#''my process'' and its just one line bracket notes that explain NOTHING

[hourcat]

blindly sending google doc links to my friends to make them suffer through my writing process with me

[mybg3notebook]

Does Gale love Mystra?

So far in EA, we have been shown that this is complicated to answer: human love is complex as well as the delirious lore of Forgotten Realms. 

Disclaimer Game Version: All these analyses were written up to the game version v4.1.104.3536 (Early access). As long as new content is added, and as long as I have free time for that, I will try to keep updating this information. Written in June 2021.

The number between brackets [] represents the topic-block related to (this post), which gathers as much evidence as I could get.

The narrative is clear until the party scene which, as I stated many times across these posts, it's a scene that feels a bit inconsistent for me (reasonable since it's EA). But if we follow what the game explicitly shows us, we know that if we send Gale to sleep at the beginning of the Weave scene in which he is watching the incantation with the shape of Mystra, he will say: 

Gale: Long days, yes. And long, lonesome nights.

If Tav knows that the incantation on his palm is Mystra, Gale will explain:

Tav: [insight] You don't have that look on your face when you're looking at “no one” / There's more to it than that. The figure I saw: she means something to you. Gale: [...] I can’t quite describe it, the need I sometimes feel to see her – to draw the filaments of fantasy into existence. [...]

Dev's notes: Passionate. [...] He was recalling Mystra as a lover, but doesn’t say that out loud. [...] Narrator: The Weave evaporates, and as it does so, you realise the night feels suddenly cold and lonesome.

This allows us to infer that, at this moment, Gale is feeling alone and probably very anxious with the oppressing feeling of the "orb" in his chest. The tadpole only increased the number of problems he has, so he resorts to seeing Mystra melancholically. We notice later in the Weave Scene that not having Mystra around increases this feeling of loneliness. The whole scene seems to give us the idea that he still loves her. There is yearning and loneliness in his current situation.

After a moment of passionate description of magic, Gale invites Tav to experience the Weave. The Weave has a particular effect on Gale: "The moment feels intimate. You realise the Weave is making you one." Considering how Gale was feeling while conjuring the incantation, this moment touched him deeply (the narrator implies that this feeling is mutual).

If Tav expresses their romantic interests, Gale will be surprised:

Gale: I.. I didn’t think.. Narrator: You perceive quick-fire gusts of embarrassment, trepidation, and finally.. elation Gale: Sorry, I wasn’t expecting… But it is a pleasant image to be sure! Most pleasant, in fact. Most welcome. Dev's notes: Warm, with real affection.

The narrator is giving us meta-knowledge, we can trust in what she says, and we can see that the situation was truly shocking for Gale. These emotional stages described here made me suspect that Gale is a character who has focused for too long on healing his condition, ignoring any chance for romance. His surprise here may confirm that, in my opinion. He feels embarrassment, a feeling that one can interpret as a sign of the surprise of being thrown into a situation he had not seen beforehand (the death protocol and Gale’s conversations show us that he is a character that thinks ahead). It follows trepidation: fear or anxiety about something that he is going to do or experience. Gale is scared of the possibility. Maybe because he is thinking in the danger he is, maybe because he was already burnt by Mystra's attention and having someone else's attention now makes him feel a bit anxious. And then, the final resolution of the process: elation, which is a feeling of great happiness and excitement about something that has happened. Gale is suddenly excited by the possibility. Something he will be thinking about, many times, for the rest of the EA. 

Tav: So what did you think about what I pictured when we were connected by the Weave? Gale: Oh, I was surprised. But pleasantly so, just like I said. Amid the madness that has befallen us, it seems almost out of place to think of a kiss/ of a romantic walk. And yet... now more than ever, it's important to recall what makes us human. [if Tav is not human] Well- you know what I mean. A stolen glance- that sudden heartbeat... Sometimes the little things are worth more than kingdoms. They promise things to come.

So romance was not something he had even considered until the opportunity arose (this is why he won't pursue a Tav who didn't show romantic interest towards him). I think that, since he is a character always living on the edge of death, he will take this opportunity to feel “human again”: after all, he follows the concept of "living life to the fullest".

During the Loss (see the post of the "Loss Scene"), we know that losing Mystra was a big blow for him. He regrets his decisions of the past in this scene, and it reinforced the idea that he is the only one to blame for Mystra's loss. There is a yearning for the lost Chosen powers, but Gale's context in the majority of his scenes seem to reinforce the idea that he sought power not as a means, but as a goal itself to be closer to Mystra and Magic. Since we are talking about a wizard, his passion lies in magic itself, in being one with the Weave/Magic/Mystra. A Chosen of Mystra is so entangled with the Weave and magic that when they die, they are part of the Weave itself. This is the level of passion that Gale has for Magic, and since Magic can only be performed by most mortals via Weave, and the Weave is Mystra, the whole three concepts are, in fact, one; and it makes it very difficult from a lore point of view to separate them. 

Tav: There's something I don't understand. If Mystra abandoned you, how can you still cast magic? Gale: The Weave is still here, all around us – inside of us too. As long as the goddess lives, magic is a tangible thing for those who know how to touch. I've studied magic for many years, and in as many ways I am still a more than capable wizard. It's just that I'm no longer able to perform those feats even arch wizards would marvel at. To have one hand on the pulse of divinity. You have to remember that the Weave is a living thing, both the embodiment and the extension of Mystra herself.She can give and she can take away. I'm afraid I'm still very much on her naughty list. Consider yourself lucky you're not. 

I personally think Gale will never stop being devoted to Mystra (and won't stop loving her in many ways), because his passion for magic and knowledge is his own life, and Mystra IS those things. He loves magic for the sake of it. So losing this unique contact with magic itself that only Chosen of Mystra have was a terrible punishment for him. His abandonment issues are not just the result of a “guy being left by a girl”. They have an extra complexity because of the nature of Magic in this world and how its deity behaves with her chosen. Gale was not only abandoned by Mystra, but was also removed of a good amount of his capacity to perform magic. If magic “is his life”, the abandonment removed a part of his life away. I think some people miss this point, because, once more, it's related to Forgotten Realm lore and not Dragon Age. Many of these people keep constantly comparing this situation with Dragon Age, which has nothing to do with it. Dragon Age has no wizards, their relationship with Magic is natural, it’s sorcerer-like if we want to compare it, and the relationship with their deities (mostly absent, silent ones) are nothing alike the ones in Forgotten Realm. The context is key, as I repeated several times in these posts and in the one about "Context, persuasion, and manipulation". 

Tav: I don't know what to make of what you've told me, but I sympathise. Gale: Thank you. [no romantic weave] I want you to know that you’re a good friend. [romantic weave] I often think of that moment we shared together – one under the Weave. I hope you think about it too. /I'm glad to know you think about it too.

Narrator: You sense a moment of unspoken affection. You want to know where it may lead. Gale: I consider myself very lucky to have found you Tav: I think perhaps we could be more than friends Gale: Perhaps. 

Tav: You said you think about the moment we shared under the weave. Do you think about it often? Gale: Do you? 1-2-Tav: Yes / From time to time. Gale: So do I. 3- Tav: Not really. Gale: And yet you ask. I do, as a matter of fact.

Gale: You see. I'm not a big believer in fate, but I do believe in serendipity. Life is a tempest of events that sometimes we brace against and sometimes embrace. You're one such event that one day soon perhaps I'd like to embrace.

So after sharing this regret during the Loss scene, Gale will show affection if Tav remains friendly during the Weave (but Gale will never directly engage it, he is waiting for Tav to give the first step; understandable if we consider he also has a dangerous bomb in his chest, so he may be torn between wanting to, but knowing he should not to). If there is no interest in pursuing romance, he will show a gesture of gratitude for being a good friend during that night of regrets. 

If pursuing the romance, we can interpret that Gale, at this point, even though he is still struggling with all the emotions that Mystra inspires, wants to experience something more “human”, a romance with a mortal. We know for sure that Gale is getting interested, slowly, while thinking about it, since in each of the following scenes he will ask (or Tav will ask) about that “moment in the Weave”. He has been thinking about it for many nights, and he is “embracing” the idea. 

If Gale is treated with judgement (despite not knowing his whole story) or allowing him to keep the secret of what or who he lost, we will obtain lines likes:

Gale: Good. Goodnight. And thank you for your patient understanding. // And try not to think too poorly of me. A cat can look at a king. A wizard can look at a goddess.

Tav: Another fool pays for his arrogance. A tale as old as time. Gale: Arrogance? Ambition, rather. And ambition is a fine thing – until suddenly it no longer is. Then again, if that is how you judge me, there’s little I can do to change your mind. But know that I have this ambition still. First to save myself, and after that, the licence to dream. (Gale Disapproval)

We could interpret these lines as the only ones so far that may suggest that Gale is still wanting something from the goddess. We know due to the tadpole dreams that Gale’s desire is Mystra. On the comments of the second tadpole dream we know more details about his major desire: it is not just Mystra, but her forgiveness.

Tav: Gale, who is the apparition in your dreams? Gale: She's... It doesn't matter. I just know her to be unreal. Tav: What's impossible about what you're been shown? Gale: Forgiveness Tav: Gale, who is the apparition in your dreams? Gale: It's indeed Mystra I see. And yet it cannot be her. There was a time when I would have believed - but no longer. I told you that I lost her. Lost her favour and lost so many of the powers I took for granted. What magic I can still weave is met only with undercurrents of disappointing silence. Mystra has not changed her mind about me. That's how I know our dreams are delusions.

I think this scene shows the difference between a standard desire for power as a means, and power for the sake of power itself (since this power allows Gale to be one with the Weave). The scene is ambiguous enough to see it as Gale wanting to return to Mystra’s side as well as remaining as an ardent devotee of her (because she is magic herself). I keep repeating that these scenes show that Gale’s most important thing in his life is Magic, which is Mystra: the extension and the embodiment of magic. So his desire for her seems impossible to be extinguished completely. In previous scenes we saw that he certainly had thought through the idea of loving her more like a devotee than a lover, but certainly the weight of being his first love will remain, especially since she is deeply related to magic itself.

During the Party Scene we find some information about his feelings for Mystra. 

I personally ponder the book of Amn’s description as very important because, from a narrative point of view, it's a lot of lines/content that, if they were not important, tend to be removed from the script. If they are there, they are meant to be interpreted. For this reason those lines mean to me that Gale has finally embraced the idea of having something important with a mortal. In my post of the "Party Scene" I go into details, but here I will stick to the interpretation related to Mystra: all what Gale numerates in that book are things that he could not access to with a Goddess. Curiously, part of those descriptions are things that make humans human, so I personally think it reinforces Gale's intention in heading into this romance with the eagerness of finding some shelter (never forget the “orb” has a constant oppressing effect in him, increasing his anxiety and fears) and to experience (maybe for the first time) the love of a mortal.

So, for some assumptions made in the post of the "Party Scene", we suspect that Gale needs to share a night to feel confident enough to speak the details of his “orb” condition. Since he wants this relationship to be strong (after all, he implied commitment during the description of the book) he speaks about the true origin of the “orb” immediately after that night, starting with Mystra (which is, after all, the true origin of his folly). Depending on the version that Tav picks, we have extra information provided by Gale about his emotions for the Goddess:

Tav: What did Mystra’s attention feel like? Gale: Love. Perhaps it was not quite love, but you see, the wizard was but a very young man. It was most certainly love to him. [...] One day all too soon, the whispers stopped. The goddess spurned the mortal. [...] and the wizard was left behind heartbroken. Tav: I hate to say it, but he really could have seen this coming Gale: He was blinded by love. Good stories are rife with lovers’ follies after all.

[Short Version] Gale: Before long Mystra tired of me. What was I after all but a mortal plaything in sacred hands? You have to realise I was heartbroken. I was a young man, she was my first love. I thought it would last forever. I vowed to win her back.

[after explaining the mistake of the “orb”] Gale: It is this folly that led Mystra to abandon me completely. I can only hope you won’t abandon me as well. After all we’ve been through.. After the night we spent together. Surely we can brave even this side by side

Gale is giving a very detailed context about his love for Mystra: she was his first love, and the first love tends to have a special weight in a person's life and their memories. That doesn't mean the person has become unable to build more relationships for the rest of their life. If we add the fact that he was very young when all this happened (more details in the Post "Gale Hypotheses- Part 1") we find him under two effects: the impression of the first love and the naivety of the youth. Both elements made him believe it was a love that was going to last forever. With a Goddess, no less.

Besides, Gale expresses this, highlighting his naivety and foolishness: he is aware of how silly he was back then, and how impossible it could be for a mortal to keep the love of a goddess. He is a pragmatic and realistic character, after all. He recognizes in the end that he was just a mortal plaything for her. 

I think these pieces of information give us a very clear context of his emotional state: he is still nostalgic for Mystra because of all the reasons I enumerated above; she is also more than just a woman, she is Magic itself. But he is aware that those emotions were the consequence of a very naïve and young self that has awakened by the burden of his own mistakes. There is also a reinforcement of “forever”, which recalls the concept of commitment that Gale pursues so much in his romance: he is not there just for the sex “intimacy”, he is there for serious commitment, maybe because he doesn't want to experience another abandonment. After all, we are talking about a character with a profile that shows abandonment issues (see the post of "Gale Hypotheses- Part 1", section: "Abandonment Issues")

[If rejected] Tav: No. This is too large a betrayal. GALE: I see. I am sorry. I am sorry that it had to come to this. All that’s left to say is farewell. Dev’s notes: hurt but understanding Gale: Farewell. (Leaves) Dev’s notes: A slight hesitation, hurt but understanding. He makes a polite little bow, then we see him walk away.

[If accepted] Gale: I don’t know what I did to deserve the magic that you do. 

Despite being terribly cheesy, this last line shows that Gale was more than convinced that Tav would abandon him because he doesn’t deserve Tav. This is why he doesn't put up much fight if Tav chooses to tell him to leave. He will try to make Tav listen to his story, and once it's done, the verdict will fall and he will accept it. He learnt his lesson with Mystra. This line also shows how everything important around Gale is or has to be worded with magic, even a silly metaphor like this is related with the word “magic”: Tav's acceptance is like magic. For him, as important and good as magic itself.

As if that were not enough, after the scene there is a comment in which Gale will reinforce his gratitude for Tav's acceptance:

Tav: If you ever feel the netherese magic overtaking you, what will you do? Gale: If it should ever come to that... if I ever know I am no longer able to stop it... I will do anything I can to ensure no one but me pays for my mistakes. I will find the remotest place on the surface of Faerûn, or perhaps far below in the depths of the Underdark. I will await that death alone. [*] I promise I will not betray your trust... You kept me by your side despite the menace that I am. If worst comes to worst, I will be gone long before the curtain falls.  [*] If romanced, Gale will say here "I cherish you."

Which makes me suspect that Gale can disappear at any moment (in full game) if for some game mechanics we are unable to get magical artefacts but the deal with Raphael did not happen (if that’s even possible). But that's just me speculating. Nothing in EA seems to suggest this. What i's clear is that acceptance—that strong concept in the book he put so much emphasis on—is really important to him, so he shows gratitude for that: he promises to protect Tav (and many innocents) from his own mistake. He also says pretty soon an equivalent of “I love you”, in a more formal/meaningful way: “to cherish” is not just to love, but to care/protect as well. 

Finally, in case someone lost those hints, or maybe as a consequence of this unpolished scene, we have a direct question with a direct answer:

Tav: Gale, are you still in love with Mystra? Gale: I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know. She is my muse still, the embodiment of magic, but the embodiment of love? Only if we ever meet again will I know

Gale simply says what we have been inferring so far with all the previous information: Gale reinforces the idea that he will remain as a strong, loving devotee of Mystra, because she is magic. I personally don't even consider it possible to remove that love from him. He may not be a cleric, but he loves his deity as one. But he also learnt his lesson that loving gods has its own dire consequences for mortals. He is very aware of it during the discussion about Karsus:

Tav: Nothing good ever comes from mortals wanting to be gods. 

Gale: Loving them has its side effects as well. Now, so many centuries later, I tried to follow in the footsteps of Karsus, not to destroy Mystra, but to prove my love for her. It tried to control only a fraction of the magic that was unleashed that fateful day. I merely sought to return one tiny diamond to an imperfect crown. Gale's Folly one might call it. History. Repetition. It's the way things go.

Once more, there is no scene where Gale doesn't reinforce that what he did was a mistake, a foolish action, a Folly. 

Finally, if talking about a previous lover immediately after awakening with a new one was of poor taste, Gale acknowledges this, giving an honest apology:

Gale: Before we go on though, do first let me apologise. To share such a night with you only to tell you of a previous lover the next morning... It wasn't the most gentleman-like behaviour. But I had to finally tell you. Silence would have been far worse behaviour still. Nevertheless, I am sorry.

He accepts any rude response or lash-out from Tav without approval penalties. This is an interesting meta-knowledge that speaks about owning up to his mistakes. Unlike the Loss scene, where rude responses made Gale disapprove because Tav was judging him without knowing the whole story [16], in this scene he doesn’t. Now Tav has the whole picture, and he accepts whatever reaction Tav shows. Of course he will approve a forgiving Tav, since Gale is a character very related to forgiveness [12, 12b].

Conclusion: 

So, answering the question that gives title to this section: yes. In my opinion, Gale loves Mystra. But it’s not a white-and-black love; it has the complexity of human love mixed with this crazy lore of deities in Forgotten Realms. I believe Mystra will always be part of Gale's life, because the Weave and magic are his life, and she is both. He will always love her as a devotee, even though he now understands the mistakes of his young self and seems more aware of how naive he was when he was a “very young man”. The comments on the second tadpole dreams explicitly show that what Gale wants the most is Mystra’s forgiveness, but at the same time, he knows that he does not deserve it. And this raw realistic view of himself is what makes him understand that those dreams are illusions. During the party scene he is uncertain about his emotions, but still he emphasises that there is a big chance for him to not see Mystra as the embodiment of love any more but reinforces that she will always be the embodiment of magic to him (a very important concept in his character design). 

Whether Gale is romanced or not, I don't see a difference in the information he shares on this matter in EA.

This post was written in June 2021. → For more Gale: Analysis Series Index

[corpsentry]

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER AND I AM LYING AMONGST ANGELS, WAITING FOR YOU TO FIND ME: a spoiler-filled addendum

because i buttfucked the timeline harder than nintendo and That’s Mildly Concerning ao3 link

q: what the fuck is this a: this fic is the answer to the question, ‘how can i reconcile the events of breath of the wild and age of calamity into a coherent narrative?’.

q: what the fuck happened a: age of calamity was a dream zelda had while partying in ganon’s apartment for a hundred years.

q: [you point a nerf gun at my head and smash my knees in with a hammer concurrently] what the Fuck happened a: link has a line near the end of chapter one which goes something like ‘my mother used to say dreams are the memories of people from another world’. this is the core concept of the story. while age of calamity is a dream to botw zelda, who saw it unfold over the course of a hundred year nap, it’s also real. in my incredibly fucked up version of things, it happened- just not in the same universe as botw. when botw zelda settled in to drink cheap beer with ganon for a hundred years, her consciousness drifted across time and space to the age of calamity timeline, where she proceeded to live out someone else’s life for a few months. are the other characters in aoc aware of this? link is. at the end of chapter two, when he pleads with zelda to ‘rebuild the old world with [him]’, he falls out of character. he betrays the real purpose of this timeline and his place in it, which is to salvage what botw could not.

q: what the fuck is up with the space-time continuum thing a: inspired by the multiverse theory (note that i know nothing about multiverse theory apart from the fact that there are multiple verses), i decided it would be fun if i added a third dimension to the botw/aoc pair. the inhabitants of this third universe are aware of the existence of multiple worlds. they are also aware of the prophecy of calamity ganon’s return, but for the purpose of this essay it does not matter if calamity ganon will rise in their world. the primary concern of zelda in this third dimension is whether she can engineer a universe where link does not die. as she says in chapter two, there are a thousand possible outcomes, but only two fulfill her requirement: the outcomes that constitute botw and aoc. we can assume she went to enormous lengths to uncover these universes, as described by impa, who says with some disbelief ‘you destroyed the space-time continuum for a boy?’. zelda destroys the space-time continuum. she moves through timeline after timeline, tweaking dialogue and moving the hour-hand ever backwards, and at the end of it all, for all her suffering, what does she actually achieve?

q: okay so what the fuck is up with the scene where link kisses zelda and is like i had a dream where i died and then nothing happens a: first of all, you’ll find this scene near the end of chapter two if you’d like to take a second look at it. as for who exactly this zelda and this link are, it’s unclear. maybe after botw zelda woke up, the original aoc zelda and aoc link lived happily after the war. maybe the zelda in the third dimension missed a positive outcome in her thousand-bullet-pointed list. maybe this, too, is a dream someone had, while lying in a field of flowers somewhere. your call.

q: rabbit???????? a: the story about the rabbit is a framing device. first introduced at the end of chapter one when link tells zelda a story on the bridge at night, it eventually comes to parallel botw zelda’s experiences, but in reverse. the rabbit is happy in her reality. she has a dream where everyone she loves is gone, becomes immersed in it, and is eventually saved by the voice of some-god-or-another. zelda is not particularly happy in her reality (botw). she has a dream where everyone she loves survives, becomes immersed in it, and is pulled out of the dream by some-god-or-another. the important thing to note here is the second rule the rabbit lays out in the story, which is that you, as the dreamer, can’t tell anyone that you’re dreaming. self-awareness is a sin in these lands, but the greater and far worse sin is to attempt to share that self-awareness with someone else. this is why link is so adamant that zelda not finish speaking at the end of chapter two, when ganon is defeated and they are standing on the balcony. he wants her to stay. he’s in love with her. he doesn’t want her dream to end because in a way her dream is his dream too; they want the same things (peace, living champions and family, each other). unfortunately for him, zelda has to leave the aoc world behind, because even a hundred year nap has to end, and so she says what she has to say, she says it feels like she’s dreaming, and she wakes up.

q: please explain, in plain english, whatever the hell goes down in chapter 2. a: chapter one is a relatively straightforward retelling of the first four story chapters in hwaoc. chapter three returns the reader directly to the botw timeline, where link shoots a glowing arrow at ganon’s ass, killing him instantly. chapter two is the glorious fuck that lies in between. in short, it splices the events of aoc and botw together with overlays and meta commentary from the third universe mentioned above, where zelda is trying to engineer a happy ending, and the ambiguous fourth one where link is the one who sees the dream. i made use of several batshit devices here, but the most prominent one is, i hope, the encore. the [ENCORE] is initially used to signal that a scene will be set in the botw timeline. it makes its first appearance before botw zelda and botw link’s journey down from mount lanayru, which, as we know, does not take place in aoc. this is played straight up until the halfway mark or so, at which point i swap out ENCORE for encore and finally ****** (still says encore though). this distinction is lost altogether once impa begins dragging link’s body up to the great plateau. up until now, ENCORE and [these brackets] have been used to distinguish the botw timeline from the aoc one, which is not an encore and is not in [these brackets]. the next segment, concerning the battle on the great plateau, flips them. now impa and co’s funeral procession is ‘real’ and the charge zelda leads to the temple of time is ‘fake’. i wonder why.

q: ‘the lights are BLUE or YELLOW or PINK’. explain. a: what’s a play? a pretense. what does it take to pretend? actors. what is zelda doing? dreaming.

q: fourth wall breaks. explain. a: the interview segments are an homage to the seven thousand articles about age of calamity i read before playing age of calamity because this game was effectively my reason to live for the months of october and november. sooga talks about google maps because he’s dead (possibly dlc?) and dead people have the right to say fuck-all. every device in this story was implemented for a vaguely coherent reason. and then i fucked it up for fun.

q: what is the state of zelda and link’s relationship? a: in the botw timeline i imagine they’re involved with each other even before calamity strikes. in the aoc timeline i imagine they’re working their way towards something, but several important trigger events in botw don’t take place in the aoc timeline and the stakes overall feel significantly lower, so i’d hesitate to say their relationship develops to the same degree it does in the botw timeline. this is all personal conjecture, so you’re free to disagree.

q: why does the last line sound like a hannibal lecter line? a: [dab] god’s plan

q: why does zelda say there are a thousand possible outcomes, and only one where link lived in chapter 3? a: the first rule of time travel: don’t.

this is everything i can think of off the top of my head that might have confused people, but i did unfortunately write this thing so if there’s something else that made you go ‘the fuck?’ please don’t hesitate to drop me an ask or a line in the replies, i’d be happy to help. also, if it isn’t clear as day, i have a lot of fucking feelings about both of these games, so if you want to talk lore, theories, or just miscellaneous zelink fuckery, hit me up. i’ll go sleep now. take care everyone.

[therosefield]

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES - When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours.

I've been tagged by @lordbelacqua (thank you Dea! <3) to talk about Backlead aka: that one Masriel fic I wrote where I got massively carried away...

Rambling/essay under the cut - fair warning, it's a long one!

Okay so first of all just a little disclaimer that Backlead did not follow my usual writing process - the idea was 110% borne out of self-indulgence and it was also both my first foray into HDM fanfic and my return to fanfic as a whole after a long hiatus from writing, so for me this was really a chance to just get back into the swing of things. Everything from Heavenly Guard through to Swansong and all of my current WIPs follow a more structured process and I'm happy to discuss any of them in a separate post!

PLANNING: I tend to find with my fics that I either have a nice little timeline of events planned out pre-writing or I have a very specific event in my head and I just take that and see how things unravel from there and Backlead was 100% the latter.

All I had in my head initially was the ballroom dance scene and so a lot of my admittedly-minimal planning was around the technicalities of that particular section, as well as some of the more general details e.g Marisa's outfit, the setting of the ball, etc. Planning the dance was the most fun part because it was a chance for me to put a lot of my dance knowledge to good use and think up something that fits the back-and-forth way in which Marisa and Asriel frequently navigate their encounters. In a way though I'm actually very glad that a lot of this fic Just Happened instead of being planned out, sometimes it's nice to just run away with an idea!

MUSIC: This gets its own section because this is one of the most important things in my process. Every single fic I write is written to various pieces of music that just help me to put myself in the right headspace for whatever I'm writing at the time - sometimes its just a single piece of music (I wrote Swansong in one hour with just one track from the Unforgotten - a TV show in the UK for those of you not familiar with it - soundtrack on repeat) and sometimes its entire playlists. I do love geeking out about my music choices for fic writing so happy to talk more in a separate post about music for some of my other fics if anyone's curious!

For Backlead I found a couple of playlist-vids from the lovely raviolae on youtube that really worked wonders for my writing. This comes with a disclaimer that I did not necessarily attribute any of these specific songs to either dance scene and I wanted to leave that open for people's imagination - but it's still brilliant vibes for thinking about two once-lovers-now-enemies trying to one-up each other whilst ignoring how much they still find each other attractive.

The two playlist-vids in question are here: you're stuck on the dance floor with your rival and find out they're an annoyingly good dancer and you're dancing with your rival and both of you want to lead

WRITING: First step every time is to figure out who's POV I'm going to cover because that makes a major difference in the way I'm going to write. Characterisation is the big thing for me and there's nothing I love more than to really get inside a character's head and basically think like them, and figure out what makes them tick and how they'll react to the story I'm putting them in. With my initial idea for Backlead being basically about the subtle power dynamics of a ballroom dance, Marisa felt like the natural go-to for this one and I found it much easier in this instance to write in her headspace than in Asriel's.

I wrote this fic in a very out-of-order fashion. The first dance (the slower, waltz-style dance) was the first part I finished, then I did as hinted at above get very carried away and move onto the section in the hallway, then I went right to the start and covered the entire section leading up to that first dance. Then I revisited the hallway scene because I wanted to rework it (the initial version was planned to be more explicit and involved less dialogue - but I wasn't comfortable with writing out the former at that time and the latter got changed by way of me having a sudden burst of dialogue-themed inspiration). The second, more set piece style dance came last in terms of the 'major events' that I wrote purely because I spent a lot of time racking with my dance knowledge to try and make it work in a way that didn't feel forced.

My final major writing stage is to write the 'transitions' between each major part - small pieces where nothing particularly noteworthy happens but it helps the fic to flow from one conversation/event to the next and also sometimes allows me to sneak in a bit of characterisation that I couldn't fit in elsewhere.

Along the way I often leave sentences half-finished with a bracket indicator so I know to go back to it later or I make little notes if I've added something in that needs explaining earlier in the fic, and I make sure to sort those parts out before I jump to the self review/beta reader stage. A couple of examples are below:

Although sometimes this method does also annoy future me too 😂:

SELF REVIEW/BETA REVIEW: Whenever I finish a fic, it gets put away for a day or two and I stop thinking about it completely - if I'm using a beta reader (usually @thatlavanderbard but I sometimes enlist help from friends on discord), I'll send them a copy of my draft at this point so they can start going through and leaving comments for me to work on, but the idea is that when I go back to my work a few days later I'm looking at it with semi-fresh eyes and can properly sift through each sentence to make sure things make sense.

When I'm self-reviewing I generally tend to follow this order of operations: spelling/grammar check (via docs') -> flow check (making sure any deliberate time skips/POV changes/etc in my fic flow smoothly from one part to the next) -> address beta reader comments (because they almost always pick up on things I myself would've picked up on anyway) -> general detailed final read through to make sure I'm happy with every single line and it all makes sense.

Backlead didn't get a full beta read because I had hit a point with it where I just wanted it up ASAP and my impatience got the better of me, but the rest of the above self-review stages still happened and I still spent a fair few evenings going through it properly and also running the occasional sentence or two by some helpful discord friends if I didn't like the way it flowed but couldn't quite figure out how to remedy it!

POSTING: First step was to reset my AO3 password because I forgot it yet again whoops

On a more serious note this part is pretty straightforward - once I'm ready to post a new fic I generally just go on autopilot for this part of the process (other than when I get to 'additional tags' and immediately get brain freeze...). As soon as it's up on AO3 I swing by here to make a post about it, then swing by discord to drop the link to friends who may be interested in reading it and then I normally nervously scuttle away from my notifications for a while out of fear that people hate it lmao.

That last part was especially true for Backlead because of it being my first trip into HDM fanfic and I always get extra nervous when posting my first fanfic for a new show/game/etc. Thankfully I got quite a few nice comments both on here and on discord that provided good motivation to stick around and post a few more things!

I always panic when asked to tag people lmao but I'll tag @fortheloveofwii for any part of the Onward, Onward series, @lyracordelia for any chapter in Hiraeth or the fic as a whole, and @glassrunner for this absolutely gorgeous gifset of beautiful game soundtracks. Please don't feel like you have to do this if you don't want to though!

[mrkwonandmrchoibabygirl]

Bared To Him -Seungri PT.3

Genre:Smut/Angst/Fluff

Rated:NC-17

Word count 4,119

PT.2

"There's no way your mom and Her Husband are going to let you come out here at night multiple times a week," Hae said, hugging his stylish denim jacket around him even though it wasn't more than slightly chilly. The converted warehouse Parker Smith used as his studio was a brick-faced building in a formerly industrial area of Brooklyn presently struggling to revitalize. The space was vast, and the massive metal delivery-bay doors offered no exterior clue as to what was taking place inside. Hae and I sat in aluminum bleachers, watching a half-dozen combatants on the mats below. "Ouch." I winced in sympathy as a guy took a kick to the groin. Even with padding, that had to sting. "How's Johns going to find out, Hae?" "Because you'll be in the hospital?" He glanced at me. "Seriously. Krav Maga is brutal. They're just sparring and it's full contact. And even if the bruises don't give you away, your stepdad will find out somehow. He always does." "Because of my mom; she tells him everything. But I'm not telling her about this."

"Why not?" "She won't understand. She'll think I want to protect myself because of what happened, and she'll feel guilty and give me grief about it. She won't believe my main interest is exercise and stress relief." I propped my chin on my palm and watched Parker take the floor with a woman. He was a good instructor. Patient and thorough, and he explained things in an easy to understand way. His studio was in a rough neighborhood, but I thought it suited what he was teaching. It didn't get more "reality based" than a big, empty warehouse. "That Parker guy is really hot," Hae murmured. "He's also wearing a wedding band." "I noticed. The good ones always get snatched up quick." Parker joined us after the class was over, his dark eyes bright and his smile brighter. "What'd ya think, Y/N?" "Where do I sign up?" His sexy smile made Hae reach over and squeeze the blood out of my hand. "Step this way." Friday started out awesome. Mark walked me through the process of collecting information for an RFP, and he told me a little more about Seunghyun’s Industries and Lee Seung Hyun, pointing out that he and Lee were the same age. "I have to remind myself of that," Mark said. "It's easy to forget he's so young when he's right in front of you." "Yes," I agreed, secretly disappointed that I wouldn't see Lee for the next two days. As much as I told myself it didn't matter, I was bummed. I hadn't realized I'd been excited by the possibility that we might run into each other until that possibility was gone. It was just such a rush being near him. Plus he was a hell of a lot of fun to look at. I had nothing nearly as exciting planned for the weekend. I was taking notes in Mark's office when I heard my desk phone ringing. Excusing myself, I rushed over to catch it. "Mark Garrity's office - " "Y/N love. How are you?" I sank into my chair at the sound of my stepfather's voice. Johns always sounded like old money to me - cultured, entitled, and arrogant. "Johns. Is everything okay? Is Mom all right?" "Yes. Everything's fine. Your mother is wonderful, as always." His tone softened when he spoke of his wife and I was grateful for that. I was grateful to him for a lot of things actually, but it was sometimes hard to balance that against my feelings of disloyalty. I knew my dad was self-conscious about the massive differences in their income brackets. "Good," I said, relieved. "I'm glad. Did you and Mom receive my thank-you note for the dress and Cary's tuxedo?" "Yes, and it was thoughtful of you, but you know we don't expect you to thank us for such things. Excuse me a moment." He spoke to someone, most likely his secretary. "Y/N love, I'd like us to get together for lunch today. I'll send Clancy around to collect you." "Today? But we'll be seeing each other tomorrow night. Can't it wait until then?" "No, it should be today." "But I only get an hour for lunch." A tap on my shoulder turned me around to find Mark standing by my cubicle. "Take two," he whispered. "You earned it." I sighed and mouthed a thank you. "Will twelve o'clock work, Johns?" "Perfectly. I look forward to seeing you." I had no reason to look forward to private meetings with Johns, but I dutifully left just before noon and found a town car waiting for me, idling at the curb. Clancy, Johns's driver and body guard, opened the door for me as I greeted him. Then he slid behind the wheel and drove me downtown. By twenty after the hour, I was sitting at a conference table in Stanton's offices, eyeing a beautifully catered lunch for two. John came in shortly after my arrival, looking dapper and distinguished. His hair was pure white, his face lined but still very handsome. His eyes were the color of worn blue denim, and they were sharp with intelligence. He was trim and athletic, taking the time out of his busy days to stay fit even before he'd married his trophy wife - my mom. I stood as he approached, and he bent to kiss my cheek. "You look lovely, Y/N." "Thank you." I looked like my mom, who was also a natural blonde. But my Y/E/C eyes came from my dad. Taking a chair at the head of the table, John was aware that the requisite backdrop of the New York skyline was behind him and he took advantage of its impressiveness. "Eat," he said, with the command so easily wielded by all men of power. Men like Lee Seunghyun. Had John been as driven at Lee's age? I picked up my fork and started in on a chicken, cranberry, walnut, and feta salad. It was delicious, and I was hungry. I was glad Stanton didn't start talking right away so I could enjoy the meal, but the reprieve didn't last long. "Y/N love, I wanted to discuss your interest in Krav Maga." I froze. "Excuse me?" John took a sip of iced water and leaned back, his jaw taking on the rigidity that warned me I wouldn't like what he was about to say. "Your mother was quite distraught last night when you went to that studio in Brooklyn. It took some time to calm her down and to assure her that I could make arrangements for you to pursue your interests in a safe manner. She doesn't want - " "Wait." I set my fork down carefully, my appetite gone. "How did she know where I was?" "She tracked your cell phone." "No way," I breathed, deflating into my seat. The casualness of his reply, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, made me feel ill. My stomach churned, suddenly more interested in rejecting my lunch than digesting it. "That's why she insisted I use one of your company phones. It had nothing to do with saving me money." "Of course that was part of it. But it also gives her peace of mind." "Peace of mind? To spy on her grown daughter? It's not healthy, John. You've got to see that. Is she still seeing Dr. Petersen?" He had the grace to look uncomfortable. "Yes, of course." "Is she telling him what she's doing?" "I don't know," he said stiffly. "That's Monica's private business. I don't interfere." No, he didn't. He coddled her. Indulged her. Spoiled her. And allowed her obsession with my safety to run wild. "She has to let it go. I've let it go." "You were an innocent, Y/N. She feels guilty for not protecting you. We need to give her a little latitude." "Latitude? She's a stalker!" My mind spun. How could my mom invade my privacy like that? Why would she? She was driving herself crazy, and me along with her. "This has to stop." "It's an easy fix. I've already spoken with Clancy. He'll drive you when you need to venture into Brooklyn. Everything's been arranged. This will be much more convenient for you." "Don't try to twist this around to being for my benefit." My eyes stung and my throat burned with unshed tears of frustration. I hated the way he talked about Brooklyn like it was a third-world country. "I'm a grown woman. I make my own decisions. It's the goddamn law!" "Don't take that tone with me, Y/N. I'm simply looking after your mother. And you." I pushed back from the table. "You're enabling her. You're keeping her sick, and you're making me sick, too." "Sit down. You need to eat. Monica worries that you're not eating healthy enough." "She worries about everything, John. That's the problem." I dropped my napkin on the table. "I have to get back to work." I turned away, striding toward the door to get out as quickly as possible. I retrieved my purse from John's secretary and left my cell phone on her desk. Clancy, who had been waiting for me in the reception area, followed me, and I knew better than to try and blow him off. He didn't take orders from anyone but John. Clancy drove me back up to midtown, while I stewed in the backseat. I could bitch all I wanted, but in the end I wasn't any better than John because I was going to give in. I was going to cave and let my mom have her way, because it hurt my heart to think of her suffering any more than she already did. She was so emotional and fragile, and she loved me to the point of being crazy about it. My mood was still dark when I got back to the Seunghyun’s Company. As Clancy pulled away from the curb, I stood on the crowded sidewalk and looked up and down the busy street for either a drugstore where I could get some chocolate or a cellular store where I could pick up a new phone. I ended up walking around the block and buying a half-dozen candy bars at a Duane Reade on the corner before heading back to the Seunghyun’s Company. I'd been gone just about an hour, but I wasn't going to use the extra time Mark had given me. I needed work to distract me from my crazy-assed family. As I caught an empty elevator car, I ripped open a bar and bit viciously into it. I was making strides toward filling my self-imposed chocolate quota before I hit the twentieth floor when the car stopped on the fourth. I appreciated the added time the stop gave me to enjoy the comfort of dark chocolate and caramel melting over my tongue. The doors slid apart, and revealed Lee Seung Hyun talking with two other gentlemen. As usual, I lost my breath at the sight of him, which reignited my fading irritation. Why did he have that effect on me? When was I going to become immune to his hotness? He glanced over and his lips curved into a slow, heart-stopping smile when he saw me. Great. Just my crappy luck. I'd become some kind of challenge. Lee's smile faded into a frown. "We'll finish this later," he murmured to his companions without looking away from me. Stepping into the car, he lifted a hand to discourage them from following him. They blinked in surprise, glancing at me, then Lee, and then back again. I stepped out, deciding it would be safer for my sanity to take a different car up. "Not so fast, Y/N." Lee caught me by the elbow and tugged me back. The doors shut and the elevator glided smoothly into motion. "What are you doing?" I snapped. After dealing with John, the last thing I needed was another domineering male trying to push me around. Lee caught me by the upper arms and searched my face with that vivid blue gaze. "Something's wrong. What is it?" The now-familiar electricity crackled to life between us, the pull made fiercer by my temper. "You." "Me?" His thumbs stroked over my shoulders. Releasing me, he withdrew a lone key from his pocket and plugged it into the panel. All the lights cleared except for the one for the top floor. He wore black again, with fine gray pinstripes. Seeing him from the back was a revelation. His shoulders were nicely broad without being bulky, emphasizing his lean waist and long legs. The silky strands of hair falling over his collar tempted me to clench them and pull. Hard. I wanted him as pissy as I was. I wanted a fight. "I'm not in the mood for you now, Mr. Lee." He watched the antique-style needle above the doors mark the passing floors. "I can get you in the mood." "I'm not interested." Lee glanced over his shoulder at me. His shirt and tie were both the same awesome cerulean as his irises. The effect was striking. "No lies, Y/N. Ever." "That's not a lie. So what if I'm attracted to you? I expect most women are." Wrapping up what was left of my candy bar, I shoved it back into the shopping bag I'd tucked into my purse. I didn't need chocolate when I was sharing air with Lee Seung Hyun. "But I'm not interested in doing anything about it." He faced me then, turning in a leisurely pivot, that ghost of a smile softening his sinful mouth. His ease and unconcern aggravated me further. "Attraction is too tame a word for" - he gestured at the space between us - "this." "Call me crazy, but I have to actually like someone before I get naked and sweaty with them." "Not crazy," he said. "But I don't have the time or the inclination to date." "That makes two of us. Glad we got that cleared up." He stepped closer, his hand lifting to my face. I forced myself not to move away or give him the satisfaction of seeing me intimidated. His thumb brushed over the corner of my mouth; then lifted to his own. He sucked on the pad and purred, "Chocolate and you. Delicious." A shiver moved through me, followed by a heated ache between my legs as I imagined licking chocolate off his lethally sexy body. His gaze darkened and his voice lowered intimately. "Romance isn't in my repertoire, Y/N. But a thousand ways to make you come are. Let me show you." The car slowed to a halt. He withdrew the key from the panel and the doors opened. I backed into the corner and shooed him out with a flick of my wrist. "I'm really not interested." "We'll discuss." Lee caught me by the elbow and gently, but insistently, urged me out. I went along because I liked the charge I got from being around him and because I was curious to see what he had to say when afforded more than five minutes of my time. He was buzzed through the security door so quickly there was no need for him to break stride. The pretty redhead at the reception desk pushed hastily to her feet, about to impart some information until he shook his head impatiently. Her mouth snapped shut and she stared at me as we passed at a brisk pace, her eyes wide. The walk to Lee's office was mercifully short. His secretary stood when he saw his boss's approach, but remained silent when he noted that Lee wasn't alone. "Hold my calls, Kang," Lee said, steering me into his office through the open glass double doors. Despite my irritation, I couldn't help but be impressed with Lee Seung Hyun's spacious command center. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the city on two sides, while a wall of glass faced the rest of the office space. The one opaque wall opposite the massive desk was covered in flat screens streaming news channels from around the world. There were three distinct seating areas, each one larger than Mark's entire office, and a bar that showcased jeweled crystal decanters, which provided the only spots of color in a palette that was otherwise black, gray, and white. Lee hit a button on his desk that closed the doors; then another that instantly frosted the clear glass wall, effectively shielding us from the view of his employees. With the beautiful sapphire-hued reflective film on the exterior windows, privacy was assured. He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on a chrome coatrack. Then he returned to where I'd remained standing just inside the doors. "Something to drink, Y/N?" "No, thank you." Damn it. He was even yummier in just the vest. I could better see how fit he was. How strong his shoulders were. How beautifully his biceps and ass flexed as he moved. He gestured toward a black leather sofa. "Have a seat." "I have to go back to work." "And I have a meeting at two. The sooner we work this out, the sooner we can both get back to business. Now, sit down." "What do you think we're going to work out?" Sighing, he scooped me up like a bride and carried me over to the sofa. He dropped me on my butt; then sat next to me. "Your objections. It's time to discuss what it's going to take to get you beneath me." "A miracle." I pushed back from him, widening the space between us. I tugged at the hem of my emerald green skirt, wishing I'd worn pants instead. "I find your approach crude and offensive." And a major turn-on, but I was never going to admit it. He contemplated me with narrowed eyes. "It may be blunt, but it's honest. You don't strike me as the kind of woman who wants bullshit and flattery instead of the truth." "What I want is to be seen as having more to offer than an inflatable sex doll." Lee's brows shot up. "Well, then." "Are we done?" I stood. Wrapping my wrist with his fingers, he pulled me back down. "Hardly. We've established some talking points: We have an intense sexual attraction and neither of us wants to date. So what do you want - exactly? Seduction, Y/N? Do you want to be seduced?" I was equally fascinated and appalled by the conversation. And, yes, tempted. It was hard not to be while faced with such a gorgeous, virile male so determined to get hot and sweaty with me. Still, the dismay won out. "Sex that's planned like a business transaction is a turnoff for me." "Establishing parameters in the beginning makes it less likely that there'll be exaggerated expectations and disappointment at the conclusion." "Are you kidding?" I scowled. "Listen to yourself. Why even call it a fuck? Why not be clear and call it a seminal emission in a preapproved orifice?" He pissed me off by throwing his head back and laughing. The full, throaty sound flowed over me like a rush of warm water. My awareness of him heightened to a physically painful degree. His earthy amusement made him less sex god and more human. Flesh and blood. Real. I pushed to my feet and backed out of reach. "Casual sex doesn't have to include wine and roses, but for God's sake, whatever else it is, sex should be personal. Friendly even. With mutual respect at the very least." His humor fled as he stood, his eyes darkening. "There are no mixed signals in my private affairs. You want me to blur that line. I can't think of a good reason to." "I don't want you to do jack shit, besides let me get back to work." I strode to the door and yanked on the handle, cursing softly when it didn't budge. "Let me out, Lee." I felt him come up behind me. His palms pressed flat to the glass on either side of my shoulders, caging me in. I couldn't think of my own self-preservation when he was so close. The strength and demand of his will exuded an almost tangible force field. When he stepped close enough, it surrounded me, closing me in with him. Everything outside of that bubble ceased to exist, while inside it my entire body strained toward his. That he had such a profound, visceral effect on me while being so damn irritating had my mind spinning. How could I be so turned on by a man whose words should've turned me completely off? "Turn around, Y/N." My eyes closed against the surge of arousal I felt at his authoritative tone. God, he smelled good. His powerful frame radiated heat and hunger, spurring my own wild desire for him. The uncontrollable response was intensified by my lingering frustration with John and my more recent aggravation with Lee himself. I wanted him. Bad. But he was no good for me. Honestly, I could screw up my life on my own. I didn't need any help. My flushed forehead touched the air-conditioned glass. "Let it go, Lee." "I am. You're too much trouble." His lips brushed behind my ear. One of his hands pressed flat to my stomach, the fingers splaying to urge me back against him. He was as aroused as I was, his cock hard and thick against my lower back. "Turn around and say good-bye." Disappointed and regretful, I turned in his grip, sagging against the door to cool my heated back. He was curved over me, his luxurious hair framing his beautiful face, his forearm propped against the door to bring him closer. I had almost no room to breathe. The hand he'd had at my waist was now resting on the curve of my hip, tightening reflexively and driving me mad. He stared, his gaze searingly intense. "Kiss me," he said hoarsely. "Give me that much." Panting softly, I licked my dry lips. He groaned, tilted his head, and sealed his mouth over mine. I was shocked by how soft his firm lips were and the gentleness of the pressure he exerted. I sighed and his tongue dipped inside, tasting me in long leisurely licks. His kiss was confident, skilled, and just the right side of aggressive to turn me on wildly. I distantly registered my purse hitting the floor; then my hands were in his hair. I pulled on the silky strands, using them to direct his mouth over mine. He growled, deepening the kiss, stroking my tongue with lush slides of his own. I felt the raging beat of his heart against my chest, proof that he wasn't just a hopeless ideal conjured by my fevered imagination. He pushed away from the door. Cupping the back of my head and the curve of my buttocks, he lifted me off my feet. "I want you, y/n. Trouble or not, I can't stop." I was pressed full-body against him, achingly aware of every hot, hard inch of him. I kissed him back as if I could eat him alive. My skin was damp and too sensitive, my breasts heavy and tender. My clit throbbed for attention, pounding along with my raging heartbeat. I was vaguely aware of movement, and then the couch was against my back. Lee was levered over me with one knee on the cushion and the other foot on the floor. His left arm supported his torso while his right hand gripped the back of my knee, sliding upward along my thigh in a firmly possessive glide. His breath hissed out when he reached the point where my garter clipped to the top of my silk stocking. He tore his gaze away from mine and looked down, pushing my skirt higher to bare me from the waist down. "Jesus, Y/N." A low rumble vibrated in his chest, the primitive sound sending goose bumps racing across my skin. "Your boss is damned lucky he's gay." In a daze, I watched Lee's body lower to mine, my legs sliding apart to accommodate the width of his hips. My muscles strained with the urge to lift toward him, to hasten the contact between us that I'd been craving since I first laid eyes on him. Lowering his head, he took my mouth again, bruising my lips with a fine edge of violence. Abruptly, he yanked himself away, stumbling to his feet. I lay there gasping and wet, so willing and ready. Then I realized why he'd reacted so fiercely. Someone was behind him.

DUN DUN DUN ....UPDATE TOMORROW!

[ronnykblair]

From Biology to Investment Banking: How to Become an Even Better “MD”

A long time ago, an angry reader kept leaving comments saying that my estimates for MD-level compensation were off.

He posted an analysis showing why my estimate of $1,000 per hour was wrong and explained why MDs make more like $100-$200 per hour.

His numbers lined up, but then I reached the end of his “analysis” and read the punchline:

“People have been led to believe that MDs make a huge salary, but the ones that are really making money are the hospitals; doctors are just employees at the hospitals and clinics.”

Oops.

I can understand the confusion.

But on this site, MD means Managing Director.

And the pay differences above are one of the many points that lead many students to switch from biology to investment banking – as our reader today did:

Switching from Biology to Business

Q: Can you summarize your story for us?

A: Sure. I graduated from high school as one of the top students in my class and started university at a Top 25 school in the U.S.

I began as a biology major, mostly due to my personal interest in the industry, but within a few months, I realized I had no idea what I was doing with myself.

So, I transferred to a much smaller and lesser-known school.

It wasn’t even ranked at the national level, and it had approximately 3-5 alumni, total, in investment banking.

I stuck with biology at first, but I began to lose interest in it after two years of classes.

My roommate was an economics major, and after speaking with him, professors in the business school, and those 3-5 alumni, I switched into economics.

I liked that a lot more, but I got such a late start that it was almost impossible to win a finance internship in my junior year, let alone an internship in investment banking.

I applied to more internships than anyone else I’ve spoken to – maybe 500+ applications – but nothing worked because all my experience and coursework had been in healthcare.

I read about valuation groups at accounting firms and learned how the skill set might be relevant for IB roles, so I gave myself a crash course in accounting, valuation, and financial modeling.

Then, I applied for and won a role at a non-Big-4 firm by heavily spinning my background.

About 9 months into that job, I began networking for IB roles.

I spent 10-15 hours per week on informational interviews, emails, and calls, and won a full-time IB Analyst role at a bulge-bracket bank after about 9 months of the job search.

Q: To start with, how did you spin your background to win the valuation role?

A: I pointed to my self-study and relevant coursework and de-emphasized my biology and healthcare work experience.

Many valuation firms look for students who held leadership roles on campus, so I emphasized those in place of my non-finance work experience.

Networking also works well at these firms since fewer students do it; it’s easily the best way to get through the resume screen.

Biology to Investment Banking: Networking Strategies

Q: You mentioned earlier that you had used some “creative” networking strategies.

Can you share them with us?

A: Sure. The standard tactics worked well for valuation roles at accounting firms, but I had to become more creative as I began searching for IB roles.

Initially, I sent mass cold emails to bankers and received a total of 0 replies.

That was because I had a weak story and no mutual connections; also, I looked like a non-traditional candidate.

So, I changed my strategy and began writing physical letters (i.e., snail mail) to decision makers at banks.

If they could ignore my email in 1 second, it would take them at least 5 seconds to open my letter and decide whether or not to read it.

Q: OK, but how did you find the physical addresses?

A: If you think about it, it’s easier than finding email addresses: Just look up the bank’s address on Google Maps!

I searched for bankers’ first and last names on LinkedIn and combined that with the address data from Google Maps to send the letters.

After I sent the physical letter, I also followed up via email.

If the bank used middle names or initials in their email address format, I searched FINRA registrations to find that information.

This process of writing letters to explain my background, story, and why I wanted to work in banking was time-consuming (~1 hour per letter at first), but then I remembered your suggestion to outsource networking, and I began doing that.

I hired a virtual assistant on Upwork to gather the data and draft letters for me, which took the bulk of the time.

I then reviewed each letter and made minor edits, and my girlfriend and I sent them out weekly. Even today we joke about how we’ve perfected the trifold.

The process became so streamlined that I could easily send out 20 letters per week.

Q: Wow.

Which banks or groups did you focus on, and how did you follow up with them?

A: I started out by focusing on healthcare and tech groups, but bankers kept telling me to be industry-agnostic.

I took their advice and began to research other industries so I could discuss trends and deals anywhere.

I started with the bulge-bracket banks and moved down from there.

After I sent a physical letter, I waited a week, and if I didn’t hear anything, I followed up via email.

If I still didn’t hear anything, I followed up a few days later and kept following up every few days for a week or two after that.

Emails sent around office open time in the local time zone got the best response rates; I won informational interviews or referrals from three Vice Chairmen (!) at different banks like that.

Q: Yeah, you want the email to arrive after they’ve cleared away everything received overnight, but before the craziness of the day begins.

What were the biggest challenges you encountered in this process?

A: The biggest challenge, by far, was telling my story effectively and convincing them I was serious about the biology to investment banking move.

I had an unusual background – I had transferred to a smaller university, I had switched majors, and I had become interested in finance very late – and I struggled to explain all that at first.

Also, I had to use my story to preempt the inevitable “Why haven’t you done a previous IB or finance internship?” and “Why didn’t you get in earlier?” questions.

I did not encounter problems with firms never getting back to me after interviews.

Lateral opportunities come up as a result of unexpected departures, so teams usually need to hire someone quickly.

Investment Banking Non-Finance Backgrounds: How to Tell Your Story and Handle Surprises

Q: Agreed; it’s also more of an issue at small banks rather than the bulge brackets.

On that note, how did you tell your story effectively?

A: I stripped my story down to its bare essentials and resisted the urge to “explain” too much.

For example, I left out the part about transferring to a smaller university because it didn’t help my case at all.

I also left out my university’s name because it wasn’t well-known, and I already had full-time work experience.

My rough story outline was:

Beginning: Entering university, I majored in biology. I had family members in medicine, and I also wanted to go into the industry.

Spark: Halfway through, I realized it wasn’t for me, and I became more interested in economics because of [Specific Professor/Class].

Growing Interest: I liked economics, but I also wanted more practical, hands-on applications of the topics, so I became interested in investment banking and valuation, which led to my current role.

Preempting of Key Objections: I started late in the process, so I was not able to complete an IB internship. But valuation work seemed like the next-best alternative, and I felt the skill set would apply to IB roles as well.

The Future / Why You’re Here Today: So, I’m here today because I want to take the skills I’ve gained in my current role and apply them to major transactions. I’m interested in IB because you influence deals rather than just weighing in one aspect, such as valuation, or analyzing deals after they’ve taken place, and I’m excited about this firm and group because of [Recent Deals the Group Has Worked On].

Q: That story outline is better than 99% of the ones we see.

What other surprises or challenges did you encounter in networking and interviews?

A: I was surprised at how my story worked very well with some bankers but very poorly with others.

Anyone who had attended a non-target school or moved in from a different career responded well, but it was harder to connect with graduates of elite universities and business schools.

Also, at some banks, I kept getting “referrals to HR” from bankers.

They were trying to be helpful, but these calls tended to be useless because they were often with teams that had no open positions.

One HR group at a bank asked me to stop asking for referrals since they had no open roles!

Since lateral roles pop up unexpectedly, staying in touch with bankers was crucial.

If someone quits randomly in the middle of the year, you need to be #1 on senior bankers’ list of “candidates to call.”

Q: Yeah, it’s even more critical than in on-cycle recruiting because of the timing.

What else did they ask you about in interviews?

A: My valuation experience and perspective put me in a good position since I had more real-world experience than most candidates.

Bankers did not ask me that many conceptual questions, but focused on topics like the selection of comparable companies and how to tweak the set to get the results the client wanted to see.

Other than that, they focused heavily on my story, how much I knew about the bank, and recent deals they worked on (which you need to know about).

Q: Great. Any final thoughts for students who also want to move from biology to investment banking (or another non-finance major to IB)?

A: The main points are:

1) Think of networking as a process, not a series of results.

It’s discouraging to focus on the results because most networking efforts turn into dead ends.

It’s better to think of it as an extended process and not worry too much about how many responses you get in one week.

2) Frame your story for your audience.

You can have the best story in the world, but it’s useless unless the person you’re speaking to can relate to it.

3) Be persistent.

If there’s anything that bankers care about besides academic background and work experience, neither of which you can immediately change, it’s persistence.

Some people track how many times candidates have contacted them and recommend the ones with the most attempts, even if they never respond to those candidates!

Q: Thanks for your time! Great tips.

A: My pleasure.

The post From Biology to Investment Banking: How to Become an Even Better “MD” appeared first on Mergers & Inquisitions.

from ronnykblair digest https://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/biology-to-investment-banking/

[samanthasroberts]

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

Last March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have deterred her. Betty a white woman who left school after ninth grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in severe poverty wanted to vote.

So she waited with busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth shes had since her late 20s both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man shed fled after he broke her jaw.

Betty worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a result, its hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath whose mouth overloads his ass.

No one loathes Trump who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility more than she.

Yet, it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?

Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class

Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didnt have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall werent clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. Surprisingly, a Gallup researcher wrote, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism not income, education, gender, age or race predicted Trump support.

These facts havent stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working classs giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trumps appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if were examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

Part of the current glimpse is JD Vance, author of the bestselling new memoir Hillbilly Elegy. A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty. A conservative who says he wont vote for Trump, Vance speculates about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus. While his theories may hold up in some corners, in interviews coastal media members have repeatedly asked Vance to speak for the entire white working class.

His interviewers and reviewers often seem relieved to find someone with ownership on the topic whose ideas in large part confirm their own. The New York Times election podcast The Run-Up said Vances memoir doubles as a cultural anthropology of the white underclass that has flocked to the Republican presidential nominees candidacy. (The Times teased its review of the book with the tweet: Want to know more about the people who fueled the rise of Donald Trump?)

While Vance happens to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isnt always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.

Countless images of working-class progressives, including women such as Betty, are thus rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll.

This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America red v blue in which the 42% of Kansans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are meaningless.

This year, more Kansans caucused for Bernie Sanders than for Donald Trump a newsworthy point I never saw noted in national press, who perhaps couldnt fathom that flyover country might contain millions of Americans more progressive than their Clinton strongholds.

In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.

Poor whiteness and poor character

The two-fold myth about the white working class that they are to blame for Trumps rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.

I have never seen them flap so insistently as in todays election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.

In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamsons assessment of poor white voters among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use deserve to die.

The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles, Williamson wrote. Donald Trumps speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

For confirmation that this point is lost on most reporters, not just conservative provocateurs, look no further than a recent Washington Post series that explored spiking death rates among rural white women by fixating on their smoking habits and graphically detailing the haggard face and embalming processes of their corpses. Imagine wealthy white woman examined thusly after their deaths. The outrage among family and friends with the education, time, and agency to write letters to the editor would have been deafening.

A sentiment that I care for even less than contempt or degradation is their tender cousin: pity.

In a recent op-ed headlined Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, David Brooks told of a laid-off Kentucky metal worker he met. On his last day, the man left to rows of cheering coworkers a moment I read as triumphant, but that Brooks declared pitiable. How hard the man worked for so little, how great his skills and how dwindling their value, Brooks pointed out, for people he said radiate the residual sadness of the lonely heart.

Im hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We dont need their analysis, and we sure dont need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.

One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with hot takes written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects.

Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a blue-collar middle class mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly started with economics and ended with economics. The anger he observed was pointed up, not down at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.

Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who wont vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the countrys moral scourge.

When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language could be read as another way of saying white-trash bin. Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss normals with distaste behind closed doors.

The DeBruce Grain elevator. Federal safety inspectors had not visited it for 16 years when an explosion ripped through the half-mile long structure, killing seven workers. Photograph: Cliff Schiappa/AP

When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.

Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.

I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.

That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.

Such derision is so pervasive that its often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.

Many people recommended to me the bestselling new history book White Trash, for instance, without registering that its title is a slur that refers to me and the people I love as garbage. My happy relief that someone set out to tell this ignored thread of our shared past was squashed by my wincing every time I saw it on my shelf, so much so that I finally took the book jacket off. Incredibly, promotional copy for the book commits precisely the elitist shaming Isenberg is out to expose: (the book) takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing if occasionally entertaining poor white trash.

The book itself is more sensitively wrought and imparts facts that one hopes would dismantle popular use of its titular term. But even Isenberg cant escape our classist frameworks.

When On the Media host Brooke Gladstone asked Isenberg, earlier this year, to address long-held perceptions of poor whites as bigots, the author described a conundrum:They do subscribe to certain views that are undoubtedly racist, and you cant mask it and pretend that its not there. It is very much a part of their thinking.

Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.

The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room, she told Gladstone. as if theyre more racist than everyone else.

That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education were told. As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.

Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites not even white Republicans who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.

It wasnt poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the war on drugs.

Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black welfare queen.

These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.

Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trumps campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.

Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American

Based on Trumps campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.

One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.

Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. A lot of whats shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas, he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.

Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. Theres this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life, he said, naming one cause as the filters that stand between ordinary people who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.

Im very encouraged when I meet people in their environments, Obama told Robinson. Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that arent always as encouraging.

To be sure, one discouraging distillation the caricature of the hate-spewing white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans is a real person of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol boy who menaces those with less power than himself running people of color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women, shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be if hed been born where I was.

Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.

Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in red America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are voting against their own best interests, undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isnt mentally fit to cast a ballot.

Whoever remains on Trumps side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Lets be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who they are.

Journalist? Then the chances are youre not blue collar

A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:

Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is an idiot.

This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesnt support Trump. It also made me laugh one cant farm cattle. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. Its sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.

The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.

This isnt to say that one must reside among a given group or place to do it justice, of course, as good muckrakers and commentators have shown for the past century and beyond. See On the Medias fine new series on poverty, the second episode of which includes Gladstones reflection that the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.

I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and Im resistant to rote condemnations of the media. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. Its everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didnt bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.

The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trumps venom now fills. That the term populism has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy its supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.

One such person was my late grandfather, Arnie. Men like Trump sometimes drove expensive vehicles up the gravel driveway of our Kansas farmhouse looking to do some sort of business. Grandpa would recognize them as liars and thieves, treat them kindly, and send them packing. If you shook their hands, after they left Grandpa would laugh and say, Better count your fingers.

In a world in which the Bettys and Arnies of the world have little voice, those who enjoy a platform from which to speak might examine their hearts and minds before stepping onto the soap box.

If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonalds bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

[silviajburke]

Peak Bull: Fake Markets, Fake Money

This post Peak Bull: Fake Markets, Fake Money appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

[Urgent Note: David Stockman warns that the nation’s future and a massive debt ceiling hangs in the balance as Wall Street’s peak bull stocks carry on. The economist is on a mission to send his new book TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… and How to Bring It Back out to every American who responds, absolutely free. Click here for more details.]

Washington is not governing. What was expected after the election by Wall Street was a rebirth of growth through pro-business policies, a giant stimulus from tax cuts and a sweeping infrastructure package within the economy. Growth expectations have been languished and slowly ground to a halt at near 1% GDP growth.

Real GDP growth is close enough to zero when you realize that they’re understating inflation. If you look at nominal GDP, which is roughly 3.5% to 3% a year at most, and you take a real measure of inflation from that – there isn’t much left.

All of the expectations that have been priced into the market and still linger will eventually come to terms with the fact that none of the anticipated growth is happening.

Government leadership hasn’t even started on a tax bill yet. They also haven’t started on the budget resolution for fiscal year 2018. There is a somewhat arcane machinery for the fiscal process to passing such a bill but without a reconciliation instruction.

Currently there is a filibuster proof majority in the Senate holding 60 votes. What that means is there’s not a snowball’s chance of anything passing. There would need to be a reconciliation instruction for the 2018 budget that would begin October 1st in order to bring a tax bill through committee and to the floor of both houses.

Congress hasn’t even started the budget resolution process and while some people may think it’s still early, the hour is late. There are very few legislative days left between now and the start of the new fiscal year and we don’t even have any semblance of a budget resolution.

Revenues, spending and tax policy must be approved and voted upon with consensus in the Republican majority. Achieving all of that in the House and the Senate is going to be virtually impossible. This is why the stimulative tax bill that was expected is dead in the water.

Now we are in early July and we’ve had weeks and months of the Trump presidency go by with almost nothing to show for it, other than controversy and continued efforts to relitigate over Russia. Because of all of this distraction, there has been virtually nothing done and even on the simple priority of repeal and replace Obamacare, we’re essentially nowhere.

I think the leading indicator is that if Congress can’t even repeal and replace Obamacare, when it was the substantial issue that Trump ran on during the campaign, that the Imperial City is frozen.

The only reason that I can see why the stock market remains at peak bull is the same reason why the S&P 500 is sitting up at $2,450. It’s what I call the nosebleed section of history on a valuation basis.

By valuation, I mean that we’re at 20 or 25 times the $100 a share that the S&P 500 companies earned on a Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) basis in the 4 to 12 month range ending in March. Now 25 times earnings is not only statistically a high number, it’s above 90% of the observations in the last century.

The question is, why believe that it’s safe to be in the casino and pay 25 times earnings this late in the cycle, when a recession is inevitable within the next year or two? Earnings are going to collapse $50 or $30 a share – just like what happened last time.

Why would you keep paying such high multiples for earnings that are bound to decline big? In a high risk/reward atmosphere, the likelihood of upside gains from $2,450, where it was a couple days ago on the S&P 500, is comparable to the downside risk if and when the economy dives.

Reagan, Peak Bull and Fake Markets

We are now at peak bull. The only thing holding this together is a belief that somehow, despite the media eating Trump alive, robo machines and day traders refuse to see this coming. It can only be explained by a belief that Donald Trump is going to pull a rabbit out of a hat and we’re going to get the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

Even if we could get the second coming of Ronald Reagan, we wouldn’t want it because the 1980’s were not all they’re cracked up to be. Not to jump on Ronald Reagan, he was in many ways a great President, far better than most. He did have the right intentions, the right philosophy, he was a small government conservative who wanted lower taxes, etc.

What is important to remember is that none of what Reagan anticipated panned out. When the politicians got ahold of the White House, the tax bill and spending proposals, they failed dead on the spot and ended up with a big tax cut and massive stimulus.

That wasn’t the supply side of Reaganism. It was accidental Keynesian debt-fueled deficit funded stimulus that helped the economy for a few years. It did not have a lasting effect, and is not something we can do today because we currently hold $20 trillion in debt.

Above is the NASDAQ 100 at peak bull before a bubble. If you simply put your hand where that peak bull line leads and ignore what’s on the right side, you could believe that there was no peak bull. You could ignore the signs and believe that this time is different. That somehow Alan Greenspan and the Fed could unleash miracles of technology and economic growth never seen before and that it wasn’t too late to keep buying stocks.

If you had, within days, the market collapsed by 10% or 15%. This was a massive bubble, and  the financial bubble we’re in today is far bigger, far uglier. Ignorance today is far less justified. If you had been drinking the Kool-Aid starting at the very peak on this chart, you will have lost 85% of your money in two years had you not gotten out.

I think we’re very close to this peak again. Fast forward 17 years and the same thing could happen if you don’t get out of the way. It’s clear that the casino is now faltering and teetering toward disaster. It won’t take much to blow the whole house of cards down.

It’s better to look like a fool before the bubble pops than to be one afterwards. I happen to be born the same year as Donald Trump. That was the first class of the baby boom. The baby boom getting hurt by markets now simply won’t get another chance. If you got blown away in the ’87 crash, you could come back. If you got hit by the dot-com buzz, there was still a chance to recover. Even if you got slammed in 2008 and you were very courageous or even foolhardy to jump back in, perhaps you’ve recovered most of your lost ground.

Now there is no more time and when this one collapses, there’s two things. First, most of the baby boom generation will be out of time. Second, there will be no snapback because I believe the Fed has finally played its last hand. It’s out of dry powder, with the size of the balance sheet it has basically trapped itself into a corner.

When the market collapses, there is going to be very little ability for Washington, either on the fiscal or the monetary side, to bail it out.

It is important to always remember what’s at risk and the danger that we face. The proposition that somehow Trump can pull a rabbit and create a revival of what allegedly happened during the 1980’s is just not possible.

What the Reagan revisionists claim happened, didn’t. That’s not for one of trying and not for a lack of good intentions, but as an empirical matter.

Murphy’s Law flattened the Reagan economic program. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. The defense budget increase was far bigger than anybody planned. The tax bill ended up double the size that we actually laid out. The point is, it isn’t what it was cracked up to be and was an accident of biblical proportions.

That is not something that we could replicate today. As the chart above shows, Reagan started with essentially a clean federal balance sheet. The total debt was $930 billion. When we took off, it was 30% of GDP. That seemed high at the time, but relative to where we’ve come since, it meant there was a lot of room. There was headroom for debt increases that, at least in the short run, could be used to fund the tax bill.

When examining the green arrow on the chart, you can see where Trump is starting. He’s starting with nearly $20 trillion of public debt. In other words, it’s exploded 20 times over those years.

We’re now at 106% debt-to-GDP. There isn’t room to have another Keynesian miracle either by accident on purpose. In the 1980’s, as the Reagan plan developed there were actual budget surpluses projected for the middle and latter part of the decade.  Not only did we have a relatively clean balance sheet to start out with, but under the fiscal mechanism in place, there was the ability to reduce the revenue without going deep in debt.  Today, that’s all gone.

There is no bracket creep. What we have now with all the fiscal irresponsibility for the last 30 years, is a built-in budget deficit that’s getting larger and larger.

With each passing year we’ve added trillions in optimistic economic assumptions that span the next decade. That’s before a dime of a potential Trump program is put on the table.  Before any additional Trump programs take place, in my judgment (contrary to the CBO $10 trillion) I say $12 to $15 trillion of built in spending.

This is a different world. This is a different fiscal universe and there is no way of replicating such measurements in the next decade for what actually happened back then.

The speculators and bulls down on Wall Street will soon begin to understand where we’re starting and where we’re headed.

The Gipper may have got away with failure because Washington kicked the can — by continuing to borrow and print money — for the next 35 years.

That inflated financial bubble which has been building since 1981 will finally implode.

This time it will stay imploded because the monetary and fiscal branches of government have finally exhausted their ability to defy the basic laws of economics and sound finance for good.

Regards,

David Stockman for The Daily Reckoning

P.S. We’ve never shared this video warning before.

But a massive bubble has been brewing in this one corner of the market…

And I have excellent reason to believe it could start to pop as early as this August 1.

That’s just weeks from now.

This is URGENT, time-sensitive material, so I strongly urge you to watch this brief video immediately. This peak bull event could have a devastating effect on your finances.

Click here now and see what’s coming.

The post Peak Bull: Fake Markets, Fake Money appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

[itsworn]

Coolest Dad Ever Builds 10-Second Coronet For Son’s Prom!

Gregg and Grant Somerville have taken a nice 1968 Coronet and transformed it into a beautiful beast.

The state of Florida is filled with lots of sun, lots of beautiful weather, and loads of cool cars. In that respect it can be kind of tough to stand out from the crowd, right? After all, when any of us builds a project we want to do it in a way that sets us apart from the crowd. Whether we outwardly say it or not, we want our stuff be the recognized because it is so clean, because it is so mean, or because it is just different than anything else, right? There are enough belly button cars out there that falling into line is easy. Thankfully, Gregg and Grant Somerville completely understand this train of thought and that’s how they came to create the awesome 1968 Coronet you see before you. No, this was not a father-and-son project that was planned from birth, but one that was a long time coming and has borne more fruit than either Gregg (dad) or Grant (son) could have likely ever imagined.

Getting the stance right on a car like this is really important and with the use of a full Hotchkis front end and the right leaf springs out back, the perfect look has been achieved. This Coronet looks ready to plant the radials and leap off the starting line at any moment.

Stories like this always have deep roots and in this case those roots sprouted with Gregg Somerville when he was a kid. “I was that kid that could identify the various muscle cars by the way they sounded,” Gregg said with a laugh. “I grew up around guys who loved drag racing and muscle cars and it rubbed off on me. I drag raced a Chevelle all the way through college and still spend time at the track today.” While he enjoyed his Chevelle, there was another guy that had a larger impact on him. “There was a guy around when I was a kid who had a Super Bee and just the sound of that car would make my arm hair stand up,” Gregg explained. “To this day there was something about that Mopar sound that connected with me.”

The Coppertone paint on the car came from a 1968 Triumph motorcycle, believe it or not. That color was beefed up with a healthy dose of pearl to really make it pop. Additionally, the cool airbrushing work on the car is a subtle but fantastic addition to the whole package.

For reasons genetic or otherwise, Gregg’s son Grant has loved old cars since he was old enough to peer out a window and see them. “It is pretty amazing to say but he has always had this knack for old cars,” Gregg said. “He’d be four or five years old and telling me to look at cars passing by or on the side of the road. When I had saved some money and he was old enough, this was something that we had talked about going after together and doing. Getting our hands on a car that we could do our way. That’s how this all got started.”

Here’s the belly of the beast and the engine that makes this Coronet so fun. The 526ci Indy Cylinder Head-built “Legend 526” took a factory 440 car that was fun and turned it into an amusement park on four wheels.

We’re taking nothing away from the great engine builders out there making horsepower every day but it is hard to argue the logic that Gregg followed when calling Indy and ordering a well sorted, reliable, turnkey 655hp package.

The real start of this father/son love affair with a 1968 Coronet started at the world famous Daytona Turkey Rod Run which is held at Daytona International Speedway. Among those thousands of cars are hundreds and hundreds for sale in a massive car corral. Back when Grant was 14 years old he and Gregg attended the event with cash in hand, looking for the right car for them. They walked into the facility and the first car they saw was a 1968 Coronet, and while they liked it they decided to keep on shopping. “We were leaving for the afternoon kind of disappointed that we did not find anything when we ran into the guy selling the Coronet again,” Gregg said. “The guy talked us into taking it for a ride and as we were cruising around I looked at Grant and we both kind of realized at the same moment that this was the car, so we bought it.”

Yes, the car was a runner and a driver but it was a far cry from the beastly thing you see sitting on the pages before you. “The car was an original 383 car and it had a kind of tired 440 in it when we bought it,” Gregg said. “The paint was OK but there were signs that we’d need to get into some body work, and generally speaking the car just needed help. It was a perfect project car because the whole thing was there and it was a ripe candidate to be improved upon.”

One area that did not get modified by Somerville was the interior. Outside of a couple additional gauges to keep track of the engine’s health, the guts of this Coronet are just as Dodge intended them to be in 1968.

The body was taken down to bare metal, the interior gutted, and the full scope of what needed to be done was seen. “There were rust issues in a few areas of the car and it was pretty wild to see how much steel was cut out of the car and replaced,” Gregg remembered. “B&B Autobody was a great partner in this project. They really did the job the right way and took a lot of pride in it as well. I have heard a lot of rough stories involving body shops, but these guys were pros from the start to the finish.”

You may be wondering about the color of the car. It is not a Mopar color. Instead it is a Triumph Motorcycle color called Coppertone that was tweaked with a significant amount of pearl in the mix. “Because of all the pearl in the paint, it legitimately changes colors depending on the light,” Gregg said with pride. “It is a pretty unique color and helps the car stand out from the crowd.” The large, square B-Body styling of the machine is also something that keeps it from blending in with some of the more curvaceous designs of the later 1960s.

If you are going to make 655 hp at the flywheel you better have the right stuff backing it up. This Strange built Ultimate 60 has 3.55 gears and a locker in it to get all of that power to the ground. Note how clean the underside of this car is!

As beautiful as the body of the car is and as unique as the paint is, if this car did not have the muscles to back up either of those two things it would all be for naught. By this point you understand that Gregg and Grant wanted to do this car once, and do this car right. By that logic there was only one possible engine to power it: an Elephant. That being said, there are tons of options to choose from these days. Build one from scratch? Go with a crate engine? A stock displacement mill? A stroker? Working with John Howard at 21st Century Automotive on the mechanical end of the car, Gregg nearly had Howard screw him together an engine but after doing a bunch of research he found another option. “I really wanted a powerful Hemi in this car because after all, when I was a kid I could not afford this stuff and when you are building a dream car, you want to go all out,” Gregg said with a laugh. “I found Indy Cylinder Head and had a few long conversations with Russ Flagle and ended up with one of their Legend 526 Hemi crate engines.” Indy has been around a long time and Gregg had a story he wanted to share about the company and their customer service. “I had the engine in the car for about a year, there was a mechanical problem and Russ took care of us like we were family,” Gregg said. “I shipped him the engine back, he took it apart, inspected everything, and kept his word on the repairs. I have had the engine back in the car ever since and it has run like a top. The thing is a total animal and I’m very happy I went in the direction I did with the powerplant.”

With 650-plus horsepower on tap and nearly 630 lb-ft of torque, you are probably wondering what the car runs in the quarter mile with its built 727 Torqueflite transmission. The answer is that the car runs in the high 10-second bracket, having reeled off a bunch of 10.90 passes at Bradenton Motorsports Park in its life. The car is a cruiser and boulevard bruiser more than a drag strip warrior, hence the fact that it does not have a roll bar in it. As we all know, they look cool but can get annoying on the street. This car has made its hero passes and it’ll stick to space shuttle launch burnouts for the foreseeable future.

One of the most visible and cool parts of any car is the stance or the rake. How a machine sits at rest tends to tell a story about how it performs while under power, right? “We went with a full Hotchkis Sport Suspension front system on this car,” Gregg said. “It drives really well and with the disc brake conversion it stops lots better than stock. The Strange-built Ultimate 60 in the back is very strong and has handled everything we have thrown at it. We run 3.55 gears in there and it keeps the car comfortable around town and on the highway.” The John Howard-built 727 transmission uses a 10-inch 3,000rpm stall converter which helps get the big Coronet up and at ’em quickly whether on the strip or the street.

The coolest part of this car isn’t the Hemi, it isn’t the paint, and it isn’t the fact that it can burn the tires for a city block or run 10s. The coolest thing is the multi-generational connection it has forged between Gregg and Grant. “This is a car he will have for the rest of his life,” Gregg said. “I let him drive it to his prom and he did not wreck it, so he passed that test recently.” That little kid who loved looking at old cars is going to be attending school in the fall to become a mechanical engineer at the University of Central Florida. The little guy who grew up listening to muscle cars and identifying them as they rolled by has officially passed the bug onto his son and he’s done so in a way that will keep that young man occupied and enthralled for the rest of his days. “This car has really bought us a lot of good time and it has been an amazing process,” Gregg said. “Whether we’re in the shop tinkering around, whether we’re going to shows together, or cruising the car, it’s something that we do together and I really cherish every minute.”

So you can take your pick on this one. Do you love the large and lovely looks of a 1968 Coronet? Do you like the killer custom color that pops in the sun? Do you like a 655hp stroker Hemi that thunders through exhaust cutouts? Perhaps you love the fact that this is a story about a dad and his son. A story that lots of car guys have been on one end or the other of. Or maybe like us you love all of the above!

Whether it’s hanging out on the white sands of a Florida beach or laying down 10-second laps on the black surface of a drag strip, Gregg Somerville’s 1968 Coronet punches all the right buttons for us. 655 hp, street driven, and a father/son project to boot!

FAST FACTS

1968 Dodge Coronet R/T Gregg & Grant Somerville; Bradenton, Florida

ENGINE

Type: Indy 526ci “Legend 526” hemi Bore x stroke: 4.31(bore) x 4.50(stroke), 526ci Block: Mopar Performance Siamesed iron block Rotating assembly: Eagle 4340 crank, Eagle H-beam rods, Diamond pistons Cylinder heads: Indy 426-SR aluminum heads Camshaft: Comp 305H Magnum camshaft, .560-/.543-inch lift, 305 degrees duration Valvetrain: stainless valves, Indy 426-27 rockers, Comp 0.80-inch wall pushrods, Milodon timing set Induction: Indy single-plane intake manifold, Holley 850cfm carb Fuel system: mechanical factory-style fuel pump Exhaust: TTI Headers, full dual exhaust with Magnaflow mufflers and Doug’s electronic exhaust cutouts Ignition: MSD 6AL box, MSD Blaster ignition coil, MSD billet distributor Oiling system: Milodon oil pan, wet-sump factory-style oiling system Cooling: Be Cool aluminum radiator, aluminum mechanical water pump Fuel: gasoline Output: 655 hp & 627 lb-ft as dyno tested Engine built by: Indy Cylinder Head Best e.t.: 10.90 in the quarter mile

DRIVETRAIN

Transmission: Chrysler 727 Torqueflite automatic, 3,000-stall Turbo Action converter by 21st century Automotive, trans equipped with Jeg’s transmission cooler Driveshaft: custom steel driveshaft Rearend: Strange Engineering Dana 60 equipped with Strange locking differential and 3.55 gears

CHASSIS

Front suspension: Hotchkis front spindles and sway bar, Hotchkis torsion bars, Hotchkis spring and shock package as well Rear suspension: stock-style shocks with leaf springs Steering: Steer and Gear rebuilt steering box Brakes: front brake Jeg’s disc conversation, rear brakes drum style Chassis: Hemi K-member swap, frame connectors added, torsion boxes added, Race-style pinion snubber added

PAINT & INTERIOR

Color: 1968 Triumph motorcycle company Coppertone with heavy pearl added, custom air brushing added Painter: B&B Autobody (Sarasota, Fla), Airbrushing by “Dr. J” Interior: Factory-style interior with addition of Auto Meter gauges to monitor engine

WHEELS & TIRES

Wheels: 15-inch American Racing Torq Thrust wheels (narrow in the front, wide in the rear) Tires: Mickey Thompson Sportsman S/R front tires, 295/55R15 Mickey Thompson drag radials in rear

Special thanks: Gregg wants to thank everyone that contributed to the project, especially John Howard at 21st Century Automotive, Indy Cylinder Heads, B&B Autobody, his son Grant, and Dr. J who nailed the paint look he was shooting for.

The post Coolest Dad Ever Builds 10-Second Coronet For Son’s Prom! appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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