed past them. Her eyes were firmly locked onto Astrid’s back who still wouldn’t look at anyone. Hiccup wished he could shield her from all that seemed to trouble her, but he knew that, right now, he was powerless. All these people knew each other since childhood, with only him being the odd one out. Whatever happened now, he could only watch, could only try to support Astrid in case it came to some form of fight between her and those she considered her closest friends. All he could do was keep his arms tight around Astrid’s trembling shoulders, assuring her that he was here with her.

“I’m sorry, milady,” Ruff sighed. “We couldn’t keep them out any longer. And the doors to the garden stood still open, so…” she trailed off, shrugging. 

Finally, Astrid stirred. She stayed as close to Hiccup as she could, but still turned her head until she could look at the others. “It’s all right, Ruff. I don’t blame you,” she whispered in a brittle voice.

Then her head turned a little more. It was clear that she was looking at Eret now, and Hiccup followed her eyes, still unsure of what to expect from his cousin. Was he angry? Disappointed? Hiccup wouldn’t even blame him… Up until about an hour ago, there had been no doubt as to who the Princess would choose as her husband, after all…

"Did you really know?" Astrid asked in a small voice, and Hiccup could feel how much she trembled. She'd been close to blacking out earlier, and all this had to be tough on her. Almost without thinking about it, his hands shifted, less holding her tight but more supporting her weight in case she needed it. His gaze stayed on Eret though, anxiously waiting for his reaction.

However, Eret's expression was unreadable as his eyes roamed from one to the other. It probably only took him a few seconds before he replied, but those seemed to stretch out forever. Then he closed his eyes and sighed. "No, I didn't know," he emphasised in a quiet voice. "I didn't want to. If I'd known about the looks you shared whenever you thought nobody was looking or how you’d make out whenever you got the chance, then I'd have been forced to lie to my best friend and future king whenever I looked him in the eye." He sighed again and shook his head. "But seriously, if it was your intention to keep what’s between you a secret, then you did a horrible job!"

In Hiccup’s arms, Astrid was trembling even harder. Hiccup felt the same, little shockwaves running through his body as the meaning of what Eret just said sank in. They’d thought they’d been so careful… 

“And-and you never said anything?” 

Eret’s expression turned sad. “And end up being torn between my loyalty toward you, my best friend and little sister, or Daniel, also my friend and future liege?” He shook his head, even as his lips twitched into something of a smile. “I’d thought about it,” he eventually added in a low voice. “And I tried… You know… Ever since the… the incident with Harold, I had my suspicions. And even though I didn’t want to know the truth, I was still searching for some form of… of confirmation, I guess. But every time I tried to probe for a reaction, carefully, either of you warded off my approach with some excuse or other. I have to grant you that, every time I thought to be sure, you managed to throw me off just enough so that I had doubts again. Every now and then, I also thought about simply confronting you directly, to stop all the hiding. But you apparently wanted to keep this secret, and I… well, after you’ve kept our secret for over two years now, I thought it was only fair to respect your secret as well.” 

Astrid’s head dropped, though whether it was some kind of nod or simply in defeat, Hiccup couldn’t tell. A moment later, she looked up again though, and her hands on his chest tightened into fists, clinging to his tunic. “And what about these last two weeks?” she asked, her voice close to breaking. 

Hiccup still felt unable to contribute anything to the conversation, but he had to admit that this was a valid question. If Eret had, well, not known but highly suspected there was more between him and Astrid… why hadn’t he said something then? Why had he let her favour him?

Eret’s expression turned pained. “After your birthday…” he whispered, “it was just the same. I saw that something was wrong with you, and understandably so. But I couldn’t be sure, didn’t know what was up, whether you had a fight or whether it was something else… Again, I tried to get a reaction, just anything that would help me understand. But you wouldn’t talk to me, just warded off my questions all over again. And when I tried to get some reaction from Hiccup, he even encouraged me to…” He shook his head. “I wanted to help you, but I just didn’t know how to do that, what exactly had happened between you two, whether you’d even want me to know, and...” He paused and threw his hands up in a helpless gesture, the pain on his face getting even more intense before he added, “I’m sorry!” 

Hiccup listened to his cousin’s words with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was still anxious and overwhelmed by the fact that so many people now seemed to know about them – and apparently had for quite a while. But on the other hand, he also felt a weird mix of relief and anger. Relief that they didn’t need to hide that desperately any more... but also the anger about how much pain both him and Astrid could have been spared if only Eret had said something! 

However, it only took one look into Astrid’s eyes as she turned to him again for this anger to evaporate. In a way, they both had needed this pain to understand, to see clearly that living apart wasn’t an option, no matter the circumstances. And in the end, it was Eret who’d lost… Hiccup could see it in the reassurance that sparkled in Astrid’s eyes, felt it in how her hand pressed harder against his chest for a moment before she wriggled out of his embrace to make a step toward her brother. She’d made her choice and that meant that she would have to hurt Eret.  

“I’m sorry, too,” she said in a weak voice. “But… but I can’t become your wife. A part of me wants to. I want to help you out of this awful situation you’re in. I want to help you both at once. But this, I can’t do.” She paused, taking a deep breath, then gasped, “I love him!”

Hiccup’s heart swelled at her words. She’d said it before already, to him, but this was different. This was what he’d dreamed of ever since he’d discovered that she was the Princess. It was openly declaring their feelings for each other, in front of witnesses and without holding back. And I love her too, more than anything, more than my own life, he added mentally, but didn’t dare to interrupt them.

When he looked up at Eret again, the sadness from before was almost entirely gone though. Instead, he smiled, his eyes warm as he held his arms open, inviting her into a hug. 

“I know,” he murmured, barely audible, after his arms had closed around her. “And Swanja... I’m not mad. Do you remember the day we talked? Down at the lake? I meant every word I said, that day and on every other day. I’d be happy and proud to call you my wife and I do believe that a life on our stud farm would suit you. But I also want you to be happy. I told you that, if you have someone you want to choose for yourself, then do so. And…” he trailed off, shared a quick glance with Dagur, and then added, “And there’s something else I also meant when I said it. If you have a problem, you only need to say it, and we'll help you, whatever it is.”

Eret’s words had touched Hiccup, had made him feel stupid and grateful at the same time. Of course, her brothers valued Astrid’s happiness, he shouldn’t have doubted them. It took a few heartbeats before the last words fully sank in though, and when they did, they left him stunned. It was one thing to accept her choice and, hopefully, to not out them publicly. Eloping, their last resort if they wouldn’t be able to find another way, would become impossible if everyone knew about them. But Eret – and Dagur, if Hiccup had interpreted that look correctly – appeared to be willing to do so much more, to even help and support them in finding a solution. Maybe – just maybe! – they actually had a chance…

In Eret’s arms, Astrid began to cry, quietly and with tremors shaking her body, but for once, Hiccup didn’t feel the urge to go and comfort her himself. He’d thought that seeing them like this again would hurt as it had before, but it didn’t. Not with the reassurance of the past half hour. It was only Eret comforting his adopted sister – and if he was honest with himself then it had never been anything else anyway. A soft smile tugged at Hiccup’s lips as he watched them now, and he couldn’t help the warmth spreading through him at the sight in front of him. Eret cooed and murmured into her hair and rubbed her arms and back until she calmed down again. A faint memory rose to Hiccup’s mind, about how she’d once told him how she had nobody she could fully trust, how she was alone when it came to her innermost problems, and how liberating it was for her to have found him. But she’d been wrong. She’d never been alone, had always been protected and cared for. 

For a minute or three, they were all silent save for Astrid’s servants murmuring in the background. Dagur had stepped closer, but, to Hiccup’s surprise, he hadn’t said anything yet. However, his hand on Astrid’s shoulder offering comfort and support said enough. Everything Eret had said was true for him, too, apparently. And when Eret eventually lifted his head to look at Hiccup standing a few steps away, he understood that this support wasn’t just aimed at their sister. Eret’s eyes were soft, his smile warm and true as he nodded at him, including him as well. 

It didn’t need any other form of communication then, Hiccup stepping closer just as Eret loosened and dropped his arms. Astrid threw one last grateful smile up at Eret before she returned to Hiccup. To never leave him again. 

Hiccup couldn’t really help himself then; holding her close and feeling her hand directly land over his heart again felt good, but it wasn’t enough. His hands curled around her face, her neck, and he pulled her into a kiss instead. When she was surprised, she caught herself before he noticed, melting into him, humming and smiling against his lips. It wasn’t the most passionate kiss they’d ever shared, just soft lips sliding and tugging at each other. But that didn’t demean the sense of liberty that overcame Hiccup. As simple and easy and playful as this kiss was, it still held so much more meaning, and it was overwhelming. Because they didn’t need to hide anymore, at least not from everyone. Among this group of friends, they could stop pretending, stop lying.

“Okay, but what are we supposed to do now?”

At Tuff’s sudden question, Hiccup and Astrid parted, ruefully, and everybody turned to questioningly look at the lanky man. His eyes wandered from one to the other, before he shrugged. “What?” he asked, defensively. “We can’t stay out here forever. Sooner or later someone will notice Astrid isn’t resting in that room anymore. So what’s supposed to happen now? Are you just going to go back and announce that you changed your mind?”

“Duh, of course not!” Ruff exclaimed and even swatted the back of her brother's head with her hand. “If that was possible, all this drama wouldn’t have been necessary. He’s not eligible, and you know that perfectly well.” 

“Well, yes, I do,” Tuff grumbled and rubbed his head. “And you know I wasn’t serious. But my question still stands. What do we do now?”

The short exchange pulled Hiccup out of his emotional high and back into reality. Sure, it was good to know that they weren’t alone, that they had support, but what was that worth? Not even Eret and Dagur were able to elevate him to a rank that made openly courting Astrid possible. Their situation was just as hopeless as it had been before. Nothing had changed...

After a short pause, Eret sighed. “I’d say that, for now, we should continue as planned, at least act as if nothing had changed.” He raised a hand to ward off any protest before it could come up. “I’m not suggesting to go through with the betrothal and the wedding in case we can’t find a solution. Honestly, I… I know you two well enough to have an idea of what you’re planning. But maybe we can find another solution, something that won’t leave a mess in its wake. As for now though, just consider one thing: men have already been maimed and died in this competition. My rank keeps me safe from open assassination attempts, but if anyone, and you all know who I mean, even so much as suspects Astrid might prefer a certain squire, then I’m not sure we’d be able to keep Hiccup safe.”

Hiccup’s heart sank at those blunt words, and he could feel how a shudder ran through Astrid’s body. From the corner of his eye, he saw how she paled, her hand clenching in his tunic again.  As much as they might prefer it otherwise, Eret was right; keeping up at least the appearance of her going to marry Eret would be the wisest thing to do for now. So Hiccup nodded when Eret’s eyes met his, agreeing if reluctantly.

“And you know I hate to admit this,” came Dagur’s voice, drawing everyone’s attention. “But I think Timothy was right.” They all looked at him. “Time’s a wasting. Get back inside posthaste or try explaining that,” he motioned with his chin towards Hiccup and Astrid holding each other, “to a patrolling guardsman. Or worse.”

Astrid’s shoulders slumped, but she nodded. “Yes, we should go back,” she whispered, hesitantly. “But… but can we meet again soon? To talk, to find a solution? Please?” Her hand in his tunic tightened even further, and Hiccup raised his hand to place it over hers, to rub her arm until she relaxed again. The look in her eyes as she gazed up at him told him enough about how she felt; anxious and unwilling to let go of him so soon. He couldn’t even blame her, but the others were right. Staying here wouldn’t get them anywhere. 

“Maybe…during the hunt in a couple of days?” he suggested. “I don’t think we’ll get the chance to talk unobserved during the tournament tomorrow and the day after. But during the hunt, we can sneak away and meet somewhere else; the stables, for example, o-or somewhere else,” he added hastily when something like a small whimper escaped Astrid. He wanted to kick himself; of course, mentioning the stables wasn’t a good idea, not after what had happened this morning. But he couldn’t take his words back anymore and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t come up with something–

“Tonight,” Eret threw in, distracting Hiccup from his thoughts. “After the ball has ended. It will be late and everybody will be too tired to care much. Rachel, do you think you can smuggle her over into my rooms without anybody noticing? There, we could talk freely.”

Hiccup’s heart began to race and he could tell that Astrid faired little better. This was better than everything he could have hoped for. Maybe, they would already find a solution tonight.

Ruff snorted and rolled her eyes. “Given that she managed to sneak out of the castle and to the stables all on her own and pretty much every night without anyone noticing… Yeah, I’d say that won’t be a problem,” she said sarcastically. 

Apparently, this was news to Eret as well – the looks on his and Dagur’s faces were priceless.

. o O o .

As they approached the castle again, Astrid was reminded of the fact that she would have to let go of Hiccup’s hand eventually. She didn’t want to, wanted to stay close to him for the rest of her life, wanted to never be separated from him again. 

But, of course, that wasn’t possible. Eret was right after all; it was bad enough that she’d put a target on his back by choosing him over her other suitors. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if Hiccup got the same attention now. 

No, all she could do as they were back in the room she’d been resting in earlier was squeeze his hand and throw him one last smile before letting go and winding her arm through Eret’s instead. He must have felt her discomfort though, because as they walked back to the busy ballroom, Hiccup, Dagur, and the others a few steps behind them, he leaned toward her and whispered, “Don’t worry, Swanja. I promise we’ll find a way out of this.“

Astrid had no idea how he wanted to pull that off, but she believed him at least so far that he would do his best to help. Maybe he’d even cover for them in case of their last resort. And even though they still had no solution, she felt lighter now. So much had changed over this past hour. She was sure of Hiccup’s and her own feelings again, was sure of their future. And the fact that she didn’t need to hide anything from Eret anymore, that he knew and was even willing to support them, to play his part to keep her soulmate safe... She would never be able to express just how relieved and how grateful she was to him. Lying to him over all this time felt so trite and stupid now, and she just hoped that there would be a way to somehow make it up to him one day. 

The rest of the ball passed surprisingly fast and ended with Astrid in a much better mood than she’d ever thought she’d be. Repeating her official dance with Eret was light and fun, just like dancing with him used to be before all this madness had started. They were back to being best friends, close as siblings, and she hadn’t known how much she’d missed this easiness until she rediscovered it now. 

She found herself beaming up at him as they whirled through the room, laughing and enjoying herself. Every now and then, her eyes flickered to where Hiccup stood, and the spark in his eyes told her all she needed to know. Earlier, he’d said that watching her with Eret had pained him, but it was clear that that wasn’t the case anymore. Everything was different now. Better. 

“That’s it, the Swanja I want to see. I missed her,” Eret whispered once the music died down, and he leaned in to place a soft kiss on her forehead that made her giggle.

A sigh went through the watching crowd at the tender gesture even though they thoroughly drew the wrong assumptions from it. But Astrid happily let them believe what they wanted to believe. It didn’t matter as long as everyone who did matter knew the truth. She smiled up at him again, trying to express all her gratitude and love for her friend, before they parted and the ball continued as it had before. 

She danced with Dagur next, and he too reassured her that they would support her and how happy he was to see her smile again. He also managed to make her – and part of the watching crowd she guessed – laugh when he made a show of not letting go of her again. Gods, it was so liberating to fool around like this again, to have her brothers back and to have fun without caring what other people might think of them. 

She danced with many other men as it was the custom, men whose names she barely remembered. But where on the days before she’d dreaded this idea, it now barely bothered her. Some of them were nervous and excited, some stiff in their attempt to make an impression on her. She wondered whether these men really still held some hope now, or whether it was their fathers pushing them. Either way, she felt pity for them where before she’d hated every single one of them. Most of these boys – because some of them were barely old enough to be called more than that – probably had gotten thrown into this just as unwillingly as she had and she made an attempt to turn their dances into something enjoyable. She was just too happy to let anyone else mope around. 

Eventually, she danced with Snot, and while the thought had made her uncomfortable at first, she soon realised that there seemed to be no reason for that anymore. 

“I congratulate you for the choice you made,” he murmured into her ear at a quieter part of the music. “I think it’s a good one, no matter how much my old man might object.” 

His words surprised her, and she didn’t know what to reply except a simple “Thanks.” These past weeks of incessant flirting on his part had alienated him to her, and Astrid wasn’t ready to forgive and forget it yet. But even though she still felt tense in his arms, certainly not as comfortable as in Dagur’s or even with all those other strangers, she had to admit to herself that dancing with him now at least felt a little more like it used to. 

At some point though, she even was made to dance with Thuggory, and no matter how good she felt, this did make her uncomfortable. She didn’t want his hands on her waist, didn’t want to be this close to him, ever. But she would endure it, there was no other way anyway. And there was even some fun in it for her too, if only in knowing that all his vague threats were in vain.

“You’re going to regret choosing that horse-crazy idiot,” he sneered, his breath on her skin making her shudder. “You’ll see.”

But Astrid wasn’t feeling like giving in or even just ignoring him today. “I doubt that,” she replied with a sweet smile. “On the contrary, I’m certain that the choice I made today was the best of my life.” He couldn’t know that she wasn’t talking about Eret but instead about going after Hiccup, but that only made her rejoice even more. Thuggory was nothing but a toothless dog, barking and annoying, but unable to actually do anything. 

At her words, his eyes contracted into slits, his sneer turning even more menacing. “We’ll see, Princess. We’ll see.”

But not even that was enough to darken Astrid mood tonight.

 . o O o .

So, that was that...

I can't say that I'm happy with how this chapter turned out. Not that I don't like this scene, but it feels incomplete without the one that's now going to come in the next chapter. Like, the rest of the ball had been meant to be a bridge between the two main scenes... Writer's block is so annoying!

Anyway, I hope some people are calmer and more relaxed now, nothing bad will happen right away. ;)

#FTLOAP #For The Love Of A Princess #Hiccstrid #Hiccup and Astrid #hiccstrid royal au #royalty au #Hiccstrid Medieval AU #medieval au #fanfiction #romance #hiccstrid fanfiction #httyd #httyd fanfiction

[anuschkalova]

Toxic. (Newt x Reader) PART 2

A/N: Okay, so I originally planned this story to be a 2-part-series. But things changed! I wrote so much that there will be a Part 3... I hope you don’t mind as there will be more to read. First I thought of ending the story here, but then my conscience wouldn’t let me. So, I hope you enjoy Part 2 and thanks to everybody for the kind feedback! 💜 Pairing: Newt Scamander x Reader

Words: 2.173 ➡️Part 1 of Toxic HERE ➡️Masterlist

24th  February, 1927 You loved traveling. There was so much to discover - the streets, the culture, the food and the people. You let yourself embrace by the countries' energy and every time you did it made your skin tingle and your stomach twist in excitement, which was a good feeling.Therefore you also loved packing for those journeys. The more your suitcase filled up the bigger your anticipation got. 

But not this time. 

The tingle on your skin, caused by the dry tear-stains on your cheeks, was repeatedly interrupted. Hot tears ran over the dried paths and reached your trembling lips where you could taste the saltiness. However, it didn't slow you down, not even your blurred view, far from it. Quick and carelessly - that’s how you stuffed your belongings into your brown leather suitcase. It matched Newt's one as it had been a gift. It was slightly bigger, because after all it was just an ordinary case with no magical extra room. He gave it to you shortly before one of your  trips to Brazil. The memory made your stomach twist, so much that you actually felt sick. A shaky sigh escaped your lips as you closed the lit. 

“Please leave.”

Newt's words ghosted in your mind, over and over. You let your gaze wander around the room for one last time. The interior was cosy and you could feel both Queenie's and Tina's presence through it. The Goldstein sisters had welcomed you so warmly, it was impossible not to love them. Tina would often show you around the magical parts of New York – all the hidden allies that were revealed by self-moving heavy bricks. It blew your mind every time and left you paralyzed with big eyes. Queenie on the other hand spent most of her time impressing you with her cooking skills. She elegantly swayed her wand in the air - making bowls, apples, flour and eggs fly effortlessly around you two. Soon, the tempting and warm fresh smell of her famous apple-pie would fill the apartment and you stared in awe at Newt who lit up the candles. You felt blessed and thankful at the same time. It was him who showed you this new world, who let you in. He had trusted you in every way, had opened his heart and mind for you.

And now you were locked out of everything. Out of this magical world. Out of his mind. Out of his heart.  Because of another woman. Another love that was long ago, but not forgotten.  

You took your case and a square box that was wrapped in a glossy blue paper. A grey bow was placed on the middle and held a tiny notice. For Newt, from Y/N. You remembered feeling proud when you had found this gift with Queenie just two days ago. Two days. Horrific how things can change in the blink of an eye.You slowly opened the door and the unavoidable squeak made you cringe. 

The living-room was still dark as the morning-sun was still low. The unlit candles on the birthday-cake left a bitter after taste as they won’t get the chance to illuminate the birthday boy’s face. The only source of light was the open fire. The flickering flames let Newt's shadow dance on the wall next to you while he sat completely still in front of it. He was bent over with his elbows on each knee, his posture limp. You sniffed quietly and saw the man flinching slightly – he hadn't noticed you coming in. It didn't surprise you though. Newt had been always a deep thinker.  He moved his head a little and you stood there expectantly, but he stopped mid-track to avoid possible eye-contact. He seemed to wait for your words. There were so many questions swirling inside your head, so many emotions mixing that threw your inner world into a turmoil. But among this dark chaos, there was one question that was bright as daylight. 

“Do you love her?” Your own voice sounded foreign to you. Like your ears refused to believe that it was you who asked Newt this question. 

The wizard kept silent, a rustling sound drew your attention to the letter he held in one hand. Leta's letter. He had read it.  The sick feeling returned immediately and you pressed your lips into a thin line.Then, Newt finally turned around to meet your eyes. It was like you stood in front of a mirror: his puffy red eyes glistened in the flickering fire and you suppressed upcoming tears, swallowing them down. Newt did the same. 

“I used to...”, he whispered and broke the eye-contact when he spotted the hurt in your eyes. Again, silence dominated and turned seconds into minutes. 

“She... Leta”, Newt began, “... and I were close. She helped a lot and understood me. There was a time I would have done anything for her... I have.”

You stepped closer, brows furrowed.

“You never told me about her.”

“There wasn’t situations that called for that.”

The fire got bigger for a split second and hissed like a snake. Your soul ached for Newt's touch, wished for his arms wrapping around your body, holding you tight. There was a time, not long ago, where you two were close. 

“I love you, Newt...”, you said, pressing your hand against your mouth to muffle your sudden sobs. Newt let out a shaky breath and then he stood in front of you, his hands firmly holding your upper arms. His eyes were so sad and it broke your heart even more. It also broke any reservation you had, so the words poured out with innocent force…

“I-I'm so sorry Newt! I didn't mean to read the letter... but... but... when I saw it I knew it must be the woman on the photography and I was so scared... I needed to know and believe me, I regret it! I am truly so sorry!”

You were about to say more, but Newt cut you off by raising his hand. He was clearly confused, as if he had just woken up from a dream and found himself in the real world, not knowing how he got in this room. His eyes darkened and darted rhythmically  when suddenly realization jumped in view with such intensity and clarity. Your whole body stiffened, every muscle turned into stone and just one word, one single word from his lips could break you into million tiny pieces. 

„You pried into my private stuff?“ The betrayal in his voice was unnoticeable. 

„I… No, I mean… I did it by accident.“ All of a sudden, Newt stood far away from you. He watched you from the corner of his eyes and it stung your heart. Did your actions make you too disgusting to look at?

„I was afraid! What would you think if you’d found another man’s photo in my room?“, you explained yourself desperately, „And then see a letter of them. You would have done the sa-.“

„I…-!“, Newt’s loud and firm voice startled you, as well as the wizard himself. His short outburst caught him off guard and he tried to blink his anger away. Something he tend to do in uncomfortable situations. 

„I…“, he repeated in a forceful calm voice,“… would have asked you instead of assuming things and betray your trust.“

„Trust…“, you said with such bitterness that Newt carefully got a glimpse of your shaky figure through his messy fringe. „So this is all about trust. Fine. I betrayed your trust, I admit that. But you betrayed my trust as well, Newt!“ 

The tears were unstoppable now and so was your pace towards the Hufflepuff. 

„So you want me to leave?!“, you yelled and hit him with the blue wrapped gift you held the whole time. „In order to get back together with Leta?! Is that why you want me to leave?!“

Newt’s widened eyes stared right into your watery ones and he seemed to be petrified with horror as he endured your punches.  

„At least have the balls and end it by yourself! Tell me that she is more important than I am, because apparently she helps you out with your book publication!!“ You hit Newt one last time with the box before you let it fall to the ground. It was all bruised and the once neatly paper was cracked here and there. Your heavy breathing filled the silence. „I offered you my help, Newt. Many times. I was always there for you, helping you out with the creatures, made sure you ate enough while writing your manuscript, listened to your many chapters, drawing illustrations whenever your hand got tired… I did everything for you. And when finally the publication came into sight you denied my help. Now I see why…“

You pointed to the letter. „Because she, Leta, is helping you. I was good enough for all the dirty unseen work, but when it comes to the real deal, my services are no longer welcomed.“

„No, Y/N, that’s not how it is… I…“, Newt stammered, but was interrupted by footsteps. You turned your head and spotted Queenie and Tina who still wore their nightgowns. 

„Happy Birthday!“, they half-sang with the most cheerful smile you ever saw, but it faded as soon as they noticed the strange atmosphere.

„Oh…“, Queenie whispered and looked at you knowingly. Her pretty face turned into a sad grimace while her sister eyed the scenario suspiciously. 

„What happened…?“, Tina asked carefully and stepped closer. She saw the packed suitcase next to your feet and her head snapped up towards Newt who avoided any eye-contact. 

„Newt, what did you do?! What happened here?“ She started to worry, but you lightly brushed your hand against her arm. Tina’s dark eyes examined you; maybe she was checking on injuries, like a swollen eye or a bloody lip. But your swollen eyes were the result of heavy crying and the realization made her arms wrap protectively around you. 

„Mr. Scamander, I expect an explanation!“ There it was - the authority of an Auror. Tina couldn’t help it, it was within her. Even though you were thankful for her commitment, you also felt tired of fighting any more. 

„It’s alright…“, you reassured her. „Newt wants me to leave and I will respect his request.“

Queenie rushed to your side, making her silky nightdress blew gently. Her hand found your shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. „Oh, honey…“, she brushed your forehead with her lips and you closed your eyes. The care of the Goldstein sisters gave you enough strength to pick up your case and putting on your coat. Tina stood between you and Newt with her arms crossed, blocking his view of you while Queenie whispered encouraging words to you as you got ready to leave. 

„Y/N…“, Newt finally spoke and took a step forward, panic urged him to act the moment you opened the door, but Tina swung her wand to push him back.  

„Don’t…“, the black-haired woman threatened like a lioness that protected her babies.  You grabbed the chance and whooshed through the door into the staircase, allowing yourself one last glimpse at your former lover. Newt’s eyes were wide and helpless as he watched you walk out of his life. Step for step, the distance and the pain of parting grew. All the said allegations and unsaid feelings hovered in the steamed air after a storm. Your aching heart pleaded your body to go back, but it was the nagging voice in your head that kept you running down the stairs. 

>>If he really wanted you, he would fight. He’s a wizard, he has the power to move mountains, but he’s using none of it. <<

There’s no point in fighting for a love that is already lost.  It makes sense. It’s logical. You pushed the heavy metal door open that released you into the cold morning of New York City. The streets were empty, just a few people passed you, mainly men that probably headed to work. They all had a destination, a purpose. Your eyes glided over their hands. Wedding rings. Of course, they had to earn money for their families. They had to fight for the women they loved. 

There’s no point in fighting for a love that is already lost. You know that. And yet, why is the face of the man that rejected you just moments ago popping up in your mind, caressing and tearing your heart at the same time. He didn’t love you, that was certain now.You whipped the tears away and raised your hand to hail a cab. The yellow car came to a halt next to you. „Where to, Miss?“, the driver asked after storing your luggage. You looked out of the car window and brushed a strand of hair aside as you noticed movement by one of the windows that belonged to the Goldstein’s apartment. 

„The harbor.“  To be continued. 🖤Tag-List: @jessiejunebug  @social-awkwardnesss @jackdawsonsgrl @0from-another-galaxy0 @imcalledflorence @itsintothegreatbeyondstuff @jl-loves-daisies @ann-is-amazing-person @newtsobrienss @usernamemingmei @alihru @barbarachern @babyhufflepuff @wizardingworlddiehardfan

#newt scamander #newt scamander x reader #newt x reader #newt x you #fantastic beasts and where to find them #leta lestrange #eddie redmayne #Harry Potter #fanfiction #angst #imagine #magic #tina goldstein #queenie goldstein

[lokilickedme]

Hello My Lady! Just because you asked, here are my faves of yours: #1 King (no surprise here), #2 Jack (too crazy not to love, and the stream crossing of pretty much all your stories is genius) #3 Chem/BD/TTW/TKH/TWK/can't remember them all. They're all special in their own way! Can't believe it'll be 3yrs soon since I started squatting your page!!! God time goes by fast! I'd like to add a special mention for the Muse Meetings, sooo funny, and a Golden Snowflake to Aleks. Cute little bumkin.

Thank you @fudgemuffinanon!  Dear god, has it been that long?  Seems like I joined up last year…*sits here blinking at my posts from 2015, wondering how that happened*

**LONG TEXT POST COMING UP**

You drew the lucky straw today my darling, I’m feeling wordy and in the mood to share.  A lot of people have asked me over the last couple of years how some of my stuff came about, and you mentioned one that gets a lot of asks.

Lemme tell you something about the Muse Meetings.  Way back in 1998 when I got my first computer, one of the very first things I ran across by way of internet fanfiction was a little something called The Very Secret Diaries penned by a writer named Cassandra Claire (who is now professionally published under the name Cassandra Clare).  The Very Secret Diaries (which are hilarious, btw) woke something up in me - mainly because, as a lifelong writer who had never allowed anyone to read 95% of my work, I finally realized that yeah, there were other people out there whose brains deviated from the standard in the same way mine did.  Her writing style back then (in the Diaries specifically, I’ve never actually read anything else she’s written) was very similar to the way I wrote, and those Diaries were exactly the sort of silly, ridiculous, irreverent thing I’d scribbled in my notebooks for most of my life.  And people liked it, she had a huge following based on just those out-of-context glimpses of her characters’ personal thoughts.  She was writing behind the scenes thoughts of characters, things that would never make it into books, and it was brilliant.  That was the kind of stuff I loved to write but had never given myself permission to show anyone.  She was showing hers to people, and they were loving it.

Which gave me the inspiration to not only put my work out there in the public eye for the first time ever, but to stick with my personal writing style (which I’d always assumed wasn’t what other people wanted to read, based on the books I’d been exposed to most of my life).  Not change anything.  Just do me.  And doing me meant writing silly nonsense if I wanted to.

So - The Very Secret Diaries are more or less the inspiration for the Muse Meetings, or at least the official written version of them.  I’d always imagined dialogues with my characters outside the confines of whatever story I was working on, but never thought anyone else would be interested in seeing me write it out.

The Diaries made me realize different.  Not only were her characters yammering and complaining and snarking at each other (both out of character and in), they were doing it in exactly the way I’d imagined my own characters interacting in the real world.  I loved it.  Seeing someone else do what I’d always done in my head - and do it in an official, out-there-in-the-public-eye capacity, was a revelation.  Finally I was able to give myself permission to write the way I wanted to, without restricting myself to the styles and methods in the books in the family library.  It had always been in my head, but now it didn’t have to stay there.  I could write proper stories, but I could also write what was going on in the other room, where the reader seldom gets to peek.  And other people besides myself might like it because hey, there’s precedent.

That was freeing, and I am grateful to Ms Claire for that.

So, a little history that leads up to how and why I finally started writing out the Muse Meetings:

My first fandoms that I wrote for online were Harry Potter and Star Wars (Kenobi specifically).  And yes, way back then (late 90′s - early 2000′s) there were already muse meetings among my characters.  I’ve been doing these for a long time, and I wish the out-of-character stuff I’d written back then still existed (my HP stuff bit the dust when The Restricted Section shut down, and my SW stuff was on FF.net for a little while but honestly I don’t remember my user ID there or the titles of the fics, though I have searched…so they’re most likely lost as well).  It’s sort of a shame because there were some old Anakin/Obi-Wan muse meetings that you guys would have loved…and the stuff between Remus and Sirius while we were hashing out what was going to be in their next chapter?  It still pains me that it’s all lost, but maybe it’s for the best.  That was nearly two decades ago, we move on to bigger and (hopefully) better things.

After my urge to write HP fic fizzled out I stopped writing for a while, but there were always muse meetings going on in my head for stories I scribbled mentally.  To me they’ve always been more fun than the actual stories, which explains my love for gag reels and behind-the-scenes featurettes for movies (I watch those first, always).

And then I found AO3 - funnily enough, I discovered it while searching the internet for one of my lost HP fics - and I decided to start writing in earnest again.  With all those thousands and thousands of fics and endless fandoms, it seemed like the perfect place to indulge my need to share what went on in my head.  And as I settled into the MCU and my stories started to grow to include multitudes of characters, those impromptu staff meetings with my muses kept being called to order.  Stuff that my characters would never say in the context of their stories got said.  Scenarios that were too ridiculous to waste time writing were played out.  Arguments and fights and bantering between characters who, in the restrictive confines of their own tales, would never in a million years interact…now they were throwing poptarts at each other (and occasionally knives) while the side characters wandered out of the room to watch TV or raid the fridge or sat in horror as someone’s until-now unassuming wife brandished a melon baller as a weapon.

It was messy and fun and was by far my favorite part of the writing process.

That’s what eventually became the Muse Meetings.  You want to know how they escaped my head and became an official thing?

Well I’m gonna tell ya lol

One of my very first friends in here, the fantastic @elvenfair1, was one of my first readers at AO3 and she told me I should post links to my fics at this site called tumblr to bring in a bigger audience.  So I opened an account here, followed her, posted some links as suggested, and she and I began messaging back and forth pretty much every night as we wrote our respective fics, bouncing ideas off each other and discussing plot points and brainstorming for character names.  And as my characters sassed me and refused to cooperate with what I wanted them to do, I would tell elvenfair what was going on in my head with my dumbass OCs and OFCs and we’d laugh and gripe about trying unsuccessfully to reel in our unruly muses.

And then one night back in 2015 she said “You should post this muse stuff, it’s hilarious.”

You know what the first thing I thought was?  Cassandra Claire did it 14 years ago and people loved it.  So yeah, I can sure as hell do it if I want.  If nobody is interested in it, at least it’ll amuse me and elvenfair and that’s cool enough.

And so I did.  I started posting them in here first, then as people started requesting them more I eventually moved them to AO3 in a more structured format.  And now you guys have multiple Lokis hurling curses at a bartender and viciously baiting a hapless movie star while teenage versions of two other attendees flirt with unsuspecting OFCs, with an occasional appearance by Thor dropping hints about future chapters and looking for fruit roll-ups.  It’s messy, but it’s fun and I’ve always enjoyed writing it as a way to let my brain decompress, especially when one of my “real” stories has hit a roadbump.

Since then I’ve seen countless other professional writers doing the exact same thing - J.R. Ward even posts her own version of muse meetings on her official website AND has a published book (her Insiders Guide) that is almost entirely nothing BUT muse meetings.   It’s surprising how many writers actually do this and I sometimes wonder if authors like Poe, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Tolkien, Gaiman, McMurtry didn’t do it themselves (I’d bet money on McMurtry).  Just goes to show there’s not an original idea anywhere in the universe…no matter how much you might believe you came up with it first, someone out there has been doing it for a long damn time before you - and a million more will do it after you :)

Anyway, I haven’t written any muse meetings in a while but they still go on constantly in my head.  I get asked about once a week to go back to doing them, and one day I will, when I have time for it.  My actual fics are struggling for writing time as it is and I made a conscious decision to weed out the unnecessary stuff in favor of “real work” (yeah right lol)…but yeah, the Meetings are still one of my favorite things and I won’t stop doing them permanently - they’ll be back.

So thank you Cassandra Claire for inspiring me to let them fly…if it weren’t for those whacked-out Diaries, the Muse Meetings would all still be in my head with only one person (me) laughing at them.

#fudgemuffinanon #long post #it's been a while since I got to talk to an adult IRL due to the kids being sick #so here have all the words at once lol

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: A Revolution’s Evolution: Inside Extinction Rebellion’s Attempt to Reform its Climate Activism

The honeymoon for Extinction Rebellion, the hugely influential climate activist group, ended on Oct. 17, 2019.

From its launch, a year earlier, until that day, it seemed like the group might have cracked the formula for saving the planet: its strategy of shutting down city centers with disruptive, nonviolent civil disobedience had drawn ordinary people onto the streets to demand action on the climate crisis. It had also made the group, now present in 75 countries, the most radical of a wave of climate activist groups sweeping the world in recent years, including the youth-focused Sunrise Movement in the U.S. and the school strikers led by Greta Thunberg.

In the U.K., Extinction Rebellion (or XR) is a household name, able to generate enough pressure to reach milestones that traditional environmental campaigners spent decades chasing: within weeks of XR’s first two-week mass mobilization in London in April 2019, the U.K. government declared a climate emergency and announced a legally binding target for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief, compares XR’s potential impact to that of groups like the suffragists and the civil rights movement. “When you’re talking about a large systemic transformation, history shows us that civil disobedience is a very important component,” she says.

But on Oct. 17, as XR began a second two-week mass mobilization in London, one local branch staged an action in Canning Town, a predominantly Black and Asian working-class neighborhood, in which several XR members clambered onto a subway car, preventing the train from leaving. Commuters dragged the protesters down onto the platform and beat them. Video of the incident prompted a massive backlash. “Upsetting the general public travelling to work in an environmentally sound way is plain stupid,” tweeted David Lammy, a prominent Black lawmaker for the left-wing Labour Party.

Daze Aghaji, 20, a member of XR and a student in London, shudders remembering the feeling of dread when she heard about the action. “It was like, ‘Wait, are we the bad guys?'” she says a few months later. “It felt like a callout from the public saying, ‘We support your efforts. But this is just not the way.'”

The moment distilled three problems bubbling under XR’s surface: First, as a predominantly white movement, founded in a small, wealthy town in England, XR has faced persistent criticism for its failure to include people of color and working-class communities in its activism. Second, the group is fiercely resistant to hierarchy, and has no formal leader and no effective way of vetoing actions, even when they cause internal divisions. And third, its strategy of disrupting the public walks a fine line between pressuring the government to act and becoming villains easily dismissed by the British media.

Falling donations and stagnant membership over the six months after Canning Town forced reflection and a rethink of core parts of XR’s operations. But just as XR announced a new strategy for 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Nationwide quarantine measures disrupted public life more than any XR action ever could, and prompted the group to temporarily suspend its central tactic of mass mobilization. The health crisis has also shifted the climate crisis down the agenda for governments, the media and the public.

Scrambling to learn from its mistakes and avoid losing hard-won momentum, XR is now planning a large-scale action for September. If the group gets its next steps right, it could offer a blueprint for activists around the world. If it flounders, XR could join the chorus of ignored voices shouting as the climate breaks down.

Rodger Bosch—AFP/Getty ImagesYoung XR activists demonstrate outside South Africa’s Parliament in Cape Town on June 1.

Since January, XR has made its headquarters in a hollowed-out apartment building in a trendy area of East London. On a sunny afternoon earlier this year, Gail Bradbrook, 48, sat at the kitchen table of a startup-like office on the first floor, surrounded by fellow activists busily typing on laptops. She acknowledged that the movement she co-founded has had a bumpy ride as it amassed more than 200,000 members worldwide in less than two years. “It feels like 15 of us started off pedaling on this bike, and then we realized we needed a train, so we keep sticking bits on while we’re pedaling,” she said.

It was in Bradbrook’s home in Stroud, southwest England, that XR began on a spring weekend in 2018. Fifteen environmental activists gathered to discuss ways to overcome the inertia on carbon emissions despite decades of warnings by scientists and pressure from NGOs. Drawing on the work of Harvard social scientist Erica Chenoweth, they decided they needed numbers. Chenoweth’s 2011 study of nonviolent civil-disobedience movements that aim to overthrow authoritarian governments concluded that those that engage at least 3.5% of the population always succeed. XR’s critics point out that demanding drastic action on emissions in a democracy does not exactly map onto Chenoweth’s scenario. But the group’s founders believe that if they can get 3.5% of a country’s population to participate in the “rebellion”–either attending actions or assisting behind the scenes–and combine that with a small core of a few thousand people willing to be arrested, as well as the passive support of 50% of the population, they can force governments into a position where taking climate action is less painful than XR’s disruption.

Bradbrook and her fellow founders envisaged a decentralized structure for XR. That has proved to be both its driving force and its Achilles’ heel. There’s a national U.K. actions team, made up of about a dozen people, that plans mass mobilizations, and a finance team that responds to funding applications from local groups. But there are some 400 of these local groups, all of which lead their own actions, with no single body in charge of sign-off. Internationally, more than 1,100 groups across 75 countries are working in a similarly loose structure.

That grassroots strategy drew in people who had never previously gotten involved in activism. Among them are grandmothers like Hazel Mason, 71, who had “never been a rebel” but went from trying to recycle more to taking to the streets. “I thought, Why am I hoping ‘they’ do something? Why don’t I do something?” she says. It also resonated with parents like Andrew Medhurst, 54, who told his colleagues at a pension fund that he “couldn’t ignore the crisis anymore” and quit in 2018 to start voluntarily coordinating XR’s finances, getting arrested three times during actions. In April 2019, thousands of XR rebels shut down central London, dominating the British media’s attention for two weeks. Millions of dollars in donations rolled in from philanthropists, celebrities and crowdfunders. While school strikers were raising global momentum around the climate crisis, XR seemed on the verge of a revolution in the U.K.

“What [XR] achieved, in a short space of time with few resources, was pretty outstanding,” says veteran activist Kumi Naidoo. After participating in civil-disobedience actions challenging apartheid in South Africa as a teenager in the 1980s, Naidoo served as director of Greenpeace from 2009 to 2015, and then as secretary-general of Amnesty International, before stepping down in December 2019 for health reasons. He says there’s “no question” that XR contributed to a shift in public consciousness on climate change, reflected in opinion polls that are “unrecognizable” from his time at Greenpeace. Naidoo sees XR’s more disruptive disobedience as “one of the only really strong, convincing parental voices” answering youth activists’ appeal for adults to act.

Extinction RebellionXR activists climb onto a train at London’s Canning Town station, prompting a standoff with commuters, on Oct. 17.

The nonhierarchical structure seems, in theory, to be democratizing and in line with XR’s belief in equality. But in practice, it has meant there was no one to blame for decisions that many felt were insensitive to Black people and other people of color. The Canning Town stunt was highly controversial within XR when its planners began sharing details days ahead of it. A statement released by its U.K. team hours after the action read: “Very few people in XR wanted this to happen, but the ‘postconsensus’ organizational model which we currently employ is such that it happened all the same.”

That did little to dampen the anger of critics. “From the get-go, they were asked by environmental justice campaigners in London to consult with communities about how to not alienate people,” climate-justice campaigner Suzanne Dhaliwal wrote in a London newspaper after the Canning Town incident. “[XR] is not taking heed of the call to look at its class and privilege blind spots.”

These blind spots are particularly apparent in the movement’s interactions with British police forces, which have a history of discrimination against Black communities. In July 2019, many heard a dog-whistle message in XR’s call on Twitter for police in London to “concentrate on issues such as knife crime, and not nonviolent protesters who are trying to save our planet.” In October, one XR member delivered flowers and a note thanking officers for their “decency and professionalism” to the Brixton police station in London. It was the same police station where, during the 1990s and 2000s, three Black men had died in police custody, sparking large local protests at the time. Kevin Blowe, coordinator for the Network for Police Monitoring, a watchdog group, wrote that the incident displayed a total lack of “empathy for communities who experience racist policing” and “outright, blatant racism [in] choosing to not ‘see’ race.”

Critics also point to the visible dominance of white people at XR’s actions, even in ethnically diverse cities like London, and to the core importance of confrontations with police and arrests in XR’s strategy. Aghaji, who is Black and has led youth-outreach efforts for XR, says the initial “focus on the arrests” in media coverage put off young people of color from joining the movement. “Arrestability does lie in privilege, and not everyone needs to get arrested,” she says. “I never really identified as arrestable.”

XR’s international chapters have also been criticized for centering white perspectives. In Canada, members of the Scia’new First Nation accused XR of entering their lands without permission while protesting a gas pipeline in February of this year. Some members splintered off from XR U.S. in opposition to language on its platform calling for “reparations and remediation led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, people of color and poor communities for years of environmental injustice.” (The rival faction, dubbed XR America, stripped out the specific language on race and class.)

In the U.K., XR’s decentralized structure has led to incidents that alienated the wider public and contributed to a narrative of its activists as careless. In September 2019, a group of XR activists, including co-founder Roger Hallam, attempted to use drones to block flights taking off from Heathrow, the U.K.’s largest airport, to protest air-travel expansion. Though XR had released a pre-emptive statement saying the group had collectively decided not to back such an action, it still hurt the movement’s image, says Jackie Scollen, a member of XR from a working-class area of County Durham, in northern England. “When my friends heard about that, they said, ‘You can’t do that.’ People work and save all year long to go on two weeks’ holiday to Spain or somewhere.”

XR activists interviewed by TIME say such unpopular actions contributed to a leveling off in sign-ups and donations in late 2019 and early 2020. XR is burning through its savings. From November to January, XR U.K.’s income averaged around $120,000 a month, while it spent close to $240,000.

Aghaji believes XR will have to learn to weather these unpredictable controversies. Imposing a top-down structure, she argues, would undermine the reason that XR has been successful in the first place. “It’s people taking power into their hands, saying the social contract is broken and rebelling in a way that’s true to them. I think that’s beautiful.”

Jeremy Selwyn—Evening Standard/ReduxXR protesters dressed as dead polar bears in Westminster, London, on Feb. 17.

On a Saturday in February, before the pandemic put an end to in-person meetings, a dozen people sat in mismatched chairs in the half-painted lobby of XR headquarters, trying to learn from the group’s rocky ride. During an all-day “DNA training,” designed to teach new members the movement’s core values, a session leader taught attendees how “to tell XR’s story” to get others involved. Tips included holding meetings in “inclusive spaces” that didn’t feel exclusive to white people and asking people about their personal experiences with the environment. There were things to avoid: using phrases that implied overpopulation was a problem; focusing on individual lifestyle changes rather than systemic change; and using “lefty language” (no examples were given). Almost every point set off a fierce debate among attendees. Rolled out at the start of the year, the workshop was an effort to learn from XR’s missteps and unify a movement that has sometimes struggled to agree on its message to the world.

Aghaji says the movement has been through an ongoing learning process on both race and class since Canning Town. “It was a turning point for us. The perspectives of marginalized groups are now at the forefront rather than just an addition.” One result has been an effort to emphasize that you don’t need to get arrested to take part in actions, Aghaji says. In January, XR started a team looking at how race and class oppression intersects with the climate crisis and why members of some groups were less likely to join XR. The movement has also intensified its focus in messaging on climate justice–the idea that since climate change is hitting harder and earlier in communities in the Global South, responses must be geared toward addressing systemic inequalities.

Antiracism protests that have spread around the world after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by police on May 25 in Minneapolis, have put further pressure on XR to address its failings on race. “We have made mistakes, and we’re now taking the time to listen, educate ourselves further and work out a plan for taking responsibility for these mistakes properly,” Alanna Byrne, a London-based member of XR’s media team, said in early June. “Racism is a key factor in the causes and continuation of the climate and ecological emergency, and tackling it needs to run through all aspects of our work.” The XR Internationalist Solidarity Network, a group formed in early 2019 and led by Black XR members from the Global South, would have a “much more” central role going forward, Byrne added.

George Cracknell Wright—LNP/ShutterstockCo-founder Gail Bradbrook speaks to activists blocking a road in Central London on Oct. 9.

XR organizers say they are more broadly shifting strategy toward a model that prioritizes the communities in which they operate. Co-founder Bradbrook says XR will ramp up outreach to local residents, getting members to knock on doors and talk with people one-on-one about how XR should organize locally, to avoid clashes. More surprisingly, the group will also move away from its focus on disrupting the public, which won it so much attention. Bradbrook says repeating the same tactic won’t sustain media interest. “We’ve made our point to the public. The public, frankly, are not the problem.”

Instead, XR will direct its actions at institutions, businesses and government bodies preventing climate action. “We can’t just be pissing people off,” agrees Scollen, the member from Durham. “We need to target the people with power.”

In late February, Scollen helped lead one of XR’s last major actions before the U.K. entered a lockdown, as 300 activists dressed as canaries blocked the entrance of an open-pit coal mine near Durham to protest its expansion. The action exemplified the new strategy, disrupting the mine owners, not the local area.

But not everyone is happy. Joel Scott-Halkes, 27, traveled up from London for the mine action. He describes a “mini civil war” inside XR over the decision to shift away from public disruption. A member of the U.K. actions circle, he spent two months working on the 2020 strategy. He argues that public disruption is what got the movement to where it is today, and that outweighs the risk of upsetting people. “The disruption is minimal and tiny compared to the disruption that’s going to come as the planet breaks down,” Scott-Halkes says.

In his view, the movement’s most powerful tactic is mass mobilization. When security forces can’t contain the protests, the argument goes, it will be easier for the government to take drastic action to cut emissions–what XR has been pushing for–than to do nothing and allow protests to continue. XR claims it came close to overwhelming authorities in October. London’s police force had to draft officers from elsewhere, and even resorted to issuing a ban on XR protests–a move England’s high court later ruled unlawful. “If we had even 3,000 or 4,000 more people, we would have done it,” Scott-Halkes says. “We would have broken something in history.”

Steve Bell—Camera Press/ReduxA die-in protest under the blue-whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum in London on April 22.

Events in 2020 have made that strategy much harder to execute. It was meant to be a landmark year for climate action. The U.K. was due to host this year’s U.N. climate conference in November, where international negotiators would gather to scale up emissions targets, five years after the Paris Agreement was signed. To ramp up pressure on lawmakers, XR had planned mass mobilizations for May and November.

But in May, the British government said it would postpone the summit by a full year because of the pandemic. Largely stuck at home since late March, XR activists have used their daily lockdown-sanctioned exercise periods to post posters or graffiti at oil companies and banks that invest in fossil fuels, urging the government not to give them bailout packages. In late June, a group of XR activists led a 125-mile march from Birmingham to London to protest ecological disruption by a planned high-speed rail link.

Fundraising has also gotten harder. Since March, XR’s monthly income has fallen to around $60,000, Medhurst, the finance coordinator, says. In mid-April, the group suspended payments to 150 activists who had been receiving small grants for living expenses. A recent $300,000 donation will help, but the pot is far smaller than in October 2019, when XR spent close to $1.2 million.

Kristian Buus—In Pictures via Getty ImagesThousands of Extinction Rebellion activists took over 5 bridges in Central London and blocked them for the day, November 17 2018, Central London, United Kingdom. The actvists believe that the government is not doing enough to avoid catastrophic climate change and they demand the government take radical action to save future generations and the planet.

COVID-19 has also threatened to sap the momentum of the climate movement as a whole. Some fear that in the rush to revive failing economies, countries will abandon their climate goals. Indigo Rumbelow, a 25-year-old member of the U.K. actions circle, says the pandemic has filled XR “with both hope and fear.” Governments could opt to prop up the fossil-fuel industry, she says. “But there’s also a sense that we can rebuild something new and create a more just society.”

To get there, though, effective organizing will be crucial. Naidoo says XR must “continue to do substantially better” on understanding race and class. For him, the convergence of COVID-19, the climate crisis and high-profile incidents of police brutality may create a “boiling point” for anger over inequality, making collaboration between environmentalism and other social movements essential. “It is critical that we have an approach that celebrates a million flowers blooming for the fights of justice,” he says.

XR appears to have embraced that philosophy. On July 3, it announced that it would stage its next large-scale action, starting Sept. 1. While following social-distancing guidelines, activists around the country will target institutions and businesses they accuse of blocking emission reductions, and “peacefully blockade” Parliament in London as it returns from a summer break. “There is growing frustration at government inaction, not just on climate but on our health, well-being, on racial injustice, inequality and more,” Byrne says. “It’s time to express that and come out on the streets again.”

Scollen, the organizer from the northeast, says XR’s future will be defined by its ability to make people from all parts of society feel empowered. “Most people, unless they’re highly educated and privileged, don’t feel like they can change anything,” she says. “But look around: it has started. People will see that you can be a part of this. You can do this.”

With reporting by Madeline Roache/London

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

[todaydreambelieversfic]

Author Spotlight: skivvysupreme day 1

DAY 1: Meet the author

Why Klaine?

It always comes back to Kurt. His story, his journey, everything about him drew me to him the moment I started watching Glee. Then Blaine came along, and became part of that, and then became an interesting character in his own right! And there’s really something to the whole “my missing puzzle piece” motif. They’re fully realized individuals but I think that the way they complement each other makes for a really fun dynamic to play around in. How does someone look at Kurt, and at Blaine, and not find them interesting?

What’s in a typical skivvy supreme story?

If it’s mine, there’s probably a trope at play that you’ve read a million times over that took some unusual turn to the left. I love subverting expectation. Sometimes I’ll get prompts that go in a very clear direction and will choose not to write the implied story because the implied story is too obvious. I just write what I find interesting. My fics also tend to be shorter than people want them to be and end just before the “walks off into the sunset” moment; I want the stories to exist in whatever world they’re in, canon or AU, as snapshots. It makes them feel more alive to me, if that makes sense, because there’s always potential for more in the things that aren’t stated outright. In terms of language, I’m fairly minimal. I can pack a lot into few sentences.

What kind of stories do you write?

I write anything I find interesting at that moment. That could be a fantasy AU, or canon episode-filler, or future-fic, or really sweet, romantic smut. Whatever. I’ll put Kurt and Blaine in almost any situation as long as they still seem like themselves at the core of it.

Fluff?

I do write fluff! But fluff without any sort of weight is too fluffy. I’m not a huge fan of fluff for fluff’s sake (though I’ve definitely got a few of those stories under my belt), and will almost always drop in a little thing here or there that anchors the fluff to something real. I like to mix my fluff with angst, tension, sex, realistic humor, etc.

Angst?

My angst answer resembles my fluff answer. I do write angst, but angst with no relief is too angsty. It will never just be hurt; it will always be hurt/comfort. It will be a sexy, romantic scenario in which one of them brings up something really serious. It will be that moment when everyone’s laughing about something and then Things Get Real. I can’t write any kind of fic that’s just one thing, be it fluff, angst, humor, sex, because from a character/storytelling perspective, that just doesn’t make emotional sense.

Sex?

I do write sex! I’m not a huge fan of PWP for the same reasons as the last questions, with the fluff and angst. I need a mix, no matter the genre. Kurt and Blaine’s relationship will always be at the core. It’s always about them loving each other and needing/wanting that mental and emotional connection.

Have you ever written anything way outside your usual wheelhouse?

I’d say the civil war AU I wrote, “The Romantics,” was really different for me. I rarely write anything that would’ve happened before canon events or present-day unless it’s part of a bigger story, so putting them in such a different timeline was a fun challenge.

Do you write AUs or fic that’s consistent with canon?

Both! As long as Kurt and Blaine are still Kurt and Blaine, the scenario doesn’t matter much for me to write it. If it’s something that stirs interest for me, of course. There are some AUs that I just don’t care about and others that I will explore every time.

What do you like about your writing?

I write fun stuff! I like my dialogue, my stories get to the point, and I make a conscious effort to write fic that I haven’t read already.

#author spotlight #author:skivvysupreme

[thisdaynews]

’Nearly insurmountable’: Bernie barrels toward Super Tuesday delegate windfall

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/nearly-insurmountable-bernie-barrels-toward-super-tuesday-delegate-windfall/

’Nearly insurmountable’: Bernie barrels toward Super Tuesday delegate windfall

Supporters cheer for Sen. Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally in Houston. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders announced to the Democratic establishment earlier this week that it can’t stop his campaign. Many rivals and party insiders now admit he might be right.

Sanders is zooming toward Super Tuesday with victories in Nevada and New Hampshire, a foothold in the delegate-rich states of California and Texas, and a divided, jam-packed field of moderate opponents. All of which puts him on a path to potentially collect enough delegates by the middle of March that no one else can catch up with him, say a growing number of Democratic officials and operatives.

They think the Vermont senator could amass a plurality of delegates by March 17, at which point more than 60 percent of the race’s total delegates will have been awarded — thereby making it difficult if not all but unfeasible for his opponents to overtake him.

“It’s entirely possible that Bernie wins South Carolina, particularly because Tom Steyer is drawing a lot of support there. That would give him a head of steam heading into Super Tuesday three days later,” said Andrew Yang, the former Democratic presidential candidate. “He may have a nearly insurmountable lead in the delegate count by mid-March.”

Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders’ 2016 campaign, said changes to the Super Tuesday lineup could also benefit him. North Carolina, one of his strongest Southern states that year, moved their primary to March 3. Maine, another 2016 stronghold, has also switched to a Super Tuesday primary. Most importantly, California is going to the polls on Super Tuesday, too.

“March 3 is not the Southern-dominated March 1 that it was in 2016,” said Longabaugh. “People haven’t really been paying attention, but this Super Tuesday lines up for Bernie Sanders much, much better than the Super Tuesday we barely survived last time.”

Sanders is first in the Golden State, according to the RealClearPolitics pollingaverage, which plays to his advantages: The electorate is liberal and heavily Latino. On Saturday, Sanders won a striking 51 percent of Hispanic caucus-goers in Nevada — 34 points ahead of his closest opponent, according to entrance polls.

“Keep in mind that California has been voting for two weeks. Texas has been voting for five days, and the ballots dropped in Colorado weeks ago,” said Chuck Rocha, Sanders’ senior adviser and architect of his Latino outreach strategy, at a caucus night party in Nevada. “We’ve already been banking all of those votes and all of those Latinos, getting their ballots, calling them, talking to them. That’s going to be a real key to our success.”

Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to former President Barack Obama, was asked by Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on Sunday if it is possible to stop Sanders if no candidate drops out before Super Tuesday. “I do not believe it is,” he replied.

Tim Miller, Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director who was part of a super PAC that year aimed at stopping Donald Trump, wrote on The Bulwark under the sub-headlinethat reads “history is repeating itself” that “what I didn’t fully realize is that when I joined the PAC, unless something dramatic happened, the race was already functionally over — two days after South Carolina.”

Sanders is suddenly being taken seriously enough that some Democrats think he might be able to pull off an upset — or at least a strong second-place finish — in South Carolina. A CBS News/YouGov poll found Biden with 28 percent and Sanders with 23 percent, and Steyer right behind them at 18 percent. Either scenario would be a remarkable turnaround from 2016, when he lost the state to Hillary Clinton by 47 percentage points.

“Bernie has learned a lot since he got crushed here in 2016,” said Brady Quirk-Garvan, a former Charleston Democratic Party chairman who had backed Cory Booker. “He’s been campaigning forever down here, made early investments, and a crowded field of moderates is his dream scenario.”

Sanders is stumping this week in North and South Carolina, including near the border, where, Quirk-Govan said, he can simultaneously “campaign in a Super Tuesday state but try to eat into Biden’s lead in South Carolina.”

But as he gains momentum, Sanders looks to be entering a more challenging moment. At the final debate before Nevada’s caucuses, most of his rivals chose to train their fire not on the frontrunner, but on Bloomberg — just one example this cycle of Sanders benefiting from his opponents seemingly underestimating him.

After Sanders’ decisive victory in Nevada, however, Pete Buttigieg used his caucus night speech to accuse Sanders of believing in “an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.”

Joe Biden took a similar shot Saturday, saying, “I ain’t a socialist. I ain’t a plutocrat,” referring to Sanders and Bloomberg. And Elizabeth Warren has stepped up criticisms of Sanders in recent days, saying, “I don’t want to be president just to yell at people.”

Sanders’ team expects an onslaught of attacks at Tuesday’s debate. And Bloomberg’s campaign has not ruled out millions in negative ads — and with an unlimited budget, it’s difficult to predict the result of such an effort.

Still, there are no signs yet that any of Sanders’ top opponents are dropping out. Buttigieg’s campaign argued in a memo that he is the one to challenge him head-to-head, despite his difficulty appealing to voters of color, saying that “if the dynamics of the race did not dramatically change, Democrats could end up coming out of Super Tuesday with Bernie Sanders holding a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead.”

Likewise, Bloomberg’s aides wrote in a memo that “I don’t think many people understand the dire circumstances here” and suggested other candidates should drop out — seen as an affront by those who have already participated in primaries and amassed delegates.

Even if the field winnowed, it’s possible a one-on-one race would not deliver the results Sanders’ many moderate opponents hope. But a February Yahoo/YouGov poll showed him defeating Bloomberg and Buttigieg by double digits if they faced off against him one-on-one. Biden and Warren were the most competitive in a hypothetical match-up, though Sanders was still ahead of them by four and two points, respectively.

Read More

#delegate #Foreign #Politics #Tuesday

[autoring]

Tak tohle tu asi ještě nebylo. Trojice Clarkson, Hammond, May, ale i celý štáb The Grand Tour jsou obviněni z toho, že Jurij Postnikovovi, zakladateli malé automobilky Partisan Motors ukradli nápad na scénář k třináctému dílu třetí série The Grand Tour, který je znám také jako Mongolský speciál.

Kdo z vás ho neviděl, v rychlosti vysvětlíme, o co jde. Trojice moderátorů byla v rámci tohoto dílu vysazena kdesi v mongolské pustině. Následně jim tam z vrtulníků produkce shodí několik beden s různými díly z různých aut. Úkolem moderátorů bylo z toho složit nějaké auto a pak se dostat do civilizace. To se jim samozřejmě povedlo, ačkoliv jejich povoz, který pojmenovali jako John, byl opravdu hodně zvláštní.

Má to ale háček. Jurij tvrdí, že ho produkce seriálu už před pár lety kontaktovala s tím, jestli by se se svým offroadem Partisan One nechtěl zúčastnit natáčení show. Tehdy podle Jurije ještě nebylo jasné, jaký scénář mají producenti v hlavě a byl to prý právě on, který přišel s nápadem shodit moderátorům auto v krabicích, aby si ho mohli složit. Jeho model Partisan One se totiž mimo jiné může pochlubit tím, že jde složit prakticky kdekoliv.

Jenomže poté, co tento nápad produkci, jejíž součástí je i Clarkson, sdělil a ta nadšeně souhlasila, prý veškeré komunikace utichly. Když se Postnikov začal ptát, kde je problém, odpovědí mu bylo jen to, že show teď na takový projekt nemá finance. Jaké ale bylo jeho překvapení, když pak zjistil, že produkce natočila právě Mongolský speciál, který jako by z oka vypadl tomu, co vymyslel. Jediný rozdíl je v použitém autě.

The Grand Tour možná po třetí sérii skončí

Jurij se proto obrátil na server Carsoops, který celý příběh převyprávěl a doložil to také skicami, které v rámci příprav na natáčení nakreslil, a které jsou datovány 24. 1. 2018, tedy do doby, kdy bylo do tohoto inkriminovaného dílu opravdu daleko, což by přípravám odpovídalo. Ale fakt je, že prakticky nic nedokazují.

Carscoops se samozřejmě obrátili na produkci, konkrétně jejího šéfa Andy Wilmana, s dotazem, co je na tom pravdy. Ten jim odpověděl, že sice s Jurijem v kontaktu byli, ale v úplných počátcích přípravy tohoto speciálu a navíc už věděli, o čem má celé natáčení být. Původně prý opravdu chtěli využít offroad od Partisan Motors, ale později si to rozmysleli. Nic víc v tom prý není a tato obvinění jsou podle něj směšná. Navíc je prý zatím Postnikov ani nekontaktoval, takže neví, co vlastně chce.

PARTISAN MOTORSMagdeburgGermanyPRESS INFORMATION5 April 2019The Russian engineer accused Jeremy Clarkson of stealing and will demand that the 13th episode of the third season of the Grand Tour program be retaped in court. In 2017, Partisan Motors, represented by its founding father Yuri Postnikov, introduced the Partisan One prototype. The off-road vehicle aroused a flurry of interest around the world, with publications about it on the websites of all major automotive and business online resources. After that, Mr. Postnikov was approached by the producers of the Grand Tour program with a proposal for cooperation. Mr. Postnikov developed a creative project scenario in which the Partisan One car – one of the characteristics of which is the ability to deliver it to the customer for independent assembly in a box – is delivered to the desert in disassembled form. A tent camp is being built there. It is also the assembly site of Partizan. The whole story was not only invented, but also sketched out by Yuri Postnikov and handed over to British partners. However, in the future the Grand Tour program refused to cooperate with Partisan Motors, referring to the lack of funding. Nevertheless, Mr. Postnikov's ideas were implemented in the 13th series of the third season of the Grand Tour, which was presented to the general public on 5 April 2019.Dear ladies and gentlemen, readers, colleagues and friends!We will demand through court that the 13th episode of the 3rd season of the Grand Tour, shot in our script, be reshot with the participation of the car PARTISAN we created, and that all copyright issues be settled with us, and only then can it be shown to a wide audience.For the majority of people it has been known for a long time that copyright is not respected in the world, other people's ideas are scornfully rejected, but if they are willing to use them. Usually, when mentioning such facts of blatant plagiarism, they despise China and sometimes Russia. Such a shameful phenomenon, alas, is not only the fate of these countries, but is also successfully flourishing in the civilized Western world. This is the latest confirmation of this statement, the last case of my engineering practice, which made me think about how I could and should fight such a shameful phenomenon.In the middle of autumn 2017 our company PARTISAN MOTORS presented its first development – the ultimatum SUV PARTISAN, about which the whole world automotive press wrote with enthusiasm, starting with such magazines as MOTOR 1, CAR, Avtoexpress, highly appreciating the simplicity and novelty of design and courage of developers.At the beginning of December 2017 I was approached by Mr. Gavin Whitehead, the producer and director of Grand Tour, who showed genuine interest in the possibilities of using the car developed and built by us in his media project.I, in turn, told him in detail about one of the main ideas that we have put in our concept of the car RARTISAN, namely its modularity, which allows you to pack the entire set to build a car in a box and throw the helicopter in the most inaccessible part of the world, where there are no roads. There, the members of the expedition would be able to assemble it and use it to move around the area, using the instructions and simple tools. All this unusual adventure could be filmed to show the general public. This is the scenario with our PARTISAN in the Grand Tour program and I offered to implement Mr. Whitehead, which he enthusiastically agreed to. We started working correspondence to clarify all the details concerning the technical and organizational issues of the planned joint project. In addition to the film crew, the PARTISAN MOTORS technical support team was supposed to participate in this event. We started to look forward to the implementation of an interesting project. I thought over and drew the whole scenario of our expedition in the form of sketches, so that already at the stage of preparation there would be an opportunity to visually present and show to all participants the essence of the upcoming task and shots of the future exciting film. Here are these pictures.Then, in the phone calls, as well as in the working correspondence, there was a complete calmness… After a while, I called Mr. Whitehead myself to find out the reason for this change. He told me that they didn't have the funding to transfer them at the moment, so unfortunately they had to freeze all the projects until they found the money. But as soon as that happens, they will continue to work on season 3, which will certainly include a bright story I invented with our equally bright PARTISAN. Alas, now it is clear to me that he lied! As you can see from the world media reports, the 3rd season of the Grand Tour show was successfully filmed with an unprecedented scale and astronomical amount of funding from the Amazon in a three-digit millionth amount, but there is no our PARTISAN, although I have a script and plots for it that I have invented and drawn in detail.Here's the 13th episode of the 3rd season of Grand Tour's program, which was presented to the public this Friday, April 5, 2019, repeating the scenario we have developed: the stages of landing crates with helicopter kits, familiarizing Jeremy Clarkson with the assembly instructions, the process of assembling a full-fledged car, and the subsequent journey. Look, compare, see for yourself what is called, personally!This is the factual side of what happened, so that it would be obvious to an outside observer where the legs are growing here, and the viewer understands that his idols from the world's steepest television show about cars slipped him stolen, passing it off as the results of his work and talent. Or maybe they don't have any ideas and talents, except to get into trust in truly talented people who create something new with their own mind and hands, look at them and steal from the whole world? Maybe the whole season is made of the same stolen material, and the presenters themselves – idols of millions of viewers except for the importance of cheeks and throwing cool phrases, can't and are nothing without the stolen ideas of others! Maybe the king is naked!One of the main Christian commandments is "do not steal! Guaranteeing the protection of human property is a powerful motivation for him to work, invent, create his own mind and hands something new on this earth.Even 25-30 years ago it was considered extremely indecent to steal other people's ideas and pass them off as their achievements. Such a person immediately received deserved condemnation and contempt from society, even despite all his previous, perhaps extremely great, merits and achievements. A civilized society rightly rejected and spewed out people like lepers, because they threatened its very existence and further development: why bother and create something if they steal and use it anyway, why bother and do something if they can go and steal? The general spread of such morality would mean only one thing – the fast and inevitable end of our civilization!It is this problem to a greater extent, and not only the fact of obvious theft of ideas and the scenario itself, that worries me so much that I decided to make this incident and my reasoning about it known to the general world community.In today's world, the theft of other people's ideas has become, alas, not only a commonplace and even the norm, but, unfortunately, a sign of valor, which is even commonplace to be proud of. He did not steal, did not deceive, did not use it, so it means that the sucker, then, a day, a year, life lived in vain…And it is not even the beggars who steal from the rich, but the rich, strong, known from those who are simpler, weaker, unknown, but more talented. They steal not because of extreme need, more often than not without need, for the sake of more money, for the sake of even greater fame, just for the sake of courage, to show their superiority, full of permissiveness and impunity.This problem is so urgent in the modern world that we should shout about it, not keep silent!That is why we want to firmly and loudly declare that ours is ours, that we will not take what is not ours, but we will not simply give ours to anyone and will not forgive, to show the thieves that they will not get away with their pranks.For the same reason, we want to set an example to draw the attention of the entire society to the problem of stealing ideas, to give courage and determination to those who, like us, find themselves in such an unpleasant situation.And we want to tell the dodgy gentlemen from Grand Tour that our company PARTISAN MOTORS invented, built, created the project of the best car for the worst roads in the world PARTISAN, invented and drew sketches of adventure stories with it not so that Mr. Whitehead and his team could enrich and become famous on our works.We strongly advise the gentlemen of the Grand Tour and their masters of Amazon to remove the 13th episode of our script from the 3rd season and not to show it to the world so as not to embarrass themselves. Dr. Yuri E. Postnikov

Zveřejnil(a) Partisan Motors dne Sobota 6. dubna 2019

Výsledek je tedy dost chaotický a je otázka, jestli se někdy někdo dobere pravdě. Postnikov má v plánu žalovat Clarksona, Hammonda i Maye a donutit je díl stáhnout, přetočit s jeho vozem v hlavní roli a až pak znovu pustit na veřejnost. Jsme si ale jisti, že na to Amazon, pod který show patří, nikdy nepřistoupí. A krom toho si Jurij musí uvědomit, že bude stát proti celé armádě velmi schopných právníků Amazonu, kteří na něm nenechají nit suchou.

Sami jsme zvědaví, jak tohle celé dopadne, ale nemyslíme si, že pro Juriho uspokojivě…

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Příspěvek The Grand Tour má velký problém. Prý ukradla nápad na jeden ze svých dílů pochází z auto-mania.cz

[theconservativebrief]

We have just 12 years make massive and unprecedented changes to global energy infrastructure to limit global warming to moderate levels, the United Nation’s climate science body said in a monumental new report released Sunday.

“There is no documented historic precedent” for the action needed at this moment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in its 700-page report on the impacts of global warming of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius.

From rising sea levels to more devastating droughts to more damaging storms, the report makes brutally clear that warming will make the world worse for us in the forms of famine, disease, economic tolls, and refugee crises. And there is a vast gulf between the devastation from 1.5 degrees C, what’s considered the moderate level of average warming, and 2 degrees C.

“It’s very clear that half a degree matters,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I at a press conference in Incheon, South Korea, where the report was released.

Under the Paris climate agreement, nations set a goal of limiting warming to 3.6 degrees F, or 2 degrees C, increase in global average temperatures, with ambitions of a stricter limit of 2.7 degrees F, or 1.5 degrees C of warming. The UN asked the IPCC to figure out what it would take to hit the 1.5 degrees C target, and what’s in store for the world if we did pull it off.

The team pooled more than 6,000 scientific publications, drew contributions from 132 authors, and had more than 1,000 scientists review the findings.

As expected, the report doesn’t pull any punches: Staying at or below 1.5 degrees C requires slashing global greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent below 2010 levels by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050.

Meeting this goal demands extraordinary transitions in transportation; in energy, land, and building infrastructure; and in industrial systems. It means reducing our current coal consumption by one-third. It also demands a vast scale-up of emerging technologies, such as those that remove carbon dioxide directly from the air. All in the very narrow window of the next 12 years while our momentum pushes us in the wrong direction.

The report also shows there’s no avoiding the costs of climate change; we either invest now to clamp down on greenhouse gases, or we pay down the line through property damage and lost lives. The additional sea level rise of going from 1.5 degrees C to 2 degrees C would put another 10 million people at risk, for example.

Another key finding is that every bit of warming matters, so every fraction of a degree we can knock off the global thermostat will pay dividends across economies.

In short, things will get worse. We can avoid some of the worst-case-scenarios of global warming, but the easiest options are no longer on the table. Regardless, our action or inaction both stand to shape the future of our planet.

As far as the science goes, there isn’t much new here. Anyone who’s been following climate research over the past six years since the last major IPCC report came out in 2012 will find much of the conclusions familiar. And that’s typical. IPCC reports pool together research that’s already been published to paint a picture of how the world will change as it heats up.

Since the early 19th century, humans have pumped increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, a consequence of burning fossil fuels to drive industry. We now spew carbon dioxide, the main human-produced greenhouse gas, at a rate of 2.4 million pounds per second.

The new IPCC report emphasizes that the 1 degree C of global warming since the dawn of the industrial revolution is already wreaking havoc through more damaging extreme weather and rising oceans. However, further warming depends on more greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report (emphasis added):

Warming from anthropogenic emissions from the pre-industrial period to the present will persist for centuries to millennia and will continue to cause further long-term changes in the climate system, such as sea level rise, with associated impacts (high confidence), but these emissions alone are unlikely to cause global warming of 1.5°C.

What this means is that we still have a chance to limit a very significant amount of warming this century. However, hitting the 1.5 degrees C target leaves just 0.5 degrees C of headroom over the next 80 years. That demands getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century, which in turn requires an almost immediate, precipitous decline in emissions:

Greenhouse gas emissions have to fall rapidly in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. IPCC

So when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, we can’t just take our foot off the accelerator; we have to slam on the brakes.

The half degree between and 1.5 degrees C may not seem like much, but it’s a yawning gap in terms of the effort required and the consequences thereof. Remember, we’re talking about a global average, which means a change over every part of the world. The amount of energy needed to heat the whole planet by 0.5 degrees C is immense. So is the effort to avoid it.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions sharply enough to reach the more ambitious climate mitigation goal requires a massive global shift in energy use. The pathways outlined in the report aren’t counting on any magical technologies that don’t yet exist; the greenhouse gas mitigation pathways use systems we have now. But they do require deploying them at massive, unprecedented scales. In particular, the 1.5 degrees C goal will require sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, even if the planet doesn’t overshoot its carbon budget.

For greenhouse gas sources like commercial shipping or from agriculture, there may not be any feasible way to trap their emissions, so the only option of balancing out that carbon is to pull it back from the atmosphere. That’s why countries need to start thinking about negative greenhouse gas emissions — there’s no way around it.

“We have not identified any pathways that get to 1.5 degrees C without carbon dioxide removal,” said Jim Skea, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, at the Incheon press conference.

Carbon dioxide removal can take the form of direct air capture, where machines scrub carbon dioxide from the air. It can also come from using bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, where plants pull carbon dioxide from the air and scrubbers prevent the carbon from the resulting biofuels from reaching the sky. Land use, from how we graze cattle to how we plant forests, is also a critical tactic for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But how much removal we need depends on what other tactics we use, whether that’s energy efficiency, switching to low-carbon energy sources, or cutting our energy use overall. In the worst-case scenario, we may have to drawdown upward 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2100, a massive international undertaking.

An avocado grove affected by a major dought in California’s Central Valley in 2014. Droughts and crop failures will become more frequent as global warming increases. Getty Images

One point the authors repeatedly emphasize in the IPCC report is that the impacts of climate change get worse as temperatures go up. It seems like an obvious point, but researchers have substantiated it.

Extreme heat and storms, as well as related outcomes like disease and poverty are projected to rise with temperatures. “Climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming of 1.5°C and increase further with 2°C,” according to the report.

But the inverse also holds true; avoiding warming also yields direct and indirect gains for societies. “Improved air quality resulting from projected reductions in many non-CO2 emissions provide direct and immediate population health benefits in all 1.5°C model pathways,” authors wrote.

“Every extra bit of warming makes a difference,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-char of IPCC Working Group II, at the press conference.

The question now is how seriously governments will take these findings. If past, climate reports are any indication, odds are it will receive some lip-service but little action. The number of new coal plants in the world is declining, for example, but that still means new coal plants are coming online and these generators will emit carbon dioxide for decades.

The IPCC researchers will present their findings at the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December.

Original Source -> Report: we have just 12 years to limit devastating global warming

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

[sportsandideas]

A Mental Game: On Happiness, or Does it Matter Who Wins? [A rescue job from 2010]

[Here’s something I wrote over eight years ago in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup; many of the names have changed, but the story is (basically) the same...]

(photo from: The Daily Echo)

Originally posted MAY 3, 2010

Re-posted July of 2018

Why do we care?  Why will hundreds of millions of fans watch the World Cup this summer and hinge their lives around game results?  Why does it matter whether the millionaire players, coaches, and owners of Inter Milan beat the millionaire players, coaches, and owners of Bayern Munich in the Champions League final?  Why does anybody, no matter how few, bother going to watch FC Dallas play?

Presumably at some level most soccer fans invest ourselves in what, after all, is twenty-two men or women in short pants chasing a ball because we enjoy it.  Somehow the game makes us happy.  But why?

As it happens, studying happiness is hot right now in the social sciences.  Psychologists have realized they spent way too long focused primarily on pathology and dysfunction, failing to learn about the other side of human experience.  Economists have realized that people are as motivated by irrational emotions as they are by rational cost-benefit analyses.  And soccer, it seems to me, can be a pretty interesting place to apply some of their ideas.

The explosion of scholarly interest in happiness does not, unfortunately, make for easy answers.  Happiness is tough to define and measure.  Most research tends to operate with the assumption that it’s best to just trust people and simply ask: On a scale of __ to __, how happy are you?  The problem is that when the question is that blunt and superficial, most people say they are happy.  It misses the proverbial ‘masses who lead lives of quiet desperation.’  It misses those FC Dallas fans.

The alternative is to try and measure the things scholars think associate with happiness.  Though those things include a wide range of characteristics from autonomy to environmental mastery, in my read of the literature they boil down to that old Freudian formulation: what matters is a combination of ‘love and work’, people and purpose.  We tend to be happiest when we balance engaging social relationships with a sense that what we do matters, be that a job, raising a family, contributing to a community, or maybe even supporting a team.

But focusing just on people and purpose also fails to tell the whole story because it doesn’t address the classic social science problem of causality—do good social networks and success in one’s endeavors cause happiness, or are happy people more likely to have good social networks and succeed?  In fact, it turns out that statistically, when dealing with large data sets, the single best predictor of happiness is something we don’t have much control over: personality.  Optimists with a sunny disposition are happier than pessimists ridden by anxiety almost regardless of the circumstances of their lives.  A sanguine Aussie will consistently out-happy a dour Englishman no matter their relative fortunes in South Africa this summer.

While this may not be revolutionary stuff, the science of happiness does highlight some ways that our fandom can lead us astray.  One recent PR company survey, for example, found that 93 percent of England fans would “give up food for a week to see England win.”  This makes news because it seems to say something about how much the game matters to people—because it seems to say how happy it would make them to see their team win.  But they are wrong.

Predicting Happiness

Say hypothetically I want to predict how happy English football fans will be one year from today.  And say I have to make that predication for two potential scenarios: 1) England wins the 2010 World Cup; 2) England is knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina in a game where Carlos Tevez scores with a balled fist, Wayne Rooney gets dismissed on a second yellow for diving in the box, and Diego Maradona celebrates by belly sliding across Frank Lampard’s bow wearing a t-shirt saying ‘the Queen can stuff it.’  Here’s my prediction: in either case, English fans will be exactly as happy as they are today.

(photo from Reuters UK)

My prediction is based on a famous study in the science of happiness that evaluated the ‘real life’ equivalents of that English soccer dream/nightmare: in 1978 a group of psychologists compared two groups at the extremes of what we imagine to define our well-being—people had won the lottery, and people who had been paralyzed for life.  Immediately after their respective fateful events, there reported dramatic differences in their emotions—the lottery winners were ecstatic, the paraplegics were devastated.  Of course.

But over time a funny thing happened: they adapted.  The lottery winners started to realize that they still couldn’t afford everything they wanted, that they couldn’t trust people who had been good friends, that money changes but does not eliminate the stresses of everyday life.  Those who had been paralyzed came to realize that they could still engage in fulfilling relationships, that it could be rewarding to make little bits of progress in dealing with new challenges, that their physical limitations changed but did not eliminate the meaning of their lives.  After six months or a year, each group (along with a control group who had experienced no dramatic life events) expected to be back to the exact same level of happiness they’d reported before fate intervened. Extending the results of that study to virtually any life events, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (of Stumbling on Happiness fame) goes so far as to say “If it happened over three months ago, with a few exceptions, it has no impact on our happiness.”*[see end note]

Granted, objective events and circumstances do make a difference in the short-term; the night of England’s World Cup win/loss will undoubtedly be an alcohol-lubricated orgy of joy/woe.  And great games do offer aesthetic pleasures, along with the types of emotional highs (and lows) that constitute the immeasurable part of human experience.  But even in the short term an interesting range of variables mediate between events, between the win or the loss, and our emotional response.

The Social Relativity of Happiness

One key mediator between events and happiness is our relative perspective on what could have been—what academics call “counterfactuals.”  While competitive sports are alluring precisely because they delineate clear winners and losers, feelings of ‘success’ are relative to our expectations and our imaginations.

A famous research example here drew on the Barcelona Olympics to compare the emotional responses of silver and bronze medal winners.  As Victoria Husted Medvec and colleagues reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, objective raters consistently found bronze medal winners to be happier than silver medal winners.  In a follow-up study with amateur athletes they confirmed that this inversion of objective results was because people were thinking about what could have been: the bronze medal winners were comparing themselves to those who came in fourth, while the silver medal winners were comparing themselves to those who won it all.

In soccer terms, this suggests that fans’ happiness at the World Cup depends less on where they finish and more on where people think their team could have finished.  Subjective perceptions of what could have been matter more than objective results.  In fact, I’d hypothesize that on average English fans would be happier with a second round exit than a loss in the final—because they wouldn’t have to torment themselves with how close they came to winning it all.

(photo from Sky News)

This subjectivity of fans’ emotional reactions is further compounded by that other key variable in our happiness equation: people.  Both in the short term and in the long term we tend to be happier when we are engaged in healthy relating with others.  One relevant study here was done by María-Angeles Ruiz-Belda and colleagues in Spain, who video-taped soccer fans watching televised games from the World Cup and from La Liga.  The best predictor of whether or not the fans seemed happy during the game had nothing to do with goals being scored or favorable results; what mattered was the presence of other people.  Although Ruiz-Belda and colleagues use these findings to question the relationship between smiling and emotional experience, from a soccer perspective the results suggest that the full glory of the game only happens when shared.

The social essence of happy fandom also shows up in theoretical efforts to explain our irrational attachments to our teams.  Why do we identify with players we don’t know and franchises that use us for our money?  Probably the most common theoretical explanation is called the BIRG effect: Basking In Reflected Glory.  The idea is that we unconsciously use teams to orient our social identities in a way that tells us something about whether we are good or bad: when the US was up 2-0 at the half against Brazil in last summer’s Confederations Cup I was irrationally happy because of a vague sense that the score line reflected well on me.  When the US proceeded to lose 3-2 I was irrationally miserable because of a vague sense that I myself, sitting dazed in front of a pub TV 10,000 miles from the actual game, had failed.  But while BIRGing makes some sense I’ve never accepted it to be the full story—there are too many people willing to stick with their teams through too many lean years  (think again about the English and the World Cup) to make BIRGing the only thing that matters.

So I was pleased recently to stumble across some scholarship from a psychologist named Daniel Wann who has offered Team Identification-Social Psychological Health Model as a complement to the BIRG effect.  Ok, the name is not as catchy, but the idea fits with everything else I know about happiness: Wann has good evidence that fandom facilitates happiness because it offers us the types of real, imagined, temporary, and enduring connections to others that our human nature craves.

Ultimately, as many others have noted, where else other than the sports arena can grown men cry, hug, sing, and dance in a way that enhances both their masculinity and their social networks?  Where else can people of all stripes engage in loud, desperate, eccentric yet culturally endorsed expressions of our full emotional range?  We often think soccer makes us happy when our team wins, but the evidence suggests it actually makes us happy by offering rare opportunities—real or perceived—to connect amidst the penetrating anomie of modern life.  So, if the science of happiness is right, the England fan screaming ‘God Save the Queen’ with arms around mates after a second round loss may actually end up happier than the fan sitting alone on a tropical island watching Rio Ferdinand raise the Jules Rimet trophy. Or at least, if that isn’t any consolation, know that a year later winning or losing probably won’t make one bit of difference.  Right?

*Note: Oddly, one of the exceptions to Gilbert’s claim may be soccer related: in their recent book Soccernomics Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski present some provocative data suggesting that hosting a World Cup does increase happiness in a country even several years after the event—though they also find that hosting other major games does not influence national happiness.  They present further data suggesting that the idea of losing in major competitions as a cause of fan suicide is a myth—in fact, they argue, sports events tend to bring people together in a way that prevents suicide.  So while the whole picture is certainly a bit more complicated than I’m making out, the basic argument holds—major events by themselves don’t matter as much as we expect them to over the long term.

[As a more meta note: Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site: pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable – the site has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. So I occasionally insert a few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really to lose…]

#pitchinvasion #sport psychology #world cup #socialscience #fandom

[mysteryshelf]

BLOG TOUR - Another Man's Poison

Welcome to

THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF!

DISCLAIMER: This content has been provided to THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF by Great Escapes Book Tours. No compensation was received. This information required by the Federal Trade Commission.

Another Man’s Poison by Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa

Cup of Tea Books, a PageSpring Publishing Imprint Cozy Mystery 3rd in Series Release Date – August 29, 2017 236 pages Will be up on GoodReads and Amazon Soon

• No explicit language and the only scene with any lack of clothing contains no actual sex.

Crime reporter Colleen Caruso has an appetite for romance…and trouble. When someone tries to poison Ken Rhodes (her handsome boss and boyfriend), Colleen vows to hunt down the culprit and serve them up to the police. She’s whisked away into the scrumptious world of restaurants and gourmet food as she tangles with four culinary divas from Ken’s past.

Trouble is, Colleen doesn’t know when to turn down the heat.

Is this Jersey Girl’s investigation a recipe for disaster?

Or will the poisoner get their just desserts?

Interview with the Author

What initially got you interested in writing? I honestly don’t remember back that far. I started writing short stories in the fourth grade and wrote periodically after that. Writing has always felt normal to me.

  What genres do you write in? I write mostly mysteries, but have published in both sci-fi and horror. Presently I’m working on something far more literary – and it’s certainly a challenge after concentrating on cozy mysteries for the past five years.

  What drew you to writing these specific genres? I love a good murder! Who doesn’t? As for horror, I also love being scared out of my wits and I like trying to scare other people out of theirs.

  How did you break into the field? I broke in by sending out an endless stream of short stories to magazine editors. When a writer constantly sends out submissions, eventually she’ll get a lovely acceptance letter from some publication. I also joined several writing groups. Writers are generous with their contacts and happily share advice with other writers.

  What do you want readers to take away from reading your works? There’s certainly nothing brilliant or earth-shattering in my published fiction so far! I’d rather create characters that readers can relate to and identify with. It does my heart good when someone reads one of my books and says, “the main character reminds me of my mother” or better still, “she’s just like me!”

  What do you find most rewarding about writing? When someone reads my book and tells me she couldn’t put the book down until she finished the very last page. Then I know for sure I’ve done a good job.

  What do you find most challenging about writing? White screen terror is the most challenging aspect for me! Facing a blank page and trying to start a new story is a scary proposition. I don’t have a real feel for the characters yet when I begin, and the storyline is just a vague notion until I’m at least twenty pages into the book.

  What advice would you give to people wanting to enter the field? Read as much as you can in your chosen genre. You’d be surprised how much you can learn from other authors’ fiction. Be consistent, persistent, and don’t self-edit while you’re writing a first draft. Chug along and bang it out. You can always go back and dress up the manuscript later on in the process.

  What type of books do you enjoy reading? I enjoy bios and memoires, true crime, self-help books, mysteries, horror, and anything to do with American history.

  Is there anything else besides writing you think people would find interesting about you? Sure. I am an avid skydiver and I’m wanted in fifteen states for poisoning a string of husbands – no, not really! Actually, I’m pretty boring.  I’ve worked in a lot of different areas – appellate printing, the government, college admissions, a newspaper stringer (though that is writing, too), an arcade game manufacturer, and a PR office. I don’t know if anyone finds this interesting, but it’s certainly eclectic.

  What are the best ways to connect with you, or find out more about your work? Visit my website at joannlamonreccoppa.com or shoot me an email at joannreccoppaauthor at gmail.com

  About The Author

About The Author

Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa is the creator of the Jersey Girl Cozy Mystery series, which includes New Math is Murder; Hide nor Hair, and the latest installment, Another Man’s Poison. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Reccoppa worked as a stringer for Greater Media Newspapers for many years and wrote hundreds of articles, covering everything from serious medical stories to restaurant reviews. She draws on her past newspaper experience to create quirky characters and outlandish scenarios for the Jersey Girl Cozy Mystery series.

Webpage: https://joannlamonreccoppa.com/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Jo-Ann+Lamon+Reccoppa&search_type=books

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Another-Mans-Poison-Jersey-Mystery-ebook/dp/B074XG62GP/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503800504&sr=1-2&keywords=another+man%27s+poison

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/another-mans-poison-jo-ann-lamon-reccoppa/1127008297?ean=2940158561641

Other books in this series:

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Tour Participants

October 2 – Books,Dreams,Life – SPOTLIGHT  

October 3 – Valerie’s Musings – INTERVIEW

October 3 – Cassidy’s Bookshelves – SPOTLIGHT

October 4 – The Pulp and Mystery Shelf – INTERVIEW

October 5 – StoreyBook Reviews – GUEST POST

October 6 – 3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, &, Sissy, Too! – SPOTLIGHT

October 7 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – SPOTLIGHT

October 8 – A Holland Reads – GUEST POST

October 9 – Mystery Thrillers and Romantic Suspense Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

October 10 – Cozy Up With Kathy – GUEST POST

October 10 – Celticlady’s Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

October 11 – Back Porchervations – REVIEW

October 12 – My Reading Journeys – REVIEW, INTERVIEW

October 13 – Laura’s Interests – SPOTLIGHT

October 14 – Brooke Blogs – SPOTLIGHT

October 15 – A Blue Million Books – CHARACTER INTERVIEW

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BLOG TOUR – Another Man’s Poison was originally published on the Wordpress version of The Pulp and Mystery Shelf with Shannon Muir

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