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bettsfic · 4 years

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how i got an agent, or: my writing timeline

when i started writing, i had no idea how publishing worked and i had a lot of misconceptions about it. but i just signed my first literary agent so i thought i’d share what my experience has been getting to this point, in case it helps anyone else with their own publication goals. i’m also including financial details, like submission fees and income, because “i could never afford to pursue writing as a career” is something that kept me from taking the idea seriously.

for context, i write mostly literary fiction and i’m on the academic/scholarly writing path. this process looks a lot different for other genres.

i didn’t write this in my pretty nonfiction narrative voice; it’s really just the bare-bones facts of how it went down, how long it took, how many words i wrote (both fanfiction and original fiction), and how much it all cost.

background

2002 - 2005: read a fuckton of books, wrote some fiction, wanted to be a writer but knew it would never happen, journaled every moment of my life in intimate detail

2006: started working full-time (at a chinese restaurant) while still in high school, also started taking courses for college credit; no time to write, and forgot i had ever wanted to be a writer

2007: graduated high school, started college (psych major), still worked at the restaurant, moved out of my parents’ house into an apartment with my boyfriend; my dad got diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer

2008: continued college full-time, quit the restaurant and started part-time as a bank teller, broke up with bf and moved in with a friend at an apartment where the rent was obscenely high; had to pick up a second job altering bridal gowns

2009: continued college full-time, started dating someone else, moved in with him, had to support him, took a third job as an admin assistant

2010: continued college full-time, still had 3 jobs; my dad’s cancer became terminal

2011: my dad passed away; i graduated college with a 3.9 and $31k of debt; quit 2 of 3 jobs; got promoted at the bank; my bf cheated on me and we broke up; moved back in with my mom

2012: a very dark time; also, bought a house (because where i’m from, it’s cheaper to buy than rent)

2013: discovered fandom

2014, age 24

this is the year i started writing and posting fanfic. prior to that i was a compulsive journaler but had no drive or desire to become a writer, despite how much i had written when i was a teenager. it seemed like a very childish dream. at this point i assumed writing was just a phase like all my other hobbies i’d picked up and set down.

but fandom proved to be really healthy for me, and i made some good friends who encouraged my writing and made me want to be better at it. i was really not very good at writing. i don’t think i had any natural creative talent whatsoever, or even a particularly vivid imagination. the only thing i had going for me was the ability to put thoughts into words after a decade of obsessive journaling.

i started writing in spring, and by the end of the year my total word count was 311k. i was making a decent income at the bank, insofar as my bills were covered and i had health insurance. i still had a significant amount of credit card debt from college that i was trying to pay down, and which was eating up all my extra income.

2015, age 25

i continued writing through 2015 and went to visit @aeriallon, whom i’d met in fandom and who told me i should consider applying to MFAs. i was miserable at the bank and knew i wanted to go back to school, but i didn’t think there was a chance in hell a grad program would accept me, since my writing wasn’t very good and i hadn’t so much as taken a single english class in undergrad. she told me to just look around and do a few google searches to see what i found.

when i started searching, i assumed i would probably be more compelled toward an MEd or MSW programs and go the therapy route, which is what the plan had been in undergrad before my dad died and my life got derailed. i never wanted to be a banker, but i’d got a promotion into commercial finance that paid decently, so i took it and told myself i’d work for a year before going back to school. but then i kept getting promoted and one year became many.

i ended up being more drawn to creative writing MFA programs because they seemed to want people with weird backgrounds like mine. also the classes sounded fun and the programs were funded. i didn’t know how i would be able to afford my mortgage payment or sell my house on a fraction of the income i was making at the bank, but i figured i’d apply and see what happened.

it took 6 months to get a writing sample ready to apply to MFAs. it was the only ofic story i’d written as an adult, and in retrospect i had no idea what i was doing because at that point i didn’t read literary short fiction. but i got the sample as good as i could get it and completed my applications. i applied to 6 schools and got accepted into 1.

in 2015 i wrote 250k. i can’t find my application spreadsheet from that year, but i probably spent between $300 and $400 on application fees. early in the year, i had finally managed to pay off my credit card debt and save a little bit of money.

2016, age 26

the school i got into was within driving distance of my house, so i didn’t bother moving. i tried to quit the bank but my boss convinced me to stay on 2 days a week working from home. i agreed to it, because my grad stipend wasn’t enough to cover my bills, and i was counting on what little savings i had accrued to get me through the program. i still had no drive or interest to publish. i mostly just wanted to go back to school so i could learn how to be better at this thing i really enjoyed doing.

in the MFA, as you might imagine, i had to read a lot of stuff and write a lot of stuff, and was encouraged to begin submitting some of the short stories i wrote for workshop. i was not particularly into the idea, considering it seemed like a lot of work for little reward, and also i didn’t think my stories were very good.

i also started teaching english comp. i hated it and decided that after the MFA, i never wanted to do it again. haha. hahahahahaha

in 2016 i wrote 343k. i didn’t apply/submit in 2016 so i didn’t pay any fees, but my grad stipend was $14k for the academic year, plus the income i was making at the bank.

2017, age 27

i did a complete 180 and decided i loved teaching more than anything else in the entire world, and i was willing to do whatever it took to become a teacher. i realized that to become a teacher, i needed to publish. begrudgingly i started submitting to literary journals. i also applied to summer workshops and got into tin house, which i highly recommend if that’s something you’re interested in. at tin house i met my dream agent, who seemed really interested in my work and encouraged me to query her as soon as i had a book done.

a lot of personal drama happened that year. i was still working at the bank in addition to teaching a 2/2 and taking a full course load. in summer i had a long overdue mental breakdown.

2017 was a rough year. i wrote 149k. this is the year i started keeping a dedicated expenses spreadsheet. i spent $174 in submission fees. tin house tuition with room and board was a little over $1500 + travel. i thought it was worth it because i met the agent i thought i would later sign, but that didn’t pan out. (i made some great friends though!!) tin house was definitely an unwise financial decision; i paid for it out of what little i managed to save in 2015.

2018, age 28

early in 2018, i went from teaching comp/rhet to creative writing, which only cemented my desire to teach writing as a career. i realized i was far better at teaching writing than writing, but i knew i had to keep writing to keep teaching (shocked pikachu.jpg), so i kept submitting to journals. i got my first story accepted. i didn’t receive any payment for that publication. i quit the bank early in the year (finally! after 10 years!) and was terrified about money, in part because my student loan payments were coming out of deferment and i was still paying off my hospital bills from my breakdown.

in spring semester, i won a few departmental awards (totaling $500ish) and got a second story accepted (again, no payment). i also got accepted to another workshop which i will not name because i hated it. i graduated in may and defended my thesis in july. the thesis would later become my short story collection, zucchini.

in fall, i stayed on at my school as an adjunct, and started writing training wheels which would later become an original novel called baby.

i wrote 450k in 2018. i paid $373 in submission fees. i was also nominated for an award for one of my publications but didn’t win. the workshop i went to was like $4000 with room and board (it was a month-long workshop). i got 75% of it covered with scholarships and i paid for the rest of it out of my savings, and even though i’d intended to drive there, my mom ended up buying me a plane ticket. again, i met a lot of big-wig writers i thought for sure would help me get an agent. i told myself i was networking, and that publication was all about Who You Knew. but that turned out not to be true for me.

as an adjunct i made $3200 per course, and i taught 3 classes in fall. in winter, i got my shit together and started applying for creative writing PhDs, mostly to convince my family i was doing something with my life, with no expectation that i would get in. in winter i applied to 2 schools. with application fees and the GRE, i ended up paying well over $500.

2019, age 29

in spring semester, i taught 2 classes while i revised training wheels into baby. when i had a completed manuscript, i finally pulled the plug and used all my networking contacts to get my dream agent i’d met at tin house. i queried her, and a very popular and well-regarded author i’d met at the other workshop emailed her on my behalf to tell her good things about me. i thought for sure i had it in the bag. this author also touched base with a few other agents whom he thought would like my work.

i didn’t hear back from any of them. not even a “no thanks.” i set down querying for a while.

i got a third story picked up and published around this time, and i was paid $25 for it. they also nominated me for an award, and i don’t think i won? but i can’t find out who did win so idk.

my grandpa passed away and i decided to sell my house and move in with my grandma so she wouldn’t be alone. i got rejected from both PhD programs i applied to and decided to get a “real job” instead, and began applying for random positions that offered health insurance, because i knew i was drastically undermedicated and it was becoming a Problem.

near the end of spring semester, i moved out of my house, put it on the market, and was interviewing for a community development manager position for a nonprofit. at the same time, i found out about another university that was taking late-season applications, and i applied. five days later, i got accepted. one day after that, i got a job offer for the nonprofit. since i had no idea how long it would take for my house to sell, and being unable to afford both rent in a new city and my mortgage payment, i deferred my PhD acceptance for a year and decided to work at the nonprofit for a while. the risk was that i could only defer my admission, not my funding, so there was a chance that the following year i wouldn’t get the same funding package.

i lasted one month at the “real job” before i had another breakdown and ended up quitting.

my house sold for well under the asking price and i received only $4000 in equity once it was all said and done. that’s a lot of money to me, but considering that i’d been paying on the house for 7 years, i was expecting a lot more.

i had a year to kill until the PhD so i decided to take a break from teaching and apply to artist residencies instead. i applied to 8 residencies and got accepted into 4, but only ended up attending 3, because the 4th was outrageously priced and there was no indication of the cost when i had applied.

in winter i picked up querying agents again. i queried 10 agents every other week. i also got a ghostwriting gig writing children’s books that paid $800 a month.

in 2019 i wrote 417k. i spent $441 in submission fees (to residencies and contests, not agent queries. never pay money to query an agent!!). i ended up teaching 3 classes fall semester.

2020, age 30

i started out the year driving across the country going to residencies. the first cost $100 (no food), the second cost $250 (A LOT OF VERY GOOD FOOD), and the third paid me $500. i was at the third when the pandemic hit.

the query rejections started rolling in. i gave up in february after 60 queries. of those 60, i received 7 manuscript requests for baby, but the consensus was that it was too long and plotless (you got me there.jpg). at the second residency completed and revised zucchini and decided to begin querying with that instead. i could only find a few agents who accepted collections so i only queried 16. i got one request for the manuscript but then didn’t hear back. i gave up in april shortly after the pandemic hit.

when i figured the collection, like the novel, just wasn’t publishable, i started submitting to contests which is the more standard route for the genre. i submitted to 12 in total and was a finalist in 1. i was rejected or withdrew from the rest.

the PhD program reached out to ask if i was still interested in starting in fall, and i said i was, so they put me in the running for funding again and i was accepted. the stipend was $17k per academic year.

like most of us, i got totally derailed in spring and stopped doing basically everything. the ghostwriting gig started paying $1500 a month and i also started my creative coaching business, which slowly but surely began to supplement my income. i also received the $1200 stimulus.

when school started, i quit the ghostwriting gig. i had no intention to continue querying either book, but i saw a twitter pitch event called DVpit (diverse voices) and decided to participate. for those who don’t know, a twitter pitch event is where you tweet the pitch for your book and use the hashtag, and agents scroll through the tag and like tweets. if an agent likes your tweet, you query them.

i got one like, so i followed up with the query. the agent asked for the full MS and a couple weeks later followed up with the offer for representation. we talked on the phone, she sent me the contract, i asked for a couple changes, and then signed!

so far this year i’ve written 375k and paid $518 in submission fees. i’ll give more details when i do my end of year roundup next month. oh, and i finally paid off my student loans.

totals

word count: 2.3 million

agent queries: 77

agent MS requests: 9

agent rejections: 28

agent no responses: 44

short story submissions: 86

short story acceptances: 3

short story income: $25

total submission/application fees: $1472

my (final) query letter

honestly this query letter probably isn’t very good which is why i got such a minimal response, but it got the job done eventually.

Thank you for expressing interest in ZUCCHINI through this year's DVpit event.

ZUCCHINI is a collection that views sex through an asexual lens. It poses inquiries into constructs like gender, sexuality, and love to dissect the patriarchal/puritanical foundations from which our social perspectives often derive. Being a collection about asexuality, each story portrays a relationship that develops from forms of attraction other than physical.

In one story, a grieving widow purchases her first sex toy; in another, a woman uses sex to cope with the death of her abusive father, and later in the collection faces the long road to recovery; an administrative assistant seeks out a codependent relationship with her boss; a masochist hires a professional sadist to lead him toward self-actualization; a woman begins to recover from her sexual assault by staging a reenactment on her own terms; and lastly, two lifelong friends in a queerplatonic relationship decide to get married. Asexuality is an under-acknowledged identity within the LGBTQIA community and is often misunderstood. In seven stories, ZUCCHINI dissects the notion of attraction, explores the intersections of sexual identity and trauma recovery, and conveys the experience of intimacy without physical desire.

Three stories in the collection have been published in literary magazines. “Lien” appeared in volume 24 of Quarter After Eight and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. “An Informed Purchase” appeared in the summer 2018 issue of Midwestern Gothic and won the Jordan-Goodman Prize in Fiction. “The Ashtray” appeared in issue 16 of Rivet Journal and has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize.

Complete at 53,000 words, ZUCCHINI is a collection in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado’s HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES, Lauren Groff’s FLORIDA, and Samantha Hunt’s THE DARK DARK.

If ZUCCHINI is of interest to you, I would be happy to send you the manuscript. Per your guidelines, I've appended the first twenty pages below, which is the entirety of the first story.

what comes next

i’m going to spend january revising the collection per my agent’s feedback. when i send it back to her, she’ll shoot it out to the first round of publishers. my understanding is that the goal is to get multiple offers on it so that it has to go to auction. if there are no offers, she’ll do another round of submissions, and so on, until we’ve exhausted our options. if that happens, we’ll reassess, but by then hopefully i’ll have another novel finished.

meanwhile, i’ll be continuing the PhD which entails teaching a 2/2, workshop, and 2 lit seminars per semester. i’m also still doing my creative coaching, writing fanfic, and working on my original projects. in summer, i’ll finally be moving to hopefully start going to school in person next fall.

the PhD is a 3 year program with an optional fourth year. i don’t see myself finishing in 3 years so i do plan to take the extra year unless something comes up. after the PhD, i’m not sure what i’ll do. a lot will probably change by then so i’m trying not to commit to one idea. i might apply to post-doc fellowships and tenure track positions, or i might leave the country and teach overseas, or i might move to LA and try to get in a writer’s room somewhere. i’ve got a lot of options.

overall thoughts/stuff i learned

first of all, you don’t have to go through all of this to publish a book. you could feasibly just write a book and query agents. the only reason it took me this long is because my PTSD brain was sabotaging me every step of the way and i didn’t start taking anything seriously until i found something i was willing to fight for (teaching). i went the MFA/literary route but other, faster routes are just as good. maybe better. probably better. actually if there’s any chance you can go a different route, you should take it.

reflecting on all of this, very little of it has anything to do with talent or being a good writer. nor does it have to do with being at the right place at the right time. i’ve only made it this far because i took very small steps over and over again, and during that walk met people who could help me -- the authors who have mentored me, the editors who accepted my stories, the agent who signed me. and as i got further along my path, i started being able to help other writers in the way i was helped.

i don’t believe i’ll ever be a great writer. the best thing i can say about my writing is that it’s competent and accessible. everything i write sets out to do something and most of the time it gets the job done. i don’t imagine i’ll ever be able to financially support myself with publishing, and i’ll certainly never be famous or well-known, but i’m good enough to keep making progress. i’ll probably continue to find opportunities that are adjacent to writing and that will keep me afloat, pending my health and provided the country doesn’t devolve into civil war.

probably the most important thing i learned in all this is that having a wide appeal isn’t the goal. you don’t write to be lauded or liked. you have to stay as true to yourself and your interests as you possibly can, so that the people who come across your path can see you and help you. you’ll need those people; no one gets anywhere alone. if you pander, if you’re too concerned with praise and success or being adored, you won’t make it very far. the rejection will eventually kill you.

with all that said, my advice to you is this: never stop writing. the ability to share our stories is the single most precious thing we have. you can’t let anything stop you from telling your stories the way you need them to be told.

#writing advice #the writing life #writing update

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nagisasstunningpersonality · 4 years

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TINSITOGS, a retrospective (happy birthday)

(yes I’m like two days too late I know I’m sorry)

Why hello followers and ass class fandom, nice to see you there. I’m sure MOST people know about this, but in case you don’t, hi. On AO3 I’m better known as livixbobbiex, writer of maybe one of the most infamous Assassination Classroom fics.

Which I mean like, if you haven’t read it yet you totally should it’s fanlore at this point I promise-

Shameless plug that I don’t need aside, I felt that, on its first birthday since actual completion, I just wanted to share some things about it. Some tit bits about writing it, fun facts, maybe even some author advice TM. I appreciate that it’ll be super annoying if I do that in the tags, though, so that’ll all be under the cut. If you don’t want to read the whole post, then no matter what, thanks for the support in general!

I also want to take the opportunity to announce that I’ve reopened my discord, so if you want to talk about my fics with me (and others), you’re more than welcome to join! (the link is here)

The origin story

I’ve stated this many times, I think, but TINSITOGS was never supposed to be a serious story. Taking you back, quite a long time, it actually started in a facebook DM with a friend. We used to come up with “head canons” with each other, which were basically just very condensed fanfiction plots over a multitude of text messages. I believe I was trying to cheer her up, and I tried to come up with some kind of plot line.

At the time, I was fairly fresh to the Ass Class fandom, and I was joking about how there were no teen pregnancy melodrama fanfictions. It wasn’t that I wanted one, I just thought it was strange for a school centric anime with a bunch of ships to NOT have one. And, back then, I only really cared about karmagisa. So I just decided ‘right it’s happening’. The reason I decided to make it ABO was due to ‘it making sense’. Fun fact: it was almost written as AFAB trans Nagisa, but I decided against it as I didn’t rate my ability to handle it well back then. Looking back on it, I’m glad I made that decision.

Over around two months, writing out the plot of this story took over my life a little bit. I had no idea where I was going with it, but I was having so much fun with the drama that I decided that Karma and Nagisa shouldn’t get together soon at all, and I had a lot of fun teasing my friend with the ‘will they won’t they’. It was only when I got bored that I invented this intense drama plotline to finish it all off.

That period of time was a lot of fun. And whilst that friendship didn’t end well, I still have a lot to thank her for. She chose Daichi’s name because I had no idea, and she wanted to annoy me because I didn’t like Haikyuu. When I couldn’t decide on his hair colour, the purple was her suggestion because ‘why logic?’ Daichi speaking Korean was because of how much she liked Kpop. She even helped me choose the title of the actual fic, so there’s a lot you can thank her for, honestly.

After I finished that story, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Whenever I daydreamed, I used to think about that damn Daichi Akabane, and how much I wanted to tell his story. I’d even come up with extra stuff to fill in a lot of the gaps, and developed his character in my mind. I decided that I was really desperate to write it down. Usually that worked when I had an idea I wanted to work through.

I wrote the first chapter in late 2017, and then the next two as well. I just, kept going, and realised that I could go further still. TINSITOGS was never something that was supposed to be shared, but I decided I may as well. After all, that fated ‘teen pregnancy drama’ fic still didn’t exist, and I thought it would be funny to make it happen.

Yes, as I’ve stated publicly a few times, TINSITOGS was a crack fic. If I wanted attention from it, it was infamy. We even joked about me cursing the fandom if it ever became the most popular fic (whoops?). What I wasn’t expecting was a bunch of people, in a fandom where at the time there were NO ongoing karmagisa fics and it was pretty dead, to really seem to enjoy it. It was enough to have me keep writing it, at least. I still don’t know at what point I actually started taking it seriously, but somehow I did, and the rest is history?

The reception

In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I would be the author of one of the most popular fics in the fandom. To this day, the amount of views TINSITOGS has is insanity to me. For the record, across all platforms it’s on today it has 238,000, which is literally a number I can’t even visualise anymore. Almost quarter of a MILLION. To this day on AO3, it’s the most viewed Ass Class fic that’s an ACTUAL ass class fic (the others are multi fandom compilations). So yeah, I achieved the original goal, I guess?

Now you might be wondering, “omg the karmagisa fandom is fujoshi trash”. And, considering the origins, it is kind of funny. The thing is, though, TINSITOGS was written at incredibly good time. It was written when there were, essentially, very few long form Karma/Nagisa stories. If any other fics did get posted on occasion, they were usually just oneshots. I was also, at that point, writing very fast. A symptom of ADHD is becoming obsessively productive over certain things. Since I was able to get a 3k chapter out every few days/once a week, TINSITOGS was consistently bumped to the top of AO3′s default view. And some of those first few chapters were altered canon, and transcribing the canon dialogue didn’t take very long. The more views it got, the more people would read it out of sheer curiosity.

I think it also helps that, at least after it started getting some positive feedback (which was honestly after the pre written chapters), I purposely tried to make it ‘not terrible’. I mean, I personally think the first chapter is pretty weak and if it wasn’t somewhat iconic to a lot of people I’d rewrite it. But in general, I purposely tried to make the world of ABO my own, to make it more accessible to those who don’t like that genre, and stay away from the inherently grosser stuff as much as possible. I genuinely do get comments about how I introduced people to the genre as a whole, still not sure if that’s a GOOD thing but hey, it happened.

TINSITOGS turned into a lot more than just a joke. It turned into my favourite hobby. It turned into a research project (honestly, you would not believe the amount of mummy vlogs and legit scientific articles about child development I consumed). It turned into something that, at least I believe, was widely loved.

Meaning

I think it might be wrong to say that I don’t have AN idea of when I started to take the fic super seriously. For me, it was around the time someone commented something along the lines of saying my writing meant a lot to them, that they’d spent all night reading it and had been unable to put it down.

Not to get too dark here, but I do have a past in writing a very long, somewhat popular fic (it’s still on my fanfic net profile if anyone’s interested, but I don’t recommend it). However, in the latter part of my teenage years, the depression struck. Writing was the love of my life, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it anymore. Maybe I’d be able to muster an idea or even a chapter at the best points of that, but I’d never completely finished any story. Starting to write again was a huge step in my recovery, and one of the reasons I convinced myself that life was worth it was being able to impact someone’s life somehow. Even to this day, I still remember the fics I read when I was, like, thirteen. How much I still remember them, and how much they meant to be at the time. I wanted to be that writer for someone else. To be honest, it was actually Yuri!!! On Ice that got me out of the super bad, but I still never wrote anything of real consequence. TINSITOGS was the first time in a long time I actually committed to something.

And, to be completely honest, there were a lot of times I was tired of it, and wanted to just quit. But, the thing was, I felt like people depended on me in a way. I got so many comments that were just FILLED with support, telling me how much they looked forward to every update. It wasn’t just empty words, either, a lot of the times these comments would be super engaged with the actual writing. I can’t even describe just how much they meant to me, how much I would look forward to reading everyone’s opinions. And then discord happened, which was a lot of fun.

TINSITOGS went a lot further than I ever thought it would. There were comments, discussions, fan art, fan FIC (which is honestly incredible to me). Someone even added it to TV Tropes, at one point. Not to mention the Cards Against Humanity deck and quiz It makes me so unbelievably happy that I could inspire that much creativity, but it’s a two way street. It was all of that which inspired me to write, too.

Writing

The only real goal I actually had was aiming for around 3000 words per chapter. I had a whole facebook log of plot points as planning, and I was mostly just trying to expand on them into prose. I honestly thought that, at its completion, the entire fic would be around 100k words, if that. Not, at one point, being literally the longest ass class fic on AO3.

There are a lot of aspects that were directly adapted from the original messages, and I tried to stay faithful to it more so at first, even if I later removed some of the pure crack. But the style was also vaguely similar, with the story being told mostly from Nagisa’s perspective with swaps to Karma when it made sense. All the main plot beats, too, are pretty much identical. The plus to this was I was able to add a lot of really fun foreshadowing, and I feel like it’s a fun reread because of it.

Honestly though, if there’s a demand to release those OG message logs, I will. Mostly because it’s kind of funny, and interesting to see. Isogai and Nagisa were engaged at one point, even.

Obviously, it changed somewhat. 3000 was the minimum length, and the time to completion was whenever it felt right. One of my big concerns was about pacing, so it took a lot more fleshing out and maybe ‘filler’ content for some of the main arcs to work.

There’s parts of TINSITOGS I don’t think aren’t written that well, and some that I’m still super proud of. I think you can definitely tell there’s a gradual shift in style, and I get a lot more comfortable with writing them as characters as it goes along. To be honest, my pride for the fic overall is what it represents.

It is funny to think about the places it got written in, though. I started it when I worked at McDonalds with no life direction, then it went through my first year of university with me. It’s been written in at least four countries. Aeroplanes, night clubs, long haul buses, a train through the Japanese southern coastline. Even the start of covid. TINSITOGS managed to see a lot. I even turned a scene in (the boat scene during the India chapter with altered names) to my university as a legitimate assignment.

There were also a few messages I wanted to achieve, once I realised I had the platform to put them across. One of them was, obviously, ‘use protection kids’. It was important to me that I didn’t glamorise it too much, and I think that came across. I also wanted to dispute some of the issues with ABO, and subvert the consent issues as much as I could. An arc I really ‘liked’ writing was how abuse doesn’t always look the same way, and that it can be a drawn out change in behaviour. How the most important part of ‘being a good parent’ isn’t perfection, but genuinely loving and doing the best you can for your kid. How love doesn’t solve everything, and effective communication can take a very long time to learn and build a functional relationship. I mean, there definitely was a lot I tried to put in, and you’re free to interpret it all how you want. But, I like to think some people learnt some of these things, at least.

Daichi

Honestly, Daichi developed almost of his own free will. I had a good idea of his appearance, and that he was smart. Writing him from birth until around nine years old (older if you read the sequel fic) pretty much allowed that fluidity. It was really fun to explore a nature vs nurture development, and let his own characteristics speak for themselves.

He’ll always have a special place in my heart.

This is the first image I ever made. When I was trying to figure out what Daichi looked like, I honestly just edited Karma’s hair (pretty well, actually? I’m impressed with my past skill). That’s where the ‘he looks just like Karma’ meme kind of came from.

This was the first image I actually created of Daichi. I THINK it was on rinmaru games mega anime creator or something, but it’s literally not available on the internet anymore as far as I can tell, so I can’t double check. This was in the pre-piccrew days. His eyes are closed because they didn’t have the right tone of goldish/silver.

His sister, Kaguya, didn’t even exist originally, even though I decided on that ending pretty early on. Actually, she was going to be called ‘Irina’ due to some hijinks. Initially, when Karma found out about Irina’s pregnancy, she was going to get super emotional and mad at him and basically force him to name his first born daughter after her. Karma agreed to shut her up, never intending to have another child, so when the surprise second child later came along they had to live with the pain. However, to be honest I just forgot to write in the actual scene that set it all up, and I decided against adding it anywhere else. The name Kaguya was a very last minute decision, and it was a chance for me to explore some ideas that didn’t fit with Daichi’s character.

Interestingly too, Daichi and Nao were never intended to be a thing. I only decided that towards the VERY end. Even though the reason I named Nao that was because of a ship I had in a J Drama (Good Morning Call). It just kind of ended up happening because I won myself over with imagining the cute.

The music

I used to write with a lot of background music, though not all the time. Particularly towards the start, there was a lot that didn’t really make sense thematically, yet I would write to a lot.

Here’s a link to the spotify playlist if you want it it’s basically all the ones I noted I’d listened to a lot. Not including the smut ones, though, I have a whole playlist for that.

Some of the notable ones:

Five String Serenade - the first scene I wrote of the entire fic, in Chapter 25 New Year Time where they fell asleep cuddling.

Cosmic Love - when I wrote Nagisa’s love confession scene in hospital (I also wrote this pretty early on)

Northern Downpour (though it was actually a cover by Emma Blackery) - The chapter after Daichi’s born (30)

When The Party’s Over - Confession Time Third Period, Chapter 69. I literally listened to this song on REPEAT when I planned and wrote the kind of ‘break up’ scene, and it’s one of the few parts that made me cry writing.

Turning Page - I know I said no smut, but this song actually gave me the idea to have the “I love you” in chapter 108 be less on a whim and actually more built up. In the original plan, Karma really did just say it without thinking. I’m glad I changed that.

Bury Me Low and Numb - pretty much all I listened to when writing the last few chapters, because Evil Nagisa core. So much so that Bury Me Low was in my top 2020 songs rewind.

As for the title, there’s actually quite a funny story. I had no idea what to call the fic, and when that happens I usually just try and find some song lyrics. I really wanted to use something from ‘October’ by the Broken Bells. Not only because it’s my favourite song (has been for years), but thematically it really worked. The issue was, it worked as the WHOLE song, there were no individual lyrics that captured everything. And, if they did, they didn’t flow very well. And naming the fic ‘October’ would have been weird for a lot of reasons. There Is No Sweeter Innocence That Our Gentle Sin really was just plucked randomly, in a desperate search to find any snappy lyrics from any song that had some kind of meaning. After a bit of discussion, we settled that it kind of worked... if Daichi is innocent and they committed a sin or something. It also wasn’t the most obvious lyric from the song (Take Me To Church if anyone doesn’t know) so I just went with it. It works out, I think, because TINSITOGS turned out to be a pretty good acronym and pronounceable word in its own right.

The merch redbubble drama

It’s a well known fact that I’m not very good at art. However, I decided to try pixel art because it seemed the easiest to not mess up. I made Karma and Nagisa, before deciding to also give Daichi a try.

This, to this day, is the only good quality art of Daichi that I actually own. The only one I’m actually happy sharing and thinking it doesn’t look terrible. As much as I love people sending me fanart, it’s not ‘my property’, right.

So, I was kind of joking about TINSITOGS having merchandise. At first I just made two funny quote things, and uploaded it to redbubble. I was never intending to actually make money from this, and I’d agreed to myself that if I did, I would just donate it to charity. I was joking with the quotes, but since I had this artwork I figured I may as well uploaded. Separately, there was also an image that had pixel Daichi next to pixel Nagisa and Karma (which I also created).

Aside from showing up in a few people’s adverts across the internet, there was no real harm with this. In fact, I didn’t make money anyway. It was just... more the joke of it existing. I did, however, buy myself a Daichi phone case, which is one of my favourite possessions.

The funny ‘drama’ comes in when they got taken down due to copywrite. Sure, the one with Nagisa and Karma, I understand. But the other three literally had no mention or anything to do with Assassination Classroom, aside from being from a fanfiction. So basically, someone who owns those rights claimed my OC as theirs. Which makes Daichi canon? Whatever the case, I found this hilarious don’t worry.

How has TINSITOGS changed my life?

This is quite a strange thing to think about. Because, in a lot of ways, it really hasn’t. As I’m sure a lot of people know, I don’t really consider myself to have any real ‘fame’, despite the impressive numbers. Whenever I tell people in my personal life, they seem to think I’m some sort of internet celebrity, but that’s never been the case for me. I mean, it’s hardly a cultural phenomenon.

In a lot of ways, I’d much rather befriend someone than have them admire me. Possibly because being someone’s inspiration is kind of weird... I’m just an awkward duck who likes to write after all. I don’t mind it, though. I genuinely find it an honour, even if I don’t necessarily agree. I also want to take this time to say that if anyone ever wants to talk or message me, you’re more than free to do so. I’m usually super casual with people who do that, I promise.

TINSITOGS was the first story I ever finished in the way I truly wanted to. Start to end, a full narrative. And it took a LOT. There were so many times I almost felt like quitting, or took super long breaks. For me, ADHD queen, actually finishing something was a huge deal. And I know I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t owe it to everyone who read it, and myself, to see it through. You know like, if I were to die tomorrow, at least I’ve left something behind.

In a lot of ways, it’s changed me for the better. It’s helped me develop my writing styles, and way of thinking. It encouraged me to become more active in the fandom, and develop some important friendships. I always feel like my Tumblr and Fanfiction ‘known’ factor is separate. I think most of my Tumblr following is more to do with my theories/Japanese context research if anything, for example, but I know I wouldn’t be so interested in that if TINSITOGS hadn’t lead me to deeply examine character and really look into analysing source material for clues. I also think there’s just... a lot of myself in it.

I was 17 years old, when I first came up with the idea. I finished the story when I was 20. Now, at the time of writing, I’m 21. That time has seen some pretty significant changes - just in general life facts and my own personal human development. For me at least, a lot of that was pretty turbulent, and TINSITOGS stands as a time capsule for that, in a way.

I know I gained a lot of confidence, and it affirmed to me that writing is what I love. Telling stories and sharing them is what I love.

Conclusion

Do I think TINSITOGS is an outstanding piece of writing, or the best fic ever? No. I really don’t. It’s strange to say because I definitely spent a lot of time on it, but it’s not like I put my full unbridled efforts into the story. I don’t fully plan, use a beta, or even read through on my own. And that’s okay - that’s not what I write fanfiction for. Fanfiction is my place to have fun with characters and stories I like, without the pressures of having to stand on my own complete originality. Yes, I’m fully confident that I can write at a “higher quality”, if I really wanted to. I’m also aware that some authors put their full effort into their fics, and that’s just as valid!

It feels odd to say this about my own writing, but I honestly think there’s just something in this story. It might not be written in the best prose ever, and the premise might be kind of dumb for a lot of people. But, I think, there’s some part of this fic that managed to grab people. Somehow, at some point, many readers get captured into the emotions and so drawn in that ‘they just have to finish it now!’ Again, I’m not sure myself how I actually achieved that. Of course, that won’t apply to everyone, but I do feel there’s some truth in it. And it makes me happy, to have caused that.

If TINSITOGS is your favourite fic, or if you genuinely think it’s the best story you’ve read, then thank you. I really appreciate your support, and I’m happy to have been a part of your life, I guess. I know how much fanfics can mean to a person, and that’s why I’m not going to take it down, or edit it at all. And it’s fine too, if you loved the fic for a while and moved on -i t happens. Whatever the case, I’m very honoured to have been able to occupy a moment of your life. Or if you find this fic in 10 years time, even, I still wholly appreciate you.

This story was incredibly important to me, and thank you for reading if it was ever important to you too.

You may ask, what now? Well, this is only intended to be a detailed look back for whoever’s interested, and it’s likely the only one I’ll actually do, a year after completion. Of course, if you ever want to ask me anything or just discuss the story, you’re honestly good to contact me in whatever way I have available.

I’m still writing my ongoing stories, of course, despite taking a small break due to the university work load. I fully intend to complete the stories I’ve already started to tell, at least. After that... I’m not sure if I’ll still write fanfiction. Don’t panic, this isn’t a ‘I’m quitting writing’ thing. I may, however, have bled the Karmagisa genre a bit too dry at that point. Who knows? I am pretty interested in writing something original for once, so maybe that’ll work out.

For now, at least, thank you to anyone who read this fic. To anyone who commented, liked, or interacted with me over it. To anyone who created or learnt from it. I’m really glad that I got to share this story with you all, and ultimately left some kind of mark, no matter how big or small.

Happy birthday, TINSITOGS. I had a lot of fun writing you.

#ass class #assassination classroom #ansatsu kyoushitsu #tinsitogs #karmagisa

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badartfriend · 3 years

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There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

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Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”

Image

Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

#emmie this for you

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oc-growth-and-development · 5 years

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on self-inserts, cliches, and writing for fun

I get asked a lot about how to write interesting and unique characters and how to avoid the “dreaded” self-inserts and Mary Sues. Obviously, writing unique OCs is rewarding in its own way, but it’s definitely not the only way to enjoy writing, especially if your main goal with writing is to have fun. Might be hypocritical for a prompt blog to argue this, but so-called self-inserts, cliches, and Mary Sues are fun to write, actually. In fact, allowing myself to be “uncreative” helped me redevelop my love for writing and break through my years-long writing block.

(ruminations on how I learned to enjoy writing again, some advice, and backstory under the cut cause hoo boy y’all didn’t sign up for this)

So this is by no means an original ~hot take~, but something I didn’t actually take to heart until fairly recently. And to be perfectly clear, this is just about what works for me and specifically about writing for your own enjoyment, not necessarily for publication. This is not something that everyone will agree with, but I’m sure at least some of you will agree and/or need to hear this.

For most of my writing career, I wrote with the assumption that someone would read my work eventually. Submitting fiction to literary magazines, writing essays for class and articles for work, discussing worldbuilding with writing buddies, etc. I love getting constructive criticism on my writing and all (I always tell my editors to just absolutely rip it apart lmao), but it screwed with my enjoyment of writing as a whole. My motivation to write was the gratification of knowing that other people liked my work, and I tricked myself into thinking that I liked what I wrote because other people liked it.

So when college happened and sapped the creativity right out of my system along with time and energy, I lost all motivation to write. I felt like I was competing with much better writers and that my ideas were too embarrassingly basic to share. I tried too hard to make my characters and plots “interesting” and “smart” to the point where they were no longer relatable nor realistic. (side note: my quest to avoid this is a large part of why I started this blog. Yay, backstory!)

It took a few false starts, but for the past several months, I’ve managed to consistently write most days and even look forward to writing, a feeling I hadn’t felt in AGES. How, you may ask? Well, I started writing out my cheesy daydreams! I have a cast of characters and a basic plot that have been ruminating in my brain since around middle school. Here’s the thing about this particular plot: it’s full of cliches and plot holes, the main character is an obvious self-insert, and the supporting cast is two-dimensional at best. Left in its original iteration, it’s objectively not a story I would want to read, let alone show other people. But I figured that, hey, if I’ve had this silly story in my head for half my life, I might as well write it down. It’s not like I have to show anyone anyway.

That became Rule #1: Don’t show people your unfinished writing. This one rule took a little bit to internalize for me, but once I managed it, it changed how approached the creative process. I became less obsessed with how “good” my writing was and focused more on my own enjoyment of writing. Knowing no one could ever judge what I was writing gave me the freedom to write whatever the hell I wanted, which interestingly, actually boosted my creativity. I still brainstorm a bit with friends in hypothetical terms and there is a slight chance I might show them when it’s complete if I’m comfortable enough, but for now, I am working with the expectation that no one will ever read this, and it feels so liberating.

Then comes Rule #2: Don’t be afraid to write about yourself. I injected so much of myself into my new stories, something I was scared of doing in the past for fear of someone extrapolating some deep, dark secret about me by reading it. I gave a voice to the (many) insecurities and the (sometimes embarrassing) fantasies I have, and I don’t have to worry about anyone learning about them. It’s oddly therapeutic. One example: When I was a repressed middle schooler, I struggled with letting my self-insert have a romantic relationship with a female OC. I still believe the act of making the relationship “canon” in my daydreams is the moment I accepted that I was bisexual. Nowadays, my OCs are all essentially personifications of some fracture of my personality, whether it be actual, perceived, feared, or aspirational.

And finally, Rule #3: Tropes are tropes for a reason. I get it, as writers, we try to avoid cliches at all costs (like the plague, if you will) (and before someone says anything, I know tropes ≠ cliches. I’m just using them interchangeably here). But when you’re writing solely for fun, do you really have to worry about how “original” your story is? I’m not suggesting to straight up plagiarize a pre-existing story and publish it, claiming full credit. What I mean is, say, you want to write a love triangle where the mc has to choose between a tall/dark/handsome newcomer and gentle childhood best friend. Cliche? Definitely. But should that stop you from fitting your OCs in those roles if that’s how you wanna envision it? Of course not! It’s a popular trope not necessarily because it’s a lazy plot device, but because lots of people enjoy this particular dynamic and the drama it causes. It’s a cliche and it’s interesting; the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Not all tropes are everyone’s cup of tea, but you don’t have to cater to them. Pour your own tea.

You don’t have to agree with my opinions and my rules to writing for fun. I am by no means an expert, but I think we can all benefit from shifting the focus from what you think your readers want to read to what you actually want to write. With NaNoWriMo coming up, I hope this will help with at least some of your motivation. I know it has helped mine!

TL;DR: Be self-indulgent. You’d be surprised at what you can come up with when you don’t have to worry about impressing other people.

Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

#not a prompt #writing advice #writing for fun #my two cents #oc development #character development #worldbuilding #writeblr #essay #meta #writing tips #writing inspo

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stuonsongs · 3 years

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My Top 10 Favorite Songs of All Time - 2006 Edition

2021 Editor’s Note: I was looking through some old files and found this thing that I wrote sometime in the summer of 2006 at age 22. For all I know, it could’ve been 15 years to the day! Looking back, I’m not sure how many of these songs would still make my top 10. Don’t get me wrong, I still love all of these tunes, but I’m sure you know how it goes - You get older, you get exposed to more things, and your idea of good music expands. Anyway, I thought it might be nice to share with anyone who still uses this site. I present it in its original format without edits to my writing. I ended up writing full posts in this blog about some of these songs if you go through the archive.

Stu’s Top 10 Favorite Songs…Ever

Let’s start with some honorable mentions. These were so close, and I thought about it for so long, but they had to be left off.

Honorable Mentions

All Summer Long – The Beach Boys

All Summer Long. 1964. Capitol

This song has been described so many times as being “the perfect summer song.” When you listen to it, you can’t help but smile from the opening marimba intro, all the way through. It just screams “summer” and it hurt me to leave The Beach Boys off my top 10.

Bleed American – Jimmy Eat World

Bleed American. 2001. Grand Royal

So full of energy, so rocking, and so what would’ve been the most recent song on my list. I wanted to keep it in the top 10 just so I could have a song from the ‘00s, but it wasn’t meant to be. When the chorus kicks in, I can’t help but headbang.

Marie – Randy Newman

Good Old Boys. 1974. Reprise

Randy has said that a lot of young composers pick “Marie” as their favorite Newman song, and I can see why. The idea of a guy having to be drunk to tell his wife that he loves her is pretty funny, and throughout the whole song it’s just the beautiful melody with tons of strings, all to a tune about a guy ripping on himself as he comes home drunk to his wife.

Does He Love You? – Rilo Kiley

More Adventurous. 2004. Brute/Beaute

I guess this is newer than Bleed American, so it would’ve worked too. This is another more recent song that it killed me to leave off the list. The outro is an arrangement of the main tune with a different chord progression performed by a string quartet. Very beautiful. Also when Jenny Lewis screams “Your husband will never leave you, he will never leave you for me,” I get chills every time.

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So here it is. After a long day’s work, I’m finally finished. It actually turned out much different than I was thinking when I first started. The number one wasn’t really even in my top five when I started, but I slowly realized I loved it so much. I also left Ben Folds (Five) off this list completely, and I don’t know, I just feel the whole catalogue of Ben is so solid, none of the songs stick out to me that much. But anyways, here it is! After the break of course…

Stu’s Top 10

10.

(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave – Martha and the Vandellas

Heat Wave. 1963. Motown.

This one beat out “Bleed American” just barely. The reason being that somehow, despite being nearly 40 years older than Bleed American, it still has so much energy that it kills. Dan Bukvich once told our Jazz Arranging class that you can boil all the oldies you hear on the radio down to three categories: 1) Great Song. 2) Great Performance. 3) Great Arrangement. This song is one of the great performances. The handclaps throughout, combined with the driving baritone sax behind everything and constant snare drum action will keep anybody with blood running through their veins dancing all night long.

Bodhisattva – Steely Dan

Countdown to Ecstasy. 1973. MCA

This song is my Freebird. It’s just a basic blues progression song at its core with some minor changes at the end of the form. The real kicker that drives this song home is the three minute guitar solo in the middle that isn’t nearly as rocking as Freebird, but it is highly proficient and takes me to places that just make me want to play the song over and over again. I have no idea what this song is about, probably Buddhism, but hey, this once again proves that lyrics rarely matter and the music itself is the core.

Zanzibar – Billy Joel

52nd Street. 1978. Columbia

This song reminds me of long car rides on vacations down the west coast with my parents growing up. They used to play a tape of 52nd Street, or at least their favorite selections, constantly on these trips. I didn’t hear this song again until early in my senior year in college and remembered why I loved it so much. The song has a heavy jazz influence, displayed in the breakdown where Jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard does a solo. The best part of this song though is at the end of the 4th line of each verse, Billy does this “Woah oh oh!” thing that just makes me want to sing every time. It was between this and “Miami 2017 (Lights Go Out On Broadway)” which is also a great song, but the “Woah oh oh!” is too much for ol’ Stu boy.

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) – Bruce Springsteen

The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. 1973. Columbia

Early Bruce Springsteen records have something that very few other artists can ever pull off without sounding cheesy or forced. It has this undeniable sense of urgency, like the world will fall apart and life will crumble through your fingers if this one moment in time doesn’t work out the way Bruce describes it. There are so many early Springsteen songs that just set a scene of “We have to get out of this town right now girl before it kills us, no matter what any of our parents, friends, anybody has to say.” There’s a line that kinda sums it up: “Well hold on tight, stay up all night ‘cause Rosie I’m comin’ on strong. By the time we meet the morning light, I will hold you in my arms. I know a pretty little place in southern California down San Diego way. There’s a little café where they play guitars all night and all day. You can hear ‘em in the back room strummin’, so hold tight baby ‘cause don’t you know daddy’s comin’.”

I’ve Got You Under My Skin – Frank Sinatra

Songs For Swingin’ Lovers! 1956. Capitol

This song falls into the category of great arrangement. This Cole Porter classic tune was arranged for Sinatra by Nelson Riddle. The story goes that he was still copying down parts for the players while riding in the cab to the recording studio on the day of recording. After the players ran through it once with Frank, they stood up and applauded. The Baritone sax takes control here, outlining a Db6/9 chord throughout the intro. Of course, Frank’s vocal delivery is spot on and goes up and down in all the right places for the biggest emotion impact. It’s amazing how a song with no real chorus can be so good.

A Change Is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke

Ain’t That Good News. 1964. RCA Victor

This song was not even going to be on this list, but then I ran across it while scouring my collection of music and remembered how good it was. Then I listened to it and was blown away by the level of detail that went into this arrangement. Sam’s vocals soar above the mind blowingly beautiful arrangement. The lyrics to this one actually add to the tune itself, speaking of wrongdoings in the world around him, and how social change is on its way in the form of the civil rights movement. The song flows with such ease out of Cooke that one might forget the weightiness of the content, but the song’s content is just so heavy that it’s impossible to deny it.

Whatever – Oasis

Whatever EP. 1994. Creation

This song was released as a Christmas present to the U.K. from the Gallagher brothers and company. It never appeared on any full album, only being released as a single, and amazingly, it blows away anything else they’ve ever done. Think “All You Need Is Love,” but with tons of rocking energy and a snide, nonchalant attitude. The chorus speaks, “I’m free to be whatever I, whatever I choose and I’ll sing the blues if I want. I’m free to be whatever I, whatever I like, if it’s wrong or right, it’s alright.” Not exactly poetry, and the song isn’t exactly breaking any new ground either, but the song is absolutely perfect in every way, and it was going to be my #1, but perhaps the only reason it’s not at number one is because I’ve played this song so many times that at the moment, these next three are beating it, but who knows how I’ll feel in a few months. This song also pulls the same “outro performed by a string quartet” thing as “Does He Love You?” but even better. It’s so simple, but I can’t get enough of it.

Mr. Blue Sky – Electric Light Orchestra

Out of the Blue. 1977. Jet

This is obviously the best Beatles song that the Beatles never wrote. The staccato guitar during the verse combined with the strings present in just about every ELO song combine to make a force that is undeniably catchy and musically challenging at the same time. This is really what makes ELO so good. I didn’t discover this song till probably Nov. 2005, and it was one of the best days of my life. I didn’t want to include two songs by the same artist in my top 10, but if I did, I probably would’ve added “Turn To Stone” on this list too because it is almost as awesome as this one. It’s a shame that just like Billy Joel, most critics at the time hated ELO for being overly creative musically (they called it pretentiousness). These days we have acts that really are pretentious (see Radiohead), but everyone loves them, even critics. I’m not knocking all Radiohead, just most everything post OK Computer. Sorry, got a little sidetracked there.

Only In Dreams – Weezer

Weezer. 1994. Geffen

This has been my favorite Weezer song since about a month into me picking up Weezer’s debut album back around early 2000. It has this ostinato (a repeated motif over and over again) in the bass throughout most of the whole song, never even really resolving to the Gb major chord (excluding chorus, which never really resolves) that it wants to until the end of a 3 minute contrapuntal guitar duet when everything dies out except the bass which just retards on its own until it finally plays the single Gb we’ve all been waiting for. The song on the whole up until the guitar duet is pretty tame, but once those contrapuntal guitar lines start intertwining, my ears perk up every time. I can sing both lines at separate times upon request and when the drums finally kick back in fully at the climax of the song, I let out a sigh of relief or bang on my car wheel in exultant joy, whichever is more of an option at the time.

All Is Forgiven – Jellyfish

Spilt Milk. 1993. Charisma

I always loved this song from the first time I heard it, but I didn’t realize how much I loved it until maybe April 2006. I found out about Jellyfish first semester of college in the Fall of ’02 and heard this song, and knew it was great. The constant tom-tom driven drums, the fuzzy, almost white noise distorted guitar, and the half time bass throughout. It was great. Then in April I put it on my mp3 player for the walk to school, and then I listened to it for about two weeks straight. Seriously. It runs into the next song entitled “Russian Hill” which is almost as good, but because it’s a separate song, I couldn’t include it on the list, but in my mind, they always run together and are basically one long 9 minute song. The ending just gets more and more white noise filled until you can barely take it anymore and then it just cuts off completely into the slow acoustic intro for Russian Hill. It’s perfect in every way. I think this would fall into the category of great song. And the way the song builds up right to the middle of the song and then cuts out completely except for some very VERY faint xylophone noodling, and then busts back in with some feedback directly into guitar solo. Man I love this song.

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theotherdoe · 4 years

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Hi. Hello.

*Clears throat, waves shyly.* Uhm hello there.

I am most likely speaking to a vast void here, but I want to introduce myself to the world of Tumblr and the HP fandom. I’ve been wanting to create and contribute to the fandom for awhile now, and have slowly started this process. I am hoping by introducing myself to, well, the internet, I guess, someone will see my plea for fandom friends and help hold me accountable to finishing my fan fiction and fan art (and I am such an awkward little introvert over here that I have no idea how make online friends. But this isn’t a one sided thing here - I’d love to provide feedback to stories and encouragement when writer’s block happens to others, too!).

So hi. Hello. I’m Sierra. An ICU nurse by night, and by day a sleepy creature that is an avid knitter, amateur cross stitcher, dog mom, wife to husband that collects VHS tapes of the Star Wars trilogy, and self-conscious fan fiction writer and fan art creator. The Harry Potter series has always been so close to my heart - when I was young, I picked up the Sorcerer’s Stone, and forced myself to learn how to read with that book. I was a slow reader, behind what was an acceptable reading level for my grade, and was embarrassed by that fact. But I was stubborn child, and with pure determination and the help of my older brother, I learned out how to read and fell in love with reading because of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Ever since then, HP has been so special to me (even though JK Rowling is literately an awful person like WTF). I grew up in a middle of a corn field small town (I mean I graduated high school with a class of 45 people small), so in the summers before I was old enough to get a job, I would babysit random kids and re-read the Harry Potter series from start to finish, and then start them all over again. When Deathly Hallows was finally released, I was an avid Hinny shipper, and wrote sweet, very poorly written Hinny fan fiction and pasted my drawn pictures of Ginny Weasley all over my childhood bedroom walls. But as I got older, became a high schooler, then a college student, other interests took over, and I lost touch with my love for Harry Potter.

Flash back to about two-and-a-half years ago, my then fiance and I moved 1200 miles away from all of our friends and family, and I started my career as an ICU nurse. It was an awesome, but scary time, and as someone who is not only an introvert, but has had the same best friends since the ripe old age of 6 years old, I struggled with making connections with people in my new home state. I turned to Harry Potter, re-opened my old middle school tumblr account, and came home to this beautiful fandom. It was such a comfortable feeling to be surrounded by the characters I knew and loved so well, in both there original stories and alternative universes. And it was during this time I feel in love with the Marauders Era and became thoroughly obsessed.

So in the past couple months, I started this new Tumblr (I thought it was probably a good idea to deleted the 10 year old Tumlbr that was started with an email that doesn’t exist anymore), and have slowly started creating fan art and writing fan fiction again (the whole COVID-19 thing put a damper in my plans to create more as I began working overtime like crazy earlier in the year). I love the amount of acceptance, creativity, and just pure love that is in this fandom, and I have become such an avid Wolfstar and Jily shipper in my old age. I want to contribute stories and art to this fandom that has brought me so much joy and reminded me that I love writing stories and creating art (even though I’m not sure if you can call my sketches art). So, if you stick around, you might get to see me gain enough confidence to share some poorly drawn fan art based on stories I’m obsessed with and my cute Wolfstar/Jily AU I’m writing (it was supposed to be a cute little song fic based on the song “Gorgeous” by Taylor Swift but somehow has turned into a multi-chapter, trope-y, fluffy story that I’m sure has been written before).

So, hi! Welcome to my Tumblr. It’s going to be mainly HP (which means lots of Wolfstar, Jily, a touch of Hinny, and any other ships I feel like sharing at the time), but it will also include stuff about healthcare equality, how much the 45th president of the United States sucks, the BLM movement, cute art, and anything else that tickles my fancy. Feel free to say hi, ask me to read through any stories you would like a second set of eyes on before posting, or anything else!

#introducing myself #introductions #come say hello #hp fandom #harry potter #jily #wolfstar #lol im so awkward come and say hi plz

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k-itsmaywriting · 4 years

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2020 Creator’s Self-Love Extravaganza

Boy howdy, but it has been a year. So much so that I felt the need to dig up this meme so I can lavish myself with a little TLC, ‘cause you know what? I deserve it! And so do you. This year has been tough, and even in the best of times it can be a real struggle to remember that, instead of being your own worst enemy, you should strive to be your best cheerleader. Remember to be kind instead of cruel, to forgive rather than condemn yourself. Creativity is hard, and it is always a journey, never a final destination, so let’s take a moment and sight-see where we’ve been this year, yeah???

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favorite works (fics, art, edits, etc.) you’ve created this year and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you’ve brought into the world in 2020. If you don’t have five published works, that’s fine! Include ideas/drafts/whatever you like that you’ve worked on/thought about, and talk a little about them instead! Remember, this is all about self-love and positive enthusiasm, so fuck the rules if you need to. Have fun, and tag as many fellow creators as you like so they can share the love! <3

Thank you for tagging me @kaedix and @sabraeal !! <3

1) Obi Under the Lanterns: Apparently I love writing music about Obi being happy and content :D It’s what best boy deserves. From the very beginning when I decided I wanted to write an album for the Lyrias Time Series I wanted Obi’s to explore a softer side of him, one that’s introspective about his place in the world and where/who with his home is. And I’m really happy with it!!! It’s soft and wistful but grounding at the same time.

2) Jennifer when she bodied idk i didn’t watch the movie (a Kikiyuki AU) - WIP: Sometimes when you procrastinate doing your homework you watch commentaries on movies you have neither seen nor have much intention to see. And Jennifer’s Body was popping up everywhere because people were talking about how the marketing failed the movie and Megan Fox deserved better (she sure did). I’ve also been wanting to write more Kikiyuki ALL YEAR and I had some Moods where I wanted to write gory stuff, so these just all married to create this idea. I don’t predict this is going to be very long bc I’m just trying to finish it (brain pls let me finish SOMETHING omg) but also it’s fun moving out of my writing comfort zone :]

3) Magic!AU Yuris Island Arc Pt 2 - WIP: It’s been months since I worked on this but it was fun and I want to finish it!!!! This ‘arc’ will probably end up being 3 parts and I know how I want it to go. It also has my very first AnS OC!!! I was originally supposed to do this for Trope Battle, but then lockdown started and for like a week I did nothing but go to online classes and Panic and before I knew it Trope Battle was over. And then the whole semester was over. And then the break was over. And then--

4) A DAY6 series based on some MVs with a shared fictional story that was originally meant to be one (1) ship fic now it’s an ensemble fic that’s already spiraled out of my control pls help me i’ve finished nothing - WIP: Listen, those MVs left me with MANY POSSIBILITIES because they gave me YEARNING and MANY FRIENDSHIPS TO EXPLORE. Writer brain ate that up with a spoon!!!! But yeah it’s been a very fun, no-pressure thing and I’ve written it when I wanted to de-stress. But now I want to finish them too and it’s been added to my mental list HHHHHHH

5) Obiyuki Youtuber!AU - WIP: Started writing it for AU Bingo! I might finish it idk but it was rly cute and kinda funny and it reminded me a lot of the kind of Obiyuki I wrote in like 2017 ie “fluff with Reveals(TM)” so that was nice :)

Tagging: @ruleofexception @the-pompous-potato and @fade-touched-obsidian

#answered #also Breakfast with Ryuu is another fav i just wrote that in 2019 so i wasn't sure if it counted????#as in it was not touched in 2020 #bc it was already finished #but anw i love it <3 <3 #another wip that didn't make it to the list #it's a high school kikiyuki i probably won't finish #but all you need to know is #1 it was inspired by the picture of the girl straddling her gal pal while doing her makeup #2 obi is a casual kpop fan but knows enough kpop twitter lingo to piss off everyone (Zen)#examples include #mitsuhide: mr forenzo is so harsh he didn't even give me follow-up points on my maths homework :(#obi: mr forenzo flop. ms gazelt outsold #zen: for the last time what does that MEAN

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mego42 · 4 years

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Writer Asks

Tagged by @sothischickshe, @bourbon-ontherocks and @medievalraven who are all v lovely and for reasons unknown to me, want me to ramble about my fic so like, blame them for this I guess

Tagging @fairhairedkings, @riosnecktattoo, @inyoursheets, @foxmagpie, @pynkhues if you feel like it

ao3 name: ms_scarlet (origin story no one asked for: I came up with it for a creative writing class where we had to submit everything under pseudonyms for anonymous full class critique, which was gr9 and not at all traumatic, and I was deeply obsessed with both the Grateful Dead and Sublime versions of Scarlet Begonias at the time)

fandoms: the only fandoms I’ve written fic for are bellarke/t100 and Good Girls (and Buffy but it was way back in the day, pre-organized archives and has been completely lost to time which is For The Best)

number of fics: 14 (lol, 5 over the course 3 years in t100 fandom and 9 since joining the GG fandom at the beginning of s3, you could say I have been inspired)

fic i spent the most time on: a song inside the halls of the dark for sure, it’s the first multi chapter I’ve ever done and I’m far enough into it that I will be super honest, I was extremely dubious over whether or not I’d actually see it through when I started but huzzah! It’s happening. But yeah, I spend like, a lot of time thinking about it, writing it (lmao obvs), rewatching clips of the show to pick apart characterization and mannerisms, etc, etc. I try to work on it in some capacity every day (sometimes that just means outlining or deleting chunks of my outline and crying about how much I hate myself) to keep up momentum so yeah, def that one.

As far as one shots go, there’s blood in my body (I’m holding on) for bellarke, I think I spent a month, maybe 6 weeks working on that

fic i spent the least amount of time on: as the world turns, the blunt burns, I was doing my usual lazy Saturday morning scroll through Tumblr before I got out of bed and saw a post like I want beth and mick to get high together (I would love to give credit but I haven’t the foggiest notion who said it, I wasn’t intending to write it so I didn’t pay too much attention, I’m the worst, I’m sorry) and then some dialogue popped into my head maybe 10 min later and I think I wrote the whole thing in like, 45 min on my phone. Cannot emphasize enough how little I thought about it (or proofed it tbh, yikes, so many typos) before posting

most hits: overall, I’ve Got You Here my t100 post s3, alt s4 thing. For Good Girls, a song inside the halls of the dark

most kudos: overall, there’s blood in my body (I’m holding on) - bellarke modern au. For GG, still song.

most comment threads: a song inside the halls of the dark by a M I L E (it twice as many as blood, the next highest), the GG fandom is so lovely and supportive and friendly and I love you guys, I really do

most bookmarks: same as kudos, blood overall and then song for GG

highest total word count: lol song is killing it

favorite fic i wrote: oh man, that’s hard. I love them all for different reasons. Blood was my first ever AU (I am a canon/canon-divergent ho) and it also deals with some stuff that’s important to me so that’s always going to have a special place in my heart. I’ve Got You Here was the first time I tried to tackle something bigger than a missing scene or short one-shot so that’s also significant.

I’m really proud of smoke, fire, it’s all going up because I think I did a p good job with the Rio POV there. I’d give her a HA! And a HI-YA! is special bc it’s my first outside POV and it was based on so little info it was basically OC, so that was a fun challenge.

All of that said, obviously, a song inside the halls in the dark is my fav. It’s been the biggest stretch of my skills (I had NO! IDEA! If I could plot and pace on the level required to sustain the fic I’d originally outlined and it’s only grown from there tbh), it’s also been like, the loveliest experience? I keep saying people’s reaction to it has broken my brain and I’m not actually just saying that. I’m deeply overwhelmed. And last but emphatically not least, it’s how I’ve gotten to know @nickmillerscaulk who, on top of being an incredible editor (seriously y’all, she is Skilled, I’ve learned so much from her), is such an awesome, amazing person and I’m so very glad we’ve become friends.

fic i want to rewrite/expand on: Oh man, idk. Pills N Potions is the easiest because it’s a prompt collection! Send me prompts! I can’t promise I’ll write them right away (my ADHD is so very real and only dubiously under my control during quarantine, so I live in constant terror of losing the thread of song especially this close to the end) but I def want to flex my quick and dirty short fic for funsies skills. I’m super looking forward to @goodgirlsficrecs prompt-a-thon.

share a bit of a wip or story idea you’re working on: ahahaha oh man, my google drive is littered with partially drafted or outlined ideas. I have a bunch of missing scene things I started at various points in s3 that are realistically dead in the water.

In terms of WIP/ideas I’m still intending to work on/finish:

A post 311 Rio POV pwp

A fishing/fencing/flute playing fluff for @medievalraven because I keep taunting her with my tags for song

The Good Guys (Rio, JT and Stan) thing that snowballed in a post way back when from @jazillia007, @nickmillerscaulk, and @inyoursheets

I still low-key want to do the transcripts for the Mick, Annie and Ruby group chat. I might save that for whenever I rewatch and have it running concurrently to s3, idk we’ll see

A Jewel Thief AU that I am wildly hyped about. I outlined the first chapter of it around when I started posting song and haven’t let myself do anything with it because I know once I get started I’m going to abandon whatever else I’m working on

More Annie POV, I don’t have any specific ideas, I just really love writing Annie POV

#tag games #my fic

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marbled-roses-au · 4 years

Text

Marbled Roses

~°Entry #: 001°~

Author's Note: As this is just the introduction, don't expect much sex or porn or anything from this. This is just to get this story on the right track.

Alex smiled excitedly, slamming a thick script and a fairly new camera on the rough wooden table in front of his friends while they ate their lunch. "I have made something amazing." He said, still smiling excitedly and his eyes shining brightly.

Tim raised an eyebrow, humming a bit, "And this amazing something is...?" He asked, eating a few of his fries with an amused smile.

"A script, duh." Alex said in a tone that said it was obvious, sitting down with them, "I have been working on it for, like, the past six months or so and I finally have it perfect."

Jay looked at the cover, "'Marbled Roses'?" He asked, raising an eyebrow and looking at Alex curiously.

"It's gonna be a romance movie!" Alex said in an excited tone. He was so pumped to get the filming started. He wanted to get everyone he knew to help out in some way.

"How original." Tim said with a snicker, rolling his eyes a bit. He shook his head a bit, eating on his food.

"Hey!" Alex said, huffing a bit and glaring at Tim. For Alex, romance was good and fun to write, why did everyone hate it so much?

Brian snickered, "So, what's it about?" He asked, eating one of Tim's fries like it was no big deal. They were best friends after all and they shared just about everything.

"I'm glad you asked." Alex said, moving the script over a bit. "So, throughout the whole film, the main character is pining after this really pretty girl, right?" He asked, "Well, his best friend is also pining after this girl and they both are competing to see who can impress her more, mostly for fun. Then, the girl falls in love with another guy, who is highly disliked by the two friends because the guy is rude and hateful to the guys when the girl isn't around, and is rude to the guys and says some awful things to them...but they end up realizing that through their little competition they had fallen n love with each other and it ends all sweet and nice like that. The two guys falling for one another is going to be a big plot twist, it won't be obvious throughout the movie." He explained, smiling at all of his friends with an overabundance of enthusiasm.

"I like the idea..." Jay said with a soft, small smile, trying to be supportive. Alex may not have had the most creativity to write this, but he sure as hell had the passion to make it and that was admirable.

"Okay, wait, so through the whole film, the two guys slowly fall for each other and it isn't obvious at all?" Brian asked, making sure he had it right. He liked that idea. Most LGTB+ films were over dramatic and either depressing or insulting. That, and Alex tended to ramble on when he was excited and words blended together sometimes.

Alex nodded, "Yep!" He said, "Because everyone assumes a character is heterosexual, I want their first impression to be wrong. That little tid bit will be a good shocker in the end." It was obvious how excited he was, his eyes shining bright and a big smile on his face.

Tim hummed, "I would watch it." He said, shrugging a bit, "Sounds like it will be a really great movie." He knew Alex normally wrote things and didn't see them through, but this time he seemed comitted and even extremely excited.

Brian smiled softly, "So, who are you thinking for the lead and his best friend?" He asked, eyes darting to the camera on the table.

"Well..." Alex started, looking over at Jay, "I was thinking, maybe...you and Tim could play those parts...?" He asked slowly, giving them an awkward smile.

The two sputtered for a moment, looking at each other then back to Alex again. "Why us?" Tim asked incredulously, looking at Alex almost like he was crazy. Brian was blushing a bit, though it was soft enough that it wasn't noticeable.

"Think about it!" Alex said, "You two are the closest best friends I know and you both are gay. You were made for these roles!" He wouldn't say it, because they both would deny it until they were blue in the face, but he also wanted them for the roles because they always gave each other these...long,.loving looks and playfully flirted while simply calling it 'playful bantering'.

Brian huffed and rubbed his face, "I..." He sighed, "I guess I don't have a problem doing it if Tim doesn't." He said, looking over at Tim.

The other sighed, "Fine." He grumbled with a soft blush on his cheeks, "I guess I don't mind either." He said, looking at Alex with a sigh.

"Who are you thinking of asking to play the girl?" Jay asked, trying to change the subject for Tim and Brian.

"Oh!" Alex said, "I was thinking of asking that girl in my film class, Jessica Locke...do you guys know her?" He asked, raising an eyebrow and not getting a nod or anything from Tim and Brian.

Jay nodded and smiled a bit, "Yeah, I have most of my classes with her. She usually keeps to herself, but sometimes we do group projects together. She is really nice, I'm sure she would say yes." He said, humming a bit. She was always interested in being part of someone else's film, even if she wasn't going to play a part as an actor.

"That's awesome!" Alex said, smiling at Jay, "Can you ask her for me?" Jay sighed, but nodded and smiled.

"I think this film is going to be really great." Alex said, holding the script. "You know, when I was writing it at three am, I got up to get some snacks and use the bathroom and when I came back, there was a marbled red and blue rose sitting on the script. It's what gave me the idea for the name." He said with a smile.

"There was just a cut rose sitting on your script? Just randomly?" Tim asked, "And you don't find that suspicious at all."

Alex shrugged, "Yeah...?" He said in an unsure tone.

"Alex, that is really, really weird." Jay said, chuckling nervously a bit. It gave him an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Were any of your windows or doors open?" Brian asked, a concerned look on his face. All he could think was that someone might have been stalking Alex and broke in.

Something about this 'randomly appearing' rose he saw made them all uncomfortable. Like someone...or, rather, something, was stalking Alex. It could've been as simple as it was taped up on the wall and fell, too. But Tim, Jay, and Brian couldn't deny the nagging sense that something wasn't right.

Alex noticed their concern and rolled his eyes, "Guys, relax. No windows were open or broken, no doors were open, no locks were picked. No one was in my dorm, but me. Everything is fine. And besides," he said, "it's just a pretty rose...its not like its gonna kill me."

#page #marbled roses #marble hornets au #marble hornets #alex kralie #timothy wright #brian thomas #jay merrick #au #masky #hoodie #skully #ARK

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mamcollection · 4 years

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Artist Gina Beavers Satirizes Our Insatiable Appetite for Personal Beauty in Her New Show at Marianne Boesky

Makeup as Muse: Gina Beavers

November 28, 2020

Despite my art history background and general love of art, I am less than eloquent when writing about it. Nevertheless I will continue soldiering forward with the Museum's Makeup as Muse series, the latest installment of which focuses on the work of Gina Beavers in honor of her recent show at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Beavers' practice encompasses a variety of themes, but it's her paintings of makeup tutorials that I'll be exploring. Since I'm both tired and lazy this will be more of a summary of her work rather than offering any fresh insight and I'll be quoting the artist extensively along with some writers who have covered her art, so most of this will not be my own words.

Born in Athens and raised in Europe, Beavers is fascinated by the excess and consumerism of both American culture and social media. "I don't know how to talk about this existence without talking about consumption, and so I think that's the element in consuming other people's images. That's where that's embedded. We have to start with consumption if we're going to talk about who we are. That's the bedrock—especially as an American," she says. The purchase of a smart phone in 2010 is when Beavers' work began focusing on social media. "[Pre-smart phone] I would see things in the world and paint them! Post-smartphone my attention and observation seemed to go into my phone, into looking at and participating in social media apps, and all of the things that would arise there...Historically, painters have drawn inspiration from their world, for me it's just that a lot of my world is virtual [now]."

But why makeup, and specifically, makeup tutorials? There seem to be two main themes running through the artist's focus on these online instructions, the first being the relationship between painting and makeup. Beavers explains: "When I started with these paintings I was really thinking that this painting is looking at you while it is painting itself. It’s drawing and painting: it has pencils, it has brushes, and it’s trying to make itself appealing to the viewer. It’s about that parallel between a painting and what you expect from it as well as desire and attraction. It’s also interesting because the terms that makeup artists use on social media are painting terms. The way they talk about brushes or pigments sounds like painters talking shop." Makeup application as traditional painting is a theme that goes back centuries, but Beavers's work represents a fresh take on it. As Ellen Blumenstein wrote in an essay for Wall Street International: "Elements such as brushes, lipsticks or fingers, which are intended to reassure the viewers of the videos of the imitability of the make-up procedures, here allude to the active role of the painting – which does not just stare or make eyes at the viewer, but rather seems to paint itself with the accessories depicted – literally building a bridge extending out from the image...Beavers divests [the image] of its natural quality and uses painting as an analytical tool. The viewer is no longer looking at photographic tableaus composed of freeze-frames taken from make-up tutorials, but rather paintings about make-up tutorials, which present the aesthetic and formal parameters of this particular class of images, which exist exclusively on the net." The conflation of makeup and painting can also be perceived as a rumination on authorship and original sources. Beavers is remaking tutorials, but the tutorials themselves originated with individual bloggers and YouTubers. And given the viral, democratic nature of the Internet, it's nearly impossible to tell who did a particular tutorial first and whether tutorials covering the same material - say, lip art depicting Van Gogh's "Starry Night" - are direct copies of one artist's work or merely the phenomenon of many people having the same idea and sharing it online. Sometimes the online audience cannot distinguish between authentic content and advertising; Beavers's "Burger Eye" (2015), for example, is actually not recreated from a tutorial at all but an Instagram ad for Burger King (and the makeup artist who was hired to create it remains, as far as I know, uncredited).

Another theme is fashioning one's self through makeup, and how that self is projected online in multiple ways. Beavers explains: "I am interested in the ways existing online is performative, and the tremendous lengths people go to in constructing their online selves. Meme-makers, face-painters, people who make their hair into sculptures, are really a frontier of a new creative world...It’s interesting, as make-up has gotten bigger and bigger, I’ve realized what an important role it plays in helping people construct a self, particularly in trans and drag communities. I don’t normally wear a lot of make-up myself, but I like the idea of the process of applying make-up standing in for the process of self-determination, the idea of ‘making yourself’."

As for the artist's process, it's a laborious one. Beavers regularly combs Instagram, YouTube and other online sources and saves thousands of images on her phone. She then narrows down to a few based on both composition and the story they're trying to tell. "I'm arrested by images that have interesting formal qualities, color, composition but also a compelling narrative. I really like when an image is saying something that leaves me unsure of how it will translate to painting, like whether the meaning will change in the context of the history of painting," she says. "I always felt drawn to photos that had an interesting composition, whether for its color or depth or organization. But in order for me to want to paint it, it also had to have interesting content, like the image was communicating some reality beyond its composition that I related to in my life or that I thought spoke in some interesting way about culture." The act of painting for Beavers is physically demanding as well: she needs to start several series at the same time and go back and forth between paintings to allow the layers to dry. They have to lay flat to dry so she often ends up painting on the floor, and her recent switch to an even heavier acrylic caused a bout of carpal tunnel syndrome.

But it's precisely the thick quality of the paint that return some of the tactile nature of makeup application. This is not accidental; Beavers intentionally uses this technique as way to remind us of makeup's various textures and to ensure her paintings resemble paintings rather than a photorealistic recreation of the digital screen. "The depth of certain elements in the background of images has taught me a lot about seeing. I think I have learned that I enjoy setting up problems to solve, that it isn't enough for me to simply render a photo realistically, that I have to build up the acrylic deeply in order to interfere with the rendering of something too realistically," she explains. Sharon Mizota, writing for the LA Times, says it best: "Skin, lashes and lips are textured with rough, caked-on brushstrokes that mimic and exaggerate wrinkles and gloppy mascara. This treatment gives the subjects back some of the clunky physicality that the camera and the digital screen strip away. Beavers’ paintings, in some measure, undo the gloss of the photographic image."

Beavers also uses foam to further build up certain sections so that they bulge out towards the viewer, representing the desire to connect to others online. "Much of what people do online is to try to create connection, to reach out and meet people or talk to people. That is what the surfaces of my painting do in a really literal way, they are reaching off the linen into the viewer’s space," she says. This sculptural quality also points to the reality of the online world - it's not quite "real life" but it's not imaginary either, occupying a space in between. Beavers expands on her painting style representing the online space: "It’s interesting because flatness often comes up with screens, and I think historically the screen might have been read like that, reflecting a more passive relationship. That has changed with the advent of engagement and social media. What’s behind our screen is a whole living, breathing world, one that gives as much as it takes. I mean it is certainly as 'real' as anything else. I see the dimension as a way to reflect that world and the ways that world is reaching out to make a connection. Another aspect is that once these works are finished, they end up circulating back in the same online world and now have this heightened dimensionality – they cast their own shadow. They’re not a real person, or burger, or whatever, but they’re not a photo of it either, they’re something in between."

Let's dig a little more into what all this means in terms of makeup, the beauty industry and social media. Beavers' work can be viewed as a simultaneous critique and celebration of all three. Sharon Mizota again: "[The tutorial paintings] also pointedly mimic the act of putting on makeup, reminding us that it is something like sedimentation, built up layer by layer. There is no effortless glamour here, only sticky accretion. That quality itself feels like an indictment — of the beauty industry, of restrictive gender roles. But an element of playfulness and admiration lives in Beavers’ work. They speak of makeup as a site of creativity and self-transformation, and Instagram and other social media sites as democratizing forces in the spread of culture. To be sure, social media may be the spur for increasingly outré acts, which are often a form of bragging, but why shouldn’t a hamburger eye be as popular as a smoky eye? In translating these photographs into something more physical, Beavers asks us to consider these questions and exposes the duality of the makeup industry: The same business that strives to make us insecure also enables us to reinvent ourselves, not just in the image of the beautiful as it’s already defined, but in images of our own devising."

This ambiguity is particularly apparent in Beavers's 2015 exhibition, entitled Ambitchous, which incorporated beauty Instagrammers and YouTubers' makeup renditions of Disney villains alongside "good" characters. Blumenstein explains: "So it isn’t protagonists with positive connotations which are favoured by the artist, but unmistakably ambivalent characters who could undoubtedly lay claim to the neologism ambitchous, which is the name given to the exhibition. Like the original image material, this portmanteau of ‘ambitious’ and ‘bitchy’ is taken from social media and its creative vernacular, and is used, depending on the context, either in a derogatory fashion – for example for women who will do absolutely anything to get what they want – or positively re-interpreted as an expression of female self-affirmation. Beavers also applies this playful and strategic complication of seemingly unambiguous contexts of meaning to the statements contained in her paintings. It remains utterly impossible to determine whether they are critically exaggerating the conformist and consumerist beauty ideals of neo-capitalism, or ascribing emancipatory potential to the conscious and confident use of make-up."

More recently, Beavers has been using her own face as a canvas and making her own photos of them her source material, furthering her exploration of the self. "Staring at yourself or your lips for hours is pretty jarring. But I like it, because it creates this whole other level of self,” she says.

This shift also points to another dichotomy in Beavers's work: in recreating famous works of art on her face, she is both critiquing art history's traditional canon and appreciating it, referring to them as a sort of fan art. "I think a lot of the works that I have made that reference art history—like whether it's Van Gogh or whoever it is—have a duality where I really respect the artist and I'm influenced by them, and at the same time I'm making it my own and poking a little fun. And so, a lot of these pieces originated with the idea of fan art. You'll find all sorts of Starry Night images online that people have painted or sculpted or painted on their body. It comes out of that. And I just started to reach a point where I was searching things like 'Franz Kline body art,' and I wasn’t finding that, so I had to make my own. Then it started to get a little bit geekier. I have a piece in the show where I am painting a Lee Bontecou on my cheek, that's a kind of art world geeky thing—you have to really love art to get it."

Ultimately, Beavers perceives the intersection of makeup and social media as a force for good. While the specter of misinformation is always lurking, YouTube tutorials and the like allow anyone with internet access to learn how to do a smoky eye or a flawlessly lined lip. "I think for a lot of people social media is kind of like the weather. We don't have a lot of control of it, it just is. It gives and it takes away. There's no doubt that it has connected people in ways that are great and productive, allowing people to find communities and organize activism, it can also be a huge distraction...I approach looking at images there pretty distantly, more as a neutral documentarian, and I come down on the side of seeing social media as an incredibly useful, democratic tool in a lot of ways," she concludes.

On the other side of social media, Beavers is interested on how content creators help disseminate the idea of makeup as representing something larger and more meaningful than traditional notions of beauty. "I was super fascinated with makeup and all of the kinds of costume makeup and things you can find online that go away from a traditional beauty makeup and go towards something really wild and cool...I also had certain paintings in [a 2016] show that were much more about costume makeup, that were going away from beauty. That’s the thing that gives me hope. When I go through makeup hashtags on Instagram, there will be ten or twenty beauty eye makeup images and then one that’s painted with horror makeup. There are women out there doing completely weird things, right next to alluring ones." In the pandemic age, as people's relationships with makeup are changing, "weird" makeup is actually becoming less strange. Beavers' emphasis on experimental makeup is more timely than ever. I also think she's documenting the gradual way makeup is breaking free of the gender binary. She says: "I mean with makeup, and the whole conversation around femininity and makeup—I think for a long time when I was making makeup images, there were people that just thought, 'Oh, that's not for me,' because it's about makeup, it's feminine. But it’s interesting, the culture is shifting. I just saw the other day that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did a whole Instagram live where she was putting on her makeup and talking about how empowering makeup is for trans communities...some people see make-up as restrictive or frivolous, but drag performers show how it can be liberating and life-saving." Another point to consider in terms of gender is the close-up aspect of Beavers's paintings. With individual features (eyes, lips, nails) separated from the rest of the face and body and removed from their original context, they're neither masculine nor feminine, thereby reiterating that makeup is for any (or no) gender.

All I can say is, I love these paintings. Stylistically, they're right up my alley - big, colorful and mimicking makeup's tactile nature so much that I have a similar reaction to them as I do when seeing makeup testers in a store: I just want to dip my hands in them and smear them everywhere! I also enjoy the multiple themes and levels in her work. Beavers isn't commenting just on makeup in the digital age, but also self-representation online, shifting attitudes towards makeup's meaning, the relationship between painting and makeup, and Western art history.

What do you think of Beavers's paintings?

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go-events · 5 years

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GO Rom Com Spotlight: @wyvernquill

The amazing @wyvernquill (also WyvernQuill on AO3) has claimed Ruby Sparks to adapt for Good Omens in the Good Omens Rom Com Event.

For reference, here’s a little background about the source material!

About Ruby Sparks: Young author Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano), once a literary darling, is having trouble composing his next novel. Following a therapist's advice, Calvin pulls out an old manual typewriter and creates a vivacious, flame-haired woman he dubs Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan). Overnight, Ruby leaps from the page into Calvin's home as a real flesh-and-blood woman. And, what's more, she's unaware that she's actually a fictional character and that her actions and feelings are dictated by whatever Calvin writes.

We spent some time chatting about how the adaptation is coming so far, as well as future plans for it! Now, get to know @wyvernquill a little better!

* * *

goromcom: Let’s begin with what Tumblr can tell me about you. You know how if you open a Tumblr chat with someone you haven't chatted to before, Tumblr tells you two things they post about? I wanted to tell you that yours reports that you post "about #fanart and #illustration". I really admire people who can draw *and* write. Do you enjoy one more than the other?

wyvernquill: Oh, don't ask me to choose between my brain-children! I love both for different reasons, and find some ideas are easier to express in writing, others through drawing; though I also love to combine the two by illustrating my fics or writing something based on some random thing I sketched during class. (I'm also a very quick artist, while my fics tend to balloon out of proportion - so "doing a quick illustration in an hour" and "writing a 102k epic" are two very different and really rather incomparable experiences!)

goromcom: Oh goodness, yes. Two very different creative outlets! But for now, let’s talk about writing. You chose to adapt Ruby Sparks as your rom com. Has this movie been a favorite of yours, or is there some other reason you chose it?

wyvernquill: Cards on the table? I never heard of this movie before. I got very close to writing the fic without having seen it once, and only watched it a week or so ago. (And even then... it's not a *bad* movie, but, personally, I didn't grow attached to the characters at all. Just didn't really appeal to my tastes, I guess.) So, why Ruby Sparks?

Well, I made a List, capital L for significance. In the 12 hours before claims, I researched the plots of every single movie up for claiming - most of which I never heard of, clearly I don't watch enough romcoms - and categorised them into "absolutely not" "mmmmmaybe?" and "possibly", making my way through IMDB short descriptions and Wikipedia pages until the List was down to the top 10; most of which were movies I'd seen or at least heard of - except Ruby Sparks, which I chose for the simple reason that I'd ALREADY written an "accidental" AU of it.

The premise was exactly the same as roughly 3k of unfinished Doctor Who fic I scribbled together and never published, even though I was quite fond of it. I figured I could re-use my favourite elements of that fic, work off the base premise rather than the movie itself, and see where writing takes me.

goromcom: That is quite a ride! I’m a big proponent of re-introducing or recycling ideas or material that you find compelling but weren’t quite able to use before! It’s like, eco-awareness for your mind. :)

Given your history with this movie, this might be an odd question, but: What's your favorite moment of your movie, and are you looking forward to presenting it in your adaptation? Any loose plans for that scene that you can share?

wyvernquill: For reasons already outlined above, this isn't really based directly on any scene of the movie, but I think Aziraphale writing his idea of a "perfect husband" (and a progressively more thinly-veiled self-insert as the main character) will be a delight!

I greatly enjoy having the subjective perception of POV characters and objective reality be comically different - "I'm an excellent cook," he said, scraping the burned remnants of what could really no longer be called an omelette onto a plate - so I think I'll have some fun there. Maybe Aziraphale will defend his Artistic Vision (And Not Wish Fulfillment At All Shut Up) to someone? I'm not sure yet.

goromcom: I have a feeling I know the answer, but let me ask it anyway. Do you plan to stick very closely to the beats of the original story, or make bigger changes?

wyvernquill: Bigger changes, definitely. I might pluck an idea or two from the movie - and, surprisingly, the rough progression of events was pretty close to what I planned anyway - but it'll be rather different. (See next answer - I might well take more from Mary Shelley than from Ruby Sparks!)

Also, I'm still a bit undecided on this, but I might actually have Aziraphale publish some of his writing about Crowley from the start, something which doesn't happen in the movie until the very end.

goromcom: What's an interesting decision you've made in your planning so far--a notable casting decision, a changing of venue, or some other plan you have to paint Good Omens all over your rom com?

wyvernquill: Well, the moral of the movie was more or less that Writer Guy--no, I don't even remember his name!--has to overcome his controlling half-neurotic nature so he can be happy both among his more easy-going family and with the freespirited Ruby. Instead, I intend to have Aziraphale struggling a la Modern Prometheus (what does it mean to create life, to play God, to have a Creature that thinks for itself?), creating a subplot that is more overtly philosophical and thought-provoking, with a hint of religiosity - the essence of what GO is to me.(Meaning the final conflict will not be Writer Guy warping Ruby into a helpless parody of herself, but instead Aziraphale growing afraid of Crowley, who's beginning to show traits he never wrote for him, attempting to "erase" him again before he loses control entirely... but it all ends happily, don't worry! ;))

goromcom: Those are some pretty interesting ideas you’re playing with! I’m looking forward to reading it. But let’s not give too much away, and move on to my last question. I am blatantly stealing this from The Good Place: The Podcast, but here goes: Tell me something "good". It can be something big or small. It can be a charity you think is doing good work, or you can talk about how great your pet is.

wyvernquill: Oh, the temptation to talk about my four darling cats is Real(tm)... but instead, I want to give a little shout-out to the absolutely fantasticamazingbrilliant teacher at my university who offered a course on fanfic and fandom studies this past term, and who is letting me write my term paper on the Ineffable Fandom!!!

She's the best, lots of fun to discuss with, and research for the paper - deadline in two weeks, I've not yet started writing it, let's hope I get it finished speedily! - is an absolute delight.

(The only difficulty will be staying within the page limit... there's just so much to write about with this wonderful fandom.)

Her course was the highlight of my week, and fan studies (unsurprisingly!) turned out to be a field that really interests me. So thank you so much, Ms Fanfic Teacher, I'm very grateful for... just about everything!!! ^-^ <3

goromcom: That sounds like a fantastic class and an even better teacher. You have to admire the people who go that extra mile to inspire and lift up their students, and get them actually excited about learning.

And you know what else is going to be fantastic? The GO adaptation of Ruby Sparks, coming soon!

#goromcom #goromcom spotlight #good omens #wyvernquill #ruby sparks

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charmingturkeysandwich · 5 years

Text

fireworks (that went off too soon)

Hey there! This is a CS one shot. An AU in which Killian is the lead singer and songwriter in a band that sounds suspiciously like Fall Out Boy...

Summary: Emma and Killian were friends in college, but haven’t spoken in 9 years. Killian’s band’s new single changes everything.

Words: 4400ish

Rating: Teen? (Swearing, References to Sex)

Also on AO3

Big thanks to @awkwardnessandbaseball for reading this over, correcting all my dumbass mistakes, and helping me polish this up pretty :) (The title comes from my favorite Fall Out Boy song, Fourth of July. It’s heavily featured in the story sung by Killian’s band.)

---

It was 3pm on Friday the 13th – also a Full Moon – when Emma Swan finally had the meltdown she’d pressed “pause” on about nine years earlier.

(Nine years, three months, more accurately, but who was counting?)

The work week was winding down. The get this done today or be fired tasks had been completed and all the emails had been answered and it was about time to start doing the bare minimum to run down the clock to 5:01 when she could, without regret, run screaming from the building and put her god forsaken job out of her mind for two days of rest, relaxation, and rum.

(Definitely the rum. Or maybe it had been upgraded to a tequila weekend.)

It was Pandora’s fault, really. (A fitting name for opening up an emotional box inside her soul that had been sealed for quite a long time and with very good fucking reason.)

Usually Emma listened to wordless music – movie scores, Vitamin String Quartet and the like – so as to keep the creative juices flowing without breaking her train of concentration. But having reached the procrastination part of the afternoon, she thought, what harm could there be in listening to a little regular music?

Emma had always had a soft spot for pop/punk/emo music. It brought her joy even when it wasn’t joyful, which is either a sentiment only shared by lonely foster girls or perhaps all emo kids, but did it matter? It was her kind of music. Long before she met Killian Jones.

But then she met him. He was an insufferable ass at least 2/3 of the time, but for the other third of his life, he was sweet, funny, and musically a goddamn genius. His voice was smooth and warm, he could play guitar like it was in his DNA, and his lyrics were both relatable and completely original. She was half in love from the start, so of course she pushed him as far away as possible.

(Love is patient; love is kind. Love is slowly losing my mind)

He was aloof. At best. They were college kids who shared a dorm building and not much else, not until their roommates fell in love with each other. That’s around the time they started spending an inordinate amount of time together. He was fucking anything with brown eyes and tits and she absolutely did not care and everything was fine. They were friends, kind of. She was a fan of his band, but not in the groupie way. She had no intention of being just a notch in his bedpost or a line in his song.

(As it turned out, she ended up becoming both. Eventually.)

When he wasn’t playing shows in dive bars (or fucking freshmen girls in a shower stall of their dorm hall’s shared bathroom), he spent a lot of time in Emma’s room. Mostly to avoid Mary Margaret and David in his room who were, as he called it, “the most sickly sweet love story this side of the Atlantic” and “a complete buzzkill to complex song-writing.” And she was OK with it. She loved when he would compose while she read. And they had the best conversations. They challenged each other on everything from politics to pie flavors and she’d never been so stimulated by someone of the opposite sex in her life.

Intellectually stimulated. In the brain.

By junior year, the two pairs of roommates had moved off-campus, opting to share a three bedroom house while they finished up school. Killian’s band was starting to actually make something of themselves, but he vowed to get his degree (this pretty face won’t last forever), and Emma played tutor for him when he skipped class for weeks on end so he could play some gigs on the west coast.

They were friends. They were equals. They meant so much more to each other than “just” friends or study buddies or housemates or anything, because the past three years had been the most stable years in either of their lives and it was all because of the support they received from each other in the darkest nights and the brightest days and seriously.

Fuck Pandora.

It had distracted her when she was in the middle of perfectly pleasant procrastinating. Now she was getting off track. Frazzled. Fucking pissed.

With her work mostly finished, she had decided to listen to Panic! At the Disco’s station. It was a safe zone – the best of two different genres: emo and pop. She bopped along to Blink 182 and “the Ballad of Mona Lisa.” She swayed and swooned a little when “Secrets” by One Republic played. And she got a good laugh at “I’m Not OK (I Promise),” remembering the days she’d scream “I’m not o-fucking kay! [trust me]” every time she got into a fight with the foster mother she now loved so very much.

But then there was a dramatic twist and a cinematic sweep and that voice and before she could switch the station, some warning popped up at her, removing all the buttons and controls and displaying the error message of SOMETHING WENT WRONG and all she could think was no shit, Sherlock.

Killian’s band got big when they were 21. And stayed big. The band broke up once, briefly, but they’d been dancing around the American Top 40 for at least 6 of the last 9 years and as much as it hurt her to hear his voice through a radio and not through a wall of their shared house, at least the lyrics of the songs never stung her before.

Because they’d never been about her before.

It was the summer before senior year, late that June, and Killian had just returned from a little pop-punk festival in Seattle. She’d picked him up at the airport in Portland (Maine) and had been chatting his ear off about how much better “our” Portland was from “theirs” (Oregon), but Killian had been largely silent.

Which was out of character to the extreme, his little creative writing/song composer mind always racing and his far too pleasing voice always spilling from his stupidly attractive lips.

“What is up with you, Jones? I just said that they have better lobster in Oregon and you didn’t even react.”

From the passenger seat, he played with the window controller, the air whooshing in and stopping to the rhythm of Seven Nation Army AKA the world’s most overplayed song that wasn’t sung by Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift.

“Hmm? Oh, it’s nothing, Swan. A problem for a different day, to be sure.”

His voice had been quiet, unsure. That wasn’t him either. This was the asshole who could start a trend with a typo and who claimed to have made a girl come with nothing but his voice. His level of confidence was infuriating, but unshakeable.

(He made forgetting the words to his own songs look attractive. And that was an eventual Buzzfeed headline, not Emma’s own assessment. Obviously.)

“Killian, what’s up? Did the festival not go as well as you wanted? From what I saw on YouTube, it seemed awfully successful.”

“Aye, love.” He perked up just a bit, finally turning toward her and smiling. “It was grand.”

“And you’re brooding because, what, you’re worried that feeling happy for too long will sap you of your emo energy or something?”

Her attempt to lighten the mood didn’t seem to take, though, and Killian turned back out the window like he was practicing for his very own music video.

When they got back to their house, Emma grabbed his clothes and Killian lugged the musical equipment and neither of them said a word.

Fog had rolled in, or maybe it was on its way out, and if it weren’t for the green leaves, it might have felt like October. But there was something about his expression that was a hell of a lot more December. Something ending.

They were lingering almost awkwardly in their kitchen, Emma trying to casually wrack her brain for how to pull Killian out of his little funk, when he interrupted her with an overdramatic clearing of his throat.

“Ahem! Fancy a drink, Swan?” Killian extended a shot glass to her, a dark liquid inside that couldn’t be anything but spiced rum.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked hesitantly.

“Perhaps… perhaps it’s a celebration.”

“…of?”

“Your business sense, of course!” He lifted his glass toward hers for a clink and then downed the shot faster than she could even raise hers to her lips.

“What kind of business are we talking here? I’m not sure if this is the setup for an idiot joke or a reference to lyrics you swear you told me you wrote but never actually did.”

“Ah, love, no. Not that, this time anyway. Actually – actually, it’s about the band. And ‘Grand Theft Autumn.’ They loved it like you said they would.”

“They being?”

“The record company. They loved it. And they want it. And us.”

Holy shit! She knew it. They were going to be famous. Killian deserved it so much and they were going to be huge and everyone was going to love him just like she did and –

Wait.

“When you say they want you… do you mean, like, deferred acceptance so you can finish college or…”

“No, love. The boys and I … we’re packing up and moving to LA.”

She was dumbfounded.

“LA?”

“Aye.”

“When?”

“Monday.”

That’s right about the time her stomach dropped to her heels and the rum threatened its way back up her throat and perhaps onto Killian’s perfectly rumpled white shirt.

She just – wasn’t ready to let him go.

She could hear his honey-smooth voice drift through her head, his own lyrics seeming oddly relevant to this dramatic turn in her life.

Maybe he won’t find out what I know; you were the last good thing about this part of town.

So they drank. And drank. And drank some more. They were more honest with each other than they’d been in three years. She told him how much she hated that he thought setting his clocks early would keep him from being late. And he told her that he didn’t truly think that… it just had fit as a song lyrics and he felt like he needed to “make it authentic by living it.”

She called him pretentious and he called her painfully adorable and neither were true and yet somehow they felt like the perfect identifiers for the characters they were trying to be when they weren’t with each other.

So of course she fell into bed with him that night. Her bed. The twinkly lights hung around her ceiling were flickering as he kissed a trail down her neck and she tugged off his way-too-tight jeans and dear fucking lord if she thought the only thing he could do with his tongue was sing, she was officially wrong.

But come morning she was officially gone. As the sun rose on a rainy June Sunday morning, she slipped out of her bed, slid into whatever clothes she could reach without making noise, and jogged all the way to David’s brother’s frat house to hide until Monday came and went and when exactly did her life turn into an emo song?

When I wake up I’m willing to take my chances on the hope I forget

September. Friday the 13th. Pandora malfunction. Her brain was reeling and her heart was shattering all over again, because the song pumping through her pathetic tinny Dell speakers was, on first blush, just another of his melodramatic fictions, a series of sentiments that sounded good together but that he’d never actually experienced (he’d admitted the best songs were much like Hey There Delilah… a lovely story and 0% real). But she could hear something genuine in that still so attractive voice. And then… a few familiar thoughts.

I’ll be as honest as you let me

I miss your early morning company

If you get me

You are my favorite ‘what if’

You are my best ‘I’ll never know’

She’d turned off her phone the morning she’d left him in her bed. Kept it off until Tuesday. And blocked his number the minute she turned it back on.

Goodbyes were bad enough. To have been reduced to his very last college-one-night-stand? She couldn’t face it.

(Especially because she’d realized mid-fuck she’d kind of always wanted to be his forever, or whatever overly-romantic hyperbole he’d scoff at before writing it down in his notes.)

She hadn’t let herself think of him for longer than the span of one of his songs since that day. Even then, she’d usually change the channel. It was just too hard.

But could this one actually be about her? And if so, what the fuck was she supposed to do with that? Cry? Scream? Sue his sorry ass for slander?

(Not that one.)

She’d made a lot of mistakes in her life. He’d never been one of them, not until the end. Is it possible that didn’t need to be the end at all?

My 9 to 5 is cutting open old scars

Again and again til I’m stuck in your head

He’d probably had a lot of almosts. Maybe he’d just gotten better at faking genuine emotion in his songs. There’s no way he still thought about her. Even for lyrical dramatics.

I wish I’d known how much you loved me

I wish I’d cared enough to know

I’m sorry every song’s about you

The torture of small talk

With someone you used to love

Well there you had it. Small talk? They hadn’t talked in years. And she already knew every song was total bullshit, made up longing. Some of his best lovelorn pandering (that she admittedly loved) had been written when he claimed to be incapable of actual love. When he would only sleep with dark-haired, dark-eyed girls who didn’t want anything more than a good breakfast the next morning.

(I’m not looking for a soulmate, darling, just a beauty without a gag reflex, he’d repeated on many occasions. Sometimes literally to the women he was hitting on. And yes, they did usually blow him afterward and he would inexplicably tell her and she Did. Not. Care.)

(Until the day she realized she always had.)

A week after he’d moved to Los Angeles had been the 4th of July. It being summer and most of her friends working various jobs, she didn’t think there would be a huge party. James had insisted, though, that they needed to celebrate the fact that their friends were getting famous. David had pointed out the irony that the band – Killian, Will, Robin, and Graham – were all from outside of the USA. And yet they were being celebrated on America’s birthday.

“Stealing things from others is the American way. Now drink, little brother!” James had shouted just before his frat brothers lifted him into keg stand position and he chugged.

Emma wasn’t one for keg stands, so she’d opted for drinking straight liquor instead, and from what she could extrapolate from the massive headache the next morning (in addition to the vomit in her bedside garbage can), she had likely drank that bottle in its entirety.

After the opening of Pandora’s box that fateful Friday the 13th, Emma couldn’t think of much else but her almost-maybe-something Killian Jones. Suddenly his stupid band was everywhere and that stupid song was everywhere and she was feeling a deep longing to connect with that girl who had two whole albums by two different bands written about her to see how the fuck she coped with old wounds being opened every fucking visit to the grocery store.

(Then again, Brand New and Taking Back Sunday weren’t quite so mainstream. Maybe that’s how she survived.)

(Is that what you call a getaway? Tell me what you got away with, cause I’ve seen more spine in jellyfish; I’ve seen more guts in 11 year old kids.)

She’d taken to keeping the radio off at all times, and humming the Star Spangled Banner when she couldn’t escape Killian’s stupidly attractive and all-too-familiar voice gracing the airwaves.

Ruby asked her out for drinks, and alcohol was exactly the cure for her current tumult, so she agreed on the very specific request that they hit the country bar downtown instead of their usual Rabbit Hole escapades. Which worked out great for avoiding song-specific reminders, but sadly didn’t keep all Killian talk at bay.

“By the way, how have you been holding up?” Ruby asked, probably in response to Emma’s downing two shots – one of which that had been intended for Ruby – in the first minute or so at the table.

“What do you mean, holding up?” She wasn’t that transparent, right?

“Well the song… the one Killian wrote about you. It’s, like… huge. Weird how he waited this long. Did he warn you first or anything?”

… what? It wasn’t about her. Sure, it kind of, a little bit, had some moments that seemed like they could be inspired by her. But it had been nine fucking years and she hadn’t seen him since the morning she slinked away from their house and it’s not like he’d ever reached out or anything (or at least he didn’t try very hard, because blocking a cell phone number wasn’t like blocking a whole-ass person), hence her nine years of denial and shoving down her feelings like the very opposite of the emo kid she once was.

She probably looked like that stupid meme of the lady thinking about math and her heart was beating nearly out of her chest, but somehow the only sound that made it out of her mouth was, “huh?”

Ruby, bless her heart, was much better at dealing with, you know, life than Emma was. And sorting through feelings and coping with unprecedented situations that Emma had so far only seen odd iterations of in Hallmark movies or … emo music videos, probably.

“The song. Fourth of July. It’s been a while since he wrote a song about you and I mean usually they were about pining for you, which is a little more tolerable, probably. But this one… I don’t know. I just figured you probably didn’t appreciate it, and that’s why you were drinking my shots.”

Another lame, dumbfounded response: “What? Killian’s never written a song about me.”

Ruby’s eyebrow shot up to her hairline (the way Killian’s always had when she said something silly). “So all that shit in college was…?”

“Made up! Ruby, he was a creative writing major. He just made up characters and then wrote songs as if he were them. He never actually wanted to date anyone. Just fuck anything that resembled Megan Fox.”

Ruby didn’t say a word. She stood, walked to the bar, ordered two drinks, and sat back down with Emma a few minutes later.

“Sweetheart. You sure are dumb for a smart girl.”

And that’s how Emma’s Enlightenment began.

As it turns out, Killian’s creative writing skills were great, but not quite as great as his love for his best friend.

Yep, love. Apparently he’d loved her.

There was a reason he’d really only fucked girls that looked nothing like Emma.

There was a reason he had valued her input so much in his music.

There was a reason he’d hung out with her so often and it had nothing to do with Mary Margaret and David’s grossness.

Keep quiet; nothing comes as easy as you. Can I lay in your bed all day?

Fuck.

“Why didn’t he tell me?!”

Ruby laughed at her, which was totally uncalled for, but also kind of made a lot of sense if she had the ability to think of any of this objectively.

“Oh, honey. He told you every goddamn day in those songs. And how he acted. You’d have to be blind to not realize how much that boy loved you. So he assumed it was a ‘no’ from your side. And then after you slept with him and then he poured his heart out to you and still nothing? That was kinda it for him. But I mean, it’s been so long. I can’t believe he released a song about that now.”

At that, Emma’s jaw dropped. Hard. There was an audible pop and damnit, she was going to have to ice that later, probably.

“How do you know I slept with him?!”

“… because you had a fight about it literally in front of every person you knew?”

HUH?

The buzz of the alcohol was nothing compared to the stinging behind her eyes and the pain in her gut and seriously had the past decade actually been a very different reality from what she’d been living?

And how had Mary Margaret, AKA the Secret Spiller, never told her that A) Killian loved her or B) that Emma had apparently had a blacked-out fight with him in front of everyone?

Emma’s Enlightment continued.

Apparently no one spilled the secret because no one knew it was a secret to start. Much like Killian had, everyone thought that Emma knew his feelings, but that she just wanted to be friends.

And after the blow up on the Fourth of July, they just assumed she didn’t want to talk about it.

While David and James and a bunch of their friends were playing beer pong and Mary Margaret and Regina were trying to find another pair to play cornhole, Emma had been nursing a bottle of Jack Daniels from the roof of the frat house. She’d crawled out of Jefferson’s window, much to his annoyance (he worked in the morning and needed to sleep), and she just watched. Everyone was having a good time. The best days of their lives were now or even tomorrow.

But hers were yesterday.

So she drank and she drank and she drank until the boys were lighting off fireworks and Belle had started a chant of USA! USA! And out of nowhere she saw the floppy brown hair and scuffed-up leather jacket she’d been wishing for every minute of the last week.

“Swan! I need to speak with you!” he’d called up at her, perched on the Lion statue at the front entrance.

But, of course, he’d been pulled in a thousand different directions as soon as everyone else saw their about-to-be-famous friend. So Emma drank and drank and drank some more, not prepared to actually have to say goodbye this time.

Ruby wasn’t sure how long it took until Killian made it onto the roof with her. She did know they’d only been talking a few minutes when Emma started screaming at the top of her lungs about thanks for the memories, even though they weren’t so great. That seemed to have really upset him, because then he started screaming about why the bloody hell did you sleep with me then and Emma had cried but ultimately said she didn’t mean to and he needed to just leave because that’s what he was going to do anyway and there was no reason to feel sorry for her.

There had been more screaming that wasn’t quite intelligible (thank goodness), but when all was said and done, Killian had told Ruby that he laid it all down on the line, how much he loved her, how he wanted her to go with him to LA, how he really would burn down the whole city just to show her the light, but she’d said no. Emphatically.

Before crying so hard in Jefferson’s closet that he threatened to take her to the ER. When Emma passed out, Killian had carried her to his car (the only sober one) and carried her into her room when they got to his now-former house, leaving her with a kiss on the cheek and his later assurance to Ruby that at least he had tried.

And Emma didn’t remember.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Emma muttered to Ruby.

Was there anything worse than finding out something that could have changed your life nine fucking years too late? She had never loved anyone like she’d loved Killian. It had been the easiest relationship of her existence. She’d never felt more safe, more valued, more… loved. But she’d thought it was friend-love.

(Even after the amazing sex.)

What a fucking dumbass she was.

Ruby left her to gather her thoughts/sulk in the corner for at least three line dances before she came back over to their table, bringing Emma a nice tall water as she cleared the un-drunk Long Island Iced Tea from next to Emma’s slumped head.

“I don’t think I can ever un-fuck this up,” Emma whined into her elbow before sitting up to chug the glass of water.

“I do have his number,” Ruby offered.

Hey um Ruby gave me your number and apparently I have a lot to apologize for

Congratulations on the fame also by the way I loved you every minute of every day

This is Emma, remember me? Apparently your song about me is doing really well

Hey Killian, I was wondering if you ever made it to this side of the country any more

I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry

After about 15 failed attempts to send him a message that would convey the depth of her regret, she nearly gave up. Hands shaking, legs bouncing, lunch threatening to make an encore appearance, she pulled up the lyrics to his new song, took a screenshot,

And all my thoughts of you

They could heat or cool the room

And now don’t tell me you’re fine

Oh, honey, you don’t have to lie

And added:

I’m not fine.

It was a very painful 26 hours before she received a response, a screenshot with an addition as well.

I said I’d never miss you, but I guess you’ll never know

Where the bridges I have burned never really led home

Can I come home?

They met outside the old frat house (now shut down) a week later, staying awake until sunrise just catching up on all that had happened since they last saw each other (and a little bit of what happened when they did). She brought sparklers and he brought nine years of unreleased song lyrics.

And when his band’s next single was called Opening Pandora’s Box on Friday the Thirteenth, well, everyone but Emma just thought they were being their usual melodramatic selves.

Yeah, songs about her weren’t all that awful after all.

#cs ff #cs au ff #cs au #keisha writes #things i love #captain swan #emo music #BAM I PUT THEM TOGETHER #if you like this let me know?#because I think we'd be friends

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breaniebree · 5 years

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Can you share your journey as a writer? How the idea of writing fanfics came into your mind? Do you have other own fiction too? Also how do start a particular fanfic? As in do you make notes, timeline or character sketches and stuff or do you just go ahead and write and then make notes on facts?

What an interesting question -- thank you for asking! This is literally going to be a novel response (letting you know in advance LOL)

My journey as a writer... I guess I always wrote things down, started as a child when I wrote in a diary and then as I got older I wrote a little poetry, none of it very good (though I wrote a poem when I was twelve to describe the loss I felt when my Nana, my great-grandmother died, and my aunt read it aloud at her funeral). I wrote a few short stories, just little things, prompts from teachers in school and such and then one day I decided I wanted to write my own story. But funnily enough, it actually came about through fan fiction.

I used to love this book series back when I was ten called Trash by Cherie Bennett, and I was completely in love with the characters Chelsey and Nick, and when Jazz claimed that she was pregnant and Nick was the father and it did ended on a cliffhanger and I didn’t have the next book, I remember writing my own version of what happened next -- God, looking back, it was probably terrible, I definitely don’t have it anymore. Pretty sure the book series isn’t that great looking back at it now, but when I was ten, it was great! LOL. I also wrote a side story for Demetrius and Karma, so even then I guess I branched off into subplots. When I was fourteen, I started my own original series, which I am still currently working on and probably will be for the rest of my life if I’m honest -- it’s changed over the years, but the characters and my ultimate goal have stayed the same.

How did writing fanfiction come into mind?

Well, with Harry Potter, it was because of my friend Chris. We used to talk on the phone every single night after school for hours on end and after HBP came out and Harry and Ginny were FINALLY together only for him break up with her, I was so livid that I had to wait to find out what happened! I remember Chris and I debated what would happen in the last book for ages and one day I must have ranted too much because he told me to go write my own story if I didn’t want to wait, so I did.

I was seventeen and it was Harry Potter and the Prophecy Fulfilled: Which looking back at it now, I think it’s not exactly the greatest story lol and you can definitely see where I’ve improved since then. After finishing HPPH, I ended up still having different ideas, all Hinny, and went on to write a few one-shots: Almost Too Late and Beautiful Mess. Then I started writing A Different Beginning, which turned into my Beginning series: A Different Beginning, A New Beginning, Why Don’t We Just Dance?, Life Is Fickle Like That, Graduation Party, and The Reunion. Those of you who have been reading my fanfiction since the beginning know that I originally posted the above stories on SIYE between 2005 and 2007 and had then completed (except for the second half of Life is Fickle onwards before Deathly Hallows was published). I didn’t start posting on fanfiction.net until 2008 and only recently on Ao3. Somewhere in between writing the Beginning Series, I also wrote a few other Hinny one-shots including The Greatest Gift, She Never Lets It Get To Her Heart, I Loved Her First (actually Arthur POV, which I later incorporated into the Beginning Series), The River (which is a standalone but also can be read as part of the Beginning Series), When the Sand Runs Out, and then the mini-series Padfoot’s Advice (Late Night Talks with Padfoot 1 & 2, Padfoot’s Advice, and Secrets from the Past). Then I wrote the short Hinny/Romione story: The Trouble With Secrets and was inspired to write a Jily series, which I did with Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which could technically be a prequel to the Beginning Series as I kept some of the story similar. I also wrote a Jily one-shot called Flowers and another Hinny one-shot called I Don’t Like Your Girlfriend.

I didn’t plan on writing any more fanfiction as university became busy, but then in 2017 I started writing these little Missing Moments for Harry and Ginny both before HBP and then during, and then after. I just sort of compiled them on my computer for a while, wondering if it would turn into a story or not and then the idea came to me one day for A Second Chance after seeing some fan art of a five-year-old-Harry in sunshades and a leather jacket while riding a child’s motorbike next to Sirius in the same outfit and the next thing I knew, this story just pored out of me in February of 2018, I had the first twelve chapters written by March and another five by April. I started posting the Missing Moments compilation, added a few more things including the Remus and Petunia scene from ASC and kept writing A Second Chance and in May, decided it was time to share it and uploaded the first twelve chapters.

By the time I realized it was going to be a long one, I knew which characters I would sacrifice and how it would end, but how I was going to get there I still have no idea. I’m not a writer who methodically plots. I have a few general bullet points at the end of my current WIP chapter and that’s really it. I add to it occasionally as I go, but mostly, I just write as I go along. I can’t tell you how many chapters it will be or how long it will take me to get to the next section because frankly, it’s constantly changes. I do not write in chronological order, which means I am often writing anywhere between 2-6 chapters at the same time depending on what scene has drawn my attention. I might write something today that fits in the chapter I am currently working on and then by the time I finish writing other stuff, I realize that it doesn’t really fit there and stick it ahead into the next chapter or ten chapters from now. I write where my heart takes me and where my creativity flows.

I rarely ever work on more than one story at the same time, though I did write the short Newtina one-shot for my friend Heather as a Christmas present in 2018. She requested it and I couldn’t write it, I found it so hard as I like them but it’s not characters I loved enough to write so I did it with a Luna spin-in, which I found helped. I never take writing requests so this was very different for me, but I think it turned out cute: Say Love, ‘Cause We Got All the Time in the World. I only recently uploaded it a month or so ago because I found it on my computer LOL.

Do you make notes, timeline or character sketches and stuff or do you just go ahead and write and then make notes on facts?

Once I am into the story, my notes are EXTREMELY detailed. I do have a time line and separate documents for the following:

Character lists and family trees

General notes on: Political stuff, bills I’ve written, the sacred 28 document I wrote, tattoos mentioned, important dates, moon cycle dates of Remus’ life, classes I’ve invented (what they are about, who teaches them etc), textbook list per school year, notes on each Animagus form and information about their animals, actual time tables I wrote up Monday to Friday for Harry’s third/fourth, and fifth year, details of Zee and Tonks’ engagement rings, history and outline of Dante’s circles of hell with notes on how to incorporate into story, notes on pregnancy, character’s wands, geographic locations of characters, and any other little notes I think are important but don’t belong in the bullet points at the end of my current WIP chapter

History and ancestry of each family (from Harry Potter Lexicon, Pottermore, Harry Potter wiki, and my own personal creations). This also includes manor information for Potter, Black, Longbottom, Nott, and Malfoy.

Hogwarts lay-out including stuff I’ve added or made up

Ministry of Magic departments and people (known and created)

List of spells (including ones I’ve made up and which chapter and which character introduced it to who)

List and pictures of Sirius’ motorbikes with information on each one

List of Pensieve memories and marauder moments (crossed out which ones I’ve shared already, some are written and waiting to be used and others just a general idea)

Terms and phrases from different languages I’ve used in the past

My playlist of songs I have mentioned in the story

An entire document dedicated to Operation FUVP including a Voldemort timeline which I have now shared in the story itself (also includes when and where each character found the Horcruxes)

A list of some of the recipes I mentioned, and

I have a 72 page document that is literally just detailed chapter summaries to help me remember what the hell I’ve written LOL (also highlights introductions to new characters in a different font colour to help me find out when people were introduced).

Hope this answers your question -- thank you again for asking!

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afoolforatook · 4 years

Text

Thank you, Wellies

So. I’ve been trying to do both class work and working on wips and just nothing is clicking. So, I thought I should go ahead and do this post, that I’ve been putting off, because.....it’s next week y’all.... So here goes.

Here’s my original post, that explains what this comic meant to me four years ago.

And here’s what it means to me now. (this is really long, sorry)

Man, I don’t really even know where to start this. How to start to say thank you. To Ngozi, to all of you.... It’s not possible to fully express what all of you have been for me the past four years. What this story has been for me.

So many things have changed since I made this post almost four years ago.

So many things haven’t.

I’ve been way less active in the fandom since starting at SCAD, and I really was never that incredibly active to begin with, outside of my small group of friends on a discord server.

And at times I feel bad about that.

But it’s not because I don’t care about or need this community anymore.

Rather it’s because this community, this story, gave me the strength to keep moving, and now I want to keep doing so, and make something that might one day even barely begin to show my gratitude.

So until then, all I can do is say thank you over and over. I can never possibly say it enough.

But still I wanted to thank you now, and try to explain to you what this comic about hockey and pies has meant to me, one last time before it ends. So that’s what I’ll try to do.

It was surreal rereading this old post earlier this week. Reading

“I think I could write a book just of our history and everything leading up to now and the details of this whole event”

When I wrote this post four years ago, I honestly couldn’t imagine a future where I’d be anything other than incomplete.Or even a future at all. Everyday was just getting up and making myself keep breathing, keep trying to push towards something, even though I had no idea what that could ever be.

For the first year I wrote daily journal entries, telling Emma about what happened that day, screaming at the universe for doing this, trying to help my future self remember little things, because everything was so hard to hold on to.

Update days were always something nearly sacred to me. And really not even from a fan point of view. I don’t read them around other people. I sit somewhere quiet, by myself, and read slowly. Because they are little moments I try to share with her still. The only person I want with me when I read them that first time is her, in whatever capacity I can bring myself to imagine.

A few months after the crash, I found one of Emma’s Spotify playlists. She made playlists for everything; birthday and Christmas presents, mood playlists, friend playlists, monthly playlists.

This was her May 2016 playlist. Last updated May 16th. Two days before the crash.

That playlist was literally the only thing I listened to for months on end. 38 songs.Over and over.

And as I listened I started to think that, just maybe, some of these songs she put there for me.

West Coast; the song me and Emma would send to each other after high school whenever we wanted to let the other know how much we missed them.

All I Want is to Be Your Girl. I mean??

Slowly I found lyrics in every song that even if just in my own fantasy, were little messages from Emma, telling me to keep going, how to stay strong.

I was always looking for stories, books, movies, songs, anything about someone grieving the kind of loss I was. Nothing I found felt like it really represented me. If it was about someone young, it was due to suicide or violence or illness. If it was a car crash, it was about a parent or child. If it somehow fit my other demographics, it was never queer.

I felt totally alone in the exact manifestation of my grief. Like no one else could understand all the tiny details that seemed, to me, to make this all more and more cartoonishly cruel.

(though one of the most touching moments of my life will always be when Emma’s step mom, the only person in her family who knows about us, sent me a book about grieving a spouse. I cried for hours when I opened that.)

I didn’t have outside representation, support. But I had journals. I had Emma’s songs. I had poems and a handful of inktober drawings. I had my little update moments of connection. And I had so much to say.

Months, years, of isolation gives you a lot of time to examine your feelings, to question the meaning of things, to think about what exactly grief looked like to you and about how you wanted to live the rest of your life, as someone grieving a love.

And slowly I began to connect those thoughts to individual lyrics from Emma’s playlist and that helped me actually write all those thoughts out, organize them.

And that’s how The Mixtape Project started (I still hate using the word memoir. I had to find something else to call it). A book about us. About Emma. About all those thoughts I’d had so long to sit with. Structured around the songs from her playlist.

I remember the exact moment that I realized that Check Please was going to actively change my life. I was talking to my dad about it, about why I loved the storytelling, the characters, the art, so much.

I’d told him many times before. But it was always tied to Emma in a way, or to the reasons that I identified with Jack. It was always a little sad in some way.

But this time. This time it was just excitement. It was just a kid who has always loved words, gushing about a story that fascinated them.

And I realized. It was the first time I had been just happy, excited, in the months since losing Emma. I remembered all those ideas Emma helped me with in high school, how we gushed over stories like that. I remembered what it was like to just love something and want to create, just because it made you happy.

I knew I couldn’t go back to UNCA, and none of the other creative writing programs I had looked at seemed like they would fit the new person I was.

So, for the hell of it, looking for some idea at how to start my life over, I looked at Ngozi’s personal story. And there was SCAD. There was sequential art.

Now. I’d never ever considered myself an artist. I went to an art high school, I knew art kids. I was never one of them. But that sequential part? That. THAT was what I wanted. That was what I could still be excited about.

That was how I could pull the Mixtape Project together. The writing, the poems, the art, the music. Comics. Sequential art. A graphic memoir that played with the format. That was the project that kept me going. That was what I was working for. That was the first future I was able to see now that Emma was gone.

So, for the first time since literally elementary school, I took an art class (also took a mythology class at the same time, which really helped keep my art and storytelling tied).

I loved it. I was actually happy with my work, surprised by my work and how quickly I felt like I improved (I wouldn’t learn about aphantasia until I got to SCAD, and understand that that drawing 1 class had been so fun, and in a way, easy, because it was all direct observation, and that drawing from memory and imagination would be a much steeper learning curve for me.)

So, when the class ended I thought ‘you know, maybe some kind of art school could be a good idea.’

And then one of my life long best friends, a SCAD animation student, encouraged me to apply, to just go for it.

And I did. It was a long shot, I was sure. We couldn’t afford it. Why would I get that in that kind of commitment, debt, after 1 art class? It wasn’t logical. But it felt good. So I did.

And then I got accepted, and the initial excitement soon fell away, to me and my parents knowing that it really wasn’t doable.

But we went to admitted students day, just to see. And when we got home, both of my parents cried for a long time. The first happy cry in our house for over two years.

Because they had decided that they had to figure out a way to make it work.

Because standing in Haymans hall was the first time they had seen me excited about the future since Emma died. It was the first time they’d seen me feel like there was somewhere I was meant to be, that there was somewhere I could fit again.

So we made it happen. I’ll still be in debt for years, and it’s not necessarily something I’d wholeheartedly recommend to kids getting out of high school, that debt isn’t worth it for many people.

For me it wasn’t really even worth it exactly for SCAD itself, and you’ll have plenty of professors tell you here that really what you pay for isn’t the education but the networking.

But for me. For me it was worth it.

Because I wasn’t wasting away in my basement.

And I really wasn’t where I’d have liked to have been, ideally, before starting. I was a BRAND new artist. My portfolio for my application was solely my writing work. I hadn’t ever done anything more than scribbled fan comics in my sketchbook. I was coming in wayyyyy behind where most other people were. But I couldn’t wait to feel like I was good enough to be there. There was a strong chance that it was quite literally, a matter of survival. I was reaching a breaking point after nearly three years of isolation and grief with no outlet. The future debt was less of a concern than making sure I didn’t have a complete mental breakdown or worse.

Now, of course, it hasn’t all been easy or fun or happy once I got here. I’ve doubted myself, I’ve had awful weeks, months, been stressed, unmotivated, in pain, near burnout.

The first quarter I was absolutely miserable because I had literally no social life.

Because I was an agoraphobic 23 yr old, living with 17/18 yr olds fresh out of high school. And if I wasn’t careful, I’d dissociate so easily. I’d let myself believe that I was still a teenager fresh from high school. That the past three years of agony hadn’t happened. That I could call Emma and it would ring again. She would answer again. And that illusion was a dangerous pit to fall into.

And it wasn’t until this fall that my social life really started to improve, beyond one or two close friends. And even still, while it’s much better, it’s nothing like UNCA, like the tight knit family I had that made me identify with SMH and the Haus atmosphere so much.

But I was moving forward. Agonizingly slowly sometimes. But still forward.

And then last Spring quarter, just about a year ago, I was in Survey for SEQA. Basically comic book history class. And our final was a 4 page research comic on a comic artist we admired. So of course, I was going to do mine on Ngozi.

The comic was due at the end of the quarter, the end of May.

Now, that quarter was the first time I was actually in SEQA classes; Survey, and Intro.

And those four pages would be the first fully colored, refined comic pages I had EVER done. It was intimidating. I didn’t want to mess it up. Especially because this wasn’t some big name of some far off artist you would never have any connection to. This was someone who all my professors knew.

I ended up getting extremely lucky and had the chance to email Ngozi and ask if she’d be able to give for a quote for the project, advice for current SCAD students.

She replied to my email the weekend of the 3rd anniversary. (I then spent hours on a thank you email - because that’s who I am, I can’t not over analyze anything I’m sending to someone important - and then I managed to save it to drafts instead of actually sending it...something I would not notice until literally months later and be absolutely mortified about my apparent rudeness of never thanking her.)

I still am not really happy with how that project came out. I still had (and have) a lot to learn, and it shows. I have, in no way, become an amazing comic artist overnight. I wasn’t expecting to.

But that short email exchange, falling on that weekend; it felt special. It felt like some speck of proof that I was doing the right thing. That things could actually go well in my life again. That if I kept going, I might actually get somewhere that I wanted to be. That maybe I really could make The Mixtape Project happen, if I just kept at it here.

And then I found out that in the fall, Ngozi would be the SEQA mentor.

Unfortunately by the time I had all the details about how to apply, the quarter had started and there were only a couple of weeks before it was due, and the only pages I had even anywhere close to being portfolio ready were either my research comic or a few older Check Please fan comics, none of which I would even have considered putting in that portfolio (I’m not 100% certain it would actually have come across as sucking up but it sure felt like it would have). And despite my best efforts, it just wasn’t possible, with how slow I work and having to keep up with classwork, for me to get a portfolio ready in time.

That hurt for a while. I felt like I had this clear sign of perfect timing. How could I pass up that chance? How could I forgive myself for not doing everything I could to earn that experience? How was I not letting Emma down if I ruined this opportunity?

It took a while to get out of that negative thought spiral. But I did, and it’s still a bummer, but it’s okay.

And something that really helped?

In October, Ngozi still came to campus to give a lecture. And that would have been good enough; just sitting in on that helped me feel excited, encouraged again. But then, after the lecture (with my amazing roommate waiting patiently behind with me, to make sure I didn’t actually have a panic attack on the way home) I got to talk to her.

We all hope to one day get to talk to the people who inspired us, whose work we love, to tell them how much they mean to us. And yes, I was a little version of starstruck.

But that wasn’t why I was shaking. That wasn’t why I told her I was going to do my best to get this out without crying (and I did, I’m proud to say).

It was because I had the opportunity, while at the school that had given me a chance to start my life again, to thank the woman who was in all likelihood, one of the main reasons I was even still alive. If it had not been for Check Please I wouldn’t have had that good thing to keep sharing with Emma. I wouldn’t have found sequential art, at least not for a while longer probably. I wouldn’t have been able to finally picture a future I wanted to get to.

And I’ll be honest, I don’t remember 90% of what I actually said that night to Ngozi.

But I told her my story. I told her about Emma. About how Check Please was the last thing we got to share. I thanked her. And she was wonderful and kind and emotional and hugged me a couple of times, and even though I don’t remember a lot of what I actually said; it was something that will be one of the most important, affirming moments of my life.

I didn’t have a panic attack on the way home. I somehow managed to not cry until we were back to our dorm. But I was stunned.

Not even because of the amazing moment I had been able to have with Ngozi.

But because it hit me.

I was doing it. I was there. I had actually made it this far.

Somewhere that just over a year ago I never would have believed was possible.

A time when, two years before, I hadn’t even been sure I could make it to alive.

That weekend was my 24th birthday. And it was the first birthday since I left UNCA at 19, that I didn’t just hate the fact that I was getting older. That I was moving away from the happiest parts of my life so far.

Yes it still hurt getting further from Emma, putting another tick on the years that I got that she didn’t.

But I was actually finally excited at the idea of even having a future, let alone having an idea of what it could be.

February was a difficult month for me. I have another (entirely way too long) post about why everything that happened with RWBY and Fairgame was so difficult for me, but to put it simply; my hope for the future was shaken.

I was back in the toxic negative thought spirals I had fought for years to train myself out of.

I was seeing Emma, or her brother, or her mom, in crowds; something I hadn’t experienced since the first few months after the crash. I was in one of the biggest crisis moments I’d had since Emma’s death.

But I was more experienced than when I was 20.

It wasn’t fun, a lot of it probably wasn’t the ideal way to cope, but I did it. And I kept up with my work. I isolated more, but not completely. I made myself vent on snapchat or tumblr, and not worry about oversharing or annoying people, because it was either get it out or let it fester in my head. And I couldn’t afford to let that happen.

In mid March, I made a pitch packet for my comic scripting final.

It was for The Mixtape Project. It was hard, and nerve-wracking, and there’s still mountains of work to be done.

But after my initial synopsis (first of like seven versions, cause trying to put this thing in a good synopsis format is a nightmare) my professor told me that he thought my story had potential.

That he could see it being published. He suggested, knowing that I was planning on taking his advanced scripting course this quarter (hey remember how mid march was only a few weeks ago?? Huh?? wild), that I keep working on it, and see about taking it to Editor’s day (SEQA students’ opportunity to basically pitch themselves and their ideas to publishers).

Now, my professor is by no means an overly harsh critic, and is plenty supportive in general.

But I also knew that that was not just something he said to students all the time. That he meant it.

Editor’s Day (now online) is in mid May. The week of the 4th anniversary of Emma’s death, to be exact.

Everything is a mess right now, and I’m stressed and tired and scared and heartbroken (this will be the first time since I was 9 that I have not had Merlefest; the highlight of my year, and since Emma’s death; the last big happy thing before I plunge into the nightmare that is May).

Tuesday will come. Check Please will end. I will continue to support Ngozi and her work after Bitty’s story ends.

But it will be sad. It won’t be easy.

This thing that has been my tether to the most important person in my life, will still be there, but it will be over.

It will have a concrete end. It will no longer be part of the future I am pushing towards.

But I am a different person than the shattered kid who wrote this post four years ago.

I’m not who I was before Emma died. I never will be. I’d never try to be. I want Emma back more than anything. But that won’t happen. And as long as this is all real, I never want to pretend this didn’t happen.

That I didn’t shatter in a way that will never heal like people expect.

I’m still all those shattered pieces that wrote this post. Maybe a few have had the edges dulled, maybe I’ve lost a few, glued a few together perfectly, maybe picked up a few stray pieces that didn’t come from the me from before.

But I will be those shattered pieces for the rest of my life.

They won’t magically fuse back together. I work every day to hold them, to keep myself in some shape that resembles a functioning person.

Some days I fail. Some days, I am too tired to even try. Some days, I am so angry, I’d rather hurl the pieces at whatever power or fate or god or chaos decided that I got to live and she didn’t.

But those days pass.

And I learn how to hold the pieces better, how to avoid the sharpest edges, how to take care of the wounds when I inevitably cut myself on one, how to allow other people to help me hold them, how to accept that some pieces may feel safe and smooth and comforting but they are traps, illusions that are the easy way to do things, but not the healthy way, not the way that will help me achieve my goals.

That person, made of all those unholdable pieces, four years ago, was staying alive for everyone else but themself.

And some days I still am.

For my parents. For Emma. For all the other queer, mentally ill, grieving kids and young adults and just people, who are looking for the same representation I was, who feel as alone as I still do so often.

But some days.

On those really good days.

I’m alive, carrying all those pieces, just because I want to be. For me.

I want to spin around in the morning, singing along to my bluegrass spotify. I want to get excited over finally figuring out how to write that line that was giving me so much trouble, or finish that sketch that I never thought I could manage. I want to hope that despite how awful everything seems, there’s still a good future out there. It’s still possible to be happy some days.

I want to cry because I get to see Jack and Bitty get the happy ending that me and Emma didn’t.

And now, unlike that version of me from four years ago, when it ends, I will have things still.

Things that I have worked everyday to reach, to deserve, to hold out to people and say

“Hey, sometimes everything hurts and you know that things will never be what they were, and parts of you will always miss that. But there are still things you can find that hurt less, that ease the hurt, that teach you how to better hold the hurt, to stop trying to say it doesn’t exist or trying to get rid of it completely and hating yourself when you can’t. You can still be hurt, be irreparably broken in so many places, and still find the happy things. You are still worthy of love, no matter how broken you are. Your worth is not tied to how much you are able to heal. You are worthy of so much love, just because you are still here, no matter how many tiny pieces you are in.”

The thing is, I will still always have a future that includes Emma. Because I couldn’t tell you exactly which of my pieces are from her, but so many of them are.

There is no version of me, from here on to the day I die, that does not have her influence embedded in every piece.

These days I try to be a little kinder to myself. It doesn’t always work, but I try.

Because, to Emma, I was Bitty. I radiated that “thing”.

Whether or not I saw it in myself, doesn’t matter, because she did.

But to me she was the one who radiated.

And she is a part of me. She can’t radiate that “thing” herself anymore.

But I can, at least I can try.

Because If this person I loved and trusted so immensely, saw something worth loving in me? There must be something there worth loving, right?

And if she is a part of me for the rest of my life, how can I hate myself? How can I do anything but keep going so that, even if just in my head, a part of her gets to keep going too.

My family and friends joke that every friend group I’ve ever had calls me something different. And really it’s not a joke. In middle school I was CB #4 (that’s a long, terribly embarrassing, story). In high school I was Pond (and many variations there of: Pondala, Pondy, Raindrop, Puddle, you get the picture). At UNCA, when I came out as nonbinary, I started going by Auden. When I went home it was back to Meagan; Meagan always felt right with my parents.

With Emma I was always Meagan. We were Meagan and Emma. Megma. Meagan and Emma have online adventures!

After she was gone, Meagan didn’t really feel like me anymore. I loved Meagan, I missed Meagan, I wished I could still really fully be Meagan, and I’m okay still being Meagan sometimes.

But that real Meagan. The Meagan that was Emma’s Meagan. Doesn’t exist anymore. I lost that Meagan somewhere in that first night of screaming and trying to break my hand against the wall, so I could just feel something other than the agony of Emma being gone.

When I joined a Check Please chat group, a few months after the crash, we gave each other hockey nicknames. I was Farley.

My second quarter at SCAD, I started going by Farley. It stuck.

That’s who this version of me is. This new artist, still figuring things out, but still going.

I may not always stay Farley (other than ya’know artist ‘branding’. We’ll see) but that’s okay. Farley is who I need to be right now.

Farley is who will finish The Mixtape Project.

(because of two people mishearing both my nickname and last name I will, at least once in my career, use the pseudonym Fartley McFarmland and no one will stop me).

I can’t imagine what, who, will come after Farley, if anything.

But Check Please will always be a part of making Farley, and every future version of me, exist.

I could go on and on about how beautiful this story and these characters are, how inspiring Ngozi is, how genius her storytelling is, how powerful and important her work is. I could go on for days about all of that. But this is already so long, and I know that so many of you can go on about that probably way better than I could currently.

But, as many of my professors tell us over and over, only I can tell this story. My story. Emma’s story. Our story. And it’s one I plan on telling for the rest of my life.

And Check Please, Ngozi, will forever be the thing that made that possible.

So thank you. Those two words that are way too small to say it all.

Thank you.

Every fic writer

Every artist

Every rper

Every chat friend

Every shitposter

Every theorist or meta poster

Every fan

Thank you.

B. “Shitty” Knight.

Larissa “Lardo” Duan

Adam “Holster” Birkholtz

Justin “Ransom” Oluransi

John Johnson

Ollie O'Meara

Pacer Wicks

Jenny and Mandy

Nicholas and Jean-Claude

Coach Hall

Coach Murray

Suzanne Bittle

Richard “Coach” Bittle

William “Dex” Poindexter

Derek “Nursey” Nurse

Chris “Chowder” Chow

Kent Parson

Alicia Zimmermann

“Bad” Bob Zimmermann

Tony “Tango” Tangredi

Connor “Whiskey” Whisk

Denice “Foxtrot” Ford

Fry Guy

Georgia “Georgie” Martin

Alexei “Tater” Mashkov

Sebastian “Marty” St. Martin

Dustin “Snowy” Snow

Poots

Randall “Thirdy” Robinson

Jonathan “Hops” Hopper

River “Bully” Bullard

Lukas “Louis” Landmann

(I’m almost certain I had to have missed someone)

Thank you.

Jack “Zimmboni” Laurent Zimmermann

Thank you.

Eric “Bitty” Richard Bittle

Thank you.

Ngozi Ukazu

Thank you. For everything.

For having my back. I’ll always have yours.

Always yours,

Farley M.

#Check Please #omgcp #my person #my writing #meagan and emma have online adventures #-slaps me- you can fit so many confused emotions in this thing

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