#and i also wanted to come back but i procrastinate with my main priorities already so yk how it is :))

[toastermin-it]

I AM ALIVE

what's up everyone? hello! it me :)

(unfortunately for you guys i am the same min, just a year or so older and way more tired.)

(i spelled put wrong in the tags i am so sorry guys it's "put" not "out")

[oldhalloweentape]

🪨Venture (OW II) x (gn) reader ⛏️

(Incapacitated Reader Edition!)

CW: Mention of puking!

(Picture’s not mine!)

(Request here! Hey guys, I know this request was simple enough but uh… On top of experiencing rather life changing things, I’m a professional procrastinator. But! I seriously needed to do something to get my head out of the hazy place it’s been the last few weeks. So. Hope you enjoy this guys :])

- So in a particular scenario where you guys go to some party and you leave high or drunk, to the point where you might stumble into things Venture’s quick to help you get steady and get you home.

- If you want something, you’ll get it, food, drinks, you name it’s going to be given to you post haste with a head kiss or two.

- Though I can imagine them being so set on making sure they do right by you they might fumble a bit, like cutting you up some watermelon only to realize you already had some cut up in a bowl in your fridge.

- Just so harmless and well meaning but they get it most of the time to the point where you feel safe to get drunk/high.

- They’re just one of the best people in Overwatch to trust to keep you company and care for you.

- When you voice or show them you’re high/drunk to a degree they keep an eye on you, especially during the party, can’t be too safe you know?

- Too out of it to walk around? Can and will pick you up while saying something like “Don’t worry mi vida you don’t have to move a muscle while I’m here! :D”

- I think they’re very keen to show themselves to be competent when it comes to caring for you because they know it takes a lot of trust, even if you don’t think so.

- They know that you would do the same for them, so, why not?

- Would definitely let you sleep against them, on the bed, couch, or even when they’re driving you home.

- As silly as they may be your safety is main priority, especially when you’re in a vulnerable state like that.

- If you get to the point where puking is going to happen more than once (if you’re drunk) they’ll make sure you have some bucket with you if you’re too far away from the toilet, holding your hair back gently with one hand and rubbing the side of your head to comfort you as you hurl.

- Helps you with rubbing away any remaining vomit from your face and brushing your teeth to get that nasty taste out of your mouth afterwards.

- If you’re overly hungry (if you’re high) they definitely get you what you want and beyond, you will probably eat the kitchen out and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

- Even if you ask for weird shit like cheese doodles dipped in pickle juice they’ll get it for you, but will definitely bring it up later when you’re sober to tease you.

- Will also you tease you if you happen to knock against the walls/furniture before making sure you were ok because… Let’s be honest it gave them a small heart attack when they heard the big ass bang while trying to get you some ice cream.

- Watching a movie or two if you don’t pass out right when you guys get home is a must, makes joke after joke about it to you if you’re easily amused in that state.

- They love making you laugh, and if you compliment them with a slurred yet sweet voice it makes them snort and laugh softly before they reciprocate.

- When you inevitably start getting groggy it doesn’t take them long to figure it out and deal with it accordingly, helping you into your comfortable pajamas and easing through your night routine.

- Everything ends with them sending you to bed and cuddling with you till you pass out, with them following soon after.

(Alright!! Done!!!! Hope y’all like this, love you all!)

[guide-to-world-domination]

Does anyone else think that Max Patel has a way darker past than ewe are led to believe? Can you honestly and with all certainty tell me that this man isn’t holding onto the memories of a secret life before joining up with the RDA? I think not. While Max is indeed quite a friendly character (My fiancé went as far as to say he has “Brown Dad Energy” - Apparently, I have the same vibes 🤨), he just triggers something in the back of my head that just says “This man is hiding something from his past”

So this post is what I believe this mysterious path to be:

- Born and raised in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, Max was born to an engineer father and a neuroscientist mother. He quickly developed a passion for science, specifically neuroscience. From the time he was a child to a teenager, he was fascinated -borderline obsessed- with the human brain

- In the background, however, Max’s father was struggling to make ends meet. Don’t get me wrong he had integrity but it was harder and harder to ignore the gangs of thieves that wanted his expertise. You see, Max’s father was the engineer that developed the technology that allows for the Valkyrie to fly. This also means that Max’s father knew enough about the Valkyrie to supply these gangs with the whereabouts of smuggler’s spaces, to stash contraband and the like.

- Eventually, the gangs left Max’s father alone but not before setting there sights on another target. At this point in time, Research about Pandora and the ability Tsayhelu was just reaching the population and by extension, the criminal elements. This made every warlord, cartel leader and triad boss extremely giddy. With the ability to look into the minds of others, so much could be done to further their goals. Blackmail, espionage, interrogation - the list could go on, but these where the main ones.

- The gangs knew that they could lean on a more impressionable Max and get him to assist in developing the technology to make Tsayhelu work for them and their activities. It wasn’t hard - Max was smart but socially stunted, so when a group of peers took interest in him, he leapt at the opportunity.

- Eventually, Max realised that this gang wasn’t actually looking to be his friend. However, by that time it too late. Max had become an expert in Interrogation, combat and had developed the first prototype of the All Seeing Eye (The device used on Spider while captive by the RDA). Max had even made a name for himself as ‘The Dread Doctor’ (I’m sure with something like the All Seeing Eye at your disposal, you can guess why that title was appropriate)

- Soon enough, Max couldn’t handle the amount of deaths caused by his A.S.E. prototype & the amount he has caused on behalf of the gang. At this point in his life, Max had already met Grace Augustine. Grace was looking to headhunt his mother for the mission to Pandora, but she declined citing a need to remain and take care of her family.

- Grace had offered a way out for Max & not long after Max was accepted into University, the RDA shut down the gang and ‘destroyed’ Max’s prototype to prevent it from getting into anyone else’s hands. Within no time Max was away and studying to join Dr Augustine when she would journey to Pandora.

Obviously there is more to talk about with this backstory, but these are the broad strokes and im sure that people who read this have much better ideas to improve this idea. I hope you all liked this because it was a miracle that I remembered to write this, in all honesty. My procrastination has reached all new levels as we come closer to my Uni Exams.

Yours faithfully,

A nursing student with very misplaced priorities in life

[shytastemakerthing]

Hii, I wanted to ask for a romantic matchup please, the fandom I choose is Jujutsu Kaisen. ^^ My mbti is infp, my enneagram is 9w1 and im pan but i prefer to be matched with male characters. I define myself as a laid back, goofy and reserved person; my social battery is very low and I tend to remain quiet when I find myself in a situation where too many people are involved. My 'extroverted' side tends to come out when I'm around my closest friends or when alcohol is involved (lmao), even if sometimes it only depends on my current mood.

The people close to me describe me as a calm, always balanced person who thinks things through before doing something; they also see me as a faithful individual with strong values, an empathetic side and as someone who likes to joke around A LOT. My bad traits are that i procrastinate and daydream often, trying to escape from my problems :p. My hobbies are shopping for clothes (i don't have a particular style, i like to dress in feminine/elegant clothing), playing video games (my favourite genres are rhythm games, story driven games and strategic games like FE or Triangle Strategy) and hanging out with my friends. I like spending time alone in my room, reading (even if i don't do it very often), wearing good outfits, traveling and listening to music (mostly pop but im fine with everything that has a good beat). I'm also trying to get better at digital art! :)

The things i hate are overly loud people (they drain out my social battery), public speeches and being ignored or left out.

Thank you very much, I hope this amount of info is enough! Don't be afraid to let me know if I have to add other details in my description, no worries. <3

Hello and thank you for your request! I do hope that you enjoy your match-up! This is my first time doing JJK as I am still rather new to the series so I hope I do this well!

Prompt:Romantic JJK match-up

Tw: None

I match you with.......

Kento Nanami

From an outsiders perspective, he seems rather closed off in his relationship with you, but they only see this from the outside, not how he really is with you

You're safety is his main priority, especially in such a dangerous area, yes, he has tried teaching you various forms of defense, it helps him feel better

Honestly, he loves how laid back you can be. It is a big change from the stress and chaos of his work life

Coming home to you at the end of the day?

Yes, please. It is like all worries just melt away off his shoulders

He loves how calm and balanced you can be, refreshing, in his mind. The two of you have quite the conversations at the end of a work day, that is certain

Knowing of your love of reading, if he happens to see or find a good book while he is out or working, he has already bought it and anticipating the smile on your face when he shows it to you

In the end, Kento loves every little thing about you, from your calm nature, your love of reading, and knowing just what to do and when. He has never been happier

Have a wonderful day/night!

[gaymershigh]

May I request a Dire Crowley & GN! Reader where the reader accidentally slips he's like a Dad to them and he just SOBS cuz they're so cute when they try to play it off as a slip of tongue 😭💖

Anonnie you really out here making me squeal at midnight with this request 😭💞💞quite sad that Crowley will never be like this in canon but oh well just imagine an au where he also sees you as his child and loves you to bits!!!

Triggers: Crowley is too nice in this so this will be changed into an au wwwww

G/n reader telling Crowley that he's like a father to them by accident

Crowley has been super caring when he found out that you're a special case. He stayed with you to help clean the Ramshackle dorm so you can at least be comfortable staying at this almost run down place. When he found out about Grim secretly staying here, he was about to kick him out once again as the raccoon's recklessness can scorch the dorm to ashes. This led to a chase but after you met and have handled the prankster ghosts that Grim accidentally bumped into, Crowley permits him to stay as he couldn't say no to your puppy eyes.

He gave you some choices of what type of uniform you want to wear. How would you like your tie? Do you want your own customized armband to represent your dorm? Do you want a vest or no vest? Do you want accessories? It took about two hours for you to answer his unnecessary clothing options for you, Grim's already fast asleep.

While he did scold after all that dwarf my situation, he was a lot softer to you than the others. Telling you that you need to rest since it must be harder for you as you were magicless. He praised you for making the three cooperate and how you were a beast tamer, all that junk. But it was sweet, he was so nice to you like you were his kid or something, it only felt slightly off because you two only met just yesterday.

But as time goes on, you don't mind it at all. You enjoy the special treatment you're getting from the principal, it's like you're his main priority since he's treating others like uh..just not the best as he does to you. You felt obligated to return the favor because you don't want to see as rude and "high privileged" as if anything, you're very underprivileged being in a school filled with magical, big, and short-tempered boys.

You were trying to help him do his paperwork but he doesn't allow you but you kept persisting on that you just want to help him because he has been so kind to you yet he still refuses, saying that "it's not that much" or "he doesn't want to burden you" but come on! The stacked papers can be as tall as a building! Impressive that he managed to keep his cool when you keep acting like a brat.

"I'm serious, (Y/N). You don't have to help me- why are you so persistent!?"

"Isn't it natural to return the kindness? I've never got to help you back and I just thought that now could be a good opportunity because you're like a dad to me!--.."

Your words were followed by dead silence as you cover your mouth from both shock and the sudden realization. It was quiet for a few minutes as you two just stared at each other and blinking rapidly, trying to process the information. Though you don't want to confirm it because my god if calling a teacher mom was bad enough imagine calling the principal dad even if you weren't in trouble.

"Y/N..did you just called me dad?-" "No."

He didn't even care that you said no because it was so obvious you were denying your words. He was squealing like a high school girl because his secret child figure called him what he dreamed to be called and seen; a dad. Also, you telling him to stop and forget the words you totally did not say was such an adorable move, it's like those cheesy tv show scenarios coming to life!

He was on the verge of just hugging the life out of you, he's just that damn happy! He kept pestering you telling you that it's ok to call him dad and no need to be shy about it. You have ego and pride, you of course turn him down but maybe you should try it? It'll make him happy and can consider it a return of kindness, you know?

Dang, 1 hour late from what I scheduled my posts..oh well! At least I got to pump some writing again and maybe tell myself not to procrastinate again!

~𝕸𝖎𝖗𝖎

[co-reborn]

Hello People

Hihi. Happy Lunar New Year to everyone!!! insert traditional greetings here, insert chinese songs here blah blah. 

On to the main topic of this message.

For the next few months, I will be much busier than I have been. Why? Well, the other writers mostly know but I’m not gonna reveal it on the blog. So don’t pry further. Anyways, my already slow output will be further reduced and asks will be answered much more infrequently (not like I get that many to begin with) and stuff. I don’t intend to retire but I hope my circumstances doesn’t force me to. So yeah, don’t unfollow me because of my inactivity.

With that out of the way, I have much more minor stuff I want to address which will be under a “read more” line. tl;dr: my drafts lists, some minor theme changes, anons and idol list

Drafts List (as of 1 Feb 2022)

CO3

Lust Potion

Is Three A Crowd?

Initiation 3*

SB2**

YB2

Some other collabs that are basically at 0 progress and not a priority for both us writers

It took me more than a month between Obedience (3) and Bust or Bust and given my upcoming schedule, it could be an even longer wait for any of these to be posted. Unless BFH happens of course. 

In the meanwhile, I have two quickies queued up for the future so that it doesn’t seem like I’ve been missing for too long. I don’t have any other backlog of fics ready so you’ll probably feel my absence after that. 

*With regards to this fic, I have actually gotten to writing it a long time ago and am like 80% done. I got distracted with other drafts and haven’t returned to complete it. Also, the draft feels like it’s lacking in many aspects that needs to be heavily edited and the (semi) perfectionist in me is procrastinating into finishing it.

**So I do apologise to all my followers from the very start that read the first rendition of SB and YB over on Wattpad. I do want to get to them, but many more ideas do come to mind that I want to get to before the inspiration fades. Fun fact (I guess): SB2 was going to be written a while back (where i started a draft for it and am a few paragraphs in). However, I was sent a picture of Uniform Mina by sins and you guys got Obedience instead and it snowballed from there. My main issue with continuing the two series is that I was highlighted some fundamental issues with my fic that I want to rectify, which makes planning it even harder. I do have the base idea in my mind already, it’s just a matter of writing it.

Blog Theme

So over the past few months, I have made several changes to my Tumblr Blog theme (which can only be viewed on the website version and not the app) with the coding hard-carried by BNS. The main big things that were added is a light/dark mode toggle and an easier to navigate masterlist (see images below) The light/dark mode toggle is on dark mode by default but feel free to change it to light mode (you monsters) and my masterlist looks like wikipedia now lol but given my many series and slowly increasing number of fics, I think it would be more useful in the long run. The “Latest Works” section definitely needs more work but I’m slowly improving that. I might add the table of contents to my Pics & Gifs collection in the future.

Anonymous Asks

So due to the number of ruder anons in our community, more and more writers have turned off anonymous asks. I don’t want to do that because I want to believe in the nicer anons. Starting from now, I will not hesitate to block the ruder anons. I am dense as fuck and I don’t know what tone you intended to use, so if it’s a sarcastic ask, put a “/s” or something. Otherwise, you’re gonna be blocked. I will also not hesitate to turn off anonymous asks if the situation gets too bad and there is no telling when I will turn it back on.

Come on guys. Is it that hard to be nicer to one another in this community? Stop with the hate on us writers who write for the fun of it. If you don’t like some writers (me included), just click the fuck away. 

Idols List

I have not changed this since I began posting on Tumblr in June 2021. My recent fic has went out of my Idols List which might get some “???” reactions from you guys. I have not changed it (at the time of writing this message) but it will likely be changed when this is scheduled to send. Most notable addition is probably going to be Itzy’s Yuna. Please do not send me endless requests to write her. While I am willing to write her, I do not have strong intentions to do so at the moment but this could change any moment if the vibes are right. 

Other additions are mainly going to be fromis_9 members but rest assured, I will not stray away from Twice and 100% be a fromis writer. Feel free to send me asks about them as well, I would like to get to know them better. My current biases are Jiheon and Nagyung so umm.. if there are any content for them (irregardless of sfw or nsfw), send them to me juseyo hehe. 

I would not post UA pics!!! I don’t care even if it’s a sfw cute moment. This is a nsfw blog and I don’t want my words to be twisted such that I’m lewding a minor. If I do post a UA pic, please let me know immediately and I will delete it.

Conclusion

That would be all. If you have made it this far, thank you for reading this long ass message. I do hope I don’t disappoint the Onces here that I’m no longer a writer that only writes Twice. I will try my very best to remain a primarily Twice writer cough cough unlike sins cough so keep out for my many planned contents that will be out in 2069 kek. Hope everyone stays safe and healthy this year <3

[gukyi]

four weeks | kth

summary: four weeks. that’s how long you’re trapped on campus after missing your flight home because of a grossly overtime final. and as you’re walking around your empty campus, thinking that you could sink no lower, you find yourself alone in the art building with a certain freshman-year-dorm-neighbor from hell, and he’s got an offer that you don’t think you can refuse: he’s staying on campus this winter break as well, and he’s happy to let you live with him.

or, four weeks is all it takes to fall in love.

{enemies to lovers!au, roommates!au, college!au}

pairing: art and chemistry double major kim taehyung x female reader genre: fluff, angst, comedy, the whole nine!! word count: 20k warnings: alcohol consumption (be safe!), unwanted sexual advances (not between main characters and not at all explicit), and a ton of college tomfoolery. a/n: i’m finally finished with my very first semester of college! it was a lot, but finishing this fic was a treat after my damn finals, which were very stressful. this is part of the stranded for christmas collab, and i’m so honored to be doing this with such amazing, talented writers! please give them and their fics lots of love, and enjoy this super fun train wreck of a fic!

Admittedly, Global Politics in the Twentieth Century has never treated you particularly well. 

Your lecturer is about as interesting as grass growing, the readings are low quality scans of book pages with the tiniest font and absolutely no line spacing, and any friends you had in that class in the beginning of the semester dropped out of it by the time mid-September rolled around, leaving you trapped due to societal pressures and a History and Politics general education requirement you still have yet to finish. 

But, of all the things you could imagine Global Politics in the Twentieth Century doing to you, like charging you an exorbitant $200 dollars for a textbook you would never open anyway, burning your house down, or even straight up just murdering you, this is by far the worst. 

It’s bad enough that your final for Global Politics in the Twentieth Century is on the last possible day for finals at the latest possible time, but when the clock strikes 8:00PM and you have just about fucking had it with this semester, you realize that no one else is standing up. 

This panic intensifies as you begin thinking of all of the terrible things that could be the reasoning behind this: you’re just the dumbass who finished their final first and got all of the questions wrong, the clocks have yet to adjust to daylight savings and you think that it’s 8:00PM when really it’s 7:00PM, or, worst of all, your final is running overtime. 

You have only ever heard of horror stories about overtime finals. Things like having to cram the next three-hour final into one hour, or having to reschedule the final to some other time that is equally as conflicting. Stuff that is, to a normal human being, a minor to moderate inconvenience at best (and to an overdramatic college student—pure, unadulterated hell), but when this is the last final on the last day at the latest time, there are no other finals to be had. No other school-related scheduling conflicts barreling into you. 

It’s just your luck, really, that on the last day of the semester, at the latest time you are allowed to be here, Global Politics in the Twentieth Century would come back to bite you in the ass one last time. As if all the times you dozed off in class (or just plain skipped), forgot to turn in your reading analyses, and showed up late to your recitation are finally catching up to you. Like the very worst kind of karma that could ever befall you. 

Well, to be fair, it’s not as if the rest of the day has treated you any better. The entire time you’ve been awake on this fine December day has been an absolute trash can of a day. 

This is how the beginning of your very last day of the semester played out:

Your alarm went off at 8:00AM sharp, purposefully set that early so you could wake up and have a productive day studying before your final at 6:00PM.

You hit snooze and ended up waking up around 11:33AM.

You scrambled out of bed very inelegantly and attempted to get your life together before noon so you could at least have six hours worth of a productive study day before your final. 

You remembered that you hadn’t packed yet, so you spent the next hour frantically stuffing your belongings into the singular carry-on sized suitcase meant to last you through your month-long winter break. 

You also realized that you hadn’t done your laundry for the week (well, week and 6 days…), and you obviously want to bring clean clothes back home so you spend the next two hours doing your laundry and finishing up your packing.

By the time you finally managed to get the time to study, the panic had fully nestled itself into your bones, so you could not focus and spent the next three hours staring at your study guide and praying that osmosis would kick in so you could actually retain information. 

You left to go to your final five minutes later than you should have and then ran across campus (with absolutely no dignity left) in order to get there on time. 

You arrived at your final just in time, only for there to be technical difficulties with printing the exam because your professor is a procrastinator, just like you are.

The next thirty minutes were then spent contacting the IT department, attempting to fix the printer, having to go print in another building, and then coming back with the final exam to a room of aggravated students who thought that they would be thirty-minutes into the exam by now. 

You are taking the final exam. It’s stupid difficult and you’re absolutely going to tank it. 

You are watching as the final runs overtime for about half an hour.

You are watching as the final runs overtime for about an hour. 

You are watching as the final runs overtime for about an hour and a half.

And on your very last day of the fall semester, your final runs overtime by two whole hours because of some mystic force determined to ruin your life, and your flight heading back home took off fifteen minutes ago. 

You know, it could be worse. You could have failed all of your classes. Instead, you paid an exorbitant $500 to miss your flight, fail your Global Politics in the Twentieth Century final, and end up trapped on campus for all of winter break because you don’t have the money to buy another plane ticket at such late notice (or at all). 

So, it could be worse. 

You trudge out of your final exam and try not to burst into tears on your way back to your dormitory. Barely anybody is left on campus now that finals are officially over, but you still want to save that last shred of dignity. As you’re walking down the pathway, you begin to feel wet splotches on your face. For a moment, you think that they are fat tears rolling down your face, but you look at the cobblestone beneath your feet and realize that instead, it’s raining. 

The perfect weather to match your mood, if you’re being honest. 

Not wanting to get caught in a downpour, you end up taking refuge in the coffee shop connected to the art building on campus. It’s a genius business design, if you say so yourself, because there is no one more dependent on caffeine than sleep-deprived, eyebag-laden art students. Surprisingly enough, there are still people behind the counter bustling around, so you use the last of your university dollars to order a peppermint hot chocolate to warm your insides (but not your cold, dead soul). 

From there, you take a quick detour to explore the art building, a building you have, admittedly, never really taken much of a look at. It must be empty now, with everyone off campus—except you, of course—which gives you the perfect opportunity to wallow in peace while admiring art. 

Walking inside, you stare at your reflection in the enormous glass walls. Look at your tired eyes, slouched shoulders, lips pressed thin, and hands warmed only by the heat of your cardboard coffee cup. Count each acne mark and hair out of place. It’s almost like you’re watching yourself as you look in the mirror, a third person standing in the background. The audience. Like the person who’s looking back at you isn’t you at all. 

It's quite artistic, actually. Ironically enough.

But no matter how picturesque, how cinematic this particular moment of your life is, nothing can really soothe you after missing your flight, failing your final, and pretty much having the worst day of your entire life.

Just then, you hear footsteps echoing down the halls.

You assume that it must just be a professor leaving their office, or even maybe one of the hardworking security guards, but as you watch the glass walls to catch a glimpse of who's passing by, you realize that it's not a professor, or a security guard, or even a very large mouse scurrying across the floor.

"I thought I would be the last one in here," Kim Taehyung says when he spots you, stopping in his tracks with a canvas about half the size of him underneath his arm.

"So did I," you muse in response, not really wanting to turn around to save yourself the trouble of talking to him.

Still, Kim Taehyung has always been one hell of an observant guy, so by the time he's stopped behind you, he's already peering into the reflection of the glass windows to look at who he's talking to.

"Y/N?" He asks, walking up to you with his eyebrow raised. He comes over, standing next to you as you look at each other's reflections in the glass. "Never thought I'd see you in here."

"Me neither, to be honest," you say. Seeing as you aren't a visual studies major, you never really considered the art building to be a location of top priority. Until now, that is.

The last time you spoke to Kim Taehyung was the last day of your freshman year, when everybody was getting ready to move out, packing up their belongings and removing the fifteen thousand Command hooks stuck to their walls. You and him made eye contact as you placed the last of your boxes for the semester into those enormous Residential Services carts, glaring at each other from your adjacent rooms. 

“First year flew by, didn’t it?” Taehyung asks, smirk lacing his features. 

“Thank God it’s over,” you tell him. 

“Not gonna miss me, huh?” Taehyung winks, and it makes you want to take this cardboard box filled with all of the notebooks and lined paper and folders you used throughout the year and chuck it at his head. 

“Miss you?” You ask with a scoff. With the final box finally out of your room, you can officially lock the door behind you, closing the chapter on your very first year at university. “Please. Nothing makes me happier than the fact that I don’t have to live next to you anymore.”

“Why are you still here?” Taehyung asks, tapping his fingers on the side of the canvas underneath his arm. “Thought you’d be off campus by now.”

“I had a late final,” you say, pretending that your life and every aspect of it is fine when it is, in fact, not fine at all. The best case scenario is that Taehyung accepts your bullshit answer for what it is and heads off to do whatever it is that he does, leaving you alone so you can wallow in pity and ponder the meaning of life. The worst case scenario is that Taehyung stays. 

And Taehyung has always been very good at picking the latter. 

“Ah, sucks, for what class?” Taehyung asks. You can’t tell if he’s genuinely curious or just wants to interrupt your personal self-wallow time for as long as possible. 

“Global Politics in the Twentieth Century,” you tell him with a sigh. You don’t want to have to hear, say, read, or write that name ever again. 

“Oh, really? I took that class last semester,” Taehyung says with an eyebrow raised, surprised. “I thought it was super interesting.”

As if you needed any more proof that you and Kim Taehyung are exact opposites in every way. You are hardly surprised that Kim Taehyung enjoyed Global Politics in the Twentieth Century—not when the two of them have so much in common, like inconveniencing you, being annoying, and sort of always having it out for you. It’s like they were meant to be together. 

“I can’t say I thought the same,” you say pointedly, lips pursed into a tight line. 

“Ah, well, I never did peg you for a history buff,” Taehyung says with a shrug of his shoulders. 

“Why are you still on campus? I thought art students had to turn in their final projects on the first day of exams,” you ask, turning the focus onto him. It’s obvious that he has no intention of leaving you alone, so your next best option is to interrogate him until the tension between the two of you is so suffocating, so thick and heavy, that he wants to leave. 

“I had a couple of chem finals after I finished up my art classes,” Taehyung says. Right. You forgot he was doing a double major. “And, my parents are actually travelling this winter break, so I was planning on staying on campus. Didn’t really want to go back to an empty house, you know?”

After the day you’ve had, you can think of nothing better than opening the door to your home, knowing that you have the entire place to yourself and can spend the night in your bedroom, watching Netflix. 

“You’re staying on campus?” You ask. Great. The only two people who will be on campus this winter recess are you and Kim Taehyung. Fantastic. 

“Yeah,” Taehyung says, clearly unaffected. He seems particularly unbothered by the fact that he can’t go home, almost like he’s been looking forward to having the entire university to himself. “You’re about to head home, then, aren’t you? Just taking a quick break in the art building?”

Well, almost to himself. 

The chances of running into Taehyung this winter break, despite being probably the only two people on campus, is still slim. It’s a big campus, and there are people who are not part of the university that walk on campus all the time. 

And still, you don’t know what you’ll do if you lie to Taehyung and tell him you’re about to fly home, and then bump into him at the local coffee shop. You might just perish. That might be what happens. 

So, for once in your life, you suck it up and tell the truth. For once. 

“Actually, I missed my flight because of my final running overtime, so I’m sort of stuck here,” you tell him, and as the words leave your lips it feels like your whole body gets weighed down, like you’re cemented to the floor.

It’s only then that Taehyung actually turns to face you, so you aren’t standing shoulder to shoulder and staring at the rain pattering on the pavement outside. You look at him, meeting his eyes and to your surprise, they aren’t filled with mirth. He hasn’t got this pleased grin on his face. He’s not milking this situation for what it could be milked for at all. He could be standing here, bathing in the satisfaction of your timely demise, and he’s not. 

He actually looks quite sad. 

“Really?” He asks, genuine. 

“Yeah,” you say, and it’s then that you accept your fate, resign yourself to the fact that you’re trapped on campus with no way (and no money) to get home, and try to look for the silver lining. “So, I’ve actually got to get going, grab my stuff and everything.”

“Oh, do you live off campus?” Taehyung asks. “We should get together sometime this break. Who else are we gonna talk to, right?” 

Spending time with Taehyung on your lonely-ass winter break sounds like the absolute worst thing in the entire world. It’s been two years since the last time you were forced to be within fifty feet of each other, so even having this conversation is taking you by surprise.

“No, I’m still staying on campus. But my dorm is closing for the winter break, so I need to go and find an Airbnb or something to stay somewhere,” you say, feeling your heart break at the notion of spending even more money this winter break after having watched your $500 dollar airplane ticket get flushed down the toilet. 

Taehyung stays silent, eyes gazing at the lines between the linoleum tiles on the floor. He’s stopped tapping on the side of his canvas, a painting which you still haven’t fully gotten a glimpse of. In the quiet of the art building, the dust settles, and you wait for Taehyung to say something. Anything. 

After a few more seconds, you decide that the two of you have been standing in awkward silence for long enough. 

“Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” you say nervously, letting out an unnatural and forced laugh as you turn on your feet and begin to head towards the exit. You have no idea where you’re going to go or what you’re going to do, but what you do know is that you have to be out of your building by noon tomorrow, so you’ve got less than a day to figure it out. 

And then, Taehyung says the worst thing he could possibly say at this given moment:

“Do you wanna stay with me?”

You stop dead in your tracks. 

“What?”

“You don’t have to say yes,” Taehyung immediately clarifies, as if that makes the offer any less sudden. “But I live in an off-campus apartment year round, so you could always stay with me if you’d like. You wouldn’t have to book an Airbnb or anything. But you don’t have to.”

You close your eyes, feeling your chest rise and sink as you inhale and exhale. You can’t believe you’re actually considering his offer. You can’t believe that Taehyung would willingly offer up his personal abode, his private apartment to you, the freshman year next-door neighbor who knocked on his door every six hours to tell him to shut the fuck up. You cannot believe that you are on the verge of accepting. 

“Are you sure?” You ask, both eyebrows raised. Yes, the idea of free lodging and no-hassle appeals greatly to you, but you’re not so certain that Taehyung or you actually want this. After all, you spent all of freshman year hating on each other’s living habits as personal hobbies of yours. “You don’t have to offer just because I don’t have a place to stay. Seriously.”

“No,” Taehyung says, taking a step towards you. It’s barely a foot, but it feels like he’s a thousand miles closer to you than he was before. “I mean it. If you want to stay with me, you’re welcome to. I have a futon in my living room that you can sleep on. I’m being serious.”

You cannot believe that he’s asking this. 

You cannot believe you’re considering this. 

You cannot believe you’re about to say yes to this. 

“You really mean it?” You ask one more time, just so you can be certain. You’d hardly be surprised if this whole thing was just a mindfuck. 

“I do,” Taehyung says. “No matter what, I don’t think anybody should be alone for the holidays.”

“Then yes,” you say, letting Taehyung catch up to you as you begin to walk towards the exit, step by step. “I’d really appreciate it.” You turn to look at him, your eyes meeting his own chocolate brown ones, nearly ink black in the dark. You can’t offer much, certainly not anything to top this gracious proposal, but you smile, and he smiles back, and you think that’s enough. 

Your first order of business is trekking back to your dormitory and grabbing your fully-packed suitcase. At least spending an hour shoving as many of your belongings as possible into a tiny carry-on has its benefits despite you not setting foot in the airport. 

“Been a long time since we’ve done this,” Taehyung comments mindlessly as you walk through campus, following the cobblestone path as a shortcut to his apartment. 

“Done what?” You ask snarkily. “Hung out with each other?” You scoff. You and Taehyung spent all of freshman year skirting around each other, desperately trying to avoid contact while also banging on each other’s doors every ten minutes. It was essentially two semesters worth of shouting at each other through walls and sneering when you actually locked eyes. 

“Talked,” Taehyung simplifies, because he’s right. 

“Isn’t that what we were aiming for?” You ask with a raised eyebrow, turning to look at him as your suitcase wheel skips on a stone out of place. “I thought we had reached that consensus already.” It’s been a year and a half since you last spoke to each other. You were almost confident that, without any overlapping classes, you would be able to keep that streak going long after graduation. 

As it turns out, things change. 

“I don’t know if we ever actually agreed on that,” Taehyung says, thinking back. “Almost like it went…” he pauses, and you can’t be sure if it’s for dramatic effect or because he actually doesn’t know what to say. “Unspoken.”

The irony is not lost on you. In fact, it hits you smack dab in the forehead as you watch Taehyung’s curious expression morph into the sleazy frat boy one he wore so much back then. He looks very pleased with his pun. It makes you want to sock him in the face. 

And as it turns out, some things never change. 

You resist the urge to punch him in the shoulder because he offered you a place to stay for this break and you sort of (actually, really) owe him big time right now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t send a disapproving frown, which seems to do the trick. 

“I distinctly remember how you were so excited to never have to live next to me again when we moved out,” Taehyung says like he’s remembering a fun trip to the zoo. Almost like he looks upon the last time you ever interacted with each other fondly. 

You mentally sigh. If only freshman year you knew what was going to happen in the middle of your junior year. If only your final hadn’t run overtime by two hours. If only you had booked a later flight. 

If only. 

“I don’t remember that at all,” you lie like a liar, saying the words as the picture of you snarkily spitting them at Taehyung at the end of your freshman year plays in your brain on repeat. 

“You sure about that, Y/N?” Taehyung says, turning to look you up and down. He’s always been such a people reader, and you’ve always felt so helplessly transparent in front of him. Even back then. Even now. “Because I don’t really think that your memory is that bad.”

“Nope, no, I don’t,” you say quickly, trying to get Taehyung to stop eyeing you like you’re a question on an exam that he thinks is suspiciously easy. 

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter then, does it?” Taehyung muses as you round the street corner and his apartment complex comes into view. “Since we’ll be living together, anyway.”

“Miss you? Please. Nothing makes me happier than the fact that I don’t have to live next to you anymore.”

Before you can wheel your cart down the hallway and kiss your freshman year goodbye, Taehyung opens his mouth and says one more thing. You almost don’t hear him, too busy reminding yourself that you’ll never have to see him again, but then he says, “One day, Y/N, you’re going to realize that we’re closer than you think.”

When you walk into Taehyung’s apartment, your eyes zero in on these three things: the navy blue futon pushed up against the wall by his television and the fact that it doesn’t look like the kind of used furniture from off of the street that most college kids typically resort to, the little wooden kitchen table that looks straight out of a family-owned Italian restaurant (looks like the two of you will be eating dinner together), and the paintings on the walls. 

“Did you paint these?” Is the first thing you ask once you’re inside, putting your suitcase up against the wall as Taehyung takes off his coat. 

“Those? Yeah, I did them early last year. My walls looked so damn plain without anything on them.”

In freshman year, Taehyung seemed like the kind of artsy hipster who shopped at Urban Outfitters and put vinyl records on his wall with Command Strips but never actually listened to them. 

But the pieces on his walls aren’t vinyls of bands like Arctic Monkeys and Modern Baseball. They’re paintings, oil and acrylics and even a bit of charcoal. Still life and portraits and shadows. 

You had never seen one of his paintings before. You never imagined you’d ever want to, or even get the chance to. And now, you’re standing in the middle of his apartment, and you’re surrounded by them. 

“They’re…” You trail off, eyes bouncing from wall to wall as you take all of them in. There’s at least ten, one, if not two on each wall in sight. His bedroom is probably filled with them. His apartment’s not enormous, rather small since it’s only got one bedroom, but the paintings make the whole place bigger. Make it feel full of life. 

“They’re alright,” Taehyung finishes. He’s already grabbing extra blankets from the storage closet in the side of the wall. “They were assignments we had during the semester so I figured that they’d be put to good use on my wall.”

“It’s very impressive,” you admit. “Kind of a flex, but an impressive flex.” There is something so perfectly Taehyung about the fact that he’s got art all over his walls, but they’re his very own pieces that he has framed and hanging, on display for the entire world to see if they’d like. 

“They’d collect dust otherwise,” he says with a shrug. He tosses two blankets and a pillow your way, letting them plop onto the futon. “Are those enough blankets? It can get fucking cold in here, so I don’t want you to freeze to death or anything.”

And for a moment, you think that Taehyung has actually outgrown his asshole-y freshman days, maturing into someone with an actual moral backbone.

“How considerate,” you say sarcastically, “but I think I’ll be alright. I’m a big, strong girl.”

“Just don’t come crawling into my bed if you want a taste of that weighted-blanket life,” Taehyung says, pretending to flip his hair. “Though, I wouldn’t blame you if you did want to sleep with me.”

With a pillow right at your disposal, you waste no time grabbing it and chucking it straight at Taehyung’s face. He easily dodges, having spotted the move from a mile away, and chuckles. 

“Come on, Y/N, you can do better than that,” he says disapprovingly, shaking his head as he makes his way to the kitchen. “Your arm was much stronger back in freshman year.”

Scowling, you watch as he puts on the kettle to boil, letting the water begin to bubble as he goes about his business like he doesn’t have a guest in his living room that absolutely can’t stand him. 

And you realize that maybe Taehyung’s a couple of years older, a couple of years wiser, but that doesn’t make him a couple of years any less unbearable.

If you were a sleep-deprived engineering student three cans of Monster deep who, in their 4AM haze, invented a time machine to go back to freshman year, and you told your eighteen-year-old self that you would be living under the same damn roof as Kim Taehyung in two years time, freshman year you would probably sock you in the face. And ask you if you changed majors. Which, you did.

It’s not a far reach to wonder why. By the time October rolled around, the two of you had already established yourselves as archenemies until the end of time. 

It was a natural progression, really. Two tiny dorm rooms right next to each other, two beds pressed up against opposite sides of the same paper-thin wall, and two disgruntled freshmen trying their hardest not to die of alcohol poisoning. 

Now, you don’t have a track record for going to sleep at a reasonable hour. In fact, you don’t think you’ve gone to bed before 11PM since middle school. But is it really that irrational of you to want to get some well-deserved shuteye at two in the morning after a long day of procrastination and a long night of doing the studying you should have done during the day? Your roommate is fast asleep across from you, having gone to sleep at midnight like a regular college student who has her life together, which means that she’s immune to the fact that right next door, you can hear nothing but pounding drums making the very linoleum floor of your dormitory shake. 

Scowling, you scramble out of bed, sliding on your shoes to go give a certain Kim Taehyung a bit of a reprimanding. 

Why the fuck does he listen to heavy drums at two in the morning? What the fuck is he doing? Does he not own headphones, or anything that might restrict the sound to his own two ears and nothing else? Does he not have any respect for the people next door to him that might also have to listen to the sound of a thumping bass while they’re trying to go to sleep?

Some of you have 9AM’s tomorrow morning. And by some of you, you mean you. 

You quietly shut the door behind you so as not to wake your roommate, dead-bolting it so you don’t get locked out and have to trudge down to the Help Desk looking like a tired piece of non-recyclable garbage, and immediately bang on Kim Taehyung’s door. He hasn’t got a roommate, and you know he’s awake, which means that if he doesn’t respond, you’ll know why. 

Surprisingly enough, he does, opening the door and immediately grinning once he sees who’s on the other side, like he can’t get enough of the fact that his mere existence bothers you. 

“It’s 2AM,” you tell him, in lieu of a greeting. 

He checks his watch. “That it is.”

“Would you mind turning down the music? I’m trying to go to sleep.”

“This late, Y/N?” Taehyung asks, an eyebrow raised. “No wonder you’re always so cranky.”

“Maybe it’s because my next-door neighbor plays loud fucking music when I’m trying to go to sleep!” You say, already beginning to raise your voice like a loser who can’t control her emotions.

Which is exactly what you are, actually. So this is very on brand for you. 

“Hmm, never thought about it that way,” Taehyung says innocently. He’s got a gleam in his eye that says otherwise. 

“I’m being very nice to you right now, Kim Taehyung. Please turn your music down. Because it’s loud and you’re probably bothering other people as well,” you say, restraining yourself. If you were any more sleep-deprived you’d storm into his room and pound in his face like it was the fucking drums he’s listening to. 

“But you’re my only neighbor,” Taehyung says, a bitter reminder that you were unlucky enough to be the second-to-last room in the corridor, and he, the very last one. 

You inhale, trying to not lose your cool despite having probably already lost it. Kim Taehyung makes you want to tear your eyeballs out. Or buy heavy-duty earplugs off of Amazon Prime. The thing is, one of those options costs you money, and one is entirely free. So, it’s not difficult to see which one you’re leaning towards. 

“Taehyung, please turn your music down, or so help me God. I’m asking nicely,” you can feel the carbon dioxide paths coming from your nose as you breathe, in and out and in and out. 

“Just for you, Y/N,” Taehyung says with a grin. God. You could just straight sock him in the face right now. “It helps me focus, but so does getting to see you.”

“Perish immediately,” you tell him sharply before pulling the door shut, marching back off to your room. 

True to his word, Kim Taehyung does turn off his music. Or puts in headphones. At least he’s conceded.

That is, until you wake up to a crash of glass later that morning at 7AM, coming from only one direction. 

The fact of the matter is, everything you and Taehyung did that year bothered the other so immensely that hatred, pure, unadulterated dislike, was really the only thing that could have come out of it. 

“You still listening to loud ass drums in the middle of the night?” You ask, eyeing the speakers by Taehyung’s television as you sit on his couch (as far apart from each other as possible) and eat some leftover spaghetti. 

“I invested in some AirPods as a treat to myself last year, so yes, but don’t worry,” Taehyung says. He’s mindlessly flicking through the available Hulu options on his TV, severely unimpressed by every one of them. 

“Wow, AirPods, sounds like you’re moving up in the world,” you say callously. “At least I don’t have to listen to it with you anymore.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said it helped me focus,” Taehyung says, all matter-of-fact about it. “It was from a Spotify playlist of modern orchestral music. You should give it a listen, it really gets you into the zone.”

“My relationship with classical music has, unfortunately, been tainted by a certain someone,” you remind him, taking the time to shoot him a glare just in case he doesn’t already know who exactly is at fault. 

“What a shame, you might actually like it,” Taehyung says sadly, shaking his head. 

“So what are the speakers for, then? If not for your fuckin’ drums,” you ask, motioning to them again as you slurp up the last of your spaghetti. It’s not as if you’ve got some sort of sacred reputation to protect in front of him. He’s seen you at your best (the first day of freshman year, when there was still light in your eyes), and at your worst (2AM, coming out of a drunken stupor, and bedhead-ridden). Like an ex-boyfriend, or something. 

“My friends really like singing karaoke,” Taehyung says. He points to the bluetooth microphones underneath the television as extra proof. 

“Why does that not surprise me,” you muse to yourself. Taehyung always struck you as someone that needs people not to calm him down, but to elevate his already boisterous personality. Friends who are equally as unabashed as he is. 

“Since you’re here for a whole month, we should try it some time,” Taehyung suggests, taking the empty bowl from your hands and heading back to the sink to wash up. 

“You need help with that?” You ask, immediately getting up because even if Taehyung has a tendency to drive you up the wall, you’re still going to be a good guest.

“No, don’t sweat it,” Taehyung says with a shrug. “You know, I have karaoke for All I Want For Christmas Is You. Super seasonal, right?” 

You dust off your hands from where you’re standing, loitering in that weird halfway point between his kitchen and his living room. Checking the clock underneath his television, you realize that it’s already past ten. And while you haven’t gone to sleep this early in a while, being in Taehyung’s apartment makes you feel all sorts of strange. Subdued and exhausted, too grateful to be your normal aggressive and witty self. And after such a long goddamn day, passing out on his navy blue futon seems like absolute heaven. 

“Not right now,” you say, shaking your head. Karaoke is something that friends do with other friends. And despite currently living under the same roof, you and Kim Taehyung are not friends. 

(But perhaps you will be. And that’s the scary part.)

You sigh, absolutely tanked. It’s been a stupidly long day. “Maybe later.”

Living with Taehyung is a sort of strange limbo you never, in a million years, pictured yourself in. You aren’t close enough to be friends but you’ve matured out of being the true enemies you had both envisioned the yourselves as in freshman year. The both of you walk around his apartment like you’re afraid to talk to the other, waiting patiently for the bathroom when the other person’s inside, trying to keep yourself busy with nonexistent work (it is winter break, after all) and the apps on your phones. 

This is the sort of thing you dreamed of when you were a freshman. A Kim Taehyung that you could co-exist with peacefully. Someone who didn’t spend every waking moment of his life making every waking moment of yours unbearable. You used to find excuses to sleep overnight in the library (it was open 24/7, after all) just so you wouldn’t have to go back to your dorm and see his stupid face. Now, the two of you sit on opposite ends of the couch minding your own goddamn business and doing two totally unrelated activities. In silence. The only noises being his refrigerator/freezer combo when it starts making ice and the sounds of your fingers hitting the keyboards on your laptops. Maybe he’s playing a video game on the Playstation 4 he keeps out in the living room, but he has headphones on and isn’t saying a word. 

It’s a very strange sort of limbo indeed, because no opportunities arise for you to become friends nor do any arise for you to become enemies. At this rate, you’ll live together for the month-long winter break and when it ends, you’ll go back to never speaking to each other again. 

And that, strangely enough, makes you sad. Makes you want to reach out to him, try and build up a relationship that last ended in absolute chaos so that when you leave this place, it won’t have been for naught. You will have gained something from it, no matter how small. 

But just like usual, Taehyung beats you to it. 

“Hey,” he says one day, walking into the living room and already pulling on his overcoat. “You free right now?”

“Yeah, why?” You ask, shutting your laptop as you turn to him. He’s all dressed up and you’ve been wearing the same hoodie for the past forty-eight hours. 

“Let’s get hotpot. I’m freezing and I want some hot soup and meat.”

So, you go and get hotpot. 

Like any normal university with more than approximately three East Asians enrolled, there’s a hotpot place right off campus that many a college student frequent. You have, admittedly, not been since freshman year, but this winter break you seem to be reaching back into all of those memories anyway, like a can of worms. Memory worms. 

“I’m starving,” Taehyung says as the two of you sit down. He’s already opening the menu, eyeing all of the different ingredients he can order for a simple All-You-Can-Eat fare. “Plus, I’ve been craving hotpot for weeks now.”

As if on cue, his stomach grumbles and you can hear it from across the booth.

“Even my tummy knows,” Taehyung says, placing a palm to his belly to soothe it. “Have you gotten hotpot before?”

“Yeah, but it was a while ago. I just never had the time to go for a whole two hours and pig out on food,” you say with a sigh. It’s been so long that you barely remember what it tastes like. 

“Then we’ll spend every minute that we’re allowed to here, eating as much food as we want and gaining a few pounds while we’re at it,” Taehyung says, determined. The waiter comes by to pour you both some water and he already begins to order, pointing to about fifteen different things on the menu before the waiter whizzes off. 

“I don’t think I heard a single word you told that guy,” you say candidly. Taehyung listed everything off so quickly that it went right over your head. 

“I just ordered a lot of food, so be prepared,” Taehyung says like it’s a promise. He’s got this glint in his eye, one that tells you that you should be glad you came on a fairly-empty stomach because it’s about to be filled to the brim. 

And prepared you are. Within five minutes of Taehyung ordering, there are plates and dishes and boards of food in front of you and a steaming pot of broth in the middle. There’s so much on the table that you can hardly see the marble table top underneath. 

Taehyung dives right in, clearly an experienced hotpot eater. He grabs two bowls filled with various sauces and pops a couple of the vegetables into his mouth as he waits for the broth to boil. And when it begins to bubble, he immediately begins dumping everything in sight into it, from meat to noodles to vegetables. It all looks ridiculously appetizing. 

When the first round of hotpot is over and done with, you already feel yourself starting to get sleepy just from the consumption overload. Taehyung, on the other hand, has apparently no limit and is already ordering more, pointing to another fifteen things on the menu. 

“Never thought we’d be doing this, did you?” Taehyung asks, and you can hear the knowing tone in his voice. Like he already knows how you’re going to answer him. 

“I have to admit that I never did,” you say. It must the food that’s softened you up. No wonder Taehyung invited you to a place where you can literally eat as much as you want in a two-hour timeframe. 

“This is nice, though, isn’t it?” He asks. 

And for once in your life, you agree. It is nice. Not just the food (though the food is very nice) but being with someone on a winter break that would otherwise be overwhelmingly lonely. Eating out with someone, even if it’s someone with whom your relationship isn’t all that strong, isn’t that sturdy. It’s nice. Because it means that, somewhere along the way, you both wanted something to change for the better. 

“It is.” You nod. “Way better than all the times we fought during freshman year.”

“Remind me why we never went to our RA to resolve things like we should have?” Taehyung says, but he doesn’t make it sound like you both made a mistake. He asks because he’s curious, and because the past is the past. 

“I think we were both too fucking prideful for our own good,” you say, shaking your head. You now would disapprove of you in freshman year so strongly. “We thought that we could either resolve it ourselves or spend the rest of our lives hating each other.”

“Isn’t that crazy?” Taehyung asks, holding up his water like it’s a glass of vintage red wine from the 1800’s. “That we thought that we could just spend the rest of our lives hating each other?”

“I was prepared to do it,” you say, taking another piece of meat from the hotpot in front of you, letting the steam waft from it like a tiny campfire. “With how big this school is, I was convinced that you and I would never have to see each other again. Never have the opportunity to change how we felt about each other.”

“But that’s not how life works, Y/N,” Taehyung tells you, looking into your eyes like he’s trying to reach into your soul, pick apart the memories of freshman year and watch as your relationship deteriorated as each day went by. “It doesn’t matter if we see each other every day for the rest of our lives or if, after this, we never say another word to each other. You will always have the opportunity to change how you feel about someone, even if you aren’t with them. Even if you aren’t seeing them at all.” He takes a deep breath, and reaches over the steaming pot of soup to nudge your shoulder with his finger, ever so slightly. It makes you look up at him, meet his dark brown eyes with your own, foggy from the steam. “That’s what makes us human, Y/N. We’re human because we can change.”

Your heart, still and silent, begins to thump. 

“Do you wanna go to New York?”

“Today?”

It’s early in the morning on Christmas Eve, and the two of you are wide awake after Taehyung’s neighbors a floor below him called the fire department as an early wake-up call for the entire complex. You’ve always been a light sleeper—Taehyung made sure of that in freshman year—but even he woke up as the fire trucks pulled up to the fire lane next to the apartment building. He came stumbling out of his room in nothing but a t-shirt two sizes too big and sweatpants hanging low on his hips, locks of his hair sticking every which way, face illuminated by the blue, red, and orange lights of the emergency vehicles beneath the window. 

And he stayed like that, even as the noise died down and the sun rose. He marched around looking like he had just rolled out of bed, barely sparing himself a second glance in the reflection of his refrigerator. 

“Yeah,” Taehyung responds like it’s obvious. “If we hopped on a bus now we could make it there by nine and spend the day there. How about it?”

“You mean, right now?” You ask, just as clarification. College and its many features have forced you to grow used to spontaneity, but it usually came in the form of “I’m hungry, so I am going to eat an entire bag of Hot Cheetos at this exact moment” or “Yes, my bank account is crying but these pants are very cute,” and not, “Do you wanna go to New York?”

“In a bit. Buses leave from here every hour to go to New York, especially since it’s the holiday season. Tickets are ten dollars. We could do it, if you’d like,” Taehyung says casually, like he’s suggesting that the two of you go grocery shopping or something else equally mundane. 

“Just for the day?” You ask, a girl of both many questions and a shocked expression. 

“Sure,” Taehyung says with a shrug, biting into a tomato as if it were a goddamn apple. “We can go to a museum or two, eat a nice lunch or dinner, and go ice skating at Rockefeller. See the tree, too. It’ll get us in the holiday spirit, don’t you think?”

And normally an outing to New York would have you planning weeks in advance, organizing reservations and buying tickets for entry into exhibits, but it’s winter break and you’ve got more free time than you know what to do with. 

And maybe you’d hate to admit it, but you need someone like Taehyung to get you off of your ass and out of the house, do something fun and spontaneous like college students do in the movies. 

Taehyung is practically a movie portrayal of a college student in real life. He’s spontaneous, secretive, sage. He’s artsy and worldly, paints but is also extremely smart and well-educated. He lives in a quaint off-campus apartment by himself and spends his days making friends and keeping busy. He loves to tease you, and has that sort of lopsided smirk that all casanovas do. And he is, as much as you’d hate to admit it, always been something of a looker. He’s got the same sort of handsome, classic look that young European men in paintings from the eighteenth century have, a portrait of them in the prime of their lives. One wink and he’d send every preteen girl in the audience to their knees.

And you? Well, you suppose you’re the tragically unlucky female lead who has to live with him until classes resume. 

Taehyung’s standing in the kitchen, leaning on the counter island as he scrolls for bus tickets on his phone. “There’s a bus leaving from the station in thirty minutes. Think we can make it?”

It might be the fact that you’ve been holed up in Taehyung’s apartment for the past forty-eight hours that makes you say yes. Or it’s the desperation to do something, anything, literally anything, to keep yourself busy this break. 

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s that little voice in the back of your chest, one buried in the depths of your heart, that makes you go. Because there is something so wonderfully exhilarating about being spontaneous.  And there is something even more exciting about it being with someone you know. 

You grin. “Let’s do it.”

Two hours later, the two of you are standing outside Penn Station in New York City, staring at the road signs to try and orient yourself. It’s chilly and a little windy, but the sun beats down regardless, shadows of skyscrapers cast along the streets. 

You pull out your phone to pull up the Maps app, looking up directions, but Taehyung just begins to walk down 7th Avenue, not a care in the world. 

“Where are you going?” You say quickly, scrambling to catch up to him. This early in the morning, your breath still turns to fog as you jog towards him to meet his abnormally long strides.

“Do you want to go to the Met, MOMA, or Guggenheim?” Taehyung asks simply, like he’s trying to decide which type of Doritos to get in the chips aisle. 

“Uh…” you are, admittedly, not that particular to the art that you’ll see. Art does not have as much of an immediate relevance to you as other things in your life, like your bank account, or your final semester grades. “Why don’t you pick the museum, and I’ll pick the restaurant we go to?”

“Deal,” Taehyung says, that same devilish gleam in his eyes, a trick (or two) up his sleeves. Only this time, you aren’t afraid of what he’s got in store. 

You find that you are very much looking forward to it. 

Twenty minutes later sees the both of you standing outside the gigantic glass doors of the MOMA, surrounded by a pitch black exterior about as edgy and contemporary as the pieces of art inside. 

“You never struck me as a modern art kind of guy,” you tell Taehyung as the both of you walk inside, glass windows and ceilings on every side of you and a bustling crowd right in front of you. Modern art seems rather stuffy. And perhaps, two years ago, you would have equated Taehyung to such, but now, stuffiness couldn’t be the furthest adjective to describe him. He may be a little obnoxious and overwhelmingly charismatic, but he is certainly not stuffy. 

“I prefer Impressionism and the subsequent periods,” Taehyung tells you, another fact you never knew but happily stow away. “But I am, admittedly, a bitch for modern art, no matter how goddamn stupid it is.”

“Good to know we’re spending our money on a museum that will definitely be worth our while,” you say dryly, taking the two tickets from the woman behind the desk. You pick up a map while you’re at it, almost certain to get lost in this maze of a museum, but Taehyung is already zooming off, forcing you to scurry through the herds of people just to keep up his pace. 

“Do you know where we’re going?” You ask, entirely serious. You fumble to open up the map and suddenly you’ve got a piece of shiny paper larger than your backpack in your hands, overwhelmed. 

Taehyung stops, the two of you standing right by the middle of a doorway, blocking everybody’s path. And he places his hands on top of yours, lowering the map as you gaze up at him, wondering why the heck you haven’t moved to the side so you aren’t inconveniencing the thousands of people roaming the museum. His brows are soft, a little furrowed, like someone began to knit them together but then forgot halfway through. Like he’s thinking. Like he wants to tell you something. 

“No,” Taehyung says softly, large hands enveloping yours as he begins to fold the map back up, “I don’t know where we’re going.”

You open your mouth, about to prove your point, but Taehyung continues. 

“But I don’t need to. Because we’re supposed to get lost,” he tells you, honest, candid, and true. “That’s the whole point. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”

You scoff, heart a little warm on the inside but wit still sharp. “You sound like an infomercial for a cruise.”

Taehyung laughs, tilting his head back in the way that says that he means it. “I’m serious, Y/N. Please. We don’t need a map. We can guide each other. All we need is faith, trust…” He pauses, leaning in and waiting for you to finish his sentence. 

Begrudgingly, you give in, mostly because he’s too naturally charming not to. “And pixie dust.”

Taehyung grins, satisfied, before he catches you by surprise, takes your hand in his, and pulls you into the elevator. 

Much like the corrupt businesses whose main offices are only a few minutes walk away, you go from the top down. Taehyung says that it is like a very, very long slide. You say that it’s an extremely slow walk. 

He’s an art student. You don’t really know what else you were expecting. He stares at each piece until it bores into his eyes, fills up another cup in his soul, overflowing with color, with light and meaning and everything in between. Every now and then, he and you stop at the same one, inspecting each and every detail, and Taehyung will lean to the side and whisper in your ear. 

He will tell you what he thinks of the medium, what he thinks of this piece and what he thinks of the positioning of that specific object. He tells you not how he interprets it in the eyes of the artist, but what it means to him, and how he perceives it. And, as the hours pass, you realize that, while you have been in museums before, you had never felt like you were truly there. And here you are, standing in front of priceless pieces of art with a boy in love with art beside you, and he holds your hand as he takes you through what brings him more joy than anything else. 

(Well, besides perhaps, chemistry.)

When you reach the first painting and sculpture floor, Taehyung lets out an audible gasp. 

You round the corner and before you know it, you’re standing in front of what could very well be the most famous painting of the nineteenth century. 

“I forgot it was here,” Taehyung says distantly, like he’s forgotten who he’s talking to. In the ink black of his pupils, you can see the oil painting reflected, the thick blue and yellow brushstrokes, each and every line on the canvas. 

“Now, this piece I’m familiar with,” you say, standing next to him and staring up at The Starry Night, an artistic feat, worth more than probably a hundred times your tuition, and a legacy. The legacy that The Starry Night left behind is one that you see still reflected today. You see it in all of the other people in this little room, clambering over one another just so they can get a glimpse. You see it in the little children who draw self-portraits in art class, Sharpies and markers and crayons littering the page. 

And you see it in the boy next to you, who loved something so much he knew that he would be doing it for the rest of his life. He would be following a legacy, forever, until he forged one of his own. You look not at the art but as Kim Taehyung gazes at it, memorizing each and every stroke and imprinting it onto his brain. And you finally realize what art means: passion. It means that it fills you up, flows through your blood and into your heart, consumes you. And it means that the only thing you can do to prevent it from eating you alive is to spread it, and let others get a taste of the madness. 

“It really is beautiful, isn’t it,” you muse. You don’t know much about art but when there is something so mesmerizing, so stunning, in front of you, it’s difficult not to notice. 

You feel Taehyung turn his head, letting the gaze of his piercing brown eyes rest upon your figure for a split second before he turns back. “It is,” he says. 

The way that the two of you go through art museums, by the time you emerge, it’s already dark and the streets are beginning to empty as tourists and cityfolk alike find places to eat, walking into every bar, restaurant, cafe, and house on the hunt for a good meal, whether homemade or curated. You had spent nearly an hour in the gift shop alone, laughing at the overpriced t-shirts and kitschy pillows. 

“Where to next, m’lady?” Taehyung asks as you push open the glass doors and let the biting cold hit your noses. 

“You know, we were so busy in there that I didn’t even have time to find a nice place to eat tonight,” you admit sheepishly. 

“That’s alright,” Taehyung says with a shrug. “I like surprises. Spontaneity is my thing.”

“You don’t say,” you comment sagely, making Taehyung roll his eyes. 

Knowing that it’s nearly impossible to get a reservation now, you and Taehyung make your way south, following the flow of traffic heading towards Times Square and keeping an eye open for any places that look relatively nice and busy, but not too busy, the perfect sign of both a delicious and available restaurant. 

After walking for a few blogs, cuddling together (in a totally platonic way) to preserve as much body heat as possible in the now freezing weather, air no longer warmed by the sun’s rays, you stumble upon a tiny hole in the wall Mediterranean place. You can’t really see anything inside due to the fog on the window, forming from the combination of cold air and hot, but Taehyung does a quick google search and says that it’s a modern Mediterranean restaurant that specializes in pizza. Google says it has two dollar signs. You hear the word pizza, and everything pretty much goes out of the window. 

“Hi,” Taehyung says as you squeeze through the little hallway to get to the host, voice warm and silky. “Table for two?”

“Your last name, sir?” The man asks. 

“Oh, we don’t have a reservation,” Taehyung says with a shake of his head. You two are college students. It’s not like you plan ahead anyway. 

“That’s okay, we still ask for every customer’s name for a more personalized experience,” the host says. He leans forward, eyes wide, waiting for Taehyung to respond. 

“Kim,” Taehyung says simply as the host gathers two menus and a wine list. 

“Right this way, Mr. and Mrs. Kim,” the host says, and you open your mouth to correct him (Because you are not married. You’re not. You’re not even dating. This is not a date. It’s not a date, right?), but Taehyung puts a finger to his lips and tells you to zip it. It’s almost like he’s enjoying this. 

For the rest of the evening, the wait staff all address you and Taehyung as Mr. and Mrs. Kim, which is absolutely outrageous for multiple reasons: you are college students, you both look like college students, you’re not dating, you don’t act like you’re dating (other than the hand-holding and cuddling which was purely out of survival and nothing else), and most importantly, you’re not interested in each other like that. That part is obvious. Isn’t it?

When you order a glass of champagne each they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When Taehyung has a question about one of the ingredients on one of the pizzas they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When you order your food they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When they come by to clarify Taehyung’s request of no anchovies they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When they bring these massive pizzas and place them down on your table, wishing you a pleasant meal they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. 

Mr. and Mrs. Kim, they call you. 

“Everything alright, Mr. and Mrs. Kim?” Your waiter asks as you’re plowing through your individual pizzas very inelegantly. 

“Yes,” Taehyung grins cheesily. “Thank you very much.”

He’s positively beaming. 

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” You ask, a single eyebrow raised. 

“This pizza is really good,” Taehyung tells you. 

“Not that,” you say with a roll of your eyes. You know that Taehyung knows exactly what you’re referring to, he’s just being annoying about it, as per usual. “The whole ‘we’re married’ thing. You like it, don’t you?”

“The “Mr. and Mrs. Kim’ thing?” Taehyung says with a smile. He’s relishing in the feeling, especially when it’s obvious that you’re not as keen on the collective nickname. “I fucking love it. You don’t?”

“We’re college students,” you remind him. 

“So? That means that they think that we look old enough to not be college students. I consider that a win, especially because Jimin always says I look twelve,” Taehyung says with a shrug. 

“We’re not married,” you add. It’s the truth. 

“You’re right, we’re not, but Mr. and Mrs. Kim has such a nice ring to it, don’t you think? I love the way that it sounds,” Taehyung says. He basks in it. 

“We’re not even dating, Taehyung,” you say with a sigh, exasperated. Doesn’t he get it? It’s weird, being Mr. and Mrs. Kim, because you never have been. There never was a Mr. and Mrs. Kim. And quite frankly, there never will be. “We’re not even interested in it.”

“Who says?” Taehyung asks, and the path he’s directing this conversation down is not one you’d like to take. It’s rocky and bumpy and unclear, hazy with fog. You don’t do fog. You like when things are clear cut and visible. 

“I do,” you say with a frown. “Are you interested in dating me, Taehyung? Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to date you right now. Or, like, at all.”

Taehyung pauses. His brows are furrowed again, but all the way this time. He stares down at his pizza, and he contemplates. You sit there and watch him, feeling the weight of every second as it passes by. Were you too harsh? Maybe you were. But it was the truth, and he deserves something honest, even if it’s brutal. 

“Oh,” Taehyung says, like he wasn’t expecting those words to come out of your mouth. What you said has been lingering between you like smoke, refusing to dissipate. “Well, I—I guess that makes two of us.” It’s obvious that there’s something else there, just underneath the water, but you don’t press further. It sounds like he’d rather keep it hidden. 

When you leave, the waitstaff bid you goodbye exactly as you had predicted. 

“Enjoy your evening, Mr. and Mrs. Kim,” they say cordially as you and Taehyung pull on your coats and hats and gloves and head out the door. 

“You too,” Taehyung says softly after a few seconds, like he was waiting for the words to fade away before speaking. “Thank you.”

Your bus leaves from Penn Station at 9:30 that night, and it’s barely seven. Plenty of time for you to continue exploring, see Times Square all lit up like it’s New Year’s Eve, go up to the top of the Empire State Building, or even take a peek into Central Park at nighttime, when the moon is high and the lanterns are lit. 

“How about we go ice skating?” Taehyung suggests as the two of you walk along the pavement, side by side. Your hands are buried deep into the pockets of your coat. 

“At Rockefeller?”

“Sure, why not?” Taehyung says. That sentence pretty much sums up your trip to New York thus far. “I’ve always wanted to go skating and see the tree during Christmastime. When else will we get the chance?”

Five minutes later you’ve paid for rental skates, a locker for your shoes, and a ticket to the rink. Visible right next to you is the enormous tree, the lights twinkling and cameras flashing as everyone scrambles to get their Instagram picture to prove that they actually went to the tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City. 

When the zamboni is finished and the employees have skated over the ice enough to increase the level of friction, Taehyung and you balance on your skates as you walk towards the entrance. Slowly, everybody begins to glide on, wobbling at first before eventually getting the hang of it. There are a couple of small children holding onto those little penguin skate assistants, laughing as their older brothers and sisters guide them along the ice. 

“I’ve never skated before,” you admit nervously, about two seconds before you’re about to enter the rink. 

Taehyung’s mouth drops open. “Never?”

“No,” you reiterate, even more nervous than before. “I have no idea what I’m doing, I just said yes because like you said we’re in New York and it’s nearly Christmas and we should just seize every opportunity that we have and—”

“Y/N,” Taehyung says, calming you down as he ushers you away from the entrance so you aren’t blocking other people’s paths. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry,” he tells you, holding onto your wrists to make you look up at him. “I can show you how to. It’s easier than it looks, I swear. I won’t let you fall. You just have to trust me, alright?” He shakes your wrists to catch your attention, make sure that you heard him. “Alright?”

Deep breath. Inhale, exhale. 

“Alright.”

Everything is, in fact, not alright. No matter what Taehyung says, ice skating is way more fucking difficult than it looks. Taehyung steps onto the ice and it turns into second nature for him, gliding around a small circle to get warmed up as you cling onto the side railing like an idiot. You have no idea how to move, you have no idea where to go, you just shuffle along the railing with the rest of the children who are far younger than you, also trying to skate for the first time. 

This is embarrassing. 

“You’re a liar,” you tell Taehyung pointedly as he circles around, coming up to rest next to you. You’d point at his chest for emphasis, but you’re afraid you’ll fall without both hands on the railing at all times. “This is—” you pause, remembering that there are children present, “—very difficult.”

Taehyung just chuckles. “You have to be brave, Y/N, come on,” Taehyung implores. He holds out his hand, motioning for you to let go of the wall and take a leap of faith. 

“No, I will not be brave. Please let me be weak,” you beg, scared for your life. One wrong move and you’d go splat in the middle of the rink and embarrass yourself in front of all of New York City. 

“Come on, Y/N,” Taehyung says, holding his hand closer. “You said you trusted me. I told you, I won’t let you fall. Come on. Be brave.” And then he adds, leaning in to meet your eyes, “for me?”

He’s always been too charming for your own good. 

Tentatively, second by second by painstaking second, you remove your hands from the railing, first the left and then the right, as Taehyung pulls you right next to him, holding on tight. 

“See?” He asks as you begin to move on your own, Taehyung’s short glides pulling you along the ice. “Look, it’s not that bad.”

“I am scared for my life right now.” You blink. 

“Focus on me, okay,” Taehyung says, making you meet his eyes once more. “Eyes on me, alright. You’re doing fine. You’re skating, isn’t this fun?”

“I am terrified that I am going to perish on this very rink,” you repeat for emphasis. 

“Look, Y/N, look! You’re skating!” Taehyung tells you, and finally you glance down at your feet and realize that they’re beginning to move on the ice, all on their own. 

“Oh my God! I’m skating! What the—heck!” You say, eyes widening in excitement. 

“I knew you could do it,” Taehyung says, hands gripping on tight. You can feel the warmth from his palms seep into your own, feel the back of your hand burning from the touch. “You just had to trust me.”

“This is so cool,” you say, immediately very pleased with yourself. “I’m such a pro, I can do anything. Who said skating was scary?”

Taehyung opens his mouth to respond, but you shoot him a warning glare and he zips his lips. 

“Watch this, I can even do it on my own. You’re gonna be very impressed, Kim Taehyung, just watch me!”

Within the next moment, you’re letting go of his hand and pushing yourself away from him, gliding along the ice ever-so-slightly as you begin to balance on your own. 

But power is short-lived, and much like every leading male in Greek tragedies, your hubris gets the best of you, and you face the ultimate demise. 

The moment you attempt to pick up your left foot, your right toe pick gets caught in a dip of the ice and you go toppling over, collapsing onto the ice in a cold, bruised ball. 

Luckily, your coat takes most of the hit, its length preventing your knees from hurting into the next century, but that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing. Ashamed of yourself and even more mortified to have to face Taehyung after boasting about how amazing you are, you slowly push yourself off of the ice, wobbling like a baby deer. 

“What was that, Y/N?” Taehyung says with a raised eyebrow as he skates over. He’s clearly just recovered from a laughing fit. 

“Fuck off,” you mutter, and you don’t even care if children hear you. “I got excited.”

“Clearly,” Taehyung notes, eyes wide and knowing. He holds out a hand, and before you even have time to think of a snarky retort your palm is reaching out for it, letting him pull you up off of the rink. “Here. Come on.”

One hour and two fairly bruised knees later, you and Taehyung are taking off your skates and relishing in the feeling of your feet, flat on the ground like feet should be. 

“You alright?” Taehyung asks. You didn’t have any massive falls following the first spectacle, but you admittedly, still cannot ice skate very well. You’ll have to figure out a way to learn. 

You round out the night by going to look at the Christmas Tree. Now that it’s fairly late, the massive families with young children have all gone home, leaving only the young adults left to bask in the glory of the peak of Christmas decorations. 

“It seemed bigger in photos, didn’t it?” Taehyung asks as the both of you crane your necks to look at the tree in all of its glory. “Like it was the size of a small tower.”

“Yeah,” you agree. It looks somewhat disappointingly small, now that you’re here in front of it. “Today was a lot of fun, Taehyung. Your spontaneity paid off.”

“When does it not?” Taehyung asks, proud of himself. He even has enough of an ego to do a little hair flip, making you shake your head disapprovingly. “But I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. I certainly did.”

“What was your favorite part?” You ask. 

“Definitely when you were in your prime for one moment and a puddle on the ice the next,” Taehyung says, and for that, he earns a punch to the shoulder. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. But I did really enjoy ice skating.”

“Yeah, because you can actually do it,” you remind him. 

“What about you?”

You think. This day has been so long, from getting woken up by Taehyung’s irresponsible neighbors and the entire city’s fire department outside your window, to hopping on a bus to New York, to museums and restaurants and ice skating and the city, you feel like you’ve lived three days in one. 

“The museum,” you finally decide. “I’m not really an art person, but I thought it was lovely. Nice and heated, too.”

“Yes, the best part about the Museum of Modern Art was its modern, state-of-the-art central heating,” Taehyung repeats, making you laugh. “I’m glad you liked the museum. I was worried you’d think it was too stuffy.”

You had thought that too. And then you watched someone fall in love with each and every piece, right in front of you, and you realized that there’s more to art than putting a price tag on it and critiquing it. It’s passion, materialized. It’s real.  

It’s Taehyung. 

“No,” you say with a shake of your head. “I thought it was beautiful.”

On Christmas Eve, it snows. 

Correction: On Christmas Eve, it snows a lot. 

Correction for the correction: On Christmas Eve, it blizzards. 

When you listened to “White Christmas” last night, this isn’t exactly what you had in mind, if you were being honest. Maybe an inch or two. Maybe even just a flurry. But certainly not nearly two feet worth of snow, effectively trapping you inside of Taehyung’s apartment complex until the next day because not even the snow plows are allowed to go out on the roads. Not until the snow stops. 

“Good thing we don’t live on the first floor, right?” Taehyung asks with a laugh that late afternoon, taking a peek out of the window to stare down at the white expanse below you. “I’d hate to be those guys.”

“It must be so cold,” you say sadly. You’ve spent the better part of today huddled up in as many blankets as Taehyung owns in his apartment and you have no intention of shedding even one of them. Not even as you sweat right through your pajama shirt from high school. 

“We can just make dinner here, tonight,” Taehyung says, fishing around in his kitchen to see what the options are. It’s already beginning to get dark even though it’s not even five o’clock. God, you hate winter. 

“What are we making?”

Taehyung fumbles through the cabinets and his fridge, hunting for anything that might make a good meal. Eventually, he pulls out two cartons of Trader Joe’s vegetable broth and every vegetable in his fridge. 

“Wanna make soup?”

Soup is very easy to make. You set the broth to simmer, chop up vegetables, and dump them in the pot. 

But the idea of you and Taehyung sharing his tiny kitchen space, both with knives in your hands is, well, a recipe for disaster.

Luckily no knife mishaps occur, but, like the children at heart that you are, you eventually end with pelting uncooked lima beans at each other in the most adult version of a food fight you have ever had in your life. No fuss, no mess, no tomatoes or key lime pies or spaghetti doused in sauce getting chucked across the kitchen floor, the dinner table. 

No, your little food fight ends with you and Taehyung kneeling down on the tile as you pick up each little lima bean, gathering them in your palms. 

You make to toss it out but Taehyung stops you. 

“Wait,” Taehyung says, a hand on top of yours as it hovers over the trash can, “don’t toss them out.”

“Huh?” You ask. 

“I’ll feed them to the birds,” he says, taking the pile from your hands and placing all of the lima beans, along with his own, in a Ziploc bag. 

“You have a porch out here?” You ask, looking around. You’ve never seen it. 

“No.” Taehyung shakes his head. “They land on my bedroom window sill so I feed them.”

When you were in freshman year, you remember how Taehyung always left his window open. You know this because even though yours was always closed, anytime a police car, fire truck, ambulance, or particularly loud motorist drove by, the sound was always loudest on the wall of your room that bordered Taehyung’s. You hated how he always left his windows open, even in the winter. Wasn’t he goddamn cold?

And now, even though it’s Christmas Eve and there’s a blanket of snow outside nearly two feet deep, Taehyung will go and open his bedroom window again and feed the birds lima beans like a fucking Disney prince, and it makes your heart flutter, ever so slightly. 

You end the night sitting on Taehyung’s couch, only a foot or so of space in between your bodies as he multitasks, channel surfing and gulping down your homemade soup. 

“I haven’t made soup in a while, but damn, this is good,” Taehyung says, drinking the rest of it before getting up to help himself to seconds. He sticks a hand out to take your bowl as well, and wordlessly you hand it to him. 

“It’s my magic touch,” you tease. It was not. Taehyung did most of the work. You don’t have much of an affinity for cooking.

“It’s my chemistry brain,” Taehyung corrects. “Chem is basically like making soup.”

“But it can kill you,” you tack on.

“But it can kill you,” he agrees, returning to the couch. This time, when he sits down, he plops right down next to you, your sides touching as you sit in front of his television, slurping up homemade vegetable soup. “How’s your major? What is it, again?”

“English with a minor in Psych,” you say over a mouthful of carrot. 

“Sounds like too much reading for me,” Taehyung comments. “I’d only like picture books.”

“Yeah, wonder why,” you tell him sarcastically. “But it’s going well. I’m thinking of maybe adding Consumer Psych as another minor since there’s a lot of overlap, but I’m not sure. I’ll think about it.”

“Sounds busy,” Taehyung comments. 

“Almost as busy as visual studies and chem,” you remind him. “Seriously, do you ever sleep?”

“Inspiration is a fickle mistress and the will to do my chem problem sets, even more fickle,” Taehyung muses like the two subjects aren’t the absolute bane of his existence. “But yeah, I mean, I made it this far.”

“Our majors are so different,” you comment. They are. Encompassing all sides of the college major spectrum, from STEM to art to humanities. The only thing you’re missing is a business minor. But only snakes would ever be interested in something like that. 

“It’s nice,” Taehyung decides. “Because this is forcing us to talk with someone with whom we don’t already share all of the same classes with.”

“I couldn’t imagine taking the same class as you,” you say, not because you’d hate having to be in the same room as Kim Taehyung or dread the potential to be paired up for group work, but because your tastes are so different. They’ve always been different. Art, English, chemistry, psychology. Headphones or speakers. Closed windows or open. It’s always been opposites with the two of you. 

“Maybe I’ll take a psych class so that way we can,” Taehyung says. 

“Maybe I’ll take an art history course,” you retort.

“You’d really take an art history course? They’re awfully boring, and I’m an art major,” Taehyung says, in disbelief. 

You ponder it for a moment, but then nod. Yes, you would. Even if it sent you to sleep. Because it looks genuinely interesting. “After today, I wouldn’t mind it. You showed me a lot about art, Kim Taehyung. More than I thought I would ever learn in my lifetime.”

Taehyung sighs, shutting the television off. You guys weren’t watching it anyway. You hardly realized it was on. He looks down at his empty soup bowl, and then at you. He always does that—always looks somewhere else before looking at you, like he has to muster up the courage by first staring at an inanimate object. And then he says, “You’ll never stop learning about art. Neither will I. It’s a constant cycle, learning and relearning and changing your mind and revisiting old pieces. Because art is all around us.”

He looks at you, like he’s trying to say something else but doesn’t have the words. “You just have to look for it.”

New Year’s Eve is often a time of reflecting on the year that’s passed, making a list of goals to achieve once the clock strikes twelve. Thanking your friends and family, your loved ones, for being there for you this year, and promising to be there for them as well next year. 

To you and Taehyung, it’s literally your last chance to get piss drunk this year without repercussions. You’ve never stayed here, at your university in the city, for New Year’s Eve (obviously). You’d be interested in getting all dressed up to go out. Taehyung would also be interested. 

And so, after a day of slouching around and making half-assed resolutions you know you won’t keep (like managing your time better. As a college student? Impossible.), you and Taehyung decide to get dressed up and go out, pulling out the winter jackets you don’t care if you lose, or if they get trashed, or if they stain with vodka. All you want is to lose your goddamn mind in a tiny club with a bunch of other wasted young adults who don’t want to stay at home on the last night of the year. 

You are, unsurprisingly, a self-proclaimed not-a-going-out person, but tonight is something of an exception. It’s your last night to do this this year, and honestly, you can’t really think of a better way to end the year. There’s been plenty of ups (that A+ on your paper on the ethics of Beowulf, yay!) and plenty of downs (Global Politics in the Twentieth Century, yikes), and no better way to say goodbye to them all than with alcohol in your system. But even if, during the regular college season, you’re something of a stick in the mud, you remembered to pack a nice party dress just in case, so you tug on a little black velvet mini-dress that sparkles rainbow in the light, covered with tiny glitters that get stuck in your hair and never come out. 

As you’re fishing around for some tights that you don’t care about so your legs don’t freeze off in the cold, the door to Taehyung’s bedroom opens. 

Out he walks in all of his New Year’s Eve glory, a full black ensemble complete with structured belt and a leather jacket. You turn around to look at him and he stops dead in his tracks, eyes blinking like he doesn’t know where to look. It gives you a clear view of him and his simple yet extremely flattering outfit. He looks like Danny Zuko. He looks like a boy you would avoid in high school. 

Funnily enough, seeing him now draws you closer to him.

“Wow, hot stuff, you clean up nicely,” You comment, tugging on some black tights with a hole in the back that no one’s going to notice. 

“I could say the same thing about you,” he adds on, a hand coming up to rub at the nape of his neck. “I didn’t even know you had this.”

“I packed it just in case,” you say with a shrug. 

“Came in handy, didn’t it?” He asks. He comes up to stand by you, holding his arm out for you to wrap yours around, two people on a mission to not remember most things about this night. “You ready to go?” 

Stuffing your phone and wallet into your purse, you quickly link arms with him as you walk to the door, your black boots clopping on the floor like the obnoxious high-heel owner you are. 

“Yeah, you ready?” You ask, doing a quick double check. You’ve got everything. 

“Let’s fuck some shit up.”

And fuck some shit up you do. By the time you reach the club that Taehyung had found online, you can already hear the bass pounding through the walls, feel the ground shake from the speakers alone. Go big or go home, you suppose. 

As you expected, the club is already packed with bodies. Every young adult within a twenty-mile radius is out tonight, eager to spend the last night of the year doing what young adults in the primes of their lives do best: drink. And you and Taehyung are no exception. 

Like everybody else entering the club at the same time as you, you make a beeline for the bar, already itching to get something into your system. You don’t love being drunk, and you like the taste of alcohol even less, so you just order a simple cocktail that should keep you occupied for a while. 

Taehyung, on the other hand, well. He seems to harbor the go big or go home mentality quite firmly. It’s obvious that he’s here to do one thing and one thing only, which is not remember what he did when he wakes up tomorrow. You watch, a little impressed and a lot nervous about what exactly he’s trying to achieve, as he downs several shots in a row, pays the bartender, and immediately pulls you into the crowd of people dancing in the center of the room. 

“The more I move, the faster my body can process the alcohol,” Taehyung tells you as your cocktail sloshes around in the glass in your hand. It’s an alright cocktail. A little too sweet for you, but you suppose that that’s your fault. 

“Wow, when you said you wanted to fuck shit up, you meant it,” you comment as Taehyung dances, jumping and swaying to the beat of whatever Top 40 pop song is blaring from the speakers. You can barely hear the music over the volume of the rest of the club, people shouting to speak to each other, the sound of feet hitting the floor. 

Within approximately fifteen minutes, Taehyung is already fairly tipsy and eager to keep going, bubbling over with excitement. 

You convince him to dance a little longer before he goes back to get more, trying to make sure at least a bit of the alcohol he had at the beginning of the night goes through his body. The song changes to something much sultrier, like honey dripping from the speakers themselves, and suddenly, the entire club’s atmosphere changes. 

“I love this song,” Taehyung says, and it must be the lack of control that causes him to place a hand on your waist and pull you in close to him, making you gasp. 

“Wow, okay,” you comment, blinking. Taehyung rests his chin on your shoulder, leaning down as he holds you tight, your bodies swaying in tandem. 

“You don’t mind this?” Taehyung asks. 

“Not if you don’t,” you respond. He’s practically drunk, and you’re even a little buzzed. There are worse things you could be doing. 

“This is nice, isn’t it?” He inquires aloud. It’s a good thing that you can’t see his face, can’t watch the haze in his eyes, otherwise you might lose your footing and collapse. 

“What is?”

“This,” Taehyung repeats unhelpfully. 

The next three minutes are some of the most confusing ones of your life as Taehyung rests a hand on your waist, palm rubbing up and down as the two of you dance together like it means something to the both of you. 

But it doesn’t, does it? You chalk it up to both of your minds not being as sharp with some alcohol in your systems. That must be it.

When the song ends, the mood disappears as well, and Taehyung’s back to his bouncy, tipsy self. He’s practically stumbling over himself once he determines that it’s time for more shots, and you’ve never seen Taehyung drunk before but you can tell that he’s nearly there. You’ll probably put a hard stop on the drinks after this round, since Taehyung is the one most familiar with the way back to his apartment and you wouldn’t mind going home and sleeping after this.

“Come with?” Taehyung asks as he eyes the bartender like he’s the love of his life. 

“No, it’s alright, Tae,” you say.

“You never call me Tae,” Taehyung comments mindlessly. Even when he’s nearly drunk, he still picks up on the little things. 

“I guess the alcohol is making me soft,” you admit. “You go. I’m gonna find the bathroom and hope that nobody’s having sex in it.”

“Okay,” Taehyung singsongs as you pull away from him, looking for a dingy hallway to go down. “Be safe.”

“You too, I’ll be back soon,” you promise him, and that’s when you go rushing down the hallway.

Things are certainly weird down here. It must be the feeling of the new year looming over your heads. Like this is the last night to do everything wrong without regretting it in the morning. The bathroom is, luckily enough, empty, so you rush in and splash your face with some water, not caring about if your makeup runs. You’d sweat it off, regardless. You stare at yourself in the mirror, and this feels so stupidly like a goddamn romantic comedy that it makes you want to laugh at the irony. 

Beautiful male art student lead gets drunk, confuses hardheaded and impenetrable female lead who doesn’t believe in love and supposedly hates beautiful male art student’s guts. Tension ensues. 

Your life may as well already have a shitty Rotten Tomatoes rating stamped on top of it. 

After collecting your thoughts and praying that that white stain on the wall isn’t what you think it is, you leave the bathroom and scurry down the hallway, eager to find Taehyung and make sure he isn’t bouncing off the walls after a second round of shots. 

He’s not. 

Instead, he’s still standing by the bar as a beautiful young woman speaks to him, long dark hair resting against her shoulders and a model-esque smile on her face. She’s leaning in with a suggestive look in her eyes, a hand coming up to rub at the side of his arm. 

You furrow your brows as you watch them from afar, a little hurt by the fact that beautiful male art student lead is confusing hardheaded and impenetrable female lead even more, but then you notice Taehyung’s hesitance. The way he backs up a little when she gets closer. How he stiffens when she touches him. 

And, well, fuck that. 

 “Tae,” you say, rushing up to him faster than you’d like to admit. “There you are, I was looking for you.” 

The girl next to him frowns at the sight of you, and it’s clear she feels no shame to hide the immediately dislike. Sure, you don’t have model proportions or a smile whiter than snow, but you have morals. 

“Who’s this?” You ask, trying to be nice. 

“Nobody,” Taehyung tells you, and his hand immediately interlocks with yours. Standing next to him, you can feel as the tension fades from his body, his whole demeanor relaxing now that you’re by his side. “She just wanted to talk.”

“Are you a friend?” She asks, because she knows. 

“I’m a special type of friend,” you say. There’s no way she’ll leave Taehyung alone otherwise. And this is definitely on the cocktail you drank (and nothing else, you swear!), but you even reach up to plop a kiss on his cheek for proof. Taehyung’s eyes widen as you do, but he plays it off as catching him off guard and grins, wrapping an arm around you to pull you even closer. “Can we help you?”

The girl is absolutely pissed, which means that you did your job. 

“No, it’s alright,” she hisses through gritted teeth before turning her sights on someone else. Someone without a friend to protect them. 

“Thanks,” Taehyung whispers once she’s gone. Even though she’s probably not coming back, Taehyung keeps you close, a hand on you at all times like you’ll fly away if he doesn’t hold on tight. 

“Of course,” you tell him. “You’d do the same for me.”

“She scared me,” Taehyung says, and if his red face is anything to go by, it’s clear that he’s pretty much reached his alcohol intake limit. “I’m glad you came.”

“I could tell you didn’t want to talk to her,” you say. 

“Because I wanted to talk to you,” Taehyung says, and it’s definitely the alcohol that’s erased his filter. “I was waiting for you to come out of the bathroom and she just came up to me and started flirting with me. I think she wanted to get in my pants. I didn’t want her to get into my pants.”

“I know.”

“I’d much rather be with you than with her. Than with anybody else. I would always want to be with you, instead.” He tells you, keeping your hands firmly intertwined as you lean against the bartender counter. 

And well, huh. That’s different. Taehyung’s aforementioned lack of a filter means that any thoughts that run through his mind immediately turn into spoken words, but you weren’t expecting those words. You never thought you;d hear them, not in a million goddamn years.

“Okay, Tae,” you say, patting him assuringly. He’s just drunk. That’s all. 

“I’m serious, Y/N,” Taehyung tells you firmly, pushing your comforting hand off of his shoulder and turning to face you directly. “I mean it.”

“I know, Tae.” you reassure him. It’s easier than trying to fight him, especially when he’s this hammered. You check the time on your phone. Maybe it’s time to leave. If you go now, you’ll be able to make it back by midnight. “Let’s go home, okay? I’m ready to go home.”

Wordlessly, Taehyung nods, and the two of you leave the club before people are even thinking about ringing in the New Year. 

When you reach Taehyung’s apartment, he takes off his leather jacket to hang on the coat rack and turns the television on. Only three minutes to midnight. 

“I had fun,” you say, trying to lighten the conversation. The way back was silent, the only noises the sounds of New Year’s Eve parties on every block you turned onto. Taehyung kept his face forward and his eyes ahead, even as you tried to huddle close to him to conserve the warmth. 

“It was sort of fun,” Taehyung halfheartedly agrees. 

“Did you drink too much?” You ask. His face is still beet red. 

“I don’t think I drank enough.”

Two minutes to midnight. 

You frown, brows furrowing. Why on Earth would Taehyung want to drink more? What would change if he had another shot, a can of beer or a little cocktail?

Slowly, you begin to peel off your own layers, resting your coat on the back of the couch and slipping off your boots. The both of you stand in his living room as the TV begins to buzz with excitement, the broadcast of Times Square lighting up the otherwise silent, tense atmosphere. He’s only a couple of feet away but it feels like he couldn’t be farther from you. 

One minute to midnight. Everybody begins to count down, and you feel yourself holding your breath. 

“Will you be alright going to sleep?” You ask. Even if Taehyung’s still drunk, he’s far less bouncy than he was at the club. 

“I’ll be fine. Goodnight, Y/N,” he says, beginning to walk past. 

Three. 

“Okay.”

Two.

“Okay.”

One. 

Something overtakes Taehyung, something quick and brief. He stops right next to you and flinches, like he wants to lean in and do something, anything, goddamnit, but stops himself before he goes through with it. Everyone on television is cheering, but this apartment couldn’t be less festive even if you tried. 

Taehyung sends you a small smile as the world rings in the new year, dashing off to his bedroom and slamming the door behind him. 

And you stand there, in the middle of his living room like the goddamn fool you are. Turning to the television, you watch over and over as every couple in Times Square kisses, clip after clip after clip, and like a goddamn idiot, you wish that Taehyung had done the same. 

The end of winter break approaches faster than you’d like it, just like it does every year. Before you know it, there’s less than a week left before classes resume and you go back to the daily college life. Less than a week left before you can go back to your dorm and pretend like this year’s winter break mishap never happened. 

Less than a week before you and Taehyung go back to never seeing each other. 

You’re sitting at his kitchen table, clearing out your backpack and recycling every paper, every syllabus and assignment and study guide from last semester, doing a deep cleanse of your life (because holy shit, you need it), when you come across the purchase you had made at the MOMA. 

“Taehyung,” you call out before you can stop yourself. 

“Yeah?” He asks from where he’s sitting on the couch, reading a James Joyce book. You love that novel. It was one of the very few you read for fun last year. 

You take the small paper bag in your hands, walking over to the couch. “I almost forgot about this, but since winter break’s starting to wind down, I just wanted to give you this as a thanks. For everything.”

“You got me a belated Christmas gift, Y/N?” Taehyung asks as you hold out the gift, clearly something thin like a posterboard or an art print.

“If it means I don’t have to buy you two things, then sure, consider this a belated Christmas gift,” you say with a laugh, sitting down a foot away from him as he slowly opens up the packet. “It’s sort of cheesy and very basic, but I just wanted to get you something nice as a thank you.”

Out Taehyung pulls is a print of van Gogh’s The Starry Night, big enough to fill up the empty spaces on his walls, so every inch of his apartment, of his life and his home, is filled with art. 

“Oh my God,” Taehyung says, mouth agape. “This is…”

“It’s basic, I know. But I know how much you loved seeing it in person, so I thought that a memory of that would be nice,” you say, trying to ease the nervousness that has bubbled up inside of you. 

“It’s wonderful,” Taehyung says, and you swear you’ve never seen him so happy, other than perhaps when you saw the real thing. “This is so fucking thoughtful of you.”

“I just—you told me a lot about the art we saw that day, but when we reached this painting, you were speechless. And I sort of knew, then, that it was your favorite piece. Because you didn’t have to explain it with words,” you tell him. “I could just tell. It was like your whole body warmed up the moment it came into view.”

“I’m touched, Y/N.” Taehyung beams. “This is all an art student could ever want, really. To be able to know that their love for art meant something to someone else.”

“I just wanted to say thank you for everything. Taking me in, cooking me food, being really nice me despite me entrenching on your living situation.” You smile. 

“I was happy to do all that stuff,” Taehyung tells you honestly. “I’ve had a lot of fun this winter break, even if we’re still trapped on campus.”

You loved getting to go home for winter break your freshman and sophomore years. You loved being able to escape from the college mindset and just relax, no deadlines, no assignments, no worries. 

But looking back on it, you think that you’ve had the most fun this winter break, stuck at school, a five-hundred-dollar plane ticket short, with your dorm neighbor-slash-nemesis from freshman year. Never have you done so much in so little time. 

“Yeah, me too,” you say, thinking back fondly. It feels like this winter break has lasted for years, but also as though it went by in the blink of an eye, 

“I have something for you as well,” Taehyung says, scrambling up to dash into his room. “Consider it just a Christmas gift, because I don’t really have to thank you for letting you stay at my apartment for free for a month.”

“Roast me, why don’t you,” you muse jokingly, rolling your eyes as Taehyung fumbles around in his bedroom before he emerges with an equally flat, similarly-sized gift wrapped up in some spare tissue paper. 

“I don’t recall you buying anything at the MOMA,” you tease as Taehyung hands you the gift, settling back down on the couch to watch as you open it. 

Slowly, you peel back the tissue paper, and when you reveal what he’s wrapped up for you, it drops to your lap. 

It’s a portrait of you, done entirely in pencil. It’s you smiling, with your eyes closed, lashes fluttering. He’s memorized your entire face, drawn it neatly onto this piece of sketch paper, like he was just passing the time and suddenly he had a picture of you on his hands. He’s even remembered where your freckles go. 

“What’s this, Tae?” You ask, like you don’t already know. 

“Uh, it’s you,” Taehyung says sheepishly. “I wasn’t planning on drawing you, I didn’t have a gift in mind, but I was practicing sketches the other day and an hour later I looked down and I had drawn you. And I felt bad for not telling you, because that’s weird, so I thought that you could see it.”

“You drew a portrait of me? Just randomly, from memory?” You ask, looking down at the sketch in your hands like it’s just ruined your life. 

“Yeah, so?” Taehyung asks. He looks terribly nervous. 

“So, that’s—people don’t just do that, Taehyung. You don’t just draw a picture of someone purely from memory while you’re practicing sketching,” You say, reeling back as he tries to lean in, attempts to explain himself. 

“What do you mean? I did that. I thought of you and I drew you, what’s so bad about that?”

“I don’t know if you missed the memo, Taehyung. I told you in New York. We’re not dating, Taehyung,” you tell him, so firm and certain in your conviction that you hardly pay attention to the way his shoulders sink. “We’re barely even friends. I’m not interested in you like that. Please don’t think otherwise.”

“Don’t tell me what to think,” Taehyung snaps, and he’s mad. Really mad, not like the fake anger from freshman year when you tried to get back at him by being an equally-annoying neighbor. “Don’t tell me how to feel. I drew you, Y/N. Not because I’m obsessed with the idea of us getting married, or because you’re my muse or some bullshit like that. I drew you because I thought of you, and I draw what I think of. Don’t tell me what to fucking think.”

“Do you like me, Taehyung?” You ask, on the verge of shouting.

Taehyung’s furious. “So what if I do? Huh? What difference does it make? You’ve told me over and over that you don’t like me back, so why does it matter? It’s not like I’d ever have a chance.”

“I told you because I didn’t want to confuse you,” you hiss, standing up and beginning to grab your belongings. It’s clear that this conversation is turning sour. 

“Confuse me? You didn’t want to confuse me?” Taehyung shouts. “You did a damn good job at that. Telling me in New York that you hated being called Mr. and Mrs. Kim, but holding my hand as we walked around the city and looked at art together. Kissing my cheek in the fucking bar but then patting me like on the back like I’m just a sadass friend of yours. Can you blame me if I was confused, Y/N?”

“I told you,” you say again. 

“I’m sorry, Y/N,” Taehyung bites. “I’m sorry that I fucking fell in love with you, even though half of the time you acted like it was alright. My mistake.”

“It was your mistake. I never said I wanted to date you,” you tell him firmly. You refuse to take the blame for something you had made so explicitly clear. 

“Can you fucking blame me for being hopeful?” Taehyung asks. He’s standing up, about to head back into his bedroom, absolutely furious. “You held my hand and kissed me on the cheek and I thought that meant that you felt it, too.”

“Taehyung—”

“Keep the portrait, Y/N,” Taehyung spits. “I don’t ever want to see it again.”

He slams his bedroom door. 

It’s a good thing you made friends with some upperclassmen when you were a freshman. 

After packing your belongings into your little suitcase and standing in the lobby of Taehyung’s apartment complex, you remember that one of your old friends who had graduated last year still lived in an off-campus apartment since he would be beginning graduate school at the same university. 

“Yoongi?” You ask when you hear him pick up your call. 

“Y/N? What’s up?”

“Long story,” you say with a sigh. “Would it be alright if I stayed with you until school started?”

“Holy shit, you’re on campus? What the fuck, yeah, sure, you know where I live. I’ll be here whenever you stop by,” he says without question.

Fifteen minutes later, you’re standing outside his door, double checking to make sure you’d got the right apartment. 

You barely get the first knock in before the door swings open to reveal Min Yoongi himself, clad in all black and looking very tired. 

“Are you okay?” You ask. He looks exhausted. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” he says, ushering you inside. 

“Have you been up all night?” You ask, resting your suitcase against the wall. 

“I took a brief nap between two and three, but yes, I have been,” he says like it’s natural. 

“You’ve always been a chaotic sleeper,” you say with a shake of your head. 

“The grad school grind stops for no one,” Yoongi says with a sigh. “What’s up? Why are you on campus?”

“It… it’s a long goddamn story. Do you have time?”

“I have a piece due for a small indie band tomorrow at noon that’s barely finished,” Yoongi says.

“Oh,” you say. You suppose the story can wait. Yoongi offered up his abode to you until classes resumed if you needed it, and there’s no way in hell you’ll be going back to Taehyung’s. 

“What do you mean, ‘Oh’? I got loads of time,” Yoongi says. He plops down on his couch and motions for you to sit next to him. “Tell me everything.”

Yoongi has always been a particularly good listener. Not just to other people’s words, but to music, to the sounds of the chords and the notes of the piano. He has an ear for things that most others would never notice. 

It’s the same thing for when he’s doling out advice. 

“To clarify,” Yoongi says when you’re finished telling your story, thirty minutes later. You had warned him that it would be a long one. “You had once hated his guts, but no longer hate his guts?”

“I stopped hating him after freshman year,” you admit, more to yourself than to Yoongi. It’s true. The moment the two of you stopped seeing each other, everything dissipated. 

“And now you like him.”

“We’re friends,” you say, tentatively. Maybe less than friends after the disaster that just went down in his living room. 

“But he drew you a portrait of yourself,” Yoongi mentions. 

“I said that it was complicated,” you say with a frown. 

“It doesn’t sound that complicated,” Yoongi says. And maybe he is a graduate student with more life experience under his belt than you, but you think that it’s pretty complicated. 

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds like he likes you, and you like him. I wasn’t really interpreting it in any other way,” Yoongi says casually. 

You reject the notion immediately. “I do not like him.”

Yoongi frowns. “Would you really be here, in my apartment having a relationship breakdown, if you weren’t confused about your feelings for him? Really?”

“I just needed to get out of his damn apartment, that’s all,” you say, avoiding eye contact. Yoongi has this very annoying habit of being extremely reasonable all of the time, and it bothers you immensely. 

“Sure, okay. Y/N, I’m not gonna dictate how you feel and try to change your mind, or anything. But if you can look me in the eye before the end of your break and tell me, one-hundred percent honestly, that you don’t like him, then I’ll believe you,” Yoongi tells you simply. “How about that?”

It sounds like a very doable deal. Maybe it’s not doable right now, but it certainly seems possible in the future. In the future, specifically. 

“Fine. But you’re making a big deal out of nothing,” you tell him matter-of-factly. Why does he care? It’s not like you’re worried about it. 

As it turns out, you’re worried about it. 

You’re worried about it because even though you’re not in the same room, not in the same building, not even on the same goddamn street as him, you’re thinking about him. Thinking about how much fun the two of you could be having right now as you relish in the last couple days of your winter break before the cold reality of school hits. 

Think about the things you could be doing. Exploring, going out to restaurants, finding new little gold mines in this city that you call home. And instead, you’re moping around your friend’s living room wishing that the two of you hadn’t ruined the whole thing. 

Maybe you had been too harsh. Taehyung has a right to be mad at you for lashing out at him. How was he supposed to feel? You held his hand and kissed his cheek and pretended that it was still freshman year, that the two of you were still just two people stuck together by unfortunate circumstances. Acted like nothing had really changed despite the years going by. Going through with all of these adventures with him knowing, in the back of your mind, that once classes started back up, you’d probably never make an effort to see him again. 

Drawing a portrait of you says one thing, but dancing around him says another. Every time you fucking see Yoongi in his own goddamn home you try to muster up the bravery to tell him that you don’t like Taehyung the way that he thinks you do, and you can’t. 

He sets up his pullout couch in his living room for you when you go to sleep that night, you dream of Taehyung. Envision him wandering the halls of a nameless museum, priceless pieces of art hung along every wall, from van Gogh to Monet to Picasso. He turns back around so you get a view of his face, dream up his curly black hair and soft eyes, sparkling with wanderlust as he roams the corridors, stopping to spare a quick glance at every painting he passes. 

And then at the end of the hall, he pauses in his tracks, looks up at the painting on the wall. You watch as the camera zooms in on what he’s looking at, what made him stop in his tracks the moment he laid eyes on it. 

It’s your portrait. A simple piece of paper out of a sketchbook, graphite on the coarse canvas. It’s barely more than a line drawing, your eyes here, your nose there, the little freckles that decorate your skin. It’s only in one color and still, even now, it leaves you speechless. Taehyung made that. He drew that, line by line. He made that for you. 

You wake up in a cold sweat at seven in the morning. Yoongi’s fast asleep in his bedroom, and you know he won’t be waking up until the hour on the clock reads double digits. Frantic, you scramble through your backpack until you pull out the sketch paper a little bit larger, a little bit thicker than the rest, still wrapped up in tissue paper. 

Pulling the paper away to reveal the canvas, you stare down at it in the hazy light of the sunrise, small rays beginning to stream through Yoongi’s window. Your fingers trace along each line, picturing Taehyung as his pencil scratched along the paper, over and over until it looked perfect. Taehyung made this. He sat down, thought of you, and drew this. 

A picture may be worth a thousand words but this one doesn’t say a thousand words. Instead, it only says three. 

Curiosity getting the better of you, you flip the sketch over to see if there’s anything else he’s drawn. There isn’t, but you find a little note in the bottom right corner. 

Y/N,

I hadn’t realized that I had drawn you until I was nearly finished with this. My bad, but it was too late to stop. I don’t know if I’ll ever give this to you, or if I’ll just have a guilty conscience for the rest of my life, but just in case I do, I want you to know this: art inspires me, and you are no exception. 

Tae ♡

When Min Yoongi wakes up that day and trudges out of his bedroom, he finds you sitting on his pullout couch, staring down at a sketch in your hands. When you turn to look up at him, he sees your red eyes and wonders how long you’ve been out here, crying. 

“I can’t do it, Yoongi,” you tell him. 

“Do what?” Yoongi asks, even though he already knows the answer. Why else would you be letting your tears drip onto your portrait?

“Tell you that I don’t like him. Because I do. And I can’t lie to him like that.”

Yoongi grins. He knew you’d come around, like you always do. You may have quite the stubborn streak, but you’ve got a big heart, and it always gets the best of you. 

He sits down next to you, glancing down at the portrait. It’s gorgeous. Taehyung did a wonderful job. He looks at you as you cry over a sketch of yourself, and he thinks that, even if he doesn’t really know this Taehyung character, the two of you will make a perfect pair. 

“You should tell him that,” he tells you with a nudge. You look up at him, scared for your life. “I think he deserves to know.”

The night before winter break ends, you ask Taehyung if tenants of his apartment complex are allowed on his rooftop. He says no, but also says that his landlord is out of town for the holidays. 

In the biting cold of a mid-January evening, you climb up the stairs of his apartment complex and push open the heavy metal door to the rooftop, a gust of wind nearly blowing you right over. Looking around, you spot Taehyung in nothing but a sweater and a scarf, sitting on the edge of the rooftop and looking out over the city. 

“Aren’t you cold?”

He turns around to find you standing next to him, wrapped up in a long coat, gloves, a beanie, and a scarf. 

“I’ve got a warm body,” Taehyung tells you, looking back out into the sea of lights. 

“This is scary, isn’t it?” You ask, sitting down next to him. Your feet dangle off the ledge, and normally you’d be insistent on sitting in the middle of the rooftop where no danger can befall you, but this feels a lot more personal. 

“Why did you want to meet me up here?” Taehyung asks, all business. 

“I just wanted to talk,” you tell him. “You know, since it’s the last day of winter break and all.”

“It went by fast, didn’t it?” Taehyung muses. 

“I remember failing my final and missing my flight like it was yesterday,” you remember fondly, laughing. It seemed like the end of the world at the time, but there’s always a silver lining. You just didn’t know what it was, back then. 

You think you have a pretty clear idea of it now. 

Taehyung chuckles, letting the two of you fall into a comfortable silence as you gaze out at the rest of the city. Taehyung’s apartment building isn’t particularly tall, but it’s got enough height to it that it feels like you’re looking out over a place you hardly recognize. There are so many things you don’t know about this city, despite having lived here for over two years. So many things you are aching to find out, and only one person you’d really like to do it with. 

“What’s your New Year’s Resolution?” You ask randomly, interrupting the quiet that had befallen the both of you. 

Taehyung jumps at the sound of your voice piercing through the atmosphere, caught off guard. You lean in, expecting him to answer. 

“Oh, um, I guess to draw and paint for fun more. A lot of the stuff I’ve been making in school I’ve been doing because I had to,” Taehyung says quickly. It’s sort of obvious that he made up the resolution on the spot. “Uh, what’s yours?”

You press your lips into a thin line, smiling to yourself. “To be honest.”

Taehyung scoffs at that. “Believe me, Y/N, you are more than honest. Brutally so.”

“To others, yes,” you reason. You always were a tell-it-like-it-is sort of person. “But I’m not very good at being honest with myself.” You swing your legs slightly as they dangle over the ground below, kicking into each other. Taehyung turns to look at you, waiting for you to continue. “Yoongi says I’m a very stubborn person. I always have been. Once I determine something is the way it is, it’s very difficult to change my mind.”

Taehyung chuckles to himself. He’s probably quite familiar with that aspect of your personality. 

“But I realized recently that sometimes, things change without you even realizing it, and that instead of being afraid of those changes, you should embrace them. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to be more honest with myself, because I think I’ll make everybody around me, including myself, happier.” You continue. 

“Good for you,” Taehyung tells you mindlessly, turning back to face out towards the city. 

“Kim Taehyung, I’m not finished talking, yet,” you demand, forcing him to look back at you. “I hated you in freshman year. You were the worst thing to happen to me that year, annoying and full of yourself. And I didn’t know you in sophomore year. We stopped talking and decided that it was better if we never did again.”

He lets out a little huff of breath, visible in the cold night air. 

“But I do know you now. You offered me a place to stay when I missed my flight after what might have been the worst final I have ever taken in my entire life. You took me to New York, and we made vegetable soup together. You let me hold your hand and kiss you on the cheek, and you drew me a portrait,” you say firmly. He looks up at you and finally, finally, his eyes aren’t foggy. There’s no haze, no mist. You look into his eyes and you can see yourself reflected in the ink black of his irises. He’s beautiful. He’s sitting on the ledge of the roof of his apartment building in the middle of January with nothing but a sweater and a scarf on, and he’s beautiful. “You are the best thing to ever happen to me.”

Before you can even take another breath, Kim Taehyung places a cold palm on your scarf-covered cheek and pulls you into a bruising kiss, his other hand wrapping around your waist as you shuffle along the ledge, closer and closer. And even if his hands are cold and his lips are chapped, his mouth is warm and soft, wanton and desperate. You beam at the feeling of his lips on yours, wrapping your arms around his neck as you ring in the New Year for real. This is how it was supposed to be. This is what you had been waiting for. 

When you part, Taehyung’s lips are a cherry red to match the tip of his nose. His brown eyes are twinkling, and not from the light pollution of the city. 

“Can I be honest, too?” Taehyung asks. He’s got the biggest goddamn grin on his face. “I think I’m in love with you.”

The words are music to your ears. “My honesty is rubbing off on you,” you tease. “Because I think I’m in love with you, too.”

Smiling, grinning, positively fucking beaming, Taehyung wraps his hands around you and kisses you again. It warms your heart from the inside out, blossoms like a tulip in spring. When you started this winter break, you thought you had reached your lowest point, but you’re finishing it on a high that you hope never fades. He loves you, he loves you, and most importantly, you love him back. And as it turns out, the movie where beautiful male art student lead and hardheaded and impenetrable female lead are stuck with each other for four weeks has a happy ending, after all. 

↳ links are broken, but don’t forget to message me with any thoughts or feedback!

[synoxshots]

worldbuilding thingy

A second one because I was tagged twice - thank you @a-master-procrastinator​

So I did my least talked about oc earlier, time for one of my most talked about - it’s your boy Ticcer, and his time in prison when he was about 17/18 years old. It makes for some grim reading this so caution is advised. 

After his sister died, caught in the crossfire of a fight down in Black Sun territory, Ticcer was at his most apathetic. Nothing mattered to him any more, his life for the past three years had been focused on her, keeping the two of them together and alive because she was all he had. And now, he had nothing. Now the only person he cares about is himself, and really he’s stopped caring that much about what happens to him. After the Sacking he’d sort of emerged as something of a leader amongst the street kids, not intentionally, it just kind of happened - he just wanted to look after his sister, but there were so many others like him, it became natural for them to stick together. But once his sister died, he just never went back to them. I’m not sure they ever know what happens to either of them - really it was commonplace that people went missing, and for all sorts of reasons. 

He’d long since gotten used to crime, it was just a way of life. A necessity, a fact you had to face to survive. But he starts taking more risks. Part of it is that he didn’t have the responsibility of someone to come back to, part of it was that he just needed to feel something again, and if it was riskier, at least he felt alive in some way. It had also been a few years since the Sacking by this point and things had started to shift as well. They’d all grown up overnight really but they were reaching adulthood now as well, and even if they hadn’t a lot of the teens were turning to gangs because it was the only route up they saw. Ticcer couldn’t join a gang, not after what happened with his sister, though he did think it might have been easier if he had. He doesn’t blame the gangs to the extent that he hates the Empire, and is bitter towards the Republic - but he also can’t throw in with them either really. 

One day, things go wrong, as happens so often for him…He's too overambitious in his choice of target and he gets caught. It's just petty theft, but it's at a time when there's lots of senators talking about cracking down on all these street criminals (rather than of course, wondering why there might have been this rise in crime), and they come down hard. Really he's among the lucky ones, getting caught by the last vestiges of the official underworld police - get in trouble in the Justicar Sector or a gangland and things could be much worse.

He's only sent to prison for a few months, but it is a learning experience. Rather than learning the error of his ways, he just learns how to get better, how to not get caught. He makes himself a friend, a Nikto called Jennak - basically someone who tells him he needs to get shut up before he gets himself hurt. Jennak takes pity on him a bit too, this little scrawny kid who's got himself in trouble through circumstance as much as anything (sidenote: there's definitely a theme of people taking pity on Ticcer around this time). Jennak has been around the block a few times and is in for more serious crimes than Ticcer - he’s also learnt it can do you well to get caught in a Coruscant authorities controlled area, somewhere they at least guarantee you a bed (albeit an uncomfortable one) and a ration bar to get you through the day; says it’s ironic you can get better care in the official prisons than if you’re making an honest living. Though perceptions of ‘honest’ are a bit skewed. Ticcer has already learnt how to fight, one of those things that are a bit of a necessity, but Jennak helps him get better, and gives him some better tips for life outside. Places to target, tricks of the trade, how not to get caught - that sort of thing. Ticcer takes it all in, comes out of prison a lot smarter a few months later. Almost gives him focus in a way - the priority is still survival, but he can go about it a lot better. Grows up a lot. 

The lessons don’t always come off, of course, and improvisation will always be one of Ticcer’s main ‘strategies’, but it was a valuable experience in many ways. 

[altcvnningham]

1, 3, 5, 15, 18 and 20 😳😳😳😳

thank you for the ask!!! (also superior url omg 👁👄👁🤲🏻)

also my answers here are suuuuper long, because i’m a rambling idiot who’s way too involved in my OC’s. so uhhhh sorry in advance,,,,,

1. what radio station(s) do you listen to?

Vana’s a Samurai stan. She wishes she wasn’t. But, y’know, Morro Rock it is. Once upon a time when she was an even angrier teen, though, she’d listen to shit just like Ritual FM.

(My music taste is all over the place, and though blues is technically my fav bc i love old music, i never listen to it in 2077. So I switch between Body Heat, the Dirge, Vexelstrom for like 2 songs, and ofc, Morro Rock. But of all stations, there’s at least one song that i HATE so I can never stick to one for a whole ride sknsksjsjs)

i think i got the names right?? Idk yall i dont have it in front of me ndndndndhjs

3. how did you feel about Johnny that first night in the apartment, and how does it differ from what you feel now after everything?

so i’m gonna cut a read-more here because i decided to just lore dump Vana x Johnny here so uhhhhhh rip also //SPOILERS//

Vana is an extremely, seriously private, guarded person. Before Johnny, Panam, Kerry- Jackie was the only person she’d ever truly let near her, to get to know her. So obviously waking up to someone else living inside her fucking head was one of the worst things that’s ever happened to her. Her past is also something she’s not particularly proud of, so Johnny getting to witness all that is traumatising. Getting Johnny out of her head was priority number one, even if digging the chip out would kill her.

But after getting fucked over by the VBs, and both of them thinking she was gonna die, Johnny takes her to that abandoned hotel in Pacifica- it’s the first time he’s given her even a sliver of kindness, and the first time she’s ever openly expressed her fears to him, even if he could already sense them before. Oaths and promises are something she holds to incredibly high importance, so obviously when Johnny gives her his dog-tags, ‘proof of my promise’, she never, ever lets them go, never takes them off. (she still doesn’t. they keep her grounded. holding them to calm herself has become a reflex, for whatever reason.)

Everything just seemed to slowly change after that. For two people who hate vulnerability, it’s the only thing that helped them actually see each other. As the Relic continues to take over, they both understand each other more, feel each other more- and eventually it becomes hard to discern where Vana ends and Johnny begins. In cliché Johnny x V fashion like yeah duh it goes further,,,, cockwhore!Vana,,,,,, but with that they also start to become extremely possessive and jealous over one another- Johnny immediately on the defensive about whoever comes close to her, Vana selfishly hiding and keeping Johnny’s existence to herself, even if it slows the hunt for a remedy to the chip- to the point of seriously toxic co-dependency. It’s full of volatile ups-and-downs, fights and make-ups, and Vana almost comes to like the fact that she never has to explain nor hide what thoughts and feelings pass through her mind, no matter how dark or vulnerable. She prefers most things to remain unsaid, but values the fact that they both have a clear, transparent understanding of each other regardless.

But there's also... softer moments. When Johnny puts aside his ego for once, he learns to like the quiet that Vana does, brief as it can be sometimes. He'll sort of just... stay around the room, even if just to procrastinate retreating back into her head, because they realise they like each other's silent, wordless company. He'll wake her up from nightmares, hold her neck and kiss her back to sleep, or until the sun comes up, if she can't. It's all tender things they often pretend doesn't even happen, out of pride, I think, but they both know deep down that those are really the best parts.

Comes to a place where she suddenly hits a wall, and realises, I don’t want him to leave.

She’s never the same again after Mikoshi.

(But uhh anyway fuck V I’m horny on main for Keanu so i was here for the whole riiiiiide yeeeeeee)

5. how do your loved ones (LI, found family, etc) feel about you being a merc? or if you’ve given up the life now that everything’s finished, what was their reaction?

Vana grew up in a rich corp family, and after all the shit she’s endured just to appease her father, don’t think anyone could hate corps more than she does (some details of her past here!!) So when Arasaka kicks her out and Jackie finally convinces her to start merc work, it’s amazing how quickly she slips into the role, almost like she was made for it- an anonymous face within the city, free to roam and drift as she wants, relying on herself and herself only.

Vana works quickly and quietly enough (though not at all with clean hands), relying on stealth and netrunning, so she doesn’t cause too much of a noise that’d have her loved ones (rare as they are) all too concerned. Judy isn’t scared Vana’d be caught in gunfire, because when Vana works, her targets rarely know she’s even there. She’s smart, cunning. Panam appreciates that these skills have helped her out, so she can’t complain. River- who is unfortunately more fond of Vana than she is of him, given that she’s not too comfortable at accepting affection- isn’t too happy about the life she leads, but hey, it’s her skills as a merc and as one of NC’s most adept netrunners that he even stood a chance of finding Randy as quick as he did, so he feels indebted to her for that. Kerry thinks it’s fuckin awesome that she gets to do as she wants and provides for herself, bestieeees

Given she isn’t all that close with many people- keeping her distance and all- the only people who seriously worry about her are folks like Vik, Misty, and Mama Welles, especially the latter two, who knew how much Jackie meant to her, and how easily she cracks under the weight of grief. The only thing, really, that concerns everybody around her, is how insatiable her bloodlust becomes, and how much she'd throw away just to try and quell it.

Johnny’s just in it for the ride. Rather she work for herself than a filthy corp, anyway.

After Mikoshi, losing Johnny, making it to the major leagues, she fuckin... just doesn't care anymore. She hates the big glass house that was practically forced onto her (reminds her too much of her stifling corp childhood), she hates that she has 20 cars that clog up her garage and not just her trusty red Yaiba Kusanagi, hates that folks keep giving her all this shiny golden shit that she doesn't want, like any of it's worth a damn. Since then she's hardly in one place- never at home if she can help it, and either wanders aimlessly around the streets and crashes over at Kerry's to sleep through grief. It isn't the merc life she wants to leave, but major leagues turned out to be a glittering pile of dogshit she wants no part in. She only really stays there because Jackie would've wanted it.

(i’m a lazy bitch like i don’t wanna be a merc. i wanna be one of those cute npc’s with the glowy earrings and bunny backpacks and skimpy plastic skirts, who picks up noodles on the way home to go watch watson whore. in my ideal life i am NOT the main character snnsmsnsks)

15. which NPC is your bff?

Kerry. Kerry is Vana’s ride or die. No fucking questions asked. Kerry’s the only person (besides Johnny, i guess) as close to her as Jackie was. He’s really the only person that ever gets her to smile, like really, stupidly, goofily smile, and despite being almost complete opposites, they just understand each other so well. Whenever they need something, they're the first person they'll call. Happens so often that just as Vana sifts through her contacts to find his, Kerry's already calling for her first. They're practically joint at the hip.

They both live loud, fast lives, but also know how to make time for silence and introspection, something they both need to stay grounded. Vana doesn't buy into his zen-wellness-yoga crap, but sure, she tries copying a couple moves while he's doing it on a lazy afternoon, before scoffing how this is fuckin' dumb and retreats back to the couch. Also, as much as she hates being reminded of the wealth that came with her corpo upbringing, she loves using up all his expensive products, and tends to klep a bottle of his shampoo when she runs out. Cute how she thinks he doesn't notice.

After what happened in Mikoshi, she practically lives at Kerry's place, just dozing away miserably as he lounges by the pool, or curl up on the couch to mindlessly watch his old Samurai tapes (he doesn't like it much, but if it helps her through whatever shit she's going through, he's not gonna take that away from her). On better days, when she actually pulls herself out of bed, he teaches her to play guitar, slipping in a couple tricks Johnny taught him. Funnily enough, the whole thing helps him find some closure too.

( me,, I need a girl like Panam in my life to endorse all of my stupid ideas )

18. what’s your dream cyberware (either something that was shown in lore that wasn’t available in game or mental creation of your own)?

I don’t have access to the tabletop lore stuff rn so i’m gonna pull this out my ass jsjsns

Anything that helps Vana become more deadly at stealth and netrunning. The most eddies she’s ever blown are on increasingly powerful cyberdecks, cooling systems, netrunning gear she can comfortably slip on under a jacket and boots- she likes convenience and functionality, but she needs it to be comfortable, too. She’d fucking kill for anything that lets her scale silently up walls and across ceilings, though- like a spider- and anything that lets her get her hands reeeeal bloody, but quietly. Guess that’s just called a knife, though.

(Me?? Fuck uhhh man i just want synth-skin that looks normal but also shimmers all pink n cute. Literally wanna be an edward cullen sparkly lookin mf. Also, i’m sorry but scanning shit w Kiroshi’s are so dope that’s literally all i want?? Idk i’m boring and mantis blades freak me out uhh)

20. is there anyone you’re crushing on that’s unavailable? (yes this is the “what romance option(s) are you foaming at the mouth for” question)

Answered here :)

(And i’ll say it again, PLACIIIIIIIDE,)

[ckingsbridge]

State of the Author

Hi, everyone! As I hinted yesterday, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately regarding my career goals and plans. Right now I’m at kind of a turning point, for two main reasons:

First, I’m finally starting to feel better, mental health-wise. August was a very dark month for me – one of the worst I’ve ever had, in fact. But after much trial and error, we’ve hit on a combo of medications that seems to be improving my mood without causing the terrible physical side effects that were plaguing me with earlier attempts.

I’ve also started biweekly talk therapy, and some testing revealed that I have a mild attention deficit that’s gone undiagnosed my whole life. I’ve always thought that my difficulties concentrating were caused by my depression, but it turns out the likelier explanation is that depression was aggravating a separate pre-existing condition. So I’m anticipating further improvement once I start treatment for that, although it’s currently stuck in insurance preauthorization limbo.

Plus, two weeks ago I adopted the new love of my life – a three-year-old terrier mix named Molly. She’s recovering from surgery to remove a bunch of bladder stones that smushed her bladder all out of shape, so she needs to be taken outside on a frequent, regular schedule. Since I work from home, that makes us a perfect fit! She’s the sweetest, cuddliest little dog; she gets me out of the house multiple times a day and gives me something to focus on outside my own head, which is definitely a big help.

Between all these developments, I’m starting to bounce back, and one of the biggest signs of my improving health has been regaining interest in long-term career planning. Which brings me to the second reason I’m at a turning point – I’m at a place where I need to go all-in if I want to move forward.

Until now, I’ve always held myself back from fully committing to the goal of being a full-time career author. I’ve never given it 100% of my focus and effort, for various reasons – the biggest one being good old fear of failure. For the most part, I’ve tended to insulate myself from the outside world and pretend I’m writing in a void. While that was a workable approach when I was just starting out, now I’m getting in my own way.

The response to the Seven of Spades series (including cool news I’m not allowed to share yet) has made it clear to me that it’s decision time: Am I ready to get serious and go all-in? The answer is a resounding yes, which means it’s time for me to make some changes.

I’m putting the breakdown of my plans beneath the cut to save space on people’s dashboards. If you’re interested, please read along (especially Patreon members, as a lot of this pertains specifically to you) and offer any feedback you might have!

Goal #1: Finish the Seven of Spades Series

This is obviously my number one priority. As I mentioned earlier today, we had to push back the release date for A Chip and a Chair several months due to my recent health issues (so apologies for that!). CAAC’s rough draft is at about 68,000 words right now, at the very beginning of the third act. I’ve set myself a strict word count goal that I’ll be pulling out the stops to meet every day. I’m aiming to have the rough draft completed and turned in by mid-October.

Goal #2: Revitalize My Patreon Community

This going to be a huge focus of mine going forward. Patreon is actually my most reliable form of income – without it, there’s no way I could be a full-time author. So I’m going to be investing a lot more time and effort into growing the community and adding value to membership, especially once I’ve finished CAAC.

I’m participating in two Patreon-run creator workshops this month: “Membership Reboot” and “Special Offers”. I’ll be discussing ideas from these workshops over the coming weeks, as well as reaching out to my patrons for their input and advice.

Other plans I have for Patreon include:

Establishing a set schedule for content updates (I’m thinking twice a month)

Revamping the community layout to make it easier to navigate and access old content, especially for new members

Adding additional rewards and incentives for membership

Introducing content other than new stories (this is a longer-term plan that I’ll focus on more after completing CAAC)

Goal #3: Focus on Branding and Marketing

This is something I’ve put off for a long, long time, but can no longer realistically avoid. To start, I need a recognizable author brand that’s consistent across my various platforms, so my first step is going to be commissioning a logo design.

Ideally, I’d love to support an independent designer in the community. I’m going to make a separate post later today explaining what I’m looking for, and if anyone has any recommendations for me for great graphic designers who’d be interested in the work, that would be awesome!

Longer-term, I need to set up my author website, which is something I’ve procrastinated on for literally years. I already own the domain, but I’ll be holding off on this for a bit so I can ensure the website design works cohesively with my logo.

Finally, there’s no longer any reason for me to conceal my RL identity. I’m considering having headshots taken to use for professional purposes, and I may even reveal my real name – although I’ll continue writing as Cordelia Kingsbridge!

Goal #4: Post a Weekly Progress Report

From now on, I’m going to be posting a regular “Sunday Update” on Tumblr – just a quick, simple breakdown of what I’ve been up to over the past week and what I have planned for the week coming up. Two of the things I miss most about my LiveJournal days are the accountability and the consistent interaction with readers, and I think this might do the trick on both fronts.

Super Long-Term Goal: Offer Story Consultations

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around recently – the possibility of offering a variety of writing consulting services, from targeted advice to ongoing coaching to in-depth manuscript assessments. It’s not something I would even consider implementing until after CAAC is finished, but I think it would be fun!

So that’s where I’m at right now! Ideas? Suggestions? Questions? Let me know!

[kpopblog]

His Favorite Patient

Locked doors. Hushed voices. Passionate movements.

    This was your routine. Every visit whether it be schedule or for an “unexplained cough”. The two of you would become inseparable the moment he closed the door. You needed this just as much as he did, despite each of your drives. You were simply in it for a quick fix, a way to rid yourself of an ever growing craving for someone. While he originally denied the idea of someone as professional as himself being involved in such a scandal. However overtime as you had convinced him with sweet promises and propositions you began to become emotionally invested. Now it wasn’t just for the intense and passionate sex, though it was a wonderful perk. But now you were there yearning to know more about your physician and amazing lover. You couldn’t help but wonder with each tight grip, each moan quickly covered by a hand, or each graceful thrust if they were worth anything.

    Your mind was quickly brought back to reality by the sudden feeling on his teeth gnawing on the nape of your neck followed by small,gentle kisses to excuse his urge. Though, to you it only made the sensation worse. Now you were aware of every thrust and grunt he would make against your body much like he had been the entire time. Unlike your mind, clouded by insecurities and doubt, his was filled with nothing but thoughts of you. His eyes couldn’t help but notice every drop of sweat on your body as your intimate act was coming to an end.

    “A-Ah...fuck! You’re so fucking good.”

One…….two.…thre-

    “Yes! Right there, please Jin…...j-just one more time”

One….two….

    By the end of his last thrust you slammed your mouth onto his in hopes of muffling your moans. Soon after this stunt Jin thrusts faster, crazed by your sudden orgasm. Once they became slower and deeper you knew he was close and you began teasing him. You grab fistfuls of his hair as you nibble on the sensitive part of his left ear. All while your other hand skillfully travels up and down his body, grabbing and lightly brushing across all the right places. Jin couldn’t contain himself much longer as your mouth began to wander and he came while pulling out of you.

    “That was pretty close there,” you say as you softly chuckle.

    “Yeah….maybe a little too close,” Jin says as he presses his forehead to yours. The two of you lightly pant as you move closing the space between both of your lips, only breaking eye contact to deepen the kiss. Jin slowly backs away despite your shared desire for more only to disappoint you, “I hate to be the voice of reason my dear but, we need to clean up. I do have other patients and I don’t think you’d want them to see anymore than my handsome face.” Comments like these are ones that make you question what you are to him. And your head soon is clouded with the same questions from earlier in your “check-up”. He obviously has some emotional value attached to you…..

    You clean yourself up and gather your clothes as these thoughts continue. You want to ask him if it’s more than just meaningless sex or a quick fix. You need to know if he is willing to start a genuine relationship with you...or maybe he already is in a relationship. Jin notices the slight change in your mood and questions you to see if he had unknowingly hurt you or did something that made you uncomfortable. You assure him that he had done nothing wrong but that doesn’t stop him. He inspects every square inch of your body to see if he left a scar too deep or if there was a bruise too dark, he was your doctor after all and your well being is his top priority. While it was very comforting knowing that he inspected your body to make sure he caused you no physics harm it still hurt.

    “Hey Jin. What….what am I to you? And don’t say ‘My patient of course!’ or ‘The best lover in the world’. It’s really been bothering me for a while and I just would feel better if you could tell me...please.” You hadn’t expected to ask him like this but, while the sex was full of the rush of danger you also needed some kind of closer.

     “Oh….well um. I-I honestly can give you a straight answer right now…” was all he could say. While you appreciated his honesty it wasn’t the answer you wanted. You needed a definite answer whether it be that you were just a plaything or something more.

    You remain silent as you nod your head and digest his answer. He apologizes to you and tries to explain himself but you can’t hear it. You can’t hear anything to be exact. The thoughts in your head have eerily gone silent. “I hope your not mad at me...I just need some time to give you a proper answer,” is all you hear as you snap back to reality. You try to reply as casually as possible and say your goodbyes to Jin and leave the office with a prescription slip you never planned to fill for your “sudden fever”. You feel bad for wanting more but deep down you knew that relationships like yours were never meant to last. He was your physician and you his patient, and it should never be anything more. A patient is supposed to go to a 6-month exam and only see their doctor for unexplained or sudden illness not because they simply want to fuck. And it’s that same patient’s responsibility to not feel like there’s something more there than two people that happen to have a sex….After you drive away, you leave behind the feeling of completeness and open the door to a seemingly never ending hallway filled with want and loneliness.

      ~        ~        ~

    It was time for your next exam and you weren’t sure what to expect. “What would Jin say?” was the main question running through your mind. You didn’t how he would react without having seen you for six straight months. Would he be touch starved like you? Or would he pretend like what happened between the two of you was nothing? Maybe he would jump into your arms and proclaim to never let you go. Or he could just end everything right there…….You park your car and slowly walk up to the receptionist. She notes on how she hasn’t seen you in a long time and comments on how surprisingly your health has increased but, you didn’t care. The only thing that was on your mind was Jin and how he would react after seeing you for the first time in what seemed like an eternity to you. You jump a little in your seat when you hear Jin call your name to an exam room. Neither of you say anything until you reach the room and Jin mentions how surprised he is that you haven’t contracted any illnesses in the past few months.

    “You know that I’m not here for small talk...you either tell me what we are or…” you trail of your sentence afraid to say that the two of you will act as though nothing had happened between the two of you.

    “Listen.” he begins, “what you need to know is that this won’t work between us. What we were doing its...it wasn’t supposed to happen. A doctor isn’t supposed to break his oath and secretly have sex with his patient, especially not at his facility.” You look away and try to avoid eye contact yet Jin grabs your chin ever so slightly to get your focus back onto him. “You didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, I should have never had sex with you but I did. And I never regretted any of it, mostly because of how amazing your body is but that’s a different story.” He winks his eye at you and you lightly chuckle at his attempt to brighten your spirit. He gently intertwines your hand with his as he delivers the rest of his well thought out proclamation. “But, it was never just the two of us getting together when we need a quick fix. That’s why I was so reluctant in the beginning. I didn’t know if you were going to fuck me and act like nothing ever happened or if you were doing it because you wanted money but you never wanted that. And while we did get out of hand more than a couple times, you would always make sure I was satisfied and learned about what I liked and disliked. And while it was not done in the typical way, you still showed you cared and that was enough for me. But when you asked me what you were to me, I felt so horrible. I barely knew anything about your personal life and yet I felt so close to you and, it was so confusing. I came here everyday hoping you would show up so we could fix it and go back to our normal routine but you didn’t. And in that time I came up with all of this. Now, it sounds like a jumbled mess of excuses and sugar coating but I promise you it’s not. This is my answer to what you mean to me and…..I pray to God that it’s what you’re looking for.”

    You sat in disbelief and shock. Jin had just told you everything you wanted to hear and more. Nothing could be better than this, he was pouring his heart out to you just like you had always wanted. You couldn’t believe that this was happening, it all seemed like you were still stuck in that touch starved haze and imaging this like before. The only difference now is that when you felt a tear fall down your cheek, there was someone there to catch it and when you reached out and held onto them like you’ve wanted to for the past eternity, this time they didn’t disappear. This time, he stayed right there and held you tight as you sobbed into his chest. This time, his hands gently patted your head and ran through your hair. And this time, the locked doors, hushed voices, and passionate movements all had a newfound meaning to the both of you.

*A/N: I really didn’t feel like doing anything so I decided to spend most of my night writing this and procrastinating. Hope y’all like what I wrote for my bias wrecker....maybe I’ll write something for my bias next >:)

[neuxue]

I was looking back at the TEotW live blog entries and I noticed the distinct shift in authorial quality from then to now, which made me curious as to what goes into creating a chapter of the live blog at this stage? You've evidently solidified your style over the years, and it would be nice to know how much effort goes into something we enjoy. Thank you for your work, and I promise Sanderson gets better at writing Mat.

Ha, yeah, I’m a little afraid to ever look at the early posts again because I’ll probably want to crawl under a rock and die of shame, but hopefully they’re at least entertaining…and hopefully the quality shift is in the right direction ;)

Short answer: nowadays, a liveblog chapter usually takes 4-8 hours to write, depending on the chapter’s length and content and how much I care, how I’m feeling that day, etc. To put this in context, when I first started the liveblog I made 2-3 posts per day, of 2-5 chapters each, and a post took me 1-2 hours.

The biggest challenge is therefore finding several hours during which I know I can sit down and do a full chapter. It’s easy enough to find an hour or two, but it’s a lot harder to find 6, and I hate having to split a chapter across several days because I never feel like I can get into it as well. This is mainly because I write while reading, so it feels disjointed if I can’t do it all in one sitting.

To answer your question more thoroughly…as you say, it’s been a case of writing my way into a style that works for me (YMMV, of course). I can’t recall specifically deciding to change anything; as far as I can tell it’s been a mostly gradual change (which adds up to quite a large change when looking at the endpoints). There are a few main contributing factors, which might give a better answer to the question of what goes into a liveblog post now, as opposed to just an amount of time.

Investment, engagement, and progress in the story. I simply didn’t have as much to say when I first started. I didn’t know anything about the world or the characters or the story yet, so while there was a lot to learn and begin piecing together early on, I wasn’t nearly as invested in it as I am now. I also didn’t have as much to draw from; if I were to reread TEotW now, I’m sure I would have far more to say, because a lot of the richness is a product of the story as a larger whole. The more context you have, the more important each individual piece will start to seem.And I care a lot more about the story and the characters now than I did when they were first introduced, so I want to look more closely and go deeper and challenge myself more.  

What I get out of it / what I want to get out of it. This whole thing started as a fun method of procrastination when I was at university. Since then, it has evolved into more of…is it pretentious to say ‘an intellectual exercise’? Being Funny On The Internet is really not my strong point, whereas I actually like writing longer freeform ‘essays’ and getting into detailed analysis. I like having the freedom that a first-time close-read provides to dig into whatever takes my interest, whether that means line-by-line (over)analysis of a particular sequence, or drawing parallels between events or characters, or writing essays on the use of POV as a tool for exploring identity, or whatever else. Because I’m a massive nerd who loves this kind of thing, and this format lets me do whatever I want with it.I’ve actually learned quite a lot about myself as a reader during this whole absurd project, especially about what I want from a story, what kinds of things I like to think about, and what things I could not give less of a fuck about. I want a book that makes me think, and I want to be challenged in some way. When I say the liveblog is primarily for me, I’m really not kidding. I’d be thinking about these things anyway, and this just gives me more structure and ability to do so, because I have to follow my thoughts through and frame them more clearly.Of course, there’s something of a flipside, which brings me to…

Expectations, both my own and other people’s, real or perceived. Probably not surprisingly, I tend to expect quite a lot (too much) of myself. Part of the reason I chose to do the liveblog in a stream-of-consciousness as-I-read format was to give myself as much freedom as possible from those expectations. When I first started, it didn’t matter if one post felt sloppy, or if I skipped over an interesting line, or even if I missed bigger ideas. But as time and wordcount went on, and I got more invested, it felt more and more important to pick up on everything, and to make every post good. (Spoiler alert: I did not make every post good).Maybe it shouldn’t matter to me how many people are reading this and what they think, but I’m human and I have flaws and also an ego. When I first started, I wasn’t thinking of it as work that I was putting on display, or something that would be read and judged as an example of my capability or intelligence or whatever. But as it started to change in style/content, and as more and more people were reading it and responding to it, there was more of a sense of…pressure (an illusion of my own perception, just to clarify, not anyone’s fault). Like I had to exhibit my best work every time, because I suppose I care more what people think of my analytical ability than what they think of my bad one-liners.It’s positive in that it pushes me to produce better work, and encourages me to spend more time on things I find interesting because it turns out there are people who like reading what I come up with. Which is awesome! But as (perceived) expectation increases, it gets harder to produce content quickly. When it didn’t matter, I could spit out several posts a day. Now, I have to spend more time – I want to spend more time; if I’m going to do this I’m going to do it well. But the longer it takes, the better I want each piece to be so that the only post in a month isn’t a shitty one, so then each post takes more time, so then…you get the idea.(To illustrate: every time I think about the Rhuidean sequence there’s a part of me that throws up an absurd amount of self-criticism for not ‘doing those chapters justice’. Because they’re some of the best chapters of the series, but at the time I hadn’t progressed enough in the series or my style to spend as much time on those chapters or analyse them as well as I might now. Also, at the time I felt like I was already doing way more than I had before, and I worried even then that it was too much somehow. Check my tags on that one; I laugh at them now, and it’s clearly a Turning Point in the style of the liveblog, but I was actually quite insecure about it at the time).

The general passage of time. The Wheel of Time turns…when I started this, I was a 22-year-old university student. Now I’m (masquerading as) a Real Adult. 3 years isn’t that long, but people change over time. There are things I’ve formed or changed or relinquished opinions on, and things I care more or less about. My priorities and goals, both day-to-day and longer term, have shifted, some in small ways and some in larger ones. Most of that isn’t going to directly impact a tumblr liveblog of an epic fantasy series, but there’s definitely an indirect impact.  The other thing to consider in terms of ‘time’ is the approach to a short-term project vs a long-term one. I initially saw this as light short-term fun, meaning I could go all-in, use all my spare time on it, and put aside other projects and hobbies for a while. When it became clear that it was not going to be a matter of 2-3 months, that had to change. I wish I could still spend nearly all my free time on this, just as I wish I could get paid to travel wherever I want while reading whatever I fancy. Unfortunately, real life seems to disagree, so the liveblog has had to slow down. 

All that said, I am still enjoying this – it’s been a surprisingly and incredibly fun, fascinating, and rewarding project, and I am still absolutely committed to seeing it through.

[stephpuppet]

Briefly Climbed Out of My Depression Hole

As usual - apologies for my lack of activity, not responding to comments or messages. My depression manifests as a weird self-isolation thing where I ignore everyone. 

I don’t know how long I’ll be back, but I know I have an important deadline coming up for my PhD, which means my writer brain is in overdrive trying to procrastinate the actual important writing I need to do in favour of writing that makes me happy. 

See more below the cut if you want to know what I’m working on.

At the moment the writing that is manifesting is me finally finishing the editing and posting my ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ fic, As Long as We Both Shall Live. It’s already written, I’m just editing and improving now. Depending on the reception, I might get a boost to work on the other Pirates of the Caribbean fics I started playing with - I posted a series of excerpts in case anyone is interested. Let me know what you would like to see next. 

I’ve also had a burst of inspiration to return to one of my childhood favourites- A Series of Unfortunate Events, after finally finishing the Netflix series. This is mostly to explore the Violet Snicket fan theory, complicated relationships between fathers and their children (a favourite theme of mine) and giving a second chance to the tragically doomed Lemony/Beatrice romance. 

Those two are my fandom focuses. I’ve also had a burst to write something original - right now this is manifesting as a LOT of planning. The ideas I have thought of would span a trilogy, but I know myself and I don’t trust myself to start writing without getting myself into a hole and abandoning the whole thing. The solution - actually try to plan it out properly, including character arcs, main plot, subplots, trying to follow a three act structure across the series and in individual novels. 

Fics I really should get back to - Piecing Together the Truth, Sacrifices for the Greater Good, Deception - those are still on the back burner. PTT my priority of those, but I’m not overly inspired for it at the moment. 

[studyari]

26 trying to become an engineer. (2nd attempt)

Hello everyone :-)

Today I’ve been feeling pretty down and thought, well, I may as well do something that might get my mind off of my mood. I thought, “hey maybe I’ll share my story on tumblr.” So, here I am spiraling.

This is not my main blog but I did notice that over the years it was hard to find blogs that were active. Somehow, I came across the ‘studyblr’ community and couldn’t believe how many people were currently using this platform in that way. I’m starting school in the fall so I thought it would be a cool idea to also make one, and maybe it would keep me motivated! We will see. I have a good feeling because there are already sooo many amazing resources and advice tips. It’s very reassuring.

I guess I should start my story off with a few details about who I am and the type of life I had before coming to this point. My name is Ari and I love learning but I never had the vision or drive to look forward into the future very much. I did not concern myself with the responsibilities of adulthood when I was in high school. During that time, I wasn’t really focused on anything in particular. I didn’t sign up for the AP Classes, I didn’t see myself going to college, and the classes I wanted to take, I never was able to get in (my school already had overcapacity classes and it was the oldest high school in my city picture the not having enough books, packed classes, and old and worn learning materials). I really wanted to get into horticulture and signed up for it 3 years straight to no avail. Even though I lacked the competitive spirit and drive, I still had high enough standards for myself to try my best in school even if I didn’t know exactly why I was doing it. I did well and my class rank, I found out was #3. I only found out because the teacher I worked for would tell me “hey you’re really close to having to give a speech” to that I was like HUH? I also was way too shy to even think about that so I just kind of brushed it off. But to this day, I wonder what I could have accomplished if I had the same goals my peers had. 

My counselor nominated me for a scholarship to which I was surprised but I applied to the school (the only school I applied to) and wrote my essay. I did this because I was honored someone actually thought of me. The school could only put up one person per scholarship per university. I’m sure she put me up because of my math scores if I’m being honest. 

By that time I had decided to go into the military, because some guy from the Navy came and talked to our class. I thought, I’m sure I could do that? I was basically doing the things I needed to do my senior year so that after I graduated I could have a job. But unexpectedly, the teacher that I worked for pulled me aside one day and asked me what my plans for the future were. I told him I’m most likely joining the military and that I applied to a university but there’s no way I could pay for it. I already had received a letter that I was denied the scholarship. He sincerely looked at me and told me that I could do anything with my life and that going into the military is great but that I could join that whenever. He told me “not everyone gets to go to college.” I shrugged because I didn’t feel like I was in control of any of that. But then he did something while I was in his computer lab and it was near the end of the school year. He had called up the university I applied to and asked them about my application…. He did that for me. And after getting off the phone with them he told me the lady said “she’ll be very happy.” Although not disclosing any details. For some reason the small gesture moved me and I’m pretty sure that was the moment that I started believing that I could actually accomplish things. I started being able to think about the things I wanted out of life. I could make the decisions of what I want to be, not some recruiter. 

It wasn’t until I got my acceptance letter stating that I had received a full ride scholarship that it all became real. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think I would ever go to college but now I have a way?

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. I was 17. It was in a new city, I was on my own for the first time in my life, I had met a lot of new people, and I was a first year engineering student hoping to graduate in electrical engineering and I was proud of it. I had felt like I had already accomplished so much just off the fact I was accepted into that program. However, reality started to sink in quick. School was HARD, the classes were HUGE 200 students in most of my classes. I procrastinated, stayed up too late, was not understanding my homework, and failing my tests. I felt like a failure and I failed Chemistry I that year. The next semester, I hoped things would be better but in fact it was much worse. I was horrible and completely lost in my computer engineering course and couldn’t create a working program for the life of me, I couldn’t even create a FLOWCHART. Because of the class size I was deathly afraid to raise my hand and just ask a question. I just kept my mouth shut hoping for the best, for a miracle really. I struggled in Calc 2 and especially in Physics I. I didn’t fail any of the classes but with the grades I received it felt no different. I received D-’s for two of my classes and I felt hopeless. I felt dumb. I thought I need to figure something out, because my scholarship covers 4 years for me. I can’t afford to retake a class I just can’t.

And during that summer I transferred out. I told my mom about my experience and she didn’t have much sympathy for me. Just heard things like “well if it was me, I would have made an A”. I tried explaining to her how hard and difficult it was but I didn’t receive any emotional support that day. In my eyes I thought I tried my best. Honestly, that interaction just furthered my belief into thinking yeahhh it is my fault. I just can’t do it. 

I was in this space where I didn’t know what I wanted to do anymore and it scared me. I talked with an advisor and she helped me make a schedule to explore more majors. I explored art, math, and environmental tech. I ended up completely dropping Calc 3 because I was making like 20% on my first test *sigh*. But I did well enough in my gen eds. I truly thought school wasn’t for me. And keep in mind I also was working the entire time through college and it would take me an hour to walk there and an hour to walk back to my dorm. I really needed money T_T. My priorities were all mixed up back then. I also was dating someone who was very very bad for me. He was a cheater, never wanted to see me, and I would miss classes just because we were arguing. I ended up losing a lot of friends because of my terrible relationship as I was spending all my time on him and not on other aspects of my life. I broke up with him my junior year of college.

After that I found myself really focusing hard on my grades, wanting A’s, wanting to do well. I told myself the difference between an A and a B is just effort. My senior year I was working as well as taking 21 credit hours a semester just to graduate. I actually had to submit paperwork to be allowed to take that many hours per semester. I had little time to myself really and I would sleep on the benches outside in between classes. I was so tired my entire senior year but I know for the first time I was doing my absolute best to graduate. I needed to graduate AND do well.  I ended up graduating in environmental tech which is under the college of forestry at my university. So it was very different than what I started off in. I was proud for a little until I moved back home.

When I got back home I couldn’t find a job in my field. I would get interviews and I would get ‘almost’ hired but I would be rejected last minute. It’s either a hiring freeze, simple rejection, or the ‘you need a car’ to work here. But I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have job to get the car and so what I did was say Fuck IT. I got a job as a cashier making $7.25 an hour at a donut shop. I could hardly save money because my family would always ask me for some. I ended up talking to a recruiter and I was about to join the military for real as I’m from a military town and jobs that weren’t the hospital or military were virtually nonexistent. That’s what I planned to do and I remember writing on my calendar in my room to “save $400” before I left. And that was a goal looking back now, made me realize how much I was struggling in that environment. 

I left. And I joined the military. I knew that I could get a free education and housing so that’s why I did it. It wasn’t a very good reason but I’m so glad that’s what I did. I grew up so much while I was there. I earned an electronics degree while I was there. In fact we went over the same exact things I learned in computer engineering, but this time I could understand and it came easy to me.  Learned a new skill. Learned social skills. Learned how to stand up for people. Learned how to manage others and really really show them that I cared. I got my first car, got my first apartment, and I learned what it meant to live comfortably and securely, even if work itself was more stressful than anything I’ve ever known. I accomplished a lot in the four years I spent there, I met so many people that are now all over the world, I have a network, and I even met my current boyfriend.  

I am now 26. Those four years I spent in the military allowed me to think about my future and what I wanted to do. I am still trying to be an engineer. I think I gave up too easily when I was 17 and I was not in the right mindset. I didn’t think I was as smart as everyone else around me. I didn’t think I deserved to be there. But I was wrong. I did deserve to be there. Now that I’m older I understand I was going through a lot of things and had very little support and I didn’t believe in myself enough. I believe we can do anything we set our minds to, because it’s about effort. This is where my new journey begins.

I’m 26 years old and I don’t think it’s too late. I’m going to be starting my nano-engineering courses in the fall and retaking chem and physics. And I will do well no matter what it takes. I’ve been talking to someone at the university here and they say that I have a good chance at getting into their Materials Science and Engineering M.S. program. Me, someone without an engineering B.S. This is where I’d like to update my story. And hopefully someone out there can relate or share their journey as well. It’s been hard understanding that I am deserving to be here and to ask questions and actually succeed. I’m not giving up this time. No way. The things you love and are passionate about will always come back to you.

[striving-toward-170]

How to start internet marketing in 2019 – content marketing 101

Is Internet Marketing In 2019 Worth It?  The truth is that it’s extremely challenging to make a stable income from marketing products online. You really have to be ready to throw everything you have into something, I’m talking effort on the level of a full-time job, and there is massive competition that you have to account for and to be effective you must be ready to really give an effort.

 So is it really worth it? Well, is it worth it for you to work extremely hard to make it work? That’s the question you need to ask yourself, because if it wasn’t profitable then why would anybody do it? What it comes down to is what you are willing to put into it, it’s worth it if you work hard enough to make it a reality. Otherwise putting little effort and expecting huge reward is unreasonable. Anything you do you can be successful given enough time and effort, so it becomes a question you need to ask of yourself.

 Content marketing takes work  It bring me back to university and how I’d procrastinate until what seemed like the last minute, to produce that massive essay, working up until the last possible minute, to make it work. If this is you also then you have to realize that this kind of behavior won’t help you, that is unless you’ve created your own deadline and are that self-structured where this becomes possible.

 If you choose to create a niche website and you are looking to depend on primarily on organic traffic from search engines then you are probably going to want to focus on creating content on a regular basis, this helps you rank faster if you are using quality original content. In order to make content marketing work for you, your best bet would to post often and keep your work updated, Google seems to like this.

 The thing is that makes it really hard and of course this is dependent on what you are attempting to sell and how competitive the niches are, is that you need to research what will be your competition and you have to produce better quality content or copy to engage your customers more and have to put in the effort to see results.

 Does your main competition have roughly 3000 word article that is well sourced and ranking well in Google? Then you’re going to have to do better than they are. You’re also going to want to look at their links; the quality of their domain and keeping all this in mind, someone else could be doing the exact same thing and competing just the same.

 Probably, my number one piece of advice that I’d wished someone else had told me, is: If you are just starting out, stay away from the oversaturated niches like that of weight loss, make money online and gambling niches are such examples. I would build a niche based on something with less competition; however there is a drawback to this as well, and that’s traffic. Some of the saturated niches get lots of traffic but there is more competition, and less saturated means less traffic. The exception to this may be something going viral, or some trend that suddenly brings interest.

   Maybe you have an actual physical product that you want to sell, or you could go into any number of affiliate programs that give you a cut of sales through your link. If you choose either you are going to want to make sure that the product is one that is a quality product, you are attaching your brand to it, so make sure it’s something you’d buy and that it provides value to your customers.

 Another piece of advice is to not box yourself in either, you are going to have to write about this niche often so make sure it’s general enough in the sense that there’s tons you can write about said niche. That bring us to writing, hopefully you are someone who can write or have people you can turn to that you can pay to write quality content for you. There are marketplaces out there if that’s the route you want to take. It all depends on what you are looking to sell and what you plan on having as your traffic source.

 Some tools that can help you are  Google’s keyword suggestion tool  as well as Bing has some  keyword tools  that are of use for finding niches that have a high search volume but not much competition. You are also going to want to get a webmaster tools account setup at Google and that along with  Google Analytics  can help you track visits, see what keywords you should use, track your rankings and help you find new opportunities for organic (free) website traffic.

 The verdict is still out on whether or not you should be trying to essentially (stuff) keywords into your copy, Google has recommended that it’s best to just write high quality content and that should be enough to get you ranking. I would suggest you just start producing great well researched content and that should likely get you ranking in Google.

 Make sure you are giving your readers something. Whatever you are promoting, that should not be the purpose of your website. Aim to really give as much quality and original content that you can and make that the priority. The exception to this would probably be a product review type website, if you are reviewing something make sure you have seen what it’s all about and know it’s a quality product.

 Don’t expect anything and when something comes, great job you deserve it! It can literally take months to get a newish web property indexed, ranked and to start seeing results, the exception to this may be a news type website that has great content, or how saturated the playing field is.

 Another great way to start bringing in traffic for free is the plethora of social networks. Sign up for some of the popular ones and setup pages or groups, or just post great content on other groups or pages to start getting traffic. This is a great way to test how effective your posts are and to begin to build a following for your brand whatever it might be.

 The less travelled road is the one paved in gold. You want to go above and beyond, or offer something in a new way that’s better than what your competition does, you need to stand out. The internet is a massive collection of data and people don’t always have the attention span for some confusing rant, make sure you are always looking for new opportunities and providing real captivating engaging content, or else you may be finished before you’ve started.

 How to make marketing work for you  So, to begin you will need a few things. First of all you need a domain. Some look for expired domains because they tend to have higher domain authority DA and even if you are lucky an established, non-penalized backlink profile that can be useful. You could also start from scratch and find a domain that is either your branding or relevant for your niche you are looking to write content about. Try doing a search to see if you can find a decent domain that is available. You may also be able to find domains for sale that are already owned and the owner is selling. I wanted my own branding so I went with somewhat generic domains.

  Creating killer content – Ever heard the saying “Content is King” well that’s true whether you are content marketing or if you are creating a sales letter, whatever it may be. You should really aim to go above and beyond, the longer and better researched, the better. You have to really find something that interests you but also something that you can write about often, that’s why I mention it’s important to not box yourself in with your content. You want to ensure that you can write about this subject and not get bored of it.  Building trust and developing long-term relationships – At some point in your journey you will find out that it’s almost all about developing trust with your target audience. This is why promoting something that you see real value in is a crucial hallmark for success in this game. You want to build relationships with your customers and through the development of these relationships you can get trust which is so important. Why would someone buy something from you, what sets your brand apart from the rest, what can you offer that’s better? These are questions that can really help you to find your niche and the best avenues to take for building more trust.  Branding and design – Branding is really important and so is site design. If you worked hard for great content the last thing you want to do is let your sub par site design get in the way of conversions and trust. Testing out your design and finding what is the most appealing for your visitors is key. I like social traffic because you can make some posts and watch with  Google Analytics  how your traffic is doing. You can find metrics like time on page and bounce rate which can help you to find where you may be going wrong and correct it. Every visit you get can be another opportunity to learn from your mistakes.  Testing for success – You should be tracking everything, if you have affiliate links, if you use  WordPress  there’s plugins that you can add that help you find what links get the most clicks and you can optimize the rest of your content this way, every little bit helps. I track all my social shares,  Facebook  also provides really good page analytics that can help you with your social campaigns to really optimize everything.  Tracking your users – In order to know what is effective, or not, you are going to have to test everything out. There are services that you can pay for to find a “heatmap” of where users are typically clicking, but there’s other free methods you can use that will help you map out your traffic and point you in the right direction.   Choosing the right domain and hosting  For choosing a domain just like hosting, there’s tons of options. Really it all depends on your needs, but you have to start taking into account that web page loading time and reliability (uptime) are factors for ranking. If you pay for subpar hosting, that may be all you need to get up and running, but how much is your visitor’s user experience going to suffer? Speed is a ranking factor and your quality of hosting really matters if you want to compete in a competitive niche. Keep that in mind and pick something that best suits your needs, you are just starting out and it’s possible to move to another host later on.

 WordPress makes web development much easier than it used to be. Building a site from scratch makes customizing maybe easier but it takes more time and effort where wordpress typically works as a great publishing framework right from the start. You could spend the time building a website from code alone, always an option but the ease of use of wordpress makes me recommend it for someone starting out.

 If you go with wordpress, there’s a ton of themes that will satisfy just about any niche you can imagine, but keep in mind for quality you’re going to have to fork over some dough. Some disadvantages of wordpress are speed but there are ways that you can optimize wordpress to speed up page loads, and much of it depends on the hosting plan you choose. Quality hosting and an optimized wordpress installation can go a long way in getting a good pagespeed score in Google, in turn helping you to outrank some of your competition.

 Expired domains are they worth it?  Expired domains can have tons of potential in that they already have been established with domain authority and can be used right away to rank content. The downside is that you would have to find a reputable seller and really have a good look at the domains backlink history and hope it hasn’t been hit with any type of penalties that could end up being a mess for you getting your new content ranked.

   The choice is yours but if you are looking to buy a domain be prepared to do the legwork for finding its history and making sure the seller is reputable. You can find some  expired domains here  and you can also use the  internet archive wayback machine  to view the expired domains content, in some cases you can’t see this data and I’d be wary of domains where I can’t see the history. They could have some issues with Google and for that reason I’ve always registered my own, if I wanted to focus on PPC advertising then it may have been worth it for me to get an expired domain that for example exact matched a product I was thinking about promoting.

 Your own domain – Starting from scratch  Registering your own domain allows you to start from scratch and build your website from the ground up. I like this method because it’s a clean slate and you have the opportunity to really build your link profile from the beginning. I liked the idea of this so that’s the route I took. The downside is sometimes it may take a while for google to find and index your new web property. In this case there are things you can do to help get your site indexed and ranked faster. This includes building quality links to your website and having your website registered with google analytics and webmaster tools also I find helps along with a sitemap which the default  yoast plugin  gives you. Keeping your site updated often will in my opinion improve getting your content indexed, you can also see the status in webmaster tools. They give you tons of metrics that you can use, including pagespeed metric tool that you can test the speed of your pages, among tons of other great features. Best of all, it’s free to use.

 Finding a great hosting provider  Once you’ve decided on a domain that suits your niche you now have the task to find reliable hosting, in order to host your website. There are tons of choices out there and many different types of packages that you can get depending on your needs.

 To begin with I used the cheap shared hosting but this is not the best choice if you are looking to have good  Google Pagespeed  metric score which can help your user experience and rankings. For that extra speed and availability I went with shared hosting and also signed up for a content delivery network or CDN which serves my images and better serves content on their cloud server network.

 So, starting out there’s no need for super expensive hosting, at most you should set aside around $150.00 per year for your hosting, so it’s not a huge investment; the real investment is the time you take and effort you put into your content, so be aware of that simple fact.

 When I first started web development I spent tons of time looking at what my competition was doing and how their websites were set up. It helped me to gain insight into my target market and to see what would be involved to really make an impact. There are of course tools that can help you more effectively gauge your competitors. Websites like Moz and Majestic have free variations that you can use to get some idea of what their link structure is. Keep in mind it’s all about competition and you will need to outrank your competitors if you are looking to reap the benefits of organic (free) traffic from web searches.

 Search engine optimization is crucial  What is SEO? SEO or search engine optimization is a method of preparing your copy or web content with keywords you have researched and so many other aspects. You would want to optimize your content to include titles, headers, and content as well that is rich with the keywords you are trying to rank for. Using image ALT tags can help to optimize your images in image searches, so that helps as well.

 There are plugins that can help you to optimize your posts and pages if you use WordPress for example. An example of this is  Yoast SEO  which lets you set your keywords and Yoast will analyze your content and give you recommendations to enhancing on page SEO, this is hugely beneficial and I would recommend the free version.

   Of course with all the websites out there; there is huge traffic that can easily be yours, but, only if you play your cards right. There are other ways that you can do it if SEO is not something you want to do examples would be paid traffic, but this also will require you to research keywords and there is tons of competition out there so the key is getting clicks with buyer intent for cheap.

 Pay-per-click PPC advertising networks  Pay per click or PPC can have some advantages but they are more for those with experience, or those that learn quickly! You can easily set budgets with most paid search providers I’ve looked into and you typically bid on keywords that appear in search engines. If you’ve searched on Google and see the results at the top that say “advertisement” those are the ads you will be competing with.

 There are many different types of advertising and I’ll just touch on a few that I know.

 Paid clicks can be great if you are promoting a niche that is not overly saturated, but it has drawbacks and of course costs money, my advice is to stay away from this until you know you have tested your content out and know roughly what your conversion rate is.

  Google adwords –  Google has a platform  that you can run your ads on and they can be extremely effective for someone with the experience and know how to get clicks for cheap. The best thing about paid traffic is that it can highly target those searching for keywords with buyer intent, however those keywords have tons of competition, so Google Adwords has some policies that can get you into trouble and possibly banned so be sure to further research their policies here before you  Bing search – The  Bing search network  includes popular search engines including not only Bing, but also other popular engines like AOL, MSN and even Yahoo search. The cost per click of Bing network is typically cheaper than that of Google, but I find better quality with Google Adwords. Bing policies leave room for more variety in the types of ads and networks they allow so that is almost the tradeoff here with Google you have a limited variety of what you can promote so the quality is better but more strict for an advertiser to adhere to.  Facebook ads – Yes Facebook has an ad platform as well and the beauty of  Facebook ads  is the amount of data you have available to target your buyer audience. Facebook ads are pretty reasonable in their cost per click and like I said you have great control over your targeted audience, more so than I was able to find with Bing, or Google. You can also promote your Facebook web properties like pages and drive traffic to your branded pages, Facebook ads is great for this purpose.   Because the rewards can be so lucrative, there can be intense competition and you will have to work harder and smarter than your rivals to make this profitable. Again, it comes down to picking a niche to advertise that is not saturated, but that has tons of interest and buyer intent, it’s not easy and I suggest you first start with SEO then move on to paid search once you have content that gets conversions.

 Start now because in a year it will be harder  Times are changing and marketing is evolving, you will only let yourself down in the future when you know you could have had a well established business but you waited, get in now and you will have an advantage on those who do wait.

 One thing that I’ve learned is that things change and in order to really be successful you have to be prepared for the times and go with the changes rather than not evolving. The same is with any market; it’s constantly evolving. People are finding and exploiting new ways to profit; those there first will stand to make the most and dominate the niche. Be prepared to fail a lot and get back up and keep going because that’s the key to success. You see most people give it a halfass attempt just to give it up before they realize just where they were going wrong. It definitely takes a deep sense of motivation and not taking failure as an option is absolutely crucial for anything, this especially true for marketing online.

 You may fail miserably at first and that is completely normal, you’ve learned the hard way now get  back up and fix it, you have to know  how to get back up and keep going.

 Don’t have unreasonable expectations  If you do decide that internet marketing is the right journey for you, don’t think you write a post or two and then leave it, it’s not that easy anymore, there may have been a time where it was that easy but I think those times are gone. You need to be promoting your work everywhere and people who are successful are working at this like it’s a full time job, this illusion that you just write a bunch of content and “it’s making me money while I sleep” is not a good mantra to have. You have to fight for it just like everyone else and I hate to say that you may not make it.

 To recap, no matter what route you are taking to promote someone else’s product, or to sell your own, you must produce quality engaging content that offers real value to your audience. You are going to want to really take the time to research your competition and connect the dots to find what worked for them and translate to that working for you, it’s no easy task, it may have been a few years ago, but nowadays the name of the game is trust and building relationships with your customer base that helps you develop your brand.

 If you’ve made it this far then you can probably get the picture that it’s not easy. In fact it’s very difficult and most of the easy money was had years ago. Today it takes a heck of a lot more effort than what it seemed like it took before. You are competing with a huge global industry and you have to be willing to put the effort into it. You are going to have to build and nurture relationships between yourself and your customer base, you have to go the extra mile. Overall, you have tons of things to consider, most fail and it comes down to how bad you want it. Those that are most successful will find new opportunity and be willing to adapt to the extreme pace of technology. Good luck!

 This guide below is the best I’ve found. I used it when I was just starting out and it covers everything you need to know to start selling Clickbank products. Just click the image below to start today. Remember this is a competition game and the sooner you get started the better chance of success you have to get established and start building your brand. What are you waiting for? Click below and take action today!

       The post  How to start internet marketing in 2019 – content marketing 101  appeared first on  Technology Watchpost .

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How to start internet marketing in 2019 – content marketing 101

Is Internet Marketing In 2019 Worth It?  The truth is that it’s extremely challenging to make a stable income from marketing products online. You really have to be ready to throw everything you have into something, I’m talking effort on the level of a full-time job, and there is massive competition that you have to account for and to be effective you must be ready to really give an effort.

 So is it really worth it? Well, is it worth it for you to work extremely hard to make it work? That’s the question you need to ask yourself, because if it wasn’t profitable then why would anybody do it? What it comes down to is what you are willing to put into it, it’s worth it if you work hard enough to make it a reality. Otherwise putting little effort and expecting huge reward is unreasonable. Anything you do you can be successful given enough time and effort, so it becomes a question you need to ask of yourself.

 Content marketing takes work  It bring me back to university and how I’d procrastinate until what seemed like the last minute, to produce that massive essay, working up until the last possible minute, to make it work. If this is you also then you have to realize that this kind of behavior won’t help you, that is unless you’ve created your own deadline and are that self-structured where this becomes possible.

 If you choose to create a niche website and you are looking to depend on primarily on organic traffic from search engines then you are probably going to want to focus on creating content on a regular basis, this helps you rank faster if you are using quality original content. In order to make content marketing work for you, your best bet would to post often and keep your work updated, Google seems to like this.

 The thing is that makes it really hard and of course this is dependent on what you are attempting to sell and how competitive the niches are, is that you need to research what will be your competition and you have to produce better quality content or copy to engage your customers more and have to put in the effort to see results.

 Does your main competition have roughly 3000 word article that is well sourced and ranking well in Google? Then you’re going to have to do better than they are. You’re also going to want to look at their links; the quality of their domain and keeping all this in mind, someone else could be doing the exact same thing and competing just the same.

 Probably, my number one piece of advice that I’d wished someone else had told me, is: If you are just starting out, stay away from the oversaturated niches like that of weight loss, make money online and gambling niches are such examples. I would build a niche based on something with less competition; however there is a drawback to this as well, and that’s traffic. Some of the saturated niches get lots of traffic but there is more competition, and less saturated means less traffic. The exception to this may be something going viral, or some trend that suddenly brings interest.

   Maybe you have an actual physical product that you want to sell, or you could go into any number of affiliate programs that give you a cut of sales through your link. If you choose either you are going to want to make sure that the product is one that is a quality product, you are attaching your brand to it, so make sure it’s something you’d buy and that it provides value to your customers.

 Another piece of advice is to not box yourself in either, you are going to have to write about this niche often so make sure it’s general enough in the sense that there’s tons you can write about said niche. That bring us to writing, hopefully you are someone who can write or have people you can turn to that you can pay to write quality content for you. There are marketplaces out there if that’s the route you want to take. It all depends on what you are looking to sell and what you plan on having as your traffic source.

 Some tools that can help you are  Google’s keyword suggestion tool  as well as Bing has some  keyword tools  that are of use for finding niches that have a high search volume but not much competition. You are also going to want to get a webmaster tools account setup at Google and that along with  Google Analytics  can help you track visits, see what keywords you should use, track your rankings and help you find new opportunities for organic (free) website traffic.

 The verdict is still out on whether or not you should be trying to essentially (stuff) keywords into your copy, Google has recommended that it’s best to just write high quality content and that should be enough to get you ranking. I would suggest you just start producing great well researched content and that should likely get you ranking in Google.

 Make sure you are giving your readers something. Whatever you are promoting, that should not be the purpose of your website. Aim to really give as much quality and original content that you can and make that the priority. The exception to this would probably be a product review type website, if you are reviewing something make sure you have seen what it’s all about and know it’s a quality product.

 Don’t expect anything and when something comes, great job you deserve it! It can literally take months to get a newish web property indexed, ranked and to start seeing results, the exception to this may be a news type website that has great content, or how saturated the playing field is.

 Another great way to start bringing in traffic for free is the plethora of social networks. Sign up for some of the popular ones and setup pages or groups, or just post great content on other groups or pages to start getting traffic. This is a great way to test how effective your posts are and to begin to build a following for your brand whatever it might be.

 The less travelled road is the one paved in gold. You want to go above and beyond, or offer something in a new way that’s better than what your competition does, you need to stand out. The internet is a massive collection of data and people don’t always have the attention span for some confusing rant, make sure you are always looking for new opportunities and providing real captivating engaging content, or else you may be finished before you’ve started.

 How to make marketing work for you  So, to begin you will need a few things. First of all you need a domain. Some look for expired domains because they tend to have higher domain authority DA and even if you are lucky an established, non-penalized backlink profile that can be useful. You could also start from scratch and find a domain that is either your branding or relevant for your niche you are looking to write content about. Try doing a search to see if you can find a decent domain that is available. You may also be able to find domains for sale that are already owned and the owner is selling. I wanted my own branding so I went with somewhat generic domains.

  Creating killer content – Ever heard the saying “Content is King” well that’s true whether you are content marketing or if you are creating a sales letter, whatever it may be. You should really aim to go above and beyond, the longer and better researched, the better. You have to really find something that interests you but also something that you can write about often, that’s why I mention it’s important to not box yourself in with your content. You want to ensure that you can write about this subject and not get bored of it.  Building trust and developing long-term relationships – At some point in your journey you will find out that it’s almost all about developing trust with your target audience. This is why promoting something that you see real value in is a crucial hallmark for success in this game. You want to build relationships with your customers and through the development of these relationships you can get trust which is so important. Why would someone buy something from you, what sets your brand apart from the rest, what can you offer that’s better? These are questions that can really help you to find your niche and the best avenues to take for building more trust.  Branding and design – Branding is really important and so is site design. If you worked hard for great content the last thing you want to do is let your sub par site design get in the way of conversions and trust. Testing out your design and finding what is the most appealing for your visitors is key. I like social traffic because you can make some posts and watch with  Google Analytics  how your traffic is doing. You can find metrics like time on page and bounce rate which can help you to find where you may be going wrong and correct it. Every visit you get can be another opportunity to learn from your mistakes.  Testing for success – You should be tracking everything, if you have affiliate links, if you use  WordPress  there’s plugins that you can add that help you find what links get the most clicks and you can optimize the rest of your content this way, every little bit helps. I track all my social shares,  Facebook  also provides really good page analytics that can help you with your social campaigns to really optimize everything.  Tracking your users – In order to know what is effective, or not, you are going to have to test everything out. There are services that you can pay for to find a “heatmap” of where users are typically clicking, but there’s other free methods you can use that will help you map out your traffic and point you in the right direction.   Choosing the right domain and hosting  For choosing a domain just like hosting, there’s tons of options. Really it all depends on your needs, but you have to start taking into account that web page loading time and reliability (uptime) are factors for ranking. If you pay for subpar hosting, that may be all you need to get up and running, but how much is your visitor’s user experience going to suffer? Speed is a ranking factor and your quality of hosting really matters if you want to compete in a competitive niche. Keep that in mind and pick something that best suits your needs, you are just starting out and it’s possible to move to another host later on.

 WordPress makes web development much easier than it used to be. Building a site from scratch makes customizing maybe easier but it takes more time and effort where wordpress typically works as a great publishing framework right from the start. You could spend the time building a website from code alone, always an option but the ease of use of wordpress makes me recommend it for someone starting out.

 If you go with wordpress, there’s a ton of themes that will satisfy just about any niche you can imagine, but keep in mind for quality you’re going to have to fork over some dough. Some disadvantages of wordpress are speed but there are ways that you can optimize wordpress to speed up page loads, and much of it depends on the hosting plan you choose. Quality hosting and an optimized wordpress installation can go a long way in getting a good pagespeed score in Google, in turn helping you to outrank some of your competition.

 Expired domains are they worth it?  Expired domains can have tons of potential in that they already have been established with domain authority and can be used right away to rank content. The downside is that you would have to find a reputable seller and really have a good look at the domains backlink history and hope it hasn’t been hit with any type of penalties that could end up being a mess for you getting your new content ranked.

   The choice is yours but if you are looking to buy a domain be prepared to do the legwork for finding its history and making sure the seller is reputable. You can find some  expired domains here  and you can also use the  internet archive wayback machine  to view the expired domains content, in some cases you can’t see this data and I’d be wary of domains where I can’t see the history. They could have some issues with Google and for that reason I’ve always registered my own, if I wanted to focus on PPC advertising then it may have been worth it for me to get an expired domain that for example exact matched a product I was thinking about promoting.

 Your own domain – Starting from scratch  Registering your own domain allows you to start from scratch and build your website from the ground up. I like this method because it’s a clean slate and you have the opportunity to really build your link profile from the beginning. I liked the idea of this so that’s the route I took. The downside is sometimes it may take a while for google to find and index your new web property. In this case there are things you can do to help get your site indexed and ranked faster. This includes building quality links to your website and having your website registered with google analytics and webmaster tools also I find helps along with a sitemap which the default  yoast plugin  gives you. Keeping your site updated often will in my opinion improve getting your content indexed, you can also see the status in webmaster tools. They give you tons of metrics that you can use, including pagespeed metric tool that you can test the speed of your pages, among tons of other great features. Best of all, it’s free to use.

 Finding a great hosting provider  Once you’ve decided on a domain that suits your niche you now have the task to find reliable hosting, in order to host your website. There are tons of choices out there and many different types of packages that you can get depending on your needs.

 To begin with I used the cheap shared hosting but this is not the best choice if you are looking to have good  Google Pagespeed  metric score which can help your user experience and rankings. For that extra speed and availability I went with shared hosting and also signed up for a content delivery network or CDN which serves my images and better serves content on their cloud server network.

 So, starting out there’s no need for super expensive hosting, at most you should set aside around $150.00 per year for your hosting, so it’s not a huge investment; the real investment is the time you take and effort you put into your content, so be aware of that simple fact.

 When I first started web development I spent tons of time looking at what my competition was doing and how their websites were set up. It helped me to gain insight into my target market and to see what would be involved to really make an impact. There are of course tools that can help you more effectively gauge your competitors. Websites like Moz and Majestic have free variations that you can use to get some idea of what their link structure is. Keep in mind it’s all about competition and you will need to outrank your competitors if you are looking to reap the benefits of organic (free) traffic from web searches.

 Search engine optimization is crucial  What is SEO? SEO or search engine optimization is a method of preparing your copy or web content with keywords you have researched and so many other aspects. You would want to optimize your content to include titles, headers, and content as well that is rich with the keywords you are trying to rank for. Using image ALT tags can help to optimize your images in image searches, so that helps as well.

 There are plugins that can help you to optimize your posts and pages if you use WordPress for example. An example of this is  Yoast SEO  which lets you set your keywords and Yoast will analyze your content and give you recommendations to enhancing on page SEO, this is hugely beneficial and I would recommend the free version.

   Of course with all the websites out there; there is huge traffic that can easily be yours, but, only if you play your cards right. There are other ways that you can do it if SEO is not something you want to do examples would be paid traffic, but this also will require you to research keywords and there is tons of competition out there so the key is getting clicks with buyer intent for cheap.

 Pay-per-click PPC advertising networks  Pay per click or PPC can have some advantages but they are more for those with experience, or those that learn quickly! You can easily set budgets with most paid search providers I’ve looked into and you typically bid on keywords that appear in search engines. If you’ve searched on Google and see the results at the top that say “advertisement” those are the ads you will be competing with.

 There are many different types of advertising and I’ll just touch on a few that I know.

 Paid clicks can be great if you are promoting a niche that is not overly saturated, but it has drawbacks and of course costs money, my advice is to stay away from this until you know you have tested your content out and know roughly what your conversion rate is.

  Google adwords –  Google has a platform  that you can run your ads on and they can be extremely effective for someone with the experience and know how to get clicks for cheap. The best thing about paid traffic is that it can highly target those searching for keywords with buyer intent, however those keywords have tons of competition, so Google Adwords has some policies that can get you into trouble and possibly banned so be sure to further research their policies here before you  Bing search – The  Bing search network  includes popular search engines including not only Bing, but also other popular engines like AOL, MSN and even Yahoo search. The cost per click of Bing network is typically cheaper than that of Google, but I find better quality with Google Adwords. Bing policies leave room for more variety in the types of ads and networks they allow so that is almost the tradeoff here with Google you have a limited variety of what you can promote so the quality is better but more strict for an advertiser to adhere to.  Facebook ads – Yes Facebook has an ad platform as well and the beauty of  Facebook ads  is the amount of data you have available to target your buyer audience. Facebook ads are pretty reasonable in their cost per click and like I said you have great control over your targeted audience, more so than I was able to find with Bing, or Google. You can also promote your Facebook web properties like pages and drive traffic to your branded pages, Facebook ads is great for this purpose.   Because the rewards can be so lucrative, there can be intense competition and you will have to work harder and smarter than your rivals to make this profitable. Again, it comes down to picking a niche to advertise that is not saturated, but that has tons of interest and buyer intent, it’s not easy and I suggest you first start with SEO then move on to paid search once you have content that gets conversions.

 Start now because in a year it will be harder  Times are changing and marketing is evolving, you will only let yourself down in the future when you know you could have had a well established business but you waited, get in now and you will have an advantage on those who do wait.

 One thing that I’ve learned is that things change and in order to really be successful you have to be prepared for the times and go with the changes rather than not evolving. The same is with any market; it’s constantly evolving. People are finding and exploiting new ways to profit; those there first will stand to make the most and dominate the niche. Be prepared to fail a lot and get back up and keep going because that’s the key to success. You see most people give it a halfass attempt just to give it up before they realize just where they were going wrong. It definitely takes a deep sense of motivation and not taking failure as an option is absolutely crucial for anything, this especially true for marketing online.

 You may fail miserably at first and that is completely normal, you’ve learned the hard way now get  back up and fix it, you have to know  how to get back up and keep going.

 Don’t have unreasonable expectations  If you do decide that internet marketing is the right journey for you, don’t think you write a post or two and then leave it, it’s not that easy anymore, there may have been a time where it was that easy but I think those times are gone. You need to be promoting your work everywhere and people who are successful are working at this like it’s a full time job, this illusion that you just write a bunch of content and “it’s making me money while I sleep” is not a good mantra to have. You have to fight for it just like everyone else and I hate to say that you may not make it.

 To recap, no matter what route you are taking to promote someone else’s product, or to sell your own, you must produce quality engaging content that offers real value to your audience. You are going to want to really take the time to research your competition and connect the dots to find what worked for them and translate to that working for you, it’s no easy task, it may have been a few years ago, but nowadays the name of the game is trust and building relationships with your customer base that helps you develop your brand.

 If you’ve made it this far then you can probably get the picture that it’s not easy. In fact it’s very difficult and most of the easy money was had years ago. Today it takes a heck of a lot more effort than what it seemed like it took before. You are competing with a huge global industry and you have to be willing to put the effort into it. You are going to have to build and nurture relationships between yourself and your customer base, you have to go the extra mile. Overall, you have tons of things to consider, most fail and it comes down to how bad you want it. Those that are most successful will find new opportunity and be willing to adapt to the extreme pace of technology. Good luck!

 This guide below is the best I’ve found. I used it when I was just starting out and it covers everything you need to know to start selling Clickbank products. Just click the image below to start today. Remember this is a competition game and the sooner you get started the better chance of success you have to get established and start building your brand. What are you waiting for? Click below and take action today!

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