#I would probably use it for week to two page spreads and monthly spreads and random notes

[ruegracieuse]

thinking of completely changing my diary plans for next year (and I guess the foreseeable) and getting a filofax

[quillsanddaydreams]

what great men say

james potter x reader

—author’s note: I was extremely soft about James and just how goofy he is around his friends and I just had to write it down. So what does being friends with James and eventually falling for him include? Enjoy!

—warning(s): mentions of food, she/her pronouns!reader 

—wordcount: 3,196

You sighed looking at the time. He would be here any minute— he never came late. Tapping your foot, you turned your attention to the book open in front of you. Transfiguration. The subject that you struggled with the most. James excelled at it. 

The turtle he transformed the teacup into that day was stunning. Popping its head inside the green-gold shell as everyone looked on. James smiled teasingly wide when McGonagall had commended him. No one noticed when he shifted aside to talk to the turtle in a baby voice. It made you smile. You blinked. Words swirled on the page you’d opened. Shaking your head, you turned to concentrate on them.

“There you are!” James shouted as the librarian shot him a glare. He was huffing— apparently from running to the library. He made an apologetic face and slowly came and plopped down beside you.

“Do you always have to be loud?” you said as he playfully rolled his eyes.

“Well, a great man once said loudness is the way of life,” he huffed, breathing deeply as you raised an eyebrow.

“And is this great man you?”

“Are you saying anything to the contrary?”

You let a small smile play on your lips which etched his grin further.

“I wouldn’t dare,” you said as he adjusted his collar, looking smug.

“I mean, even great men tell the turtle they made from a teacup that it is a good boy,” you said nonchalantly, opening a notebook. James flustered.

“I didn’t tell Jake he was a good boy,” he murmured.

“Jake, huh?”

“Shut it.”

The two of you spend the next hour working on the transfiguration assignment. James was patient as he helped you through spells and theory. You laughed, studied and talked. It was just like that between you two. You were good friends, you teased each other, pulled a few pranks and had fun. There was something about him that made you open up more than anyone else. And you loved him. It was stupid really. 

James was utterly and completely in love with Lily Evans. Everyone knew that. You tried and you tried to push it back but you couldn’t help it. It crept up upon you- he had always been so kind to you, so adorably cute that you just fell for him. As torturous as it was, you didn’t dare to even hint him about it. Listening to him gush about the perfect head-girl, you never let your smile fade even if it never reached your eyes. 

James poked your side as you packed your books.

“Hmm?”

“Lily and I talked a lot last night,” he said excitedly as your chest contracted. You zipped up your bag, hanging it by your side.

“Oh yeah?” you asked, plastering on a smile. The two of you started moving out of the library.

“It was amazing,” He said, punctuating each word, a dreamy look on his face. “She told me about her muggle life- records, music tapes- that sort of stuff. She was surprised when I talked to her about Queen and Beatles, impressed even.”

He scratched the back of his head, narrowly avoiding a first year who ran past the two of you.

“Couldn’t tell her you introduced it to us and it’s what Sirius blasts in the room all day long.”

You giggled.

“Did he listen to all of them already?” you asked, desperate to change topics. The two of you turned around the corner. James scoffed.

“Pretty sure he heard each of them at least a hundred times.”

“It’s good music James,” you sighed. “Ask him whether he’s free next Hogsmeade weekend, I’ll show him a place he’s going to adore.”

“Ah, I have some head-boy duties with Lily, Remus is helping Slughorn for extra credit and Peter is practicing astronomy,” James said as you furrowed your eyebrows.

“So Sirius is free?”

“Yes, but we aren’t,” James shrugged as you laughed.

“Okay,” you dragged on, not sure where the conversation was going. “Ask him if he’d like to go with me?”

James turned to you, confused.

“You’ll go with Sirius, alone?” he asked as you hummed in response, shrugging. He scowled.

You turned back at James standing at the door to the common room.

“Tomorrow, same time?” you asked with a smile. He nodded giving you a half-hearted grin and moving towards his room. Did you say something wrong? Shaking your head, you retreated to your dorm.

-♡♡♡-

A loud knock shook you. You looked towards the window and… James?

“James what the hell are you doing there?” you asked, jolting towards the sill and unlocking it. The idiot was standing a broom nearly forty feet above ground.

“I was wondering whether you’d join us all for a trip to the kitchens?” he breathed, a small smile playing on his lips. You heard snorts making you look down at the ground. Sirius, Remus and Peter were rolling out in laughter, but you couldn’t think much about that.

“Are you insane? Bloody sit down on your broom or come in,” you said eyes wide.

“Fine, I’m coming.” James grinned, jumping inside. He grabbed your arms almost falling over you. A strong perfume attacked your senses. His face was so close to yours, you could count the faint freckles on his face. Messy strands of hair fell over his forehead making you want to run your hands over them. You blinked, steading yourself before taking a step back. James coughed.

“Um, I was sneaking out for some hot chocolate,” he said placing his hands in his jeans’ pocket, thumbs out. “I remember you complaining we never took you.”

“Oh,” you said, feeling awkward all of a sudden. “Let me just get my jacket, it’s kinda cold.”

Grabbing the nearest jacket, you put it on as James stared around your room. You had decorated it beautifully. Post cards, quotes and some letters were put up on a wall on the far end. His eyes fell on you as you turned to him smiling, ready to leave. He gulped.

“How are we leaving?” you asked and James gestured to his broom floating outside your window.

After much bickering, you found yourself sitting behind James, holding onto him for your dear life. That wasn’t to say you didn’t enjoy it. It felt good being so close to him, having your hands around his waist. You almost felt sad when you reached down. Sirius smirked at you as you climbed off the broom. He knew more than he probably should.

“What took you so long?” Peter complained. You saw Sirius open his mouth to say something but closed it on seeing your glare. He wrapped an arm around your shoulder.

“Well now that she’s here, shall we?” he said leading you ahead of the group.

James frowned at the two of you. Sirius whispered something in your ear making you roll your eyes playfully.

“What’s made you so off now?” Peter asked. Remus patted his shoulder.

“Jealousy is always a bad colour on people my dear wormtail,” Remus said dramatically. James raised it eyebrows.

“I’m not jealous,” James said pointedly and then shrugged. “What would I be jealous of?”

Remus rolled his eyes.

“Sureeee.”

You took in the warm room while the boys asked for hot chocolates for all of you. Sweet smell of banana bread and muffins eloped the kitchen. Remus called for you, handing you a steaming mug of cocoa. You sat down beside James tuning in to their conversation. He gave you a small smile as Remus and Peter quarrelled about their divination predictions. You laughed and you talked, feeling the week’s tension slowly slip off your shoulders. When it was time to leave, you felt oddly content. Making them promise to make this a monthly thing, you finally turned to leave. James held you back.

“I was wondering, if you’d like to have a bit more fun?” James asked, biting his lip. “Just us two.”

You looked at him curiously and licked your lip.

“And what will this fun, entail?”

“There’s this small place near the edge of forbidden forest,” he said and you raised an eyebrow. “I swear it’s not that dangerous. It’s honestly beautiful.”

James didn’t know why he was so bent over to spend some more time with you. All he knew was that he didn’t want the evening to end. He didn’t want to leave you just yet. So when you nodded slowly, he couldn’t stop the grin that spread on his face.

The two of you tip-toed through the castle, James’s invisibility cloak with him just in case. Checking the map, he turned towards you. Taking your hand in his; he whispered, “Run.”

Your eyes widened. James sprinted forward, taking you with him. There was no time to think. Trying to keep up with him— you made your way through the grounds, the air icy against your face. You were huffing by the time you reached the lip of the forest.

“What exactly were we running from?” you asked, taking in gulps of air.

“No one— we were taking too much time,” he said shrugging. “And adrenaline always feels good.”

He didn’t notice you glaring at him. You slapped his arm playfully.

“Hey—” he groaned, rubbing at the spot.

“Now that you’ve wounded me, shall we?”

You nodded, biting the inside of your cheek. Placing his palms on your shoulder James turned you, leading you towards a small clearing. Your arms erupted in goosebumps, feeling him right behind you. His breath tickled your neck. Did he really not know the effect he had on you? Reaching there, James gestured around dramatically. Fireflies buzzed around the area and the ground bloomed with wild flowers.

“Wow,” you gasped. James watched you, his face lighting up. Running your hands through the shrubs you looked up. Night sky was always clear at Hogwarts. But somehow it seemed even more beautiful then. You glanced towards James catching him staring.

“See something you like?”

“You look beautiful,” James uttered before he could stop himself. Your cheeks heated up.

You did. You looked gorgeous every single day. James swallowed, a distinct blush covering his cheeks. He felt your gaze on him, waiting for him to say something. He heard you sigh after a little while.

“You know, when I was small, I used to collect fireflies in a jar,” you said, sitting down slowly. James joined you. “Pretty little things they were. I would stare at them for hours. Mum hated them. Dad didn’t seem to mind. They would zoom around in the jar and I would take it in hand running through the house saying they were my army. Danger shall befall those who cross me— I used to say”

James let out a laugh, sighing as you both watched the stars. Sneaking a glance at him, you caught him doing the same. Light from flies lighted up his face, his brown eyes sparkling. You didn’t know who leaned in. His lips were soft against yours as you let your hands tangle in his hair. His arms went to your waist, tugging you towards him. The kiss seemed to light you up. Pulling back breathless you stared at him, seeing something that made your stomach. Guilt. You dug your nails into your palm, waiting for the excuses to come. And it came. He called out your name.

“Don’t.” You snapped.

Scrambling to your feet, you started moving back towards the castle. James followed you.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think. I don’t know what happened and I—”

You twisted towards him.

“I’m not angry at you James,” you said, your voice barely above a whisper. James frowned. “I— I just like you, okay? I’ve liked you for quite some time.”

James’ eyes widened a little. You let out a laugh, looking away.

“I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at myself. Do you realise how pathetic it is, to love someone knowing they’ll never love you back?  Every day I’ll tell myself; it doesn’t matter. That it’s a crush and it’ll go away. And every day I fall a little more in love with you knowing you’ll never feel the same.”

Silence fell around you and you wrapped your arms around yourself. You felt cold. James watched you, desperate to reach out. He wanted to stop you but he didn’t know how. All he could do was listen.

“I think, I think it’ll be better for me to stay away from you for a while,” you breathed, trying your best not to let the tears in your eyes fall.

You walked back to the castle leaving James alone. A tear fell down his face and he furiously wiped it off.

-♡♡♡-

The next few days seemed never-ending. Classes, homework and head-boy duties kept James busy. He practiced harder and longer on the field. But his mind wasn’t in it. It was full with the thoughts of you. He tried. He really tried to reach out to you somehow. To catch your eye during classes, give you a small smile, but you hardly even glanced at him. It hurt. More than he could ever care to admit. He had quite forgotten what it was like not to spend time together every single day. To not listen to you complain about your day, hear your laugh. He felt alone.

Bacon and eggs were laid out in front of him, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat. He toyed it around with his fork.

“Ahhh James! Just the person I was looking for,” Lily said with a bright smile as James looked towards her. “I was thinking maybe you could join me after lunch? We can review the prefect rounds’ details.”

James furrowed his eyebrows.

“Didn’t we do that last week?”

Lily’s expression fell, but she covered it up quickly.

“Yes we did, but I thought maybe we could go over them again?” she said expectantly.

“Uh- sure.” He said, moving his attention back to his plate. He pushed it away.

Sirius, Peter and Remus raised their eyebrows at him. James looked at them questioningly.

“Are you dead?” Remus asked.

“No?”

“Yeah I think he’s dead.” Sirius pipped in. James opened his mouth to retort but Sirius bet him to it.

“Look, I know finding out your friend is in love with you while you think you’re in love with someone else isn’t easy—”

“Especially when you’re actually in love with the said friend," Peter said, taking a bite of his toast. James opened his mouth.

“Especially then —but you gotta make up your mind. Go date Lily and find out how worthless it is and then go back to friend or go now and talk to her and tell her what you really feel about her.”

James blinked.

“I’m not in love with her,” he said slowly as they collectively groaned. He ignored them. “And how did you know that she told me she likes me?”

“It was obvious?” Sirius said as Remus rolled his eyes.

“You know what? Let him continue his idiocy for more. I want to see how long this can actually go on,” Remus said as others hummed in response, shrugging.

“What? You’re not even going to listen to me now?” James stated as his friends paid no attention.

“Not when you’re being a dumbass, no.”

James banged his head on the table. Remus continued to read his book while Sirius and Peter concentrated on their breakfast.

“What if, what if I said,” James began slowly. “That maybe I do love her. I do love her and I was the biggest fool in the world and screwed this up beyond repair?”

Remus stared at James, a small smile overcoming his features.

“You tell her exactly that.”

-♡♡♡-

You sighed turning the page. The story was captivating at first, but now— not so much. There was a knock at the window and you turned to see… James? Your heart thumped against your chest. He stood there, probably on his broomstick waiting for you to let him in. Pushing the covers aside, you got up and opened the small lock as James hopped in. Your chest clenched seeing him for the first time in weeks. You had missed him. His hair was disheveled and he fidgeted awkwardly, staring at you.

“James why are you here?” you asked softly. You wanted nothing more than to hug him. But you held back. You couldn’t do that to yourself, not anymore.

“I— um— I wanted to tell you something,” he said as you gestured at him to go on. There was silence.

“Well?”

James flushed, looking down.

“I— I had this whole speech prepared and now I forgot what I was supposed to say,” he said and you looked at him curiously. “I know it starts with me saying I might be the biggest dumbass at Hogwarts.”

“That I can agree on,” you pointed out, a small grin evident on your face. James cracked a smile hearing you tease him after weeks. Somehow, he never minded it when it was you. There was silence again, but this time it felt calmer.

“You see? I had a fascination with this red-headed girl,” he whispered. Your throat bobbed. He was here to talk about Lily? “This fiery girl who rejected me every time I asked her out. And my fascination just grew. So much that I couldn’t even notice myself falling for someone else. Someone who’d been an amazing friend.”

Your eyes snapped towards him and he gave you a light smile.

“I don’t love Lily. I don’t. And I hate myself for not realizing it. But even more than that I hate myself for turning you away. I’m sorry,” he said as you sniffed, letting his words soak in. He loved you, not Lily. You knew you must be looking like an idiot then, giddiness blooming through your body.

“Are you sure this isn’t the speech you prepared?” you said as James chuckled. He shook his head.

“My prepared speech was written by a great man and it did not end with an apology.”

“Oh? What did that great man end the speech with?” you said, joy evident on James’ face. He was enjoying this.

“Asking you out,” he said cheekily and you let out a snort.

“Well, that’s a let down,” you said, putting on a disappointed expression, noticing James furrowing his brows. “I was hoping the speech would end in some kisses; after all, don—"

You couldn’t finish the sentence as James pulled you closer by your waist and pressed his lips against yours. You sighed, tugging him closer by his neck. Pulling back, you rested your forehead against his taking deep breaths.

“I fucking love you,” James said, cradling your face and starting to press kisses all over. You giggled.

“I love you too. Tell that great man I’d like to go out with him this Hogsmeade weekend, will you?” you said as James let out a laugh.

���as for the taglist: I don’t make taglists, I have a blog @from-my-quill which is updated whenever I post fanfiction. You could have the notifications on for it and it will work just like me tagging you.

⟨⟨REBLOGS AND FEEDBACK ARE APPRECIATED⟩⟩

[galladrabbles]

Galladrabbles with a Capital G!

Six months ago I got offered a bet. And Evie (@energievie) already knew me, Vey (@look-i-love-u), well enough at this point to know I can neither say no to a good bet, nor to a writing challenge. So the first Galladrabble, still without a title, happened in November. I won the bet and Evie had to write it. So it continued for a three months.

Ten weeks ago monthly bets turned into the weekly "galladrabbles". Evie and I enjoyed the many challenges too much to just leave them for once a month. Even though I'm not sure if it's the writing or 'getting the worst reaction out of each other' - that we enjoyed more.

But #galladrabbles was born and for a few weeks things went back and forth between the two of us. We wrote drabbles for each other's prompts and exchanged many messages dreaming about maybe other people wanting to join in and what everyone would come up with for our prompts and how amazing it would be to spread the drabble joy (and let's be honest: fun and frustration that come along with them sometimes.)

And then it happened! We don't know how. We don't know why... but suddenly a few wonderful people wanted to join in. So this blog was made and....

... we made it to double figures this week! Galladrabbles! With a capital G!

There are now twelve great writers and prompters who created eleven (!!!) galladrabbles this week.

It does feel like a dream has come true. I know it feels like that for me and I think, Evie, too.

So I, we, really would like to say thank you to everyone participating. As a writer. As a reader. As a liker and reblogger and commentator. As a prompter. As someone who may roll their eyes but deals with having the tags flooded on Wednesday (we really probably should work on that a little bit XD). Thank you, very much!

And in case you missed it: Lily, @tsuga-of-mars, says thank you too and shared a "O.O" kind of pic that inspired her prompt this week.

And to wrap things up quickly: The prompt and author pages are up to date now.

Evie will post the drabbles to AO3 on Mondays now in case someone posts their drabble on Sunday.

And a shout out to Maria, @mzshko, it's your turn to set the prompt tomorrow. Please submit it via ask to this blog. I'm looking forward to catching whatever you throw at us!

Oh! And last but not least: Evie and I live in European timezones so if it takes a short while to get your drabbles reblogged to galladrabbles or your questions answered... that's probably why ;)

[farfromsugafanfic]

Sutures - Chapter Two: Conjugate

Genre: Soulmates AU, Idiots to Lovers, slight Enemies to Lovers

Pairing: Yoongi/Named Reader

Warnings (chapter specific): invasions of privacy

Synopsis: “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” –Jean de la Fontaine

There was only one thing you and Min Yoongi had in common that night. You were both brokenhearted. You only intended to be together for one night, but when you both end up in the hospital the next day you discover that you are soulmates. It could kill you to be apart. As you and Yoongi attempt to sever the bond between you, will another be formed?

Notes: This was originally written and completed on Wattpad between 2018 and the beginning of 2020. I’ll be slowly posting the chapters here. I may make a tag list depending on if enough people want to follow along with updates. Leave me some feedback if you would like added to a tag list.

Previous | Series Masterlist | Next

You sighed as the nurse pulled the IV out of your arm. The muscles in your body relaxing for the first time in hours.

"There we are," the nurse said. "Looks like you'll be out of here in a few hours. Just make sure not to get too far from that man of yours."

You smiled up at her, not wanting to explain that he wasn't your man and that you'd only just learned his name from a news broadcast a few hours ago. When Eunji had texted you that he was an idol, you'd thought she was joking. She was drunk after all and probably would've called any guy flirting with you an idol.

"This is crazy," Eunji said. "What're you going to do?"

"I don't know," you said. "I guess I'll have to contact him somehow."

"Did you get his number?"

"No, we never intended to see each other again."

"Well, he's looking for you."

---

"Jang Sumi?" a man asked, knocking politely as he entered.

"Yes?"

He bowed politely as he entered.

"I'm Bang Sihyuk, CEO of BigHit Entertainment," he said.

Your eyes grew wide and you immediately bowed, feeling slightly embarrassed you hadn't recognized him and done so before.

"We would like to discuss a proposal with you. If you'd please sit down," he said, pointing to the newly made hospital bed.

You sat down and the man sat down in the chair Eunji sat when you first awoke. "We have reason to believe you are Min Yoongi's soulmate. I'm sure the doctors have already explained that this means the two of you must remain near each other."

You nodded.

"In order to protect his career, we would like you to move into the BTS dorm. We will pay you and compensate you for any trouble."

"What about my career?" you asked.

The man nodded, his shoulders relaxing as if he'd expected you to question him.

"We've done our research and you're an English tutor? You can continue online sessions and do occasional in-person sessions away from the dorm. We don't want to take away your livelihood by any means. We want to protect both of you."

Your mind overflowed with thoughts. You'd be living with seven guys. Seven idols. Would girls get jealous? Would their fans even know? You had too many questions for the man to possibly answer.

You could certainly use the extra money and without having to pay rent, it would allow you to begin saving money. Something you'd wanted since you'd moved out.

You'd have to work less though, but you were sure the compensation that BigHit offered would be more than enough to make up for the fewer hours.

"All right," you said. "As long as I can keep my job, I agree."

---

"Boys, this is Jang Sumi," Bang PD said.

You bowed to the seven boys in front of you, secretly wishing the much more charming Eunji hadn't gone home. Even though it was obvious they had rushed to the hospital based on the various array of sweatpants and messy hair, they all still looked gorgeous.

The boys bowed back and their gazes wandered down to your neck, their eyes wide. You hadn't noticed the bruises there from the night before. You shyly broke eye contact and looked over to Yoongi who sat with his feet dangling off the hospital bed.

You met his dark eyes. Instead of the mysterious and hungry look they'd held the night before, they now looked exhausted and slightly annoyed. His gaze left yours momentarily as his eyes looked down at the bruises on your neck. His face remained expressionless except for a small flick of his tongue between his lips.

"The doctors need to run a few more tests and talk with Yoongi and Sumi," Bang PD said. "We should leave them alone"

The six other boys filed out of the room and you took a seat on the bed next to Yoongi, leaving a large space between you, so that it would be nearly impossible to accidentally brush against one another.

"Hi," you said. "So, it's been an interesting day, huh?"

The boy didn't respond and before you could make more futile attempts to fill the silence two doctors walked into the room.

"Min Yoongi and Jang Sumi?"

You both nodded and bowed.

"All right, I know this is all a bit overwhelming right now, but once we all discuss and decide on the various options, I'm sure you'll feel better." The doctor flipped a few pages on his clipboard before looking back up at you. "So, as you both know, this is still a fairly rare condition. Finding one's soulmate and having it cause heart attack like symptoms is not well understood. Due to this, we request at least monthly check-ups for at least the first year for both of you to ensure your heart is okay and to check your overall health. The rest depends on how the two of you choose to proceed. Are you two currently in a relationship?"

"No," you both answered.

The doctor nodded.

"The easiest and best way to proceed is to attempt a relationship. While it might be awkward at first, for your overall general health, it will be the best way to adjust and will allow the withdrawals to be less frequent and violent in the future. If--"

"No," Yoongi said. "We can't do a relationship."

"What do you mean?" you asked, your head whipping around to face him. The last thing you wanted was to be in a relationship with a man you barely knew, especially the day after you'd officially ended it with your ex. But if the doctors said it was the best way to deal with the situation, you were inclined to listen.

"It's for both of our own good," he said. "You have no idea what a relationship with an idol would be like."

"Well, there are other options," the doctor said, glancing between the two of you. "If you truly don't want to be together, we can work on trying to weaken or even sever the connection between you. It is rare and difficult to do, but it has been achieved. You will have to stay in the same building as the other person most of the time. There do seem to be some exceptions such as work or situations where the other absolutely can't be present. However, at first, these withdrawals will be powerful and you may not be able to leave the building without the other person at all. For the first week, we suggest not doing so.

"In order to attempt to sever the connection, we will have to monitor your mental health and work to keep the relationship on track. While you don't have to remain distant from each other, it is important to not have feelings for each other, or else it will not work. You will have monthly or bi-weekly appointments with a psychiatrist who is trained to work with cases like this.

"You will also experience something we like to call urges. These are instances of extreme attraction to one another. It will be extremely difficult to be apart from each other during these times. It is important that you be together in these times, but if you are choosing not to pursue a relationship, you must do your best to resist the attraction."

After the doctor was done explaining everything and had recorded your decision to attempt and sever the connection, they drew blood from both of you and allowed you to leave.

---

You'd spent the rest of the day packing. Your things were going to be confined mostly to one room, meaning you had to downsize and choose what was most important to you.

You heard a knock on the door and before you could answer it, it was already open and Eunji and the entirety of BTS came through your door.

"Sorry if I scared you," Eunji said. "I let them in."

"Sumi," the tallest one said. He was the leader, Kim Namjoon, according to Google. You figured you should at least try to learn your new roommates. He introduced himself and the rest of the boys, other than Yoongi. "We decided to help you pack up before the movers get here. I'm sure it's quite overwhelming to have to move all of a sudden."

"Yes," you said. "This is very sweet. I guess, um, you could help clean up a bit? I haven't had a chance to clean the kitchen since I got home. And, maybe someone else wouldn't mind getting dinner?"

"No problem," Namjoon said, motioning to the members.

"I'll be in my bedroom if you have any questions or need me for anything."

Eunji was already bonding with the younger members of the band and showed them where all of the cleaning supplies were kept. You smiled at her ability to make friends quickly and headed back to your bedroom.

Your suitcase laid open on your bed as you sorted through your clothes, trying to decide what to keep. You'd already packed the essentials, the rest of your closet spread out around the suitcase.

You felt something soft beneath your foot. You bent down and picked up the fabric, recognizing it as the dress you'd worn out the night before. You hated to leave it behind it, but you weren't sure you would need such a nice dress again. And if you did, you could just borrow one of Eunji's. You folded the dress and were attempting to make a decision when a knock sounded on your door.

"Come in."

The door opened and Yoongi walked in. He wore a beanie, a sweatshirt, and a pair of jeans. You almost liked the more casual look on him more than the slightly more dressed up look he'd worn when you first met. You weren't sure if you truly liked it better or if it was just the connection between you talking.

"Sorry to intrude," he said. "I was just wondering if you needed any more help? The rest of the boys pretty much have it handled out there."

You tried to put aside the resentment you felt for the boy from earlier in the day when he so bluntly decided not to follow the best option and try the relationship.

"You can pack up my knitting stuff," you said pointing over to your desk in the corner where you kept yarn, knitting needles, and the various guides. "Just be careful not to tangle the different yarns together."

He nodded and grabbed an empty box and carefully placing each skein in the box. You turned back to the dress in your hands. You fingered the soft fabric and sighed as you went to set aside. Before you could set the dress with the rest of your discarded clothes, you felt a hand take it from you. You looked up at Yoongi, who held the dress and placed it into the suitcase.

"It looks good on you."

---

"You like to knit?" Yoongi asked, a few minutes later.

"Yeah," you said. "It calms me down when I'm stressed."

He nodded as he placed the rest of the items from the desk into the box.

"Sumi!" someone called from the hallway.

"What do you want us to do with this?" one of the boys asked, you believed his name was Jimin, followed by a blond-haired boy, Taehyung. Jimin dangled your stuffed cat in the air, a smirk across his face.

"Hey!" you said. "Don't hold Kitty that way!"

The boy laughed as you snatched the stuffed animal from him. One of Kitty's button eyes was loose and dangled slightly, causing her eyes to look uneven.

"You named it Kitty?" Jimin asked laughing.

Eunji came into the room. She seemed slightly annoyed with the two boys who had run off from their duties.

"I was four!" you said, looking down at the stuffed cat. "Besides, it's an English name!"

"All right, all right," Jimin said, relenting his taunts. "Do you want to take Kitty or not?"

You made eye contact with Eunji who's eyes were wide. She knew what Kitty meant to you, but Kitty was also falling apart. Her eye was the least of her trouble, you'd sewed the majority of her seams back together multiple times. You didn't want to risk Kitty getting lost or falling apart altogether. You knew it was time to let her go.

"She is pretty old and I'm getting too old for toys anyway. Um, I guess put her in with the donation pile." You handed the stuffed animal back to Jimin who took it and hesitantly walked from the room.

You felt tears pricking at your eyes, but you held them back and went back to sorting through your clothes. The task felt harder all of a sudden, but eventually, you finished, zipping up the suitcase.

---

It was late by the time you arrived at the dorm. It was huge, the biggest apartment you'd ever seen. It was surprisingly clean for being inhabited by seven boys, but you figured they were just too busy to cause much of a mess.

The extra bedroom they'd been using as storage was already clear for you. You made your bed and then opened your suitcase and began emptying it into the dresser.

"Need some help?" Namjoon asked, standing in the doorway.

You smiled at the boy as he began sorting your clothes, making it easier for you to put away.

"Thank you," you said. "I'm exhausted and I'm honestly dreading the rest of the boxes getting here tomorrow."

He nodded.

"We've moved a lot," he said. "Sometimes I feel more tired after moving than dance practice."

You both laughed lightly.

"They told me you're an English tutor?"

"Yeah," you said.

"It'll be nice having someone else who can speak English."

"None of the other boys can?"

He shook his head.

"No, they all understand a little. But none of them are fluent."

"We'll have to change that then," you said, laughing.

"How'd you learn it?"

"My mom grew up in the US. Her parents were from here but moved to the US when my mom was a baby. She met my dad when she was here visiting family and she ended up moving when they got married. So, I grew up speaking both Korean and English. My parents recently moved to the US actually, to be closer to my grandparents."

"Wow," he said. "That's a better story than mine. I just watched Friends."

You laughed.

"That's more impressive though. You taught yourself. I kind of just learned it the same time I learned Korean."

You felt some of the nerves you'd felt coming into the dorm beginning to leave you. While you were sure it would talk longer for you to adjust, the boys had all tried to be as helpful and welcoming as possible. Even Yoongi. Despite the fact he'd barely talked to you, he still helped pack up your apartment.

"Sumi," you heard another voice say. You turned around and saw Yoongi standing in the doorway, his eyes focused on his phone. "We have a problem."

"What?" you asked, your eyebrows knitting together.

"Someone found your shoes."

"My shoes? You mean, the ones I left at the bar last night?"

Yoongi nodded.

"Someone is selling them online. They're using the connection to me to get attention. The bidding ends tomorrow."

You grabbed onto the dresser and tried to steady yourself. You'd expected something like this to happen eventually, but just twenty four hours after you'd even met Min Yoongi?

You heard Namjoon say something to Yoongi, but you didn't catch what it was. You felt a hand on your shoulder and saw the leader looking straight at you.

"We're going to get this figured out."

All you could do was nod.

[mskatesharma]

FA. I think most of the non-Vogue big American fashion magazines (Harpers Bazaar, Elle, Instyle) are either accounted for or a reach (though not impossible). Simone does have a great “hook,” but those magazines usually feature A-listers or solid rising stars (for example, Alana Haim was on Feb’s Harper’s and is not A-list but she has Oscar buzz right now).

Trying to think of other possibilities! Porter mag is actually out (just saw Simone Biles is this month). I can’t keep up/remember if Marie Claire is doing monthlies or not. So many magazines aren’t anymore because of budget issues. Glamour is digital only and possibly not monthly either. Rachel Zegler was on Town and Country but I kind of dismissed that as an option because it’s rather stuffy for both the show and Simone’s vibe. I suppose Zegler was on it because she was promoting West Side Story, much more “traditional,” despite her being 20 years old and not exactly their readership age.

The reason I think British Vogue is quite possible is because of the synergy of Simone being the heroine of a regency romance. And also because the options are dwindling lol

Nicola was just on Elle UK. Phoebe was recently on Harper’s Bazaar UK, so not that either. Umm…Nylon?

Rihanna makes complete sense for American Vogue with it being “bodies.” I don’t know if she’d have been showing in time for the photoshoot is the only thing. Rihanna could be a later cover as well. And we’ll see what Zoë Kravitz gets.

Fashion anon with more thoughts lmao

The timing of season 2 is kind of annoying because I think Simone would have a very fair shot at scoring a bigger cover during a “quieter” time. She has a great newcomer narrative, is a WOC, and is super model-like and stunning. But season 2 is happening during Oscar season (still a little aghast at the release date decision tbh…Easter and the long holiday weekend was a just few weeks away and they wouldn’t risk being drowned out by the Oscars. Anyway).

I’m not sure if Simone and Jonathan will get a cover together. I think EW was the best opportunity for that, and well…Possibly on one of the weekly trades (Variety/Deadline/Hollywood Reporter). But definitely not a shared cover of a fashion magazine imo…a feature/photoshoot? Almost surely. But not a cover. If Simone miraculously scores British Vogue, I would guess W or Vanity Fair. If not, I think they’ll make the BV spread a tradition for each couple.

(This ask.)

Lol, should we assemble a prayer circle for Simone’s BV cover? 🕯🙏🏽🕯 Nylon magazine could be cool though! I just, like you said, Simone has a great ‘hook’, and I want her to be featured as much as possible, because her casting as Kate means so much? I think BV would be the best fit, especially under Enninful, and I honestly think it would be the right platform, because like said, Town and Country does seem a bit stuffy. Would it be too much to go through BV’s IG page to see how much they featured Naomi Scott and Emma Corrin before their covers, just so that we have a comparison? 😂

I think regarding US Vogue and Rihanna, the poster to Deuxmoi said she was photographed in Barbados last month? (I should probably go and find the post) Also, regarding Zoë Kravitz, @nanso mentioned that Zoë has covered BV twice already, so while I still think she could feature again for Batman, maybe they’d be more inclined to feature someone else?

I’m still quite annoyed that season two comes out the same weekend as the Oscars, because it just feels like such a dumb move? Like you said, there is a real risk of Bridgerton getting drowned out by it, and idk, you’d think they wouldn’t want to risk that, especially when RJP already isn’t returning?

I just want at least one joint shoot with Jonny and Simone, because it’s what they, and we deserve, so even though they weren’t there for EW (which, something just feels a bit...off about that?), then hopefully they’ll get one of the weekly trades 🤞🏽 And yes! Like Phoebe and RJP, I hope we at least see a feature of them together in BV!

[samiii-p]

miss temptation (I don’t think you know) 1/?

aka The Maryan Roommate AU no one asked for 🙃 ao3

“You need a home address by next week or I’m writing you up.”

Fuck

Scratching an 'X' over another available apartment listing in the newspaper, Ryan grunts, blacking it out in her frustration. This one was her last true option within her price range and it was about the size of a walk-in closet with a communal bathroom to boot.

And no, just no. God no.

At least the last one had a view. It was a brick wall of the neighboring apartment but one nonetheless.

“You know for someone who needed this job, you sure don’t look the part.”

Sucking her teeth, Ryan glances up from her troubles, spots Luke in his custom three piece suit, grumbles and glances back at the paper where the only options left cost an arm and a leg to stay. Gotham wasn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but selling her organs on a monthly basis just to get by didn’t seem all that appealing either.

“What do you want, Luke?”

“Can’t a guy just stop by?”

“Sure.” Ryan says, flipping the newspaper to the next page, maybe she could find something outside of town. The commute would be hell, but at least she’d have an address and her parole officer would finally get off her back. “I take it that’s not what you’re here for though.”

She hears him harrumph and nothing else. He does it a second later, again … and again.

“Okay, how can I help you?” She asks, sliding her current issues down the counter. Another 18 months in jail won’t hurt, let alone leaving the city in shambles when Batwoman disappears again .

Luke tilts his chin, hard line forming between his brows, a look Ryan has grown accustomed to over the past few weeks. Even though he’s apologized and promised to give her a chance until Kate’s return, there's still a tiny bit of friction lying beneath the surface no matter how much they both try to ignore it.

Reaching into his breast pocket he unearths a photo and slides it across the bar into Ryan’s line of vision. A picture of a black mask, outlined like a skeleton, stares up at her with cold hard eyes. In the corner a coiled snake is drawn with Luke’s handwriting underneath.

Snakebite - fear toxin/mushrooms

“Um, who or what am I looking at?”

He thumps the photo twice. “I was hoping you could tell me. You said you run in similar circles-”

“- ran.”

“As Victor Zsasz, I was hoping you could tell me a little about our friend here.”

“Sorry to tell you this but, no.” She pushes off the bar with a huff, nodding at the photo. “Whoever this person is, is new in town. At least to me.”

“Yeah, well his snakebite is hitting the streets like a plague and no one knows its source. There’s only this photo as a possible supplier but there’s no name, no facial recognition, no origin or leaks, no nothing.”

“So what do we do?”

“You suit up.”

Heat signature enabled, Ryan takes a look around the abandoned building noting two low level street hands Luke identifies as TJ Pillar: 1 to 3 strike for armed robbery and Curtis Armstrong: out on parole for possession.

“Come on, dude.”

She totally gets how uneasy it is to get back on your feet after spending a little over a year incarcerated but at least try to do better.

“What?” Luke asks through the coms, Ryan ignores him, scouting more of the building. It’s been over an hour and nothing. They wouldn’t be here if no one was coming but it’s growing closer to midnight and she has to be back at work at nine.

“Can’t I just bring them in? It’s late.”

“I mean you could, but it’ll be a waste of time. The guys on the street don’t know anything except to wait for the drop here.”

“And we couldn’t call in Gotham PD or the Crows for surveillance because..?”

“Hey, you wanted the job, this is what it entails.”

Behind the mask, Ryan’s eyes roll, mocking this is what the job entails meh meh, like she's a child grounded for the night, which, all things considered…

“Besides, it’s not like you have anything better to do.”

“Okay! Okay!” Over the coms, Ryan hears hushed voices arguing, a muffled ‘no’ then the sound of chairs being switched, Luke’s voice replaced by Mary’s, “heeey, girl. How ya’ doing?”

She smirks, attitude vanishing the moment the heiress speaks. Call it a general preference to all things sans-Luke based but she’d one hundred present rather talk to Mary until the butt crack of dawn instead of Mr. Kate would do it like this and Kate would do it like that. For starters Mary’s a lot nicer. Calmer. Funnier, I mean the girl’s one liners are top tier, bone tickling funny.

And well, she was a hell of a lot prettier too.

“Oh, you know, just pulling an all-nighter right before my day shift.”

A hiss sounds dramatically over the intercoms, the image of Mary’s twisted face pops up and Ryan can almost see the apple of her cheeks bunching and her eyes closing in that cute ass scrunchy face she makes when she’s thinking hard or embarrassed clear as day.

“Don’t worry about it, you can always come in later.”

“You enable her by making exceptions.”

“Luke!”

“What!?”

More muffled noises, a bang and yelp later Mary comes back on. “What I was getting at is that if you want to come in a little bit late, it’s totally fine or we can even change your schedule to mid-day, as your boss and fellow bat accomplice, I would totally understand.”

The corner of Ryan lips quirks up, “you don’t have to do that.”

“I do. We don’t know for sure how long you’ll be out tonight. Coming in afterwards is going to be draining-”

“It’ll be draining for all of us.” Luke yells.

“Shh!”

Unfortunately, Luke has a point. It's not fair on the team if she’s the only one taking the easy way out when they all have lives and responsibilities outside of the cave to adhere to, and a mid-day shift would never work anyway. Mid-day is Officer Steven’s favorite time of day to intrude on Ryan’s life.

“No that’s okay,” Ryan says, “Luke’s right. I have to put on my big girl panties and suck it up like everyone else, besides, I’m going to be too busy selling body parts for an overpriced cardboard box in the foreseeable future or it's a one way ticket back to Black Gate-”

“Wait, what-?”

“Oh, hold up.” An engine alerts Ryan to an incoming vehicle speeding into the warehouse disrupting their conversation. “We got action.”

Censors pick up on a lone body inside, facial recognition scanners kick on and work to identify the driver’s profile as well as the car’s make, model design, vehicle number and license plate number are all shot over to home base for further analysis. She twitches them off once complete just in time to see a window roll down and a hand throw two duffle bags out the window before speeding off.

“Did we get anything?”

A beat passes before Mary’s back on, “Not yet. Gotham PD and the Crows database has no facial identification, Luke’s expanding the search but the car is unmarked, plates false, even the tires vin numbers have been scrubbed. Whoever this person is, really doesn’t want to be found.”

From Ryan’s personal experience, news like that is never good. Someone that deep undercover either has a checkbook large enough to make themselves disappear or an iron grip so ruthless the utter mention of their name is probable cause for permanent removal. This was going to be harder than any of them expected.

“Keep me posted.”

Kicking off the beam she leaps down sticking another perfect grand entrance; hoping the acclaimed symbol printed on her chest will be enough to scare off the bad guys for once.

She is really tired after all.

Unfortunately, Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dumb both reach for guns, shooting before she can warn them to stand down. And there goes her ‘early’ night. Figures.

“Ya’ll know I’m fucking bullet proof, right?”

Another bullet ricochets off the suit as she takes a step forward. Idiots. Surprisingly they keep at it until the clip clinks, empty, and Ryan comes face to face with Curtis who tries throwing a punch she easily ducks, coming back up to head butt him so hard his knees crumple. His coworker steps up and he’s a bit more of a challenge throwing blow for blow with her until she ducks up under him and comes back with a roundhouse kick to his Adams apple. He clutches his windpipe, now down on one knee she delivers the final blow to the bridge of his nose.

She picks up the bags and hightails it out of there, latching onto a high beam for an easy escape, and heads towards G.C.P.D where she drops the contraband with a note attached of where they can find the assailants tied up and ready for arrest.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re homeless!?”

Ryan wonders if disrupting her day as a civilian was going to become normal protocol for Luke and Mary going forward and on a recurring basis.

“I wouldn’t say homeless.”

“How else would you classify living out of your van down by the docks?”

“Surviving on wheels – ow!” Ryan giggles, rubbing her shoulder and doesn’t know whether to cower or soothe the frustrating scowl rapidly spreading across her friend’s face. “How’d you find out?”

“I had Luke track you after you left last night.”

“Wow, talk about invasion of privacy.”

“And for good reason, why didn’t you say anything?”

Ryan flips an empty glass, dries it out before placing it on the rack and considers how to move the conversation forward, possibly far, far away from this topic all together. The best she comes up with is, “it’s handled.”

Handled ends up being a 200 square feet one room apartment Mary demands to see. The bedroom, kitchen and living room are all one in the same but at least she has her own bathroom. The walls are paper thin, she’s pretty certain the constant dripping sound is coming from the kitchen, one she can easily fix after a YouTube tutorial or two, and a hotter than hell furnace the landlord warns her not to touch when the temperature is anywhere over 60 F unless she enjoys suffocating.

She watches Mary take in the room, the petite brunette moving in a slow swirl on her heels, lip turned down and Ryan just knows it’s not good when they make eye contact.

“Nu-uh.”

“What do you mean nu-uh?” Confused, Ryan watches Mary storm past her and out the door. “Mary! Mary, what does that mean? Mary!?”

Mary breaks her housing contract. When Ryan tries to object she quickly learns that all 5’2 of Mary Hamilton-Kane is nothing to play against and a powerhouse forced to be reckoned with.

… It kind of gets Ryan hot under the collar watching Mary tell her landlord exactly what’s about to happen, and cutting a check like it's nothing in the process.

Assertive has always kinda been her type.

“You’ll be staying here.”

Mary says, showing Ryan around her penthouse in the upper echelon of Gotham City. The apartment is just shy the size of a department store, the lounge being big enough to take up most of the square footage, built in with four bedrooms, one now officially hers, one for guests and another used for office space and three huge bathrooms big enough to house a football team.

“Jesus,” the name slips under her breath as she takes it all in. This place is – is. It’s too much. “I can’t afford this.”

The carpet under her feet probably cost more money than she'll ever see in her lifetime.

“Well, it’s a good thing I’m not asking you to pay anything.” Ryan quickly gets shut down as Mary carries on, “until you can save enough money to get back on your feet. It’s the least I can do. Being this city’s vigilante is hard work. The last thing you need to worry about is where you’re going to lay your head at night.”

It makes sense, but still. “I’m not comfortable asking you - I won’t use you.”

“You’re not.” The med student emphasizes. Mary takes the box out of her hands and places it on a dresser. “My home is yours now, bestie. Stay as long as you want to.” And before Ryan can prepare herself, Mary’s arms are snug around her waist and her cover girl smile is beaming up at her.

This is going to be terrible.

It’s worse.

Far worse than Ryan could have ever predicted. Not only is Mary super considerate of her new roommate, but she makes her resources Ryan’s own. She’s never slept so good, ate so well or drank water so delicious for that matter. Until recently she thought water was just water but Mary’s fridge is full of this alkaline stuff straight from the mountains, and Ryan swears she can never look back.

“You want pickles?”

Ryan visibly gulps, sitting on the couch, eyes focused on anything other than Mary prancing around the kitchen in her underwear. Mary’s always been super comfortable in her skin but especially at home when she’s surrounded by her things in her place of peace and why shouldn’t she be, this is her home. Ryan wants her to go about as she normally would, actually prefers if Mary pretended Ryan wasn't there altogether. The last thing she wants is to intrude or take up space but she can only take so much. It’s been nearly a month of coming home to Mary asking how her day was, waking up to Mary smiling at her over homemade breakfast or passing out on the couch cuddled together after another failed movie night. There’s only so much she can take.

What they’re doing is borderline domestic. And Ryan’s too gay for this.

“…pickles?”

“Hmm – what?”

“I asked if you want pickles on your sandwich?”

"Uh, sure."

Handing her a plate, Mary plops down on the couch leaving no space between the two and licks the pad of her thumb, humming pleasantly at the taste.

Ryan bites the inside of her cheek. “So, what are we watching?”

Hopefully something gory, and bloody staring a cis-het white male. Anything to take Ryan’s mind off of Mary Hamilton.

Mary chooses Its Okay Not to be Okay on Netflix and by the end of episode 2 both girls are huddled together, simping hard for all the three leading actors. Mary is obsessed with Kim Soo-Hyun's entire face and Ryan’s pretty sure if Seo Ye-Ji stomped on her in six inch heels and dragged her through the mud, she’d thank her.

At least they can agree Oh Jung-se is a freaking king and is killing his role as Moon Sang Tae.

It's nearly midnight before they start to turn in, cleaning up the little mess they made, Ryan shuts off the lights and walks Mary to her room; the first door to the right.

“Night.”

It kind of feels like a date, which is absurd. She knows. But can you blame her when pillow soft lips press against her cheek and Mary breathes, “sleep tight, Ryan” in her ear. Its stupid. She’s being stupid, and seeing things that arent there. Or maybe she needs to get laid. Whatever she needs to do, Mary can’t be a part of it.

After weeks of failed interrogations the team finally manages to catch a break. A source looking to get out and start over leaks the warehouse location where a scheduled supply of ingredients are due to be shipped in at any day now. Niko of course makes Batwoman promise to protect him at all cost and that means working with the Crows.

“Where’s the shipment being dropped?” Sophie asks.

“Unimportant.”

The lieutenant cocks her head to the side, unsurprised at how this conversation is going. The Bat has never worked well with authority in this town, no matter who dons the emblem.

“The only thing I need is for you to make sure Niko is somewhere safe, undetected.”

“Is he at least willing to stand trial in the event you manage to catch this guy?”

“I think that all depends on if your team can keep him alive. Crow.”

The alley is dark, damp and the chill fogs Sophie’s breath as she sighs. “You're going to get yourself killed. I know you have something against my badge and everything it stands for, but it can do some good if you let it. Now, tell me where the shipment is and I can have my team there as back up in seconds. We can get this drug and these thugs off the street.”

That word makes Ryan's jaw tingle. Thug. Of course a Crow wouldn't understand that sometimes people do bad things to make ends meet, but it doesn't make them bad people. To a Crow they’re all the same and need to be locked away never to see the light of day again. Including her.

“Focus on our informant. If I need you for anything else I know how to find you.” And she’s gone, vanished in a cloud of fog.

“Nice job pissing off potential allies.” Ryan switches her coms off.

The warehouse is guarded heavily by six men up top, double the number at the bottom not including the others unloading trucks full of supplies. Photo analysis identifies them and sends the information to Gotham P.D. before she strikes.

“Hope you’re ready for this. If we’re lucky this can all be over tonight.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Taking it as his cue, Luke hits the lights covering the warehouse in complete darkness. Motion sensors switch on and Batwoman moves into action. The training her team insists she go through pans out as she’s able to take out four guys twice her size in fast compact moves. One guy goes over the railing after she cracks him in the nuts with the steel toe of her boot. His strangled whimper is heard all the way down, but hey, no one ever said this was going to be a fair fight.

The team at the bottom catches on and gun fire immediately follows, running across the bridge Ryan spreads her arms and flies through the air, her red and black cape bellows behind her as she sticks another perfect superhero landing. All at once it seems like twenty people are coming at her from all different angles but as always she's quick on her feet tying a handful of them up by their ankles and running through the rest with a non lethal taser, just enough to subdue until she can contain everyone before she starts asking questions.

“We ain’t telling you shit!”

Another guy spits on her shoe, the red of his blood splattering against her boot and she rolls her eyes. There’s no need to be nasty.

“Look, I’m trying to help you guys out here.” Spotting a pair of boobs in the corner, she course corrects, “and girls - theys? Whatever! I’m trying to help you all out here. This thing,” she holds up a box of snakebite, “is killing the community and while it may bring you all brief satisfaction, financially, what’s it going to do for your futures when you get caught, to your families?”

“Who knew the new edition of the Bat came with such a bleeding heart?”

“Well, she does. So if anyone here is willing to tell me anything that’ll point me in the right direction of your boss, I promise I can protect you, get you somewhere safe.”

From the little the authorities have been able to dig up about this gang, anyone willing to betray their leader either winds up dead or living their last days in a vegetative state. That’s why it’s so important to have Niko, no matter the length it takes to protect him, it was for the sake of Gotham.

“I said-!”

“I heard you the first time,” Ryan says, cutting him off, “And I don’t know what you’re used to but I’m only going to tell you how this is played once. I ask the questions and you give me the answers, if you don’t, have fun rotting in jail or better yet … I can let the little I do know out onto the streets.” She bends down right in front of the man and lifts his rabbit mask, exposing his face. In seconds she knows his name. “I’m sure your boss would love to know who’s ratting him out, huh, Robert Michael Humprey?”

The terror in his eyes says it all.

[outshinethestars]

The Stars are Bright Enough, my Dear

For the first five years of her life, Winry Rockbell lived in a modest apartment in East City.  Her parents were both doctors, but her mother only worked part-time so she could look after Winry, and both her parents found time for her and loved her very much.

When she was five, her father sat her down and told her that he and her mother were going to have to go away, maybe for a very long while.  That they still loved her very much, but that they were needed somewhere else.  He told her that he and her mother were going to go to Ishval to help people, and she was going to go to Risembool to live with her grandmother.  He told her all this very simply and very seriously and asked her if she understood.  And Winry, five years old and very, very brave, whose parents had taught her kindness all her life, said, “Yes, Daddy,” as solemnly as she knew how.

So, a couple months later, Winry hugged her parents goodbye on the train platform, and she cried a long time, and she was a little scared to be going away to live with her grandmother, who she only knew from a few weeks visiting in the summers and monthly phone calls, but she pretended not to be.  (And her parents hugged their little girl, and they wiped their tears away before they could really begin falling, and they were very scared to be going off to a warzone, but of course they pretended not to be.)

That first year, Winry probably spent more time at the Elric’s than her Grandmother’s.  Nothing against Granny, of course, Granny was wonderful, but the Elric boys made more interesting company for a little girl, and Mrs. Elric made the best cookies.

Looking back on it, Winry would remember that first year in Risembool as a sort of pinnacle of her childhood, a time full of lighthearted adventure, a time when nothing bad had ever happened, and it felt as though nothing ever could.  That isn’t true, of course.  It is a hard thing for a child to lose everything she’s known, to lose her parents.  Those first few months, especially, were difficult, with everything so quiet and strange.  But the Elrics, then and always, were like a force of nature, so much louder and larger than life, and they swept her up with them in all their adventures to see the world as they did, and for them, 1904 was the year before things began to go wrong.

The year that Winry was six years old, Mr. Hohenheim went away.  He did not sit his sons down very seriously and explain where he was going and what he needed to do, he did not ask them if they understood, and he did not say a tearful goodbye on the train platform.  He simply stood up one day and left.

Edward Elric was enraged, six years old and ready to fight the whole world, but mostly his father (whom he only called “That Jerk” because he didn’t know the word “bastard” or “Fucker” yet) if he could get his hands on him.  Alphonse was mostly sad and confused, and he trailed after Ed like a baby duckling, partly because Ed was his older brother, and Al clung to him in a world that no longer made sense, but also because even at five, Al considered it his job to look after Ed and make sure that he didn’t get himself or anyone else hurt.

“Maybe,” Winry said to Ed one sunny day, “Maybe he had a good reason to leave.  Maybe he had somewhere he needed to be, maybe there’s something important he needs to do.”

“Bulshit!” Ed said.  “Shit” was a word Ed had only learned recently, and he knew his mother didn’t like him to say it, so he used it sparingly, exactly, like a hidden knife to be pulled out as a last resort.

“That’s bulshit,”  Ed said, “That Jerk didn’t have a good reason.  There’s no such thing.  Parents aren’t supposed to leave their kids, not ever!”

And Winry, Winry didn’t know what to say to that.

Mrs. Elric died on a late spring morning almost a year after Mr. Hohenheim left.  Winry went to her funeral, it was the first funeral she had ever been to. 

Ed and Al stood on either side of her, like they couldn’t bare to stand next to each other, like maybe if they looked at each other they’d hurt each other with their sadness.  Alphonse had sobbed silently, shaking, with tears streaming down his cheeks so hard and fast that Winry was vaguely worried he’d get dehydrated, but not making a sound.  Ed had sniffled violently, dashing his tears away with angry motions of one hand, while he held on to Winry’s so hard with the other that it hurt.  Winry had been the only one who cried like a normal person, noisily, with snot getting everywhere.  She felt a little silly doing it, because Mrs. Elric wasn’t her mother, but Ed and Al were both so quiet it scared her, and someone had to break that silence, and anyway, she couldn’t stop.

Edward took to grief with anger, as if he could beat it into submission.  But since there was no one to be angry at in this instance, he was merely sullen and bad-tempered and prone to blowing up at everyone at the drop of a hat.  Al was a forlorn and equally stubborn shadow following him.

Both brothers refused to move in with Granny and Winry.

Winry was seven years old and not prone to patience, and she didn’t understand people yet, quite as well as she thought she did.

“I wasn’t this silly when I was five,” Winry said.

“What do you know?”  Edward yelled, “It’s not like your parents died.”

Winry would get a letter from her parents twice in a year, if she was lucky.  She had learned to write sending them letters, she wrote to them every single day at first, until her little hands ached and sloppy letters filled the page.  She knew that they never received most of them.  As time went on her letters dwindled, until now she only thought to write to them every few months.  The last time Winry had written to her parents was soon after Mrs. Elric’s funeral.  She had been halfway through writing it when she realized that her parents didn’t really know Mrs. Elric, and she broke down crying and never finished the letter.

Winry listened to the radio and wondered how much of what it said was true.  She was seven years old and just beginning to understand what war was, beginning to see the edges of it.  She helped Granny with the soldiers stumbling home, saw their scars and missing limbs, saw the things even Granny couldn’t fix, and heard their stories sometimes, when they thought she wasn’t listening.

“It’s not like your parents died,” Ed said, and Winry screamed right back at him.

“They could have!  They could have died months ago, and we wouldn’t know.”

Ed and Winry didn’t speak to each other for a long while after that.

“It’s our house, Winry,”  Al explained in the end,  “We can’t just leave it behind, because if we moved in with you it would still be our house, and it would still be right there, just sadder.  We can’t live next door to us, it wouldn’t work.”

The Elric house had belonged to Mrs. Elric’s parents before they died.  Ed and Al had lived there all their lives and so had their mother.  Winry supposed that Granny could remember a time when the Elric house hadn’t been built yet and there weren’t Elrics living in it, but most people probably couldn’t.

Winry’s memories of the city were growing fuzzy around the edges, so far away it felt like another world.  And even then it had only been the apartment, and her parents had only been renters.   But Granny’s house was still Granny’s house, the place she’d come to visit every summer of her life.  Even after two years it still felt like a long, extended visit, even if she had begun to have an unpleasant, twisty feeling in her stomach that her parents were never coming back, and she would stay here forever.  Even if she had the even more unpleasant twistier feeling, that she couldn’t picture a world where her parents did come back.  She couldn’t imagine living in a place where she didn’t know everyone by name in a ten mile radius, couldn’t walk down to the general store by herself and do the shopping, couldn’t wander all across the hills and half-drown herself in the creek with the Elric brothers. She couldn’t imagine ever leaving Risembool now, couldn’t imagine leaving Granny or the Elrics.  But still, it was Granny’s house and not hers.  It was different for Ed and Al.

“Okay,” Winry said, and that was the end of it as far as she was concerned.

Granny, of course, had her own opinions, but in the face of steadfast Elrics, there’s really nothing that anyone can do.   Ed and Al ate and washed their clothes with Granny and Winry, and they even took their baths in Granny’s big copper tub, but every night they went to bed in their own house.

For another two years things were alright, they were comfortable.  Winry and the Elric brothers continued to be the young terrors of Risembool.  They didn’t spend so much time playing games of pretend, games began to feel a little too hollow, the real world to spread about them a little too real, for them to want to play at being legendary alchemists or heroes of myth.  At least Winry supposed that was Ed’s reasoning.  She herself had never been that passionate about larger than life fantasies, only happy to follow in the brothers’ wake and familiarize herself with the wide, sprawling country.  They still wandered, free as the wind, ditching school to alternately be an annoyance underfoot, and help out in the surrounding farms.  Ed and Al studied their father’s books, advancing in alchemy in leaps and bounds, while Winry spent more and more time helping Granny with automail surgery.  But the year that Winry was nine, in the spring shortly after Alphonse’s birthday, the Elrics left.

It was an inevitable sort of thing, the Elrics were never the sort of people who stayed, and there had been a kind of frantic energy in them, ever since their mother died, that only built and built as time went on.  They said they had learned all they could from their father’s books, and were looking for a teacher, which was fair and true enough, even if Winry would have preferred if they were more patient.

“Those boys,” Granny said, “Will either kill themselves or change the world.  There's no stopping them either way.”

As someone who had spent two years trying and failing to tell the Elrics what to do, Winry supposed she was an expert.  

As for Winry, she felt a little lonely and strangely left out, but she didn’t have much time to dwell on it.  

Not long after, in that same year, the Rockbells received a telegram.  Winry’s parents were dead.

Winry stared blankly at the typed words.  There wasn’t much in the way of typewriters in Risembool.  Print was for the newspapers and schoolbooks, impersonal, having nothing to do with her.  Winry stared at the odd, blocky letters, and it didn’t feel real, like a story from somewhere far away.

Well, she supposed it was that, technically.  

Granny had tears in her eyes.  That was the surrealest part of all.  Granny and crying did not belong in the same universe.

Winry didn’t cry.  She thought she should.  She had cried for Mrs. Elric, she should cry for her own mother.  But she didn’t. 

It didn't feel any different, was the strange thing.  She caught herself forgetting.  Wondering if her parents would send a letter, wondering if she should write, and then remembering that they were dead.  She hadn’t written them in months.

When Mrs. Elric died it had been like the entire world had shifted, like she had left an eternal hole In Ed and Al, a gaping, black void that could never be filled.  There had been a fire in Edward’s eyes, a rage, all consuming, roaring, unstoppable.  There had been an emptiness in Alphonse’s, less noticeable, quiet, but vast, and to Winry, at least, who knew them so well, both before and after, far more frightening.

Winry looked at herself in the mirror, and she didn’t see any difference at all.

Then she did cry.  Curled up on her bed, wondering what was wrong with her, that she wasn’t broken, and feeling ridiculous for it.  She cried.  For her parents, for Ed and Al, for something she couldn’t reach, and didn’t know.

The Elrics, she knew, were hardly a good template for healthy grieving, but they were the only example she knew of children who had lost their parents.  

She had grieved her parents once, when she was five years old and lonely.  She had been so very sad then, those first few months.  She tried to remember it.  Tried to feel what her younger self had felt for parents who were so very large and kind and real.  But all the edges were blunted.  She thought her mother’s hair had been light brown, but she couldn’t be sure.  She wondered if it had actually been blond, and she had blended her with Mrs. Elric.

She had grieved once, when she was five years old, but she had not understood then.  And she had been so sure they would be back soon.  Maybe a few months, maybe a year, and for a five year old that was practically forever, but then again it was nothing like forever at all.

She had not quite grieved when her parents left, and now, four years later, it was too late, and she grieved the loss of her grieving.

The Elrics came back in March, just after Winry’s tenth birthday.  The Elrics came back as, Winry realized, she had never doubted they would.  She and Granny welcomed them home with plenty of yelling, and all the hugs they would allow (some, in Al’s case, and very few, accompanied by loud protestations in Ed’s).

Ed had always had a knack for getting into fights, and Al had always had always had a knack for getting out of them, one way or another.  But now it seemed that someone had gone and given them actual training, which was vaguely terrifying.  They also seemed to have found their alchemy teacher, and were brimming with alchemical ambition.  

Given all of that, and given that Winry herself was now something of a full time apprentice/assistant to Granny, and had to attend school at least three days out of five because Granny said so (and Winry wasn’t the sort of girl who ran off and disregarded everything her legal guardian said just because she wasn’t her “real parents”) they didn’t spend as much time together as they used to.  But still, it was good to have them back, even if “back” sometimes just meant she could see the lights on next door at three o’clock in the morning.  It was comforting to know they weren’t off who knows where in the wide, wide world, like somehow she could watch over them.

What time they did spend together, they mostly spent in Mr. Hohenheim’s study, talking.  Ed and Al were only interested in Science, they considered themselves to be adults now, and had left more childish pursuits behind.  At barely-ten-years-old, Winry thought this might be just a little premature, but then again, who was she to say no to Science?

So she and the Elric boys spent long happy hours debating the merits of different metals and alloys.  Ed and Al knew all sorts of things about atomic structures and the interactions between elements that Winry was eager to learn.  They seemed to have returned from their journey of self discovery with a keen interest in anatomy and human biology, and Winry happily answered all the questions she knew, and looked up what she didn’t with them. 

There were some things, of course, that Winry didn’t know, and neither did Granny, automail was hardly a general field.  Risembool didn’t have a library, or much that could satisfy the Elrics’ voracious appetite for knowledge.  Mr. Hohenheim had quite a bit about biological alchemy, but of course the boys had read it all through multiple times by now.

My parents would have known, Winry thought.  Odd, how she thought of them more now that they were dead than she ever had when they were alive.

Thinking of her parents, though, gave her an idea. “We could take the train to the City, just over the weekend,” Winry said, “They have the library there, it’s free and they let anyone read the books, at least the medical ones.”

“Why didn’t I think of that,”  Ed said.

Winry asked Granny’s permission to go to the City, because she was polite (yes, really) and not an Elric.  Granny gave it in the way that meant she knew perfectly well that her asking was just a formality.  The way of a person who did not exactly think that her grandaughter taking an overnight train to a large city with only two other children for company was exactly a good idea, but who had more or less discovered the uselessness of “putting your foot down” when a couple of recently bereaved little boys had concluded that the concept of adult supervision was optional.

It was strange to be in the City again.  She had forgotten what it smelled like, and yet it was simultaneously the most familiar scent in the world.  She hadn’t been here since she was five years old, and early childhood felt like another dimension, which she was now looking in on from the outside, too big to fit in it, and too small to reach its bigness.

Ed and Al took the lead as they headed out through the city in search of the library, and that was its own sort of strangeness.  Edward always led the way at home, of course.  He was, as he was always reminding her, the oldest.  But Winry could remember when they were all very small, and she told them stories of the City, how she had told them there were buildings made of concrete that went up and up and up, and had metal inside for bones, and how Eward and Alphonse had stared at her with wide, wide eyes and didn’t believe a word.  Now they were Men of the World, and she was only a little girl from Risembool, who could hardly believe that the buildings went up so high without falling over, even if they were smaller than she remembered.

Or, well, really Ed and Al were still only a pair of small, country boys, even if Ed thought he was a man, and they were doing their fair share of wide-eyed staring.  But Alphonse knew how to weaponize that, and got them good directions instead of muggings.  As always, Alphonse was a little terrifying. 

They reached the library and Ed and Al were in love.  The rows upon rows of books were certainly impressive, but personally Winry preferred places with more grease and metal and an actual human patient, alive and messy.  Books were important and necessary for understanding what you were doing, but she preferred the doing, she’d take metal and gears and good old fashioned elbow grease over the library any day.  But then, that was alchemists for you, alchemy was all theory that sometimes somehow became reality.  Or blew up in your face.

That being said, Winry still dove headfirst into this treasure trove of knowledge, and she was surprised to learn just how much she already knew about medicine.  Ed and even Alphonse were geniuses in such a loud, flashy sort of way, they shone so very brightly, that Winry had never thought of herself as anything exceptional, she was the ordinary to balance out their ridiculousness.  So it was a bit of a shock to realize that at the age of ten she knew more about, say, the human nervous system than most doctors.

Eventually though, Winry got bored of arguing with the Elrics about exactly how much selenium there was in the human body (answer: who the hell cares?) and wandered over to the mechanical engineering section instead.

Looking back, Winry could hardly believe she hadn’t realized the boys were about to do something incredibly stupid, as though as long as they were right in front of her nothing bad could happen.

One night Winry was woken by a loud, metallic banging sound.  When she ran down the stairs and opened the door, a huge suit of armor was carrying most of Edward Elric. 

Winry had never once been sick at the sight of the parts of a human that were never meant to be seen beneath the skin and flesh, and she refused to be sick now.  Instead, she scrambled to stop the bleeding and tried to remember what blood type Ed was.  Granny was there moments after Winry was, and together they managed to mostly keep him from leaking and get him to surgery where they got some replacement blood into him.  The suit of armor had Alphonse’s voice, but that was a problem for later.

Ed wasn’t dead. That’s all that could be said for him, really, he wasn’t dead.

In the end, Alphonse told them the story of it, how he and Ed had tried to bring their mother back, how Ed had traded his arm for Alphonse’s soul and sealed him into the armor.  It all sounded like some sort of nightmareish fairytale. 

She and Granny manhandled Ed into a wheelchair in the morning, and manhandled him into the Granny had made up for him all those years ago when Mrs. Elric died.  He looked terrifyingly small with half his limbs gone, he looked terrifyingly small, broken and quiet and defeated.  Ed spent the days sitting in his wheelchair, silent and unmoving, like a dead thing.  Alphonse sat next to him in a heap of metal, silent and perfectly still, like something that had never been alive.  It was difficult to keep from staring at Ed.  Winry was used to seeing people who were missing limbs, some of them chose to get automail and some of them didn’t, but it was Ed’s quiet that was so loud, so wrong, so impossible to ignore. 

Winry didn’t know what to do.  She wanted to scream at Ed, she wanted to help somehow, she wanted to snap him out of it.  But Winry had matured since she was seven.  She knew that wasn’t how trauma worked, she knew better than to yell at people who were hurt.  So Winry tried to be quiet and she tried to be kind.  It only added to the bizarreness of the situation, and if Ed were in any state to notice would have found it very creepy.  (Alphonse did notice, and later he would tell her that he appreciated the effort, but please never be nice again.)

Then, a random soldier walked into their house, yelled at Ed, and snapped him out of it.

If anyone asked, Winry wouldn’t have been able to explain why it needed to be her who made the automail, she just knew that it had to be.  It had something to do with Ed, the way that he prickled at charity, the way he could never quite trust Granny, even if he loved her very much deep down, and it had something to do with Winry, the way he was her best friend, the way she felt responsible, and the way that this felt like a milestone with no turning back, one the Elrics had already crossed and she needed to be a part of.

Winry was ready.  She knew her way around a wrench and a scalpel.  She had been helping Granny for years, and she was very good at it.  She knew she was ready, and she knew it had to be Ed.

Granny did not ask questions when Winry told her what she wanted. She only looked her up and down, as if weighing every inch of her.

“Alright,”  Granny said, “Do it properly then.”

Winry did do it properly.  She kept her construction of the arm and leg simple, even though her mind was buzzing with innovations she wanted to try out.  She only made sure that it was easy to modify as Ed grew taller and she found ways of improving it.

And at the age of eleven, Winry performed her first surgery.  

When Winry Rockbell was eleven years old she walked with her two best friends to the train platform.  She hugged Al even though he couldn’t feel it, because she knew he would appreciate it anyway.  She didn’t hug Ed, because she knew he wouldn’t appreciate it, and because she thought if she hugged him she might never let go.  She had promised herself she wouldn’t cry, she had been sure she wouldn’t, but she cried, a little, anyway.

“You understand why we have to go, right?” Ed asked, with that pinched look he had always gotten on his face when she cried for as long as she could remember.

“Of course,”  Winry said with a firm nod of her head.  Because despite all the times over the past year she’d yelled at him and called him an idiot, all the times she tried to change his mind, of course she understood.

So the Elrics went away to join the military, and Winry stood on the train platform in Risembool and watched them go.

[ryik-the-writer]

The Audacious Storybrooke Mirror Advice Columnist (Wednesday Paper Edition)

In which Lacey French is a smutty advice columnist for the Storybrooke Mirror.

Ch. 1: Lacey is challenged at work and discovers she has an admirer. 

Based off a prompt I saw eons ago. Will be plot driven for the first few chapters but I hope to just wing it the rest of the way.

A03

-.-.-.-.-.

“FRENCH!”

Lacey smirked around her cherry sucker as the echo of Glass’s feet boomed closer, her eyes never leaving the screen of her ancient but well-maintained computer.

She hummed when she heard him stop behind him and didn’t even flinch when a rolled up newspaper hit her desk.

“Wanna explain this?” he seethed, hands on his hips like he actually could intimidate her.

Lacey held up one finger as she continued to read her email, knowing her “boss” was getting more annoyed by the minute.

“French,” he growled in warning. Lacey chuckled, and turned to him.

“Yes?” she inquired, fluttering her eyelashes.

Glass held the paper to her face, causing Lacey to lean back.

“I read this morning’s paper, thanks,” she said.

Glass’s finger slapped at a section of the paper. “I’m referring to this trash you put in my paper!”

“Trash that the night editor had no problem with,” Lacey waved him off.

“I’ve talked to Cruella, but she’s as perverted as you are.”

“So, this is my problem how?” Lacy inquired with a flick of her wrist.

Glass’s eye twitched. This was it. Lacey French was going to be give him an aneurism in the middle of his office.

“This,” he began to explain quietly for the thousandth time. “Is a community newspaper, and you just told a member of that community to…to…”

Lacey bit her lip as Glass sputtered through the answer Lacey gave in her most recent advice column.

Well, to be completely fair, “advice” was putting it mildly.

Lacey gave a guide to pleasure, for one’s self or for them and their partner, which ever they were seeking.

“Racy Lacey” as she was penned in a small, one-fourth sized space each Wednesday on the back of the Storybrooke Mirror’s sports page, gave relationship, intimacy or any sort of general tips that dealt with one’s sexual life. A twist on “Dear Abby,” so to speak.

Yes, shocking in a small community newspaper, but hell, it made the Wednesday paper the most popular one each week.

She knew this from the hundreds of emails—good and bad—she got each week, depending on just how “degrading” the column was that week.

The process was simple: someone would send her an email with their problem (sex wasn’t good anymore, she doesn’t know I exist, he doesn’t know I exist, something like that) and Lacey would write back with a suggestion. A handful of the emails (usually the most sexual one) would go in the Wednesday’s paper, and Belle would spend the rest of the day going through the flood of emails that either bashed her for her “sinful” ways or wanted advice for their own conundrums.

This week was no different.

With a smirk, she snatched the paper from Glass’s hands when he could find the words to describe her latest round of advice.

“Dear Racy Lacey,” she began, dodging Glass’s grab.

“I haven’t slept with my husband in nearly five months! And I’m starting to worry he’s no longer attractive to me!”

“French!”

Lacey jumped on the desk of another journalist, a true feet in her heels.

“We’ve been so busy with our jobs and children, we’re so tired during the week, so last weekend I sent the kids to their grandparent’s house, put on something flattering, and thought we were set, but he just went straight to bed! What’s happening to us?”

Signed: Bland Bedroom

Just as Glass was ready to take a stapler to her ankle, Lacey jumped down and began zagging through desks to keep away.

“Dear Bland Bedroom, my advice is to put on your sexiest high heels—”

“French!”

“Put one on his chest—”

“I’m warning you!”

“And ride him until he’s spent.”

Lacey threw herself back in Glass’s chair, lightly panting as Glass struggled for his breath at her.

“Remind him that you are a goddess among worshipers and he should be worshipping you, every night on his knees, preferably.”

Lacey met Glass’s heated glare and causally handed the paper back to him.

“Best luck to you, Racy Lacy.”

Glass snatched the paper back, kicking his office door closed from all spectators.

“You’re evil.”

Lacey shrugged. “I prefer imaginative.”

Glass took in a deep breath. Lacey could practically see his blood pressure slowly drop down to normal.

“You’re fired.”

Lacey waved him off as she spun in his chair. “No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“No, I’m not.” Lacey pushed with a chuckle. “People like what they’re reading, and they like it more when it gets a little…sultry.”

Glass groaned, a second away from busting a blood vessel.

He knew good and well Lacey’s M-rated columns helped keep subscribers sending in those monthly checks, but he couldn’t help it if some of those subscribers happened to be a bit more persuasive of what should and shouldn’t go into their community paper.

“The truth is Lace…Regina called again.”

Lacey’s smirk melted into a scowl.

“So what?” Lacey shrugged, trying to hide the uneasiness bubbling in her gut. “Hasn’t her majesty ever heard of first amendment rights?”

“Easy,” Glass warned, more than certain that the walls had ears that led straight to Mayor Mills.

“No,” Lacey scoffed. “I’m not going to let her dictate what I write, and neither should you!”

“That woman has the ability to sway this town any direction she chooses, and she might just persuade them to chase you out of town.”

“Oh please,” Lacey spat, though she wasn’t foolish not to take such a threat lightly.

Glass groaned, exhausted already. Dealing with the mayor and then one of his most hard-headed employees would put anyone out, but he needed to find a solution to appease both sides.

Lacey was talented. Sultry, yes, but she had skills befitting a feature writer.

The advice columns were easy income for the paper, but a target for mockery for Storybrooke’s more conservative residents.

It would seem the mayor was only getting involved to settle them, her biggest supporters and the ones who primarily funded her mayoral campaign each year.

“Look,” Glass said. “For modesty’s sake, can you try to write something nice for next week? Why not just a simple advice piece on…anything!”

“If people wanted advice, they’d go to Hopper,” Lacey pouted, leaning her head back in the chair.

“Just…try, please?”

Lacey glanced at the man who was technically her boss. She’d always thought he looked like a bulldog, expressionless and kind of dumb, but loveable.

“I’m not publishing any fluff,” Lacey affirmed.

“That’s not your call,” Glass replied with a dry smile. “Just keep it PG and we might live to see another edition.”

“If by PG you mean post-coital gratification than—“

“French!”

Lacey snickered before sliding out of his chair. “I’ll…attempt to be civil,” her smiled faded for a moment, her eyes going dark, “But no promises.”

Glass sighed, knowing that was as good as he was going to get for now.

“Have something on my desk by Monday,” he said as he began to leave his office. “And get your boots off the desk.”

Lacey dropped one boot, keeping the other firmly stacked on yesterday’s paper in defiance.

This was ridiculous! Who the hell was the mayor, telling her what she could and could not write!

“Probably the closest thing to sex she ever gets,” Lacey snorted to herself.

With an exaggerated groan, she heaved herself upright, lazily logging into her work email from Glass’s computer (he’d be pissed later but so be it).

She scrolled through the dozens of emails she received from Storybrooke’s secretly lewd citizens, as well as the ones condoning what she did for a living (including a particularly lengthy one from Mother Superior.)

Of course, they signed their letter with a penname or a name surrounding their problem, such as “No Longer Interested” or “Spice it up or Give it up?”

She went through a few of them, but had to decline writing on them. They were sex-related, and already tempting her to screw what Glass or Regina or anyone else said and reply to them.

“Ugh,” she moaned, sorrowfully scrolling past the deliciously sinful emails.

Just as she was ready to shut down the computer, a few choice words at the subject line of the email.

Alone in Storybrooke wrote:

Dear Racy Lacey,

Your mind is brilliant, in both your columns and in your day to day life.

I see you time to time in town, and I’m instantly drawn in, like a month to a flame.

Your courage to stand up to this town is admirable, as brilliant as a warrior on a battlefield.

Your outer beauty as well isn’t without comment.

Brown hair, beautiful blue eyes and an unforgettable accent…and legs for days I may add.

Reading your columns every week is equivalent to sampling the finest of erotica the world has ever known, I hope to enjoy them…and perhaps one day you…in the future.

Lacey blinked, the twinge of pink that had spread over her cheeks heating her entire face.

It would seem she had an admirer, well another one that is.

She had her fair share of fan mail, some of which cusped on downright creepy, and there had been a time or two she had left a tip on Sheriff Graham’s desk.

Yet this was more…flattering. Abet, a bit strange, but still worthy of a hearty reply.

She cracked her knuckles, ready to reply to this fellow. Her current task could wait.

As she highlighted the name of the penname, her eyes caught the email address, which looked terrifying familiar.

mrgoldsshop@gmail.com.

Lacey’s stomach lurched.

“No way…”

She hovered her mouse over the email address and her worst fear was confirmed.

Mr. Augustine Gold. The beast of Storybrooke who owned every piece of property within the town line.

And her landlord.

“Oh Shit.”

[hawkbucks]

Heyo! New follower, loving the vibe over here! Okay, so, I saw your latest post and I was wondering if you could write some Nat & Tony stuff? Could be any genre you want, but please please no Stevetony? I still can't stomach it after CW. Sorry! (I love winteriron tho. And Ironstrange. And really any other ship that doesn't have Steve in it lol.)

Anon, I love you for this prompt because I am such a staunch believer in the IronWidow bromance it is unbelievable. There is implied WinterIron and implied PepperNat because I am That Guy that pushes my PepperNat agenda onto everything askdfsalkdsakld.

1.

“You are obsessed with these sheet mask things,” Natasha teased as Tony dumped a veritable armful of sheet masks into their shopping basket. This shopping trip was a monthly tradition: it allowed them to get out of Avengers Tower for a while and relax without having to worry if Thor was gonna break the TV again.

And it also allowed for Tony to stock up on his frankly ridiculous amount of sheet masks.

Tony huffed, picking up one pack that advertised the mask as being infused with rosewater. “They’re… relaxing,” he defended. “It’s nice to just put one on and lie back or something, you know?” No worries about the next upgrade to the suit or really anything having to do with the outside world for at least 10 to 15 minutes? Now that was true luxury, Gucci and Rolls Royce be damned.

Natasha reached over to pluck it out of Tony’s hand, ignoring the indignant sound that rose from his throat. She turned it over, examining the back. “Then we should try it together, yes? As your friend, I would like to be involved in what you do.”

Tony smiled. “We can watch one of those dramas you like so much.”

Then the pack was thrown to his face. “How do you know about those?!”

2.

Tony gratefully accepted the glass of orange juice that Natasha quietly placed in front of him, gulping it down at a pace that was probably concerning.

“Nat never gives me any orange juice,” Clint said, stabbing at his waffle petulantly.

“She just doesn’t love you as much as she loves Stark, man,” Sam replied.

3.

“He likes tulips,” Natasha said as she looked over Bucky’s shoulder and glanced down at the flower catalog in his hands.

Bucky closed it so damn quickly he might as well have had ripped a hole in the space-time continuum. “What? Who likes tulips?”

“Tony.” She took the catalog from him and opened it to a page rife with the different tulip options. A pen appeared in her hand, and she used her teeth to open it, keeping the cap in her mouth as she circled different arrangements. She recapped the pen, looking Bucky dead in the eye as she tapped a red-painted nail over every circle. “One of these. He will like them, I promise you.”

“Should I… ask how you know this?”

She gave him one of her little smirks. “I buy him flowers too.”

Shit. He was really gonna have to step his game up, huh?

4.

“You should put on a sweater. Heard that it’s supposed to be cold.” Tony held up a black ribbed sweater, insistently waving it towards Natasha.

All she did was roll her eyes. Steve was far from the only mother hen on the team. “I will be fine, Tony.” She was confident that an insulted long-sleeve, a pair of thick jeans, and those fur-lined boots she bought in Russia a couple of years ago would be good enough.

Or so she thought before she came in a couple of hours later, nose threatening to fall off as she rubbed at her biceps in an attempt to warm up.

“I told you so,” Tony said when she sneezed.

Her glare was colder than any New York winter.

5.

Tony engulfed Natasha in a hug the second he saw her, onlookers be damned. “2 weeks–no communication. Goddamnit, Romanoff, you actually had me worried,” he said into her shoulder. Every call from Fury had him scared that it would be that kind of call.

She smiled, more as a reaction to Tony than as an indicator of how she fared. “You were worried?” she said, reaching up to rub his back. “Imagine how I felt. I was afraid you might burn down the Tower in my absence.”

Tony rested his chin on her shoulder. She could feel the vibrations spreading throughout his chest as he laughed. “Pepper is far too good at her job to let me do that.”

“Indeed, she is. I feel like I should take her out to an expensive dinner to say thanks.”

Tony froze. Then he pulled back, placed his hands on her shoulders, and looked at her with eyes that sparkled brighter than the stars in the night sky. “You should. Oh my god, Natasha, you should.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You are just saying that because you want to treat me like your guinea pig and pick out my outfit.”

“Can’t it also be because I think you two would make a great–” he shook her shoulders– “couple?”

She stared.

“Okay, so maybe I wanna help you with your outfit, but Natasha–”

[studypurple]

bare basics bullet journal: a guide and masterpost

So you want to try bullet journaling but don’t know where to start? You’ve come to the right place! 

When I started my first bullet journal, most of the guides I saw told me to just put everything that I write down in one notebook and see how it evolves. However, I didn’t like this method because things got messy really quickly and it felt stressful to get my bullet journal to look a certain way. I just wanted something that was really built for me without being stressful.

Because of that, I started with a lot of quick, easy, and clean spreads that basically created a planner that was tailored to me, and decided to share my tips on how I made one!

Disclaimer: This is what worked for me and will not necessarily work for everyone. However, if you really don’t know where to start or just need to spend as little time as possible on your bullet journal, I believe this is a good place to start!

Step One: Include the bare minimum.

First of all, bullet journals don’t have to begin in January - they can start any day you want! You don’t need to have yearly cover pages or yearly calendars. Instead, you can let your bullet journal work just week by week, or month by month.

Personally, I start my bullet journals at the beginning of every academic year, which means they start every August for me. I also only add to my bullet journal in monthly spreads, which means that I prepare for the whole month in one go. This is because as a student, I really need the space to add things that are due for the next week or the next month.

Both of these pages can be the start of your bulet journal! One of the pages is kind of yellowish because the notebook is kind of old and it came out weird in processing. Oops.

Decide on what you need in a bullet journal, and only include what you need. If you’ve seen the typical bullet journal layout, you know that most people recommend adding an index (a table of contents you fill in as you write your bullet journal) or a yearly calendar. While these are great, I personally discovered that I just never found the time to fill in the index, especially because my journals were just regular notebooks that didn’t have any page numbers.

As you get used to journaling, you can start adding pages that you really need and are important to your life, such as book trackers or habit trackers. Remember to make it tailored to YOU.

This is a reading tracker I made when we had to read Les Miserables for school! I noted it down chapter by chapter so I could track my progress as the test was approaching.

Step Two: Print stuff out.

So you want to put in a habit tracker or a yearly overview but don’t have the patience or skills to write out every day of the year? Print it out instead!

Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with adding printed pages to your journal. If you still want to get creative, you can even turn it into a collage-type spread. Whatever it is, don’t give yourself a hard time.

Here are some links to some printables that you might want to add to your bullet journal.

masterpost by @emmastudies of all her printables (ilysm)

to-do tracker  by @reallystudies 

weekly planner by @studytako 

100 days of productivity tracker by @seajaystudies

self-care tracker by @mameill

undated printables by @fivestarstudying

Step Three: Just simplify it.

One thing that I really wanted to incorporate into my bullet journal was a monthly habit tracker, but whenever I tried to write tables, my pen would smear and make me feel like I had to start all over again.

So instead of creating a table where I had to color in every square, I just decided to put my habit tracker in columns and just use check marks.

Here's what my June and July habit trackers look like! I blurred out my study blog trackers in the second pic to keep things a surprise ;)

Did it save me time and stress? Yes. Was it still pretty, functional, and worked for me? Yes.

And honestly, that’s all that matters when it comes to bullet journaling - finding a balance between what looks good to you and what works for you.

This is a really plain spread I made this quarantine on a lined notebook when i just needed to organize my life best as I could with the least effort. Was it hard to make? Not really. But did it work for me? Yeah!

Step Four: Let yourself make mistakes.

If you’re a perfectionist like me, you probably know the struggle of drafting a nice layout, only for it to have smudges in places where the ink didn’t dry, or just not look the way you wanted it to.

And that’s okay. Let it go. Let it be as it is. If you want to cover them up, here’s a helpful post on some ways to fix them.

In this picture, I actually made a mistake drawing something and decided to just cover it up with some green brush pen. Is it noticeable? Not really. In the end, was I still able to use this spread? Yes!

Whatever it is, don’t focus on the mistakes. Instead, focus on making it work for you, smudged or not smudged.

Step five: Have fun with the process.

So you’ve finally embraced bullet journaling as something that can work for you. That’s great, and I’m so proud of you!

But remember, don’t let other people’s bullet journals or aesthetic posts here or on Instagram distract you from your own journal. Remember that the focus is on creating what works for you, and not for everyone else.

Here's a screenshot of what my studygram feed looks like! I used to feel a little pressured by everyone else's bullet journal to try and make my journal look a certain way or make my feed look more aesthetic, but after I remembered I wanted to have fun doing this, I felt a lot more confident to post my spreads!

Or maybe you’ve come this far only to realize that bullet journaling doesn’t work for you. And that’s okay! At least now you know what works for you and what doesn’t. I’m still proud of you for making it this far. ❤️

Hope you guys found this helpful! If you're interested in seeing more of my posts like this, check out my navigation here.

Love, Elle 💜

[luckyladylily]

$4000 of unexpected medical bills, please help if you can

I am going to explain everything in detail, but I am going to put the donation link at the top so people can find it easy. I set up a Ko-fi for people who can give that way and I will add other things to this post when they come up. Reblogging also helps a ton, please consider at least spreading the word if you can’t help yourself!

Why do we need help? 

My daughter is autistic, 4 and a half, and as of yet effectively cannot communicate. She can’t communicate like other 4 year olds, but she is easily as smart as other 4 year olds so, for example, she knows how to unlock our door, use the elevator in our building, and could easily decide that she wants to go outside and play and get hit by a truck in the road. This sort of thing is why she needs someone keeping a close eye on her at all times. She is a wonderful little girl and I don’t consider it a burden, but it does make getting even a part time job out of the home impossible for me, no day care that we can afford will accept her because she so frequently needs 1 on 1 attention. This is what I do 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Even if I could get a job it would probably be difficult to do. I have 5 mental conditions that have been judged to be disabling in their severity, including major depression, social anxiety disorder, general anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and ADHD. I also have major damage to my feet that can make walking incredibly painful, and nerve damage in one leg that causes me daily pain.

My wife is currently providing for my family, but there are limits to what a single person can do.

If this was all we could probably make it on our own but we have had a great deal of unusual financial stressors that have made providing even basic needs nearly impossible.

The first was an unexpected bill of $7350 from my university. When I was forced to drop out of school due to my mental health one of my semesters of student loans was retroactively canceled - meaning I had to pay the university back for the student loan immediately. I was able to make a deal to pay it off over 10 months (no interest), payments starting on the final day of our final notice to pay the bill. We are nearly through this particular one, only 4 payments left, but it has been incredibly difficult paying this on top of rent, my normal student loan payments, and other monthly expenses.

We then had a major problem with our car in late January. My wife needs her car to get to work, She works a 2 AM shift so no buses can take her at that time, so not getting it fixed was not an option. That cost us around $800 and wiped out what little money we had managed to put away for emergency.

Then last month we had a major medical expense. One of my mental health symptoms is that I grind my teeth while I sleep, which has weakened my teeth considerably. We had to deal with one of the long term effects of this last month when I needed a root canal for two separate teeth that had been weakened by my grinding. In addition, one of those teeth was unusual (having 3 roots instead of the 2 usual for that tooth) and required a second root canal performed on that tooth by a specialist. Even with the best possible dental insurance we can get through my wife’s work that still cost us nearly $2000, and I was in severe pain for nearly a month as it was all sorted out.

Less than a week after the second root canal appointment (before they were even able to put on the crowns!) I had an unusual pain in my stomach that rapidly got worse until I was forced to go to the emergency room doubled over in pain. Turns out I was having a gall bladder attack due to gall stones and had to have emergency surgery to have it removed. The emergency room visit alone cost us $200, and while we don’t have the bill for the surgery yet it is likely going to be around $1800, at which point our deductible will kick in and should pay for anything else. Again, this was with the best possible insurance we could get.

It has been less than a week since the surgery and I am still in recovery, and will be for at least 2 more weeks.

We have applied for assistance, but because we make too much trying to pay off that extra 735 a month we don’t qualify for stuff like food stamps. Last time we applied for disability benefits we were unable to get them and because we are so poor I have not been able to get consistent enough treatment to try again (I will need doctors letters as part of the application process).

On top of all this my wife’s work decided to cut her hours by 25% a week ago.

At this point we are not sure how we are going to make our bills. If we can absorb these unexpected medical bills and get past the last payments to the university we should be able to rebuild our finances, but we are just not sure how that is possible. We are looking into any and all options. We have already asked family and friends, and if anyone out there can help at all with donations we would greatly, greatly appreciate it.

Also, I am going to be offering writing commissions. I’ll make a more detailed post about that soon, but if you are interested you can send me a message here on tumblr or to my email at lilivia.oswald@gmail.com and we can discuss it. I am planning on $15 per 1000 words for the first commission to see how it goes, but that might go up. I am willing to write almost anything including highly kinky/fetishy smut if that is what you are into. Don’t feel like you can donate but you would be willing to spend a bit of your entertainment budget for a story about your OC’s doing pet play? I can make that happen. Check out my fanfics for example of my writing, there is a link to my AO3 page on my blog.

[recentanimenews]

Fan Community Shines at Shield Hero Manga Signing

  On a humid spring day in San Francisco, fans of the smash hit The Rising of the Shield Hero gathered on the second floor of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya. Aiya Kyu, the artist adapting the Shield Hero light novels into manga form would soon take a seat in front of dozens of passionate fans. The event would be comprised of a formal interview, a fan Q&A session, a live-drawing, and a book signing. In the hour leading up to the event, the sense of anticipation was palpable–the air was electric.

The room at Kinokuniya was standing room only!

During the event, two fans cosplaying Naofumi and Raphtalia entered the store and were immediately swarmed with people requesting their photos! With good reason–they looked absolutely amazing.

Even Naofumi and Raphtalia showed up for the event.

Fans were also able to peruse a selection of Shield Hero merchandise ranging from T-shirts to manga and light novels.

As the manga artist, Aiya Kyu, took to the stage, the room fell silent. There was a really strong sense of reverence in the room–every eye in the audience was trained on Aiya-sensei as she answered questions and performed the live drawing.

Aiya Kyu effortlessly inking a pensive Naofumi.

Throughout the event, I noticed something really wonderful–people who were complete strangers before the event were talking to one another and building immediate friendships over their shared love of this story. I saw people connecting over their favorite story moments, comparing differences between the light novels, the manga, and the anime adaptation, and never once did I hear any of the typical gatekeeping that so often comes with discussions of anime adaptations and their source material. The fans who were here just wanted to connect with the creator behind something special to them, and to meet other people who loved the same thing they did. This is a really special community of fans, and this event represents the real, powerful ability of anime to bring people together.

Included below is a full transcript of the interview and Fan Q&A.

Interview

(Transcription credit: Kevin Matyi)

Tim Lyu (Crunchyroll Host): So, Aiya-sensei, how do you like San Francisco?

Aiya Kyu: It’s a very good place to spend your days, and I actually went around doing a lot of tourist-y stuff yesterday.

TL: Fantastic. Okay, let’s go and get straight into the in-depth questions–when did you start drawing manga, and how did you break into the industry?

AK: I always loved drawing. Ever since I was a child I was like, “I want to draw for a living,” so basically I went to school specifically for this kind of vocation. I was a manga assistant, then, finally I became my own manga artist.

TL: So how did you become involved in adapting The Rising of the Shield Hero to manga, and were you a fan of the novel before you started writing it?

AK: So I didn’t know about the series until I got the offer, and I was approached one day by the editorial staff at Monthly Comic Flappersaying “hey we have this series Shield Hero, would you like to draw a manga for it?”

  TL: Many fans find Naofumi’s story to be very special and relatable. What makes Shield Hero stand out from other isekai (‘another world’) stories?

AK: So I’m sure that everyone’s gone through a time where they were betrayed or they were framed by someone else, and they felt alone in the world, so that they really feel some kind of link to Naofumi. That’s probably why they feel so much emotion for the series, and that’s also the reason why this series is so unique in the isekai genre.

TL: How closely do you work with Aneko Yusagi-san for the manga adaptation, and do they have an active role in the work?

AK: How to present a story in a manga form is slightly different than that of a novel, so we basically have a little bit of freedom, but I work very closely with Aneko-sensei to make sure that their worldview is still correct but that it still has that very manga feel to it.

TL: What has been the most challenging aspect of adapting the light novel into the manga?

AK: The most difficult part is the fact that there’s a lot more words involved in a novel, so it’s very hard to fit all of that in a manga–it gets too crowded if you try to force all of the original words in there, so trimming the fat, so to say, and making sure that it’s presentable in manga form yet still has all of the concepts that are in the original novel is the hard part.

TL: Right, because, like you talked about before, when you talk about magic in the light novel you can just spend pages explaining, but in the manga, if you keep all of that, you basically have a nice PowerPoint presentation. Y’all don’t wanna read PowerPoint presentations.

AK: (She laughs) So basically you want to preserve the tempo and feel, making sure the manga isn’t too sluggish so in more explanatory segments you try to use more art and use pictures over words to keep the flow going smoothly.

TL: Naofumi is a complex character who’s viewed as a villain but is actually deeply kind and generous. Was this a challenging character to work with?

AK: I believe the character is very easy to empathize with and you just get into it with him in the novels, so trying to keep that aspect of being easily relatable going to the manga was very difficult.

TL: One of the more popular characters, Raphtalia, is a very complex character with quite an intense backstory. How did you work to convey all of her depth in manga form?

AK: Thanks to all of the efforts of Naofumi, Raphtalia is a very strong woman nowadays, but it’s very important to remember the past that she grew up from. It’s very difficult but I always try to keep in mind her backstory and to keep the past that created what she is now.

TL: And here’s a nice little fun one: which character from Shield Hero is your favorite to draw, and why?

AK: Naofumi’s the main character, he’s central to the story, he’s easy to empathize with, so I find him easiest to draw.

(As Aiya-sensei said ‘Naofumi,’ sounds of approval and laughter spread through the crowd.)

TL: I like how the audience, when she said ‘Naofumi,’ was just like “heck yeah.”

(Tim and Aiya-sensei laugh.)

TL: Do you have anything you would like to say to the Western fans of The Rising of the Shield Hero manga?

AK: First of all, thank you for the invite to the signing event, because I wouldn’t be here to begin with if it weren’t for the novels. It’s really amazing to see so many fans here for this event. It makes me happy, and I hope that you guys all continue to like Shield Hero.  

(Applause.)

A photo-op spot where anyone could become the Shield Hero!

Aiya Kyu then moved on to the Fan Q&A, starting with some questions sent in by our news readers from our article last week.

Fan Q&A

Crunchyroll News Reader: How do I improve my drawings to be a successful manga artist?

Aiya Kyu: Becoming a manga artist is not just skill–you also need luck in equal measure, but more importantly you need to be able to tell a story well, and not just draw well. So basically, in all aspects of drawing and storytelling, you just gotta keep practicing.

CRN Reader: Have you played any role playing fantasy games?

AK: In the past, I loved fantasy games and played a lot of them, but nowadays I just don’t seem to find much time to play very long games, so I haven’t been playing as much.

CRN Reader: Why have you chosen to draw this series in a more light mood than, let’s say a darker tone such as Berserk? We all understand that it’s primarily a good series and that it was drawn more light to help bring the more upbeat tone into it. However, Shield Hero has dark overtones in the story. Was this a request from Aneko Yusagi-sensei themself or was it your idea, since this was an isekai show?

AK: One big part of it was my original art style to being with. But I got very inspired by the illustrator for the original novels, Minami-sensei, and I wanted to approach that art style, so the inspiration from the original novels was a big part.

The event then transitioned into an open audience question and answer session.

Audience Question: When drawing the manga, have you experienced any emotional bonds with the characters, to the point where events that happened to characters still affect her?

Aiya Kyu: I’m sure that if I got too emotionally attached to a character, I would definitely feel some kind of emotion if something were to happen to that character, but I feel it’s better to pull back a bit and just look at the entire worldview. I always try to keep in mind to take a step back and look at the big picture instead.

Aud: Is there a character that you like drawing the least?

AK: I don’t have any particular characters that I don’t like drawing, like let’s say everyone’s least favorite character, Myne. I don’t have to really draw her as a beautiful woman so I can really relax while drawing her and so I have fun drawing her because I don’t have to make sure that she’s really cute. So I don’t have any characters that I don’t like drawing.

Aud: How does it feel drawing Mai solo?

AK: I just make sure that I give her evil looks. (Audience laughs) I just try my best to bring out the worst in her.

Aud: You already answered the question about your favorite character, but what’s your favorite shield design?

AK: I really like the small shield the best, because it’s the easiest to draw.

Aud: Were you expecting Raphtalia to become one of the most popular female characters of 2019?

AK: I really didn’t expect this at all when I was drawing the manga! I’m just transforming the already existing story into manga, so I didn’t really think too much about it.

Aud: Are there any characters that you want to see cosplayed?

AK: Let’s just keep it simple and plain. Give me Naofumi and Raphtalia.

Aud: What is your favorite character and why?

AK: I like the worldview of the series, and I like every single character. But if I really, really had to pick one, it’d be Naofumi because I find him the most fun to draw.

Aud: If you were trapped in an isekai, would you choose the shield, sword, spear or bow?

AK: Strictly speaking, if it was just for arms, I’d pick a sword.

Aud: Removing Naofumi, Raphtalia and Filo, who’s your favorite character?

AK: That’s a really hard question! If I really, really had to choose, since I like drawing monsters, maybe one of the monster characters, or Fitoria since she’s kinda somewhat a monster.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[cecilspeaks]

131 - Brought to You by Kellogg’s

Today as all days, As every day of your life, Has been brought to you by Kellogg’s. Are you worthy? Welcome to Night Vale.

Hello, listeners. Well, we’ve been having some real budget troubles here at the station, so it does seem that today’s entire broadcast will be a sponsorship message from Kellogg’s. I know that feels like a lot, but it was the only way to keep the station up and running.

Station Management consumes three tons of soil from Paris each month! And it has been massively expensive digging it up and shipping it here. Not to mention all the bribes needed for government officials. All to say that Kellogg’s has agreed to pay for um, uh, let me check, OK. One month of soil shipments in exchange for us exclusively talking about them for the next three years.

Uh. OK. Well that doesn’t sound like the best bargain, but I’ll consult the station’s legal advisor and see if we can get out of that.

Oh, our legal advisor is Laura, who is a server down at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. Between shifts, she likes to read Wikipedia pages about, mm, law stuff, so we often go to her for her expert opinion. In the meantime, probably best for me to just do what the contract says. This explanation brought to you, of course – by Kellogg’s.

Let’s get to the news. John Peters – you know, the farmer – said that some folks came to his farm. They said they were from Kellogg’s. Said they heard that he grew the finest imaginary corn in the state. Said they were thinking of getting into imaginary Corn Flakes, and that they wanted to buy up his entire crop. He told them that he already had a deal with Flakey-O’s, a good local cereal company, and that he couldn’t go back on his word. One of the folks from Kellogg’s squinted up at the sun, then spit on the ground through tight lips. “Oh,” that person said. “Iii wouldn’t worry about Flakey-O’s.”

To be honest, listeners, I’m now worried about Flakey-O’s.

And now the Community Calendar. This evening is the monthly school board meeting. Topics covered will include updating text books to contain words, rather than runes and diagrams of ritual dances. Hiring a new vice principal after that whole endless cave of suffering mess a few weeks ago, and replacing all food in the cafeteria with cereal. Scientists from the Kellogg’s Institute say that most food has no nutritional value at all. Oh, wow. I did not know that. And that only cereal contains all the protein, vitamins and corn that a body needs to live. Yeah, that seems right.

Thursday, the Boy Scouts are holding their summer bake sale. They will have bowls of cereal and nothing else. The cereal is not available to you. You are available to the cereal.

Friday is now called Kellogg’s day. Mentioning the outdated name for Kellogg’s Day will result in severe fines and disappearances.

OK, I’m actually getting some sort of urgent text from Carlos. Hm. He says that something I’ve said recently is not scientifically accurate, but you know, I don’t have to check what. Kellogg’s isn’t paying me to text. Or maybe they are. You know, it’s not clear what Kellogg’s wants from us.

Saturday morning is the summer softball league’s weekly game, pitting Steve Carlsberg’s Happy Hyeenas against Susan Willman’s Garbage Dump Team. That’s  not the actual name of the team, but it should be. Ugh, Susan Willman! Kellogg’s will be sponsoring the game by replacing the softballs with fistfuls of Apple Jacks and sending employees to hurl boxes of cereal at players.

Sunday afternoon in Grove Park, Sarah Sultan will be offering free meditation classes. Sarah is, of course, a fist-sized river rock, and so is extraordinarily good at staying still and silent. And she wants to pass these skills onto you. Kellogg’s will place a six-inch deep layer of Special K over the entire park, for reasons that are their own.

The Night Vale Metereological Society has issued an extreme heat watch for Monday, saying, “Hey, it’s a desert. In August. It’s probably going to be hot as heck on Monday, and all other days.” Kellogg’s suggests using the sun to cook up some Rice Krispie treats by building a simple solar energy panel and using that to power an electric oven.

And please, set aside all of Tuesday, as Kellogg’s has indicated that they have use for us, all of us, on Tuesday. And then Kellogg’s made this hollow dry laugh that sounded like it came from a long dormant stone well.

This has been the Community Calendar.

In other news, Flakey-O’s executives announced that they are going to stand strong against this current Kellogg’s encroachment. “We are citizens of Night Vale,” said Flakey-O’s chief executive, Leopold Tuesdale. “We’ve been through a lot of terrifying stuff. It’s a real weird town. We’re not afraid of a competing cereal company.” Then he yelped, as the closet in his office opened and the folks from Kellogg’s came out. One of them squinted up at the sun, then spit on the office floor through lips. “I wouldn’t worry about Flakey-O’s,” the person said. And then the Kellogg’s group left the office while Leopold sputtered about how they got in, and why anybody would ever spit on another person’s floor.

Next up, we have traff- oh, oop, nope, OK. Um, [clears throat] I’m being told that traffic has been replaced today by our new segment.

Listeners, I’m… pleased to bring you Common Kellogg’s Questions, in which you ask questions and I answer them, with off the cuff answers that are not written down for me on these carefully scripted cards.

Question number one: How much is too much cereal? My off-hand answer: How much is too much life? How much is too much love? Would you deny yourself blood in your veins? Would you deny yourself dreams in your evenings? There is not too much. There is only ever the deposit and the longing.

OK, question number two: Sometimes it seems my cereal boxes are watching me. I don’t know how else to describe, they-they don’t have eyes or anything, and they’re just sitting there, but it feels like they’re watching me. Just improvising here, but: Certain measures are taken for your own good. Don’t worry about it. it’s fine.

And question number three: Is this coupon for Frosted Mini Wheats still usable? I’ve had it since, like, 2007 but it doesn’t have a date on it. Is it still good? In answer to your questions and for your extemporaneous listening pleasure: Here are ten seconds of a person eating cereal, recorded really really close to their mouth. [crunching noises]

This has been Common Kellogg’s Questions.

Hey, let’s just keep this going. [clears throat] Health tips. Did you know that Corn Flakes cure most cancers? The reason you didn’t know that is that it isn’t true. But we have made a person on the radio say it to you, and now you will remember that he said it and forget that he said it wasn’t true. Because our minds are fallible and easily manipulated. Okey, this is just insulting. Do I really have to… [whispering] Station Management is not happy about my endangering their soil shipment, so let’s just keep moving.

Flakey-O’s chief executive Leopod Tuesdale has vanished under mysterious circumstances. A white van with a Kellogg’s logo pulled up to him as he walked to his car, and a group of people hustled him into a burlap sack and the burlap sack into the van. One of the people stopped to squint up at the sun and then spit on the ground through tight lips, before jumping in and the van roaring off. So I am being ordered by our current sponsors to report that nothing is know about Leopold’s disappearance and there are no clues indicating what happened. You know, probably he just got scared about the quality of his competitors’ products and fled. Happens all the time! All the time, Kellogg’s has asked me to repeat.

Now, let’s see what kind of weather Kellogg’s has deigned to give you.

[“Standard Deviation” by Danny Schmidt]

[booming noise] In the beginning, there was nothing. There was not nonexistent or existent. There was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in and where, and what gave shelter? Was water there unfathomed, depth of water? Darkness was upon the face of the deep, death was not then, nor was there (ought) immortal.

Then, there was Kellogg’s. Nothing became something. Kellogg’s spread and formed. Kellogg’s became the planets and the stars. Kellogg’s gathered into long strands to become the arms of galaxies, an infinity of Kellogg’s. Space made tangible out of the empty. Kellogg’s became soil and water, it became trees and it became birds, and it learned to sing and it learned to speak.

The first man rose and found the first woman waiting for him, and her name was Kellogg’s, and his name was Kellogg’s, and they shouted in horror at their own mortal forms.

Later, there were cities and before that, there were communities. And it all came from Kellogg’s and was of Kellogg’s and belonged to Kellogg’s. The people knelt and they gave a joyful thanks for their own creation, but Kellogg’s could not hear. It was a heaving dumb creature and it created out of a natural impulse, like how humans bleed, like how birds bleed, like how trees bleed. It did not create out of benevolence. Kellogg’s is not benevolent. It is not evil, either. It is a stone. It is a star. It is every empty distance between the stones ad the stars. It is not capable of morality. It. Is. Kellogg’s. It is – forever.

Once, long ago, the first king looked out over the first kingdom. It was not a very big kingdom, but then, there weren’t a lot of people at that time. Great empires would come later, but at that moment, the world was very small, a stretch of grassland near water. And the person who held that grass land was the king. And the grassland became a kingdom. There were titles given and borders erected. The king felt that he had created something great here, that his name would ring out forever. No one knows his name now. Even 100 years after his death, it was forgotten. The only name that rings out forever – is Kellogg’s.

Once, there was a farmer who lived at the edge of a forest, and she worked her fields. She would look at the forest with longing, because it seemed to her that her life was built only of routines and chores, and that these were the walls that boxed her in. And that by monopolizing her days, these routines were killing her. They were killing her in the sense that they were taking her entire life away from her, and she felt that if she ever got the nerve, one Kellogg’s day evening, she would run into the forest. Maybe it would be scary in there, probably dangerous. She would be less comfortable than she was on the farm, but she would also be truly herself. It was all waiting for her in the forest. She never ran into it. Later, she died while working one of her fields. This story doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters – is Kellogg’s.

Years from now, the universe will disperse. The stars will dim, running out of the energy imbued to them when it all exploded. Planets will become cold rock and molecules will stop forming, and atoms will stop vibrating and it will be still. It will be still forever. Or at least until the next thing. And nothing from this thing will ever see the next thing. [whispers, inaudible] Kellogg’s will watch the universe (-) to (fire) and will help it lay itself to rest. [quietly] And Kellogg’s will wait in the darkness. Will wait as long as it needs to. Forever, or what a human would perceive as forever. Maybe it will wait for ten times as long as this universe ever existed, but eventually, it will stir. There will be water there, unfathomed depth of water. Darkness will be upon the face of the deep, and it will all start anew.

There is a town, and that town is called Night Vale. It exists on a plane in a desert surrounded by the Scrub Lands and the Sand Wastes. Above us are lights that flit about. When they (peer), we (peer) back, wonderingly. We are simple, and we love each other, and we conceal secrets and we hold multitudes, and in this way we are like anyone. We live lives that are rich with meaning and awe. Or we live lives that are heavy with torment and worry, or we live lives that pass by like a Wednesday afternoon and we reach the end and say, “oh my God, was that it?” And it was.

We are a community. Like the king, we have made the world smaller, and in claiming this tiny corner as our entire world, we have created a kingdom. Like the farmer, we eye the forest and contemplate what could be out there if we ever left, if we ever went. But few of us do. And like the universe, we are brought to us – by Kellogg’s. We belong to Kellogg’s, and we are made of Kellogg’s. We cannot understand Kellogg’s, and that may be because the mystery is too complex. Or, it may be because it is as simple as a monolith, and truly there is nothing to understand.

Flakey-O’s is no more. The company has been bought out, with no management left to resist the hostile takeover. It is now a research wing of Kellogg’s, designed to test out a concept that Kellogg’s says they have just invented all on their own. Which is a line of cereal meant for night time only. The new head of this division squinted up at the sun, then spit on their own office floor through tight lips before saying, “Ii wouldn’t worry about Flakey-O’s.”

That’s it for our sponsored show.

Remember: today has been brought to you – by Kellogg’s. And Kellogg’s can take today away.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Keep your eye on the ball. Keep your lungs on the court. Leave your stomach in the locker room.

[dansamdavid]

Back in 2016 I notice that I suck at planning. Even this post was delayed for two weeks because I still suck at planning. So I bought a planner. It worked for a short while but I noticed that I was not really using it as much because it did not work for me.

I eventually stumbled upon the Bullet Journal. It’s a system more than it is a product. You don’t have to buy anything online to make this work for you. The creator of the Bullet Journal, Ryder Carroll, described it as

“The Analog Method for the Digital Age”

It is an analog system tracks the past, organizes the present, and plan for the future. 

I will be showing you how I use my Journal. The best part about the system is that you can modify it to fit your need. Keep track of your medication, your financial plans, your school requirements, even your shopping list. I personally use it to keep track of School. This Journal has saved my butt on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

The things you’ll need are:

Notebook of your choice

A pen 

That’s the bare basics to start your Bullet Journal. This is a video tutorial from the creator himself. I recommend watching this very short video before proceeding.

Mark the first spread as the index. 

Add the future log and mark down its pages in the index.

Add the monthly log and add it to your Index.

Add the daily logs and add it to your Index.

Repeat the step 2-4 after every month.

Add any notes and log it down in the Index.

The video goes more in-depth on how each log works.

Index

I follow the same design of Ryder’s Index. if there is a page I need quick access to I add the sticky note strip.

Future Log 

My future logs consist of a spread with a calendar on the first page followed by month-long events and special events. As you can see its pretty bare but it will fill up as 2019 comes in. I keep track of music, games, and book releases.

Monthly Log 2019

Monthly Log 2019

Monthly Log 2019

Monthly Log 2019

Monthly Log 2019

Monthly Log 2019

Monthly Log 2019

At the end I added the tasks and goals I want to finish before 2020.

Yearly Goals

Future Log from 2017

Monthly Log 2016

Monthly Log 2016

Future Log from 2018

Future Log 2018

Future Log 2018

Future Log 2018

Monthly Log

By the time I was writing this It’s still 2018 so no 2019 monthly log yet. I will be following the same format as last years. Plans for the day are written on the first page and the second page reflects plans for the month.

It will look sort of like this

This is a monthly log from 2018

2018 Monthly Log

2018 Monthly Log

2018 Monthly Log

Daily Log

Again, 2019 has not started for me so for the daily logs I will follow the same format as last year but in a more simplistic design. 

Daily Logs 2017

Daily Logs 2017

The 2019 I would make would probable look like this:

2018 Daily Log

Collections

Collections are modifications I added into my Bullet Journal to fully accommodate my needs as a writer, reader and doodler. 

To Be Read (TBR) List

I love to read lots of books. And I have a lot of books on my shelf and they deserved to be read rather than just collecting dust. I write down the books I want to finish that year and I cross it out when I’m done. 2018 was not a good reading year for me.

For the 2018 design, You write down the books you own and want to read on the shelves and the books that you want to buy on the next page. Books not yet released are written on the thought bubble.

2019

2018

Don’t Break the Chain Habit Developer

I use this to keep myself drawing and writing. This is very effective you want everything looking aesthetically pleasing. You write down a task that you would want to do everyday. After you do the task, you color in the box that correspond to that day. If you miss a task, you’re going top have a hole in your chain.

Don’t Break the Chain

The Movie/TV Show Tracker

I tried at some point to watch more films but that plan crashed and burn as soon as I thought of it. I was able to watch a few this past two years but I’m just not a movie person. It is still a good mod for anyone who loves their movies.

It works by writing the movie title on the popcorn and then you shade it or cross it out after you watch the film. For upcoming movies you log them down the next picture movie poster frame.

The Movie Tracker 2017-2018

Music Cover Task Manager

I used to make song covers using Vocaloid and Utau on Youtube and Soundcloud. Vocaloid and Utau are singing sythesizer softwares. I use it so I don’t have sing.

To keep track of all the production materials I use this checklist. I get the Instrumentals, then I tune the UST or the VSQX which is like a midi file. Tuning includes inputting the lyrics and making sure the phonemes are correct. Japanese has the easiest phoneme library to work with so I cover more Japanese songs than English which is a bit more complicated in terms of phoneme usage. Then I mix the vocals and the Instrumentals. Then I make the video and edit. If I upload it to YouTube I still have to add the subtitles. This method has helped me not lose track of this long process. 

Life saving Task Manager

Notes and List

I make a lot of notes and list on my Bullet Journal. It was  life saver when I have ideas or researches that I would need later. It all works so long as you log everything you do in the Index so you would have no trouble looking for it later.

Processed with VSCO with preset

Processed with VSCO with preset

Processed with VSCO with preset

More Modifications

There are so much people online who are using this system for its flexibility. You can check out YouTube for Bullet Journal tours and tutorials. Pinterest, and going to Bullet Journal Website for more information and tips about the Bullet Journal

I hope I was able to help you in your 2019 journey. If you think I missed something or if you have any questions you can message me and I would love to talk about it. The bullet Journal works at its best when you yourself are adamnt in reaching your goals. Here is to our more productive 2019.

Plan 2019 With Me: How to Bullet Journal Back in 2016 I notice that I suck at planning. Even this post was delayed for two weeks because I still suck at planning.

[jeanmoreaux]

Oh my gosh… how do you find the time to read such a massive amount of books in a year? /Is it super tough to choose favorites from such a long list, or do the best books pop out at you? What do you use to track your reading? I’m so impressed by your drive and organization!

hey madeleine 💛 i’ really flattered by your message 🤗 well, i feel like reading is such a big hobby of mine i do it every day (when commuting, when i am stuck at home, before i go to sleep...) so my book count just accumulates quite naturally over time 😅 but since i started listening to audiobooks while commuting/cleaning/doing chores/cooking/etc a few years ago i definitely get a lot more reading done (~30 books more than before i started listening to audiobooks). it's probably important to mention that a number of the 194 books i read this year a) were not for personal pleasure (some were for class, some were textbooks) or b) were quite short (around 100 pages or poetry collections). i imagine that without including these reads my book count would be around 150 books or something (which is still a lot i know but it looks less a little impressive lol).

frankly, i have an easier time choosing favourites when i have read more titles. not just bc i have more books to choose my favourites from, but also bc after reading so many books the ones that stay with me and linger in my mind are much more obvious. like, i can read a good book but completely forget about it two weeks later, while another good book takes up space in my thoughts for months. a good chunk of my reading turns out to be quite forgettable or mediocre, so my favourites definitely stick out. i currently use goodreads and storygraph to track my reading (as well as the monthly wrap ups i put on tumblr). i would love to keep a reading journal, but i just know i don’t have the time or commitment to actually keep it updated. tho i might start an excel spread sheet for 2022 if i can find one i like online (bc i am lazy and bad at excel).

[christinesumpmg]

Beyond Youtube: Video Hosting, Marketing, and Monetization Platforms, Compared

Posted by AnnSmarty

A few weeks ago I did a step-by-step article on building up your YouTube presence. When writing the article, I immediately had a follow-up idea on expanding my tips beyond YouTube. Since then, some of the comments have confirmed the need for this follow-up.

The increasing interest in video marketing and diversifying your efforts is not surprising: According to HubSpot’s research 45% of web users watch an hour or more of video per day. That’s a lot if time our customers spend watching videos! And it's projected that by 2020, 82% of all consumer web traffic will be video.

Obviously, if you are seriously entering the video marketing arena, limiting yourself to YouTube alone is not a smart idea, just like limiting yourself to any one marketing channel is probably never a good way to go.

With that in mind, what other options do we have?

More video hosting options

YouTube is not the only major video hosting platform out there. There are a few solid options that you want to consider. Here are three additional platforms and how they fit different needs:

YouTube

Vimeo Pro

Vimeo Business

Wistia

Cost

Free

$20 /m

$50 /m

$99 /m

What's included

Unlimited videos

20GB per week

5TB per week

10 videos a month

Lead generation

No

No

Yes

Yes

Customizable player

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Collaboration

No

No

Yes

No

Publish native to Facebook & Twitter

No

Yes

Yes

No

Clickable links

No(*)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Domain-level privacy

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Analytics

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes (**)

Video schema

No

No

No

Yes

Customer support

No(*)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Cons

Crowded, no good way to send viewers to your site...

Often has issues with bandwidth; videos load slower. If you are looking for organic visibility, it's quite niche-specific (artists, etc.)

Most expensive

Best for

Anyone

Filmmakers

Agencies

Businesses

(*) Unless you become a YouTube Partner (which is next to impossible for new and medium-scale channels)

(**) I (as well as many reviewers) consider Wistia analytics much better than that of YouTube and Vimeo

Bottom line:

Choosing a video hosting platform is overwhelming but here are a few easy-to-digest takeaways from the above comparison:

YouTube is beyond competition. If you are into video marketing, you need to be there, at least for the sake of being discovered through their search and suggested videos. However, a YouTube account is only good for promoting the YouTube account. There's little chance to drive leads to your site or build solid income there. You do need to be there for branding, though. Besides, none of the other options will offer an opportunity for such a powerful organic spread.

If you are into creative film-making (artists and storytellers), you'll want to give Vimeo Pro a try. There's a big community there and you want to be part of it to find partners/clients.

If you are a video marketing agency, Vimeo Business may be your platform of choice (thanks to their collaboration and multi-user support)

If you mostly need videos to embed on your landing pages, Wistia will save you tons of time. It's the easiest to use and understand. No extra training needed. You don't have to be an experienced filmmaker OR marketer to understand how it works and use its analytics.

Video courses and on-demand video

These days, anyone can create their own on-demand video channel. Isn't it awesome? It's also a very smart way to monetize your videos without forcing your viewers into clicking any ads or buying any affiliate stuff you didn't create.

When consolidating your video marketing efforts into your own on-demand video channel, there are important goals to keep in mind (targeting at least several at a time being the smartest approach):

Creating a knowledge base around your product

Positioning your brand as a knowledge hub in your niche

Building up an additional conversion funnel (for those people who are not ready to buy yet)

To me, creating a video subscription channel seems to be a perfect way to monetize your video creation efforts for two very appealing reasons:

You create a product of your own which you are able to sell. With that comes an ocean of opportunities, from enhanced branding to an ability to expand your reach to many more platforms where you can sell your product from.

You build and nurture your own micro-community, which (if you do things right) are able to spread your word, refer more people to join and support you in your other endeavors.

With that in mind, which options do we have to create our own video course?

Not surprisingly, there are quite a few platforms that fall into two major groups:

Revenue sharing platforms. The power of those is that they are interested in selling your courses and there's usually a community to market your course to. That benefit also creates one major drawback: Expect these platforms to dictate you how to format and market your course. Udemy is the best known example here: I started using it mostly for branding and quickly got discouraged due to their multiple restrictions and poor customer support. Still, it's a good place to start.

VOD (video-on-demand) platforms. These will charge you a monthly fee but they will come with awesome marketing features and integrations, as well as total freedom as to what you want to do with your content and your audience. Like with anything, you get what you pay for.Uscreen is a big player here: You can choose your payment model, use your own domain, brand your course the way you want to, send email marketing emails to your students, and even create a custom smart phone app to give your students an alternative on-the-go way to consume your brand-owned content:

Bottom line:

Like with video marketing platforms, there's nothing preventing you from using both of the above options (for example, you can sell a lighter version of your course on Udemy and keep a more advanced, regularly updated version for your own domain) but just to give you an idea:

Udemy is best if you are very new to course creation and have no budget to start. It also makes it easy to keep an eye on competitors and understand your audience better by watching what and how they rate and review

Uscreen is a logical step further: Once you get more comfortable and have accumulated some videos you may want to bring it to the next level, i.e. create your own branded spot to engage your community better and build an alternative source of income.

Live streaming

Live streaming refers recording and simultaneously broadcasting your video to your audience in real time.

Live streaming has been getting bigger for a few years now and there's nothing that would signal an upcoming slow-down.

The biggest players here are:

YouTube Live

Facebook Live

Periscope

All the above options are very interactive and engaging: You can see your viewers' comments and reactions as you are streaming the video and you are able to address them right away.

In this case, your choice depends on your own marketing background: Stick to whatever channel currently works best for you in terms of follower/subscriber base and engagement.

Personally, Facebook is my preferred way to stream videos, not because of the actual audience size but because Facebook audience is more engaged. Besides, Facebook sends a notification to my friends whenever I go live which always results in more views.

But it's possible that we don't have to choose...

There are a couple of services that claim to stream "simultaneously" to several of the major platforms which is something I haven't tried yet but I am definitely planning to. If you like the idea, here's what I have been able to find so far:

Vimeo Live

Crowdcast Multistreams

Supported platforms

"Vimeo and Facebook, YouTube, or your favorite RTMP destinations"

"Facebook Live, Periscope, YouTube Live, and more"

Cost

$75 per month

$89 per month

Extra Pros

Comes with all Vimeo Business features (analytics, collaboration, hosting, etc.)

Comes with nice webinar hosting features

More tools to amplify your video marketing

In my previous article I listed lots of video creation and marketing tools and I didn't want to leave you with no tools here as well.

If you have read up to this point, you must be very serious about your video marketing efforts. So to award you, here are a few awesome tools you may want to take note of:

Create: Lumen5

Here's a nice tool I failed to mention in my previous post: Lumen5. If you are looking for an easy start for your video marketing campaign, take a look at this tool. It turns blog posts into videos and the result is pretty awesome.

I don't mean to say this tool is enough for a well-rounded video marketing campaign but it's definitely a nice way to re-package your text content and broadcast your articles to video-only channels, like Youtube and Vimeo.

Monetize: Patreon

Apart from selling your videos as a separate project, there's another cool way to monetize your video activity.

Patreon is nice platform aiming to help independent video creators: Set up your page and invite your social media followers to support your video creation efforts by a small monthly subscription. If you don't want to sell anything, that's a nice way to earn your living by engaging your supporters:

You can learn more on how it works from its current user here.

Monitor: Awario

There's never one perfect method of doing marketing. There's always a need to try different tools, formats and platforms. Monitoring your competitors is one great way to discover more of those tactics to play with.

Awario is a great solution to use for competitive multi-channel monitoring. They support all major media including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, blogs and more. You can easily filter out any channel to clear out clutter. YouTube monitoring is a life saver when it comes to keeping an eye on what your competitor is doing video-wise:

When it comes to video marketing, I am not aware of any other solution for monitoring video content.

Conclusion

You don’t have to limit yourself to YouTube for video hosting, but you cannot really do without YouTube altogether.

When it comes to YouTube, it’s a powerful video discovery engine but there’s not much you can do to direct those viewers to your own site. You need to be there to be discovered, though.

When it comes to other video hosting platforms, every solution serves its own purpose, so choose one that will serve your needs best.

If you want to consolidate your video marketing efforts (which is a smart and logical step further), create your own on-demand video channel. These days it’s pretty easy and affordable.

Video live streaming is a great way to earn organic social media visibility. Choose your platform to stream based on your current level of engagement and reach. Or, try paid solutions that allow to stream to multiple platforms simultaneously

Are there more tools and platforms you are using? Let us know in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/2LsfKI3