ideal ways for me to die
1. old age, peacefully in my sleep
2. after a long and illustrious career i am at a rooftop gala hosted in my honor. i am wearing a beautiful gown, holding a glass of red wine, standing by the railing. a scorned lover approaches and, after a passionate spat, they push me over the edge of the building. the wine glass goes flying, splattering their outfit in red as a visual metaphor for the blood on their hands. as i descend my gown flies around me like two beautiful wings, a bird in flight. a photographer on the street manages to take a photo before i hit the ground and that photo wins the pulitzer. a new york times think piece is released regarding whether or not it's moral to profit off a photo of someone's death. the think piece also wins a pulitzer.
3. sex accident.
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having a lot of toh thoughts tonight, so here's a few :] I think that king and the collector would be life partners ( probably platonically, but mostly just whatever keeps them together forever hehe)
i also think the collector would take luz's passing the hardest (given their history with it and all...) and i think she'd know this and do her best to prepare them for it. so here's me trying to deal with all that.
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actually I think a lot of people whisper their confessions to Superman because they know there’s a — greater than average — chance he might be listening after all. wishes, secrets they take to their death bed, things they don’t want to be judged for but need to say.
and Clark takes it all on his shoulders with the grace he exhibits in the rest of his life. until one day that voice in his ear is familiar. there’s a heart, racing but beginning to slow. and it’s Bruce’s words that come to him, choked out between the sound of his lungs filling with blood.
and it doesn’t matter that Clark shatters the sound barrier traveling across the globe to a random alley in Gotham. by the time he arrives, it’s already too late. Bruce had chosen the last few seconds, knowing Clark would hear him. knowing he’d pass those words along to his children. knowing he would burden his closest friend with his last words, and still trusting (cursing?) him with them anyway.
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I have ~Thoughts~ on the Harry Potter Phenomenon that was
(Courtesy of memories prompted by this Tumblr Poll)
Back when I was a senior in college (back in the mid-to-late 1980s), I actually wrote a fantasy novel for kids aged ~8 - ~11 (in a self-designed course for a single credit, under the guidance of my Literature advisor), inspired by a series of dreams and recurring characters that showed up in them.
My advisor encouraged me to try and get it published. And so, I arranged with teachers from my old school to have a class of 30 or so 10 year-olds beta read it, and give me feedback for revisions. The kids also encouraged me to try and publish it.
So I did.
Now, back then, there was no "Self Publishing." The closest thing was "Vanity Publishing," where you would pay 100% of the publishing cost of your book, which would be printed in hard copy, for the benefit of having 500 -1,000 books shipped to your personal address, which you were then responsible for storing and selling out of the trunk of your car in a parking lot, somewhere. And if word got out that you were trying to claim credit for being a "published author" because of a Vanity Press book, actual publishers wouldn't touch you with a 40-foot pole.
If you wanted to get published, you had to buy that year's copy of Writer's Market: a listing of magazine and book publishers, and agents, with a brief description of what material they published, and what they wouldn't touch.
Guess what genre no agent or publisher was interested in handling?
That's right, Gentle Readers: Fantasy for children aged 8 - 11. I would have happily sent out a dozen queries for each story I wrote, if there were publishers and agents willing to look at them. But for three to four years of trying, in directories of two-columns of tiny print, and several [hundred]* pages long, I'd be lucky to find two or three outlets even willing to look at fantasy for kids.
The general consensus, across the publishing business, was that fantasy was a dead and obsolete genre. If it was for kids old enough to read chapter books and novels, it must also be firmly grounded in realism and actual history, because everyone knows the only people buying books for kids that age were teachers, who wanted stories with practical applications in the classroom.
***
After 3 - 4 years of trying, while I was in grad school, I finally got a rejection from the one agent who agreed to read my novel. A few days later, I received news that my mother had died from the breast cancer she'd been fighting, and my heart just went out of the project altogether.
A few years later, the first Harry Potter book was published. And it became a worldwide phenomenon. And it was the kids, themselves, who were driving the sales.
See, I think the real reason the books were such a success, even though they were never really very well written, was because they were in a genre the audience was hungry for -- a genre they'd been denied access to for all of their young lives.
Someone who is starving will think even moldy bread is delicious.
*Gosh, what a word to leave out via typo; the Writers Market rivaled the Manhattan Yellow Pages in length.
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