#and that often results in me writing a coda

[peachpety]

Upon reflecting this past year, I’m reminded of one area as a fandom citizen that i am lacking - reading fic. And so was born an idea to canvas my fandom family and friends to share with me a fic they've written, art they've created, a podfic they've recorded in 2023 of which they are most proud.

This two part 'rec yourself' list is the result.

Part One features Drarry creations (heavily featured since that's my OTP). Part Two (here) includes a kick-ass mix of various HP ships and ships from other fandoms, including Carry On, Check Please!, Good Omens, Teen Wolf, and Stranger Things. Also, and most importantly, each entry presents a smol blurb from the creator about why they chose their particular piece as their 2023 favorite.

For ease in reading, I've also placed all submitted works posted to AO3 into a filterable bookmark collection, Rec Yourself 2023. Be aware that there's a range of ratings and archive/creator tags, so please, take appropriate responsibility for your personal consumption. And please also be sure to shower the creators with kudos and lovely comments.

Y'all. This endeavor has been a fucking blast. One thing's for sure, I am blessed, humbled and honored to know a whole bunch of fantastic, brilliant, fun folks. Big love to you all, and thank you for participating.

So go forth. Indulge and enjoy! xo peach

* * *

✩ @pato-roldnart ✩ Quiet as a mouse HP | Viktor Krum x Ron Weasely | ART | G rating | Unleashed!Fest 2023 I'm quite proud of this one, I don't know how I made it, I had never drawn them before! My mind went full "oh yeah ronvik " Also, I like the idea of them bonding over their pets and Ron seeing that Viktor cares about something else that is not Quidditch.

✩ @tontonguetonks ✩ Coffee and a Croissant HP Next Gen | Scorpius x Albus | 903 FIC | G rating There are parts of myself and my lived experience in every story and character I write—how I socialize, how I take my coffee… I can’t help it. In *Coffee and a Croissant*, I put a lot of myself in my ace and autistic Albus. He is very dear to me in this story, and in my Fizzy Lifting Drinks drabble. The fic is just a toe-dip in the Soulmate waters where Albus grapples with what to do if he is someone’s Soulmate, but they’re not his. Parts 2 and 3 are in the works, but there is no timeline on either of them. Maybe in 2024?

✩ @crazybutgood ✩ I Bloom Pink For You HP | Narcissa Malfoy x Pansy Parkinson | 993 FIC + ORIGAMI COMIC | M rating | HP Bodice Ripper Fest 2023 This whole idea came about because I got so excited to fold a corset for hp bodice ripper fest, realised I couldn't just submit that one thing, and started brainstorming more loose ideas. It all clicked together when I was inspired by a fic by @schmem14, whose writing I adore. I was so grateful and even more excited when Em gave permission to make this. From there started the self-indulgent process of folding fancy things with fancier papers for this origami comic, and I couldn't have done it without Em and my lovely support team.

✩ @seekercass ✩ Something Cosmic HP | Cedric x Draco x Harry | 1.7k FIC | M rating | Polyship Week 2022 A self-rec that I am still extremely proud of is a short fic written for Polyshipping Week 2022 called Something Cosmic. It's a small coda to Something Good to Always Keep, another fic that I wrote for Quidditch Fest 2021 that I cherish very much. Even though writing is still hard for me these days, I often think about this 'verse and what life is like for Harry, Draco and Cedric after they graduated from Oxford. These three and slice of life bring me such joy. I hope to write more of them.

✩ @roseharpermaxwell ✩ Sounds Worth It HP | Hermione x Draco | 5k FIC | T rating | D/Hr Advent 2023 Being nominated for d/hr advent was a sweet surprise. It gave me a good excuse to remember how to write and the nudge I needed to create something this year.

✩ @basicallyahedgehog ✩ (They) Keep Me Warm HP | Hermione x Harry x Ron | 5.8k FIC | E rating | HP Trans Fest 2023 This was my transfest fic - I wrote it as a love letter to all my trans and Enby friends and as a way of processing some of my own feelings. It’s my first (and so far only) foray into poly golden trio and I loved playing with their dynamics with that added layer to their relationship.

✩ @lumosatnight ✩ For I Have Found Salvation HP | Harry x Severus | 7.1k FIC | E rating | Snarry AUctoberfest 2023 Although this is a smut fic at its core, I tried really hard to make the pacing flow, bringing in background characters, and creating memorable imagery. I am very proud of how it turned out. However, this is probably my favorite fic from 2023 simply for the fact that I had the most fun writing it!

✩ @sugareey-makes-stuff ✩ Feel You Breathing Teen Wolf | Derek Hale x Stiles Stilinski | 8.4k TEXTING FIC | E rating | 2023 Year of the OTP This is my fav 2023 piece because I learned how to create a custom text message AO3 skin, stylize things for plain text reading, and I wrote a whole story  that had some plot that was told through text messages. Also, I did not know I could achieve so much spiciness and throw in so many bad pick-up lines through this medium, but hey, the more you know! XD

✩ @schmem14 ✩ Mastermind HP | Harry x Ron; Draco x Harry; Ron x Draco | 10.7k FIC | E rating | Dronarry Fest 2023 This is one of the few times a story just flew out of me. Possessive stalker Draco sets out to win over Ron in this creepy thriller, but there’s a catch: Ron is already in love with Draco’s boyfriend, Harry.

✩ @drwhoisginnyholmes & @fledglinger ✩ Not Bad, For A 6000 Year Old Classic! Good Omens | Aziraphale x Crowley | 11.8k FIC + ART | E rating | DIWS Reverse! Reverse! Mini Bang

✩ @sniperjade ✩ The Sounds of Us HP Marauders | Regulus x Remus | 20.4k FIC | M rating | Remus Lupin Fest 2023; HPFC Spring Fling 2023 I've been thinking about this for a couple of days and whilst I would really love to say it was the drarry I wrote for this fest last year my favourite would have to be this moonseeker I wrote for Remus Lupin Fest last year. It's my favourite because I lived this fic. It became the entirety of my personality for a whole month because I desperately needed to get to the chapter where Regulus was riding on Padfoots back, through the forbidden forest, with only the light of the full moon to guide them, just to try and help Remus. It's also just because it's very musical and I'm very musical so that makes me love it all the more.

✩ @ghaniblue ✩ Sleeping With Ghosts HP | Regulus x Draco x Harry | 21.9k FIC | M rating | Harry Potter Rare Pair Fest IV I posted a Regulus/Harry/Draco fic last month that I'm very fond of. I started writing it more than 1 1/2 years ago, before I ever read a single Regulus fic. It's triad fic, and I'm pretty proud of the way the individual relationships develop. That was important to me, and I think I succeeded. Posting the first fic on ao3 with this triad tag doesn't hurt either.

✩ @celilasart & @wolfspurr ✩ Shifted Teen Wolf | Derek Hale x Stiles Stilinski | 25k FIC + ART | T rating | Sterek Reverse Bang This work was created for sterek reverse bang, a collaboration fest where the artists create first and the writers write second. wolfspurr and I just clicked when we talked about my art and the things that it inspired in their writer brain ;D the result is just an amazingly sweet and wholesome fic, that is still set in the teenwolf universe as we know it. but unlike many other fics which are full of violence and danger, this one starts with a bang and then it is a beautifully woven story of two people who just complete each other. also... the working title for my art was: tiny fox & sour wolf.

✩ @orange-peony ✩ At the speed of light Carry On | Basilton Pitch x Simon Snow | 26.3k FIC | E rating I picked [this fic] because I had a lot of fun writing it! It started off as a drabble and ended up 26k because I just had a blast writing it and the fandom support was so lovely. Last but not least, Pato made an absolutely stunning art piece for this fic, and it was the best present ever.

✩ @wynnyfryd ✩ i don’t know, you figure it out Stranger Things | Steve Harrington x Eddie Munson | 35.4k WIP FIC | E rating bragging about yourself is difficult, but i’ll just say it’s my favorite because i’m proud of myself for sticking to one project for this long, i love all the artwork the fic has inspired, and i just think the line “the river styx must taste like pennies” fucks severely lmao.

✩ @decaflondonfog ✩ growing pains Check Please! | Eric Bittle x Kent Parson | 50k FIC | T rating i am not usually a long fic gal, which i think is in part lack of patience, but also how attached i get to a universe if i’m working on it for a longer period of time. i finished writing this back in june but this fic felt very “me” in many ways and i think about them so often still  so it’s definitely my 2023 creation i’m proudest of!

[bluespring864]

ancient monday? or perhaps august wednesday? (i'm having too much fun with these combinations haha)

ancient monday will be me tomorrow going back to work after a holiday 😂

ancient: the first fic you ever posted online?

A story in German for my beloved Tatort fandom with the extremely German title 'Wäschekellergespräch' (i.e. a conversation in the laundry room) The laundry room in the cellar of the house is where the two main characters sometimes meet in this TV series (or was it only the one time?) because the detective and the coroner who work together solving criminal cases happen to live in the same house and everyone needs to do laundry :)

monday: do you struggle with the ‘boring’ parts of writing?

Hm, I don't really know what that means. Proofreading and editing and formating isn't my favourite part but I do a lot of it as I go along, so it doesn't accumulate at the end, and therefore I don't mind it much. I have a lot of trouble plotting anything, I often write as I go along, but that's not really a boring part of writing, just one that doesn't come naturally to me.

august: are any of your fics associated with certain genres/artists/songs/etc?

Well for some reason a certain Ms Swift seems to write lyrics that lend themselves to fic titles very well, so there's lots of those. And a couple of titles are borrowed from U2 lyrics as well. The mood of the coda to A Line That We Could Just Go Cross (In The Cracks of Light, which you may remember :)) was heavily influenced by a specific version of an Italian song called Buenanotte Fiorellino.

wednesday: name a fic which you have posted which you think is underrated?

Hm, I always think the Two and Two verse is somewhat underrated (in terms of kudos at least) because it's probably the most interesting thing I've written, but then again lots of people don't read poly fics at all and the people who leave comments on it are all very enthusiastic <3 So let me give my other frequent answer and say On A Cold December Night. I don't know if it's the asexuality tag or the pairing or something else that makes people wary of reading that one, but it's a bit of a shame that that's one of my least read tennis fics! I really loved writing it and like the result as well.

[vinylspinning]

The Wildhearts: Fishing for Luckies (1996)

For much of the early '90s, great songs were oozing out of Wildhearts leader/singer/guitarist Ginger's pores like venereal diseases, and they were just as catchy and difficult to get rid of ... not that I would know.

This is why today I'm writing about Fishing for Luckies, which collected numerous B-sides and studio outtakes from the amazingly prolific British group, which I've often described as history's heaviest power pop band.

Originally made available exclusively to fan club members as a six-song EP in 1994, it was followed one year later by the nine-song Fishing for More Luckies (see both of their moldy covers overhead), and then repackaged for commercial release in '96 as a ten-song CD and fifteen-song LP. (*)

The latter, now extremely rare and expensive, rounds up so much top-notch material in "Sick of Drugs," "Red Light - Green Light," "Beautiful Me, Beautiful You," and "29 X the Pain" that it almost qualifies as a proper predecessor/successor to The Wildhearts' U.K. Top Ten sophomore album, '95's P.H.U.Q.

So the only giveaway that this was NOT a regular Wildhearts studio LP was that many of track lengths pushed the envelope at either side of conventional three-to-five-minute norms, with seemingly little regard for radio airplay or simple arrangements.

As a result, short and manic bursts like "In Like Flynn" and "Mood Swings and Roundabouts" are countered with form-breaking epics like "Inglorious," "Schizophonic" (both of which appeared as bonus tracks on the CD version of P.H.U.Q.), and "Sky Babies."

But I'd like to call special attention to another, near-eight-minute exercise in musical personality disorder called "Do the Channel Bop," which brilliantly combines a number of madcap ideas with an irresistible, descending, children-led chorus without flinching.

The remaining tunes range from the catchy "Weekend '96" and "Soul Searching on the Planet Earth (Different Kind of Love)" to obscurities like "Johnny Wash 'n Go" (an ethereal blend of wordless choirs and volume knob swells), and a gentle acoustic coda dubbed "Nite Songs."

Considering The Wildhearts' eventual collapse amidst record company ineptitude, intra-band strife, and Ginger simply being a complete nutter, Fishing for Luckies now stands even taller as an essential part of this band's already impressive discography.

And it also illustrates Ginger's creative range (like the song says, he was truly "Schizophonic") as well or better than any of the band's "official" (whatever that means) studio full-lengths -- too bad it's so difficult to come by.

* Although only ten songs are cited on the rear sleeve, I can vouch for the fact that there are, in fact, fifteen.

More Wildhearts: Earth vs. The Wildhearts, Caffeine Bomb EP, Suckerpunch EP, P.H.U.Q., Red Light-Green Light EP, Fishing for Luckies, The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed!

[workingforitallthetime]

bonus scene

hi, here is a bonus svech pov scene from good times rollin’ on me. i had this interaction in mind when i wrote the fic, but i didn’t have a way to reference it from marty’s pov because he’s not present for it and nobody who is would tell him the interesting bits.

The list of words was on all the rainbow signs. They were taped to the narrow strip of glass next to most of the classroom doors at his new high school, announcing “Safe Space.” That was different from Barnaul.

Andrei didn’t add them to his own list of new words, the one he kept on his phone with entries like glorious and unbelievable, but he looked them up all the same. It was nice to learn them. To know which one was his.

He doesn’t end up using them that much. It doesn’t take particular vocabulary to find people, here and there in Michigan, and then more easily in Raleigh, in actual college, not community college where nobody wants to be.

And, unexpectedly, on his new hockey team. Andrei had expected a beer league team like he’d found in Michigan: older guys, with meat and potatoes jobs like mailman or property manager or grounds supervisor, who called him “kid” but made the game fun because they were so happy to be there, playing hockey, getting their one night a week away from wives and kids.

Instead, his new team has Dougie and Foegs. Andrei sees them before their first game. Notices Foegs tuck his chin over Dougie’s shoulder, brush his lips against Dougie’s shoulder pad, quick. Andrei lets Foegs notice him noticing. Then he scoots down the bench in the locker room and asks the two of them about bars in Raleigh. 

Foegs snorts at him. “Are you even twenty one?”

“Sure,” Andrei says, grinning. It’s a useful word, one of his favorites. It moves a conversation along even if Andrei doesn’t entirely understand. Or entirely agree. Or, sometimes, if he wants to pretend later that he didn’t understand. Foegs can think what he wants. It’s not really about the bars.

Foegs never ends up answering Andrei’s question. Instead, Andrei ends up playing Fortnite and watching hockey with them. They make space for him, in the locker room, on the bench, at the bar after games, whenever Marty hasn’t already dragged Andrei into the thick of things. Dougie calls him their little brother and Foegs calls him “our new twink friend” and Andrei rolls his eyes and pretends to hate both options. He doesn’t need any more older brothers. But he does think less about missing Evgeny when Dougie and Foegs are around. They understand things about him that Evgeny does not. It’s a small miracle to have friends who understand that, right from the start.

Andrei keeps an eye on Marty, too, wondering if there’s something to notice. Marty seems like a lot, generally, but sometimes Andrei gets the sense that some of the energy pouring off Marty is directed at him specifically. He’s always looking for Andrei, beckoning him into the group, including him in conversations. Asking Andrei questions, looking at him with intent blue eyes like the answers matter. So the second or third time Andrei’s over at Dougie’s apartment, watching hockey and eating Chinese, he decides to dredge up the vocabulary to ask. 

“Marty.” Andrei parks his chopsticks in the container of noodles he’s eating. “Is he…”

“Nope.” Foegs passes the broccoli beef to Dougie at the other end of the couch. “Marty’s not gay.” Andrei barely recognizes the flicker of disappointment he feels, brief and surprising. Foegs leans over and decisively spears a dumpling from the box on the coffee table. “He just likes dick.”

There’s probably a word for that. Andrei decides not to ask Foegs what it is. It sounds like his answer might be biased.

“Wow, harsh.” Dougie folds his legs under him, settling into the corner of the couch and balancing the takeout container on the arm.

“No, seriously.” Foegs swallows his dumpling. “He hooked up with so many of my friends in college. Marty was, like, the jock you hooked up with to get it out of your system.”

Andrei’s eyes try to go wide. He bites the inside of his lip.

“Then he got a girlfriend, and”—Foegs slashes a diagonal with his chopsticks—“that was that.”

Andrei waits a moment, hoping Dougie picks up on the obvious question. Dougie’s still kind of new too, trying to keep track of all the lines connecting Foegs and his friends just like Andrei is. Sometimes he saves Andrei the trouble of asking. Obligingly, Dougie stretches his foot down the couch and pokes Foegs. “So did you?” 

“No.” Foegs hauls his knee up and knocks Dougie’s foot back. The broccoli beef teeters on the arm of the couch and Dougie catches it just in time. “I played hockey. Hockey players were not, like, this exciting frontier I needed to explore.”

“Gee, thanks.” Dougie pokes Foegs again.

“That’s different, I didn’t know you were a hockey player.” 

“You noticed my Bruins sweater pretty quick.”

“That doesn’t count.” Foegs pushes back at Dougie’s foot with the hand that’s not holding onto his chopsticks. Dougie holds him at bay, looking like it doesn’t take any effort at all. “I was already in your bedroom. It was on your floor.” They’re at an impasse, counterpressure by Foegs holding Dougie’s foot in midair.

Andrei always likes to watch Foegs try to pick a fight with Dougie. It’s like watching a fly in a pasture buzzing around a big placid bull. It’s comfortable. It’s comfortable to spend time at Dougie’s apartment, across the city from campus, with people who know who they are and what they want to do.

“So what?” Dougie suddenly pulls his foot back so Foegs, still pushing, almost tips over on top of him.

Foegs straightens himself up. “You were already going to get it.” He jabs his chopsticks at Dougie triumphantly. “Before I knew you played.”

Andrei doesn’t understand why Foegs wouldn’t want to hook up with a hockey player. It’s kind of nice to think that’s possible. It’s nice to see Dougie’s glove resting on Foegs’ helmet after a goal, and know it means a little bit more. Andrei never would have thought of that in Russia, or in Michigan. The rainbow Safe Space signs didn’t make it as far as the locker room at the rink where his high school team played.

Dougie, unbothered, steals a dumpling. “Nice of you to stick around after you figured it out.”

Foegs smirks. “I kind of had to, the team needed another D-man.”

Dougie tips the broccoli beef onto the coffee table and pins Foegs in a headlock. Chopsticks go flying. While they struggle, Andrei reaches over to sit the takeout container upright before the contents ooze out.

Foegs, with his head smushed against Dougie’s chest, catches sight of him out of the corner of his eye. “Hey.” He digs a finger into Dougie’s ribs. “Hey, Dougie, I think we’re missing the point here.”

Andrei sinks back in his chair, out of the very limited angle of Foegs’ vision.

Dougie’s watching him now, though. “Oh yeah?” He lets Foegs go. After looking around in vain for his chopsticks, he fishes in the empty takeout bag for a fork instead. “What’s that?”

Foegs rakes a hand through his hair, tousling it back into place. He leers at Andrei. “Why’s our new twink friend asking about Marty?”

“Stop it.” Andrei tucks his smile down into his container of noodles. He pokes his chopsticks at a bite of chicken. “I just wonder.”

The expression on Foegs’s face sharpens. “If you’re wondering if he’s flirting with you, the answer’s probably yes.”

“Hmm.” Andrei hums neutrally, channeling Dougie’s imperviousness. Pasture. Cow. Tail flick.

Foegs looks like he’s ready to pounce. Andrei chews slowly, swallows, and snares another bite of noodles. He glances at Dougie. Dougie raises his eyebrows at him, no help.

When Andrei doesn’t add anything, Foegs sits back a bit. “Marty’s just here for a good time.”

“Oh, big surprise,” Andrei scoffs at him. Of course Marty’s fun. He’s fun to play hockey with. Probably, Andrei thinks, he would probably be fun to do other things with. If Foegs means it to be a warning, it’s not an effective one. Andrei wouldn’t mind a good time. He’s a thousand miles away from anyone who’d care, and he wants to have some fun.

[animalinvestigator]

hi coda sorry for sending an ask abt this but i like talking its like a socratic seminar i think if someone really really resonates with your art and respects it and enjoys it they will not take your character to be a cruel person. basically if someone does have that reading the objective truth is theyre not picking up what youre putting down and while its good to tune into these things in the sense that you can adjust accordingly i think more often than not if a character gets misinterpreted its not a result of poor writing/communication but rather a lack of experience or resonance with the person viewing them. which the author has basically no control over. the best you can do is be earnest and place beacons and people who get it will see it and people who dont wont. its a scary reflection of how real life functions but i think that makes it a little more special doesnt it . anyway i keep thinking abt flowey and chara

hello clyde its ok hi : ) yea its true that there will always be someone who doesnt really connect with what you're trying to say... i really wish i had the confidence to be like , Ok what i'm trying to say isn't even really the point here though. my biggest wish is to be confident enough in what i'm making to let my own intentions coexist separate from how they're recieved, and allow the discrepancy to exist and find beauty in that... but that's a hard thing, because you obviously want them to be as close to eachother as you can possibly get them...but like you said, so much of that relies on the life that the person who is recieving the art has lived and the way they choose to interface with the thing...its hard to accept that it's mostly out of your control. the artist realyl honeslty does so little of the legwork in the relationship i think.... i said this earlier but i try to have an attitude of like, no matter how they take it, if this can mean something to somebody then that's all i could ever ask for, if the emotional weight it has to me lands with someone else, that's all i could ask for, even if its a completley different kind of emotional weight. even if 5 other people look at it and it doesnt land, if it lands even once, then you won.

i think about flowey and chara a lot too toby fox reads as an example of a kind of person who is really confident about this type of thing....For a guy who has made a game so widely played that its inevitably going to be one of the most misinterpreted things in the world just by nature of how many people are trying to interpret it , he seems pretty at peace with that...that kind of earnesty and acceptance is where i'd like to get. thank sfor the socratic seminar ask hope youre well today

[talkinbouttinygames]

Guildlings, ”And I knew everything would be fine.“

Heads up, this issue is gonna be a little something different. Although it relates to a game I enjoyed, unlike previous issues this one isn’t meant to be a recommendation - partially due to being an exclusive title for a games subscription. Also, beware major spoilers for the video game Guildlings. On with the show!

When I was younger, and just beginning to get myself acquainted with the idea of creative writing for the first time since English class in first grade, I had an idea for a story. Comparatively, my ability to understand and craft metatextual horseshit was thoroughly trained even back then, and thus the story idea I came up with was this: a group of young adventurers headed by the protagonist all embark on some sort of Epic Quest. They face many battles as they travel, and just as many personal hardships, and after the hardest fight yet three-fourths of the way through the story that sets up the final conflict, the group gets a short period of rest in some cottage or other similar place. The fire is warm, the light is soothing, all of the adventurers much appreciate the time to just enjoy themselves together, and there, in that cottage, the protagonist remarks that in that moment ‘I knew everything would be fine’, and the story ends.

I could tell back then that I wasn’t nearly experienced enough as a writer to even dream of writing out the story at that moment, least of all the fact that its genre was one known for having longrunning polynovel series, so I kept it with me. I still haven’t written it. Even with much more experience, I haven’t even come close to experience with a story of that magnitude. In the intervening time I’ve had many other story ideas, some of which I’ve written, some of which I’ve saved for later (but an earlier later than this story) - maybe I’ll never write it. But it’s stuck with me. I’ve added on details to it in the time since then, and the ideas behind that story are ones that have predicted most of my creative writing output after.

A fortnight ago I finished playing Guidlings. It’s a very enjoyable and interesting game, and I highly recommend it to anyone who can shell out money for (or use up their free trail on) an Apple Arcade subscription. Shame, shame, I know. The game itself is a cellphone-themed JRPG where the protagonist, Coda, after finally getting a used phone (called a tome) from her sister Syb, boots it up only to find it’s auto-started an old Hero software app because, yeah, the milleaux of Guildlings is a magical realist one where Fantasy Cellphone heroes used to be a big era of the past, and their legacy is felt all around the world. The software assigns Coda the role of guildmaster - a figure who guides various guildlings on heroic quests like the player of any JRPG - and encases her in an unbreakable bubble on her bed until she can complete a Major Quest.

As being in an unbreakable bubble is a bit of a showstopper for anything else you have planned, she and her sister devise a ‘major quest’ in order to break the bubble as soon as possible - get Syb to a date with her boyfriend Haas and back home safely. However, the seemingly simple quest quickly turns more and more convoluted as it’s discovered that something’s been tearing out pieces of the world and sending them floating high into the sky, one of which is actually the two sisters’ house with Coda still inside.

Guildlings bills itself as a casual RPG, as combat is based on surviving to the end of a set number of turns without running out of health, or as the game calls it, battery. This by itself is a change from JRPGs I’ve played before, but another interesting design choice that belies Guildlings’ strengths is that experience points aren’t gained from fights, but from how Coda responds in conversation with the various friends she picks up as guildlings as the game goes by. And the characters are well-written enough to support this kind of focus - I love all of them, and getting to know them was a delight.

I played Guildlings in an amount of dedication and excitement that grew exponentially - first casually picking the game up, then actively prioritizing it for playing, and then knocking out every sidequest assigned to me in one big spree, before binge-playing the game as I felt it creep closer to the end. There I had reached a point where one of my favourite guildlings had just gone through character development and gained a new skill, with the entire guild hot on the trail of whatever was cutting up the world. The lift that would take the group further into a deep woods where the worldcutter seemed to be heading had the characters remark that it was likely going to be a while before I had the chance to swap out the party, so I deliberated for a few minutes on which guildlings I wanted to bring along, before embarking on the next stage of the journey... and the credits rolled.

I didn’t know what to think. I sat there, shocked, before opening up my save again, going through the motions, only to get the same result. Frustration welled up - I wanted to know what happened next, damn it! And then I began to laugh.

So that’s what it’s like.

A former friend who I once described my story to told me that if they had been the one reading it they’d have thrown the book onto the floor. I can’t really blame them. After another few minutes of double-checking with a different party, I went to the Guildlings wbesite. Though the website itself is fairly minimalistic, the press kit page describes the game as episodic - and upon checking the social media for the game while writing this, it appears that I actually had played the game up the second episode - so it seems the story will go farther than this.

Except that game development takes time. And I only ever buy entertainment subscriptions for a year. As much as I love the game, I can’t justify the 6 sawbuck pricetag for a year of Apple Arcade if it’s the only game I’ll play. And while I can just cancel and not re-instate the subscription ‘til the next installment’s out, the future is a busy place, and people move on from things. The thing about installment media is that so often, for so many people, the thing that comes along and takes people’s attention away from a serialized work in the in-between time doesn’t have to be better. It only has to be newer.

So maybe all that I’ll ever know of the story of Coda and her friends is everything up ‘til they start to really get into the meat of their journey. But regardless, I have the unshakeable feeling that for them, everything will be fine.

[bigskydreaming]

For the record: I fucking adore pre-Crisis Dick and Bruce and always have. And would have ZERO problems whatsoever with people focusing on the version of events surrounding Dick’s leaving home in that last reblog…if not for how often this is paired with the reactions and attitudes Dick was written as having in direct response to the OTHER version of events in which he was fired. Its literally just the mixing and matching that’s the problem for me. 

(And additionally for the record, this has absolutely nothing to do with that reblog or its OP or anything other than the fact that I’ve been trying to write this particular post for like two months and could never muster the spoons before now. But seriously, not really about that post at all, it just finally got the gears working in the direction I wanted them to go).

Anyway. Like I said, its the mixing and matching of cause and effects that are inherently just not MEANT to match up and go together, because the effect was not referring back to a specific cause, but rather a different one altogether....that’s the issue. That’s always been the issue.

Because when you leave out the key fact that Dick’s hostility in later stories is written with the explicit intention of referring back to stories in which Bruce instigated their estrangement, you make it look like Dick is just a spoiled brat who throws temper tantrums when things aren’t about him, when that is literally not the scenario he was being characterized that way in response to. 

My problem has never been with Dick and Bruce having a good relationship or Bruce being a good father who loves his eldest and expresses that in a myriad of ways. Its with the narratives that twist a specific sequence of cause and effect to shift the focus away from any possible reason Dick could have for being upset with Bruce….to spotlight SOLELY Dick’s upset, with all actual relevant context deliberately stripped away and replaced with the context of “Bruce is a good father who loves his eldest and never fails to express that in a myriad of ways.” 

And with the way this pattern has then been mirrored over the decades since it was initially applied by fandom to avoid dealing with the earliest stories where Bruce was written as abusive….and with the ripple effect consequentially being that it has become a fandom staple for the focus to be put entirely on what Dick’s doing at all times and never on WHY, so that he constantly keeps getting upheld as the problem even in situations where he was clearly the victim. Like with Spyral, like with Ric Grayson, like Mirage and tons of other times throughout this character’s history because once you establish a precedent and uphold it to the degree that we’ve so often seen with “Dick is really the mastermind of his own misery, because none of the things that he’s miserable about really happened to him, look see, Bruce is a fabulous father and always was”.....like, you get a lot of repetition at that point.

Because that, right there, ESPECIALLY when paired with the reality that the stories that this tendency is most commonly used to distract from, like Dick’s firing and NTT #55 and NW #30 and other issues where there were clear and obvious instances of abuse in how Bruce was written......intentionally or not, that replaces these narratives of abuse, but NOT with stories where everything’s all fine and dandy.....but rather, with a narrative of abuse apologism, even if it is largely unintentional.

Because when an abuse victim’s behavior in specific moments is called into question AT THE SAME TIME as the root cause of that specific behavior in those specific moments is shuffled offstage and KEPT out of focus, so that the abuse victim’s specific behavior is upheld as the ONLY issue at hand, leaving the abuser who they’re reacting to free to just keep on walking while no one pays them any attention now.....this is a fundamental cornerstone of abuse apologism in real life as much as in fiction. And it has nothing to do whatsoever if its INTENDED that way, its simply the reality of what results.

And its that last part that usually gets me and a lot of other fans so worked up because just like a lot of people turn to Bruce as their emotional support character because they relate to either his trauma or his coping mechanisms or a million other things about him.....there’s a shit ton of us who turn to Dick Grayson as our emotional support character because we relate to HIS trauma....which, like it or not, for many of us INCLUDES his at-times extremely shitty relationship with his parent.

The way people condescend about this in particular, acting like the ONLY POSSIBLE REASON anyone ever has for writing Bruce as abusive or writing fixes or codas or transformative response-takes on actual literal canon stories where he was written as abusive.....like, treating the situation as though people ONLY do this for the sake of angst porn or to smear Bruce’s character, like, they’re just in it for the drama and there’s absolutely no other possible reason to engage with those particular stories.....its aggravating as hell. 

Especially when this is paired with stuff like “oh, sorry I’m not addicted to making Bruce an abusive shithead, I have taste and am above click-bait angst lolol” like.....people really think they’re saying something there, but its probably not what they think they’re saying when you hold it up against the fact that most people saying this have ZERO problem with excessive angst and misery in literally any other context EXCEPT for ones where Bruce is to blame.

I like to refer back to the fact that people disparage any focus on Dick being fired as being ‘just a retcon’....because of how that coincides with the fact that Jason’s pre-Crisis stories were largely (though not completely) retconned as well. Because its not just the fact that Jason’s origin as an acrobat was retconned to him being a street kid that’s significant here....but rather, the fact that HOW he became Robin was retconned as well. Since originally, pre-Crisis, just like it was Dick who chose to move on from Robin himself, it was Dick who chose to make Robin the name Jason used as Batman’s partner as well. 

So I’d be fine with people being like “oh I don’t engage with the retcon of Dick being fired because it was just a retcon” except for the fact that they DO engage with a huge part of that retcon still. They engage with the part where Dick is bitter and resentful of not being Robin anymore, just not the REASONS for it, because they’ve supplanted all the history for the version of events where Dick is resentful with the history from when Bruce was nothing but supportive. And then ADDITIONALLY, they still engage with the part where it was Bruce who made Jason Robin, not Dick, as this is then linked in fanon to WHY Dick is allegedly so resentful of Jason as Robin.....even though that too is a retcon, and if they just went with the original story where Dick gave Jason his name and costume before Jason ever debuted as Robin for the very first time.....voila, no resentment or bitterness from Dick towards Jason would ever exist.

See what I’m saying? Its frustrating hearing over and over that people don’t like the firing retcon just because it was a retcon and they like the original....AT THE EXACT SAME TIME as they continue to interact with and engage with literally every part of the retcon EXCEPT for where Bruce did stuff that Dick understandably could be upset about.

And that people claim this is to avoid the more negative aspects of things between Bruce and Dick and make for a more positive family dynamic....except then they still KEEP Dick being estranged and not coming home and sniping at Bruce as WELL as keep Dick being resentful and bitter about Jason so its like.....Error 404, More Positive Family Dynamic Not Found, its almost like you’re totally fine with Dick being the fly in the family togetherness soup, just so long as Bruce comes across fine.

And this is the pattern we see over and over, and that’s why the frustration Dick Grayson’s fans have with a lot of the rest of fandom are not directly interchangeable with the frustrations fans of any character have when its their favorite character in the hotseat. Because its not the simple fact of other fans not liking his character or stories about his character, its the HOW and WHY of the reasoning, and how often that’s telling people who relate to parts of Dick’s narrative that include the uglier bits with Bruce, that like....the stories we’re upset about don’t matter, or aren’t relevant, or didn’t happen, lmfao.

Because here’s the thing: nobody has to engage with parts of canon they don’t like. We all come to these stories and characters for different reasons and if Bruce written abusively is totally counter to everything you love about the character, OF COURSE you don’t want to engage with those takes! Of course you find that out of character and view it as shitty writing that should never have happened. And that’s FINE!

But its not about whether or not you just choose not to engage with these stories or ones based on them.....its about how often people then TALK OVER the people who DO choose to engage with these stories or ones based on them.....and belittle their validity in existing at all, try and paper over the stuff that people are directly trying to address by way of fic by arguing points that aren’t in contention.....because we’re not disputing that there’s a version of events where Dick left home happily, we’re literally just saying THAT’S NOT THE STORY WE’RE TALKING ABOUT.

Like, if I go on a post where people are just having a good time with good wholesome father and son interactions between Bruce and Dick and say something like “wow wish this was real and that Bruce wasn’t actually an abusive shithead”....I’M THE ASSHOLE THERE. Lol, make no mistake. But the flip side of that is when people go on posts where people are talking about times and places and ways the dynamic between Bruce and Dick is shittier, and say stuff like “wow good thing this isn’t real and everyone with taste knows that this is just angst bait and Bruce is actually the Best Father”.....uh....what exactly is the difference here?

(Especially, and I CAN NOT stress the hilarious irony of this enough....when they then just go back to making another Whumptober entry. LOL that’s fine! The part that’s hilarious though is condescending to people who write abusive Bruce Wayne takes as just being in it for the misery business when like......umm. Like I have a point here, but I’ll let people reach it on their own. The dots though. They’re extremely connectable).

Also also, I would just like to point out that Batfandom in particular has always leaned heavily on the “sometimes people write things to cope” in regards to rape and incest fic, etc........so as long as certain corners of fandom are willing to lean heavily into that argument to defend any and all kinds of sexual content in fic, they might consider extending that very same logic to “sometimes people write things to cope” in regards to abuse survivors writing about abusive dynamics within the Batfam to work through their own shit with abuse.

But I’m just extremely tired with the “but its a retcon/its bad writing” arguments rearing their heads anywhere people are like “here is a canon story I would like to engage with because hey I thought fanfic was supposed to be about us being able to fix shitty canon or address shitty canon or just lampshade that shitty canon is shitty”.....particularly when that awareness of things being a retcon seem to be devoid of any awareness of how retcons WORK.

Because the thing is, we all know and get how retcons work. We understand that retcons act as an insertion point for a second version of events that later stories can refer back to or act upon INSTEAD of the original version of events.

This is why literally nobody in fandom writes stories about Jason as the Red Hood and tries to like....use them to make points about Jason’s childhood as a circus acrobat. Because everyone gets that the issue there isn’t whether or not Jason’s early childhood was retconned, and there only being ONE TRUE VERSION of that you can go with......no, people get that it doesn’t matter IF they for whatever reason prefer Jason’s original story.....literally no canon story about the Red Hood has been written with the intention of referring back to THAT origin instead of the street kid Jason origin. No story about the Red Hood is attempting to SAY anything about or DO anything with Jason the child acrobat instead of Jason the street kid.

So why does that awareness vanish the second that stories about how Dick RESPONDS to the retcon of being fired come under scrutiny....with people acting like they just don’t get how retcons work all of a sudden, and its fine to argue the point about how that second inserted sequence of events isn’t relevant and everyone knows this so clearly there’s no problem treating Dick’s reactions to those events as though they’re just reactions to Bruce and Dick fighting over college?

Every character has at least two versions of themselves, tbh. A canon version and a fanon version. And obviously with a shared universe as old and having passed through as many hands as DC has....you could argue that there are many canon versions of Dick’s character. 

I would argue however that there are two distinct fanon versions of Dick’s character as well. And to be clear, each of these fanon versions encompass a spectrum unto themselves, there’s a wide range of varying DEGREES of these two fanon takes.....but there’s two specific fanon Dick Grayson STARTING points.

One of these of course is the happy-go-lucky, air-headed, never worried about anything in his life, cereal-munching, fashion disaster, sails through everything without a care in the world other than his care for everyone but himself Dick Grayson. 

I mean, I don’t particularly care for that one, but it is what it is, and like I said, every character has that fanon take that has a lot of their fans going Lol wut a mess, like plz just no.

The fanon starting point I’m usually more concerned about is this one: the Dick Grayson who grew up in the lap of luxury but never really appreciated it or what he had, who is territorial and possessive, prone to fits of anger with very little provocation prompting people to walk on eggshells around him, who cares about other people but is often oblivious of his effect on them because he’s just so reckless, so impulsive, that frequently he jumps into situations without thinking about how other people will be impacted by what he says or does, and then is too proud to take it back.

The reason I’m bothered so much by THIS fanon Dick Grayson is because I flat out don’t believe we get to him by looking at canon....but rather by extremely selectively AVOIDING looking at canon, but only specific PARTS of canon.

And thus we get a Dick Grayson who never really appreciated his childhood or what he had.....as evidenced by the Dick Grayson who at times takes shots at Bruce for how he raised Dick......but without ANY examination of or awareness that the way those shots are written in canon, are with the intention of referring back to specific stories in which Bruce DID fuck up in certain ways while raising Dick....rather than a Bruce who was nothing but supportive and nurturing and did no wrong ever.

And thus we get a Dick Grayson who is territorial and possessive....as evidenced by the way he’s been less than graceful about ‘sharing’ Robin with certain of his siblings, or even Bruce himself......but without ANY examination of or awareness that the reason he’s written as ungracious about these things in these specific moments is because they were written with the intention of referring back to specific stories where something he built from the ground up - Robin - was stripped from him and given away without consulting him, or when he had to watch others enjoy a specific aspect of their relationship with Bruce that he was never (or at least not yet) ever offered himself......rather than just because Dick’s spoiled and selfish and never learned to share because he has only child syndrome.

And thus we get a Dick Grayson who is prone to fits of anger with very little provocation prompting people to walk on eggshells around him.....as evidenced by the way he blows up at certain people at certain times....but without ANY examination of what they said or did to him just BEFORE he blew up at them, or awareness that the reason he said awful things or displayed such anger is because he was specifically being written as reacting to things that very understandably PROMPT such anger, or he was written standing up for himself in the face of people saying or doing shitty things as well, or even outright attacking him......rather than just because Dick has a hair-trigger temper and anger management issues, and nobody’s ever said or done anything that justifies him getting angry at them ever.

And thus we get a Dick Grayson who is oblivious to his effect on other people because he’s just so reckless and impulsive that he jumps into situations without thinking about how they’ll be impacted....as evidenced by the way he does things like fake his death without thinking through what this will do to others......but without ANY examination of the fact that the stories in which he’s originally written MAKING the decisions to do these things, he DOES think through how others will be impacted, like how in NW #30 he did nothing BUT argue how it would affect his siblings and Barbara, or awareness of the fact that the reasons these arguments don’t change the outcome of events is because they’re deliberately written as not being ALLOWED to change the outcome, as Dick’s objections and concerns for other people are actively overriden and over-ruled.....rather than because he doesn’t make these objections in the first place or think through how other people will be impacted by things.

And thus we get a Dick Grayson who is just too proud to take things back when he fucks up.....as evidenced by the way that he either doesn’t apologize for certain things, or his apology seems hollow or insincere, or his apology doesn’t preclude him from doing something similar again later down the line....but without ANY examination of the fact that the reasons for all of these more often have to do with the fact that the crimes aren’t his to apologize for in the first place, its often him that’s owed the actual apology, and he simply won’t be ALLOWED to not get into the same situation in the future because the entire reason this pattern persists so frequently is because there’s zero sincere examination of what the pattern actually consists OF and just WHY it is that Dick in specific is so frequently stuck in this particular pattern....rather than just because Dick’s simply too proud to ever acknowledge when he fucks up.

Does that specific fanon interpretation of Dick Grayson sound at ALL familiar to anyone else?

And can you understand how the frustration with it could stem from not simply the fact that it exists, or that its not canon based....but rather the fact that it in order to exist at all, it REQUIRES building upon a foundational cornerstone of abuse apologism and outright ignoring and disregarding stories where he is the one victimized in order to prioritize that no blowback for the canon instances of abuse impact or reflect badly upon the actual victimizing characters in fandom conversations about these things?

Because speaking solely for myself now....this is and ALWAYS HAS BEEN, the ONLY issue I have in this matter. I have zero problems with good dad Bruce Wayne content, with prioritizing takes where Dick wasn’t actually fired, with simply not wanting to engage with canon or fan content where Bruce is abusive....none of these things have EVER been my problem or ever will be....as long as they like....don’t go hand in hand with making an abuse victim his own victimizer and everyone else his hapless victim whenever the specific instances of when he’s been a victim of other characters in canon comes up either in fic, headcanons, meta or just casual conversation.

[flowerfan2]

In 2020 my muse was inspired in many ways, resulting in over 150k words posted on A03.  It’s pretty interesting to look back on some of the highlights, in roughly chronological order:

Text Fic - I wrote a humor-centric series of fics almost exclusively in text messages.  It was freeing in a lot of ways and really cracked me (and hopefully some readers) up.  See Group Texts Are Forever.

Pandemic Fic – I had a lot of fun putting some of my old Glee loves together as graduate school roommates and playing around with how the lockdown’s lack of privacy would affect them (hint:  sexytimes).  See Private Time.  I also wrote an H50 pandemic one-shot, right at the beginning when it was all I could think about.  Shelter At Home.

Overlooked Challenge Fic - Did you ever write a fic that you felt like got lost in the shuffle? This can happen, especially in big fandoms.  I wrote a Good Omens fic that was one of many in a challenge, and I wish it had gotten a bit more love.  See I Get Along Without You Very Well.  (I should have called it Summer of Love, or Summer in the City.  Sometimes your titles get away from you.)

Coda Fic While The Show Was On The Air – I persisted with my second year of writing H50 codas while the show aired, which was a challenge given that the show had little coherency from week to week and tends to go off the deep end way too often, but it was fun to try to make sense of it and craft a story that gave us all some satisfaction and McDanno love.  Affinity.

H50 Prompt Fics -  I have a great discord group to thank for these, including a rather self-indulgent fic using a song about finding love at an auction (so sue me, writing should be fun, write what makes you happy).  See Love on the Auction Block, among others.  These also prompted my whipped cream fic (everyone should have one).  The Whipped Cream Incident.

Completed a WIP - I finished a multi-chapter H50 hurt/comfort WIP that was sort of over, but really needed one more little piece to be complete.  Gray Skies.

Sherlock Fics – I love reading Sherlock fic, but it’s not the easiest thing for me to write.  I thought this one was the best of the bunch:  The One That Remains.

Threesome – a first for me, and my first Schitt’s Creek fic, in response to an SC challenge. Even I can admit that this fic is freakin’ hot.  Me, You, and Stevie.

Schitt’s Creek – This new fandom has really gotten my writing juices flowing.  I wrote and posted one challenge fic (the threesome one), wrote a really satisfying multi-chapter hurt/comfort fic (my favorite thing to write), have two more challenge fics in the works, and am writing a Season 5 coda series, plus who knows how many more. See  Part of You Indefinitely (28k words, hurt/comfort); Season 5 Coda Series.

What did you enjoy writing (or reading) this year?  Tagging anyone who wants to play - please add to this post, reblog, comment, or come chat with me in any form you choose!

[echo-bleu]

Writing thoughts: March 2020

So...March is over. I won’t comment on RL, it hasn’t been as bad for me as for many people. Work-wise, it was almost entirely procrastinating on things I can’t afford to procrastinate on, so here’s to April being different (no).

Writing-wise. Pretty good overall word count (a bit over 45k), not incredibly consistent but also not that bad. I didn’t really write any of my longer WIPs though, and I’m not hugely happy about that. I posted a couple of stand-alones (Vacation, life would lose its touch and Cactuses0), quite impressively bringing my RNM fic count to 50 (!) and word count over 200k, but what I’m actually really happy and proud of is setting fire to our insides (for fun).

Setting fire is something that I started thinking about and writing back in October. It’s very important to me for a number of reasons, mainly the difficult themes it looks at, and I went at it real slow at first because it was so much to handle. I thought I’d write maybe 15k and post it in one go, but it grew far beyond anything I’d dreamed of. It’s hard. It was hard to write, and it’s likely hard to read. But I managed to write and post all 10 chapters of it, almost 40k, and I am really proud of it. Now onto the sequel :)

Now for April:

RNM coming back makes me want to write codas, but I’m containing myself because those often frustrate the hell out of me (I write what I want to happen on the show, and then it obviously doesn’t...). Also means that depending on how it goes, I might find or lose my mojo at random times. I live in AUs though. Canon is overrated (though it hasn’t been quite as bad as I feared with the first episode).

I need to continue my WIPs ASAP, Complicated Truths and Power Through (I feel terrible for taking so much time to update that one). And my Gifted WIPs as well, but that’s not going too well. There’s the sequel to setting fire, and I have a bunch of other fics in various stage of writing.

There’s the AU event for RNM this month, I’m not sure if I want to do anything specifically for it. I thought maybe a sequel to my Musketeers AU (it would fit under book, film and pre-1900s :D). Anyone want to read that?

Last April I used an Autistic Acceptance Month prompt list to write ficlets (was it last year? feels like ages ago). I don’t feel it this year, and I’m not advocating much at the moment, so I don’t know. The whole thing will probably fly under the radar anyway with what’s going on.

Oh, I do have a new AU I’m going to start posting soonish that has autistic!Michael. So I guess that will have to do. It’s called our hands clasped so tight, where Jesse was just a little bit more cruel in the shed and Rosa didn’t die...resulting in a whole bunch of changes.

We’ll see what the month brings, I suppose. I hope you’re all doing okay 💙

[pitiless-achilles-wept]

How to Endure: Cancer in the Time of Pandemic

[Originally posted March 28, 2020]

Hi all, Welcome to a very special birthday post from me in which I mostly think about what it's like to have cancer in the time of a global pandemic. As a way of topping my last year's celebration--where I was just about to start chemo--this year the world is sheltering in place under quarantine orders as an unprecedented public health disaster unfolds around us. (Sorry if my prediliction for dramatic narratives is in any way responsible for this fact...) I've been trying to work up the energy to post and let you know that I'm doing ok in this time of a global emergency...as ok as anyone I guess. I should say right off the bat that I am not, right now, immunocompromised, although I am at risk for it. We can all hope my system keeps bouncing back as it has done to keep me out of the most vulnerable group. (I do also have lung tumors, so a respiratory infection would automatically come with complications.)

Mostly, I spent a lot of the past two weeks wondering not if but how the pandemic was likely to affect my cancer treatment and I finally have enough information to confirm that, as of now, I'm still able to stay on the study and get chemo as planned this coming Thursday (April 2nd). I had been scheduled to get CT scans on Tuesday, March 31st to assess whether the treatment I started at the end of January has worked well enough for me to continue on the clinical trial. Although I get so many that it has perhaps come to seem routine, "scanxiety" is a very real phenomenon because these are how you learn whether things are going well (or well enough) or whether the disease has "progressed" and you have to regroup and try again with a new treatment plan. It had been since October that I had had a positive scan, with November showing a halting of improvement and December and January documenting the reversal of recovery. So obviously I was anxious and wanted them as soon as possible. Hearing reports of "non-essential" treatments being canceled, my Penn oncologist and I decided to try to move my scans up. After many phone calls and the efforts and good will of a number of doctors and hospital staff I was able to get them on the 23rd in Princeton (avoiding both the drive into Philly and the potential for exposure there). I'm glad we did because I learned yesterday that the treatment has been working fine; not great, but well enough that a) some tumors got somewhat smaller, b) no tumors got bigger, and c) no new metastatic sites were observed. Clinically, that's ruled as "stable disease" b/c in order for it to be a "partial response" you have to have your cancer go down by at least 30%. But reversing the trend of growth is still a win, and perhaps more time will see more results. And crucially, I do not have to investigate a new treatment option or try to change in the midst of what is soon to be the crest of the pandemic wave of cases. It's only relatively lucky, but I will take it! I have also seen reports in the cancer community about people having their chemo canceled as non-essential, which was shocking to me. I wrote last year about feeling like cancer should always be a "red ball" case that gets rocketed up the chain for testing, insurance approval, etc. and being shocked that it just wasn't. I understand that in some cases where a cancer patient is immunosuppressed, even attending a treatment at a hospital may pose greater risk than delaying it because the risk of infection is such a threat. But that is an extraordinary statement to make, amidst a daily barrage of extraordinary statements. Not all the stories were that clear-cut, though, so I was glad to hear from my doctor that as a stage 4 patient my scheduled treatments will not be bumped. I cannot have any visitors (and it's a pretty rough thing to do alone), but I can and will get through this. We all will. Because we all have in us more than we know. *** Shortly after my beloved grandma died (suddenly, from complications during surgery) my dad told me that one of the last things she said to him was that she would be ok because, "I'm a warrior." And she was. From a tiny place in the woods of east Texas, as a teenager she ran her family's store during the Great Depression and cared for a mess of brothers. When my daddy was eight years old, she and my grandfather picked up and moved away from a community where they knew everyone and had for generations to Dallas--an unfamiliar big city--because his younger brother had been born deaf and they wanted to send him to a special school. She founded and ran her own school, an income she supplemented with other jobs while my granddaddy was away walking pipeline for an oil company. When I knew her, late in her life, she had lost her sight but continued devouring books on tape and listening to the clues on "Jeopardy!". I was the first and only grandbaby and I was adored (not to say spoiled). The only times she actually saw me, before she was blind, I was just a few months old, chewing clean laundry in the basket in which someone had deposited me. As I grew up, she would feel my face, my hair, my ever-increasing height (and joke each time that "I'm going to have to saw your legs off!"). She would listen to my voice on Sunday phone calls; do crossword puzzles with me, as I read clues while lounging on her velour sofa; offer a "piece of Hershey" or a stick of spearmint gum from the same blue tin on the table in which she kept her cigarettes. She could still piece quilts by feel, even though she couldn't see the fabric, and advised me on the 1ft patchwork square I made for my doll's bed. She was weakened, exhausted, blind, and often in pain (which she tactfully never mentioned with me around). Except when she changed to a polyester pantsuit for visiting the doctor, she wore carpet slippers and housedress with a pack of Marlboros in the pocket that she lit from a gas burner, leaning on her walker by an ancient stove. No one knew quite how old she was when she died--our best guess is eighty-three--because she was also the kind of Southern lady who told no one her real age. She was a warrior in that, despite all that had happened in her life and all that was happening to her body, she kept on going. She endured.

When I search for inspiration to continue with treatments that make me feel worse than the disease, to fight so hard to save a body that's betraying me, to stay in an increasingly terrifying world that's betraying all of us, I think of her last words. I'm a warrior. I will endure. Believe it or not, you are also and you will too. In our struggles to continue with our lives in the face of monumental uncertainty and paralyzing anxiety, our greatest achievement is to keep on going. We fight (each of us different things) so that we may endure. It is not pleasant. It will reduce you to tears. You will exhaust all your emotional resources. But you will triumph. I have been fighting, existing in crisis mode, for 14 months and that is how I know that you can do it. You must grieve (and allow yourself time for it) for what you have lost, including a sense of safety or normalcy. But as you press on, you will find that inner strength or resiliency. I'm sorry that this is being demanded of you. It is not fair. But that will not change it. You may grieve, cry, fight, and struggle but, ultimately, you will accept that your way forward, your treatment, is to endure. I've reflected a lot on social media about how living with stage 4 cancer accidentally prepared me for the experience of the pandemic. I wrote a coda to an essay that will be published--likely this May--about the "Body as Data." Since the coda itself will probably change by then, the situating evolving as rapidly as it is, I thought I would share it here. Thank you for being with me and providing that community that has been the saving grace of treatment. Love, Bex *** As of writing this essay, it’s been 14 months since my diagnosis. I have tried three different treatments, two of which were clinical trials, one of which I am still enrolled in. It is approaching my thirty-sixth birthday [it's actually today - March 29th] and everyone is sheltering in place because of the coronavirus. I have lived more than a year now tolerating the same kind of existential uncertainty and fear of an alien invader in the body that the world as a whole is now experiencing. I have played my own doctor, watching my body for signs that a treatment is working, or that it is not, in much the same way. I have tried to anticipate what will happen if I become immunocompromised (as I currently am not, but am at risk for) and given up many of the pleasures that made my life better before (traveling, going out with friends) in the name of my health. I have offered my body up as data to research scientists with the goal of furthering not just my own treatment but the survival prospects of future patients. I did not know that throughout this year I was in training for a time when we would all of necessity be regarded as bodies with the potential to produce valuable data about the spread and effects of COVID-19. We are starved for numbers, for data on infections and recoveries and for statistical models that may relieve us of the uncertainty we feel about the future. I cannot provide that. But I can tell you to be cautious readers of data and statistics that speak with any pretense to authority right now, even though I crave them too. Cancer is invisible and so are viruses. This particular virus can inhabit the body but produce no symptom and live for days on surfaces. It may be in us. It may be in those we love. We are in the middle of the data. We are the data. Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor that “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place” (3). A pandemic transcends borders but does not do away with the kingdom of the sick. As someone already resident, I can say to you: welcome. The hardest thing about being here is the grief for what we have lost, including a sense of normalcy. The best thing, though, is what we may find: community in a time of crisis.

[dustedmagazine]

Dusted’s Decade Picks

Heron Oblivion, still the closest thing to a Dusted consensus pick

Just as, in spring, the young's fancy turns to thoughts of love, at the end of the decade the thoughts of critics and fans naturally tend towards reflection. Sure, time is an arbitrary human division of reality, but it seems to be working out okay for us so far. We're too humble a bunch to offer some sort of itemized list of The Best Of or anything like that, though; a decade is hard enough to wrap your head around when it's just your life, let alone all the music produced during said time. Instead these decade picks are our jumping off points to consider our decades, whether in personal terms, or aesthetic ones, or any other. The records we reflect on here are, to be sure, some of our picks for the best of the 2010s (for more, check back this afternoon), but think of what follows less as anything exhaustive and more as our hand-picked tour to what stuck with us over the course of these ten years, and why.

Brian Eno — The Ship (Warp, 2016)

You don’t need to dig deep to see that our rapidly evolving and hyper-consciously inclusive discourse is taking on the fluidity of its surroundings. In 2016, a year of what I’ll gently call transformation, Brian Eno had his finger on multiple pulses; The Ship resulted. It’s anchored in steady modality, and its melody, once introduced, doesn’t change, but everything else ebbs and flows with the Protean certainty of uncertainty. While the album moves from the watery ambiguities of the title track, through the emotional and textural extremes of “Fickle Sun” toward the gorgeously orchestrated version of “I’m Set Free,” implying some kind of final redemption, the moment-to-moment motion remains wonderfully non-binary. Images of war and of the instants producing its ravaging effects mirror and counterbalance the calmly and increasingly gender-fluid voice as it concludes the titular piece by depicting “wave after wave after wave.” Is it all Salman Rushdie’s numbers marching again? The lyrics embody the movement from “undescribed” through “undefined” and “unrefined’” connoting a journey toward aging, but size, place, chronology and the music encompassing them remain in constant flux, often nearly but never quite recognizable. Genre and sample float in and out of view with the elusive but devastating certainty of tides as the ship travels toward silence, toward that ultimate ambiguity that follows all disillusion, filling the time between cycles. The disconnect between stasis and motion is as disconcerting as these pieces’ relationship to the songform Eno inherited and exploded. The album encapsulates the modernist subtlety and Romantic grace propelling his art and the state of a civilization in the faintly but still glowing borderlands between change and decay.

Marc Medwin

Cate Le Bon — Cyrk (Control Group, 2012)

There's no artist whose work I anticipated more this decade than Cate Le Bon, and no artist who frustrated me more with each release, only to keep reeling me in for the long run. Le Bon's innate talent is for soothing yet oblique folk, soberly psychedelic, which she originally delivered in the Welsh language, and continued into English with rustic reserve.

Except something about her pastoralism seems to bore her, and the four-chord arpeggios are shot through with scorches of noise, or sent haywire with post-punk brittleness. In its present state, her music is built around chattering xylophones and croaking saxophone, even as the lyrics draw deeper into memory and introspection, with ever more haunting payoffs. It's as if Nick Drake shoved his way into the leadership of Pere Ubu. She's taken breaks from music to work on pottery and furniture-making, and retreats to locales like a British cottage and Texas art colony to plumb for new inspirations. She's clearly energized by collaboration and relocation, but there’s a force to her persona that, despite her introverted presence, dominates a session. Rare for our age, she's an artist who gets to follow her muse full time, bouncing between record labels and seeing her name spelled out in the medium typefaces on festival bills.

Cyrk, from 2012, is the record where I fell in, and it captures her at something close to joyous, a half smile. Landing between her earliest folk and later surrealism, it is open to comparison with the Velvet Underground. But not the VU that is archetypical to indie rock – Cyrk is more an echo of the solo work that followed. There’s the sharp compositional order and Welsh lilt of John Cale. Like Lou Reed, she makes a grand electric guitar hook out of the words “you’re making it worse.” The homebound twee of Mo Tucker and forbidding atmosphere of Nico are present in equal parts. Those comparisons are reductive, but they demonstrate how Cyrk feels instantly familiar if you’ve garnered certain listening habits. Songs surround you with woolly keyboard and guitar hooks, and one can forget a song ends with an awkward trumpet coda even after dozens of listens. The awkwardness is what keeps the album fresh.

She lulls, then dowses with cold water. So Cyrk isn't an entirely easy record, even if it is frequently a pretty one. The most epic song here, reaching high with those woolly hums and twang, is "Fold the Cloth.” It bobs along, coiling tight as she reaches into the strange register of female falsetto. Le Bon cranks out a fuzz solo – she's great at extending her sung melodies across instruments. Then the climax chants out, "fold the cloth or cut the cloth.” What is so important about this mundane action? Her mystery lyrics never feel haphazard, like LSD posey. They are out of step with pop grandiose. Maybe when her back is turned, there's a full smile.

Who are "Julia" and "Greta,” two mid-album sketches that avoid verse-chorus structure? Julia is represented by a limp waltz, Greta by pulses on keyboards. Shortly after the release, Le Bon followed up with the EP Cyrk II made up of tracks left off the album. To a piece, they’re easier numbers than "Julia" and "Greta.” The cryptic and the scribble are essential to how Cyrk flows, which is to say it flows haltingly.

This approach dampens her acclaim and her potential audience, but that's how she fashions decades-old tropes into fresh art. She’s also quite the band leader. Drummers have a different thud when they play on her stage. Musicians' fills disappear. She brings in a horn solo as often as she lays down a guitar lead. The closer tracks, "Plowing Out Pts 1 & 2," aren't inherently linked numbers. By the second part, the group has worked up to a carnival swirl, frothing like "Sister Ray" yet as sweet as a children's TV show theme. Does that sound sinister? The effect is more like heartbreak fuelling abandon, her forlorn presence informing everyone's playing.

Fuse this album with the excellent Cyrk II tracks, and you can image a deluxe double LP 10th anniversary reissue in a few years. Ha ha no. I expect nothing so garish will happen. It sure wouldn't suit the artist. In a decade where "fan service" became an everyday concept, Le Bon is immune. She's a songwriter who seems like she might walk away from at all without notice, if that’s where her craftsmanship leads. The odd and oddly comfortable chair that is Cyrk doesn't suit any particular decor, but my room would feel bare without it.

Ben Donnelly

Converge — All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph)

Here’s the scenario: Heavily tatted guy has some dogs. He really loves his dogs. Heavily tatted guy goes on tour with his band. While he’s on the road, one of his dogs dies. Heavily tatted guy gets really sad. He writes a song about it.  

That should be the set-up for an insufferably maudlin emo record. But instead what you get is Converge’s “All We Love We Leave Behind” and the searing LP that shares the title. The songs dive headlong into the emotional intensities of loss and reflect on the cost of artistic ambition. The enormously talented line-up that recorded All We Love We Leave Behind in 2012 had been playing together for just over a decade, and vocalist Jacob Bannon and guitarist Kurt Ballou had been collaborating for more than twenty years. It shows. The record pummels and roars with remarkable precision, and its songs maniacally twist, and somehow they soar.  

Any number of genre tags have been stuck on (or innovated by) Converge’s music: mathcore, metalcore, post-hardcore. It’s fun to split sonic hairs. But All We Love… is most notable for its exhilarating fury and naked heart, musical qualities that no subgenre can entirely claim. Few bands can couple such carefully crafted artifice with such raw intensity. And few records of the decade can match the compositional wit and palpable passion of All We Love…, which never lets itself slip into shallow romanticism. It hurts. And it ruthlessly rocks.  

Jonathan Shaw

EMA — The Future’s Void (City Slang, 2014)

When trying to narrow down to whatever my own most important records of the decade are, I tried to keep it to one per artist (as I do with individual years, although it’s a lot easier there). Out of everyone, though, EMA came by far the closest to having two records on that list, and this could have been 2017’s Exile in the Outer Ring, which along with The Future’s Void comes terrifyingly close to unpacking an awful lot of what’s going wrong, and has been going wrong, with the world we live in for a while now. The Future’s Void focuses more on the technological end of our particular dystopia, shuddering both emotionally and sonically through the dead end of the Cold War all the way to us refreshing our preferred social media site when somebody dies. EMA is right there with us, too; this isn’t judgment, it’s just reporting from the front line. And it must be said, very few things from this decade ripped like “Cthulu” rips.

Ian Mathers

The Field — Looping State of Mind (Kompakt, 2011)

Looping State of Mind by The Field

On Looping State of Mind, Swedish producer Axel Willner builds his music with seamlessly jointed loops of synths, beats, guitars and voice to create warm cushions of sound that envelop the ears, nod the head and move the body. Willner is a master of texture and atmosphere, in lesser hands this may have produced mere comfort food but there is spice in the details that elevates this record as he accretes iotas of elements, withholding release to heighten anticipation. Although this is essentially deep house built on almost exclusively motorik 4/4 beats, Willner also plays with ambient, post-punk and shoegaze dynamics. From the slow piano dub of “Then It’s White,” which wouldn’t be out of place on a Labradford or Pan American album, to the ecstatic shuffling lope of “Arpeggiated Love” and “Is This Power” with its hint of a truncated Gang of Four-like bass riff, Looping State of Mind is a deeply satisfying smorgasbord of delicacies and a highlight of The Field’s four album output during the 2010s.

Andrew Forell

Gang Gang Dance — “Glass Jar” (4AD, 2011)

Instead of telling you my favorite album of the decade — I made my case for it the first year we moved to Tumblr, help yourself — it feels more fitting to tell you a story from my friend Will about my favorite piece of music from the last 10 years, a song that arrived just before the rise of streaming, which flattened “the album experience” to oppressive uniformity and rendered it an increasingly joyless, rudderless routine of force-fed jams and AI/VC-directed mixes catering to a listener that exists in username only. The first four seconds of “Glass Jar” told you everything you needed to know about what lie ahead, but here’s the kind of thing that could happen before everything was all the time:

I took eight hours of coursework in five weeks in order to get caught up on classes and be in a friend's wedding at the end of June. Finishing a week earlier than the usual summer session meant I had to give my end-of-class presentations and turn in my end-of-class papers in a single day, which in turn meant that I was well into the 60-70 hour range without sleep by the time I got to the airport for an early-morning flight. (Partly my fault for insisting that I needed to stay up and make a “wedding night” mix for the couple — real virgin bride included — and even more my fault for insisting that it be a single, perfectly crossfaded track). I was fuelled only by lingering adrenaline fumes and whatever herbal gunpowder shit I had been mixing with my coffee — piracetam, rhodiola, bacopa or DMAE depending on the combination we had at the time. At any rate, eyes burning, skull heavy, joints stiff with dry rot, I still had my wits enough to refuse the backscatter machine at the TSA checkpoint; instead of the usual begrudging pat-down, I got pulled into a separate room. Anyway, it was a weird psychic setback at that particular time, but nothing came of it. Having arrived at my gate, I popped on the iPod with a brand new set of studio headphones and finally got around to listening to the Gang Gang Dance I had downloaded months before. "Glass Jar," at that moment, was the most religious experience I’d had in four years. I was literally weeping with joy.

Point being: It is worth it to stay up for a few days just to listen to ‘Glass Jar’ the way it was meant to be heard.

Patrick Masterson

Heron Oblivion — Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop, 2016)

Heron Oblivion by Heron Oblivion

Heron Oblivion’s self-titled first album fused unholy guitar racket with a limpid serenity. It was loud and cathartic but also pure beauty, floating drummer Meg Baird’s unearthly vocals over a sound that was as turbulent and majestic as nature itself, now roiled in storm, now glistening with dewy clarity. The band convened four storied guitarists—Baird from Espers, Ethan Miller and Noel Harmonson from Comets on Fire and Charlie Sauffley—then relegated two of them to other instruments (Baird on drums and Miller on bass). The sound drew on the full flared wail and scree of Hendrix and Acid Mothers Temple, the misty romance of Pentangle and Fairport Convention. It was a record out of time and could have happened in any year from about 1963 onward, or it could have not happened at all. We were so glad it did at Dusted; Heron Oblivion’s eponymous was closer to a consensus pick than any record before or since, and if you want to define a decade, how about the careening riffs of “Oriar” breaking for Baird’s dream-like chants?

Jennifer Kelly

The Jacka — What Happened to the World (The Artist, 2014)

Probably the most prophetic rap album of the 2010s. The Jacka was the king of Bay rap since he started MOB movement. He was always generous with his time, and clique albums were pouring out of The Jacka and his disciples every few months. Even some of his own albums resembled at times collective efforts. This generosity made some of the albums unfocused and disjointed, yet what it really shows is that even in the times when dreams of collective living were abandoned The Jacka still had hopes for Utopia and collective struggles. It was about the riches, but he saw the riches in people first and foremost.

This final album before he was gunned down in the early 2014 is full of predictions about what’s going to happen to him. Maybe this explains why it’s focused as never before and even Jacka’s leaned-out voice has doomed overtones. This music is the only possible answer to the question the album’s title poses: everything is wrong with the world where artists are murdered over music.

Ray Garraty

John Maus — We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (Upset The Rhythm, 2011)

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves by John Maus

Minnesota polymath John Maus’ quest for the perfect pop song found its apotheosis on his third album We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves in 2011. On the surface an homage to 1980s synth pop, Maus’ album reveals its depth with repeated listens. Over expertly constructed layers of vintage keyboards, Maus’ oft-stentorian baritone alternately intones and croons deceptively simple couplets that blur the line between sincerity and provocation. Lurking beneath the smooth surface Maus uses Baroque musical tropes that give the record a liturgical atmosphere that reinforces the Gregorian repetition of his lyrics. The tension between the radical ironic banality of the words and the deeply serious nature of the music and voice makes We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves an oddly compelling collection that interrogates the very notion of taste and serves an apt soundtrack to the post-truth age.

Andrew Forell

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society — Mandatory Reality (Eremite, 2019)

Mandatory Reality by Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society

Any one of the albums that Joshua Abrams has made under the Natural Information Society banner could have made this list. While each has a particular character, they share common essences of sound and spirit. Abrams made his bones playing bass with Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Mike Reed, Fred Anderson, Chad Taylor, and many others, but in the Society his main instrument is the guimbri, a three-stringed bass lute from Morocco. He uses it to braid melody, groove, and tone into complex strands of sound that feel like they might never end. Mandatory Reality is the album where he delivers on the promise of that sound. Its centerpiece is “Finite,” a forty-minute long performance by an eight-person, all-acoustic version of Natural Information Society. It has become the main and often sole piece that the Society plays. Put the needle down and at first it sounds like you are hearing some ensemble that Don Cherry might have convened negotiating a lost Steve Reich composition. But as the music winds patiently onwards, strings, drums, horns, and harmonium rise in turn to the surface. These aren’t solos in the jazz sense so much as individual invitations for the audience to ease deeper into the sonic entirety. The music doesn’t end when the record does, but keeps manifesting with each performance. Mandatory Reality is a nodal point in an endless stream of sound that courses through the collective unconscious, periodically surfacing in order to engage new listeners and take them to the source.

Bill Meyer

Mansions — Doom Loop (Clifton Motel, 2013)

I knew nothing about Mansions when I first heard about this record; I can’t even remember how I heard about this record. But I liked the name of the album and the album art, so I listened to it. Sometimes the most important records in your decade have as much to do with you as with them. I’d been frantically looking for a job for nearly two years at that point, the severance and my access Ontario’s Employment Insurance program (basically, you pay in every paycheck, and then have ~8 months of support if you’re unemployed) had both ran out. I was living with a friend in Toronto sponsoring my American wife into the country (fun fact: they don’t care if you have an income when you do that), feeling the walls close in a little each day, sure I was going to wind up one of those kids who had to move back to the small town I’d left and a parent’s house. There were multiple days I’d send out 10+ applications and then walk around my neighbourhood blasting “Climbers” and “Out for Blood” through my earbuds, cueing up “La Dentista” again and dreaming of revenge… on what? Capitalism? There was no more proximate target in view. That’s not to say that Doom Loop is necessarily about being poor or about the shit hand my generation (I fit, just barely) got in the job market, or anything like that; but for me it is about the almost literal doom loop of that worst six months, and I still can’t listen to “The Economist” without my blood pressure spiking a little.

Ian Mathers

Protomartyr — Under Colour of Official Right (Hardly Art, 2014)

Under Color of Official Right by Protomartyr

By my count, Protomartyr made not one but four great albums in the 2010s, racking up a string of rhythmically unstoppable, intellectually challenging discs with absolute commitment and intent. I caught whiff of the band in 2012, while helping out with editing the old Dusted. Jon Treneff’s review of All Passion No Technique told a story of exhilarant discovery; I read it and immediately wanted in. The conversion event, though, came two years later, with the stupendous Under Color of Official Right, all Wire-y rampage and Fall-spittled-bile, a rattletrap construction of every sort of punk rock held together by the preening contempt of black-suited Joe Casey. Doug Mosurock reviewed it for us, concluding, “Poppier than expected, but still covered in burrs, and adeptly analyzing the pain and suffering of their city and this year’s edition of the society that judges it, Protomartyr has raised the bar high enough for any bands to follow, so high that most won’t even know it’s there.” Except here’s the thing: Protomartyr jumped that bar two more times this decade, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t do it again. The industry turned on the kind of bands with four working class dudes who can play a while ago, but this is the band of the 2010s anyway.

Jennifer Kelly

Tau Ceti IV — Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending (Cold Vomit, 2018)

Satan, You're The God of This Age But Your Reign is Ending by Tau Ceti IV

This decade was full of takes on American primitive guitar. Some were pretty good, a few were great, many were forgettable, and then there was this overlooked gem from Jordan Darby of Uranium Orchard. Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending is an antidote to bland genre exercises. Like John Fahey, Darby has a distinct voice and style, as well as a sense of humor. Also like Fahey, his playing incorporates diverse influences in subtle but pronounced ways. American primitive itself isn’t a staid template. Though there are also plenty of beautiful, dare I say pastoral moments, which still stand out for being genuinely evocative.

Darby’s background in aggressive electric guitar music partly explains his approach. (Not sure if he’s the only ex-hardcore guy to go in this direction, but there can’t be many.) His playing is heavier than one might expect, but it feels natural, not like he’s just playing metal riffs on an acoustic guitar. But heaviness isn’t the only difference. Like his other projects, Satan is wonderfully off-kilter. This album’s strangeness isn’t reducible to component parts, but here are two representative examples: “The Wind Cries Mary” gradually encroaches on the last track, and throughout, the microphone picks up more string noise than most would consider tasteful. It all works, or at least it’s never boring.

Ethan Milititisky

Z-Ro — The Crown (Rap-a-Lot, 2014)

When singing in rap was outsourced to pop singers and Auto Tune, Z-Ro remained true to his self, singing even more than he ever did. He did his hooks and his verses himself, and no singing could harm his image as a hustler moonlighting as a rapper. He can’t be copied exactly because of his gift, to combine singing soft and rapping hard. It’s a sort of common wisdom that he recorded his best material in the previous decade, yet quite apart from hundreds of artists that continued to capitalize on their fame he re-invented himself all the past decade, making songs that didn’t sound like each other out of the same raw material. The Crown is a tough pick because since his post-prison output he made solid discs one after each other.

Ray Garraty

[otsukare-katsukare]

How not to feel like there are ants under your skin when you realise you’re in the presence of someone more talented than you will ever be: a beginner’s guide

I know I’m very late to the party but I just played (watched?) The Beginner’s Guide and I need to set this down.

I went into the game with no idea that it was a mockumentary, and really only twigged that Coda wasn’t real in the final act, which might make me incredibly thick or it might make Wreden a very talented storyteller, I don’t know, but either way the effect was that this story-thing got in me in a personal way that I haven’t really felt from media in a while. I felt, oh, what’s the word, seen by it, or something, I guess. 

this is long. I don’t want to waste people’s valuable scrolling time, so

Davey in the Beginner’s Guide cannot imagine living his life unmotivated by validation, which is why he doesn't understand Cody and why he makes the narrative in the first place. He sees a friend creating fantastic, inventive and - to his mind - meaningful art, none of which is shown to the public, and this drives him insane. He never says as much in the narration, and seeing as this is the guy who made the Stanley Parable I don’t know if it’s quite the emotion he’s reaching for, but at least for me, I completely associate this feeling with my intense competitiveness and insecurity about writing. Specifically how that translates into a feeling of agonising pins and needles all over me, the moment I’m confronted by something good written by someone young, especially when that person is creating for themselves only. When they say something like, I never show my writing to anyone, or, I’ve filled hundreds of notebooks with words no one will ever see, it’s like a stake being driven slowly through my chest. Something about it, though it has nothing to do with me, makes me feel like a complete fraud, like I’ve missed the boat somewhere, and that’s the whole emotion behind this game. It changes into a need to make Coda into a project, a problem for Davey to solve, so that Davey can be the one in control, so that he can have something to be proud of: I figured out my friend. I fixed my friend. And of course, that makes it so much worse. 

The way I see it, Davey has two essential beliefs, which are challenged by Coda at the end of the story, the first of which takes precedence in the narrative, but the second of which is just as important, I think. 1. Coda is broken, and it’s Davey’s job to fix him. 2. Coda’s art, despite (or probably because of) its incomprehensibility, is better than Davey’s. 

The latter of these beliefs is not stated directly in the game, but it makes sense of everything to me. These two beliefs get tangled together so that a familiar fallacy is reached, that of the suffering artist - Coda’s art is great because he is depressive, and the fact that he never shows his art to anyone is a mind-boggling tragedy. But such a beautiful tragedy. Davey can be the deus ex machina. That’s how Davey can reconcile his own inadequacy, by inserting himself into the story, because once he faces himself, once Coda cuts himself off and removes his source of Davey’s validation, he finds nothing, no creativity, nothing to give. And he now has the additional terrible guilt of taking Coda away from the world too, leaving them both in the dark. It’s like Amadeus, if Salieri only intended to help Mozart, instead of destroying him. (Salieri being another figure I’ve expressed an uncomfortable affinity for, if only for the fact that he describes the sensation of hearing Mozart for the first time, without a trace of metaphor as pure bodily pain. Looking at his hands and seeing how useless they are, how incapable, dull blocks of flesh too blunt to produce the aural poetry that comes so effortlessly from his rival. We’ve all been there, pal.)

So the Beginner’s Guide called me out for my obsessive competitive streak, but it went further than that, and called me out for the thing I’ve always kind of used as a justification for all that bitterness, for the privileged life I never earned, for my own inadequacy as a creator, which is my need to help others.

I used to do the stupidest things sometimes. I think I was eight, this one time. I don’t remember what the context was, not even the country it happened in, but I remember that when I did it, I thought - or I was told - that this was a recurring pattern of behaviour I needed to stop. And I thought, why do I always do this? The thing was this: there was some kind of party, and there was a girl, younger than me. I must have taken a liking to her. I have zero memory of what she looked like, what we talked about, and why she meant so much to me, but I do remember that at some point in the evening she lost a plush bunny. We were outside for most of the function, a large garden wreathed with shrubbery and trees. And for at least half an hour, I circled this garden, frantically searching for this god damned bunny. The sense memories stay with you the most, and more than anything visual or factual I remember being out of breath from running round the place so many times, the wet leaves crunching underfoot and in my hands as I scoured every crevice. I was certain that it was for some reason up to me to find this toy, and feeling both indignant at the world that no one else seemed to care, and perversely gleeful that I cared enough to do it. 

I never found the toy, because it turned out to be in her father’s pocket. She’d given it to him and forgotten. I was so wrapped up in my idea of this person’s problem, the idea that I could solve their problem, the idea that only I could do it, that I wasted everyone’s time, not least my own. I don’t run round gardens anymore, but I think this drive is still in me. I’ve shaped it into simply being a good friend and listener and giver of pep talks or whatever, and I have pretty much made peace with the idea that I’m doing it for the validation, but this game threw me in for a loop, getting me scared of what it all means, making me second guess my actions and my tendency to do what the narrator does, to make people projects when I cannot finish my own. To know that I fixed someone, and to feel like I can carry the mantle of the therapist friend. 

When it got to the final level and Coda’s message, I was still under the impression that the whole thing was real and seeing it knocked the wind out of me. The idea of trying something like this, realising how utterly and devastatingly wrong you got it, and having to live with a broken friendship as a result, though it’s something I haven’t specifically had to go through, felt so viscerally plausible and close to home. All this selfishness bites you in the rear some day. And for it not only to be the consequence of selfishness, but the consequence of selfishness believed to be selflessness, that’s even more terrifying. Because lord knows I second guess myself enough as it is, whatever I’m doing. 

We all do, right? This story is going to be really good. Oh, wait, what if it’s terrible. I just had a good and productive conversation with someone I care about. Except, hang on, what if what I said was actually extremely insensitive and they’re just trying to forget it now? I’m sure Catbells isn’t anywhere near Coniston, but that person just said it was, and actually, you know what, they’re probably right. That vertigo, that swooping stomach-turned over sensation when you can just feel the foundations of something you believed in shudder beneath your feet, I’m sick of it. I’d like to be certain of what I’m doing for once. If I had any certainty at all, I could get on with my work. I could write and write until I was finally good enough to feel happy with myself, instead of sitting in fear of my documents. I would probably do a better job of being the therapist friend too, not having this overhanging fear that I’m somehow doing the wrong thing.

I don’t even know what I wrote this for, to be honest. Most of it doesn’t make sense, and I was hoping it would add up to something, that these disjointed thoughts would come together. As I have so often done, I leapt in with great vague ideas, and have ground to a halt as the picture became clearer. And if I were forced to admit the true reason for writing it, it would be that I thought it made for a good written piece, something that someone could read and think “wow. this person just wrote something good.” because god forbid, right? god forbid I ever do anything in life and have it not be for the validation

[quietdaysco]

The Process: Research

Ever wanted to make something, but didn’t know where to start? We too. In this second installment of The Process, we’ve finished forming our idea and now it’s time to inform it. 

2. Research 

Mind you, this isn’t a “step two” per se. Here’s the big kicker on what we soon discovered about this part of development:

Research is an active, ongoing process, whose goals change throughout pre- to post-production.

We may have created the idea of Primrose Path but our research didn’t stop at the end of pre-production, as if to say we’ve got everything we need and now it’s time to dive into making it. During production, we still had questions. Research is the only reason that, if you stopped us on the side of the street, the topics of future biomaterials and methods, dynamic UI design, and historic architectural eras could all pop up in the same conversation.  

And all of that is valuable information to us, because researching is relevant in every area of the process! But what kind of information did we look for? 

Our five categories are Community Canvassing, Story & Character Development, Team Management, Game Design, and Marketing. 

Let’s break it down:

A. Community Canvassing

Identifying and learning our target audience.

Identify personal wants from our game.

We have to stop and think: what kind of game do we want to play? If you want something, chances are, there’s a group of people out there who want the same thing. They are our audience.

Identify the type of media and genres relevant to our game.

Our video game is a visual novel, and its market genres are predominantly adult, drama, and romance. Because the medium of visual novels originated and is popular in Japan, we use the term otome (Japanese for “maiden” or “girl”) or otoge (portmanteau of “otome” and “game”) in our genre list. So, our game is an adult, drama, romance, otome—or focused on a female main character who deals with a cast of potential male partners.

Case any census data and statistics on target and related communities’ research blogs.

This one was important to us because we like considering quantifiable data that gives us the bigger picture. Statistics blogs and databases helped us get a clearer view of different demographic subsets of the visual novel community. It’s also important that we read material about sister media like the general interactive fiction community, as both deal with reader input and resultant story-branching.

Inquire fans in those genres for game recommendations and any opinions.

Community hubs are a click away. We connected with others via forums like Reddit and instant messenger servers like Discord that specifically revolve around fans and game developers of the visual novel medium.

Read game reviews in those genres by other fans and critics.

The most interesting thing for us when we read these reviews is not so much what someone did or didn’t like, but what aspects of the game they focused on, and what other topics they decided to connect to their original answer. You may be surprised how people decide to expand on their answer and where tangents lead, which is very telling, valuable associations.

Connect with other developers for support and networking.

The Western visual novel community is a small community, but commercial success is not confined to said community. Building a rapport with other hardworking devs is important, as it follows us in such a small space—for better or worse. There’s a lot to learn from the wider indie development community, too.

B. Story & Character Development

Creating an organic experience.

Real-world parallels to inspire for or reference in game direction.

Whether we take a trip to the city with a camera and sketchbook, rent and buy books from libraries and bookstores, or visit Google Maps in satellite view, we are pulling up everything we need to inform our game’s locations, people, and events.

Observe and converse with people.

The behaviors, quirks, appearances, opinions, and feelings of people are abundant, and it’s not until we observe and sometimes familiarize ourselves with others that we catch some of the concerted expressions that create a nuanced individual. 

Interacting with others is first-hand experience, and listening to or reading others’ experiences is second-hand. If we can't write from first or second-hand experience, we must inform ourselves with other sources, as it’s crucial in writing characters with whom we may not directly or easily identify. We often defer to interviews and documentaries to start.

Psychology and sociology research.

Sometimes reading from experts about general trends and triggers of the human condition makes it easier for us to understand, verify, and better portray things like addictions, behavioral disorders and mental illnesses, fetishes, and cultural stigmas for our character development and world-building. Though this isn’t limited to negative or abnormal things we cannot identify. It can also be in what ways the values of a person or society evolve, or how players interact with video game avatars!

Read and deconstruct critically-acclaimed novels in our genres

It’s understood that if people want to become better writers, they have to become better readers. Being able to settle down with some traditionally-published, well-received books relevant to our interests will help us build on our knowledge of suitable writing conventions, as well as analyzing broader narrative elements, like plot pacing. We even have a list of writing resources saved to help us break it all down!

C. Team Management

Standardizing ways to increase workflow efficiency.

Pipeline development.

Know a general end-date to keep in mind for the finished product. Setting a scope for our project and a timeline for production challenges us to keep on task as we work towards that date. We’ve set ours up by month and refer to that document for phase estimation.

Time management, task delegation, task tracking, and work logs.

Whether your team is me, myself, and I, or made of employees and contractors, it’s important to stay synchronized and keep record of that progress. Quiet Days has our own GitScrum board to help us with assigning tasks, timing how long a task takes us versus the amount of time we expected it to take, and streamlining the process from start to finish. It also keeps track of percentage of overall project completion and key performance indicators (KIP), or the metrics of a user’s personal contribution and work ethic over a period of time. There are a plethora of other task management sites and apps available to use too.

Style guides to standardize writing and art.

Between the two of us at Quiet Days, we both work on the 2D art and writing, and we both default to different visual and writing styles. So, we’ve set up and continue to add to our respective guides, keeping the art style and narration and character portrayals consistent. This is especially helpful should we take up other artists or writers, so that they can easily assimilate into our workflow. 

Account delegation for social media and company correspondence.

Understanding who does what for cohesion under a company brand is important for its image. We share all accounts under the company name, so technically both of us have access, which works well for our team of two. It’s early, but so far “delegation” seems to have taken on a natural division between Coda and Elm—the former taking to micro-blogging, and the latter to streaming and forum correspondence. While this dynamic may change in the future, we both refer back to each other under the Quiet Days brand.

Potential for contracting help.

We’ve considered that there may be a time in production where a helping hand is needed. Additional considerations like the freelancing market and pricing are kept in mind for the future. 

D. Game design 

Scrutinizing game elements from a developer’s lens.

Consider for which platform to design.

PC? Mobile? Console? Cross-platform? While we are primarily designing our game to be played on PC, should we want to capitalize on popular handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch, for example, things like game engines and builds, game optimization, resolution, encryption, touch capabilities, and content guidelines for their private company platform all need to be considered. These things change between platforms.

Consider designing globally.

There are people different from us who would like to enjoy our game too. We consider the user experience (UX) for things like the possibility of game translations and using fonts types that read well for different language characters like Chinese or Russian. We also consider how to customize the experience to accommodate for players with different cognitive abilities, which falls under accessibility features.

Play what’s commercially un/successful and community-recommended.

We can learn a lot from both good and bad game design, and what the community mostly consumes. We engage with these games and take notes on graphics, accessibility features, user interface (UI) designs, game mechanics, soundtracks, and overall presentation and aesthetic. What did we like and what would we have preferred?

Stay updated on game design development tips from industry heads

There are people who have been doing it much longer than we have, and a number of them are setting industry standards. We can learn a thing or two in how they handle a problem and find solutions.

E. Marketing 

Methods for optimizing outreach and return of investment.

Social media strategies for engaging and involving our audience.

We’ve laid the groundwork for character accounts on social media to launch as a way for our audience to interact with characters from our game. While role-playing is a fun marketing and meta world-building device, we’re exploring other cool avenues like exploitable images and audience challenges to drum up future participation. 

Types of advertising and promotional materials.

There may come a time when word-of-mouth may not be enough. Would we consider purchasing ad space on different sites for greater visibility, or spend money on “promoting” features on social media? Would we commission or create and sell promotional merchandising for our audience?

Crowdfunding platforms and prospects.

Popular ones like Patreon, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo all have their draws and their drawbacks for creators and supporters alike. For what expenses would we crowdfund? What additional rewards would we provide for the financial support, if any? Do we want financial support for our project, or continual financial support as a company creating content? Some developers don’t actually use these platforms to request funding, but as another way of advertising their game. Would we do that?

Cross-exposure with other devs.

Interviews, public events, and collaborations with other game developers is a win-win situation with everyone involved. We want to be able to not just network, but allow each other to introduce our products and skills to a greater audience, creating and sharing a unique, dedicated fanbase in the overlap.

The Takeaway

At the time of this post, we’re still in the production phase, so some of this information isn’t applicable right now, but no knowledge is wasted: these things will always be handy to know and consider for later. We’re making our decisions in lieu of—and even despite some of—our research, in order to create a game that we’ll love and hope others will too. It’s important that as a game developer, you too keep yourself informed!

Speaking of ongoing research, Western otome is a largely indie market with many small, tenacious teams and hardly any corporate studios. If you are a Western otome developer, please contact us! We’d love to interview you in a Q&A, get your input on your process, and feature your story on our blog! 

[voroxpete]

Here is a completely unprompted rant about the ending of RWBY Volume 6

So, I wanted to take a moment to talk about how much I loved this season finale and why, and most importantly what kind of lessons it offers to writers.

In general, RWBY has always suffered from a tendency to let procedural plotting ("what is the immediate, physical problem in front of the characters and how do they overcome it?") drive the action while dramatic plotting tends to get slotted in around it. The ending of the first two seasons are both good examples, leading up to really badass fight scenes that ultimately do very little to express or advance the characters and their personal journeys.

In more recent volumes we saw attempts to rectify this, but the writers approached the problem by simply taking the action that resulted from their procedural plotting and awkwardly shoving dramatic resolution into it. The end of season 5 is a great example of this. The fight in Haven is a fucking mess. Everyone just sort of awkwardly pairs off in ways that don't make any logical sense, it's just done to create opportunities for ham-fisted character moments. It's so bad that in a couple of shots you can actually see Ren and Nora standing around very obviously doing nothing because the desperate need to force character moments into the fight means that its not their turn to get involved yet.

The ending of season 6 on the other hand... Oh my God, this was fantastic. What's key to how well this ending works is the multitude of ways in which the action and the themes directly support each other. We start with the action splitting in two, leading to the mech fight and the Adam fight... But notice how these scenes aren't actually disconnected. Everything about Cordovin - a character really only introduced for this moment - is designed to reflect and echo the elements of Adam that we're being asked to focus on. Cordovin is an abusive person. Not in the sense of abusive relationships specifically, but she uses her power to bully people. She's a narcissist, and even her physical design is meant to emphasise this dichotomy. She's a tiny person who loves to look down on others.

In this context, her misuse of the battlemech makes complete sense. Sure, she could have sent her airforce, and that would have made more sense, but it wouldn't have satisfied her personal need to be the bully, to be (literally) big and powerful and in control.

And all of this reflects perfectly in Adam. Just like Cordovin, he's ultimately small, and weak, and desperate to be powerful and in control. Even the damage that he's suffered plays into this. He's been hurt, and now he hurts other people to regain the control that he lost.

This plays out in his fight with Blake and Yang through some especially on point dialogue choices. The line "I wouldn't have to be doing this if you would just behave" left zero doubt where they were going with all of this, and was a bold choice that really raised the stakes for the scene. The decision to really lean into "Adam is an abusive ex" took a fight that was already excellent on a technical level and turned it into something really powerful. It's also kind of neat that both sequences lead up to a moment where the heroes give the villain a chance to stand down, and both fights conclude with the villain being astonished when the hero literally disarms them. Again, all of these parallels are reinforcing the central themes. The story being told through these two action sequences is very explicitly one of the characters (notably, women) standing up to powerful abusers. That shot of Ruby alone in front of Cordovin's mech, and the follow up where her eyes narrow in disappointment is seriously fucking powerful, and her smallness in the face of her bully perfectly reflects the way Yang and Blake feel facing Adam. Reflections on reflections on reflections. It's brilliant.

This is how you craft an action sequence that is also a character moment. Not by shoehorning character moments into a fight, but by writing action that parallels and enhances your dramatic themes.

It's not perfect of course. The arrival of Grimmzilla feels a little sudden and a touch forced, but it creates an excellent moment, allowing the writers to kind of recap and summarize everything that's just happened. We've seen, through the Cordovin fight, how Ruby has outgrown her uncle (a theme that's been playing out throughout this season), and giving her this moment to really emphasise what the character has become is a really nice way to allow those themes to breathe. It allows us to see the team reunited (something we've been desperately needing ever since the end of season 3), and really foregrounds the counterpoint to this theme of standing up to abusers, which is that you can't easily do it alone. One of the most dangerous behaviours of abusers is that they isolate people. While Ruby may be the only one with the special plot power that can slow down the Grimm attack, everyone is a part of helping her do it. There's even a great little moment where we see Blake, lacking any ability to physically assist, is still involved, acting as an emotional support for her friends, giving them whatever strength she can (it's also fun to note how "giving others strength" is literally Jaune's semblance, and it's cool to see the ways that got used throughout these scenes; there's a really interesting thematic tension between Jaune and Qrow specifically as opposing models of masculinity, and both the fight with Cordovin and the Grimmzilla scene clearly foreground the ways in which Qrow's model of trying to be the powerful patriarch figure who puts everything on his own shoulders is anything but helpful, whereas Jaune's masculinity - supportive, loving, kind - is the one that makes a difference, as Qrow discovers when he stops trying to carry everyone and starts, as Calvera puts it, catching them when they fall).

Again, thematically, this is more than just action, and that's why it resonates. From a purely mechanical point of view it's easy to see the Grimmzilla fight as disappointing, but that completely neglects the obvious purpose of that moment. We've already had two giant action sequences, the story didn't need another big blowout fight. What it needed was a coda, and Grimmzilla did that job beautifully.

All in all season 6 has made me excited about this show again, but more importantly I think that it offers a lot of great lessons to writers. People often criticise the writing in RWBY in very glib surface level ways; complaining that a certain line was cheesy, a certain moment was predictable. They're not wrong; the Blake and Yang fight definitely had a few moments where the dialogue choices felt painfully obvious or perhaps a little awkward. But writing is so much more than just plotting and a few lines of dialogue, and in so many of the ways that count the writing in this finale was superb and well worth studying.

[todrobbins]

brilliant trees sessions . Berlin . 1983 from Samadhisound on Vimeo.

Brilliant Trees sessions . Berlin . 1983 . raw camera footage

This raw footage shot on, what’s now seen as a primitive camera but which was a top of the line consumer product at the time, a massive, unwieldily object, was documented by Yuka Fujii. I’ve put the material together in the order it was recorded to give a very general idea of the process of development. It’s been my practice to work closely with each individual musician since my earliest days with the band in an attempt to get the best results. I’ve always maintained the band prepared me for working with others, gave me the confidence to work with my peers, the ‘newcomers' in the room all being older than myself (25). At this point in time Ryuichi’s english was very rudimentary (this was to change radically within the next ten years or so) so we had to communicate as economically as possible, or rather, 95% of the exchange was purely musical. Yuka and Peter Barakan would step in when greater explication was needed. Holger’s english remained consistent throughout the years i knew him. Again, subtleties could be lost so the dialogue was relatively basic. These sessions in Berlin were my first step in creating what would become 'Brilliant trees' and my initial move away from the structure of the band. It was one of the happiest recording experiences I can recall while signed with a major label. Because of the success of having everyone meet in Berlin, a city native to no one involved, it felt like an adventure. People arrived with a spirit of openness and receptivity. I went on to repeat this process with albums such as 'Secrets of the Beehive', 'Rain Tree Crow', and 'The First Day' among others.

I've left a lot of Jon’s conversation in as it's of interest. In one section he’s explaining the nature of raga and how he came to it by working with renowned Indian singer/teacher Pandit Pran Nath. He was also intimating that, as 'Brilliant Trees' asked that he play in the western tradition, ‘steps’ as he describes it, he didn’t see how his performance could be incorporated into the title track. I persevered. He returned to his hotel room that evening to work on it and, overnight, came up with something so beautiful and complimentary to the piece, that moved away from raga (outside of the coda), and gave us one of the rare, if not unique recordings, of Jon playing in the western tradition.

Besides the limited nature of my vocabulary, the paired down nature of our exchanges for the reasons given above, my only regret is that I didn’t use Holger’s guitar solo on ‘Red Guitar’. At the time I felt it a little lightweight compared to the mix Steve Nye was prepping. I would now mix it quite differently pushing the drums way back (from the mid 70s through the 80s drums were often foregrounded, a trend I wasn’t fond of. I fought for a change of approach on ‘Beehive' and that’s about the time when things began to resemble how I’d initially imagined the material. There are always exceptions of course, ‘weathered wall', ‘Before the Bullfight’ are just two examples). I loved Holger dearly and wish I’d immortalised his solo in some capacity. If it still exists on multitrack all is not lost.

I came away from Berlin with an incomplete album and preceded to write a few remaining pieces to complement the best of what I had. 'The Ink in the Well’, ‘Nostalgia' and ‘Backwaters' were added, 'Blue of Noon', an alternate version of ‘Forbidden Colours', and a new track composed with Ryuichi were, with the exception of the latter, to find a home elsewhere. 'Blue of Noon' was originally a vocal piece but I felt this version didn’t hold together and, in any case, was out of place in the context of the album. Virgin released a working rough mix of the track as the B-side of a single.

I hope the mutual respect and good humour of everyone involved comes across along with their seriousness and committed nature to the material. Rarely has this proved otherwise for me. In this respect I feel very fortunate. From this session I made lifelong friends, a trend that was to continue for many years to come.

david sylvian july 2021

in order of appearance: Ronny Drayton . David Sylvian . Ryuichi Sakamoto . Holger Czukay . Jon Hassell . Steve Nye.

© david sylvian / yuka fujii no unauthorized copying, broadcasting, reposting without permission.

[shockertv]

brilliant trees sessions . Berlin . 1983 from Samadhisound on Vimeo.

Brilliant Trees sessions . Berlin . 1983 . raw camera footage

This raw footage shot on, what’s now seen as a primitive camera but which was a top of the line consumer product at the time, a massive, unwieldily object, was documented by Yuka Fujii. I’ve put the material together in the order it was recorded to give a very general idea of the process of development. It’s been my practice to work closely with each individual musician since my earliest days with the band in an attempt to get the best results. I’ve always maintained the band prepared me for working with others, gave me the confidence to work with my peers, the ‘newcomers' in the room all being older than myself (25). At this point in time Ryuichi’s english was very rudimentary (this was to change radically within the next ten years or so) so we had to communicate as economically as possible, or rather, 95% of the exchange was purely musical. Yuka and Peter Barakan would step in when greater explication was needed. Holger’s english remained consistent throughout the years i knew him. Again, subtleties could be lost so the dialogue was relatively basic. These sessions in Berlin were my first step in creating what would become 'Brilliant trees' and my initial move away from the structure of the band. It was one of the happiest recording experiences I can recall while signed with a major label. Because of the success of having everyone meet in Berlin, a city native to no one involved, it felt like an adventure. People arrived with a spirit of openness and receptivity. I went on to repeat this process with albums such as 'Secrets of the Beehive', 'Rain Tree Crow', and 'The First Day' among others.

I've left a lot of Jon’s conversation in as it's of interest. In one section he’s explaining the nature of raga and how he came to it by working with renowned Indian singer/teacher Pandit Pran Nath. He was also intimating that, as 'Brilliant Trees' asked that he play in the western tradition, ‘steps’ as he describes it, he didn’t see how his performance could be incorporated into the title track. I persevered. He returned to his hotel room that evening to work on it and, overnight, came up with something so beautiful and complimentary to the piece, that moved away from raga (outside of the coda), and gave us one of the rare, if not unique recordings, of Jon playing in the western tradition.

Besides the limited nature of my vocabulary, the paired down nature of our exchanges for the reasons given above, my only regret is that I didn’t use Holger’s guitar solo on ‘Red Guitar’. At the time I felt it a little lightweight compared to the mix Steve Nye was prepping. I would now mix it quite differently pushing the drums way back (from the mid 70s through the 80s drums were often foregrounded, a trend I wasn’t fond of. I fought for a change of approach on ‘Beehive' and that’s about the time when things began to resemble how I’d initially imagined the material. There are always exceptions of course, ‘weathered wall', ‘Before the Bullfight’ are just two examples). I loved Holger dearly and wish I’d immortalised his solo in some capacity. If it still exists on multitrack all is not lost.

I came away from Berlin with an incomplete album and preceded to write a few remaining pieces to complement the best of what I had. 'The Ink in the Well’, ‘Nostalgia' and ‘Backwaters' were added, 'Blue of Noon', an alternate version of ‘Forbidden Colours', and a new track composed with Ryuichi were, with the exception of the latter, to find a home elsewhere. 'Blue of Noon' was originally a vocal piece but I felt this version didn’t hold together and, in any case, was out of place in the context of the album. Virgin released a working rough mix of the track as the B-side of a single.

I hope the mutual respect and good humour of everyone involved comes across along with their seriousness and committed nature to the material. Rarely has this proved otherwise for me. In this respect I feel very fortunate. From this session I made lifelong friends, a trend that was to continue for many years to come.

david sylvian july 2021

in order of appearance: Ronny Drayton . David Sylvian . Ryuichi Sakamoto . Holger Czukay . Jon Hassell . Steve Nye.

© david sylvian / yuka fujii no unauthorized copying, broadcasting, reposting without permission.