#Janet only vaguely remembered it

[nerdpoe]

Surrogate au

Janet Drakes body was unable to handle a pregnancy, she was found to be infertile, and she and Jack wanted a kid.

So they hired a discreet surrogate. She was from a bad part of town, and already had one kid she'd apparently adopted or something, and even if she didn't keep her mouth shut literally no one would believe her.

Her name was Catharine Todd.

Jason just vaguely remembers, before his mom fell to drugs, that for about nine months while she was pregnant with his little brother or sister they had everything paid for.

But then she'd gone into labor at home, a special baby doctor got called, and a weird couple that smelled like money literally yanked his new baby brother from her arms.

Afterwards, she'd never been the same.

That on top of his dad getting abusive ultimately drove her to drugs.

Then everything else had happened, and he didn't have time to look into it. How could he? Even with all of Batmans tech, he genuinely had been so scared for his mom that he couldn't remember the faces of the couple that kidnapped his brother.

Sure, he could have asked Bruce to look, but he was afraid of finding his answer in the form of a headstone.

After Jason comes back, as he's stalking Tim to get ready for Titans Tower, digs into the Drake records.

And he finds it.

It's Tim. Tim's the little brother he lost before he could even see the kids tiny baby face.

It doesn't matter that Catharine wasn't his biological mom, she raised him; she earned the title of mom. Which meant Tim was his brother.

And in Jason's mind, there's no way that Bruce didn't know when he recruited Tim. He'd not only upgraded, he'd kept it in the family, so to speak.

Now Jason's torn between demanding Bruce kill the Joker and just killing Bruce himself, for putting his only remaining family in danger instead of protecting them.

[mzminola]

Because something superhero comics, noir, and fanfic all have in common is leaning into soap opera convolutedness, @alexmaybe & I have come up with the Bruce Wayne Spawn Shell Game AU, in which the middle kids are all biologically Bruce’s.

(Dick really is John & Mary Grayson’s, and Damian is Talia’s direct clone.)

No one finds this out until Batman!Bruce & Robin!Damian are fighting a magic user who has heard rumors that Robin is Batman’s son (rumors started by Damian’s not so quiet comments about being The Blood Son). The mage gloats that they’re going to use a “teleport everyone with X trait to me” spell to yank Robin over, and use the disorientation of teleportation to take him hostage. “I will summon Batman’s direct blood descendents! Mwa ha ha ha!”

Cue Damian staying firmly at Bruce’s side, while Cass in street wear with bubble tea, Jason doing gear maintenance, a random college student studying for exams, and Tim in his pajamas pop out of the ether all within a yard of the mage.

The mage regrets their life choices.

~

Now, how did we get here?

Firstly, during the years Bruce is doing his world tour of Learning Batman Skills while still swinging in and out of Gotham, Bruce is seeking physical activity to make his brain shut up, and also seeking intimacy but keeping too many secrets to let himself actually get close to people, so he is sleeping with Even More People Than In His Batman Years. He remembers condoms but always doesn’t use them perfectly.

Bruce meets Sandra & Carolyn Wu-San at their dojo in Brooklyn. Some time later when David Cain coerces Sandra into reproductive sex, she seeks out every male martial artist she vaguely respected or thought had potential to sleep with them too as a Fuck You to undermine Cain’s scheme without openly breaking their deal.

Bruce has a one-night stand with pre-transition Willis Todd, both of them just giving their first (legal) name, no contact info. Figuring out several months later that he’s pregnant but no clue how to find the other father, Willis, who does want kids someday, weighs the pros and cons of “having trouble making ends meet right now, can I support a kid?” with “everyone says pregnancy would be harder later in transition,” and opts to have Jason now.

Sheila Haywood is either a friend or a bribable hospital worker (or both) who agrees to put her name down as the mom so Willis can legally be his kid’s dad without any complicated paperwork. Willis and Catherine never got around to telling Jason before both of them died. When Jason showed up at the camp thinking Sheila was his bio-mom she rolled with it, figuring she could get details of why he thought that later, and then unfortunately [canon ensued].

It won’t be until the spell incident happens that Bruce puts together one night stand Wilhelmina with Why do the pictures of Willis Todd look kinda familiar? Because he definitely never slept with Catherine or Sheila.

Bruce meets, befriends and sleeps with Janet Drake while going on an archaeological research binge. He’s also still having a lot of random bar and nightclub hook-ups.

Some months later, while Jack is out of town on a business trip, Janet complains to Bruce that Jack really wants a son, but the latest ultrasound shows a female fetus. Janet really doesn’t want to deal with pregnancy ever again, but Jack isn’t open to adoption, and ugh if only Janet could just swap this one for a male infant. It would be so easy to nudge Jack into an archeology dig closer to the due date, he’d never have to know!

(No, neither Bruce nor Janet have thought maybe Bruce got Janet pregnant instead of Jack.)

“You’ve got this knack for finding odd things at just the right moment, Brucie…”

Janet knows it’s a long shot, and dubiously ethical because adoption records exist for good reason, and if they can’t find a baby that works she’ll just have to dig her heels in with Jack against trying for a son, but if Bruce could find a baby…

Bruce makes no promises other than keeping an eye and ear out.

Anyway, Bruce isn’t Batman yet, but he’s home between tutors on his World Tour and venturing into the city in various disguises to learn more about Gotham’s underworld, and getting into trouble. So it is Bruce Wayne with a fresh concussion, not a drunk Brucie, who stumbles into an alley to vomit and finds a baby in a dumpster.

It’s a very full dumpster, one half of the lid broken off. An orange cat (who may or may not be Teekl returning a future favor) is curled around the newborn baby boy. The infant has a shock of hair as dark as Janet’s.

Concussed Bruce walks all the way to the Drake townhouse marveling at the tiny hand gripping his finger so tight.

Janet schedules a C-section. Bruce forges Timothy Jackson Drake’s birth certificate and arranges the adoption of Janet’s daughter by a family in Oregon. He keeps tabs on them over the years, preparing a Wayne Foundation scholarship to the college of her choice someday.

~

Back to the magic incident: Nightwing and Batwoman were on their way there as back-up when the mage cast the summoning spell, so Dick is able to hug Damian as the kid bluescreens about Not Being The Blood Son.

Bruce awkwardly explains that yes, he ran Damian’s DNA when Talia dropped him off, but when he realized Damian was Talia’s direct clone, he also realized Talia was taking steps to ensure her child escaped the League of Assassins, by attaching him to one of the few people on the planet who can go toe to toe with (and even defeat) her father. Bruce opted to go along with Talia’s choice.

Kate has gotten popcorn from somewhere, munching on it while Bruce desperately thinks back to his Mega Ho Years to figure out how everyone else happened.

Cass is feeling a vindictive sort of smugness about not being David Cain’s bio-kid. He’s still her dad, but he only got part of what he wanted from Shiva.

Jason is pissed at Bruce for not figuring it out earlier, but kinda relieved that Sheila wasn't actually his mom.

The freshman college student from Oregon is really annoyed, she was at study group and she CANNOT fail this class!!! Now she’s on the entire opposite coast???

Tim is having some feelings about how fucking soap opera his origins turn out to be. Bruce slept with his mom Janet, but also she wasn’t his birth mom, he was adopted and no one told him??? Who the heck is his other birth parent??? What were the odds of his apparent bio-parent Bruce being the one to find him??? Wait, was finding baby Tim in a dumpster why younger!Bruce suddenly had Wayne Enterprises put money into improving and proliferating Safe Drop-Off Sites in Gotham???

(He is Not Thinking About his complicated relationship with Jack.)

~

Tim, when things are just starting to quiet down: “Wait, so does Talia have XY chromosomes, or does Damian have XX? Because I’ve done a lot of of cloning lab work, and—”

Damian: “Don’t talk about my mother’s chromosomes, dumpster baby.”

Tim: >:(

Bruce, very tired: “Damian, don’t call your brother a dumpster baby.”

Damian, indignant: “But you just told us you found him in a dumpster as an infant!”

Freshman college student: “Dude, it’s still fucking rude? Like how would you like being called a test tube baby?”

Damian: /draws sword/

Dick, pushing sword back into sheath: “No drawing weapons on civilians. Or calling Tim rude things. Tim, I think any chromosome questions are Talia and Damian’s personal medical business, so please don’t speculate on them.”

Tim, sarcastically: “Sorry, I forgot medical privacy exists after how you all reacted to the spleen thing.”

Freshman college student: “Spleen thing?”

Tim: “Don’t worry, it’s not genetic. Speaking of, B, you’re gonna have to update, like, all our medical history now.”

Bruce, even more tired: "Hn."

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

Listening

First posted: April 14, 2019

Focuses on: Tim Drake, Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson

Tier: Middle of the pack at best

This is my “behind the scenes” series where I indulge myself horribly by annotating my fics. Link to the fic itself above. Thoughts below the cut.

More than once person requested a continuation of Carried for the one-year ficiversary prompt, so after Shoulder to Shoulder I wrote this. Since I already rehashed Janet's funeral from Dick's POV, I figured it was time to take on Bruce, but for what happened after.

Bruce didn’t know what he was doing. On paper, he was trying, just like he had promised Dick. But Dick, ever the optimist, had underestimated just how broken Bruce was. I don’t know how to do this, he admitted to no one, but surely they could tell. 

Bruce is Not Well, y'all. Like bless him outwardly he's all 🗿, but internally? Parental Panic 24/7.

Dick had been too young and traumatized to notice when he had first come to the Manor. Jason—would it always hurt like this, just thinking his name?—Jason had expected everything and nothing of him and so hadn’t been disappointed to receive something in the middle. But what ground Bruce had gained, he had lost in a gleaming swing and a deafening explosion.

I would remove the "gleaming swing" because I'm not sure Bruce would know about the crowbar specifically, and even if he did, I'm not sure he would think of it in those terms. (Also it sounds more like a sword?) I'd want another adjective-noun pairing there for balance, though. Just "deafening explosion" doesn't feel right. The rest of it is nice, though, very true to how Bruce perceives his own efforts and how/why he feels his kids forgave his many mistakes.

Unlike the others, Tim had been unwanted. Bruce could admit that to himself, if to no one else. Tim had been the chirping bird on the windowsill, urging him to meet the dawn when all Bruce wanted to do was never wake up again. Tim had been the buffeting blow of an airbag to the face, the ricochet of a guardrail, the snap of a harness.

Hello, still fairly fresh off It Wasn't Real, howzitgoin. It's awfully fun to take a thing that two characters are each secretly thinking and secretly agree on and show how very far apart they remain on what that thing means. Tim knows Bruce did not want him around at first, and he carries that rejection with him long past when it was valid. Bruce acknowledges Tim wasn't wanted at first but places the onus of that on himself. It has nothing at all to do with Tim, other than the fact that Tim was pushing him to live when he wanted to die.

Tim had saved Bruce’s life, maybe in more ways than he would ever know, but he had not been wanted, only needed. Even once that had changed, Bruce’s behaviors hadn’t, not significantly. For all the deception his life depended on, he wasn’t sure how to fix this disconnect between behavior and emotion.

Ain't that always the way.

There had been no tears, no outbursts, no nightmares like the ones that had rousted Bruce from bed to pace the halls and Dick to cross his path in the glow of the open fridge.

Readers during Shoulder to Shoulder had noted the implication that being at a funeral would affect both Bruce and Dick, as people with past trauma involving death and funerals. Here's the payoff. Tim's mom died and Bruce and Dick are the ones who can't sleep.

He had only crossed paths with Jack Drake once or twice before, despite being neighbors, and remembered little about the man other than a vague sheen of dislike, like a thin film of oil floating above the water of his impression.

I like that line. Sometimes that's just how it is. There's no real mass, no substance to a dislike. A person just leaves a bad aftertaste.

He had reminded Bruce too much of other little boys, too much of himself, too much of Tim himself the first and only time Bruce had raised his voice outside the cowl.

I don't know why I wrote that. My guess is that I figured Bruce couldn't have yelled at Tim too much before this point or he wouldn't have reacted to strongly to Tim's reaction, but wow I really painted myself into a corner there. Bad Mental Health Bruce only yelled at Tim once???

And maybe if Tim had needed him still in the days to follow, that would have made things easier and given Bruce a template to follow. Instead, Tim was fine and Bruce was the one floundering.

me @ me: o o f

“I’m sorry you’re dead. Which is a-a dumb thing to say, I know, but... You were really important to Bruce. Even if no one said so, you can tell, by the way he doesn’t talk about it. And he’s old now. I mean, an adult and everything, but he’s still upset about it. Which is how it should be, right?”

I am perpetually fascinated with Bruce's grief, especially how it might be perceived by and affect those around him. It's often portrayed as this nostalgic, static thing—an unchanging event from his childhood—rather than a real, living, ongoing thing that affects his day to day life. Tim knows better.

“I’m upset you’re dead,” Tim was saying, “because you seem like good people, and because it hurt Bruce when you went away. And I’ve never even met you. So... so shouldn’t I be upset about my mom, too?”

IIRC, that first bit was one of the sentences I was writing toward, one of the reasons I put Tim out here in the snow at all. He needed someone to talk to and no way was he confessing any of this to people who might think less of him.

"But I was surprised, because they said she must’ve been on her way home, and I hadn’t even known she was coming back.”

Another sentence I remember being determined to fit in, since it fit in well with his previous sentiment in Carried.

“Alfred installed these. They’re really buried in Gotham Cemetery, but I wanted a way to talk to them every day, so...”

Oh I fussed so much about figuring out the logistics for the Waynes. You can't just bury people on private property! But I wanted them there! Thinking through why and how there might be a replica of a gravesite on the grounds was a useful exercise, though.

That seemed a long time ago, the days when he felt bursting with things to say. Bruce could still remembering the tight, burning sensation in his chest, like if he didn’t get all the emotions out, he would go to pieces, but it was like remembering something that happened to another person. He still had the emotions, still had the blaze beneath his breastbone, but the words had slipped away entirely.

I was pretty deep into Nature and Nurture by the time I wrote this fic, so clearly Bruce's psyche and communication skills remain Of Interest. I just love the idea of some parts of Bruce being a consistent throughline while others that non-Alfred people might think of as a core piece of his identity are actually a result of trauma.

Bruce pointed to the chipped arm of his mother’s cross. “I did that. I was... I don’t know how old. I don’t even really remember why. I just remember being angry. Angry at them for not being here, angry for leaving me with two hunks of rock that didn’t talk back. Angry at myself for being angry.”

I had to pull these details back up for a later fic and work around them/incorporate them into The Rain Again, when Bruce gets angry again.

The words came slowly, as they always did, but Bruce had learned by now to speak at a measured pace to make them seem as deliberate as they were, if less hard-won.

I was reading some book at the time that uses this framing for a character's speech and I wish I could remember what it was, because it makes sense.

“You were missed,” Bruce finally answered

I loved knowing that that's where this fic was headed, in the end. It made me feel so warm and cozy.

[grimbeak]

on a Serious note: I am very worried the conclusion to this arc will be the boy killing adult kevin, implying that certain people are too broken to be fixed. I feel like if the conclusion of this arc ends with current kevin being dead it'll undermine literally all of his baggage into "just some crazy guy" instead of. a guy with disorders the dsm hasn't even seen yet who deserves to heal from his past

on a more speculative note: it's mentioned talk therapy is illegal in desert bluffs too. the first idea they have for the boy is to take him to a child therapist, which is talk therapy. just thought that was interesting

Well,I had a whole answer written up, and then I looked at a transcript and it was gone. God bless Tumblr. I'm going to paraphrase.

I don't think they would do that. For one, this is a child talking about murdering his future self. He talks about how he is going to do it in explicit detail. While Night Vale has segments that are gorey and occasionally sad, even including the deaths of characters, I think this would be too big a leap. This is a more serious topic- for example, the episode we get where Old Woman Josie has died, and we spend it learning about her and her life. While she wasn't a big recurring character, it was clear that she meant a lot to Cecil and the town. There was so much about her we never got to learn.

Kevin. Kevin is a huge character. While not recurring often after his "defeat", we still hear from him from time to time. However, he's such a big character because of who he is. He's Cecil's double. While we really don't know much about Cecil (so much of what we have is just speculation from the vague hints left in occasional episodes), we know even less about Kevin.

Kevin... We really have no idea what he's up to. He wanted to take over Night Vale with Strex, but they lost. After Kevin got trapped in the Desert Otherworld, we could have easily never heard from him again. We've barely heard anything about Lubelle post-mortem, except that she's probably still under the cow.

You could argue that we didn't know much about Janet Lubelle. However, we did know her motives. We knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to explain Night Vale, plain and simple.

Now? Kevin has a life separate from StrexCorp and even the Smiling God. Lubelle never had a clear life separate from the University of What It Is. Kevin has a partner, a stepson. A kind-of-friend in Lauren. An old companionship with Carlos. Kevin is a character that has been developed outside of his main focuses, and I think that's important to remember. Night Vale interns die because, well, they're interns. Not much we learn about them. The ones we did learn about? Still alive. Dana Cardinal- former mayor, now therapist. Maureen- owns dark owl records with Michelle. Even Kareem had something to distinguish himself- a double, and a family that didn't remember him. All of them are still living.

One of, if not the only character that's been developed to have a personal life and still died, is Old Woman Josie. Dead from a hip infection. And we got a whole episode (several if you count the ones mentioning her worsening condition) about her passing. She was a very important character, especially to Cecil. Based on those odds, and the extreme difference in death cause (natural hip infection vs murdered by your past/future child self), along with the whole topic being extremely heavy for the podcast, I don't think they're going to have Kevin be killed by himself. Kevin's a very developed character that we still know very little about, and we're only just learning more now. Along with that, Josie had a daughter, but they had a complicated relationship. During one of the last few times we heard from Kevin, he got a partner and a stepson. While it is odd that we didn't get a mention of them in the past Adult!Kevin episode, I think it can be easily explained by the focus being on a specific holiday and Lauren suddenly showing up and surprising him/the whole "smiling god doesn't actually love you" thing. The difference in time between the desert otherworld and night vale hasn't been explained fully yet. Who knows if it's still ten times faster? Who knows if the active portal is messing with the time? I think there's a very high chance that Charles and Donovan are still alive, and likely similar ages from when we last heard from them. I doubt finknor would give him a young child to care for and then instantly age him up without letting us see how that's affected Kevin.

If Charles and Donovan are still alive, then would Brinknor really kill a man in front of his child and partner? After the healing he clearly went through to get to that point? I don't think they've forgotten about Charles and Donovan.

Not only would it not make sense for his character, it would also be a very dark turn for the podcast. While Night Vale has had it's dark moments (Go To The Mirror), I think there's a huge step to make between cosmic horror and a child murdering his future self (who we've recently been purposely reminded exists! Who's recently been given more dialogue to a name!). Even if you see the "killing his future self" part as an average night vale plot, this is still a child. A child who we've grown to know both versions of. A child who, a few weeks ago in Night Vale time, was pretending to be an airplane in a park. While The Boy has gotten more serious and seemingly more unstable over the weeks, he's still a child. Cecil offers him goldfish crackers and a root beer.

The way the episode ends, especially with the addition of Carlos trying to help The Boy with symbolism, it feels very much like The Boy saying that he needs to murder his future self, and describing it in detail, is something that is not going to be tolerated by the other characters. Brinknor wouldn't suddenly switch up Carlos's personality and have him help Kevin continue the cycle of violence that he's clearly very traumatized from.

All in all, I totally understand your concerns, but I don't think it's something you have to be worried about. Even if it's his future self, a child commiting murder and that being deemed okay is a huge step for a podcast where the main character refused to work for several days because he didn't know trees grew from seeds. I think a likely ending is going to be about Kevin breaking the cycle of violence, trauma, and abuse. Whether The Boy goes back to wherever he came from, whether he gets to grow up in Night Vale and start again, whether Adult!Kevin helps him through his struggle, I think there's going to be a happy ending for The Boy that doesn't involve murder.

[scintillyyy]

I can’t believe I had followed you this long without realizing you had a whole >100k word fic you were working on. I spent the past few days reading My Baby, You are a Gift, One I Will Cherish.

Your writing is honestly so amazing. I can’t remember the last time I read something that long from start to finish in such a short time. The characterizations, the reinterpretation of canon events; so many things were just incredible. It really shows how much work and care you put into it.  

It’s so nice to have a story that puts so much effort into fleshing out a character like Janet Drake. Was there anything in particular that inspired you when you were writing her?  

hahaha, yep, that's me! that fic is my baby lol. thank you, i get very bashful about my writing lmao. im glad the characterization had been decent, i'm always so worried about that. anyways, this answer might get a little long so i'm putting it under a cut lol

as far as anything in particular that inspired me? uhhh, well i guess i'll have to go into something that you're basically almost never going to see me talk about ever on the internet if i can help it so i'll still keep it vague-ish: i actually have a young child of my own. (i mean. if it wasn't super obvious already. people usually don't get into attachment science on a whim. they do it because it's 4:37AM and someone has only slept in half-hour increments since 11:30PM and they've been crying off and on for the past 2 hours desperately hoping that the someone will just fall asleep for 2 hours please and all they do is research everything about parenting obsessively because that's the absolute only thing they can do-). so i have spent a lot. and i mean a lot of time in parenting spaces. i'm part of my local area moms group in all their glory (they're very, uh, special), and i personally know a lot of other parents, and i'm basically immersed in a very interesting and complex culture (marriage and parenting culture). and i have seen my fair share of conplex, not great marital dynamics. and now that i have a kid that's what the majority of my patients talk to me about, so i get to hear a lot about different views and experiences of parenting from a lot of different viewpoints.

so anyways after the batman came out and my husband and i went on a date night to go see it, i ofc got the itch to get back into reading dcu fanfics and comics after not doing it for years since the nu52 (i also saw that they rebirthed tim's original history back, so i forgave dc a tiny bit), so i got myself the dc app so i could re-read all my beloved post-crisis comics. and it was a nice hobby to pick up again because it was very easy to pick up and put down in 20 minute increments and work around, you know, child care. i was devouring all the most popular fics (which 90% are fanon, lbr) while re-reading old storylines, and while the absolute disconnect between fanon and canon was fine for me at first because it's all fiction and i really didn't care that much, i eventually started to personally get a bit...discontent at fanon in general and the fanon drakes, especially janet (but jack too. like it or not, he does have an established characterization!). like. i read the comics!! she wasn't necessarily a great parent by any means, but the five panels she got prior to being fridged for tim to officially become robin basically showed her being physically affectionate, caring, and generally supportive of her son. who was this weird, cold woman who never once held her son and didn't care about his well-being at all?? she was unrecognizable to me. and as i started to make my way through post-crisis, i also became a bit mad at dc for killing her for tim's character and then basically making her a non-entity that barely got mentioned. despite her failings, tim was legit devastated when she died (and he later said he can't let himself drown in his grief for her--he clearly must have loved her so much) and then they did nothing with it. what was their relationship?? who was she?? why was she a generally loving mother yet left with jack?? did she think tim was okay?? what were she and jack constantly arguing about?? why did jack say to tim that his mother wouldn't want them to be so far apart?? did she maybe have some misgivings about traveling, did she not necessarily like being far away from tim?? how does this woman become the mother she does?? what were her intentions?? she deserved to have more character development in my mind! why does this woman basically get flattened into the worst mother ever? i know a lot of imperfect mothers who are in complex marriages and are just trying and not always succeeding. what exactly did that look like to me? how do i marry the two ideas?

another thing that interested me immensely was the idea of a difference in perception from tim and from his parents regarding tim's childhood. obviously, we know tim's pov. but what did his parents think? did janet think everything was going fine?? did they have a rosier picture of tim's childhood than he did? and thus, the first fic was born. me blathering for 27k words trying to showcase janet as a parent who was trying her best, who was semi-isolated by life circumstances, but was simply unable to balance work, kid, marriage and was unintentionally making tim feel abandoned by her, something she never would have wanted if she had realized. and that was going to be it.

and then i got sad about her, because janet as i view her (i like to think a lot of tim's good traits come from her) i think would have done a lot better with a second chance with tim than jack did! like, she, as a mother, might have a very different response to the tragedies and loss of her husband and try to focus more on her son than jack did. she as a widowed mother would also face very different judgments than jack did (society is obsessed with the idea that boys need a father figure--so she'd probably be more likely to let tim hang out with bruce rather than jack fighting their relationship at first because "it's good for him" to have an older man he can look up to) she's more supportive in her appearances, after all, saying that tim could be just like dick when he grows up. i think that she'd find out a lot sooner. and i think her surviving wouldn't have changed any of the big events, and i became obsessed with the idea of "but how would she deal with this canon event vs jack". she is, after all, a different character who deserves her own internal feelings and motivations. the drakes weren't great, but i don't think they're that irredeemably bad. and i think tim would want them redeemed too!

and nobody else was writing the canon-but-with-janet fic in my head that i couldn't stop thinking about, so i figured i'd give it a shot just in case there was one other person who felt the way i did and wanted to see it lmao.

anyways tl;dr a lot of inspiration comes from the fact that i am a mom and have spent way too many hours dissecting parenting in my head and the fact that i know a lot of moms who are very complex, imperfect humans and i just like stories about motherhood and allowing mothers to be nuanced and to redeem themselves.

[dollarbin]

Dollar Bin #9:

World Party's Goodbye Jumbo

In the Spring of 1990 I became momentary friends with the edgy older dude next door.

I was 14 and in 8th grade, emerging from a month of missed school due to an epic case of poison oak followed by an even more epic bout with the chicken pox. I looked like the Elephant Man, one eye blistered entirely shut. Edgy Older Dude was in his mid-twenties and was definitely on drugs.

How do I know he was on drugs, you ask? Don't worry, I still know little to nothing about drugs. But a year after our moment of friendship Edgy Guy moved out and my dad, who owned the guy's apartment, sent me over to clean out his kitchen. In the frig I found, swear to God, at least 7 open bottles of identical BBQ sauce. Now my frig today can get a bit chaotic; sometimes I discover we're working on two competing jars of mayo simultaneously. But only a 20-something white dude on drugs is capable of racking up 7+ squirt jars of Kraft's Slow Simmered Original.

Anyway, this guy and I conducted our friendship entirely through his bedroom window. You see, at that point in 8th grade I was searching for The Answer. So were you. A calendar year earlier I Won't Back Down had fundamentally changed my life. Tom Petty's full moon masterpiece disinterested me in baseball cards and comic books forever and set me firmly on the path that led straight to the Dollar Bin.

Petty led me to the Wilburys; the Wilburys led me to the Beatles; the Beatles led me to insist on getting a pair of Lennon's circular granny frames at the optometrist. But then I hit a roadblock. MTV was all Aerosmith and Janet Jackson and I never could work up the energy to try and understand Janie's Got a Gun or what had happened in 1814. So what was next? My 8th grade self had no idea.

Then World Party's Put the Message in the Box glided out the window next door: a warm, earnest cloud of harmony and comfort set to a white guy beat.

And if you listen now, you might hear, a new sound coming in, as an old one disappears...

Him: "Hey kid, what's up?"

(It was a reasonable question. I was standing directly outside his bedroom window, staring in, transfixed.)

Me: "Oh, hey. Sorry. I like that song, sir."

Him: "Yeah. Just came out. World Party. Totally sweet."

Me: "Wow. Yeah. I like the Beatles."

Him: "Right on kid. Want me to tape this for you?"

Me: "Wow. Yeah. Like, totally."

A day later the guy's arm stuck out the window and passed me a Maxell tape (remember the guy sitting in profile in his armchair, getting blown away by the audio quality one experienced from a Maxell tape?) of World Party's Goodbye Jumbo, an album I will now argue belongs in the pantheon of still extremely worthwhile 80's White Guy Rock.

Ah, the category known as Worthwhile 80's White Guy Rock. Stephen Stills appears in it not. Little did you know that what started with Armed Forces and found prestige pinnacles with The Joshua Tree, Disintegration, Graceland, So and Synchronicity, and classic oddball variations with Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars and Petty, Dylan and Co's various resuscitations, all finds its righteous conclusion in Goodbye Jumbo, Karl Wallinger's fantastic double to The White Album.

Of course Goodbye Jumbo remains a very minor record in comparison to the others I mention above. If there's a signature sound from the album left in the memory of anyone other than me it's likely the brief, squirming riff that opens the first single, Way Down Now. Wallingher squeezes his guitar like a full tube of toothpaste, spiraling out a strangled surge of joy. Take a listen.

At the close of the 80's my father seemed like the person least likely to help me on my quest to find awesome popular music. My siblings and I grew up without a working stereo in the house and when I insisted we listen to Running Down a Dream in the car the only vaguely relevant comment my mercurial and forever overworked dad could summon up was that I should really listen to Toad, Cream's 8 minute drum solo song from Wheels of Fire. Somehow that track, and that track alone, had lodged in his memory. Was his recommendation earnest or mischievous? Definitely both. That's my dad.

Anyway, my father's sole moment of brilliance when it comes to talking to me about music in the last 35 years came when he first overheard me listening to Way Down Now. As the song began to climax and soar he stepped over the Millennium Falcon that still cluttered up my bedroom floor and started singing along!

Woo-Woo! Woo-Woo!

Somewhere in his brain, otherwise crammed with Reganomics, house paint color wheels and bidding estimates, there was still room left for Toad and the background vocal line from Sympathy for the Devil.

"Your band is stealing from the Stones, son," he said as the song ended. Then he wandered off, continuing to sing it, without further explanation, leaving me totally flummoxed: who were "the Stones" and what did they have to do with the fantastic music coming from the homemade tape I had on repeat? Furthermore, did my father have a secret life?

I once again sought out the dude next door, standing at his window, oblivious to all social mores, until he reappeared.

"What's up kid? Like the tape?"

"Oh yes, sir. But my dad says they're stealing from the Stones."

"The Rolling Stones? Damn, he's right. Sympathy for the Devil. They're stealing from everyone. It's genius. The fifth track is my favorite. Pure Prince."

At that point I was even more confused. I knew about The Rolling Stones. My friends Matt and Eric, who had cool dads, had gone to see Keith and Mick at the LA Colosseum the year before; Guns and Roses, whose fold-out naked lady tape cover for Lies scared the living crap out of me, had opened for them. But how could a band copy the senior citizens behind Mixed Emotions and the Bat Dance guy at the same time?

I went, like a good little boy, and listened to my tape again, counting down to the fifth track, Ain't Gonna Come Till I'm Ready, and I instantly discovered it was the only song I couldn't stand on the album. Maybe Neighbor Dude and I were not destined to be best friends after all. World Party sang like a girl in that song! The word "falsetto" was definitely not in my vocabulary and it would take another year or so before I heard Crazy Love and began to understand white people soul music.

Another word that was not in my vocabulary was "genre", but my self-education took a step forward when I realized that every song on Goodbye Jumbo had a different mood, a different sound.

Listen to the album today and all this stuff is obvious. The album opens with a handmade gesture; Is It Too Late? is Eno sitting in on the Let It Be sessions, with Wallinger turning on an amateur drum machine and then asking an engineer to start recording even though, obviously, he's already rolling. Does this band know what they are doing, we wonder? Of course they do; by the middle of the track things are on fire.

Every song that follows after in Goodbye Jumbo unfurls its own unique sonic banner. Check out the clouded rainbow dream pop of When the Dream Comes, or the Plastic Ono beautiful death march of God On My Side, or the Dylan/Simon breakfast cereal mashup on Take It Up.

In the decade that followed, Yo La Tengo took Goodbye Jumbo's mixtape, honor-thy-many-masters, approach and perfected it. They rocked; they crooned; they raged; they droned. But Ira, Georgia and James were three (ridiculously talented) people. Wallinger built Goodbye Jumbo alone. That's right; don't be fooled by the full band, cheesy music videos: like the aforementioned Plastic Ono Band, World Party was basically just one guy playing every instrument.

The lyrics on the record are tough for me to measure with any real objectivity. Love Street and Put the Message in the Box sounded to me, at age 14, like sister tracks to Let it Be and Imagine. Wallinger isn't humble on this record; he's out to change the world with a way early environmentalist focus and all kinds of Pleas For Understanding that probably sound pretentious to modern ears. But I still hear those songs like I'm back in Algebra 1, teaching myself how to draw peace signs.

By one measure Goodbye Jumbo is the last record I own that should be considered for the Dollar Bin. Last Spring, after 30 years of looking, I found a pristine vinyl copy and bought it for $40, making it the most expensive individual record I've ever bought. Vinyl records were barely made between 89 and the 00's, so records from that era are always priced at a steep premium.

But don't lose faith in me because of that sticker price, my fellow Dollar Bin Dwellers: I guarantee that you can pick up a CD copy of Goodbye Jumbo for a buck without too much hard looking, and, who am I kidding, all this stuff is available on Spotify anyway.

So I'm putting this message in the box and I'm sending it around the world in a car: Goodbye Jumbo is the late 80's Dollar Bin treasure.

[no-where-new-hero]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong: Day 17 (Part 3, Ch. 5)

...in which Polly is beginning to understand.

To me this chapter really starts to signal a kind of sick sense of doom, of plunging headlong into Polly's fate as we are reminded that everything we are reading is, in fact, Polly's true memories. I remember the first time reading this being so lulled by the immersion of events that I forgot the framing narrative, and this was a bit of a jolt: oh yeah. We've only got a year left. Things are going bad, and they're going to go worse soon.

Right now, we get a little bit more background on Leslie, who has been absent from Polly's ordinary memories--very likely because he was more or less "invented" by her and Tom during hero business. I do think it's emblematic as well of the fact that Laurel has started getting her claws in him, seeing him during the Wilton College concert and preparing him as a new sacrifice. He's also protected by "the devil's own luck and cunning," which seems to keep him on the side of Nowhere. Even though it's never really stated (but then again DWJ never does), Polly seems to exhibit a certain attraction to him, and honestly, I find a bit of the original Tam Lin in the overt sexuality of Leslie's character. Polly also associated the young Tom with Leslie, which makes another link.

On the other hand, we have Seb, a sort of mini Morton Leroy, who tells Polly about Tom through vague insults, but even though his manner is condescending, Seb manages to give Polly a portrait of Tom as he was before she knew him: kind to Seb (avuncular even though they must not have had a huge age gap--maybe even Tom wanted to protect him) and determined to cling to any handhold possible in staying out of Laurel's grasp through music. Seb continues to remain enigmatic for me because on the one hand he's very much an agent of Hunsdon House--but on the other, he still drops clues to her about what's going on.

We also learn at last that the boy in the picture Polly took from the House is Tom Lynn as a boy. It always struck me as remarkable that Polly never recognized him, but I do think DWJ is saying something about sight here again: sometimes it's harder to truly see the people closest to you. But the picture makes her understand that the Leroys "got" Tom at this young age and she comes closer to realizing what the terms of the curse are.

She was left with a strong feeling about Mr Lynn that seemed to be foreboding. It was something she had known almost from the moment she had met him, but it seemed only now to have come up to the surface. Once it had, it would not go. It ran through everything, the way superstition ran through Granny.

The final bit where Polly tries on clothes is deeply significant: in the first place, Granny has to tell her what to wear and ends up being right. Jeans are "Hero's clothes" and have been since part 1, but Polly is getting too muddled up by pressures of femininity to realize this right away. She also rejects wearing the color green on "superstitious grounds," because it's bad luck, but green is also a color widely used in medieval texts to signify sexuality. It's even in the ballad (Janet wears green for her assignation with Tam Lin). Polly is twice rejecting sexually mature signifiers (feminine clothes and the color green) even though she considers them (she tries on earrings and weighs the possibility of wearing a green shirt before deciding against it).

[aho-dapa]

And to add: I vaguely remember her saying her parents paid for college but I could be mixing that up with another author

I wouldn’t be surprised tbh, still, that’s a lot of money fuck

Makes sense why her writing the archerons in poverty literally does not make sense

You show up with a few gold coins more their worth to exchange at the market, you bet someone’s getting stolen from and/or shanked

It’s like, sjm couldn’t compute how people could even survive off of nothing

I always saw the creditor scene as a more violent version of an eviction, and to get to that point, I was surprised to see that she had given them pity money and THREE YEARS OF IT TF?? that’s like, still a lot of money?? What even

Not even that, but it was so poorly managed? Like from a former merchant that from what we know had only one bad job? Or if it was his kids managing the few gold coins they had, IT STILL LASTED THEM THREE YEARS

THREE YEARS, JANET!!!

[bonesbuckleup]

Me? Bothering the batfam fic hive mind again? It's More Likely Than You'd Think. I'm looking for a fic but the parameters are vague, at best. @picklesquash and I have been searching for a heinously long time.

All we remember is that there's a moment where Tim thinks that birthday parties are something that only happen on TV. Or thinks that he used to think that. Or possibly says it to someone. It may or may not include a party thrown for Tim, but we can't remember exactly. Neglectful Jack and Janet are a given. It's also possible that it's a small chunk of a larger fic, but not necessarily.

That's it. That's all we've got. If this sounds familiar to you, hit me up!

[ponyxaviors]

Which book-I-own-but-haven't-read-yet should I read next? (Poll below cut.)

Some explanation/backstory: *Feel free to skip below the cut to jump right to the poll if you don't want to read all of this.

The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright - I watched the movie as a kid, and it basically traumatized me. I just found out it was a book and couldn't resist getting it. Maybe reading it would be...therapuetic?

The Crucible by Arthur Miller - My only knowledge of this classic play is from another book I once read that briefly and vaguely made mention of it. I've wanted to know more about it ever since.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis - I technically read this as a child, but I don't really remember that. I know the story by heart from the movie and I've wanted to read it basically my entire life. (I've already read The Magician's Nephew, as I opted to read the series in story order.)

Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen - I've read several of Sarah Dessen's books already, but haven't yet gotten to this one.

The Wish List by Eoin Colfer - I started this one years ago, but thought all of the supernatural/religious stuff was sort of weird and quit it. Since that time, however, I've watched the TV series Supernatural in its entirety, so this book no longer seems daunting, like, at all.

Type Talk by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen - I enjoy all things MBTI. I already know a lot about it, but I never get tired of reading more and I've been meaning to borrow my dad's copy of this and give it a read.

Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis - I don't know anyone who's ever read this, but I got it for free a while back. To be honest, I don't even remember what the summary said about it...

The Tale of Despereaux by Katie DiCamillo - This book just sounded so cute. I love reading children's books occasionally and picking out which ones I'd like to read to mine and my sweetheart's currently nonexistent children in the future.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien - For reasons I no longer fully understand, I adored The Secret of NIMH movie as a child. I had no idea it was based on a book (although I'm not surprised), and when I found out I sort of blindly grabbed it on some sort of childhood nostalgia high.

[havendance]

Why you wanna fly, Blackbird?

Ao3

Fandom: Batman

It’s the Lonely Place of Dying fic I’ve been working on, finally finished up!

Summary:

The first memories Timmi had were of death and the Batman. In the end, was it really any wonder that she ended up where she did?

(A fem!Tim Drake character study)

Excerpt:

 Dick could feel a headache forming. “Tell me again what your name was?” he asked.

 The girl who was his current source of stress couldn’t have been much older than thirteen. Well off, judging by the quality of her clothes, but dirty. Greasy black hair was pulled back in a messy braid. Muddy jeans and sneakers. A look of urgency in gray blue eyes. An overly-full backpack sitting next to her that looked like it belonged more with a jungle expedition than a school kid. Under normal circumstances, he’d assume that she was a runaway. After the mess of her sticking her nose in his investigation, he was pretty sure whatever was going on, normal wasn’t it.

 The girl shook her head. “That’s not important.” She shoved a spiral-bound notebook at him. It had TOP SECRET written on the front of it in permanent marker. “Batman needs you.”

 That would’ve been a bigger red flag if Dick hadn’t already opened the notebook to find it full of photographs, printed out and pasted in. They were all of Batman. Batman fighting a man with sword. Batman falling off the dam. Batman walking towards the Batmobile, obviously injured. He flipped through the pages quicker and quicker. There were more pictures, newspaper clippings going back weeks. The obituary of Jason Todd, carefully centered on a page all of it’s own. “My God,” he said under his breath, “Where did you get all this?”

 The name on her birth certificate was Timothy Jacqueline Drake, but the only person who ever called her that was her mother. Everyone else — her father, her teachers, the endless parade of nurses and nannies — they just called her Timmi. The official story was tidy little thing involving a botched ultrasound and a dead great-grandfather that was trotted out at formal events and the few extended family gatherings that the Drakes actually attended.

 Unofficially, well. No one ever Timmi the real story. She had to piece it together from dusty old documents hidden in the corner of Janet’s study, from fragments of conversation, from arguments and old stories. As best she could figure, it went down like this:

 Back at Janet’s first job, the one at the university in California that she never talked about, she’d received the news that her application for tenure had been denied shortly before going into labor and spent the next 15 hours in pain and angry about it. There were official reasons given, vague platitudes, but she knew the real reason was her pregnancy, was the fact that she was a woman that spoke her mind and didn’t take the bullshit her older male colleagues tried to throw her way. The end result was that Janet looked at the little, screaming red bundle in her arms and decided that her daughter’s name wasn’t going to be Angela like they’d planned, it was going to be Timothy.

 “If you have a boy’s name, they have to judge you to your face, they can’t just dismiss you out hand,” Janet had said once when she’d had a little too much to drink.

 “You know how your mother gets,” Jack had said with a shake of his head when Timmi asked. “It’s easier just to humor her when she gets an idea in her head like that.

Timmi didn’t remember California. Shortly after she was born, Janet got a new job at a private university in New Jersey and they moved across the country to just outside Gotham. Sometimes she wondered what life would’ve been like if Janet had gotten tenure and she’d grown up as a girl named Angela in California. If she’d never heard of Gotham or the Batman.

Keep Reading on AO3!

[maddie-grove]

Little Book Review: YA/Children's Literature Round-Up (May-December 2022)

Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary (1983): Leigh Botts keeps up a years-long correspondence with children's author Mr. Henshaw, which becomes an important outlet after his parents divorce and he has to move to a new town with his mother. This is the book that won Beverly Cleary the Newberry Award, and frankly it's like when Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor for The Revenant instead of The Wolf of Wall Street. Cleary was a legend, but she excelled most at lower-stakes childhood (and sometimes adolescent) drama, like being bad at cursive, not owning enough cashmere sweaters, or (at worst) worrying because your father lost his job. This is still a sweet, sensitive problem novel, yet I feel like Judy Blume or Betsy Byars would've pushed it to the next level.

The Snow Angel by Suzanne Weyn (1996): In the eighth volume of a middle-grade series about four girls who are friends with angels, rich girl Molly is devastated when her boyfriend dumps her for hippie-dippy Christina. She distances herself from her loved ones, almost relapses in her recovery from anorexia, and ignores the gigantic snow-angel-turned-tourist-trap on her other friend Ashley's horse farm. Luckily, her dad just brought a catatonic Irish boy into their house! Can Molly help herself by helping him? I bought this book for a dime because it looked completely ridiculous, and it delivered on that front. I really didn't like any of the girls except for Molly, and with her it was mostly just the sympathy I'd have for any troubled teenager.

The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney (1881): In a small New England town, widowed Mrs. Pepper and her five kids (Ben, Polly, Joel, Davie, and Phronsie) must work hard to keep their spirits up in the face of grinding poverty, measles, and monkey-related shenanigans. I made several gos at reading this book as a child, but always lost steam after the Peppers made friends with the wealthy King family. Little Emily was right on the money, because this classic is just not very good, especially after the rich folks start helping out. It's beyond treacly and only a few of the episodic chapters have a good amount of tension. Polly's almost-going-blind-from-measles-and-eldest-daughter-syndrome arc is still great, though.

Afternoon of the Elves by Janet Taylor Lisle (1989): Sheltered fourth-grader Hillary forms an unlikely friendship with her neighbor, outcast sixth-grader Sara-Kate, after the older girl claims to have elves in her backyard. I had to read this book for school in fourth grade and I did not like it. I felt like it was trying to lure me in with something fun (magic, miniatures), only to never deliver and hit me with the actual sad topic (poverty and mental illness of a parent) instead. I stand by my elementary-school opinion. The good version of this novel is Daphne's Book by Mary Downing Hahn (if you want to read about an average girl befriending the class outcast before losing her to Social Services) or Lucie Babbidge's House by Sylvia Cassedy (if you want to read about a troubled girl getting lost in the arguably magical miniatures sauce).

Ten Cents a Dance by Christine Fletcher (2008): Working at a meatpacking plant to support her arthritic widowed mother and little sister in early-1940s Chicago, pretty, scrappy teenager Ruby Jelinski takes a chance and becomes a dime-a-dance girl at the recommendation of a handsome neighborhood hoodlum. I read this book at some point in high school and vaguely remembered liking it, but this time I was blown away. Fletcher packs a mind-bogging amount of character development and historical detail into a fast-paced story that ventures into some unexpected territory. It's maybe one of the best historical novels I've ever read.

Mitch and Amy by Beverly Cleary (1967): Nine-year-old twins Mitch and Amy don't always get along, but, if an outsider messes with one of them, he better be prepared for double trouble. Class bully Alan Hibbler learns this to his sorrow. This is the kind of cute slice-of-life story that was right in Cleary's wheelhouse, although it's not her most memorable. There are lots of sweet moments between the twins; for example, Amy gets Mitch an exciting book from the library when he's sick because she senses it'll help him with his reading struggles, and Mitch goes to bat for her when the dreaded Alan spits in her hair. I do think it would've been ideal if Mitch had also done something to help Amy with multiplication, for the symmetry. Also, I can't believe I missed the beginning-of-the-late-1960s California setting. These are some Joan Didion babies.

Cleopatra: Daughter of the Nile by Kristiana Gregory (1999): Her older sister wants to kill her, her father is a severe alcoholic, and she's stuck living in Rome with a bunch of gross old men who don't take her seriously, but teenage Cleopatra doesn't let that keep her from learning and adapting. This is one of the Royal Diaries I didn't read as a kid, and I really enjoyed the characterization of Cleopatra, who's resilient, clever, curious, and conflicted about her thorny family relationships.

(The Snow Angel, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and Cleopatra: Daughter of the Nile were all first-time reads; the rest were rereads.)

[bess3714]

I'd love to know about Photograph 👀👀

I actually started this one a while ago but then left it because I didn't know where to go with it but luckily I think I figured it out and I'm actively working on it again!

If I had to write a summary it would sound something like this:

Tim can't remember her face. He's got a vague sense of her voice, enough that one time in the mall he'd heard a woman talking and spun around with his heart beating fast, sure that it was Janet Drake.

It wasn't. And when he tried to settle his racing pulse by reminding himself of what she looked like, the differences between his mother and the random mall woman, he realized: he couldn't remember her face. No matter how hard he tried, the only thing he could bring up in his mind was what she looked like in the photograph he kept on his dresser, a pale imitation of the real thing.

(One of the other fics on the wip list is actually part of this fic, for some reason I just started a new doc instead of opening this one but yeah, eventually they'll be combined)

[intofclklore]

a halloween party with steve harrington on the couch next to her. the erin from a year ago would be shocked and appalled if she could see her future self. 

maybe, just maybe, she’d be a little thrilled, too. 

but mostly shocked and appalled. 

but here she is. it’s a cold, october night in indiana and erin’s tipsy in someone’s basement, drinking beer and nodding her head to a janet jackson song, sharing a bowl of pretzels with steve. 

life’s funny.

a year ago, she was avoiding even looking at him. calling him a stranger to his face. 

just this spring, she went from wanting to turn a weapon on him to kissing him to telling him she needed space. forgiving and forgetting’s never been her strong suit. moving past things is hard for her. 

and now, less than seven months later - well, they’re sharing pretzels and talking shit about people’s costumes, and she’s probably going to try and make out with him later. 

somehow, this really is the weirdest thing to happen this year. even weirder than the monster stuff.

“oh, eight -” steve says to her, subtly pointing at a girl coming down the steps with her boyfriend. they’re counting madonna costumes and betting on what the end of the night total will be. she’s not sure what they’ll win yet. only bragging rights, so far.

the rules aren’t clear and she knows they’ll end up arguing about it. two former - well, one former - athletes. too competitive to just let it go and let the other have it. 

but she likes that. she always has liked that about steve, even when she pretends she doesn’t. it’s always attractive to see someone unwilling to give in to defeat. 

she spots another girl coming downstairs, but as she hesitates to call it because she thinks they’ve already spotted her, there’s a loud bang upstairs. then, a scream. 

“what the fuck’s wrong with her?!” a deep voice cries from above them. 

erin and steve both go tense. across the basement, erin glances over to see that nancy and robin have the same looks on their faces that she is sure her and steve do. 

despite being involved in all of this for much, much shorter of a time than they have, it’s quickly been ingrained in her. that alertness. always with a guard up. and after the way things ended, they all seem to be just killing time, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

halloween would only be a fitting time for vecna to return. 

there’s only the normal noise and sounds from upstairs for awhile, and then a squeal, and laughter. the same loud voice as before. “you’re so not funny!” they yell. “fuck you guys!” 

they don’t need to see anything to know what’s happening. some sort of prank. an unfunny one, by the sounds of it, and erin’s inclined to agree. she hears steve sigh beside her, and she leans back against the couch beside him, letting her shoulder press heavily against his. 

“i hate halloween,” steve breathes. 

again, a year ago, erin would have had a very different reaction to that. it’s always been her favorite holiday. and it still is. she likes the costumes and the horror movies and the decorations. but she can’t ignore that steve has very, very valid reasons to hate it. 

they all do. it’s not always a holiday for the faint of heart. 

she vaguely remembers seeing him once, a couple years ago, at a halloween party. had watched him storm out upset after, she presumes, a fight with nancy. she wonders if that attributes to his hatred of the holiday, too.

she won’t ask. she’ll just hope his mind doesn’t go there anymore. because as much as he hurt her, she’d never truly wish the same hurt on him. even if, at the time, she’d thought good. he deserves it. he doesn’t. 

“we don’t have to hang around here,” she says. “it’s late anyway. i think we’ve counted all the madonnas.” 

steve laughs, quiet but not insincere, and sits up. “yeah? you want a ride home?” 

“you trying to get rid of me?” she teases. she takes his hand as he stands, lets herself be helped to her feet. 

“hey, you said it was late,” he reminds her. “you wanna hang out?”

she grins. “sure,” she says, casually, as if she hadn’t been waiting for the invite. “we can watch a non-scary scary movie. that new vampire one maybe? with jim carrey? i don’t think it was very good, but we can make fun of it.”

or, if things go as she wants them to, it’ll just be background noise. 

[ilikereadingactually]

Reread Time: The Lampfish of Twill

i wish i had done a better job taking this photo, whoopsies. but it's time for a reread review! a few months ago i grabbed this one from my parents' house and had it sitting next to my bed waiting for the right day, and then i read the sad news that Janet Taylor Lisle had passed. if you had asked me as a child who my favorite authors were, she would definitely have made the list, even though i could not tell you now what any of her books were about, including this one! i have such a fond feeling about it, even this very 1993 cover, but i went in with no idea how it was going to hold up or what was going to happen.

i wept! i was not expecting this book to be a really gentle meditation on the cycle of life and grieving and letting go, but maybe it explains something about me that i loved it at age 11. i was delighted by main character Eric, his eagerness and his fears and the way he learns to see the world differently, and got a kick out of old Zeke who everyone thinks is mad, and i honestly adored gruff but devoted Aunt Opal and her best friend Mrs. Holly (who were definitely an item, right? unmarried aunt and widowed neighbor living hard lives in a dreary fishing town plagued by terrible storms, who are constantly together or talking about each other? they might as well combine households, they'd be warmer at night.) and i have to give an honorable mention to Gully the seagull, the source of all my weeping.

and the gorgeous illustrations by Wendy Anderson Halperin!! i did not remember that this book was illustrated. this was my favorite one, revealing to me the source of my long-held desire for clouds to actually be huge fish:

this was a great reread, and was definitely the right book to pick out of my childhood collection to memorialize Janet Taylor Lisle.

the deets

how i read it: i read my slightly beat up copy, pictured, probably from a book fair or one of those catalogs they used to send us home with, curled up cozy in my bed.

try this if you: love bittersweet stories, dig a magical journey and especially magical fish, enjoy timeless-feeling lit, have feelings about hardscrabble fishing communities, or know a kid in the 8-12 range who would enjoy those things.

a line i really liked: just such beautiful insight

So long ago did this seem now that Eric could barely remember it, and even his parents' faces had become vague moons in his mind, though he would never admit this to anyone. Only his memory of the first blind terror of losing them traveled with him through the years, making him a careful person, a boy who'd rather rely on himself than the plans and promises of others.

[rredboard]

i know we’ve all seen the nightwing movie intro post and i want to propose an intro to a tim drake (as robin) movie. also this is long so its under the cut

first of all i think that in this movie jack should still be alive and married to dana at the town house, after he gets out of his rich person depression. so if i’m remembering correctly, that would also mean to include steph, bernard, and darla as his friends. i think that one of the best aspects of tim’s run as robin is the fact that he’s hiding being robin from his dad, and the way that forced the robin run to focus on more than just being robin. i think that of tim’s generation of heroes at the time he was the only one who had to actively hide his hero status from his parent. (actually no that’s wrong there was anita fite, but i’m going to maintain this bc her dad was already entrenched in weird shit working for the deo, so a superhero daughter was not an insane jump i would say, esp with her family situation, by which i mean the guy that killed her parents) so anyways all this to say that i want the tension btwn his civilian life and his robin life to play a large role in the story, bc i love that shit.

so in that vein, i would want the movie to start out in his civilian life, and in a similar way to the nightwing movie idea where it doesn’t show his face until the title screen. like, we’re in the theater, we know what we’re seeing, so all we have to introduce is his civie life, bc we know who batman is and how he works.

so anyways to get to the actual intro…

we start out in literally the messiest teenage boy’s room you’ve ever seen. stacks of cds, messy notebooks with papers half ripped out, a half deconstructed computer tower, a picture of steph in a purple frame on the desk. there’s a photo booth strip of photos peeking out from behind with the core four, one of them wearing large oversized sunglasses so you can’t see his face. you hear a rustling sound off screen and a hand reaches onscreen and grabs a skateboard as a female voice (dana) yells for tim vaguely from a room away/downstairs.

we see tim’s legs/board as he jogs downstairs, then scan over like, family photos? to show the circus photo, show that janets died, jacks remarried, and like maybe some school awards? that taper off over time to show the effect of robin on his grades? like he’s focusing even more on being a hero, adding to the tension btwn civilian/hero life. maybe on the fridge there’s a report card with a c or d grade circled with the words “we will talk about this” or smth on it in red pen. tim opens the fridge, grabs a snack, and continues out the building, calling out a goodbye to dana/his dad on his way out.

outside, we see tim throw down his board and start skating (this part i see being soundtracked with i wanna be sedated by the ramones. major 90s teen movie vibes is what i want from this in general). he starts skating and we see the people he skates by wave at him, maybe with birds of prey-style notes pointing to each person saying what robin saved them from? idk maybe too derivative lol. anyways he keeps skating, doing a few tricks as he goes. the board obviously has like robin, nightwing, wonder girl, superboy, and impulse symbol stickers on it. maybe there’s like a handmade purple “s” design too for spoiler. anyways he keeps skating until he gets to a skatepark, where he meets steph, who says smth like “you ready to go?” and has either roller skates or in-line skates, obviously purple bc i want to really commit to stephs love affair with purple. we hear like a yes or smth from tim, who then skates into the park and we do a freeze frame on tim in the middle of a trick mid air, where we actually see his face for the first time, and get the big robin title over it. i want this to be disgustingly nineties.

i don’t know which robin arc i would want this to follow, or like a different plot, but i would like jack to find out he’s robin and make him quit. i’d rather have steph just get closer to bruce than become robin. i lovelovelove steph as robin but i’d want the movie to start and finish with tim as robin and i 1.) don’t want steph to die and 2.) just think that war games is too much to tackle to get him back as robin. i also don’t want a war games movie bc despite the fact that tim’s part of wg at his school is my favorite part of the arc, i really don’t want thay in a movie. like i would hate that in a way i can’t describe.

but also, i do want steph to be in a lot of this movie. she’s a really important character in tim’s run as robin, and at this point in the run, a lot of the issues were like half steph stories. also, as much as i love the core four, i’d like to focus on just gotham. i’d also like to maybe do tim’s 16th birthday arc, but i’d want him to already be 16 so…🤷‍♀️

soundtrack: lots of 70s/80s/90s rock and pop. the ramones, the clash (obvi), some led zeppelin, deceptacon by le tigre, blondie or maybe some spice girls? teenage dirtbag by wheatus is kind of a must. so is the cure. also when bernard hangs out with tim i want stacys mom to play when he sees dana. i have a brand and i stick with it. also maybe some rooney. during a steph part i’d really like chick habit by april march to play. also kids in america playing during a spoiler and robin fight montage.

so anyways yeah. that’s all i have. a lot of words for a little substance. and skater boy tim. i want tim’s vibes to be like a mix of both ferris and cameron from ferris bueller’s day off