#as opposed to like ‘50 different words to use instead of these same boring words’

[hanzajesthanza]

maybe i just don’t follow enough about the fanfiction community anymore but… i feel like plot and story, and actually making scenes make sense and have structure and purpose, is harder to get write than even other things about writing that i consider hard—like having consistent, relevant pacing and creating natural-sounding, in-character dialogue.

and from what i’ve seen, it’s like no one ever talks about improving this major overarching skill, when compared to how much as they talk about minute and minor details to improve with your writing, like the vocab you use.

and maybe fanfiction is uniquely challenged here because the point of it (if the source material is decent, anyways) is supposed to be that it’s not necessary, and is often without a serious purpose and written without structure.

my interpretation of it is that the core of writing (which is giving your readers a reason to read) is assumed to be already accomplished when you write fanfiction—because it’s fanfiction—but this is often to the detriment of the writing, no matter if it’s fanfiction or not, because writing needs that purpose to exist.

[zuzuslastbraincell]

fun world-building facts about the eyeliner incident:

so the main canon divergence is that roku killed sozin, instead of just chilling in his cottage for ~50 years. he ended up leading a coalition force against him, in prep for civil war, although was able to bait him out to an erupting volcano and kill him at the age of 40 or 50 or so. roku then lived for another 100 years (hardly out of character for an avatar to do so).

roku went further, though, and after killing sozin, declared there would be no more fire lords in the avatar state. this split the fire nation into monarchists and anti-monarchists, essentially, and there was still a fair bit of civil unrest/war after sozin’s death because not everyone agreed.

a lot of monarchists ran off to the colonies after sozin was killed, to protect their assets, to protect their lives, as a place to hide out until the storm blew over (it did not blow over) and to regroup for a next assault (which did not succeed).

this was fine, until a second phase: roku wanted to give the radicals in his coalition a leading voice in the next government to be. a lot of people disagreed. in the colonies (many of which had officially been handed back to the earth kingdom), there were riots, lots of dissent, etc. amongst fire nationals.

when the north western earth kingdom became the site of resistance against radicals in the fire nation (as roku’s opposition to sozin was based on a coalition of liberal nobles and bureaucrats & emerging radical workers syndicates), a lot of monarchists & ultranationalists ended up emigrating with the initial wave of noble émigrés, and eventually, some of the more liberal nobles supporting roku turned against them as well. (this is also how roku’s youngest daughter, rina, who was married off to a sozin loyalist in a hostage situation organised by sozin, ends up in the earth kingdom - she and her husband defect, and initially support roku, but seeing the radicals that he is genuinely helping and supporting, they move to the earth kingdom). the reputation of this second wave depends on province - ex-soldiers are always hated, and the north west & regions in close proximity despise the fire nation, but the east & ba sing se has always been quite hospitable, & many have dual bases in ba sing se and the northwest. the ba sing se nobility, over time, mingle more and more with high profile fire nation émigrés who have property.

fire nationals in the earth kingdom are thus culturally different, usually, to fire nation citizens in the modern fire nation. more likely to be monarchists, more likely to hold sympathetic sentiment to azulon etc. (though most agree - publically - that sozin went too far, even if they think azulon should have his crown in private), and a lot of their styles of fashion, music, art, dance etc. is based on a lot of “antiquated” “old fashioned” fire nation traditions with some earth kingdom ideas mixed in. to fire nation residents, they just look at least 80 years out of date.

fire nation descendants in the earth kingdom are more likely to be involved with particular organised crime syndicates (the triads, as opposed to ones with other names). this is because after the war ended abruptly with sozin’s death, a lot ex-mercenaries and ex-soldiers stationed in the colonies/northwest began to find work/business through protection racketeering (in absence of organised govt. in the north-western earth kingdom). even in the modern day, the north west has problems with corruption, control, and is economically quite deprived despite having massive resources and that’s an after-effect of colonialism and attempts by the national government to ‘penalise’ the officials in that region for colluding with fire nation nationals/ex-colonists (very exasperating for genuine earth kingdom officials, and earth kingdom locals). roku did try and help the region but he’s generally disliked for lots of reasons & was trying to stop the fire nation from collapsing after supporting the radicals (a controversial decision!) and facing counter-revolutionary violence. i think roku felt like he neglected the fire nation for the earth kingdom in his youth and that’s why sozin was able to get as far as he did, so i think he made the very difficult decision to prioritise trying to sort out the fire nation. hence why yu dao is in a bit of a state. i imagine yu dao (republic city) is a big buzzing city but has those same problems with organised crime we see in lok.

the sozin dynasty, as azulon & his descendants are called, aren’t an exception to this involvement in organised crime. a lot of people were actually quite sympathetic to a young azulon after his father was killed at around the age of fifty or so, including fire nationals in the earth kingdom, but also the nobility in the earth kingdom, themselves staunch monarchists, who saw sozin as the problem and not the system of monarchy itself. all of this allowed azulon & his family to flee the caldera & manage to transfer a number of their assets with relative ease; they were never penniless, despite the sob story you might here.

azulon set up links with local businesses who were run by sympathisers, as well as organised crime syndicates, and through wise purchases, good advisors, & some savvy of his own, shifted from aristocracy to bourgeoisie with relative ease, & bought/negotiated their place at the negotiating table, to eventually come to be considered the lead stakeholder in those crime syndicates (with enough distance, though, as not to be suspicious). very much saved his name from being a laughing stock through his own ability there, but if you��d hear the story told, people who say that folks were deferential to him in part because of his lineage (sometimes, but not always true - the revolution had caused people to doubt).

regarding his sons, iroh had far more involved in organised crime and illegitimate business than ozai, who essentially looked after the more boring legitimate side of things (but took that role seriously and expanded it beyond being a simple front). iroh actually had a worse reputation up until azulon died, and was just considered a very competent but cut-throat political/business leader/general player with a lot of very very shady links that couldn’t quite be proven, but also like, was famously quite charming and well-liked in the high society ba sing se network. like, i want to be honest to show iroh here - he was bad! in the show, he was a war criminal! i mentioned he was a war profiteer (largely because ‘war criminal’ doesn��t make as much sense imo), and that was almost definitely regarding civil wars/coups that have been attempted in the fire nation & earth kingdom. this stopped when lu ten ended up being shot in the crossfire during a turf war and rather than pursuing a violent vendetta, iroh stepped out of the spotlight and let ozai take over the reigns more.

anyway, after zuko was burned for attempting to stand up to ozai, iroh basically faked his own death and completely ditched anything left of what he’d spent his life building in order to whisk zuko away and invent new identities for themselves in the fire nation (ironically) where they worked as tea shop workers (yes. li and mushi, still canon). i don’t think they live in the caldera, since cameras/photos mean it’s easier to be tracked, and zuko probably lives somewhere quiet-ish like ember island. zuko has a decent adolescence, considering, after he’s estranged. no “find the avatar” in this universe, for fairly obvious reasons.

i’m not an expert in organised crime by any means but hopefully this all makes sense. a lot of what azulon/iroh/ozai is doing, through the purchase of land, the control of business, the use of organised crime as an illicit form of govt. essentially is a form of colonisation, where the region is deprived due to fire nation business interests and in earth kingdom control in name only. corruption and close ties between ba sing se and fire nation émigrés mean that centralised govt is underfunding & turning a blind eye to it (which, in canon, ba sing se does, ‘no war in ba sing se’ etc.). most of the colonisation efforts are centred in the north-west, but azula is brought up in ba sing se given it’s far more reputable/prestigious, though she’s undoubtedly been to both places.

as for what’s happening in the fire nation, i feel like aesthetically it’s a little different - ba sing se is ancient buildings with sky trains, lots of urban sprawl & a very wide and endless city, whereas i imagine the caldera is a very tall city due to limited space available, more skyscrapers in the fire nation due to limits in islands. also, the fire nation has sea trains and submarine trains/tunnels, because. politically? haven’t quite decided but they’re some flavour of anarchist-communist (was reluctant to use that word in the fic itself because people have all kinds of interpretations of it, often very negative knee-jerk responses to it, but essentially: community-owned services and businesses and spaces instead of privately-owned ones, with egalitarian principles enshrined into the culture & identity now) over there if i’m honest, with lots of democratic councils. obviously i don’t think it’ll be perfect and i imagine ‘the national question’ is something that comes up a lot, with some difficulties between national & regional identity (imo the fire nation is very diverse, we see the sun warriors and then the sages who help korra in s2 are from different groups/cultures than the militaristic one that rose to prominence in the 100 year war and i hc a lot of that regional diversity was steamrolled for sozin’s imperialist project).

ANYWAY

there’s a reason i made this post on my main last week:

this is getting very long but hopefully this is some insight into what i’ve been thinking about when i made this AU

[hitandrunduorp-a]

What's Matt and Mattie's vampire lore? Is Charlotte in this au, too? Your lore stuff is so fun to read!

//thank you so much for being interested in the lore!! It's a bit lengthy, at least Matt's mostly is, so I'll put it under a cut ♥\\

//I haven't entirely decided if Charlotte will eventually make an appearance in this AU, and if sh does I haven't quite figured out a story so... we'll see on that front-\\

The Angel of Death; Matt LeBlanc

Matt's a pureblooded vampire who's roughly about 900 years old. No one really knows much about his first 200 years, except that he was adopted by higher class vampires at around the time he would be almost a teen in human years. After around 100 years, his parents were killed by hunters, whom he slaughtered in retaliation, and with having already shown great strength, he became a part of the army, so to speak. It was on the battlefields though, that truly gave Matt the title of Lord and 'The Angel of Death', and the respect he now holds.

He was sent as a scout but was captured during a very large war. Their kind was losing, and Matt was sure he'd be the next on the chopping block... but something happened, which caused him to not only lash out, and by the time reinforcements came to save him, the young vampire had, single-handedly, slaughtered a large portion of the large base he was held captive in, as well as taking out key generals and strategists.

For those wondering, while no one but him knows, the reason he managed to slaughter the base was cause one; he was planning on being captured all along, but what made it from killing some generals to a massacre, was seeing a few other vampires there... those who he had let himself become friends with, to trust... only to find out that they were traitors, and were planning on helping the opposing side win, in exchange for safety from the slaughter. Matt snapped, and instead of only a handful of deaths... well, it was a large base.

At almost 400 years old, he was granted his titles, as well as a place on the council, seeing as he was not only strong but his charisma and wit were greatly admired and respected as well. Not the best by any means, but when surrounded by those, like his cousin, who focus on brute force alone, he was a voice of reason and brilliance.

When he was 400, or just passed, he was given his first 'pet'; a human who, while meek, had life in their eyes. A burning flame that the young lord grew addicted to, and at one point treasured and fell in love with.

It was taboo but not unheard of for a vampire to fall for their pets, some even turning them to keep them in their lives... but Matt's story is never so sweet. The person, when he lowered his guard enough, turned on him and tried to kill him; nearly succeeding. Though they weren't expecting the rage that bubbled from the usually gentle and kinder lord, and he spent days breaking them, until they were nothing but a shadow of their former selves. Only then did he finally let them die.

And for the next few hundred years, whenever someone with that same flame came into the auction houses, or from traders, he would buy them, only to shatter their spirits into dust, enjoying the power it gave him over them... and the soothing effect it had on his anger, at least at first.

Eventually, he grew bored and apathetic from doing such things. His anger had long since dulled into a numb pain, and he decided to do something different; he treated them with masked kindness. Never getting too close, just enough to let his pets trust him... and, with a little bit of hypnosis here and there, fall for him, and willingly give him their blood. Blood, he finds, it far sweeter when given, than drained from a terrified source, but after he was about 700, it was rare for him to take a human in, only doing so on the very rare occasion.

While not a master in magic, he's quite skilled in hypnosis and mind tricks, his silver tongue and charismatic character able to tempt even the purest of minds. Known for being very calm and collected, it's rare to truly anger him... but if you do, then pray for mercy from whoever you believe in. Because he will have none.

The Young Lord; Mattie

Only 200 years old at most, it is rare for a vampire, let alone one who was once human, to gain such a title as Lord at such a 'young' age.

A drifter in his old life, he enjoyed his freedom until a vampire stole him away, having fallen for his kindness and beauty. He lived in a gilded cage, becoming nothing more than a living doll for his 'master'.

One day, his master was stressed and drank too much from the blond, and at first, feared he had killed his precious treasure. Heartbroken and panicking, the vampire hadn't realized he accidentally turned the blond, and when Mattie woke up, all he saw was red.

With his master slaughtered, he was lost in a frenzy that lasted around 50 years. Hiding away in a small part of a forest, he only ever attacked anything and anyone that came close.

Matt found the boy when his mind was, while still fractured, was starting to grip sanity once again, and after a time of offering him food and winning his trust, he managed to bring the boy home so he could recover in peace.

It took a bit longer, but Mattie eventually managed to mostly get his mind together again, really only faltering when he's hungry or angry. At first, the boy was planning on leaving to live his old life again as a drifter, but he accidentally walked in on one of Matt's meetings with other lords and overheard the plans they had for a troublesome group of creatures. They didn't want a conflict, but nothing anyone can do could calm them, and it was looking like another war was going to break out... and at the time, the vampires were already having issues in another area, and had little resources if a war were to start.

Not one for senseless violence, Mattie went on his own as an emissary, and single-handedly managed to soothe the conflicts, and helped avoid a small war from breaking out.

For his bravery (seeing as he could have been slaughtered before getting a word out), and for aiding in keeping the peace at such a dire time, he was given the title of Lord and a district, and while he's not thrilled to be stuck in one place, he's found ways of enjoying his new life, like learning various magic, and visiting the varying settlements around his district that he's managed to make peace with.

Quickly becoming proficient at blood magic and illusions, sometimes it's difficult to know if the boy you're talking to is really there before you, or is actually behind you, ready to rip your throat open. He can't control people, but if having open wounds, or worse, being on a bloody battlefield, he's a true danger; he's able to control the blood into anything he needs, be it weapons, spikes, projectiles, or bindings he can use and control, and thus can slaughter someone without ever getting close.

He doesn't need his illusions or the blood to fight though; while not physically able to go one-on-one, he's dangerously fast and agile, and a well-placed slice to the throat can be far more efficient than attempting to pummel an enemy down.

The Bull of War; Jason Moroe

Over 1200 years old, the pureblood lived during a time where he, and many other creatures, lived as slaves to humans who managed to control them, using them for work and heavy lifting, or thrown into a pit and forced to fight for entertainment. Jason was often rebellious, and tossed into the Pit often, and had fought -and won- against many creatures, growing stronger and stronger with each battle.

Eventually, he and others turned and rebelled against their masters, slaughtering everyone and earning his freedom.

When he joined vampire society, he was quickly respected for his incredible strength, with not many able to face him and win. He was a general for many wars, all of them able to inspire everyone for battle, no matter the odds, and more often than not, able to win the day because of it.

Another reason he's formidable is that he has no need to bring weapons with him; he's always armed. Tattoos litter his skin, and with them, he can form them and summon weapons from his skin at a whim, going from dangerous to deadly in moments.

He and Matt... don't get along, but they respect one another, knowing each of them struggled to survive for a long time; it's why Matt's strong enough to take Jason on, and possibly win. But their views on humanity are very different, and thus cause a lot of arguments.

Jason saved Matt from his first pet, and while he didn't kill them outright for nearly killing Matt, he made sure they couldn't run away while Matt recovered. It's why he, in recent years, gets worried when Matt takes a human in, not wanting the other vampire to be killed because of his softness to humans.

[s-mething-mbti]

Hiya! I just discovered your blog and was wondering if you could help try to type me (sorry this is pretty long)

1. I’m currently pretty torn between the intuitive introverts. I was able to narrow it down to INTJ, INFJ or INTP. I’m about 97.2% sure I use Ni. The only thing that’s giving me a bit of doubt is I find myself occasionally learning for the sake of learning which I’ve found is a traditionally Ne trait. Despite this I’m still pretty sure I use Ni as when I go down a rabbit hole and start learning for the sake of learning its always about a topic that interests me or is entertaining. I won’t waste my time learning about something I find mundane or drab. I resonate a lot with Ni’s “aha” moments where the correct answer simply pops into my head or a vision suddenly seems clear or a plot holes solution suddenly seems painstakingly obvious. I also resonate with starting out with a broader range of information/ possibilities and narrowing it down to one or two things. Another intuitive thing I highly relate to is living in the future. If almost never living in the present, and a constantly fixate on the future. I have a distinct, clear, and well thought out plan for the next 20 years (give or take).

Where I run into a bit of trouble is when I try to figure out which judging functions I predominantly use. It honestly feels like I use them all (though I know you’re only supposed to be able to use two well). For example I plan out everything, and set deadlines for myself. My desk often seems really messy to others especially when I’m doing art. This isn’t because I don’t value cleanliness, but because it simply makes more sense to keep all my art supplies out rather than having to spend at least fifteen minutes taking them out and then putting them away only to take them right back out the next day. I set goals based off of easily measurable, external things such as time, or grades. I make daily to do lists that outline everything I’ll need to do in the day, and some stuff to focus on if I have extra time. With my to do list I also plan out the approximate time each thing should take. When coming up with a scientific theory, I take others opinions/theories and test them against each other, and current scientific laws in order to formulate the most probable theory. External opinions (in a scientific/ logical manner) mean a lot to me (I don’t really care about how people that aren’t my friends think of me). To me these things seem very Te. But then I’m always smiling and am a fairly warm person. I want my friends to be happy, and I want to help others. I despise emotionally driven conflict(though I love debates), and while I’m not afraid to disrupt it if it threatens my morals/ is promoting something blatantly wrong (factually or morally) I do really harmony. These seem like pretty Fe things to me. As for Fi, I rarely share my negative emotions, preferring to deal with them predominantly alone. While I may not talk about them much I also have EXTREMELY strong morals. If something is crossing them I’m not going to simply ignore it for the sake of harmony. While I tend to be private I do try to be as authentic as possible. My morals are derived by information I’ve collected and decisions I’ve made myself, rather than being derived by ‘the groups’ collective morals if that makes sense. To me these things appear to be very Fi. As for Ti, sometimes I enjoy learning simply for the sake of learning. The knowledge may have no practical use to me but if I find it interesting or want to learn about it I can devote hours to it. I try and come to the most logical/accurate conclusion possible, and when I’m offering advice I may offer additional advice that takes different variables into account. The truth is really important to me as well.

2. Reading. I absolutely ADORE reading(specifically fantasy/sci-fi/dystopian books or research/scientific articles about topics that interest me). For reference there was a period of time when I had some free time and I was reading 2 or 3 books a day? Read maybe 50 books in the span of 20 days? But yeah I absolutely love reading. Just he way the book sucks you in and deposits you and a completely new world full of wonder and disaster and ugh it’s just magnificent. And don’t even get me started on impeccable character development and eeee. The way rereading a book feels like you’re reconnecting with an old best friend or going back to your childhood home and *sobs*. I also LOVE trying to predict plot twists and character deaths. Most of the time I can predict things correctly and idk it’s really fun to just try and figure out what’s going to happen before the big reveal. And the rush of satisfaction you get when you’ve guessed something right- it also helps me brace for character deaths (sorta. For example I knew *the* death in the final empire [by Brandon Sanderson] was coming since nearly the very beginning [I had my suspicions since the moment vin was introduced] but I still sobbed when the character died. [a tad off topic but what caused me to cry wasn’t the death itself but another characters reaction to it. This is often the case I find. A death of a character I love leaves me feeling empty but what typically gets me to cry is the others reactions- for thus reason funerals usually make me cry. I should also add that I only cry when I’m alone. I’ve cried around people (that aren’t my parents) a grand total of 1 time.]

Uh and daydreaming. I’m almost always daydreaming. Ie. if my brain was a search engine or whatever one tab would be reality and I would consecutively have at lest 20 other tabs open. Some of then playing videos (daydreams) others supplying music(if I’m not actively listening to real music my brain cycles through songs I have memorized. Occasionally does this with book scenes too if I’m bored [yes, I memorize some of my favourite scenes, word for word, so I can play them like a movie in my head when I, bored) others containing random info (just me thinking random stuff) etc.

3. I guess how to solve some problems? Wether it’s a math or science problem, or an argument between friends, figuring out how to solve things has always been something I’m decently good at. Math and science just. Make sense. And then with issues between people I’m good at looking at different perspectives (even ones that I don’t agree with) and playing out different scenarios/ possible outcomes of different approaches. This lets me come up with a solution that will successfully solve the problem with the least amount of negative ramifications involved

4. Hmm maybe being present? I honestly feel like life is passing me by and I’m just immobilized on the sidelines. Im so far into the future that I kinda forget to actually *live* every once in a while.

5. Honesty? Truth? Morals? These topics are all really interesting as they can be kinda subjective. The line between honesty and cruelty is so small. What is truth? Cause while yes, we have some set truths (such as the earth is orbiting the sun) so many ‘truths’ are simply subjective and completely depend on ones perspective. And morals my goodness. The stormlight archive is a really fun series that plays around with things like what is justice? And honour? I won’t get into it now but it brings up so many really interesting questions regarding morals.

6. Perspective . I think perspective is such a fascinating thing. Just. Different opinions. Seeing the world through completely different lenses. Interpreting the same thing in utterly different ways. When toying around with an idea I find it really fun to try and imagine opposing perspectives. While I can find different perspectives really interesting, they can also well... get on my nerves to say the least. Sometimes someone perspective is just? So blatantly wrong? And has absolutely no factual evidence backing it up? And part of me wants to just just scream and it would be so much easier if everyone just. Assessed the facts in front of them instead of making wild accusations or whatever without anything to support them. But yeah overall I think perspectives are really cool and they’re part of what helps to make the world diverse and life so much less interesting without different perspectives.

The future. I’ve found a bunch of my friends find thinking about the future stressful but if I’m being honest I find solace in thinking about the future. Having things planned out and knowing what I intend to do/ where I want to go takes off so much stress. I lowkey live in the future and I honestly cannot wait till it comes, and I achieve my goals. While I might be a bit scared the future excites me so much more than it’ll ever scare me.

7. Maybe add some more stuff about the judging functions and feelings and thinking etc . I absolutely adore science and math. I literally do math for fun. I’m currently aiming to get my PhD in astrophysics.

Not sure if this is relevant at all but my biggest (harmless) pet peeves are my grandmother’s door stopper (it always gets stuck in the door and then u can’t get it out and the door won’t close properly- I have an unhealthy amount of hatred for that thing AHAHJSEJKSMDJDJDJJ) and when people say some variant of “you did good”. Like nO NO YOU DID NOT DO gOoD. YOU DID W E L L (Anyways theres my little mini rant).

I’m my friend groups therapist (sorta). While I’m really not good with words and recycle the same three responses I always let everyone know that I’m here for them and they can talk to me without judgement etc. While I really don’t know what to say or do I try my best because I care about my friends and want to help them. I love them and so I want them to be able to be happy. Im always smiling (though this is more so because people don’t ask me how I’m doing when I look happy than because I’m genuinely happy. Most of the time I’m he farthest thing from that). I’m a pretty warm person who’s always happy to help, however I’m very introverted. I haven’t had a single conversation with the majority of people in my class (I’ve had a convo with maybe 5. Talk to 2 regularly. There are 26 people in my class). I never express negative emotions (with the exception of stress- I panic intensely in the 5 minutes immediately before taking a test as this helps me to completely turn off my nerves while I’m writing the exam. I may also make a joke or two about my negative emotions with close friends). I should also add that when making decisions I value logic more and think thinks through thoroughly, examining the pros and cons etc. While I take feelings and emotions into consideration when making decisions they’re more like an additional variable to consider rather than the main driving force that determines my decision. If I’m feeling really emotional and I need to make a decision I will postpone deciding until I feel more levelheaded. I’m really not impulsive in the slightest.

Thank you so much!!

INTJ

Living in the future rather than the present and your comfort in that sapce, your ability for and enjoyment of making predictions, your ability to really understand and try on different perspectives you don’t necessarily agree with, your focus on “ramifications” (aka future implications) while problem solving - this all points to high Ni.

You also show a Te preference - goals based on external metrics, to-do lists for daily tasks, logic based on the outer world (external opinion). When you said “While I take feelings and emotions into consideration when making decisions they’re more like an additional variable to consider rather than the main driving force that determines my decision” - that is a clear cut definition of Te over Fe preference.

Your tertiary Fi shows through here as well - willing to disrupt harmony if it upsets your morals, your morals being personally derived, needing to understand your emotions while alone. And lastly, your statement about “forgetting to live” from being in the future is pretty textbook inferior Se. 

[lionheartslowstart]

Getting To Know Me

I had a rough start during quarantine. My mental health was dipping pretty low, I felt isolated and bored, and I was alone with my thoughts so the body dysmorphia was turned up pretty high. I’m not sure what happened, but somehow, I was able to do a complete 180. I’m taking the time to change my lifestyle and find ways to make myself happier, because, what the fuck else am I going to do during quarantine?

First things first, I’ve changed my sleep cycle. Huzzah! I went from falling asleep at 3-5 am and waking up at 1-3 pm, to falling asleep at 10-11:30 pm and waking up at 7-8:30 am. Crazy right? Somewhere in there I hit a couple bumps in the road, so now it’s been more like falling asleep around midnight and waking up between 9 and 10. Still way better than how it was before, but I’m trying to work back down to at least 8 in the morning. This was incredibly challenging for me, and a huge victory. My energy levels have increased, and my mood has generally been better.

I’ve started doing yoga. Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve been doing yoga for almost three weeks now. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up. My best friend turned me on to this amazing app, Daily Yoga. Highly recommend. I do yoga for two days in a row then rest the third day, which is what the app suggests. I’ve been taking courses, beginner courses specifically since I’m new to this whole yoga thing. The sessions started at about 10-15 minutes, and they’ve increased to 20-30 minutes or so. Not very long, but I figure I’m doing it almost every day, which I’m told is better than long, intense workouts less frequently. I’m hoping to increase to 45-60 minute long sessions. Though, once society resumes and I start school, I may no longer be able to do it every day. But that’s why I’m trying to increase now. If I can only do yoga a few times a week instead of every day, I want to be stronger so I can participate in longer routines, and so I can challenge myself with more difficult poses.

In addition to my almost daily yoga, I have a short work out regimen I do every day, including on days I don’t do yoga. I do 100 squats, 50 crunches, 50 lower abdominal crunches, and 60 oblique crunches. Every. Single. Day. Some days I don’t want to, but I force myself, and I’m always glad I do. I also try to go on walks, especially on non-yoga days. There’s a lovely trail right by my apartment, so I try to get in at least 30 minutes. Like I said, I’ve only been doing this stuff for about three weeks, so it’s not like I’ve lost weight or anything. But I do feel stronger, and I think I look a little stronger. Also, my butt is poppin’ thanks to all the squats. I don’t know if it’s because I’m feeling stronger, or because the exercise is helping with my mental health, maybe a bit of both, but my body dysmorphia has seen a drastic decrease. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely still have bad days, but I would say that, overall, I’m obsessing about my body less, and shitting on my body less. There have even been several days where I see myself in the mirror and think, Damn, I look good.

Other than fitness, I have added a couple of other things to my day-to-day. I’ve been making sure to practice my Spanish on Duolingo every day for about ten minutes. Not only that, but I started taking French, too, which I also practice for ten minutes a day. Unlike Spanish, French is very difficult for me. I’ve studied Spanish since middle school, and while there was a large lapse in my speaking of it, it came back to me very quickly. I’ve always loved the language, and grasping it came easy to me. French, not so much. It’s way harder than Spanish. Just, generally. The grammar is less consistent, most of the differences in words are in how things are written out and NOT how they are actually spoken, so as a result, all of the words sound the fucking same, there are 80 fucking vowels to memorize, and, to top it all off, the pronunciation is super difficult already. I hate it. I love it. The challenge is the fun! My mom and I were supposed to go to France this summer (fat chance now, I know), which is why I chose French as my second language to learn. My mom speaks French, but I figure if I’m going to be spending time in a foreign country, I might as well at least try to understand what’s going on around me, as opposed to solely relying on my mother to get us around.

Another thing I’ve been working on is learning guitar. This is something I’d been doing before quarantine began, but being in quarantine has allowed me to practice a lot more. I’ve added guitar practice to my regimen, although there’s been a pause in that, as the handle for the case broke on the way to my mom’s house for a lesson, so the guitar will be remaining there until the new case arrives. But before that (and presumably after we get the new case), I’d been practicing every day. I would practice all the chords I know and play through the two songs I’ve been working on two or three times. At my most recent lesson with my mom, we downloaded a P!nk song online, and she taught me a new chord so I could play it. Now I know 10 chords: G, C, D, D7, Em, E, A, Am, A7sus, and Bb (aka, the hardest chord ever). Obviously, I still have a lot to learn, but I’m proud of the progress I’ve made. Guitar is hard, but I’m determined.

So, these 5 things (yoga, daily workout, Spanish, French, and guitar, in that order) are how I begin my day, every day. I usually finish anywhere from 10 to noon, depending on how early I wake up. This frees up the rest of my day for household chores, errands, cooking, calling my friends, video games, overall chillaxin’, and various creative endeavors like crafting or writing. But this has led to two different results, one positive and one negative.

The positive effect is that I have a schedule. My mornings are pretty set in stone, and I try to organize the rest of my day as best I can. I use a “To Do List” every day, and I include my leisurely activities on it as well so I can put everything in some kind of order. I try to accomplish any chores or errands I have in the middle of the day (with the exception of doing the dishes and cleaning the stove, which I do every night after dinner), and spend the rest of the day having fun and relaxing. I end every night by reading in bed for about thirty minutes, which has definitely helped with my sleep cycle. All of this has led me to the conclusion that I can be functional in a regular society.

The negative outcome is that I’m still bored. When I was living in Italy, I was constantly anxious because life is so slow-paced there. Other than my classes, I felt like I had nothing to do, which was a stark difference from life in the Big Apple. It just felt weird to have all this time on my hands, and as a result, I often felt unproductive. I also didn’t take as much advantage of the free time as I should have, but that largely had to do with the state of my mental health at the time, as well as just not being used to having buttloads of leisure time and therefore not knowing what to do with it. With everything going on, life right now feels really similar to how it did in Italy. Like I said, I finish my routine by the end of the morning, and then the rest of my day is just a big blank space that I try to fill with everything and anything else.

But even this has led to another positive realization! When I started this journey three weeks ago, I was afraid that when society reforms, my schedule will fall apart and I’ll become overwhelmed because I’ll suddenly have a lot of other things I need to do (namely school and medical appointments). I definitely still have anxiety about that, especially since school will be incredibly demanding, but that anxiety is beginning to lesson. Why? For the same reason I’m bored all the time! My morning routine only takes a couple hours. Even if I have to switch to the evening because of school, or split it up into half one day and half another, it will still be manageable. I know I will have space for the other demands in my life. As my mom has said to me, it’s a lot easier to go from having one schedule to having a different schedule, than to go from having no schedule at all to having a schedule. I’m sure there will be adjustments, maybe ones I haven’t thought of. But I’ll be able to figure it out, even if there are bumps in the road (which I’m sure there will be), because I’m building a skillset.

So, what does all of this have to do with the title of this entry, “Getting To Know Me?” I was on the phone with my therapist the other day, telling her about all the progress and positive changes I’ve made, and how I’ve been feeling as a result. She responded, “You’re getting to know yourself.” This took me by surprise, which I voiced to her. I told her that I’ve always prided myself on knowing exactly who I am, but I nevertheless thought she was right. That, yes, I do know Who I Am, but, as with everything else, I’m discovering even more. I keep peeling back layer after layer, I keep thinking I’ve reached the core, but then I tap a few times and realize, Oh fuck yeah! There’s even more! 

I’ve learned that I like waking up early in the morning. My goal is to be able to wake up at 7 or 7:30 every day. (This doesn’t change the fact that I love nighttime, which will no doubt cause me issues down the line, but I’ll figure it out.) I love learning languages. I want to be able to speak Spanish and French fluently. Maybe I’ll even try learning Italian after! I want to be able to speak as many languages as I can cram into my brain. I’ve learned that I can take this fitness journey, and I’m enjoying it. It’s okay that I’m still a beginner, and that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of being an expert if I keep going. And I can live without sweets. I still treat myself every now and then (and when I do, portion control is still an issue I’m trying to work on), but for the most part I don’t crave chocolate or sugar the way I used to. I’m currently attempting to go two weeks without dairy. Now that has been HARD. The exceptions being anything that comes with my Blue Apron meals, because I’m not going to waste food, and putting a little bit of milk in my coffee, because I can’t not have a little bit of milk in my coffee. But in terms of breakfast, lunch, and snacking, zero dairy. I’ve substituted Pringles and Pop Tarts for fruits, applesauce, and (non-dairy) yogurt. I’m only on day three, but I’m confident I can make it to day fourteen. I’ve learned that I have more energy than I thought I did, which is huge. I’d been so used to feeling sluggish and exhausted, I had no idea I have the capacity to feel this energized! The best part is that I know it’s because I’m doing all of these things that MAKE me feel energized. And they make me feel energized because they make me happy. Even sitting here writing this, I’ve just thought of more things I want to work on while I have this time. And I’m going to! I have the time, all I need to do is remember to add it to my To Do List.

I know it’s a scary time right now. I don’t want to pretend it isn’t, or that a lot of lives haven’t been lost, or that we shouldn’t take it seriously. But taking it seriously involves staying at home as much as possible, and if we’re stuck at home anyway, shouldn’t we make the most of it?

[thirstyforjohnseed]

Death’s Goodbye Kiss

Pairings: Dabria Waters x John Duncan/John Seed

Warnings: Smut, some death and murder, implied child abuse

Word count: approx. 3,414

A/N: So I tried my hand at smut for the first time ._. Been working on this short for a while and was hoping I’d have it done and uploaded before I left for camping this weekend that just passed. Didn’t happen but here it is finally lol Thank you @jacobsknifeplay for the title idea and always helping me proofread my stuff. You’re amazing and I love you! 💕 Again I’m always open for any constructive criticism or advice.

Some mood music I guess? Lol

Enjoy~ ^-^

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It was supposed to be an easy job. All she had to do was sneak into the party, careful not to draw any unnecessary attention to herself, kill the senator, and sneak out. She’s done jobs like these hundreds of times, this wasn’t anything new to her. She’s a freaking death angel for goodness sake. She didn’t even really have to be in the same room with the target to do the job, but noo some crazy part of her enjoyed the thrill she got at the risk of getting caught. Well any plans to go unnoticed were thrown out the window when the host of the party showed up.

She had been mingling around the buffet table, keeping an eye on her target, when John Duncan made his appearance. As he finished making his welcome speech and began to converse with his guests, she turned and continued to snack lightly. She wasn’t here for him though he was certainly more attractive than she had anticipated. She’s never met the guy but she knew he was a very expensive and damn good lawyer. She wasn’t very fond of high class parties anyways, they were too stressful. The food was delicious though. She may not need the sustenance but what girl didn’t dream of being able to eat without gaining weight?

As she turned to go back to getting lost in the crowd, she noticed that John was making his way towards her. She felt herself panic a little. Gaining his attention would completely derail her plans, but now she was rooted at the spot like a deer caught in bright headlights. Instead she focused on trying to keep her composure when he reached her. “Excuse me, but I don’t believe we’ve met before Miss…?” He trialed off waiting for her to introduce herself, watching her every move. Everything about him was so calculated, refined, and confident; definitely knows he’s good looking and using it to his advantage. She had this urge to dig in and try to do away with his façade but she couldn’t allow herself to get distracted right now. “Angela Kiesling,” she lied without a trace of agitation, using her alias as she held her hand out to him. “A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Kiesling” He said as he took her hand and laid a gentle kiss on the back of it. Not once breaking eye contact with her.

Shit, he was hot, and any other time she would’ve loved to stay to flirt with and tease him; but she was working now and had to lose him somehow. At least she could keep track of the senator without alerting John that her focus was on something else. Her heightened senses and ability to feel the difference in everyone’s spiritual energy were a huge help in that regard. “Is this your first time attending one of my parties? I’d honestly be disappointed in myself if I had never noticed such a lovely face as yours.” “I’d honestly be surprised if you even remembered me if I had”, she said as she nodded towards the group of women who were trying, and failing, to look like they were mingling and not watching them. Probably jealous that she had him all to herself at the moment, whether she wanted to or not, she didn’t care enough to make sure. “Should you be keeping your entourage waiting?” She asked trying her best to seem as apathetic as possible.

John chuckled and said, “There’s always room for one more.” “Mm sorry I don’t really play well with others, Mr. Duncan,” she said as she took a sip from her glass, “I’d hate to accidentally break one of your toys.” “Please, my dear. You may call me John,” he responded with a confident smirk, “We’re far more flexible and resilient than we appear. Besides… a new favorite toy always gets time alone with the master.” “Lucky them, I’m sure. However this doll chooses her master.” They continued to go back and forth like that for a bit. She was starting to lose her patience. It was like the more she tried to resist, the more interested he became and it was infuriating. Eventually in a final and desperate attempt to discourage him, she turned and started devouring the mini eclairs nearby. Trying to make herself look like a glutton, but also careful not to ruin her makeup or dress.

She looked back at him as she was finishing, hoping that did the trick, but nope. He just smiled, wiped the cream off the corner of her mouth, and licked it off his finger with a seductive look in his eyes. Argh, that really backfired on her! She did her best to keep her fluster hidden as she said, “John, don’t you have other guests to tend to? Rather rude of you to ignore them.” “Mm, you’re right about that. I’ll find you again later, my dear. You’re not allowed to leave without sharing a dance with me,” he licked his lips lightly as if still tasting the cream from the eclairs as he winked at her and walked away.

Once he disappeared into the crowd, she sighed in relief and rested her drink and hands on the table for a moment. Good god, why had it been so difficult for her to keep her act together with him? She knew better than to fall apart like this while on the job. She blamed his eyes; She was incredibly weak for eyes like his, intense yet a hint of sorrow or was it loneliness? Something felt incredibly familiar about him too as if… as if she’s met him before… No, she couldn’t afford to get attached to anyone right now. She forced down all thoughts of John and downed the last of her champagne before turning to join the large group of people dancing.

The next hour or two was a blur of swirling skirts, many new unknown faces, and hunting down prey while being hunted. Eventually the constant exchange of dance partners led her right into the arms of the senator himself. For a man in his early 50s, he was keeping up quite well on the dance floor. He also had a fairly attractive face, she might’ve been tempted had it not been for the terrible things he’s done. The very reason she was here in the first place. He pulled her close as he whispered, “I saw you talking with John Duncan earlier. I don’t suppose he’s staked his claim on you yet?” Her skin crawled at his touch, and she tried to put a bit of distance between them as she answered, “That remains to be seen.” They spun together in time with the rest of the group and music. “Well that’s certainly encouraging. I can give you a good time,” he whispered in her ear as he pulled her close again. She hid her disgust as she said, “A tempting offer, but you’ll have to do better than that.”

To her relief they had to switch partners again as she said that, so she turned and left a smiling senator to give her attention to her new partner. Well it would’ve been better for her to switch, if her new partner wasn’t John himself. Fuck not again! She thought to herself as John pulled her close to him. She could feel his heartbeat against her chest and he had that seductive smirk again. Funny how she didn’t mind being held so closely to him as opposed to how she tried to pull away from the senator earlier. “You’ve been avoiding me, dear Angela,” he whispered, his breath brushing her ear gently, sending chills down her spine, “Do I make you uncomfortable?” Far from it, she thought. She was completely at ease around him and that’s what worried her.

“Not at all,” she confessed, “Quite the opposite actually.” He had her trapped now and was leading her away from the group, making it clear that he didn’t plan to let her slip away again. “Then why play coy?” He asked as he spun her around and held her close with her arms crossed in front of her. She turned her head so he could see the smirk on her lips, and mischievous spark in her eyes as she answered, “And miss the chance to give you a bit of a challenge? Come on, you must get bored of everyone giving in so easily.” He smiled and spun her around again and said, “You seemed to be having some fun with the senator earlier.” She didn’t even try to hide her disgust this time as she rolled her eyes and said, “That was only lip service. Really not interested in someone who’s been accused by multiple victims for sexual assault.”

Speaking of the senator, if John wasn’t going to let her go, she’ll have to fall back on her backup plan. Crushing his heart telekinetically was one of the only sure ways of killing him without drawing any suspicion to herself. She won’t be able to prove to her client that she was responsible, but it was the only foolproof method at her disposal now. She’s not about to leave this job unfinished. “Ah, yes not one of my most proudest victories in court, but a job’s a job,” John said snapping her attention back to him. She cocked an eyebrow at him as she asked, “You were the one responsible for him avoiding being convicted? That doesn’t bother you?” He shrugged as he said, “It doesn’t matter what I think of the whole situation. His fate is in God’s hands now.” That’s one way of looking at it… she thought as she said, “I didn’t take you for a religious man.” “My parents are devout Christians. Let’s just say they pounded it into me…” he said softly.

The song they were dancing to came to an end, and he dipped her as the finishing move to their dance, but not before she caught the glimpse of deep pain in his eyes. As he held her there for a few seconds, she immediately focused on the senator’s heart and envisioned invisible fingers tightening around it and shutting off his arteries. Immediately the man clutched at his chest, pain wracking his face, his breath becoming shallow, and he began to sweat profusely. Many people around him began to panic and tried to reach out and help him, but he pushed them away and fell to his knees as his life was slipping away.

John immediately rushed to help him, and she followed but stayed behind in the crowd. However by the time John reached him it was too late. The man was dead, and no amount of CPR or use of a defibrillator would bring him back, she made sure of that. Recognizing that there was nothing else that could be done to save him, John immediately turned to his guests and asked them all to leave the room in an orderly fashion. His servants helped lead everyone out to another room that was just as big as the one they had been in.

As they all waited for the mess to be cleaned up, she noticed how most of the guests were actually pretty calm about the whole thing. The only ones who were clearly visibly shaken were the actors and actresses. For the gangsters and police officers who see death all the time, this probably wasn’t anything new and thus not too unsettling for them. Well there went the rest of her pay, she’s gonna have to find something else to reward herself with for a job well done. Soon John came in announcing that the incident has been taken care of. The party will be moved to their current room now, but if anyone felt like leaving they were welcome to do so. Surprisingly not many people left, but the mood was definitely more somber and tense. It gradually became more relaxed when the drugs were passed around again.

“I’m glad you decided to stay,” John said as he walked up to her and offered her a glass of champagne which she took gratefully, “It’s been quite the eventful night.” “Indeed. I can’t help but wonder about everyone’s priorities if they can go back to partying after witnessing that,” she said as she drank from her glass. “Well the same could be said about you, my dear” he smiled as he finished his glass and set it down on the small table beside her, “Want to get out of here?” She smiled and leaned closer to him as she asked, “Looking to get a little frisky?” “Ever since I laid eyes on you,” he said in a deep seductive tone. Well with her hit done and taken care of she had some free time before having to move on again, so why the hell not? He’s been driving her crazy all night. She placed her half empty glass beside his on the table, took his hand, and let him lead her out.

They were so impatient that they barely made it into his bedroom without tearing at each other’s clothes. They stood at the edge of his king sized bed as she kissed him; her hands working on undoing his tie, and the buttons of his blazer and shirt. She didn’t want to get emotionally involved, just relief some stress. A man like him probably has a different lover every night anyways, or so she was trying to convince herself until she pulled his shirt off exposing his chiseled torso.

It wasn’t his perfect body structure or tattoos that had made her pause; it was the scars. She gently traced her fingers over them as he sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled her closer; his hands resting gently on her waist. Rubbing circles on her hips and slowly creeping to the hem of her short skirt. “Are these… from your parents?” She asked remembering the look in his eyes when he had mentioned them earlier. She looked deep into his eyes, observing any and all emotions in them, as he hiked up her skirt enough for her to have room to move her legs, and pulled her up onto his lap making her straddle him. She could feel his erect member pressing against her womanhood. The few layers of clothing between them doing nothing to hide how much he wanted her as he caressed her thighs.

“Yes…” he answered softly before, resting his head in her chest, taking in her scent as he unzipped her dress. She felt his pain and anger buried deep within now. Great, well so much for not getting attached… she thought to herself as she remembered a little boy with a similar name in a similar relationship with his parents… She couldn’t do anything to help that boy but she could play nice for this John. Now she didn’t feel like being selfish. Tenderly she passed her fingers through his hair and down his back. Placing soft kisses on the top of his head and forehead. He sighed in contentment at her gentle touches before pulling her dress over her head and taking her lips with his again.

While she tangled her hands in his hair, he placed his right hand behind her head and deepened their kiss. Licking her lips, begging for entry which she refused to give just yet. With his left hand, he held her hip firmly and motioned for her to move her hips more as he thrusted against her. The feeling of his hard cock rubbing against her caused her to gasp in pleasure, giving him the opportunity to slip his tongue into her mouth. Their tongues wrestled for dominance as she grinded her hips in rhythm with his thrusts; eliciting moans from him. Her heart was beating a thousand miles and she could hear his heart doing the same. Every thrust caused the fire in her skin to burn hotter and hotter. She wasn’t sure how much more she could resist before it would consume her. God she wanted him inside her already.

Unable to hold back any longer, John broke their kiss, leaving them both breathless and panting; grabbed her ass and lifted her up so he could turn around and lay her on her back. He crawled on top of her and kissed her sensually as he undid his pants with her eager help. Once he was free, he began to trail light kisses down from her neck, to her breasts, down her stomach. When he reached her panties, he grabbed it with his teeth and pulled them off her, leaving her completely exposed to him. He went back up to her face and kissed her while his right hand played with her warm lower region.

She moaned and arched into him as his fingers rubbed against her clit, occasionally pumping into her. She was so dripping wet from his touch and was getting close to her peak. He saw this and immediately switched out his hand and slipped into her. They moaned in ecstasy as he pumped into her faster and faster. She clutched the bed sheets and cried out his name as she reached her climax. Feeling her tighten around him as she unraveled under him sent him over the edge as well, and he pulled out of her just a few seconds before coming all over her. Fortunately most of it landed on her stomach and chest; she used her finger to wipe off what little got on her face, and licked it clean all the while holding his gaze. Still breathing heavily, he smiled at her as he said, “Sorry about that. I’ll get you a towel.”

After cleaning up, they went at it for a few more rounds before they were finally tired out enough to stay cuddling together under the sheets. He laid on his back propped up on a few pillows while she laid across his chest, her head just below his chin. She felt so safe in his arms that maybe she’d actually be able to get some sleep for once, but before she let herself drift off she looked up at John. “What is it, my dear?” He asked her as he noticed her looking at him. “Just wondering why you chose me. You could have had anyone you wanted and yet you persisted after me even after I so rudely tried to turn you down. Why?” She asked genuinely curious. “You want the truth? It was your eyes. They shine in a way the others down there can only dream. So full of kindness and warmth. It was even more encouraging when I noticed I was the only one you showed that side to. You’re pretty cold and closed off to everyone else,” he answered with a smile and passed his fingers through her hair.

She had a feeling that there was a bit more to it than that, but she didn’t press further. Maybe it was better not to know as she was still going to be leaving the next morning. “Wow, that was a bit corny,” she said with a smile as she decided to tease him instead, “I can just see the headlines if that got out. ‘Millionaire playboy lawyer secretly a hopeless romantic?’ Oh the amount of ladies who’d want you after that would be endless.” He laughed as he said, “I may have to take you to court for that if you say a word to the media.” She giggled softly as she felt her exhaustion begin to take her under. He kissed her gently on her forehead before falling asleep with her.

The next morning, she woke up before him. Her sleep wasn’t plagued with visions and nightmares for once so she actually got some rest. This only served to remind her how much it hurt to leave him like this, as she never gets a restful sleep unless she’s with someone she absolutely trusts. She held back tears as she kissed him gently on his forehead, careful not to wake him up. Best not to make this any harder than it needed to be with a long goodbye, so she quietly slipped out of the room with her high heels in hand. Two feathers left behind on the pillow next to him. One black and one white.

[wowawesome117]

Vargstad - the Wolf City

There's a city run by werewolves, for werewolves. Everyone outside the city claims its a safe haven for those afflicted. It's safety for werewolfs and for everyone else. Keep all the bad seeds in one place and they won't spoil the bunch. But to everyone inside Vargstad, it's not quite as simple.

It's a home of debauchery. Non-werewolves travel here to indulge in carnal desire. Prostitution, high-stakes gambling, murder, and all manner of perversion. For the right amount of coin you can find anything you want. There are no laws in the city. There is no government and no region claims ownership of the land.

Roll a d12 to see what's going on around you right now 1-4. Too much drinking, 50% of a street fight starting 5-6. Public orgy 7-8. Show of domination 9-10. Public feash 11. Bonfire in street 12. Public assassination

The city itself is made of tall, leaning, brick buildings, with large, wrought iron fences wrapped around them for protection. It's tightly packed and claustrophobic. It's always too hot and there's never enough shade. There's no pets, no animals of any kind, and it's quiet the majority of the day. Don't meet anyone's eye while walking down the street. Don't answer any leeding questions at the tavern. And DO NOT comment on anyone's smell, not even your own.

Werewolves come in one shape and size. Monsterous wolfman and large. But how they see themselves and how they choose to interact with the world around them is the true personality of a lycanthrope. And in the secluded city of wolves, there are several different personalities that lend to the politics.

Beowulf

Shortened to Wulf. This is the name for any werewolf in the city. The new, the old, the scared, and the proud.

Most people in Vargstad do not come willingly. Parents send their children, soldiers send bitten comrades, monster hunters capture wild ones and drag them here for coin. The ones that do come willingly hear the same stories as everyone else. "This is a safe place for you. You will be cured and be able to leave whenever you're feeling better".

Wulfs are met with a much harsher reality. It's a city based on pure instinct The two biggest factors are Fear and Sex. Everyone wants to mate, and eat, and sleep. There are fights in the streets. People travel in packs, never alone. An argument will end in bloodshed. Food is served raw and on the floor. There is a watering hole in town that everyone drinks from and bathes in. There is no sewer system, and there is no need. Everyone does a wolf would do.

It's not all violent. In fact it's quite peaceful most of the time. The basics for survival are handled, so only when something threatens that survival do things become violent. But when it does, it happens fast. Vargstand snaps from dead silent to racous slaughter in no seconds flat. And before you know it, it's back to its peaceful, serene self.

There are a lot of politics in Vargstad that the Wulfs get tangled up in. Everyone is a part of a gang whether they want to be or not. If you live on a certain block, you're under someone's protection. If you eat at a certain pit, you eat there because the people know you. If someone doesn't know your name, that's grounds enough for a fight.

Bonds

Some loan their expertise out to other sides as mercenaries, some are constantly reaching out for a cure, and a few take on a Bond.

Bonds are Songbirds who are accepting of whatever Lycanthropy is and are looking to take a Wulf on adventures. These bonds are sometimes short lived, and some can last a life time. It's the only legitimate way that Wulfs are allowed to leave Vargstad, and only Beowulfs can take on Bonds.

D12 Wulf-for-hire Costs number on the die times 10gp per day Has hp equal to the dice (do 1HD per number on die if in 5e) 1-6. Young Wulf, freshly captured, doesn't want to be your Bond, wants to escape, easily gives into animal ways, quick to grow attachment 7-10. Seasoned Wulf, previously lost Bon, lasting injury, haughty and knows more than you, has weapons and gear 11. Riddare, armored, can attack with claws and teeth 12. Kung, armored, has a class

The Bastille

After some years, a minority of the population of Vargstad was born inside the walls. Born of one or two werewolf parents. These children have the odd experience of growing up as mostly animal in a city that acts as both a cage and a warzone. These kids do not turn out normal by any stretch of the word.

In a recent development, masked Wulfs have been hitting various all-human, and human-accepting residences in Vargstad. They do this in their human form, fighting with makeshift weapons and tactics that illicit terror. They use their wolf-forms to rip humans apart in front of large crowds. At nights they go through human-centric living districts and raid houses, maiming all those they find.

They call themselves the Bastille, and a young girl by the name of Dawnar Bloothe has claimed to be the leader. In a message left on the wall, written in a Lumineer's blood, the Bastille claimed that their goal is to rid the city of human, kill any werewolf that opposes them, and go from village to village eating every human they can.

Dawnar Bloothe

Says Wulfs are better than humans

Doesn't say that all she wants is the power that comes with fear

Actively hides that she was not born in Vargstad

When things get boring in Vargstad, roll a d12 to see what the Bastille do 1-4. Leave a warning in blood on the wall 5-7. Set fire to a house 8-10.Rob a general store at gunpoint 11. Drag a human family from their home and parade their body parts through the street 12. Terrorist attack in public space

The Cursed

Led by the Alchemist Lidande, the Cursed are a sect of Wulfs who worship Suffering. They believe, and Lidande preaches, that Wulfs are a cursed folk. That lycanthropy is a punishment given to them for some past deed, possibly even from a previous life. She says that only through continuous suffering can peace be attained.

These cultists follow the Path of Suffering, an ancient tradition of habitual self-harm and bodily sacrifice meant to appease the Spirit of Suffering.

They are a non-violent group, not retaliating to the attacks of other political groups in Vargstad. Instead they hold large gathering in broad daylight by choosing a building or place in the city, taking it over with their wolf bodies, and holding sermons of agony. Lidande herself holds these sermons personally. Even if there are multiple going on in different parts of the city.

Path of Suffering

To walk the path of suffering, Wulfs must shed their human form and leave it behind. Once this choice has been made, their fur is trimmed by sharpened knife, by their own hand. No one can aid them in this. Then the claws must be clipped down to the finger.

After this they are officially followers of Lidande and must daily give sacrifices of their own body. Roll a d12 to see what method a Cursed takes today.

1-5. Blood letting 6-8. Fasting 9-10. Running the fat from their bodies 11. Removal of a non-essential organ 12. The taking one of one's left eyeball

The most elite members of Lidande's cult with have an eyepatch and be little more than skin and bone.

Lidande

Says she's a paladin of suffering

Doesn't say she's not a werewolf

Actively hides that she uses the sacrifices of her people to make clones of herself

The Lumineers

An Inquisition that has pushed itself on Vargstad with a patient and violent force. They take no prisoners and no excuses. They are the pack considered to be in control at the moment and they hold onto their control with an iron fist. They believe that being a werewolf is wrong, that embracing your animal instincts is vile and against the nature of humanity itself.

They are at war against the Beowulf of Vargstad. Most of them are Wulfs themselves who have abandoned their animal form. Everyone from the scribes to the high ranking inquisitors wear steel collars around their necks so that if they turn, a strong electric shock will neutralize them. At nights they chain themselves like dogs so that the rest of the city is safe.

The Enforcers roam the streets as a vigiliante police force, equipped with strobe-light gauntlets meant to render the Wulfs useless. They protect public spaces, track criminals, and apprehend those suspected of unhuman conduct. After just a week of this, their jails filled up. So they began funneling people out of the prisons single-file. They are led to a judge who asks them their crime and if they are guilty. The judge then either has them step to the left or to the right. To the left is freedom and all information is expunged from their record. To the right is the gallows, or the guilotine, or firing squad. This is done in public. There's always a crowd.

Saint Forlorn is the head of this inquisition. He's a young saint looking to prove himself and has a knack of the dramatic.

Says he wants to bring peace and knowledge to humanity and is using Vargstad as an example

Doesn't say that he thinks all animals/animal-human hybrids are lesser than humans

Actively hides that he has no idea what he's doing and that this whole thing is going out from under him

Spectre Cost is the head Enforcer.

Says he's a servant to the cause

Doesn't say that he enjoys killing

Actively hides that he's a werewolf

If there's Wulf activity, roll a d12 to see the response 1-6. Lumineers attempt to aprehend suspect 7-8. Lumineers round up several suspected Wulfs for trial 9. A Wulf is hung from a tree and beaten like a pinata 10. A Wulf is drawn and quartered in the street 11. Wulfs in cages are paraded down the street to be mocked 12. Public Wulf execution

Humans

Despite the city's purpose, plenty of humans enjoy living in the general populace. The city became what it is today because humans allowed werewolves to stay un-hunted. But as the years went by, things became more complicated as the politics took hold. Now there are humans on all sides of the werewolf idea.

Notable Humans

Dio - Werewolf hunter turned activist. He fights against the punishment and vilification of werewolves. He's always mad at something and always in a hurry. Angus - Leader of a small cult who follow the path of suffering, believing that all people should suffer, not just werewolves. He is attracted to scars. They are a person's true character. Sabbath - Leader of werewolf hunters who wear the pelt of their kill. After they make their kill, they eat the heart of the werewolf and gain bestial strength. They are known for starting fights and being more animal that most Wulfs. Rane - Leader of an extremist group of abstainers that route out werewolves, even if they haven't done anything wrong. She is always front and center at the executions.

The Hunt

I'm a fan of werewolves transformations not linked to the moon. If you prefer the moon transformation (or just like violence) you can use the Hunt.

This is a night where all werewolves transform, willingly or forcibly. For all purposes, it's the Purge. The city turns into the main city in Bloodborne. Lots of danger, violence, and bloodshed. It's a time for the factions and cults to make a mark so that when the sun comes out, maybe they will be in charge.

Why would you come to Vargstad?

Escorting a werewolf in custody to be dropped at the city

One of the party members has been bitten by a werewolf and wants a cure

Same as above but someone is paying you to find a cure

You meet Lumineer Inquisitors who urge you to join the cause

Hunting werewolves is a wealthy proffesion

You want to indulge in your animal desires

[aros001]

Read through light novel vol. 12. Random thoughts.

A while back there was a cartoon called Superman The Animated Series and there were a lot of fans who thought their version of Lex Luthor was black because his skin was darker than what most other incarnations had been. Later on in the series, there was an episode with a one-off character whom had the exact same character model as Lex except he actually was black. The common fan theory for that episode was that the showrunners did that so people could see through a direct comparison what Lex would look like if he was black and they'd stop getting asked about it.

I bring this up because Alta reminds me a little bit of that, like she was created by the author in response to misconceptions too many people have about Raphtalia. That she worships Naofumi, that she loves him to the point of obsession after he saved her life and cured her illness, that she agrees with everything he says and would let him do anything to her if he wanted, etc. None of this is a criticism of Alta, since she's still a fun character (if a bit of a creepy stalker sometimes), but there are times when I'm reading where she feels like she's the author's way of showing what Raphtalia would be like if she actually was any of those things.

Overlord was my gateway series into both Isekai anime and light novel books, so naturally I tend to compare things a lot to Overlord. Alta reminds me a LOT of Ainz's minions in regards to her relationship with Naofumi. "You're great! You're amazing! You're perfect! Anyone who even minorly inconveniences you must DIE." That girl is thirsty in every sense of the word. Obviously I'm hoping her infatuation isn't due to the elixir. It's still creepy to have a child fawning that much over a grown adult (though not as much as it'd be the other way around) but it'd be far worse if that's the result of brain altering chemicals or the like over her own natural feelings. Like I said with Motoyasu's Temptation ability, stuff like that always makes me feel really uncomfortable.

Wyndia?! Dragons?! F**k yeah, I love Breath of fire!

The Demon Dragon Emperor was a great boss monster. It kind of took the best parts of the previous big boss battles and rolled them into one. He was an overwhelmingly powerful force like the Spirit Tortoise but still had an actual personality like Glass, not being just another monster like the Soul Eater. Using the Shield of Wrath to power up and wanting to absorb Naofumi because of his anger even gave an interesting dynamic, like with L'Arc and Therese being Naofumi's allies for a time and fighting to save their world. There was even the outright ego and lust for power that Kyo had but the Demon Dragon never threw a tantrum when things didn't go his way. He either got angry and fought harder or tried to run when he was in over his head. It never seemed like he was so weak mentality that he had to actively protect his ego. He was as good and powerful as he claimed and let his actions speak for themselves. When that didn't work he didn't start whining, just promised that he would return. I love forward to him being Naofumi's Nine Tailed Fox.

“It seems like you’re just going out in search of unjustified resentment based on misunderstandings, and then using that to condemn me as evil. Instead of wasting your time doing that, why don’t you just fix all of those problems yourself? You’re a hero too, right?”

“No, Princess Malty told me that these were special powers that only your shield possesses!”

What the f**k is with this bitch?!

Also, got to love how the three guys who prided themselves on "clearly" knowing everything about this world because they've played games similar to it believe every single thing they're told about Naofumi's shield, even if they've never heard about shielders having such abilities. Especially hearing such info from a person who has no reason to know anything about what the Legendary Shield can do. Malty is the ex-princess of a country that worships every hero EXCEPT for the shield. First the ability to brainwash, then that he was controlling the Spirit Tortoise, and now the ability to bring the dead back to life.

[Five seconds later]

A BRAINWASHING BOW?! ARE YOU F**KING KIDDING ME?!

Between that and Motoyasu's Temptation ability, now I'm going to be paranoid that Naofumi does actually has some kind of mind altering power he can unlock (closest right now is just Hate Reaction, which just makes monsters focus on him during battle). Malty is going to have a field day with that if it ever happens.

I'm kind of split on how I feel about the situation with Itsuki. Obviously I'm glad he apologized to Rishia and is on Naofumi's side, as well as his actions being the result of his background and issues as opposed to him just being a jerk. But it's kind of like with Trash, where the sympathetic backstory doesn't feel like it excuses or makes up for what he's been doing. All the heroes, including Naofumi, have serious flaws and reasons for those flaws, but Itsuki throughout has kind of felt like the most hypocritical and sometimes nefarious of the four. Treating Rishia so badly and then getting rid of her, not just because she upstaged him during a wave, but because she reminded him of when he was bullied back in his old life make him feel like an even worse person. Maybe I have a bias because I am a huge fan of superheroes, which was a comparison drawn a few times in this book, and there are certainly fans, including myself probably, who would probably act just like Itsuki has been for the same reasons, but it still doesn't endear me much to his character. Instead of using his backstory as a reason to be better, he chose to be just as bad as what he's dealt with, justifying it only with his own desire to want to be the hero; to want to be the main character. He's a little like Light from Death Note in a way. "I am justice and those who disagree with me are against justice.", while any fan of modern superheroes could tell you it's not that simple (like Rishia did). Obviously, I'm probably being way too harsh. I feel like I'd maybe be less split and more forgiving if we'd gotten to see Itsuki interact with his former party after they abandoned him to the Spirit Tortoise, not just Rishia, like we did with Motoyasu. See more how he treated the people who didn't remind him of himself and how it felt when they stopped feeding his ego and hero complex.

I'm really enjoying the different drawbacks each of the different curse series have. It'd be really easy to have just a loss in stats or a risk of death like Naofumi's Shield of Wrath but I like that each has its own unique consequence that relates to the power that was being used. Ren used the sin of greed to gain temporary power and now the quality of whatever he touches lowers, as well as his own exp. It's like a reverse Midas touch. Then we have Itsuki, whom after spending so long demanding everyone conform to his ideal, now becoming completely passive and obedient. Of course, now I'm concerned about what the drawback to Motoyasu's curse is, since it seems to be based in lust.

Am I the only one who thinks the ninjas attacked not because of the Miko outfit but because they were bored? They've been watching Raphtalia's family since before she was born and have done nothing other than that. Now they're attacking over the smallest excuse, because they should know the context of why she was wearing that outfit since they've been constantly watching; not as a sign she wants the throne but because, well, that sh*t gets Naofumi going. I think they were just bored and jumped at the chance to finally fight something.

But back to seriousness, Naofumi's reaction at the end was my absolute favorite of his yet. Just that realization that these people watched Raphtalia's village get attacked several times, watched her family die, watched her get sold into slavery, and did NOTHING to stop any of it, only to finally reveal themselves now trying to kill her over a misunderstanding. I'm completely on his side. F**k these people! I'm glad they're going to go take over their country and crush it! (I'm vindictive today, jeez...). I took a peek at the art for vol. 13 and it has Naofumi sitting on a throne like freaking Lelouch from Code Geass and I'm just sitting here going "Ohboyohboyohboyohboyohboy!" I love a bad guy I can root for.

I'm just imagining that Lilo and Stitch meme, where Raphtalia is at her bedside praying to Heaven to send her a friend; the nicest angel they have.

Cut to Naofumi, laughing maniacally and surrounded by fire.

If Naofumi and Raphtalia ever have a daughter, he is going to forbid that child from leveling up until she's 18 if there is ANY chance she'll grow like a typical Demi-Human. Naofumi will want her to stay as cute, little, and innocent for as long as possible after all the other things like Filo he's helped raise. 50/50 he'll do the same if they have a son.

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/shieldbro/comments/fi2imi/read_through_light_novel_vol_12_random_thoughts/

[disco-auditore]

How to get website traffic on google

Professionals Share the Most Efficient SEO Tips to Drive Web Traffic to Your Internet site [Professional Summary]

If you have a site, the concept is for people to see it. A web site s web traffic mirrors just how well a company is doing online. It is likewise an indicator of customer habits, as well as will assist you create an advertising method that will get you a much better ranking in the online search engine results.  The basic idea of SEO optimization is obtaining much more web traffic to the web site. However with 1.24 billion sites on the planet, exactly how do you guarantee that your website gets excellent web traffic?  Here are my leading seven SEO suggestions that will certainly assist drive traffic to your site:  

7 SEO Tips to Drive Traffic

 Keyword phrases: In many searches, a minimum of 50% of individuals make use of 4 words or even more. This indicates that just key phrases are not important. You need long-tail keyword phrases that specify to the search.  When it pertains to broad keywords, there is tough competitors out there which indicates that you need to supply something more to stand out amongst the crowd. A long-tail key words is necessary so that individuals obtain details results of what they are trying to find.  Top Quality Material: In this affordable world, there are many people that compose on the same topic. What should you do various to obtain provided at the top of the search listings? The answer is writing great, well-researched material.  The content on your internet site must likewise vary to prevent any inner competitors among websites for search engine listings. You require to arrange your web site in manner in which when people search for something particular, all associated info is conveniently available. Likewise ensure that your content is routinely upgraded as online search engine consistently check for updates to supply the most effective outcome to its individuals. Composing excellent material can boost up your website traffic and ultimately affects your Search Engine Optimization.  Meta Description and also Title Tags: Title tags are similar to a publication title. This is the clickable web link that appears on internet search engine result web pages. If we take Google s example, a suitable title tag should be much less than 60 personalities.  A meta summary is what shows up below the title in internet search engine results. This is what develops the first impression on an individual, as well as trust me, impressions matter. If you have a great as well as succinct meta description, there s a much better possibility of people seeing your website as well as additionally good for SEO.  Enhance Pictures: Images are what add shade to a website as well as make it less boring. I can t even think of a website with pictures. For a much better online search engine listing, make sure that you maximize the images by adding descriptions, alt tags, as well as titles. Its helpful for your site Search Engine Optimization initiatives.  An online search engine can t recognize a picture s web content. It is the message with a photo that assists them price just how relevant a web page is. For this, make use of initial, optimally sized, high quality pictures.  Backlinks: For an internet search engine, back links are a recommendation of an internet site. A visitor blog site on one more website that connects back to yours will certainly drive website traffic to your web site.  Obtaining a listing in on the internet directories will also drive traffic to your web site. The summary of your company in a e-directory will have a link to your web site. See to it you continuously upgrade your details in these directory sites to generate web traffic as well as enhance your Search Engine Optimization ranking.  SSL Certificates: For an online search engine, an SSL certification is essential. What an SSL certificate essentially does is it transforms your internet site s http:// to https:// that makes it a lot more credible and also secured. If you desire a search engine to trust you, a SSL certification is a must.  Mobile Friendliness: According to Google, there are much more mobile searches than on desktops in 10 nations including Japan and also the US. In order to capitalize on this growing pattern, your site needs to be mobile pleasant.  Certainly, aside from these standard SEO ideas, there are many other ways that SEO can assist drive web traffic to your site. Listed below, 91 Search Engine Optimization experts share their best Search Engine Optimization suggestions for web traffic generation.

Andy Crestodina - Orbit Media Studios

Show relevance. This is the most vital, most efficient SEO technique or ideas there is. If you anticipate to rate for a phrase, you need to utilize that phrase in the title, the header as well as the body text. It appears apparent, but it isn t. Go back to any web page that isn t rating where you really hoped as well as give it the Control + F Test. Just using the locate function of your web browser will certainly show you if it s enhanced or otherwise.    Keep in mind that although the phrase might have shown up in web links, these put on t matter when you re suggesting importance for this web page. Hyperlinks suggest the significance of the web page they link to, not the web page they re on. So utilize the phrase in the body message right here and also in links there!

Barry Schwartz - Internet Search Engine Roundtable

Construct something that Google would certainly be humiliated not to rank well in their online search engine.

Shama Hyder - Zen Media

Developing more site web traffic with SEO made use of to be everything about Keywords, but now there are numerous various other Search Engine Optimization steps or suggestions that can be taken to boost the general audience.  Maybe the most effective as well as simplest location to start is with site web content. A larger volume of content raises the probability that the site will be the very best solution to a search query as a high quality result. The big amount of material supplied also leads to a lot more linkable content, which will, subsequently, boost the variety of back links the site obtains. This will likewise assist to increase SEO ranking.  Search engines also return featured web content at the top of a results checklist to offer the best solution to an individual s search when they enter an actual inquiry. Boosting the site ranking to be included in this function content can offer one more big boost to website website traffic. Begin this process by recognizing what the primary concerns an individual of your site would be asking, as in Exactly how do I. or Why does, and after that customize the content to concentrate on rapidly answering those inquiries.  While key words are not the only search tactic in today s SEO video game, they are still very essential. Usage analytics as well as Google s search console to determine underperforming key words. Not all keyword phrases carry out just as, and also while they might assist your website turn up in a search, the content on your page might not be enough to sustain a high sufficient ranking in action to that keyword. Determining the search phrases that are getting a high number of perceptions yet a low variety of clicks can indicate where interest needs to be focused in enhancing the content of your website.   Ultimately, the trick to getting the most out of search engines is by focusing on providing top-notch web content to the individual. The internet search engine has the duty of supplying the very best outcomes to the user to answer their concern, as well as if your website is concentrated on supplying those responses, you will have the ability to drive even more web traffic to your site.

Eric Siu - Solitary Grain

There is so much content on Search Engine Optimization around, and also it can really feel difficult to begin an optimization overhaul. I focus on ideas or methods that work AND ALSO make the very best use of resources, consisting of the web content you currently have. Here goes:.  Update your existing material?? Existing web content already commands as well as a recognized audience. So as opposed to composing something totally from the ground up, find an article already executing well, rejuvenate it with updated info, include visuals, as well as rely upon existing signals to make it place for terms.  Enhance interaction to boost rankings. Take your existing material as well as make it much more understandable?? break up any large blocks of text, separating material up with headers, bullet points.  Focus on subjects instead of key words?? Google formula updates now allow the online search engine to figure out intent as opposed to depend exclusively on the actual key phrases. So while keyword research study is still really essential, focus on what individuals are looking for as opposed to different means to expression a search question to improve up your Search Engine Optimization.  Develop back links?? Earned backlinks?? with top notch content, outreach and also influencer advertising and marketing?? are still incredibly reliable. As well as try to find visitor uploading chances on trustworthy websites. We constructed our domain authority on visitor messages from excellent websites like Business owner, Hubspot, Forbes, and much more. While both back links and visitor posts will certainly take some manual outreach and tenacity, they re huge for your brand name recognition and also SEO.  Reporting and analytics ideas?? The numbers put on t lie so gauge what s working and what s not and constantly continue to repeat.

Eric Enge - Rock Temple Consulting

The negative regarding this concern is that people will certainly dislike the easy action, which is to include fantastic material to your site. Individuals hate this response due to the fact that everybody claims it nowadays, however the truth is that it s real.  Nevertheless, allow s dig a little much deeper. This has to do with where Google (and even others like Facebook) are going. They re done in a battle to win the hearts as well as minds of users. Their hang on market share is completely based on their ability to offer a quality individual experience. In today s world, also if your Google or Facebook, if you diminish a little bit in the value off your usage experience, total market share will experience.  For Google, individual experience indicates providing the ideal web pages in their search engine result that use the very best, most straight, a lot of total solution to the users demands. My belief is that this is mostly what Google s machine learning programs are targeted at examining.  For you, as the author of a site, the sensible influence is that boosting your site material quality, and also deepness, supplies the adhering to advantages:.  1. Raised conversions from individuals on your site. 2. Boost search traffic as Google starts to see your website as supplying even more worth.  Let me mention the ideas clearly: boosting the top quality of your content on your site will likely enhance your Search Engine Optimization web traffic. To be effective at this, you need to recognize exactly how Google specifies better material. Typically that indicates deeper, a lot more extensive, material.  ( PS: doing this well will boost your capability to obtain featured bits as well).  This ideas of enhancing your site material high quality (and also the individual experience) on your website needs to be a religion, as well as a continuous quest.  It s the key to your short term, as well as long term, success.

AJ Ghergich - Ghergich & Co

My preferred suggestions would be reoptimize your old material to make Google Featured Fragments. Earning Included Fragments permits you to inhabit placement 0 and get high CTRs against your rivals.  These modifications will likewise set you up perfectly for Voice Browse Optimization. 80% of Google Residence quizs return answers from Included Fragments.  1. Seek web content that has leading 10 20 rankings however has actually not made featured bits. 2. Reformat your content to include purchased as well as unordered lists. 3. Use lots of descriptive sub headers to separate you material. 4. Maintain you content concise with paragraphs no more than 40 50 words. 5. Send your updated web content to Google through Browse Console.

[dist-the-rose]

Section 5: The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture An increased number of labourers under the control of one capitalist is the natural starting-point, as well of co-operation generally, as of manufacture in particular. But the division of labour in manufacture makes this increase in the number of workmen a technical necessity. The minimum number that any given capitalist is bound to employ is here prescribed by the previously established division of labour. On the other hand, the advantages of further division are obtainable only by adding to the number of workmen, and this can be done only by adding multiples of the various detail groups. But an increase in the variable component of the capital employed necessitates an increase in its constant component, too, in the workshops, implements, &c., and, in particular, in the raw material, the call for which grows quicker than the number of workmen. The quantity of it consumed in a given time, by a given amount of labour, increases in the same ratio as does the productive power of that labour in consequence of its division. Hence, it is a law, based on the very nature of manufacture, that the minimum amount of capital, which is bound to be in the hands of each capitalist, must keep increasing; in other words, that the transformation into capital of the social means of production and subsistence must keep extending.39 In manufacture, as well as in simple co-operation, the collective working organism is a form of existence of capital. The mechanism that is made up of numerous individual detail labourers belongs to the capitalist. Hence, the productive power resulting from a combination of labours appears to be the productive power of capital. Manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent workman to the discipline and command of capital, but, in addition, creates a hierarchic gradation of the workmen themselves. While simple co-operation leaves the mode of working by the individual for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionises it, and seizes labour-power by its very roots. It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Not only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals, but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation,40 and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realised. 41 If, at first, the workman sells his labour-power to capital, because the material means of producing a commodity fail him, now his very labour-power refuses its services unless it has been sold to capital. Its functions can be exercised only in an environment that exists in the workshop of the capitalist after the sale. By nature unfitted to make anything independently, the manufacturing labourer develops productive activity as a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop.42 As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital. The knowledge, the judgement, and the will, which, though in ever so small a degree, are practised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman, in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in the exercise of his personal cunning these faculties are now required only for the workshop as a whole. Intelligence in production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them.43 It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, as the property of another, and as a ruling power. This separation begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.44 181 Chapter XIV In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers. “Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may ... be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.”45 As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons.46 “The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” After describing the stupidity of the detail labourer he goes on: “The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind... It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.”47 For preventing the complete deterioration of the great mass of the people by division of labour, A. Smith recommends education of the people by the State, but prudently, and in homeopathic doses. G. Garnier, his French translator and commentator, who, under the first French Empire, quite naturally developed into a senator, quite as naturally opposes him on this point. Education of the masses, he urges, violates the first law of the division of labour, and with it “our whole social system would be proscribed.” "Like all other divisions of labour,” he says, “that between hand labour and head labour 48 is more pronounced and decided in proportion as society (he rightly uses this word, for capital, landed property and their State) becomes richer. This division of labour, like every other, is an effect of past, and a cause of future progress... ought the government then to work in opposition to this division of labour, and to hinder its natural course? Ought it to expend a part of the public money in the attempt to confound and blend together two classes of labour, which are striving after division and separation?”49 Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labour in society as a whole. Since, however, manufacture carries this social separation of branches of labour much further, and also, by its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his life 50 , it is the first to afford the materials for, and to give a start to, industrial pathology. “To subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate him if he does not... The subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people.” 51 Co-operation based on division of labour, in other words, manufacture, commences as a spontaneous formation. So soon as it attains some consistence and extension, it becomes the recognised methodical and systematic form of capitalist production. History shows how the division of labour peculiar to manufacture, strictly so called, acquires the best adapted form at first by experience, as it were behind the backs of the actors, and then, like the guild handicrafts, strives to hold fast that form when once found, and here and there succeeds in keeping it for 182 Chapter XIV centuries. Any alteration in this form, except in trivial matters, is solely owing to a revolution in the instruments of labour. Modern manufacture wherever it arises I do not here allude to modern industry based on machinery either finds the disjecta membra poetae ready to hand, and only waiting to be collected together, as is the case in the manufacture of clothes in large towns, or it can easily apply the principle of division, simply by exclusively assigning the various operations of a handicraft (such as book-binding) to particular men. In such cases, a week’s experience is enough to determine the proportion between the numbers of the hands necessary for the various functions.52 By decomposition of handicrafts, by specialisation of the instruments of labour, by the formation of detail labourers, and by grouping and combining the latter into a single mechanism, division of labour in manufacture creates a qualitative gradation, and a quantitative proportion in the social process of production; it consequently creates a definite organisation of the labour of society, and thereby develops at the same time new productive forces in the society. In its specific capitalist form and under the given conditions, it could take no other form than a capitalistic one manufacture is but a particular method of begetting relative surplus value, or of augmenting at the expense of the labourer the self-expansion of capital usually called social wealth, “Wealth of Nations,” &c. It increases the social productive power of labour, not only for the benefit of the capitalist instead of for that of the labourer, but it does this by crippling the individual labourers. It creates new conditions for the lordship of capital over labour. If, therefore, on the one hand, it presents itself historically as a progress and as a necessary phase in the economic development of society, on the other hand, it is a refined and civilised method of exploitation. Political Economy, which as an independent science, first sprang into being during the period of manufacture, views the social division of labour only from the standpoint of manufacture, 53 and sees in it only the means of producing more commodities with a given quantity of labour, and, consequently, of cheapening commodities and hurrying on the accumulation of capital. In most striking contrast with this accentuation of quantity and exchange-value, is the attitude of the writers of classical antiquity, who hold exclusively by quality and use-value. 54 In consequence of the separation of the social branches of production, commodities are better made, the various bents and talents of men select a suitable field,55 and without some restraint no important results can be obtained anywhere.56 Hence both product and producer are improved by division of labour. If the growth of the quantity produced is occasionally mentioned, this is only done with reference to the greater abundance of use-values. There is not a word alluding to exchange-value or to the cheapening of commodities. This aspect, from the standpoint of use-value alone, is taken as well by Plato,57 who treats division of labour as the foundation on which the division of society into classes is based, as by Xenophon58 , who with characteristic bourgeois instinct, approaches more nearly to division of labour within the workshop. Plato’s Republic, in so far as division of labour is treated in it, as the formative principle of the State, is merely the Athenian idealisation of the Egyptian system of castes, Egypt having served as the model of an industrial country to many of his contemporaries also, amongst others to Isocrates,59 and it continued to have this importance to the Greeks of the Roman Empire.60 During the manufacturing period proper, i.e., the period during which manufacture is the predominant form taken by capitalist production, many obstacles are opposed to the full development of the peculiar tendencies of manufacture. Although manufacture creates, as we have already seen, a simple separation of the labourers into skilled and unskilled, simultaneously with their hierarchic arrangement in classes, yet the number of the unskilled labourers, owing to the preponderating influence of the skilled, remains very limited. Although it adapts the detail operations to the various degrees of maturity, strength, and development of the living instruments of labour, thus conducing to exploitation of women and children, yet this tendency as a whole is wrecked on the habits and the resistance of the male labourers. Although the splitting up of handicrafts lowers the cost of forming the workman, and thereby lowers his value, yet for the 183 Chapter XIV more difficult detail work, a longer apprenticeship is necessary, and, even where it would be superfluous, is jealously insisted upon by the workmen. In England, for instance, we find the laws of apprenticeship, with their seven years’ probation, in full force down to the end of the manufacturing period; and they are not thrown on one side till the advent of Modern Industry. Since handicraft skill is the foundation of manufacture, and since the mechanism of manufacture as a whole possesses no framework, apart from the labourers themselves, capital is constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of the workmen. “By the infirmity of human nature,” says friend Ure, “it happens that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and of course the less fit a component of a mechanical system in which ... he may do great damage to the whole”61 Hence throughout the whole manufacturing period there runs the complaint of want of discipline among the workmen62 . And had we not the testimony of contemporary writers, the simple facts, that during the period between the 16th century and the epoch of Modern Industry, capital failed to become the master of the whole disposable working-time of the manufacturing labourers, that manufactures are short-lived, and change their locality from one country to another with the emigrating or immigrating workmen, these facts would speak volumes. “Order must in one way or another be established,” exclaims in 1770 the oft-cited author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce.” “Order,” re-echoes Dr. Andrew Ure 66 years later, “Order” was wanting in manufacture based on “the scholastic dogma of division of labour,” and “Arkwright created order.” At the same time manufacture was unable, either to seize upon the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionise that production to its very core. It towered up as an economic work of art, on the broad foundation of the town handicrafts, and of the rural domestic industries. At a given stage in its development, the narrow technical basis on which manufacture rested, came into conflict with requirements of production that were created by manufacture itself. One of its most finished creations was the workshop for the production of the instruments of labour themselves, including especially the complicated mechanical apparatus then already employed. A machine-factory, says Ure, “displayed the division of labour in manifold gradations the file, the drill, the lathe, having each its different workman in the order of skill.” (P. 21.) This workshop, the product of the division of labour in manufacture, produced in its turn machines. It is they that sweep away the handicraftsman’s work as the regulating principle of social production. Thus, on the one hand, the technical reason for the life-long annexation of the workman to a detail function is removed. On the other hand, the fetters that this same principle laid on the dominion of capital, fall away.

[entreprenergy]

Tribes – by Seth Godin

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.

A group needs only two things to be a tribe : a shared interest and a way to communicate.

Tribes need leadership. People want connection and growth and something new. They want change.

Humans can’t help it : we need to belong. One of the most powerful of our survival mechanisms is to be part of a tribe, to contribute to (and take from) a group of like-minded people. We are drawn to leaders and to their ideas, and we can’t resist the rush of belonging and the thrill of the new.

Some tribes are stuck. They embrace the status quo and drown out any tribe member who dares to question authority and the accepted order. Big charities, tiny clubs, struggling corporations – they’re tribes and they’re stuck. I’m not so interested in those tribes. They create little of value and they’re sort of boring. Every one of those tribes, though, is a movement waiting to happen – a group of people just waiting to be energized and transformed.

A movement is thrilling. It’s the work of many people, all connected, all seeking something better.

Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.

Here’s what’s changed : some people admire the new and stylish far more than they respect the proven state of affairs. More often than not, these fad-focused early adopters are the people who buy and the people who talk. As a result, new ways of doing things, new jobs, new opportunities, and new faces become ever more important.

Marketing, the verb, changed the market. The market is now a lot less impressed with average stuff for average people, and the market is a lot less impressed with loud and flashy and expensive advertising. Today, the market wants change.

Jack, an “occasional restaurant” run by Danielle Sucher and Dave Turner in Brooklyn. They open the restaurant only about 20 times a year, on Saturday nights. By appointment. Go online and you can see the menu in advance. Then, you book and pay if you want to go. Instead of seeking diners for their dishes, they get to create dishes for their diners. Instead of serving anonymous patrons, they throw a party. Danielle is the food columnist for the popular Gothamist website, and she and Dave run the food blog Habeas Brûlée. That means they already interact with the tribe. It means that once the restaurant is up and running, it becomes the central clearinghouse, the place to hang out with the other tribe members.

Leaders don’t care very much for organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them.

There’s a difference between telling people what to do, and inciting a movement. The movement happens when people talk to one another, when ideas spread within the community, and most of all, when peer support leads people to do what they always knew was the right thing.

Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them.

IMPROVING A TRIBE: It only takes two things to turn a group of people into a tribe:

A shared interest

A way to communicate

The communication can be:

leader to tribe

tribe to leader

tribe member to tribe member

tribe member to outsider

So a leader can help increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members by:

transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change

providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications

leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members

At SxSW, Scott Beale was tired of waiting in line to get into the Google party, so he walked down the street, found a deserted bar, grabbed some tables in the back, and used Twitter to announce, “Alta Vista Party at Ginger Man”. Within minutes, 8 people showed up. Then 50, then a line out the door.

Organizations are more important than ever. It’s the factories we don’t need.

Organizations give us the ability to create complex products. They provide the muscle and consistency necessary to get things to market and to back them up. Most important, organizations have the scale to care for large tribes.

Organizations of the future are filled with smart, fast, flexible people on a mission. Thing is, that requires leadership.

We choose not to be remarkable because we’re worried about criticism. We’re worried, deep down, that someone will hate it and call us on it.

Watch a few people get criticized for being innovative and it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that the very same thing will happen to you if you’re not careful.

How can I create something that critics will criticize?

All great leaders are generous – they enable the tribe to thrive.

The most powerful way to enable is to be statue-worthy : by getting out front, by making a point, by challenging convention, and by speaking up.

It’s easy to hesitate when confronted with the feeling that maybe you’re getting too much attention. Great leaders are able to reflect the light onto their teams, their tribes. Great leaders don’t want the attention, but they use it to unite the tribe and to reinforce its sense of purpose.

When you abuse the attention, you are taking something from the tribe. When a CEO starts acting like a selfish monarch, he’s no longer leading. He’s taking.

TIGHTER:

The first thing a leader can focus on is the act of tightening the tribe. It’s tempting to make the tribe bigger, to get more members, to spread the word. This pales, however, when juxtaposed with the effects of a tighter tribe. A tribe that communicates more quickly, with alacrity and emotion, is a tribe that thrives.

A tighter tribe is one that is more likely to hear its leader, and more likely still to coordinate action and ideas across the members of the tribe.

This tightening can happen without technology, and it can happen when there’s no profit motive. Keith Ferrazzi leads a tribe of smart celebrities and opinion leaders – from Meg Ryan to Ben Zander – and he leads this unleadable group merely by tightening the tribe. He introduces people. He invites them to dinner. He finds areas of common interest then gets out of the way.

DISCOMFORT IS WHERE THE LEADER IS NEEDED:

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers. It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail. It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo. It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle. When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed. If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

FOLLOWERS / MICRO-LEADERSHIP:

Blind sheep do nothing but mindlessly follow instructions. They don’t do the local leadership required when tribe members interact. They’re not going to do a very good job of recruiting new members. Evangelism requires leadership.

People eagerly engage when they want something to improve. This micro-leadership is essential. It’s the micro-leaders in the trenches and their enthusiastic followers who make the difference, not the honcho who is ostensibly running the group.

Leaders work hard to generate movement that can transform a group into a tribe.

The posture of leaning in is rare and valuable.

When looking to hire – I set up a private Facebook group for the applicants and invited each one to participate. 60 of them joined immediately. No tribe existed yet – just 60 strangers. Within hours, a few had taken the lead, posting topics, starting discussions, leaning in and leading. They called on their peers to contribute and participate. And the rest? They lurked.

Whom would you hire?

Not all leadership involves getting in the face of the tribe. It takes just as much effort to successfully get out of the way. Jimmy Wales leads Wikipedia not by inciting, but by enabling others to fill the vacuum.

The one path that never works is the most common one : doing nothing at all.

The difference between backing off and doing nothing may appear subtle, but it’s not. A leader who backs off is making a commitment to the power of the tribe, and is alert to the right moment to step back in. Someone who is doing nothing is merely hiding.

Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing. Lean in, back off, but don’t do nothing.

Others will scoff and move on, wondering what the obsession is all about. That’s what makes a tribe, of course. There are insiders and outsiders.

Curious is the key word. It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. Leaders are curious because they can’t wait to find out what the group is going to do next. The changes in the tribe are what are interesting, and curiosity drives them.

In order to lead a tribe, all you need to do is motivate people who choose to follow you.

KEEPING IT SMALL:

Imagine two classrooms with similar teachers. One has 15 students, the other, 32. Which group gets a better education? The smaller class – because the teacher has more time to spend customizing the lesson to each student. She has fewer students, hence fewer disruptions as well.

Great leaders don’t try to please everyone. Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.

Some tribes do better when they’re smaller. More exclusive. Harder to get into. Some tribes thrive precisely because they’re small. Push to make one of these tribes bigger and you might just ruin the entire thing. “No one goes there anymore – it’s too popular.”

Leaders who set out to give are more productive than leaders who set out to get.

The tribes can sniff out why someone is asking for their attention.

FAITH VS RELIGION:

If you watch kids learning dyno (rock climbing) you’ll see that the secret to developing the skill isn’t about building their muscles or learning some exotic technique. It’s merely about developing the faith that it’ll work. Without faith, the leap never works.

There are countless religions in our lives. The religion of Broadway determines what a musical is supposed to look and feel like. The religion of the MBA standard curriculum and perceptions of what is successful.

Religion gives our faith a little support when it needs it.

Religion at its best is a sort of mantra, a subtle but consistent reminder that belief is OK, and that faith is the way to get where you’re going.

Religion at its worst reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of our faith.

Sticking, without variation, to principles prevented them from turning it into a new better kind of experience.

Heretics challenge a given religion, but do it from a very strong foundation of faith. In order to lead, you must challenge the status quo of the religion you’re living under.

Successful heretics create their own religion. New group of friends, new supporters, new rituals.

Recognize the need for faith in your idea. Find the tribe you need to support you and create a new religion around your faith.

When you fall in love with a system, you lose the ability to grow.

STATUS QUO vs BEING FIRST:

Leadership almost always involves thinking and acting like the underdog. That’s because leaders work to change things, and the people who are winning rarely do.

Leaders go first. Initiating : see something others are ignoring and jump on it. Cause the events that others have to react to. Make change.

Everyone believes that what they’ve got is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change.

At first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin. Soon enough, the new thing will be better than the old thing. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late.

This isn’t about having a great idea. The great ideas are out there, for free, on your neighborhood blog. This is about taking initiative and making things happen.

Getting out first and staking out the new territory almost always pays off.

When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff.

The biggest step comes from anyone who teachers or hires. Embrace non-sheep behavior. Reward and cherish it.

MICRO-MOVEMENT KEY ELEMENTS:

1. Publish a manifesto. Give it away and make it easy for the manifesto to spread far and wide. It doesn’t have to be printed or even written. Bit it’s a mantra and a motto and a way of looking at the world. It unites your tribe members and gives them a structure.

2. Make it easy for your followers to connect with you. It could be as simple as visiting you or emailing you or watching you on TV. Or it could be as rich and complex as interacting with you on Facebook or Ning.

3. Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another. There’s that little nod that one restaurant regular gives to another recognized regular. Or the shared drink in an airport lounge. Even better is the camradarie developed by volunteers on a political campaign or insiders involved in a new product launch. Great leaders figure out how to make these interactions happen.

4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement. Money exists merely to enable it. The moment you try to cash out is the moment you stunt the growth of your movement.

5. Track your progress. Do it publicly and create pathways for your followers to contribute to that progress.

PRINCIPLES:

1. Transparency really is your only option. Every failed televangelist has learned this the hard way. The people who follow you aren’t stupid. You might go down in scandal or more likely from ennui. People can smell subterfuge from a mile away.

2. Your movement needs to be bigger than you. An author and his book, for example, don’t constitute a movement. Changing the way people applly to college does.

3. Movements that grow, thrive. Every day they get better and more powerful. You’ll get there soon enough. Don’t mortgage today just because you’re in a hurry.

4. Movements are made most clear when compared to the status quo or to movements that work to push the other direction. Movements do less well when compared to other movements with similar goals. Instead of beating them, join them.

5. Exclude outsiders. Exclusion is an extremely powerful force for loyalty and attention. Who isn’t part of your movement matters almost as much as who is.

6. Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up.

The customer service staff shows up and follows the handbook and treats every customer the same, then can’t figure out why they’re being disrespected in return.

Be willing to be wrong. Realize that wrong isn’t fatal.

The secret of leadership : paint a picture of the future. Go there.

It’s OK to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It’s OK to say, “You’re not going where I need to go, and there’s no way I’m going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I’m heading off. I’m betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.”

You can build a bigger, faster, cheaper tribe than you used to be able to. Transaction costs are falling while the costs of formal organizations (offices, benefits, management) keep increasing.

Many big organizations are getting bigger as a way of fighting off the power of the tribes. Hoping that formal nature of their bigness will somehow successfully fight off flexible, fast, and sometimes free power of the tribe. (Very unlikely.)

If you hear my idea but don’t believe it, that’s not your fault – it’s mine. If you are a student in my class and you don’t learn what I’m teaching, I’ve let you down.

It’s really easy to insist that people read the manual. It’s really easy to blame the user/student/customer for not trying hard, for being too stupid to get it, for not caring enough to pay attention. It’s tempting to blame those in your tribe who aren’t working as hard at following as you are at leading. But none of this is helpful.

If no one cares, then you have no tribe. If you don’t care – really and deeply care – then you can’t possibly lead.

Leaders create a culture around their goal and involve others in that culture.

People want to be sure you heard what they said. They’re less focused on whether or not you do what they said. Listen. Really listen. Then decide and move on.

Find one person who trusts you and sell him a copy. Does he love it? Is he excited about it? Excited enough to tell 10 friends because it helps them, not because it helps you?

Tribes grow when people recruit other people. That’s how ideas spread as well. The tribe doesn’t do it for you, of course. They do it for each other.

A big part of leadership is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another – so they follow.

People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. Then often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do : give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change.

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[samuelpboswell]

CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved

In her introduction to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, Content Marketing Institute’s Cathy McPhillips draws several commonalities between content marketing and video games: the interactivity, the trial-and-error learnings, the camradery.

But, while many marketers have their own personal “cheat codes” that help them gain an edge, there are no true hacks in content. Certain video games allow you to tap in a series of commands and gain invincibility, or jump ahead to the next level. Content marketers, however, cannot magically produce an audience or monetization out of thin air.

As the Content Director for Capterra, and also an avowed lover of gaming, J.P. Medved understands this reality. His company’s industry-specific blogs have grown to 1 million monthly readers, and it wasn’t because of any secret elixir.

Instead, Capterra’s success owes to a proven, adoptable strategy tethered to the fundamentals of organization, goals, promotion, and experimentation. Medved will explain this formula in-depth during his Content Marketing World session, Better Than Hacks and Schemes: A Proven Approach to Building Your Audience, and was also kind enough to share some insights with us ahead of the September event.    

Medved has a reputation for being sharply honest and entertaining, and those traits definitely came through during our interview with him. Keep reading to find his thoughts on silent content, scalability, documenting strategies, and content marketing lessons learned from his experience writing fiction.

  What does your role as Content Marketing Director at Capterra entail? What are your main areas of focus and key priorities?

My day-to-day as a Content Director involves a lot of email and meetings, at this point. We’ve grown to a team of nine writers, six of whom I manage directly, so a lot of my time is devoted to supporting them. I join monthly topic planning meetings with all of them, as well as frequent check-ins with the editors and the marketing folks that support the content we produce. I also now spend a fair amount of time in our analytics and various content management systems just checking in and tracking things.

As we’ve grown—and I suspect this is common in most roles—I’ve transitioned away from being a content producer, to being a content manager. I no longer write content myself, and we centralized editing early last year so I no longer edit individual pieces either. Instead I spend more time coordinating long-term content plans and calendars with other teams in the business, managing content experiments or helping new projects get off the ground, and working with the folks on my team to help advance their career goals.

  Why should content marketers beware of “hacks” and shortcuts when it comes to growing their audience and impact?

The content marketing world, and the digital marketing space more generally, loves the idea of the Cinderella story. That blog that hits everything just right and experiences exponential, “hockey stick” growth and also there’s a royal wedding involved somehow. But our experience, and that of the vast majority of successful content marketing operations I’m aware of, is actually a lot more boring.

Jimmy Daley of the great animalz.co blog calls it “silent content;” that company that has just been plugging away and producing and refining great content for years, and grown a consistent, large audience and strong search position.  

With Capterra’s content, we’ve grown to a million readers a month, writing in an ostensibly boring, B2B software space, and we never had a breakout “viral” hit, or flashy media coverage, or exponential traffic growth (it’s all been linear). We’ve just been working away at it since 2013, publishing consistently and getting a little bit better each month.

I think if you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” and shortcuts sold to you by whatever case study is making the rounds on YouMoz that week, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing; the block-and-tackle of creating and promoting really great, helpful—if unassuming—content. As a result your growth, though it may experience the occasional spike, will actually slow and it’ll take you more time to build a sustainable traffic base in the long-run.

If you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” & shortcuts, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

What are the most pivotal roles in developing an effective and scalable content strategy?

Scalability is still something we struggle with, having grown the team 6X in the last four years. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. Assuming an average writer production schedule of two, 1,500 word articles a week, a full-time manager can effectively manage and edit 3-4 writers. If they’re not editing (you bring in a centralized editing team, or use a round-robin method, or delegate to senior writers), that number goes up to 6-7.  

But you should have someone in place to help you well before you hit that number, not only to give them time to ramp-up and learn management skills, but also to allow you to plan effectively for new hires and content coverage growth.

The biggest lesson content I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Why is experimentation so critical in the content creation process?

Most of our content fails. Like, over 90% of it. And that’s not at all uncommon in the content marketing world. If everyone knew the exact ingredients to a “viral” content piece, that’s all anyone would produce. But we don’t know. Pieces I think will do really well, more-often-than-not sink without a trace, and pieces that seem like throwaways can take off because they’ve tapped into some pent-up need in the marketplace of ideas.

So we try to test a lot. 50% or more of our content is trying out new topics or channels or formats, and the other 50% is either updating successful past content, or scaling up a content type that our previous testing has discovered works.

I differ here from the current received-wisdom in the content marketing industry. Right now it’s hip to say content marketers need to produce fewer pieces of longer, higher quality content. But I actually argue you should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later.

Brian Dean of Backlinko is often the poster-child of the “publish less, publish higher-quality” model, and I love his content and he’s obviously been very successful. But might he have been more successful publishing weekly instead of monthly? Could he have sacrificed a little bit of length to experiment with a broader range of topic ideas earlier on before scaling the ones that worked? I think it’s possible.

You should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

What are the most common mistakes you see individuals and companies make when developing and launching a blog?

The biggest one is not taking content marketing seriously. That manifests itself in two major tactical mistakes: not hiring someone to do content full-time, and trying to squeeze direct revenue out of content in the first year.

If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their “real work” for the day. We tried this model for years and never got any traction with our content until someone owned it full-time and could devote themselves to thinking about it strategically and producing content consistently.

And you should not try to monetize your content in the first year. It will distort your writing, even if you think you can guard against it, and result in lower-quality, less helpful, more salesy content. Focus on creating content that is genuinely helpful for your audience first, and you will build reader trust for any kind of monetization scheme you want to implement later down the road.

If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their real work for the day. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Why is it important for businesses to have a documented content strategy, as opposed to an intangible framework?

I think people get intimidated when you say, “You need to have a documented content strategy” because they envision this 30-page document written in corporate buzzwords that will take a month to create. But we literally started with nothing more than a two-page Word doc with some bullet points listing our short and long-term goals/metrics, the type of content we wanted to create, and who was responsible for what aspects.

The benefits to us of even something that basic have been huge. Actually writing it down forced us to think through the specifics and showed us where the gaps in our plan were, having agreed-upon goals and timelines upfront made for easier team and executive buy-in, and it gave us something to refer back to when we had questions about whether a new content idea fit our overall goals.

  What have you learned in your ‘side hustle’ as a fiction novelist that applies to your day job as a content marketer?

For writing fiction I spent a lot of time studying story structure, and plot architecture, and all the elements that make a story really “flow” and feel effortless to people reading it. What struck me is how many of the same principles apply to a content piece.

You want to start off with a strong “hook” that introduces an element of mystery and makes the reader want to know more, your “climax” needs to deliver a memorable experience or information, and the dénouement has to be satisfying. A novel that doesn’t tie up loose ends in the last few chapters is as unsatisfying as a blog post that doesn’t include a concrete next step or call to action in the last few paragraphs.

  Which speaker presentations are you looking forward to most at Content Marketing World 2018?

I love video games, so I’m excited to hear Jane Weedon of Twitch give her talk. I’ve also always been fascinated by the science behind online behavior, so Brian Massey’s talk on Behavioral Science for Content Marketers is high on my list as well.

Find Your Path to Content Marketing Greatness

Consistency, experimentation, and getting better each month: They might not be the stuff of Cinderella stories, but in the real world these techniques work and Medved’s team serves as living proof.

He is one of many CMWorld speakers who contributed to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, so as we look forward to seeing them on stage in Cleveland, make sure to soak in all their awesome advice by clicking through the slides below:

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2018. | CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved

In her introduction to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, Content Marketing Institute’s Cathy McPhillips draws several commonalities between content marketing and video games: the interactivity, the trial-and-error learnings, the camradery.

But, while many marketers have their own personal “cheat codes” that help them gain an edge, there are no true hacks in content. Certain video games allow you to tap in a series of commands and gain invincibility, or jump ahead to the next level. Content marketers, however, cannot magically produce an audience or monetization out of thin air.

As the Content Director for Capterra, and also an avowed lover of gaming, J.P. Medved understands this reality. His company’s industry-specific blogs have grown to 1 million monthly readers, and it wasn’t because of any secret elixir.

Instead, Capterra’s success owes to a proven, adoptable strategy tethered to the fundamentals of organization, goals, promotion, and experimentation. Medved will explain this formula in-depth during his Content Marketing World session, Better Than Hacks and Schemes: A Proven Approach to Building Your Audience, and was also kind enough to share some insights with us ahead of the September event.    

Medved has a reputation for being sharply honest and entertaining, and those traits definitely came through during our interview with him. Keep reading to find his thoughts on silent content, scalability, documenting strategies, and content marketing lessons learned from his experience writing fiction.

  What does your role as Content Marketing Director at Capterra entail? What are your main areas of focus and key priorities?

My day-to-day as a Content Director involves a lot of email and meetings, at this point. We’ve grown to a team of nine writers, six of whom I manage directly, so a lot of my time is devoted to supporting them. I join monthly topic planning meetings with all of them, as well as frequent check-ins with the editors and the marketing folks that support the content we produce. I also now spend a fair amount of time in our analytics and various content management systems just checking in and tracking things.

As we’ve grown—and I suspect this is common in most roles—I’ve transitioned away from being a content producer, to being a content manager. I no longer write content myself, and we centralized editing early last year so I no longer edit individual pieces either. Instead I spend more time coordinating long-term content plans and calendars with other teams in the business, managing content experiments or helping new projects get off the ground, and working with the folks on my team to help advance their career goals.

  Why should content marketers beware of “hacks” and shortcuts when it comes to growing their audience and impact?

The content marketing world, and the digital marketing space more generally, loves the idea of the Cinderella story. That blog that hits everything just right and experiences exponential, “hockey stick” growth and also there’s a royal wedding involved somehow. But our experience, and that of the vast majority of successful content marketing operations I’m aware of, is actually a lot more boring.

Jimmy Daley of the great animalz.co blog calls it “silent content;” that company that has just been plugging away and producing and refining great content for years, and grown a consistent, large audience and strong search position.  

With Capterra’s content, we’ve grown to a million readers a month, writing in an ostensibly boring, B2B software space, and we never had a breakout “viral” hit, or flashy media coverage, or exponential traffic growth (it’s all been linear). We’ve just been working away at it since 2013, publishing consistently and getting a little bit better each month.

I think if you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” and shortcuts sold to you by whatever case study is making the rounds on YouMoz that week, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing; the block-and-tackle of creating and promoting really great, helpful—if unassuming—content. As a result your growth, though it may experience the occasional spike, will actually slow and it’ll take you more time to build a sustainable traffic base in the long-run.

If you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” & shortcuts, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

What are the most pivotal roles in developing an effective and scalable content strategy?

Scalability is still something we struggle with, having grown the team 6X in the last four years. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. Assuming an average writer production schedule of two, 1,500 word articles a week, a full-time manager can effectively manage and edit 3-4 writers. If they’re not editing (you bring in a centralized editing team, or use a round-robin method, or delegate to senior writers), that number goes up to 6-7.  

But you should have someone in place to help you well before you hit that number, not only to give them time to ramp-up and learn management skills, but also to allow you to plan effectively for new hires and content coverage growth.

The biggest lesson content I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Why is experimentation so critical in the content creation process?

Most of our content fails. Like, over 90% of it. And that’s not at all uncommon in the content marketing world. If everyone knew the exact ingredients to a “viral” content piece, that’s all anyone would produce. But we don’t know. Pieces I think will do really well, more-often-than-not sink without a trace, and pieces that seem like throwaways can take off because they’ve tapped into some pent-up need in the marketplace of ideas.

So we try to test a lot. 50% or more of our content is trying out new topics or channels or formats, and the other 50% is either updating successful past content, or scaling up a content type that our previous testing has discovered works.

I differ here from the current received-wisdom in the content marketing industry. Right now it’s hip to say content marketers need to produce fewer pieces of longer, higher quality content. But I actually argue you should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later.

Brian Dean of Backlinko is often the poster-child of the “publish less, publish higher-quality” model, and I love his content and he’s obviously been very successful. But might he have been more successful publishing weekly instead of monthly? Could he have sacrificed a little bit of length to experiment with a broader range of topic ideas earlier on before scaling the ones that worked? I think it’s possible.

You should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

What are the most common mistakes you see individuals and companies make when developing and launching a blog?

The biggest one is not taking content marketing seriously. That manifests itself in two major tactical mistakes: not hiring someone to do content full-time, and trying to squeeze direct revenue out of content in the first year.

If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their “real work” for the day. We tried this model for years and never got any traction with our content until someone owned it full-time and could devote themselves to thinking about it strategically and producing content consistently.

And you should not try to monetize your content in the first year. It will distort your writing, even if you think you can guard against it, and result in lower-quality, less helpful, more salesy content. Focus on creating content that is genuinely helpful for your audience first, and you will build reader trust for any kind of monetization scheme you want to implement later down the road.

If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their real work for the day. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Why is it important for businesses to have a documented content strategy, as opposed to an intangible framework?

I think people get intimidated when you say, “You need to have a documented content strategy” because they envision this 30-page document written in corporate buzzwords that will take a month to create. But we literally started with nothing more than a two-page Word doc with some bullet points listing our short and long-term goals/metrics, the type of content we wanted to create, and who was responsible for what aspects.

The benefits to us of even something that basic have been huge. Actually writing it down forced us to think through the specifics and showed us where the gaps in our plan were, having agreed-upon goals and timelines upfront made for easier team and executive buy-in, and it gave us something to refer back to when we had questions about whether a new content idea fit our overall goals.

  What have you learned in your ‘side hustle’ as a fiction novelist that applies to your day job as a content marketer?

For writing fiction I spent a lot of time studying story structure, and plot architecture, and all the elements that make a story really “flow” and feel effortless to people reading it. What struck me is how many of the same principles apply to a content piece.

You want to start off with a strong “hook” that introduces an element of mystery and makes the reader want to know more, your “climax” needs to deliver a memorable experience or information, and the dénouement has to be satisfying. A novel that doesn’t tie up loose ends in the last few chapters is as unsatisfying as a blog post that doesn’t include a concrete next step or call to action in the last few paragraphs.

  Which speaker presentations are you looking forward to most at Content Marketing World 2018?

I love video games, so I’m excited to hear Jane Weedon of Twitch give her talk. I’ve also always been fascinated by the science behind online behavior, so Brian Massey’s talk on Behavioral Science for Content Marketers is high on my list as well.

Find Your Path to Content Marketing Greatness

Consistency, experimentation, and getting better each month: They might not be the stuff of Cinderella stories, but in the real world these techniques work and Medved’s team serves as living proof.

He is one of many CMWorld speakers who contributed to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, so as we look forward to seeing them on stage in Cleveland, make sure to soak in all their awesome advice by clicking through the slides below:

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®, 2018. | CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved | https://ift.tt/faSbAI

The post CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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[befoundonlinemarketing]

CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved

In her introduction to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, Content Marketing Institute’s Cathy McPhillips draws several commonalities between content marketing and video games: the interactivity, the trial-and-error learnings, the camradery.

But, while many marketers have their own personal “cheat codes” that help them gain an edge, there are no true hacks in content. Certain video games allow you to tap in a series of commands and gain invincibility, or jump ahead to the next level. Content marketers, however, cannot magically produce an audience or monetization out of thin air.

As the Content Director for Capterra, and also an avowed lover of gaming, J.P. Medved understands this reality. His company’s industry-specific blogs have grown to 1 million monthly readers, and it wasn’t because of any secret elixir.

Instead, Capterra’s success owes to a proven, adoptable strategy tethered to the fundamentals of organization, goals, promotion, and experimentation. Medved will explain this formula in-depth during his Content Marketing World session, Better Than Hacks and Schemes: A Proven Approach to Building Your Audience, and was also kind enough to share some insights with us ahead of the September event.    

Medved has a reputation for being sharply honest and entertaining, and those traits definitely came through during our interview with him. Keep reading to find his thoughts on silent content, scalability, documenting strategies, and content marketing lessons learned from his experience writing fiction.

 What does your role as Content Marketing Director at Capterra entail? What are your main areas of focus and key priorities?

My day-to-day as a Content Director involves a lot of email and meetings, at this point. We’ve grown to a team of nine writers, six of whom I manage directly, so a lot of my time is devoted to supporting them. I join monthly topic planning meetings with all of them, as well as frequent check-ins with the editors and the marketing folks that support the content we produce. I also now spend a fair amount of time in our analytics and various content management systems just checking in and tracking things.

As we’ve grown—and I suspect this is common in most roles—I’ve transitioned away from being a content producer, to being a content manager. I no longer write content myself, and we centralized editing early last year so I no longer edit individual pieces either. Instead I spend more time coordinating long-term content plans and calendars with other teams in the business, managing content experiments or helping new projects get off the ground, and working with the folks on my team to help advance their career goals.

 Why should content marketers beware of “hacks” and shortcuts when it comes to growing their audience and impact?

The content marketing world, and the digital marketing space more generally, loves the idea of the Cinderella story. That blog that hits everything just right and experiences exponential, “hockey stick” growth and also there’s a royal wedding involved somehow. But our experience, and that of the vast majority of successful content marketing operations I’m aware of, is actually a lot more boring.

Jimmy Daley of the great animalz.co blog calls it “silent content;” that company that has just been plugging away and producing and refining great content for years, and grown a consistent, large audience and strong search position.  

With Capterra’s content, we’ve grown to a million readers a month, writing in an ostensibly boring, B2B software space, and we never had a breakout “viral” hit, or flashy media coverage, or exponential traffic growth (it’s all been linear). We’ve just been working away at it since 2013, publishing consistently and getting a little bit better each month.

I think if you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” and shortcuts sold to you by whatever case study is making the rounds on YouMoz that week, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing; the block-and-tackle of creating and promoting really great, helpful—if unassuming—content. As a result your growth, though it may experience the occasional spike, will actually slow and it’ll take you more time to build a sustainable traffic base in the long-run.

If you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” & shortcuts, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

What are the most pivotal roles in developing an effective and scalable content strategy?

Scalability is still something we struggle with, having grown the team 6X in the last four years. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. Assuming an average writer production schedule of two, 1,500 word articles a week, a full-time manager can effectively manage and edit 3-4 writers. If they’re not editing (you bring in a centralized editing team, or use a round-robin method, or delegate to senior writers), that number goes up to 6-7.  

But you should have someone in place to help you well before you hit that number, not only to give them time to ramp-up and learn management skills, but also to allow you to plan effectively for new hires and content coverage growth.

The biggest lesson content I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Why is experimentation so critical in the content creation process?

Most of our content fails. Like, over 90% of it. And that’s not at all uncommon in the content marketing world. If everyone knew the exact ingredients to a “viral” content piece, that’s all anyone would produce. But we don’t know. Pieces I think will do really well, more-often-than-not sink without a trace, and pieces that seem like throwaways can take off because they’ve tapped into some pent-up need in the marketplace of ideas.

So we try to test a lot. 50% or more of our content is trying out new topics or channels or formats, and the other 50% is either updating successful past content, or scaling up a content type that our previous testing has discovered works.

I differ here from the current received-wisdom in the content marketing industry. Right now it’s hip to say content marketers need to produce fewer pieces of longer, higher quality content. But I actually argue you should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later.

Brian Dean of Backlinko is often the poster-child of the “publish less, publish higher-quality” model, and I love his content and he’s obviously been very successful. But might he have been more successful publishing weekly instead of monthly? Could he have sacrificed a little bit of length to experiment with a broader range of topic ideas earlier on before scaling the ones that worked? I think it’s possible.

You should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

What are the most common mistakes you see individuals and companies make when developing and launching a blog?

The biggest one is not taking content marketing seriously. That manifests itself in two major tactical mistakes: not hiring someone to do content full-time, and trying to squeeze direct revenue out of content in the first year.

If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their “real work” for the day. We tried this model for years and never got any traction with our content until someone owned it full-time and could devote themselves to thinking about it strategically and producing content consistently.

And you should not try to monetize your content in the first year. It will distort your writing, even if you think you can guard against it, and result in lower-quality, less helpful, more salesy content. Focus on creating content that is genuinely helpful for your audience first, and you will build reader trust for any kind of monetization scheme you want to implement later down the road.

If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their real work for the day. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Why is it important for businesses to have a documented content strategy, as opposed to an intangible framework?

I think people get intimidated when you say, “You need to have a documented content strategy” because they envision this 30-page document written in corporate buzzwords that will take a month to create. But we literally started with nothing more than a two-page Word doc with some bullet points listing our short and long-term goals/metrics, the type of content we wanted to create, and who was responsible for what aspects.

The benefits to us of even something that basic have been huge. Actually writing it down forced us to think through the specifics and showed us where the gaps in our plan were, having agreed-upon goals and timelines upfront made for easier team and executive buy-in, and it gave us something to refer back to when we had questions about whether a new content idea fit our overall goals.

 What have you learned in your ‘side hustle’ as a fiction novelist that applies to your day job as a content marketer?

For writing fiction I spent a lot of time studying story structure, and plot architecture, and all the elements that make a story really “flow” and feel effortless to people reading it. What struck me is how many of the same principles apply to a content piece.

You want to start off with a strong “hook” that introduces an element of mystery and makes the reader want to know more, your “climax” needs to deliver a memorable experience or information, and the dénouement has to be satisfying. A novel that doesn’t tie up loose ends in the last few chapters is as unsatisfying as a blog post that doesn’t include a concrete next step or call to action in the last few paragraphs.

 Which speaker presentations are you looking forward to most at Content Marketing World 2018?

I love video games, so I’m excited to hear Jane Weedon of Twitch give her talk. I’ve also always been fascinated by the science behind online behavior, so Brian Massey’s talk on Behavioral Science for Content Marketers is high on my list as well.

Find Your Path to Content Marketing Greatness

Consistency, experimentation, and getting better each month: They might not be the stuff of Cinderella stories, but in the real world these techniques work and Medved’s team serves as living proof.

He is one of many CMWorld speakers who contributed to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, so as we look forward to seeing them on stage in Cleveland, make sure to soak in all their awesome advice by clicking through the slides below:

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2018. | CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved | https://ift.tt/faSbAI

The post CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved posted first on http://www.toprankblog.com/

[burningglitterbouquetfan-blog]

The Way To Optimize Your Time And Effort Using E-mail Marketing

The length of time has it been since you last checked your inbox? If you're a normal person, you download new email at least 2 times per day. Email is the easiest way to communicate with your potential customers when running a successful business. Here is some advice on how to get going in e-mail marketing. You should seek to make your emails seem as personal as possible. Similar to many other kinds of marketing, people are more likely to respond once they feel your own connection with you. For instance, include the key reason why they are getting emails from your business within your ads you send directly to them. Design your email around an individual specific message. It is vital that your audience fails to grow bored or caught up by an excessive amount of facts inside a single message. Produce the specific message using brevity and conciseness. A compressed email shows respect for your duration of your potential customers. To help keep your email recipients engaged, use various sequences for various kinds of readers. For example, if you achieve an e-mail address from your sale, that customer should get a very distinctive welcoming email compared to a reader whose email you received from your lead. If readers aren't getting what they really want from emails, they simply won't read them. To find the much of your e-mail marketing, purchase a program that personalizes your emails with every customer's given name as opposed to a generic greeting. Making certain every email starts with the recipient's name is vital to encouraging your clients to view your newsletters as valuable information and not simply more sales spam. Try following track of an item review when sending a follow-up email in your clients. You can insert the link on your email that informs these to enroll by simply clicking this link. The ending P.S. around the message could urge them to employ this opportunity you are providing them. Try making it as easy as possible for customers to unsubscribe from the emails. By not so that it is simple, they will feel like you are being too pushy and may even be turned off from the product or business. Allow them to have the option to opt out of a number of your emails or every one of them. Every once in awhile, change up the format of the emails. If you utilize HTML with your messages, try submitting a fundamental text email instead. When well-written, this could give your consumers an emotional avenue with regards to your products and services. In your emails, you should utilize a call for action. Your recipients ought to know what they must do inside your emails on your part letting them know directly. If you use links, include instructions on what to do with them. For the best effect, use a call to action in the beginning and conclusion of your message. Automatically unsubscribe customers who don't answer your ads after a certain number of emails. If your customers aren't answering your emails anymore, they more than likely have lost desire for your newsletter but aren't annoyed enough by it yet to unsubscribe. By unsubscribing them, you avoid generating bad feelings that can hurt your small business. Be sure to ask permission in order to send information to someone's email. When asking, make sure you offer something in return. Transform it into a thing that your potential customers will anticipate checking as an alternative to dreading it. This may make your emails from looking and feeling like spam. Use A/B testing for the e-mail marketing campaign. This basically entails creating two completely different versions of the same email (A and B) and sending "A" to 50 % of a small test group and "B" to the other half. Whichever half receives by far the most positive response is one which you need to be using for the campaign. Create your emails truly personal. Usually do not only use their names within your emails play with their needs and wants as well. You need to realize your prospects and why they opted into the list. Whenever you talk with them personally, they will likely feel much more comfortable using the services of you. Observe the phrases and words that get the most attention inside your industry. What this means is knowing who your audience is and what they're looking for. Consumer products sell best when advertised through words for example "new", while informational products sell better when coupled with words like "advice". Make certain you know what your audience is looking for and word your copy accordingly. Use plain text. Plain text emails will be received as increasing numbers of personable and HTML might be tougher for many people to see. Some email readers might even stop the delivery of HTML, based on user settings. how to bypass google recaptcha , simple text will definitely be easily readable and very well received. Reflect current festivities together with your email marketing messages. Have got a theme focusing or talking about love at Valentine's Day. Be thankful to your subscribers around Thanksgiving. Broadcasting content in tune with current holidays lets your readers realize that your messages are current and not simply old content being regurgitated by some server. You may make shopping on your site easier by utilizing subscription information you got through your subscriber list. This implies the purchasing form will already be completed using their email address and name. This makes the sales process go much smoother and encourages them to buy. When following up with your potential customers, you might mail out a follow-up email that includes a mrr/plr option. You can include an instruction on your own ad that informs your prospects that they could save at this time. The ending postscript could claim that this is providing them a pass for life. Imagine mailing out emails so as to stay connected to the customers. Go ahead and take information you have learned here and put it on to your own email marketing campaigns to help you achieve positive results. Email might be a powerful and effective technique to market your business.

[smartworkingpackage]

Podcast: Tiago Forte’s Approach to Productivity

The Taking Note podcast is back and moving from a monthly to a bi-weekly schedule! For this episode and the next, we were pleased to invite productivity consultant Tiago Forte down to Evernote HQ for a two-part interview. Check out Part 1 now:

Taking Note: Episode 5

Length: 22 minutes iTunes | SoundCloud | Google Play | MP3 | RSS

  You may recognize Tiago’s name from his guest posts for the Evernote blog, in which he’s argued for a brain-based approach to creative workflows and changing the productivity curve of our work days. More recently, he’s launched “Building a Second Brain,” a productivity boot camp for personal knowledge management.

Highlights of our conversation are transcribed below. To hear the complete interview and subscribe to future episodes of “Taking Note,” head over to iTunes, SoundCloud, or Google Play.

Let’s talk about the modern workforce. We all live in this giant paradox. We’ve got access to endless information and we’ve got more flexible ways to work than every before, but at the same time, we’ve got so many inputs. Our days are fractured. We’re frustrated. We’re burning out. And to add a paradox on top of a paradox, we’ve got this seemingly endless series of solutions which are presented to us, prescriptions and methods for productivity. What’s your solution to this problem?

It’s just what you said. I mean, with great freedom comes great responsibility, right? It’s like we’re kids getting out of school, just throwing off our backpacks, “We’re free. We can work anytime, anywhere, on any device.” But then, summer vacation starts and we realize we’re kind of bored or frustrated or stressed because all the structure that is there in the workplace is gone.

And I kind of have a theory about this. I call it the rise of the freelance generalist. Freelancing has been around a long time, but almost by definition you had to be a specialist. You had to be a very niche, focused specialist because that was the only way that you had skills that could be monetized easily enough that you could do away with the organization. And that kind of provided its own structure. You’d wake up in the morning and know that you were doing copywriting, you were doing coding, you were doing design. It was pretty straightforward.

Now, I think technology is reaching an inflection point where it’s easy to use enough, cheap enough, seamless enough, frictionless enough, that you can be a generalist, which is what I consider myself to be, and make a living as a freelancer using these tools.

Are there solutions out there that you find are counterproductive?

Yes, there are. In particular, the trend with deep work. I’m opposed.

You know, I get it. People are feeling frazzled and just scatterbrained and all these things. But I really think this idea that you’re sort of this monastic knowledge worker, that you’re going to enter your chambers and just think deeply for hours and hours and hours on end, is a holdover from that freelance specialist mindset. And following up on that idea of a generalist as a freelancer, to do that effectively you need a portfolio. You can’t have just one narrow skill that you do.

You need a portfolio. You can’t have just one narrow skill that you do.

And this is kind of how I think now. I have free products — like my blog I write for free for lead generation — but then I have other things that are not free, like online courses. Then I have consulting and corporate training for companies, but also one-on-one coaching for consumers. So it’s like I’m constantly managing this portfolio of products and services. Some are passive, some are active.

What that requires is not this kind of intense mono-focus. It requires being very skilled and fluid with switching between things. Multi-tasking is not going away. That’s not a disease or a plague. It’s just the way the world is going. We can either fight it and treat it like a threat, or we can get better at it.

You wrote a guest piece for the Evernote blog not too long ago where you got into some of these topics. You argued that since our days are filled with these interruptions constantly, and those interruptions do make it harder to deliver value from our work, maybe instead of trying to alter the shape of our days, we should try to alter the shape of our value curves and deliver more value in smaller pieces throughout the day.

That post came from a lot of research I’d been doing on the history of productivity, specifically manufacturing. And it’s kind of amazing being here in Silicon Valley that we have this breathless fascination with technology and the future, which is great, but a side effect of that is we ignore history.

If you look at the history of manufacturing, one of the great, great insights that took decades and decades to discover was small batches, right? That was one of the key breakthroughs to better quality, to speed, to more throughput, to more profitability in manufacturing. And then you go to knowledge work and you have the deep work thing, which is another way of saying big batch sizes. Deep work, spending hours and hours in deep flow, is a big batch size. So it’s like we’ve completely gone against decades of experience in manufacturing.

But, like with the example of Toyota developing this entire culture around it, using small batch sizes requires skill, and requires a different way of thinking and doing things.

So with the question of changing the value curve, I always kind of come back to this idea that there’s no inherent structure to work. Work has no inherent unit. We make units; we make tasks, and projects, and milestones, and goals. But nothing about those is inherent in the nature of work. So that’s a little scary because it’s all arbitrary, but it’s also an opportunity because it means we can use whatever units we want.

There’s no inherent structure to work. Work has no inherent unit. We make units. But nothing about those is inherent in the nature of work.

Say, the word “project.” That word comes with baggage. All these ideas about how big should a project be, how long should it last, how much money should it make, how many people should be on a project? I almost like using different words. I have this one word “intermediate packet.” Instead of “deliverable,” I say an intermediate packet. Try to finish every working session, whether it’s 15 minutes or 8 hours, with an intermediate packet that you expose to the world; that you get some sort of feedback on.

I look at my to-do lists and I’m kind of overwhelmed by that. I don’t even necessarily get 25 minutes free because there are meetings and there are requests, and there are emails, and it’s all coming in constantly. Is there any way to get past that sense of overwhelm?

There is, and this is starting to get into the particular philosophy I have around using Evernote, actually. This is my main project these days, is an online course called “Building a Second Brain,” that’s actually a virtual boot camp because it’s not self-paced, take whenever you want, however you want. It’s five weeks, really intense, two meetings per week, and live video conferences. And essentially, it’s an end-to-end personal knowledge management system.

PKM, personal knowledge management, is related to PIM, personal information management. It’s basically making use of the knowledge that you gain on a personal level. Knowledge management, traditionally, has been organizations. When an employee walked out the door, all the knowledge that person had gained would go with them. So for years now, organizations have been trying to capture and catalog and use the knowledge of their employees.

Well, now if you look at the research, employee tenure is at, I think, 2.3 years. We spend a couple of years at a company. We do a few projects, a certain number of projects, and we’re gone. We need a better way to take knowledge with us. Not proprietary, confidential stuff, but actually just the insights and the breakthroughs and the learnings that we gained in the course of our work.

You mentioned that this plays into how you use Evernote. I know when you do the “Building a Second Brain” course and the other workshops you do, you try to structure them in a way so that they’re not tied to a particular platform or tool, but you are an Evernote user and Evernote is sort of the default example you give. So let’s talk about how you use Evernote. How is it set up? How is your personal Evernote set up?

I have this method I’ve developed called PARA, which stands for projects, areas, resources, and archives. And the inspiration from this — a little bit of historical background — is something called the OODA loop, which stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. It was developed by this guy named Colonel John Boyd starting the the ’40s or ’50s. He essentially used it to revolutionize aircraft fighter warfare. And it was basically a way of thinking about how to react dynamically to quickly changing conditions. You observe, you orient yourself, you decide on a course of action, and then you act.

It’s been an incredible inspiration for a lot of people in a lot of fields. It’s sort of underappreciated, the impact it’s had. But the thing that really sets is apart is it’s not a static way of thinking. It’s not like a flow chart — do A, do B, do C, do D. It’s loops, and then loops within loops, and then loops within those loops. Because you’re at all times intaking information, turning that into decisions, and then into actions.

And it’s the same with PARA. PARA is 4 categories, and that’s kind of the starting point. You divide your work into projects, which I’m using here the GTD definition, a series of tasks linked to an outcome.

Areas of responsibility: Some standard or area of your life that’s an ongoing concern; that you want to maintain on an ongoing basis.

Resources: Basically, interests or topics. Things like website design. For me, it’s not a particular project — not even really an area because that’s not my work — but it’s something I’m interested in that I’d like to keep track of.

And then Archives, which is anything from the previous three categories that’s no longer active, because you want to avoid clogging up your actionable categories. As soon as something is not top of mind, not front and center, you want to move it to the archives, but still keep it in case you want to go and find something there.

You have a whole workshop around applying design thinking to workflows, and to doing day-to-day work. What concepts do you draw from design thinking, and how do they apply?

Great question. Design thinking is an incredible way of thinking; an incredible movement, really, and taking place across many decades. The thing I take away the most from design thinking, especially when it comes to productivity and personal knowledge management, is just really the idea that you are a designer. Each one of us truly is a designer by nature, even if not by training. And that’s something that’s hard for people to get used to.

Each one of us truly is a designer by nature, even if not by training. And that’s something that’s hard for people to get used to.

I actually had a previous course called “Design Your Habits.” It was on habit formation. And I had to be constantly explaining to people, because they would see “Design Your Habits” and they’d go “Oh, I’m not a designer. I didn’t go to design school.” And I’d have to be like, “No, you design habits. If you’re trying to lose weight and you want to change your diet, you design this whole routine that might be around exercise, or walking, or food. And you do that, in most cases, pretty instantaneously, intuitively, and just naturally on the course of your day.”

It’s a spontaneous process, but it does involve, I think, a lot of the same steps; sort of looking around and taking stock of sort of the elements in front of you, thinking of a workflow and a process, having some sort of a feedback loop.

Yes, design thinking, getting this process that has become a profession and bringing it back to its origins, which is just the way humans think. We are designers, we make, we create, we modify, we get new information and we change, we tweak. That’s completely natural to what it means to be human.

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