#anyways if you have the same problems as me i recommend fascinating horror

[ed-e]

it’s incredible the sheer amount of crime/disaster channels on youtube that are just. so so bad

[carpisuns]

Hey! So I'm in a bit of a pickle and I feel like since you're in the publishing industry (or I'm completely confusing you for someone else who's a copy-editor) you might be able to help me...?

I'm trying to put conscious effort into improving my writing and especially my style, and I feel like as of right now, I want it to feel a little haunting? Kind of like when you read something and the words feel like phantom beings around you? Like the lines have a mystical feeling to them? Idk if I'm able to explain it properly.

But the problem is, when I type into Google anything regarding "author" and "haunting writing style" to find some examples, it just gives me horror authors which is not helpful at all.

Could you please help me?

(Feel free to ignore this ask if you don't feel like answering or if it's just a really stupid question!!)

ngl i was kind of at a loss for this at first lol but actually i think i know exactly what you mean!

A novel that comes to mind is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. He is a brilliant writer with a very fascinating (and, yes, haunting) writing style. It also helps a lot that the book is narrated by Death lol. Here's a little sample of what you'll find in the book:

The last time I saw her was red. The sky was like soup, boiling and stirring. In some places, it was burned. There were black crumbs, and pepper, streaked across the redness.

Earlier, kids had been playing hopscotch there, on the street that looked like oil-stained pages. When I arrived, I could still hear the echoes. The feet tapping the road. The children-voices laughing, and the smiles like salt, but decaying fast.

Then, bombs.

And for fanwork, I highly recommend checking out Reiaji's work on ao3! She is one of my biggest #goals writers and she has such an incredible knack for writing really beautiful prose that somehow both sinks slowly into your blood and also and slams you in the ribs like a semi truck at the same time lol. in particular i think her fics whose woods these are (i think i know.) and the last day on earth are great examples of that haunting style you're looking for. Here's the opening paragraphs of "whose woods":

The wood is full of whispering, and the forest knows his name.

immediate chills, right? omg

And one line that has always haunted me from "last day" is this one:

That’s her, falling down through the middle of time; her skin turning warm, her eyes turning clear, her clenched teeth rattling like rosary beads.

also final girl by @picayunearts is another example of excellent writing that often has similar vibes in the prose. ex:

All the way home, on the rattling, grime-slick train, Marinette stares into the darkness past the windows, Mullo cupped to her chest like a heartbeat.

one thing i've noticed about these writers is that they do a really good job of balancing the abstract with the concrete. if you're going for "mystical" and "phantom-like" and "haunting," you might be tempted to go full abstract, but you need grounding details to give the description weight and "stickiness." readers need something concrete to latch onto when they're reading, so if you strike that balance well, that's what gives the writing real staying power in their mind.

it might be helpful to pull out one or two stand-out details from the character's surroundings to create the atmosphere you want (like the black-pepper streaks in the soupy-red sky, or the grime and the rattling sound of the train). you can also pack striking imagery into your figurative language to create that vibe (like the rattling rosary beads simile). i'd also recommend playing around with sentence structure. for example, a sentence with a series of cumulative commas could build up tension/suspense, whereas a short, punchy sentence dropped at the right moment could serve as the last nail in the coffin, haha. just read and ponder and try things out and i'm sure you'll figure out how to develop the style you want!

anyway, I hope this helps :) good luck, and happy writing!

[tlbodine]

Closing Out the Asian Horror Series With Two Thai Films

We’re wrapping up our journey through Asian horror with a pair of newer films, both of which hail from Thailand (with a bit of help from South Korea). 

The Medium (2021), directed by  Banjong Pisanthanakun, is a mockumentary about a woman who serves as the town shaman/medium for a local deity. The mediumship has been carried by the women in her family for generations, although she came by it a bit unusually -- her older sister was next-in-line to inherit the deity’s connection, but side-stepped it by converting to Christianity instead. This decision comes back to haunt her though when her daughter starts exhibiting some unusual symptoms, and the question becomes....is the girl the next medium, or is she possessed by.....something else? 

This is a really good folk horror that offers a fascinating glimpse into a very different set of cultural trappings and expectations than what I’m accustomed to as a Western audience member. I think it pairs off extremely well with The Wailing if you want to do a double feature -- both are folk horrors that look at the uncomfortable intersection of Christianity and shamanic religion. 

The Medium is kind of an exorcism movie, too, and though it has a pretty plodding pace to get to the real meat of it, the third act is quite tense and pays off most everything that was set up before. There are a couple of places where the mockumentary framing strained my suspension of disbelief, overall it was quite immersive. Recommended. 

Krasue: Inhuman Kiss (2019), directed by  Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, is a Thai supernatural thriller/romance(?) about a Krasue, which is a sort of local vampire variant. Versions of this monster seem to show up in local legend throughout many countries in East Asia, with some variants, but the basic gist of it always seems to be the same -- a woman whose head comes loose from her body at night to roam around and bite people and/or livestock. 

This particular film is set in the 1940s, a period in which Thailand gets pulled into WWII against its will courtesy of some Japanese occupation (which then puts it in the crosshairs of the Allied forces). The village in the movie has no doctors or nurses left because everybody is in Bangkok tending to the war effort, so a teenager is doing the best she can to take care of the locals. Except their village seems to be having a slight case of vampirism, and it turns out she’s the problem (though she doesn’t know it yet). 

This movie is really beautiful, visually. It is very Del Toro-esque in its sound and visual style as well as the plot. It’s kind of a love story, centered on a love triangle between the girl and two childhood friends, and to say more about all of that would be to rob you of some of the richness of the film. But I will say that the movie takes a stab at the idea of relationship accommodations and the logistics of loving a monster in a way most films don’t. 

Let me put it this way: If you made a triangle where The Shape of Water is on one side and Let The Right One In is on the other, Krasue: Inhuman Kiss would be the third leg. 

Anyway I liked this a lot. It’s a bit slow and over-long, but well worth the watch. 

[thiswasinevitableid]

for the meet uglies, 55 indruck sfw? sorry apollo

Here you go! For those wondering, Apollo originates in my Amnesty Super Hero AU

“Okay sir, I’m gonna say this as nice as I can.”

Indrid looks up from his drawing of some mushrooms. The ranger, a man about his age whose little bronze name tag reads “D. Newton”, has the look of someone choosing his words very, very carefully.

“You are this close to me writin you up. And I mean this. Close.” He puts his thumb against his finger.

“I, is this not allowed?” The log he’s sitting on is technically on the trail, just next to it.

“This ain’t the problem. It’s everythin you done since this morning that’s the problem.”

“I-”

“First there was leavin your breakfast trash on the picnic table by the visitor center so chipmunks got into it--it’s real bad for them y’know, makes ‘em too bold--then there was the selfies on off-limits spots, then you had the fu, uh, freakin nerve to be rude to Juno when she asked you to stay in safe areas, you littered left and right, then you left a beer can in the reeds by the plover nestin’ grounds. I don’t even know where to start with that one; you know we don’t allow alcohol in the park. Campgrounds sure, but we don’t want fellas like you gettin drunk and then fallin off a rock. How can you be so careless, or not give a shit for a place people put time into protectin?

The smile that’s been spreading across Indrid’s face since the word “selfie” is wide enough that the ranger spots it.

“Man, if you think this is funny, you won’t when you’re too drunk to swim or run from a bear. Then I’m gonna have to bail your ass out, which I will, and you’re gonna eat a slice of humble pie big as that overinflated ego of yours.”

Indrid snickers. The ranger glares. Slowly, Indrid pulls back the hood of his sweatshirt and retrieves his glasses from the front of his shirt (he doesn’t wear them when drawing in color due to their red lenses). The other mans expression slides off confusion and tumbles into horror.

“Aw hell, I’m sorry sir. Thought you were your, uh, well, guessin you got a twin runnin around this park.” He pulls the brim of his hat down in a charming attempt to hide his face.

“I do, and this is far from the first time I’ve been scolded in his place. Less so since I dyed my hair” he indicates the artificial silver framing his face, “I’m mostly amused by how accurately you captured his orientation towards the world. It’s also bitterly funny to discover he made someone else's day as unpleasant as he made mine.”

The ranger studies him, seems to notice the creases by his eyes and mouth, “Seem a little old to be gettin forced into family time. Not that you look old. Just, uh, I mean, you might be younger than me, hard to tell with the hair, uh, yeah.”

Indrid points in the direction of the beachside campsites, “The Cold Family Reunion can only be begged off so long.” His phone dings, the reminder that it’s his turn to help his aunt with dinner, “speaking of which, I should pack up.” He quickly gathers his supplies, sends the other man a final smile, “thank you for the laugh, Ranger Newton.”

“You’re uh, you’re welcome. And tell your twin to throw his damn trash away.” He smiles as he says this, suggesting a joke, but Indrid resolves to remind Apollo of his manners anyway.

----------------------------------------------

The fog caresses the coastline, hiding the dawn entirely. Indrid pulls his hood up against the chill, the wooden bench and viewing deck damp from the weather. He’s not going back to camp until he’s captured the sight before him; dozens of fishing boats on the dark water, their lights beautiful and soft against the grey world.

Sandy gravel crunches to his right, and then Ranger Newton appears. He keeps glancing at Indrid as he writes something indecipherable on a clipboard.

“I’m the nice one.” Indrid says in response to the quick, searching, looks.

“Thank fuck.” He turns so they’re actually looking at each other, “guess we’re both on the early shift.”

“Normally I wouldn’t be, but the cold and quiet is preferable to my twin snoring. I brought my own one person tent, but then my aunt and uncle had their monthly argument and she needed a new place to sleep.”

“That was mighty kind of you.”

Indrid shrugs, “Not really. I just want to get through this reunion with as little conflict as possible.”

“How’d you end up on this thing? Said you couldn’t get out of it but-”

“I just moved to town a month ago. Turns out this is a place my parents have always wanted to visit. Not enough to see me, mind you, or refrain from criticizing my choice of towns, but enough to host the reunion here so I had no escape. And if I want to eat with the family, I have to spend the night in the camp and not at home. And since money is tight after moving, well..."

The ranger whistles, “Damn, that’s rough. But uh, since you live in town you’ll actually get to see this place in nice weather.”

“I’m looking forward to it.” He shivers, “though I enjoy the cold when I can be in my nice little apartment. In a tent, not so much.”

“If you get a good sleepin bag or good company, gets a lot better.” The ranger smiles, then looks at his notes, “sorry, that ain’t appropriate talk around a visitor.”

Indrid meets his green eyes, “If you have recommendations for either, I’m all ears.”

A gust of wind carries salt spray all the way to the platform, Indrid shivering as it mists his glasses.

“Here” the ranger holds out his hnd, “I gotta go open the visitor center; nice and warm in there.”

“...Could you possibly come back in ten minutes? I’d like to finish my sketch.”

“Sure, won’t kill me to check on the tide measures while I’m out here.” He tips his hat and soon Indrid sees him winding down a path to the beach. Eleven minutes later he’s back, telling Indrid about a huge starfish he saw.

On the walk to the visitor center, he learns the “D” on his nametag is for “Duck,” that he’s a transplant from West Virginia, and that they’re actually the same age. When Indrid explains that he’s a tattoo artist who sells his drawings on the side.

“You’ll appreciate this, then” Duck bends down to roll up his pant leg. Indrid appreciates the view and the well executed geometric tree tattoo on his ankle.

“Juno and I got ‘em together. Had to go with the ankle because I already got some on my arms. Can’t show those off right now though.”

“My, my, Ranger Newton, you’ll flash a scandalous ankle at a guest but not take him to the gun show?”

Duck laughs, the sound like the mating call of a strange tropical bird; absurd and enchanting.

“Glad you’re in town to stay, Indrid. Think you’re the kind of fella I’d like to get to know.”

----------------------------------------------

Maybe he’s being childish. It’s not wrong for Apollo to say he’s making their father proud, that he’s successful, that he’s a golden boy of his field.

It’s just obnoxious for him to do this the one time their extended family expressed Indrid’s professional accomplishments. With that smile, the one Indrid knows for a damn fact he had fixed, that tone, that, that….

That voice sounds familiar.

He reverses course, takes the path he passed by that points towards the amphitheater. What he gets is more a firepit with a small stage, but standing at the center and addressing fascinated families is Duck.

Indrid sits on the rickety bench furthest from the stage, lets Ducks explanations of night blooming plants and the creatures that pollinate them drown out the echoes of family dinner. When the program ends and the parents shepherd their children off with instructions for bedtime and brushing teeth Indrid stays, not ready to leave but not intending to attract Duck’s attention.

He gets it anyway.

“Enjoy the talk?” Duck stays two steps down from him, rests a foot up on the bench, “this one is always real popular; when it gets warm, the little animal rehab place south of town brings education animals in. Y’know, bats and owls, stuff like that.”

“I’ll have to come back to see them.” The thought of seeing bats up close excites him, but he’s too tired to sell the emotion.

Duck frowns, “You okay?”

Indrid shakes his head, tells him about the constant comments, the threat of living forever as the family disappointment, a threat he can deal with until he’s around them all. Then he’s right back to being seventeen and afraid of failing them.

“....Apollo’s always been the golden boy, ruthless and goal focused like our father. He always knows just what to say to get under my skin and dig out the scar tissue,” Indrid sighs, “All I wanted tonight was to roast marshmallows and go to bed early.”

The ranger moved from the steps to the bench beside him as he told his story. Now, Duck looks at him, smile more soothing than the thrum of the distant waves, “I got an idea. Guessin’ you don’t gotta tell your family where you’re goin, right?”

“No, most of them will assume I’m off sulking and Apollo will hope I’ve fallen off a cliff.”

“Then leave ‘em to be their shitty selves and come home with me. Uh, not, not-not like that, fuck, like what you’re thinkin, uh. Fuck. What I mean is; I got a fireplace and some marshmallows. You want in?”

Indrid watches the dying fire flicker of the curves of his face, thinks back on the last week. The ranger has been a frequent companion, brings him hot cocoa from the little cafe and tells him where he’ll be for chunks of the day in case Indrid needs a break from his family. Last night, all Indrid could think about was wanting Duck to be in the tent beside him.

“Absolutely.”

On the drive over, Indrid points out his apartment complex and Duck points out the best places to eat and the cheapest laundromats. His house is tiny, looks like it was built when the town was a logging hub and not a tourist destination.

“Make yourself at home, it’ll take me a sec to get the fire goin’--uhuh, Taco, stop tryin’ to open that cabinet.” He hoists a yowling, blonde ball of fur on the couch. The cat directs a suspicious look Indrid’s way and then settles on top of the pile of blankets.

“You a s’more man?” Duck calls from the kitchen.

“No, thank you. I prefer my sugar in a single bite.”

“You eat marshmallows in one bite? I’m always worried I’ll choke.”

“I have an accommodating mouth.” Indrid smirks when Duck audibly drops the bag. He’s not always the best with social cues, but if the way Duck kept brushing their hands together on the center armrest in his car is any indication, the ranger is trying to pick him up.

Once the fire is going Duck sits on the rug, patting the spot to his left. Indrid joins him. Caramelizing sugar and increasingly sleepy laughter soon fills the air. Neither of them keep their knees from touching, and Duck keeps dropping his head to Indrid’s shoulder when he giggles. The whole scene is so heavenly Indrid isn’t paying attention to their marshmellow consumption. He reaches into the empty bag and makes a disappointed noise.

“Damn, we really went through ‘em.” He catches Indrid’s eye with a playful grin, “you still cravin’ sugar?”

Indrid licks his lips, “Yes.”

Duck cups his cheek, guiding him into a sleepy, close-mouthed kiss, brushing their noses together when he pulls back to murmur, “That do the trick?”

“Hmmmmm?” Indrid cocks his head, “no.”

The other man guffaws as Indrid pulls him down on top of him, kissing him happily and wiggling his hips when Duck digs his fingers into his hair. His own hands migrate under Duck’s shirts, finding his body just as warm and wonderful as he hoped.

He nips Duck’s lower lip. The ranger growls and Indrid is no longer tired.

“Care to see just how accommodating my mouth can be?”

Duck rolls them twice so they’re a safe distance from the fire, “Hell yeah.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Indrid saunters into camp late in the morning, some of the Colds already packing up to depart. His twin is stuck on dish duty, grins like a barracuda when he spots Indrid.

“I don’t know why you’re here. You missed breakfast, and you weren’t in camp last night, so you don’t get lunch or dinner either. May as well skulk back into the shadows.”

“Mmm, yes, I was rather undutiful.” Indrid spots a figure checking campsite permits, who stealthily blows him a kiss, “but at this moment in time, I don’t particularly care.”

[scoutception]

A look at: Moon.

Writing reviews is always a learning experience for me, and one of the important things I’ve learned is that, sometimes, it’s pretty hard to write about certain individual games, visual novels, or such considering the kind of detail I like to go into. Therefore, this will be the first in a new series of mini reviews, or as mini as they get with me. Maybe there’s just not enough to a game to really give me details to dig into, or maybe it’s difficult to talk about without giving away more than I wish, or maybe there’s just something related to it that I’m more interested in talking about than the actual product; whatever the reason, these will hopefully be less rambly and excessive than my usual reviews, while still giving enough of an overview that they stand as proper reviews on their own. Either way, the subject of this post is an old, obscure visual novel from 1997 with a bit of history to it, called Moon.

Moon was developed by Tactics, a humble developer of adult visual novels, and was the second one developed by them, with the first, Dōsei, seemingly just being, well, a plain H-game, and the third, One ~To the Radiant Season~, while still obscure, is actually fairly notable for being a prototype to Kanon in a lot of ways, as many key staff at Tactics would later break off to form Key afterwards, with them having also worked on Moon beforehand. Thus, Moon is in a very interesting spot when it comes to the progression of the developers that would change VNs as a genre with the release of Kanon, and that’s really the only reason I checked it out.

Moon follows Ikumi Amasawa, a girl who joins a mysterious organization called Fargo, which recruits others with the promise of acquiring an alleged “invisible strength” that can put one far ahead of ordinary humans, in order to investigate their possible connections to the murder of her mother, and if possible, take revenge on the ones responsible. Upon arriving at the Fargo facility, Ikumi quickly befriends two other initiates with ulterior motives of their own for joining: Haruka Mima, a determined girl with a cool attitude who keeps her goal to herself, and Yui Nakura, a cheerful, but naive girl who’s seeking to bring home her older sister, who joined Fargo several months prior. Though the three agree to become allies and help each other achieve their goals, they are quickly separated in different “classes” housed in different buildings, with Ikumi being assigned to Class A, the most prestigious of them all. Settling into her new life as a Fargo initiate, which mostly consists of “training” with the Minmes and Elpod, machines that confront her with various parts of her very troubled past for the purpose of “mental reinforcement” in the form of a vengeful doppelganger of herself, Ikumi gradually discovers many strange things about her situation, such as there only being one other member of Class A, that being Youko Kanuma, a quiet, cold woman who has been part of Fargo for many years. Additionally, Ikumi is forced to share her room with a strange boy who doesn’t volunteer his name, who, though part of Fargo itself, is quite low ranking, and more than a bit dim witted at times. Worst of all, upon finding a passage that allows her to access the buildings where her allies are kept, Ikumi finds that the other classes are subjected to horrific abuses by Fargo’s personnel in order to further their mental reinforcement. As Ikumi struggles to aid her allies however she can, the confrontations with her past begin to put a heavy strain on her mind, and the existence of the invisible strength Fargo claims to have starts to become more and more plausible.

Needless to say, Moon isn’t exactly Clannad. I did not know much about this VN before I got into it, and finding it to be a psychological horror VN was a bit of a shock. Even more of a shock was just what form the majority of the horror came in. You see, even though One ~To the Radiant Season~, Kanon, and Air were all released as adult games, the h-scenes are very disconnected from the plot, most of the time, to the point of losing nothing from skipping them or even removing them from the game, and were pretty much just obligatory inclusions to help them sell better. From Clannad onward, most Key VNs have been clean to start. With Moon, on the other hand, you can’t go 5 minutes without running into some explicit scene, the main source being the Elpod sequences and the abuses the Fargo personnel inflict, and it wastes no time getting to them, at that. This is the biggest thing that drives off many of the few who go out of their way to experience Moon, and even with me having just watched an understandably censored playthrough of this on Youtube due to its shorter length, I almost quit very early into it, and definitely would have if I had actually played it. The Elpod is one thing, as the sequences are used for the purpose of developing Ikumi, but even then, most of them are just excessively disgusting more than disturbing, and that goes doubly for the sequences outside of it. Instead of really changing things up, they’re just content to get gradually more and more depraved, and outside of disgusting, the main thing I can even call them is repetitive. This is one of my biggest problems with Moon, and it was pretty hard for me to get into it because of it.

Another major problem I have with Moon is how it handles its cast. Moon is pretty short for a VN, only around 10 or 11 hours if you go straight for the true ending, and even though there are 7 endings in total, they don’t add much more time onto that, with two being worse variants on the true ending, and the rest being bad endings gotten through making bad choices. Having as small a cast as it does should naturally work fine with that, but they really aren’t balanced well. While Ikumi gets developed across the whole game, and Yui gets a good arc pretty early on, Haruka only gets a short arc that ends as quickly as it starts and doesn’t do a lot for her, Youko barely has any screentime despite establishing a good dynamic with Ikumi, and the boy doesn’t have much presence or relevance until late in the story. The pacing is just bizarre and rushed feeling.

That’s not to say there aren’t a number of good points to Moon’s story. Ikumi is very well developed throughout the story, with the Minmes in particular leading to many melancholic scenes that make her quite sympathetic, and were definitely the high points of the normally rigid daily schedule much of the story takes place during for me. Despite the story’s flawed handling of some of them, the cast is still decent on a whole, with Youko’s gradually developing friendship with Ikumi and Yui’s development during her arc being some of the more memorable parts for me. The atmosphere is very well done, with the cramped, depressing corridors of the facility always feeling like they’re hiding something awful just around the corner, especially since you need to manually navigate the place using a map screen, and once the plot really kicks into high gear things become much more compelling, with the final days containing many high points in characterization and an infamous mindscrew of a sequence that, once looked back on with a more understanding eye, is actually quite fascinating in its own right.

Visually, Moon’s art was done by Itaru Hinoue, the same artist as the majority of Key’s VNs, and it’s a lot rougher than the art of, say, Kanon. It’s not outright bad, but it looks very dated, with the designs and sprites not really sticking out. The CGs vary in quality, as some look pretty ridiculous, but others are quite good. Most impressive, though, is two animated intro sequences included in the DVD version, which happens to be the only version with an English patch anyway. They’re fairly brief, but do a great job of setting up the atmosphere and premise despite that.

On the sound side, the soundtrack is great. It’s not a very big one, with only about 16 tracks, and the use of them can get a bit repetitive, but most of them are just a joy to listen to. From the electronic and tense Closed Space, to the wistful, yet peaceful The Place Where the Sun Shines, to Youko’s ethereal theme, to the credits theme, Sorrow, and especially the nostalgic music box theme, Memory, it’s worth looking up even if you hold no interest in the VN itself. There’s also voice acting, also added in the DVD version, and most of it is just average, with not many performances standing out, with the exception of Kahoru Sasajima as Ikumi, who delivers a very solid performance, especially during the more intense moments.

Overall, Moon can be a pretty hard sell. While I thought it was a decent experience by the end, its very offputting content, lack of similarity to any other Key works, and bleak atmosphere can make it pretty hard to go through even if you’re prepared for what’s to come. Even if you wanted a horror VN, there’s plenty others out there, like Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child, Higurashi: When They Cry, Wonderful Everyday, Raging Loop, or just about anything from nitro+. That said, if you can stick to the end, I definitely feel it becomes fairly satisfying, and when I got to thinking, I realized something that actually boosted my opinion quite a bit just by itself. As much as Moon is a story about cults and psychic powers with a somewhat unclear point to it all, it’s even more so just a story about a very troubled youth struggling with her grief, irrationally falling in with a bad crowd, and being forced to face her past and actions if she wishes to accomplish anything. Looking at the story that way, it’s actually quite well done, and going in with that in mind may even make it a bit more palatable. Still, I wouldn’t especially go out of my way to recommend it, and ultimately it’s still very far from being one of my favorite visual novels out there. Either way, that concludes my first mini review, which still turned out longer than I thought it would. My next post will be something unusual for me as well, but that’ll take a bit to come. Till next time. -Scout

[imnotoverlyobsessive]

Looks Like Someone Picked a Whole Bushel of Oopsie Daisies: Prologue

yeah okay I ship pinecest and I’m writing a soulmate AU nobody asks for or needs but you know what either I write it and not post it or I write it and post it so I might as well post it. If you’re not into pinecest, that’s fine, you can skip on by. TBOAS chapter 23 is coming out soon.

Regarding this fic, let me explain a few things about it. So in this universe, everyone has a soulmark that appears as soon as you touch your soulmate. It's exactly the same as theirs. Soulmarks appear regardless of age, but once you hit seventeen, you start to feel an insanely strong attraction to your soulmate whether you've touched them already or not. When you do actually touch them, you get a very very strong urge to, well. Bone. It's also very draining to be away from them for too long, so most soulmates who find each other move in with each other right away, just so it's easier on them. There are no laws against incest-y soulmates, but it is still strictly taboo. Most people think that incestuous soulmates should just live separately and not be around each other at all. It’s not gonna be the most angsty fic on the face of the earth, but there is definitely gonna be some in there. And probably a healthy amount of sexy stuff because, despite being in a happy relationship, I am also a huge pervert and like to see my ships do the do so that’s gonna happen. Buckle up. And now, without further ado, welcome to the prologue of Looks like Someone Picked a Whole Bushel of Oopsie Daisies. Starts under the cut.

“No one is ever ready to be a parent. We’re all just varying degrees of not ready.”- my Mom

August 30th, 1999, 10:42pm

“…and as we get closer and to the new millennium, more and more people are coming forward with opinions on the new studies indicating that 17% of mated couples are actually siblings, with an astonishing 73% majority being twins. We have one of the researchers here who has her own opinions about the issue, Dr. Eleanor Robinson. Thanks so much for joining us this evening, Dr. Robinson,” said the news reporter on the television.

Mildly interested, Mr. Will Pines took a sip of his can of Pitt soda as a blonde woman in a lab coat came on screen.

“No problem, Robert, happy to be here,” said the doctor.

“So Dr. Robinson, are these statistics true?” asked the reporter.

The doctor nodded. “Yes, absolutely. I participated in the research myself, and we made some very interesting discoveries.”

“Really?” The reporter leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “What kind of findings are you at liberty to share with us?”

“Well,” the doctor continued. “We’ve found that biological sex doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on the soulmarks showing up. The rules seem to be the same as they are with anybody else- except the twins we’ve studied, their marks have been there since birth.”

“So they never have that “ahah!” moment the rest of us experience when we first touch our soulmate?” Robert wondered.

The doctor twisted her lips slightly. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly. They get the same sort of… electricity when touching their soulmate prior to accepting the bond, and they certainly feel drawn to them both romantically and sexually, but that doesn’t happen until later in life.”

“Oh, so they don’t experience it as children, then?”

“No,” Dr. Robinson shook her head. “As with all children who find their soulmate early in life, while touching them does cause the mark to show up, it does not elicit any biological reactions until both parties are at least seventeen.”

“Interesting,” the reporter said with a nod. “And is it true that you support attempts to eliminate the social backlash that these couples experience?”

“Oh, absolutely, absolutely,” Dr. Robinson nodded. “Soulmarked couples are in no way at fault for their feelings for one another, and should not be criticized or judged for acting on those feelings. It’s completely biological.”

“What about the risks of inbreeding? Is that a concern?” Wondered Robert.

The doctor shook her head. “Not really, no. Soulmarked couples are at a much lower risk of genetic birth defects, because they are chosen partially because of their abilities to produce the healthiest children each individual is able to produce. So you see the statistics of soulmarked couples who aren’t related compared to couples that are not soulmarked, and the percentage of birth defects in the former is so much lower than the latter that I’d have difficulty believing it had I not done the research myself.”

So, wait,” the reporter interrupted. “There’s no risks at all?”

“Well of course there are risks, there are always risks when having a child,” reasoned Dr. Robinson. However, with soulmarked couples, the risks are vastly lower than with non-soulmarked couples. The pregnancies are much safer, the births are much safer, and the children themselves are much healthier. According to the research we’ve done, that doesn’t change in the slightest when factoring in the biological relationship, if any, of the couple.”

“Fascinating, just fascinating. Do you have any personal recommendations for parents who have soulmarked children?”

“You mean children who are soulmates with their siblings?” The reporter nodded, and Dr. Robinson tilted her head slightly in thought. “Well,” she began. “I’d recommend that those parents don’t panic or try to separate their children from each other. Even at a young age, after you’ve already had your soulmark appear, not having your soulmate nearby at all can lead to difficulty concentrating and depression. This can, of course, be counteracted with medication, but that’s wholly unnecessary if you allow the children to spend adequate time together in a way that’s age-appropriate and healthy. Supervise them, of course, but the reason most people move in with their soulmate as soon as they find out they share a soulmark is because it’s incredibly draining to be apart. As a doctor, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend attempting to have them live separately if it can be avoided.”

Mr. Pines snorted. Obviously such a thing could never happen. Not to anyone he knew, anyway.

At that moment, Mrs. Caroline Pines staggered into the room, one hand clutching the wall and the other clutching her very large belly.

“Will!” She cried out, wincing. He whipped his head around, startled. “It’s time,” she told him in a shaky voice.

In their haste to get to the hospital, he barely managed to turn off the television.

~~~~~

Six and a half hours later, Mrs. Pines had given birth to two children, a boy and a girl. She was too exhausted to give them names just yet, and when the nurse placed them in her arms, she smiled tearfully.

Mr. Pines smiled affectionately at his family. “I’ll be right back, honey. I’m going to go grab us some water bottles.”

She barely noticed him, cradling her newborn children.

Mr. Pines jogged out of the room and found the vending machine down the hall. Putting in fifty cents for each water bottle, he leaned down to grab them from the vending machine. Standing back up, he heard a horrified screech he recognized as belonging to his wife.

He felt a horrible drop in his stomach. No. No, it isn’t possible.

“Caroline!” He called out, running as fast as he could, coming to an abrupt stop at the hospital room door, his shoes squeaking on the waxed floors as he did. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Two nurses had taken the children from Mrs. Pines, rocking the newborns in their arms to calm their crying. Mrs. Pines was sobbing uncontrollably, clutching at her hair. A third nurse was desperately trying to calm the new mother down, but was unsuccessful.

“Their wrists!” She gasped out. “Look at their wrists, Will!” The drop in his stomach worsened, and dread filled his veins, but he did as she told him, gently turning each squalling child’s wrists so that he could examine them.

To his horror, he discovered what had upset her so much. Both children had soulmarks.

And they matched.

~~~

Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Concerns that aren’t insults about my new ship? Cool, message me! I’m always happy to talk about pinecest.

[jeannereames]

Writing Historical Fiction (Well)

From an anonymous ask:

"What advice would you give to someone who wants to write about Alexander?" Sorry I didn't clarify, I was thinking of writing a fictional novel (but do not plan to publish it, lol)

If you’re just writing for yourself with no plans to publish, you don’t have to worry about constraints like wordcount and publishability. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to sell mainstream historicals. Selling a genre historical is easier (historical fantasy, historical mystery, historical romance). But there’s a reason it took me 30 years to get Dancing with the Lion into print. Yes, some of that time I was actually writing it, but much more was devoted to finding a market for it, and notice that I did, finally, have to sell it as genre even though it isn’t really. (It was that or shelve it forever.)

Yet if you’re asking for my recommendations, I assume you want to write something that’s marginally readable. Ergo, what follows is general advice I’d give anybody writing historical fiction.

For historicals, one must keep track of two things simultaneously: telling a good story, and portraying history accurately enough. It’s possible to do one well, but the other quite badly.

First, let’s look at how to write a good story.

There are two very basic sorts of stories: the romance, and the novel. Notice it’s romance small /r/. A romance is an adventure story; in romances, the plot dominates and characters serve the plot. A novel is character-driven, so plot events serve character development. Dancing with the Lion is a novel.

Once you’ve decided which of those you’re writing, you have a better handle on how to write it. You also need to know where you’re going: what’s the end of the story? What are the major plot points? Writers who dive in with no road map tend to produce bloated books that require massive edits. That said, romances will almost always be faster paced, in part because “what’s happening” drives it. Whereas in novels, the impact of events on characters drives it. Exclusive readers of romances are rarely pleased by the pacing of novels. They’re too slow: “Nothing is happening!” Things are happening, but internally, not externally.

Yet pacing does matter. Never let a scene do one thing when it can do three.

You will want to pay attention to something called “scene and sequel.” A “scene” is an event and a “sequel” are the consequences. So let’s say (as in my current MIP [monster in progress]) you open with a fugitive from the city jail racing through the streets with guards following: he leaps the wall of a rich man’s house and ends up in the bedroom of a visiting prince. That’s the scene. The sequel is the fall-out. (House searched, prince hides fugitive, prince gets fugitive to tell him why he’s running.) Usually near the end of the sequel(s) to the first scene, you embed the hook to the next (a slave of the rich man has been found murdered outside the city walls). The next scene concerns recovering the body and what they discover (then fall-out from that). Etc., etc., etc.

That’s how stories progress. Or don’t progress, if the author can’t master scene-sequel patterns.

It also means—again—you need to know where you’re going. Outlines Are Your Friends. But yes, your plot can still take a sharp left-hand turn that surprises you…they almost always do.

When I sat down to write Dancing with the Lion, I knew three things:

1)     I wanted to write about Alexander before he became king.

2)     I wanted to explore his relationship with Hephaistion.

3)     I especially wanted to consider how both became the men they’d did.

With those goals in mind, I could frame the story. Because I always intended Hephaistion to be as important as Alexander, the novel opens in his point-of-view to establish that. And because I didn’t want to deal with Alexander as king, the novel had to end before he became one. History itself gives a HUGE and obvious gift in the abrupt murder of Philip. Where to open was harder to decide, but as I wanted to explore the boys’ friendship and its impact on their maturation into men, I should logically begin with their meeting, and decided not to have them meet too young. From there, I spun out Hephaistion’s background, and his decision to run away from home to join the circus, er, I mean Pages. 😉

IMO, Alexander’s story is Too Big to do in a single novel, or you get an 800+ page monstrosity like Chris Cameron’s God of War. The author must decide on what piece of the story she wants to tell. (Or, like me, view it as a series.)

So that’s (in a nutshell) how you construct a story.

As for the historical side, there are three levels here:

1)     What the world looks like (details).

2)     The events that take place.

3)     How people living in that world understand life, the universe, and everything.

Number two is probably the easiest. Numbers one and three require deeper research on all sorts of things. Sometimes historical novels spend all their time on number one and completely forget number three exists.

The past is a foreign country. Just as you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) write a novel set in Japan (if you’re American) without learning something not only about the physical country but also the customs…same with stories set in the past.

This is why the Oliver Stone movie failed. He put modern people in a costume drama. He didn’t understand how ancient Macedonians (or Greeks or Persians) thought. So he committed crazy anachronisms like the oedipal complex between Alexander and Olympias. Freud may have named his theory after a Greek hero, but it’s largely a foreign idea to the Greek mind. (Whether it’s valid at all is a topic for another day).

The author has to let ancient people be properly ancient.

Problem: what do you do when they’re SO foreign they’re impossible to understand for modern readers—or their attitudes are outright offensive?

Well, if you don’t plan to get your story published, you don’t have to worry about that. Or not as much. But if you want to share it with others, you might still want to consider it.

There are two basic approaches:

1)     Introduce your world through a “stranger” who enters it.

2)     Spread out more “modern” views among various characters in the story, to give modern readers something familiar to hang onto.

The first of those is by far the most common. So in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, Claire Randall—quite literally a modern woman—introduces the modern reader to Jacobite Scotland. As she learns about her new world, so does the reader, and in Claire, the reader has a voice to express both their fascination and their horror of that world. In Judith Tarr’s Lord of the Two Lands, she uses Meriamon, an Egyptian priestess, to enter the Macedonian world of Alexander. Judy can then contrast Egyptian and Macedonian cultural values in order to explain them. Meriamon asks questions the reader wants answers to—or Niko (or Alexander) ask questions of her about Egypt.

The second choice (which is what I did in Dancing) is to identify cultural mores likely to offend modern readers: indifference to slavery, glorification of war and conquest, Greco-Macedonian attitudes towards women, and Greco-Macedonian attitudes towards sexuality. Then to assign one of the characters to voice a more modern view. Alexander gets to be a proto-feminist, and I gave points of view to two women. One of those women, I made a slave. Hephaistion gets to express a more modern view regarding the horrors of war. Sexuality was a bit tougher, but I used the boys’ atypical relationship—that the younger is the one of higher status—to illustrate Greco-Macedonian assumptions about what a male-male relationship should look like.

That approach presents more hurdles, but for my purposes, I preferred it.

I harp on this because it’s the biggest problem for historical fiction: not having historical characters! It wrecks what might otherwise be decent research into the details. No matter how much you look up what they ate, how they dressed, the way their houses were laid out…if you have them behaving anachronistically, it’s a bad historical. Or if you have circumstances that just wouldn’t occur.

Let me give an example. I’ve said before that, when I started writing the novel in December of 1988, Dancing always began with a run-away boy (Hephaistion). But in my initial version, he showed up in Pella incognito. The more I read about Macedonia, however, the more I realized that was virtually impossible. There just weren’t that many Hetairoi. He’d have been recognized, and probably sooner rather than later. So I went back to the drawing board and, instead of having him try to hide, he comes right out and says who he is, and that he wants to join the Pages. It might take away the “mystery,” but set up more interesting dynamics: would Philip let him stay? What would his father do? Etc.

That requires the author know enough about the culture to know what’s possible, probable, and impossible. It also requires the author to be willing to change original plans in order to reflect reality, not insist on doing ___ anyway.

A good example of jettisoning history in favor of “what I want to do!” can be found in David Gemmell’s Lion of Macedon. So many, many things wrong with that book, starting with his choice to make Parmenion a Spartan for no historical reason whatsoever—but (I assume?) because Spartans Are Sexy. Parmenion likely belonged to the royal house of Upper Macedonian Pelagonia. Although even if he didn’t, absolutely nothing suggests he wasn’t Macedonian, and quite a lot says he was. The whole duology (with included The Dark Prince) was essentially Blue Boltz ™ Epic Fantasy Does Greece. The fact he actually included a bibliography in back, and got weird, isolated details right only added insult to injury.

Yet Gemmell was a best-selling British fantasy novelist who knew pacing and how to spin a good yarn. For a reader with zero knowledge of Alexander, it would stack up as a predictable but tolerable fantasy set.

Remember that as an historical fiction author, your job is to practice the art of getting it right. If that isn’t important to you, please God, write something completely made up.

At the spectrum’s other end is Showing Notecards on Every Page. You’ve done ALL that hard research, and you’ll be damn sure the reader knows it!

Um, the reader doesn’t care. The reader wants to be transported to another world. How locals in that world shoed horses (or if they shoed horses at all) is irrelevant. It matters only if your main character’s a farrier. And even then, it matters only if said-farrier is having a conversation with someone else while shoeing a horse.

If people want all the little details of history, they’ll read a history book.

Now, how much detail is “too much” can vary from reader to reader, and often has something to do with the genre.

Regular readers of historical fiction are fans because they enjoy history. So they’ll expect proper world-building. But they don’t want the Dreaded Information Dump. Weave in details. The Dreaded Information Dump is a common beginning-author error across the board, but especially bad in certain genres, such as historicals, fantasy, and SF.

What’s an “information dump”? It’s where the author provides details the reader doesn’t need at that point in the story. What the character looks like, is wearing, their family background, what they had for breakfast….

As mentioned, details should be woven into the story organically. What your character had for breakfast matters only if, later, it’s giving him/her gas: “Damn those beans in my breakfast burrito!” Some details may be useful to set a scene and prevent characters from walking around, having conversations in a void, but again, a light touch.

Similarly, One scene, One head. We do NOT need to see everything from each character’s point of view. No, really. We don’t. And dear God, please don’t “head-hop” inside of scenes (unless you’re writing omniscient, but be sure you know what omniscient IS). Drives me BUGGY.

Anyway, back to the Notecard Showing Problem. As noted above, genre expectations and reader preferences often dictate what IS “too much detail.” Generally, historical Romance (the genre) and historical mysteries go lighter on detail than historical fantasy or plain historicals. That’s because the former two have genre conventions that work against it. Romances preference the love story front-and-center at all times, and mysteries have a mystery to unravel. E.g, they’re plot driven. By contrast, historical fantasies tolerate more world building because world building itself is a feature of fantasy (and science fiction too). And the appeal of mainstream or literary historicals IS the world building, so you get massive novels like Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth.

I’m blathering now, but hopefully this gives pointers not just about writing Alexander, but writing fiction period, and historical fiction in particular.

[thefloatingstone]

We’ve gone from Self-Isolation to Quarantine and in some places to gradual relaxation phases, but that doesn’t stop the need for more nonsense you can watch on youtube while you wait for things to get back to normal. And recommending things and making lists are some of my favourite things to do but I have not yet figured out how to start or structure a video myself, you guys get another rambling tumblr post of things you can watch on youtube.

This time I’m once again just gonna recommend individual videos rather than full channels like I did in part 2.

Part 1

Part 2

In no particular order; 

LOCAL58: The Broadcast Station that Manipulates You

I recently started watching the Nexpo channel when I went on a binge of creepy youtube videos. Most of his videos are really good although the ones where he himself goes into theory crafting can be a little asinine. However, this video is REALLY good. And before you get nervous, LOCAL58 is not a real TV station. LOCAL58 is a youtube channel created by the same guy behind the Candle Cove creepypasta. This video by Nexpo covers the various episodes of LOCAL58 and discusses them. Just be aware going in that this is abstract horror, and will probably get under your skin regardless if you’re unaffected by certain topics or not. although cw for suicide mention.

I also recommend most of the rest of this channel, although be careful where you tread. I don’t recommend his series “Disturbing things from around the internet” as it can sometimes include real life crime, abuse and such caught on security cameras. Everything else is really good tho. (although I was really annoyed by his 2 videos on KrainaGrzybowTV)

The Search for D.B. Cooper

LEMMiNO has a new video out covering one of the most unexplained crimes in the past century of the US. LEMMiNO is the guy I’ve recommended before who did videos on the Universal S. He is very down to earth and not someone prone to conspiracy or even really that fanciful of thinking. (He’s like the one person I feel covered the Dyaltov Pass incident and was confused by why this was even a mystery because if you read the Russian Autopsy reports and documents associated with the case it’s all pretty logical and easily explained)

D.B. Cooper is the name given to a man who, in 1971, hijacked an airplane with a bomb, asked for a large sum of money, and after receiving it, parachuted from the plane and was never seen or heard from again.

The Austrian Wine Poisoning | Down the Rabbit Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole also has a new video out, this time covering the Austrian Wine Poisoning event from 1985. A scandal that involved literally the entire country of Austria, affected multiple countries, and forever changed the way wine was made world wide. As someone who is generally pretty allergic to most artificial substances this one made me personally very angry. But luckily, it has a happy ending and a better world for us all... if I could drink wine which I can’t do anyway.

The Turbulent Tale of Yandere Dev - A Six Year Struggle

The Right Opinion is another channel I only recently subbed to after watching his cover on Onion Boy. I put off subbing to him simply because of his channel name and I thought it meant he would come across as smug and elitist. Luckily this seems to merely be one of those “I chose a bad channel name and now I’m stuck with it” type of situations. (IHE has a similar problem).

Anyway, I have a weird interest in bizarre internet personalities, so I’ve been enjoying his channel as he simply discusses and presents a timeline of events of certain individuals. In this video, he covers the developer behind the much maligned Yandere Simulator. It’s a tale of hubris, arrogance, immaturity, and an unwillingness to accept your own shortcomings due to ego.

Oh and there’s a meme game about Japanese school girls with anime tiddies in there as well.

The Most Relaxing Anime Ever Made | Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō

Kenny Lauderdale is a youtube channel which is slowly becoming bigger which I’m very happy to see. He exclusively covers anime and live action Japanese television no younger than the mid 90s (as is the case with YYK) and which usually never saw a release outside of Japanese Laserdisc. I do wish his videos were a little longer, but if nothing else his videos serve as an excellent starting to point to find some older and underappreciated shows... or hot garbage fires. In this episode he talks about the 2 OVA episodes made based on one of my favourite manga, Yokohama Shopping Log. A Post apocalyptic anime about an android who runs a coffee shop outside of her house, and the quiet solitude of living in a world of declining human population, brief encounters with travelers and other people, and just... existing. The anime was never released outside of Japan and is only available on Japanese VHS and laserdisc.... but hey guess what!! Somebody uploaded both episodes, subbed, to Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2HCVOH6DtA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqSTwfkobME

YMS’ slow descent into madness as he uncovers just how bullshit the Kimba Conspiracy is

I’m linking a full playlist for this one.

YMS is busy planning his review on the “live action” Lion King remake as the original 1994 movie is probably his favourite movie all time (and also self declared what made him a furry). As part of the 2 hour review, he decided to what all 2000 hours of Kimba the White Lion just to mention how The Lion King potentially stole the idea. ....until he actually watched all 2000 hours of Kimba and realised that if you actually WATCH Kimba, it has VERY little to do with the Lion King at all apart from having the same animals in them because AFRICA. Watch as one man slowly loses his mind as he realises just how stupid this conspiracy theory is, just HOW DECEITFUL and straight up LYING people can be. People who write BOOKS. People who teach LAW AT UNIVERSITIES. Because NOBODY bothered to actually watch the entire show and just parroted the “Disney stole this” lie which got started by like 2 salty fans on the internet.

The man set out to just mention how Disney stole an idea, and uncovered one of the most infuriating rabbit holes on the internet. Screaming for SOMEONE to provide him with sources or evidence.

YMS will be publishing his full Kimba documentary this month which he has said is around 2 hours long before he continues to work on the Lion King one.

Science Stories: Loch Ness eDNA results, Poop Knives, and Skeleton Lovers

TREY the Explainer has a video giving us some updates in Archeology from 2019. In this video he discusses the findings of the eDNA results conducted on the Loch Ness to see what animal DNA the lake contains which will tell us what living animals currently inhabit the lake, ancient knives made of poop and if this is a real thing that could have existed, and a skeleton couple found buried together which were at first thought to be lovers, then revealed to be both male, and then how in this instance we cannot let our modern sensibilities dictate what we WANT this burial find to be, but to look at the evidence as presented to us and place in context finds of this nature. The worst thing an archaeologist can do is look for proof to a theory they already have.

The Bizarre Modern Reality of Sonic the Hedgehog

Super Eyepatch Wolf is back and he’s here to talk to us about the very very strange existence of Sonic. a 90s rebellious “too cool for School” answer to Mario, a lost idea as the world of video games changes and culture shifted, a meme and punching bag amplified by a unique fanbase and poor quality games, a transcendence into a horrific warped  idea of what he once was, and modern day and where Sonic and his fans are now. As usual Super Eyepatch Wolf knocks it out of the park.

Kokoro Wish and the Birth of a Multiverse: A Lecture on the Work of Jennifer Diane Reitz

I don’t even sub to this channel as I’m not entirely sure what Ben’s usual content is about. But every now and then he has a “101″ class, where he explains to a room full of his friends in a classroom setting (complete with Whiteboard) an internet artist and oddity, the timeline, and what it is they have created. (wait... didn’t I say this already?). Unlike TRO however, the 101 classrooms are not a dark look into disturbed individuals (although the CWC 101 is debatable) nor is it a “lol look at this weirdo” dragging. Instead, of the 3 he’s done so far, it’s usually a rather sympathetic look at some of the strange artists on the internet who through some way or another, left a very big cultural impact on the internet space through their art. Sometimes they may not be the best people, but their work is so outside of what we’re used to seeing that just listening to him run you through these people’s internet history is fascinating.

In this episode he talks about Jennifer Diane Reitz. And although it is titled Kokoro Wish, the lecture is more about Jennifer’s larger work back in the early internet when being a weeb was unheard of, how being trans influenced her stories and characters, and her world building that is so rich and in-depth with it’s own ASTRO PHYSICS it puts any modern fictional world found in games or movies to shame.

Jennifer is not exactly a nice person... and in many ways can be seen as dangerously irresponsible, but she created something truly unique in a way that you kinda struggle figuring out if it’s terrible or a work of genius.

Anyway I think that’s enough for now

[roaringgirl]

Books read in January

I am keeping this as a little record for myself, as I already keep a list (my best new year’s resolution - begun Jan 2018) but don’t record my thoughts

General thoughts on this - I read a lot this month but it played into my worst tendencies to read very very fast and not reflect, something I’m particularly prone too with modern fiction. I just, so to speak, swallow it without thinking. First 5 or so entries apart, I did quite well in my usually miserably failed attempt to have my reading be at least half books by women.

1. John le Carré - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974): I liked this a lot! I sort of lost track of the Cold War and shall we say ethics-concerned parts of it and ended up reading a fair bit of it as an English comedy of manners - but I absolutely love all the bizarre rules about what is in bad taste (are these real? Did le Carré make them up?).

2. John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963): I liked this a lot less. It seemed at the same time wilfully opaque and entirely predictable. Have been thinking a lot about genre fiction - I love westerns and noir, so wonder if for me British genre fiction doesn’t quite scratch the same itch.

3. David Lodge - Ginger You’re Barmy (1962): This was fine. I don’t have much to say about it - I was interested in reading about National Service and a bit bogged down in a history of it so read a novel. As with most comic novels, it was perfectly readable but not very funny.

4. Dan Simmons - Song of Kali (1985): His first novel. This is quite enjoyable just for the amount of Grand Guignol gore, and also because I like to imagine it caused the Calcutta tourist board some consternation. Wildly structurally flawed, however. Best/worst quote: ‘Hearing Amrita speak was like being stroked by a firm but well-oiled palm.’ Continues in that vein.

5. Richard Vinen - National Service: A Generation in Uniform (2014): If you are interested in National Service, this is a good overview! If not, not.

6. Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall (2018): I absolutely loved this. About a camping trip trying to recreate Iron Age Britain. Just, very upsetting but so so good - a horror story where the horror is male violence and abuse within the (un)natural family unit.

7. Kate Grenville - A Room Made of Leaves (2020): Excellent idea, but not amazing execution - the style is kind of bland in that ‘ironed out in MFA workshops’ way (I have no idea if she did an MFA but that’s what it felt like). Rewriting the story of early Australian colonisation through the POV of John Macarthur’s wife Elizabeth.

8. Ruth Goodman - How to Be a Victorian (2013): I mostly read this for Terror fic reasons, if I’m honest. I skimmed a lot of it but she has a charming authorial voice and I really like that she covers the beginning of the period, not just post-1870.

9. Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story (2010): I read this on a recommendation from Ms Poose after I asked for good fiction mostly concerned with the internet, and I thought it was excellent - it’s very exaggerated/non-realistic and that heightening of incident and affect works so well.

10. Brenda Wineapple - The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019): What a great book. I had to keep putting it down because reading about Reconstruction always makes me so sad and frustrated with what might have been - the lost dream of a better world.

11. Halle Butler - The New Me (2019): Reading this while single, starting antidepressants and stuck in an office job that bores me to death but is too stable/undemanding to complain about maybe wasn’t a great decision, for me, emotionally.

12. Halle Butler - Jillian (2015): Ditto.

13. Ottessa Moshfegh - Death in Her Hands (2020): Very disappointed by this. I don’t really like meta-fiction unless it’s really something special and this wasn’t. Also, I’m stupid and really bad at reading, like, postmodern allegorical fiction I just never get it.

14. Andrea Lawlor  - Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017): This was really really hot! I will admit I don’t think the reflections on gender, homophobia, AIDS etc are very deep or as revealing as some reviews made out, but I also don’t think they’re supposed to be? It’s a lot of fun and all of the characters in it are so precisely, fondly but meanly sketched.

15. Catherine Lacey - The Answers (2017): This was fine! Readable, enjoyable, but honestly it has not stuck with me. There are only so many sad girl dystopias you can read and I think I overdid it with them this month.

16. Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall (2010, reread): Was supposed to read the first 55 pages of this for my two-person book club, but I completely lack self-restraint so reread the whole thing in four days. Like, I love it I don’t really know what else to say. I was posing for years that ‘Oh, Mantel’s earlier novels are better, they’re such an interesting development of Muriel Spark and the problem of evil and farce’ blah blah blah but nope, this is great.

17. Oisin Fagan - Hostages (2016): Book of short stories that I disliked intensely, which disappointed me because I tore through Nobber in horrified fascination (his novel set in Ireland during the Black Death - which I really cannot recommend enough. It’s so intensely horrible but, like Mantel although in a completely different style/method, he has the trick of not taking the past on modern terms). A lot of this is sci-fi dystopia short stories which just aren’t... very good or well-sustained. BUT I did appreciate it because it is absolutely the opposite of pleasant, competently-written but forgettable MFA fiction.

18. Muriel Spark - Loitering with Intent (1981): Probably my least favourite Spark so far, but still good. I think the Ealing Comedy-esque elements of her style are most evident and most dated here. It just doesn’t have the same sentence-by-sentence sting as most of her work, and again I don’t like meta-fiction.

19. Hilary Mantel - Bring up the Bodies (2012, reread): Having (re)read all of these in about 3 months, I think this is probably my favourite of the three. I just love the way a whole world, whole centuries and centuries of history and society spiral out from every paragraph. And just stylistically, how perfect - every sentence is a cracker. I’m just perpetually in awe of Mantel as a prose stylist (although I dislike that everyone seems to write in the present tense now and blame her for it).

20. Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means (1963, reread): (TW weight talk etc ) As always, Hilary Mantel sets me off on a Muriel Spark spree. I’ve read this too many times to say much about it other than that the denouement always makes me go... my hips definitely wouldn’t fit through that window. Maybe I should lose weight in case I have to crawl out of a bathroom window due to a fire caused by an unexploded bomb from WW2???? Which is a wild throwback to my mentality as a 16 year old.

21. China Mieville - Perdido Street Station (2000, reread): What a lot of fun. I know we don’t do steampunk anymore BUT I do like that he got in the whole economic and justice system of the early British Industrial Revolution and not just like steam engines. God, maybe I should read more sci-fi. Maybe I should reread the rest of this trilogy but that’s like 2000 pages. Maybe I should reread the City and the City because at least that’s short and ties exactly into my Disco Elysium obsession (the mod I downloaded to unlock all dialogue keeps breaking the game though. Is there a script online???)

22. Stephen King - Carrie (1974): I have a confession to make: I was supposed to teach this to one of my tutees and then just never read it, but to be honest we’re still doing basic reading comprehension anyway. That sounds mean but she’s very sweet and I love teaching her because she gets perceptibly less intimidated/critical of herself every lesson. ANYWAY I read half of this in the bath having just finished my period, which I think was perfect. It’s fun! Stephen King is fun! I don’t have anything deeper to say.

23. Hilary Mantel - Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985): You can def tell this is a first novel because it doesn’t quite crackle with the same demonic energy as like, An Experiment in Love or Beyond Black, but all the recurring themes are there. If it were by anyone else I’d be like good novel! But it’s not as good as her other novels.

24. Dominique Fortier - On the Proper Usage of Stars (2010): This was... perfectly competent. Kind of dull? It made me think of what I appreciate about Dan Simmons which is how viscerally unpleasant he makes being in the Navy seem generally, and man-hauling with scurvy specifically. This had the same problem with some other FE fiction which is that they’re mostly not willing to go wild and invent enough so the whole thing is kind of diffuse and under-characterised. Although I hated the invented plucky Victorian orphan who’s great at magnetism and taxonomy and read all ONE THOUSAND BOOKS or whatever on the ships before they got thawed out at Beechey (and then the plotline just went nowhere because they immediately all died???) I had to skim all his bits in irritation. I liked the books more than this makes it sound I was just like Mr Tuesday I hope you fall down a crevasse sooner rather than later.

25. Muriel Spark - The Abbess of Crewe (1974): Transposing Watergate to an English convent is quite funny, although it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that’s what she was doing even though I lit read a book covering Watergate in detail in December. Muriel Spark is just so, so stylish I’m always consumed with envy. I think a lot of her books don’t quite hang together as books but sentence by sentence... they’re exquisite and incomparable.

Overall thoughts: This month was very indulgent since I basically just inhaled a lot of not challenging fiction. I need to enjoy myself less, so next month we’re finishing a biography of Napoleon, reading the Woman in White and finishing the Lesser Bohemians which currently I’m struggling with since it’s like nearly as impenetrable Joyce c. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but, so far... well I hesitate to say bad since I think once I get into I’ll be into it but. Bad.

[cheerfulmelancholies]

This is a little something I thought up today that was inspired by a prompt I'd been meaning to try. It's not something I'll do much else with but it was still pretty fun.

The Adventurer's Guild was packed today; Gloria Everheart was there with the highest paying job available. Even Maxwell was too shocked to do much more than stare at the crowd surrounding the woman, jaw slack and teeth just barely visible through his thick brown beard. Richard almost felt sorry for him, having been ambushed like this by perhaps the most powerful woman in existence. If he didn't put up a decent offering, she'd no doubt shut him down and humiliate him.

Somebody tapped Richard on the shoulder and he turned to see his old friend, Simon.

"I hope you aren't about to go over there and grovel for a chance to be her escort," he said.

"No. But it seems you are," he replied, eyeing his friend's gear.

"Don't be ridiculous. I would never soil my dignity for that woman. I'm only dressed like this so I can take on Maxwell's most promising mission. Poor fellow looks like he needs it." The man was currently sweating bullets.

"Ah. The dragon?"

"The dragon," he said, striding up to the counter, armor clinking.

"No! I will not have a weak kneed man such as yourself accompany me to my uncle's affairs." The wannabe knight was lying on his side, cradling his masculinity. She watched the other men take cautious steps back. "Is there no one in this sorry hut you call a guild who can escort me?" she shouted to Maxwell.

He leaned back and looked like he might run at any second. Or drop to the floor and beg for forgiveness.

Simon brought an armored hand to his lips and tried not to make it obvious he was laughing. Should the Guild be closed down for one man taking a heeled foot to his privates, while it would mean he'd be taking jobs from elsewhere, it would be all too funny.

Richard was going to leave--deciding that whatever riches he'd be missing out on could wait for another day, if there was one--when the sound of a heavy woosh caught his attention. It was followed by another, and another, and another still until he realized it was getting closer and sounded uncannily like a-

"Dragon!" somebody shouted, rushing out the front entrance to see the massive, winged beast touch down with a boom. They all crammed out of the doors behind him.

Standing on all fours, towering far above them, was a sapphire blue dragon with blood red eyes. Its scales glinted in the morning sun and it pressed its wings to itself, keeping them from blotting out the light. The thing lowered its head to observe them more closely. Though at least half of the men were armed to the teeth with swords, spears and other weapons, none of them dared to draw one. They could only watch in horror as the beast opened its jaw and sucked in air.

"I would like to inquire about one of these 'quests,'" the dragon said, tilting his head. "I understand you humans will give out gold upon its completion?" The gathering of men only stared. His head tilted the other way. He was certain they could speak.

Richard was one of the ones standing the closest, having been nearer to the door than the rest. He eyed a clawed finger warily. It would easily be able to skewer three men and he'd be the first. Swallowing the fear, he said, "That's usually how a quest goes." He stepped back when the head turned to him.

"And what might I have to do to complete one?"

He couldn't believe his ears. A dragon--a DRAGON--was asking for a quest? An odd job? He couldn't fathom why the creature would need to do such a thing. Didn't it know its kind was hunted?

"You are probably confused as to why I'm asking," he said, lips pulling back into a smile, though the men thought he was baring his teeth. "Well, it's because you humans offer gold. Why is that, anyway?"

"For... That's our payment. It's our money. We need it to buy things." Not steal goats, he kept to himself.

The dragon nodded. "I see. So humans have their own sort of hoards, is it? Well, I shall be willing to do whatever jobs you have to offer me, so long as I am paid in gold."

Before any of them could find the bravery to let out a war cry and attack the thing, Gloria presented herself at the front of the crowd. They could only watch, flabbergasted, as she and the dragon began to speak terms.

"I shall give you fifty thousand in gold for escorting me to my uncle's castle in Varland."

"Fifty thousand!" he said, rearing his head back in shock. "So reckless! Does your gold really mean so little to you?"

"That is nothing. It's decent change for a trip. So, do you accept?"

"Of course! What kind of a fool would I be to decline such a healthy offering?"

"Wait!" Simon rushed to her and blocked her from the dragon. "Why would we trust you? Why would YOU trust him?" he added to Gloria. "This beast has a price on his head. Are we really going to let him leave?" Several other men cheered in agreement and stood by him, weapons drawn. One of them even had a bow, what little good it would do against the scales of the creature.

"A bounty? On me? What for?" His eyes narrowed, pupils becoming slits.

"For stealing our goats!" one of the men shouted.

"And our cattle!"

"You've ruined my whole farm! All my crops, gone!"

"I did no such things," he said, still angry but growing confused. "I haven't even been here before."

"It wasn't a blue dragon, but it was still a dragon," Simon said, pointing his sword. "You and your kind are nothing but monsters."

"It looks to me that the only ones with a problem here, are you humans. Don't hold the entirety of my kind accountable for the crimes of a few." He let out an indignant puff of smoke.

"Well, who's going to repay us for our losses. You?"

He hummed. "Why not. Perhaps we can reach an agreement here." He watched the men lower their weapons in interest, still mistrustful.

"What kind of an agreement?" came a man near the rear of the crowd, beard hiding his mouth so the dragon could not see his expression.

"I won't claim to know much of your culture, but I do know you humans value more than gold. You don't believe that gold is the only thing I collect?" Silence. "I will let you debate. In the meantime, I have work that needs to be done." He lowered his head to the ground, shooing away the men so that the woman could climb onto his neck. He gently raised back up. "I shall return in due time," he said, stepping backwards.

They all watched as the dragon, Gloria perched on his neck like some sort of warrior goddess, stretched his wings and took to the skies, blasting dust in his wake. His wing flaps faded into the distance.

"What... just happened?" Richard stared dumbly at the surrounding men, making sure they'd seen it too and that he wasn't losing his mind.

The dragon, true to his word, returned mere hours later from a trip that would have taken days, and landed in the same spot as before. This time, however, he brought gifts with him. Trinkets from his lair that he claimed he had no use for. Jewels, jewelry, armor and weapons fell from his maw. One of the weapons, a sword with an ornate decoration on the hilt, caught one of the men's eye. He rushed over and inspected it.

"This is..." He turned to the group behind him. "Do you see what this is? This sword was made by Saurus. That man's work is legendary. He's been dead for years, this thing is a treasure." He snatched it back when someone tried to take a look.

It took quite a lot of debate, but eventually the poster for a dragon-killer was pulled down. He'd promised to look for the ones causing trouble and have a word with them. Aside from that, he'd be willing to take on their jobs so long as they gave him gold. His second 'quest' was to protect a family's farm from wolves while they put up new fencing.

"Thank you very much," the father said as he handed the dragon his payment, coins jingling together in the burlap sack. As an afterthought, he added, "I'm sorry but... What should we call you? You have a name right?"

He nodded. "It would be a bit difficult to say in your language, as there is no way to translate it, but the closest it can get from my native tongue is Gerald."

It didn't take long for the other dragons to catch wind of Gerald's deeds and come out of hiding. They offered up pieces from their own hoards in exchange for the human's gold and soon a sort of system was formed. It wasn't always peaceful, but it was nice. Interacting with dragons so closely was fascinating and it spawned several philosophers and studies. There were dragons who were just as fascinated. Many villages began coexisting for the sole purpose of cultural studies.

Things had changed quite a bit in the span of that single day. Richard wasn't sure what sort of nonsense Simon was currently getting up to, now that he was no longer the resident dragon slayer, but he knew the man was just as relieved at the way things turned out. It was certainly a relief to be able to enjoy the beauty of the sky without having to hope the sight of wings wouldn't kill you.

A fun little idea from a prompt about a dragon showing up for a quest because it heard humans will just give out gold like that. The blog the prompt is from is @writing-prompt-s . They've got all kinds of great ideas there and I'd recommend checking them out. Written in one go just for an enjoyable exercise. And yes I just named a dragon Gerald.

[drlauralwalsh]

Top 7 Recent Obsessions and 3 Freshly Intolerable Topics

Since my wife died in February, I’ve transformed into an obsessive recluse.  I’ve always been a weirdo but now I’m a grieving weirdo.  It takes eccentricity to a whole other level.  Before, my obsessions were psychology and home improvement projects.  Now, work is impossible and I break down trying to choose flowers at the local Home Depot.  Removing every last dandelion from the yard is my glorious new passion.

Since I trust you, I’m going to tell you about some of the other strange occupiers of my mind.  Like squatters, these topics have moved into my brain to fill up the unused rooms.  I vacillate between kicking them out and kinda liking the company.  Until new obsessions come along, I’ll play reluctant host to this ragtag collection of ideas.  

1. Life After Life

It’s natural to wonder what happens to someone after they die.  I’ve been doing some light reading (usually at around 3AM) on what psychic mediums think on the subject.  Apparently, we continue life on the other side, often recreating the likeness of our earthly homes and possessions out of familiarity.  In my wife’s afterlife, I hope she made some improvements.  She’s likely finally found the perfect couch (comfy yet stylish!) and is no longer taunted by the daily dog hair tumbleweeds.

I have a few questions.  Does my wife get to meet celebrities? She’d be totally psyched to meet Dolores O’Riordan, the lead singer of The Cranberries, who died in January of 2018.  Did she get to watch the last season of Homeland that aired after she died?  Can she still water a lawn in contemplative meditation?  Most likely, she’s cavorting with her first girlfriend, Suzy.  I’m told Suzy was a little crazy in her earth life so I hope she’s not a bad influence.

If I end up living a few more decades, I’ll probably grow and change substantially.  Will Patty recognize me when I finally make the trip? Will she and I still be soulmates or will I have to share her?  Like, did Suzy claim my wife as her soulmate?  I don’t wish anyone loneliness in the after life but dang, I’ve got dibs.

2. Cookie Butter Therapy

If you’ve read my self care tips, you know I’ve found cookie butter solace.  Listening to my body’s unique nutrient requirements, I heed the call for that smooth comfort.  As a psychologist, it used to bug me when I’d see memes like, “I don’t need therapy, I’ve got wine!”  Occasionally speaking aloud, I’d reply, “Hello future client!”

Now, I’m not so sure that retail, alcohol or food therapy is all that bad.  I mean, it IS bad in that it doesn’t solve the problem and could turn into something worse.  But if keeping your head above water saves your life, perhaps I should reconsider these stopgap measures.  Personally, I’m planning a future half marathon to combat the future cookie butter problem.  And by planning, I mean it’s on my list to look up neighborhood jogging routes.

3. Signs from Beyond the Veil

After my Dad died in 2002, I looked for evidence that his energy was still around.  Losing a spouse takes it to a completely new desperation.  Again, according to psychic mediums, we can ask our departed loved ones for specific signs and they will try to send them to us.  Oh the pressure!  Being an overachiever, of course I wanted to come up with the perfect sign to request from my wife.  One that hits just the right balance of inside joke and everlasting love.

To get the ball rolling, I picked the first thing that came to mind.  I asked my wife to send me a maroon Nissan Rogue SUV.  Weird, I know - but also the perfect symbol of our family.  I’m not that great at these requests just yet so I hope she knows I’m asking to see one, not get one as a gift.  Years ago, she borrowed my maroon Nissan for a road trip with two little boys who would become my step kids.  Having not yet met, questions about the car’s owner became a convenient way to talk about Mama’s new sweetheart.  

I started seeing this car EVERYWHERE.  There’s this one little problem, though.  Have you ever heard of confirmation bias?  Psychology Today says, “Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. “  Basically, I started seeing the car because I wanted the sign from her.  The overly enthusiastic part of my brain said, “Yeah, but wouldn’t she also FLOOD the world with whatever sign you requested????”  Next time, I’ll ask for money.

4. Meditation

After all the grief festivities were done (i.e. initial horror and subsequent wake and funeral), one of my besties recommended the book, Proof of Heaven by Dr. Eben Alexander.  The author is a smarty-pants neurosurgeon who had a near death experience.  He woke up out of a coma, wrote everything down, and set about trying to disprove the platitudes he once touted to patients.  Anyway, a fascinating book and GREAT for the active griever in your life.

Veering from his conventional colleagues, Dr. Alexander’s career diverged towards the path less taken.  He’s now involved in projects with the founders of Sacred Acoustics, a brainwave entrainment audio recordings company.  That’s a fancy way of saying guided meditations with binaural beats that create experiences.  There’s one that facilitates “communication with spirits across the veil.” Since I’m obsessed with getting back with my wife without leaving my kids and dogs, I became a convert. 

Before Patty died (AKA BPD), I was known to dabble in mindfulness and may have claimed I meditated for longer and more often than I actually remembered to do.  Don’t judge me, I was a busy mom!  With a renewed desperation and time on my hands, I gave these wacky meditations a go.  OMG, y’all they are amazing.  I dare say I’ve done a little cavorting with my wife (at least in my mind).  Seriously, between ADHD and grief brain, I can still knock out a 38 minute ‘Love Body’ meditation, no sweat.  In the least, it’s a crutch over the rough spots.

5. Crafty Crystal Suncatchers

I haven’t gone off the deep end (yet) and meditated while balancing my chakras (okay, maybe once) with family heirlooms.  If you read more than one book about the afterlife, you’ll pick up on themes.  Psychics love auras, butterflies, and RAINBOWS.  Since I’ve got time, I figured it wasn’t hard to put together my own suncatcher.  You can certainly purchase these dandies but I prefer my own extremely amateur creations - especially since I need one for every window.  Not sure what to do with these colorful messages from beyond but they are a comfort of sorts.

You may have gathered that I wasn’t previously into the paranormal.  For instance, I knew that smudging was a thing but now, thanks to Etsy, I have my own kit.  Same with healing crystals.  As a child from a family of geologists, semi-precious gems, variegated rocks and hefty quartz crystals already held a special awe.  I must note that my grandfather never mentioned crystal suncatchers as a method for communicating with the dead.  It’s all me who’s hoping for yet another channel where, through refracted sunlight, my wife asserts her presence.

6. Documentaries About Death

It’s a widow habit to categorize life events as ‘before’ and ‘after,’  We use these terms with a wistful air of melancholy apology.  We didn’t create these terms but they’re used as handy shortcuts before launching into yet another story about our dead spouses.  This next tidbit is about me, though.

I love documentaries but before, I’d skip over the downers.  Who wants to watch a flick about eroding habitats when your lawn looks so good?  Times change and now after, I’ve completely confused Amazon’s algorithms with my new entertainment searches.  I find comfort in tragedy.

I recently watched The Bridge, a documentary on the world’s most dangerous suicide locale - the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  Since it was built, upwards of 1,700 souls have leapt to their nearly assured demise.  The doc profiles the families of people actually caught on film at the moment of decision.  Should sound awful, right?  To me, it’s soothing.  Not the suicides, but hearing the family process the death.  They’re in the soup with me.  Their stories make me feel normal.

7. Unique Grave Decorations

I’m only sharing this with you because I know you’ll understand.  I threw this one in the mix because I had a brief, but intense love affair with unusual grave decorations.   Did you know you can get “grave blankets” to keep your loved one warm?  Obviously more popular in northern climes, they're actually giant wreaths of evergreen branches to cover the gravesite.  Sadly, they aren’t allowed in my wife's cemetery or I’d be all over it.  She was always cold…..before.

Switching gears, turning towards the following topics is a sort of exposure therapy.  They each flutter at the windows of my mind and blot out the light (which I need for rainbows).  I might as well add them to the growing list of crap I have to deal with eventually.  Just so you know, I’m not weird enough to literally keep a list (yet).

1. Birthdays, Holidays, and Other Horrible Occasions

I know they’re coming.  I limped through some already.  May holds the double whammy of Mother’s Day and my birthday.  Despite the embarrassing lack of evergreen splendor, we’ll visit her gravesite where I’ve already smuggled in other decorative contraband.  Since I buy presents for myself all the time, for my birthday, I generally request a tasteful yet classic homemade card.  I’ll get through the anticipatory dread and trudge through the sewage of my lowered expectations.  It’s only another 24 hours to get through.

2. Getting Married Again

I can’t even think about what’s next.  Or rather who.  When I do think about it, I feel sorry for the sad sap who’s attracted to the runner up spot. Here’s the thing, I think about getting married again ALL THE TIME.  My fantasy only went as far as imagining waking up in a fully formed relationship.  Because I loved being married to my wife, it seemed reasonable to want our life reinstated.  As the days turn into months, finding someone new continues to stubbornly insert itself from outside my head.  I blame Patty.  She always insisted if she died first, she’d want me to remarry.  Less charitably, I countered that if I died first, she could never remarry because I’m her one true love.  She apparently wants the last word.

To be fair, I am only 45 years old.  When my stepson asked, I told him I was going to marry the dogs.  He just doesn’t want me to change my last name, so on that we’re cool.  Like passing me a note, Patty’s best friend from high school also delicately floated the idea.  Even my brother-in-law said he wouldn’t want me to pass up something special.  They all want me to be happy.  I don’t want to want to get married again.  It feels like forcing myself into a loveless, arranged marriage.  With my luck, I’ll live another forty years.  Maybe I’ll feel differently if my wife sends me a convincing sign.  

3. The Next Death

The completely self absorbed grieving person I’ve become can’t even think about the next shitburger tragedy that’s surely on its way..  You’d think I’d have a guess who it might be but you’re wrong.  I never would have put my wife on the shortlist but here we are.  With new obsessions hoarding space in my grieving mind, it’s too crowded to handle another disaster.  So I just don’t think about it.

If you’re grieving too, I want you to know you’re not a weirdo.  Or at least you’re a weirdo like all of us - another broken toy tossed onto Bereavement Island (like Fantasy Island but more sad).  I was never particularly interested in psychics, grave ornaments or dead people (beyond famous authors).  Grief turns you inside out until you no longer recognize the person you were before.  It wasn’t so easy to tip me over and I certainly didn’t cry in public.  Falling into grief is similar to falling in love.  With both, I lost my appetite, deeply felt things I’d never felt before, and became completely obsessed.  In the end, grief is just another stage of love.  An unfortunate byproduct of the grandest home improvement project.  I’m comforted to realize that even as I’m swept up by transient passions, I’m essentially the same loving partner at my core.

[everyone-needs-a-hoopoe]

What was it that you didn't like about Amnesty?

oh thank you for asking!!! i was Musing late last night so i will share all my thoughts with you... i’ll start with the Big Nasty, move onto story criticism and finish with the stuff i really loved end up tying criticism and praise together because everything i liked came with a “but” regrettably. though its overall quality really suffered for its flaws, i’d still recommend amnesty even though i think i prefer balance.

(spoilers, duh!)

so... i don’t know what made justin drop all his brain cells and decide duck should date his teacher, who was already centuries old when she met him on the day of his eighteenth birthday. like, she met him when he was a teenager and she was at the very least already a middle-aged woman. she literally watched him grow up. even if that weren’t the case, you can’t just suddenly decide you’re on equal terms with someone who’s been your teacher for over half your life. it was seriously, deeply disturbing and it’s all the more disturbing that such a large chunk of the fandom thinks it’s “haha one of the only m/f ships i respect” and the same as magnus and julia’s relationship. 

that plus the treatment of cops in amnesty was a real “the mcelroys are four straight white men” reality check. i can kind of tolerate the cops thing just because a couple of years ago i wouldn’t have found anything wrong with it either, but ducknerva was just genuinely disgusting. they all should’ve known better.

as a much more minor gripe, i am pretty frustrated that griffin still can’t wrap his head around having more than one single nonbinary character per story. i do love hollis though and i think they’re cute with keith. a little iffy on his only nonbinary character being a gang leader, but i think they’re so reasonable and ultimately heroic that it’s not as big of a problem as it could’ve been.

onto narrative criticism: minerva’s ending made me pretty sad for her, too. she’s been alone for centuries, only able to talk to one or two people, and now she follows duck to a place where it’s effectively the same. it’s good for duck to be there, but for minerva that was an awful choice, and it did her a serious disservice.

speaking of disservices to characters, ned’s death would’ve worked better narratively if they hadn’t tried to replace him with thacker. if the pine guard was down to two you would really feel his absence, and the others would’ve had so much more opportunity to work through their feelings about him and dwell on what he meant to them. obviously, on top of meaning clint would have to sign off for the rest of the show which wouldn’t have been any fun for him, the mcelroys have a lot of trauma around death which would’ve made it no fun for any of them to do that. 

it would’ve been better not to kill ned at all. it didn’t make any sense that aubrey didn’t try to revive him when it’d already been established she could do that, but it also didn’t make any sense that a mixed success killed him in the first place. it was just very contrived and while the death scene was very well done it just didn’t work for the story.

and god, poor thacker. his relationship with mama was fucking delightful, his concept was awesome, they really did put in the effort to characterise him, and it didn’t work at all. there’s a reason it’s very firm writing advice to not introduce new characters more than a third of the way through the story; poor thacker embodies it. he was so good and i feel absolutely nothing for him. you did your best clint i salute you

the gulf between amnesty’s concepts and its characters is one of my biggest criticisms of it. the quell and sylvain, reconciliation, the horror elements, they were all fantastically done, and they feel a bit like they’re just concepts hovering in a void. hell, i think i like the pine guard as characters better than tres horny boys, but ironically the focus on storytelling over gameplay in amnesty made the world feel so much less unified than the world of balance. (doubly ironic considering the theme of bonds in balance??) 

i don’t feel like the pine guard had enough relationship with each other, and i don’t feel like they had relationships with the world around them. i want to love danaubrey with the passion of a thousand burning suns but, despite travis deliberately seeking out scenes with dani... i just didn’t really feel it and that sucks. again, the concepts of dani’s arc were really cool, but her execution as a character just didn’t happen. 

as my final note of criticism, a more fandom-oriented gripe: sternclay kind of annoys me. just from my quick sift through the tag yesterday i found it’s far far far more popular than danaubrey when stern’s character is nil and their chemistry nonexistent. like, it’s fine to have preferences and all, but m/m ships with minimal chemistry or presence in the story being infinitely more popular than canon f/f ships is a pattern i’ve seen repeated across countless fandoms and it’s exhausting. also fuck the fbi, stern’s cop ass does not have rights

anyway, to finish off with some things i liked that don’t have a “but” tacked on!  

i’m soooo deeply in love with the motifs of terrifying technology, the beauty of uncorrupted nature, and the horror of nature corrupted. griffin really nailed those. the imagery of all that in amnesty is something i like about it more than balance. 

sylvain and the quell are also one of my favourite things ever. entropy and creation portrayed not as enemies but as deeply in love with each other? that’s so fucking cool!!!! i’m really delighted by the quell taking the form of a sylph to reflect while its forces aren’t needed, too - it’s a really cool character concept and one that was executed well to boot.

reconciliation also was so fascinating and heartbreaking and horrifying and i loved every aspect of it. so fucking cool. i love explorations of well-intentioned evil, of calm and friendly and loving things that are just so unforgivably vile nonetheless. i love the exploration of preventative justice and how flawed and awful it is despite how it might sound good in theory. it was just so well done

i also love billy and i’m so glad he got a second chance - as heartbreaking as his death scene was, it also frustrated me that he’d never been checked in on before it, so his revival and his chance to reflect on what he’d done and try to make up for it was really, really good. 

and that’s my thoughts overall! if anyone has any good amnesty meta i’d love to read it and see other people’s thoughts too

[moistwithgender]

Monthly Media Roundup (April 2019)

April was a bit of a disaster month for me, and as such I didn’t get much of anything finished. Old wounds got reopened, I was sick all month, I had an unavoidably bad birthday, and a lifelong pet died. I didn’t engage with a lot of things, and mostly slept. I did play a lot of Breath of the Wild, but seeing as I didn’t finish that, I’m not including it yet. Here’s the things I did finish:

Games:

Blaster Master Zero (Switch): I actually first bought and finished this two years ago, and since the sequel has come out I decided to replay it with the Shovel Knight DLC character. While I genuinely like this game (I 100%’d it both times), I was not really in a good spot to enjoy this playthrough, and just kinda mindlessly pushed through it for nine consecutive hours, beating it in that single sitting. Playing as a DLC character removes the story, which is fine since they’re intended for replays, though I wonder if it added to my emotional disconnect. SK doesn’t receive fall damage, and so the precariousness of navigating the world outside of the highly-mobile tank doesn’t exist nearly as much, though the trade-off is that SK’s combat abilities in dungeons are hindered by an overall lack of range. The game is still rather easy, though, so I can’t say any particular level cadences or combat scenarios carved their way into my memory.

To the game’s credit, though, the things that are good about it are still good. If you have an attachment to the original NES game, or an interest in retro properties, or just want a nice, breezy platformer, it’s very good. It’s interesting in how it repurposes the altered plot of the US version of the original game (where it was its most popular), including even the plot of the little novelization that came out because Gotta Get Those Video Game Kids to Read Something. It has a fake out ending, and if you 100% the maps it unlocks a final map that is genuinely surreal enough to be the highlight of the game. Despite my sighing, it is a genuinely good time, and I’m very curious to play the new game, somewhat hilariously titled Blaster Master Zero 2.

Anime:

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: I chewed through the last four episodes of this so that I could say I finally finished the season. I didn’t watch the post-season recap episode. TenSura (the abbreviation of the Japanese title, which I will use to refer to it because satisfyingly abbreviating the english title is impossible) is not a very good show, but for about half the length of the 24-episode first season, it fascinates due to how it functions at all. TenSura is an isekai show, much like the other isekai shows, where a person dissatisfied with their life is brutally murdered (usually by a truck. USUALLY by a truck) and is reborn in a fantasy world that coincidentally gives them an absurd advantage over other people, allowing them to live out all the decadence they felt they deserved in the real world. If this sounds like the most boring kind of wish fulfillment possible to you, that’s because it is. It’s also extremely popular with consumers. Which is interesting! I think the isekai boom is indicative of how late-stage capitalism everyday people the world over, that we envision or escape to worlds where your efforts actually return appropriate reward. A bonkers concept, to be sure.

In TenSura, the formula doesn’t stray much. The main character is a man in his 30s (?) who has never fucked and gets knifed to death while HEROICALLY saving a coworker from a plot-irrelevant stabber dude who was running down the sidewalk with his knife out for no reason besides Main Character Needs an Inciting Incident Now. It’s actually pretty weirdly violent for the start to a show that is almost entirely light-hearted. Dude dies, his coworker dumps his hard drive in the bath out of respect (lol), and he wakes up in a fantasy world that works on videogame logic, including loot, skill trees, and class upgrades. He is reborn as an adorable slime a la Dragon Quest, but the personality traits he had in his previous life (and I guess his choice of dying words) scan to obscenely convenient passive abilities that ensure he’s not only invincible, but will never stop experiencing exponential power growth. Also he immediately makes friends with a final boss-level dragon and then eats him. That’s how he makes friends in this sometimes.

I’m being very cynical here, but the core narrative loop (and it IS a loop) of the series kept my interest for longer than I expected. Rimuru (the name of the reborn protagonist) goes somewhere he hasn’t been, astonishes the nearby (sometimes violent) inhabitants with his overpowered abilities, makes friends with them, and then improves their lives with community. Goblins, direwolves, orcs, demon lords. It stacks and builds upon itself to absurd degrees but it’s interesting that in a genre loaded with very problematic stories of disenchanted dudes finally getting the underage harem they’ve always wanted (aaaaAAAAAAAAA) that the main concept of this series is improving the lives of others and giving them closure for the ways life has hurt them. Even if. Sometimes that hurt was the main character’s doing? Like Rimuru absolutely decapitates a direwolf leader and then adopts the pack who from then on absolutely LOVE the dude. Also one of Rimuru’s abilities is that if he gives a monster a name, it class upgrades, which is generally and reasonably seen as a life improvement. Though, these class upgrades are almost always decidedly “less-tribal” or outright human, which smacks of some imperialist thinking. It’s also something I’m sure I never questioned in old videogames growing up. Meanwhile, there’s also a bit with a woman who came from Japan during that one really bad war, you know the one, and the closure she’s given as she’s dying is handled with actual delicacy. It’s a weird series! It’s only a shame to me that after most of the first season, there was less to talk about. Sometime after the halfway mark, you realize the show is never going to maintain tension for more than half an episode, that all problems are solvable (yes, even terminally ill children), and that the show isn’t going anywhere you can’t predict. It’s a checklist show, and the plot points are a list of achievements being checked off one episode at a time.

I don’t think I would actually recommend the show to most people, despite how popular it is. It’s not a great show, but it does weird enough things for a while that it generates conversations. Which is honestly pretty okay. It’s a pretty okay show. Also, Rimuru is effectively nonbinary (with he pronouns), and that’s… somethin’! (24 episodes, finished 4/17/19, Crunchyroll (Funimation also now has the dub I think? Clips I saw were pretty weird, Rimuru seemed to be characterized differently.))

Manga:

Nejimaki Kagyu Vol 1: You would think a manga that immediately starts with a reference to Phantom Blood would be, well, at least interesting.

Okay maybe invoking a beloved work doesn’t actually mean anything. I just wanted to share this blatant callback. Nejimaki Kagyu is a seinen manga about a highschool teacher whose tragically cursed to, uh, have all teenage girls fall in love with him. And the highschool-age childhood friend of his who has spent her whole life obsessed with him and learning super martial arts to defend his chastity. Her supers make her clothes explode.

…

I take no joy in this travesty.

Anyway, uh. The biggest tragedy here is that the art is actually really good, though the paneling is regularly squished around to hilarious degree. Let’s look at some pages and then forget this manga exists forever.

That horror face is how I feel the entire series should be portraying itself. The manga has a distinct lack of self-awareness.

The fan translation for this series appears to have dropped off halfway through and hasn’t been picked up for years, and based on reviews I saw on MAL talking about the directionlessness of the later volumes, I wonder if the translator got fed up with the series. Oh well!

Kyou no Asuka Show Vol 1: Oh god damn it I just got done with talking about a series about ogling the youth.

BLEASE STOP

Okay so. Kyou no Asuka Show, or “Today’s Asuka Show” is an older slice of life manga by the same author I mentioned previously who is doing an edutainment series about people working in a condom factory. Innocently-minded women in comedically lewdish situations appears to be his whole bag. I think Asuka is pretty charming, but I also know she’s designed to appeal to my monkey male gaze. Obliviously sexy is very much a mood, and in a more adult context I would be all for it. There have been a few chapters where I find myself at odds with the wisdom the author is attempting to impart, sometimes through Asuka’s father, who works as an adult photographer, and doesn’t want his daughter involved in anything that could cause her to be ogled. Like, that’s already something that requires a lot of unpacking in the modern day. Aforementioned wisdom sometimes takes the form of Asuka doing something stupid and innocent and ripe for objectifying, like wearing a school swimsuit in a rainstorm. Or she’ll work a job as a cute girl courier and inadvertently turn a shut-ins life around. Situations where, if it were in real life, I’d think “wow that’s weird and charming,” but by being a work of intentional authorship, it inherently loses some of that innocence, and becomes something well-meaning but problematic. Is that the second time I’ve used the word “problematic” in this post? Is this 2014?

I may continue reading this, but I really can’t recommend it to most people I know in 2019 without several disclaimers and also without probably getting some side eye. I think it’s worth a couple chapters to feel out what its doing before you decide whether you can siphon the charm from it, or would rather move on to something else.

Me enjoying myself when this manga tries to suddenly get up to some shit.

Blue Period Vol 1: This is the last thing on my list, because I don’t want to expand this list beyond the three mediums I’ve already assigned to it. Also, I actually finished this May 1st, but I wanted to talk about it now.

If I had the power to actually get people to engage with a specific work once per month, Blue Period would easily be the one I pick. That doesn’t mean as much when all the other things I finished this month were conflicted experiences, but I really think everyone would benefit from this series. Or at least anyone with even a passing interest in visual arts.

Blue Period (named for Picasso’s Blue Period) is about a highschool delinquent who has a knack for studying, a safe social life, and no interests in pretty much anything. He’s on the road to do fine in his life, and he doesn’t question it much, but that’s it, until he discovers art and realizes it’s the only way he’s ever been able to truly communicate his feelings. It changes everything about him, for more emotionally satisfying reasons, but also riskier ones. He only has one year of highschool to go to decide what he’s doing with his life, and Japan has a very strict education system. You’re not really allowed to just “get around” to things.

Apologies in advance if you’re tired of me spamming full pages but I really do wanna show this off. This is another series with an educational angle to it, though the emphasis is definitely more rooted in a personal narrative of growth. The explanations of art practice and the functionality of exercises and tools are both very informative and relevant to the characters, never feeling like the story is taking a backseat to explain. The characters are, hilariously, everyone I’ve ever met in an art class. There’s the kid who would rather exclusively draw the things they like, there’s the kid who likes art as a hobby but haaaates being given a project, etc etc. There are students who have an innate grasp on how to draw but haven’t internalized the Why of the exercises, and students who are receptive to the lessons but don’t have the ability to match. The narrative is extremely even-handed towards all of these different levels of skills, and places a lot more importance on why, emotionally, you should totally care about drawing apples and water pitchers for five hours at a time. It’s GREAT and I want to force it on every creative I’ve ever known.

Another thing I appreciate about this series so far is that while there has been something resembling sexual/romantic tension, it’s kind of not like that at all? In the first volume I haven’t been able to pinpoint where a potential relationship subplot would go, if at all. Two possibilities are this girl:

...who is a very likable character but surprisingly doesn’t fit into that box of “standard love interest”. The protag’s interactions with her have been exclusively respectful and admiring, which doesn’t even necessarily imply a romantic subplot, but would be pretty cool if it did? And the other girl:

...who is featured in decidedly more sexual tension-y contexts, is actually TRANS. The manga actually portrays them so uncompromisingly feminine that I didn’t realize they were crossdressing (the term used in the text) until the author’s notes at the end of the volume. I will partially blame this on me being out of it this month, since I just went back to their introduction and yep, they got misgendered and contested it. Given how the character is regularly framed (confident, attractive, skilled, nonstereotypical), I’m… pretty okay with this! If a romance blooms between a delinquent boy and a trans girl, that’s amazing.

I hope y’all understand where I’m coming from in expecting a shoehorned romantic subplot. I’m not hoping for one, I just know the product by now. And if it happens, the options are considerably more interesting than usual.

These are pretty good kids.

Manga licensing is a lot better nowadays than it ever was before, with lots of obscure series being picked up, old series getting re-localized, and translations being better than ever. I really really want this series to get licensed so someone can be compensated for it, and so more people might read it. Until then, I think you should look up the fan work.

---

So that’s all for April. If these posts included live-action movies, I’d have talked about Endgame, but I also don’t want to go spoiling anything for someone who still wants to go see that (it’s probably one of my favorite MCU movies, though). I read most of 1970-71 in Marvel comics, or at least most of the issues on my reading list, but I semi-liveblog about those, so you can just search my “curry reads comics” tag for that. Here’s hoping I have more interesting, more positive things to say about May in a month. I expect to finish Breath of the Wild by then, so I’ll finally talk about that. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far! Go check out Blue Period.

[donnerpartyofone]

#4

In 2018, with the help of some concerned and informed people in my life, I discovered that I’m probably pretty autistic. The driving factors were not what you might expect (I didn’t, anyway)--chiefly, a kind of persistent clumsiness, disorientation, organizational difficulty, trouble learning certain practical tasks--but it helped explain a lot of things about me that one might otherwise consider “quirks”. I had always taken for granted, for instance, that I have a lot of trouble recognizing faces, including ubiquitously famous actors, or members of my own family. I have also been accused from time to time of taking things “too literally” (to which I usually reply something like, “But this is literally what’s going on in reality, how does literalness make it dismissible?” I really don’t get it). Also, most typically, I have never liked being touched. “You’re just like Dave Letterman!” my dad chortles, an interpretation I don’t mind. I think it might also be pretty autistic of me to be so averse to family. I don’t have the slightest inclination toward maternity, which one could guess from the previous passages, but it’s more than neurosis. I know intellectually that people care about their families; the same way most people burst with pleasure at the sight of a baby, any baby, they also respond automatically to the very idea of blood relatives. As a kid, I was always baffled by the obsession other kids seemed to have with their cousins, or how in love they could be with their grandparents. In my world, you obsess over people to whom you have something to say; people who share your taste in art, your politics, your philosophies, your passions and phobias. I don’t understand relationships that are based on blood alone, on being trapped in the same place and time by virtue of pure circumstances.

Today, as my friends are all having babies one after another, I find myself strangely fascinated by them. Some of these people have struggled all their lives to find a sense of belonging or purpose, and having children has given them a sense of meaning beyond anything they previously hoped for. As someone who continuously struggles to find a sense of purpose, which I base exclusively on my intellectual and artistic pursuits, I’m amazed by the idea that I could potentially put all my existential confusion behind me if I were willing or able to become a mother. I can estimate how profound it must feel to create life, and then to become responsible for turning that life into something good. But, I remain unable to attach meaning to the idea of something being “a part of me” on a purely biological basis. I have insurmountable trouble thinking of my biological predecessors as being “where I come from” on the identity level. I can’t imagine being so sentimental about being an organism in a colony of like-organisms, not the way I am about people who have brought me experience and taught me to think.

So, even if I were without the mother-related trauma heretofore detailed, I still think there is something about who I am as a person, that would have made me recoil from my grandmother. My mother’s mother was the platonic ideal grandmother, a plump, pleasant old lady with a syrupy southern drawl who seemed to have stepped out of a cookie commercial. Excessively generous with money, food and affection, she presented as a person any family would welcome in their household. However, I always detected something oppressive about her. I was raised to be guiltily dutiful toward her, so as a child, I thought my suspicion and repulsion was just a problem with me. It must make me an asshole, that I don’t want her to hug me with her entire body for such a long time that I can’t figure out what’s going on anymore and I’m suffocating from the heat. I must be a dick, that I don’t want someone chasing me around, staring at me, posing me and jostling me like a baby, which I haven’t been for years. Maybe it was my problem, that I didn’t want her to burst into the bathroom and shriek with glee at the sight of me on the toilet trying to take a single solitary piss. Maybe I was just being a jerky teenager when I froze in horror while my grandmother sat next to me at the dinner table, gazing smolderingly into my eyes like a lover and caressing my hair non-verbally when I was perfectly capable of having a respectful adult conversation.

As I grew up a little more, I began to pick up on the fact that she drove both of my parents nuts. All of this motherly pageantry was incredibly manipulative, and really a way of controlling people. The creepy coddling I received as her granddaughter was really something she did to everyone. She was bright, incredibly shrewd really, a person whose hard work and frugality produced a self-made millionaire, though this didn’t reflect in her humble home. She was a dyed in the wool republican who was capable of watching the Daily Show with appropriate delight. Actually, she had a weird sadistic sense of humor; I always thought she got a little too much joy out of seeing little boys get smacked in the nuts by speeding baseballs on America’s Funniest Home Videos. That probably bothered me because of how she unforgettably screamed with laughter at my flinching when she took me to get my ears pierced. Everything indicated that, regardless of her age and conservatism, she wasn’t a vulnerable, senile old biddy, but a keenly intelligent woman very much in touch with the real world. This made it endlessly disturbing to me that she so insisted that everyone around her act like a little baby, adults and children alike, so she could rule us all as the ultimate mommy. Her aversion to grownup conversations and self-reliance was a way of forcing everyone into a Rockwellian time capsule in which everything was predictable and hygienic, in which mother knows best. Literally any admission of imperfection could trigger an outburst that would enslave everyone to the process of cheering her up. I recently heard a story about a Christmas visit during which she and her husband were lavishing attention on my brother as if I wasn’t even there. Concerned that I might be lonely, my father suggested that they include me in this play session. At this recommendation, my grandmother burst into hysterical tears, and my parents had to spend the rest of the night apologizing for accusing her of being neglectful.

Eventually, I learned little by little that she was more than just a prototypically clingy old lady with a keen talent for doling out guilt. It was a little weirder than that, and ultimately, a lot darker. First, there were the things I had heard about my mother’s life as her daughter. I remember a story my mother told about a birthday party that her mother threw for her when she was little, sometime in grade school I think. Her mother said that she had hired a gypsy woman to tell everyone’s fortunes, which was extremely exciting. A little carnival tent was set up in the back yard, and all the kids lined up to hear about their futures. When my mother’s turn came up, she walked in, only to find her mother in there in a turban talking with a corny accent, as if her own child wouldn’t know who she was--let alone any of her friends. My mother told this story to explain how embarrassing her mother was, but what I picked up from this was less a funny story about how parents traditionally humiliate their kids, and more like evidence that my grandmother’s identity is completely rooted in her position as an apex matriarch, well beyond anyone else’s intelligence or control.

The way she infantilized me was not an ordinary byproduct of having a grandchild, but something she did to everyone in her life, historically, up to and including my adult parents. She certainly continued to do it to me as an adult, and she insisted on a childish sort of positivity that I could barely muster. I thought, if she wants us to have a relationship, I should talk about my life, which sometimes includes complaints--or simply categorizing things as just-ok, or business as usual. Of course, she found this extremely irritating for some reason, and would pressure me to change my story with declarations like “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE SO MISERABLE!” One Christmas when I was really in a bind, I called to thank her for the holiday check she had sent me, saying that it gave me much-needed help in making my rent at that time. “Oh...well, I thought you would do something nice with it,” she said in a strange tone that let me know she was sort of angry with me for some reason. I had to sort of bend the truth into a story about some special treat I supposedly got myself in order to get her to cut it out.

A better example of what was really going on with her also had to do with Christmas. You know Christmas: If you’re a little kid, you get up at about four in the morning, you beeline for the tree and try to peak into the openings in the wrapping paper, you wake up your parents either by force or by the shockwaves coming off of your person, you all open presents together in a sleep-deprived daze, and you’re basically all back in bed by 10am. Well, this might happen with my mother, but once my grandmother was awake, a ritual began. First, she would get out her camera, and follow my mother back into the bedroom. There, my mother would get back into bed, and pretend to be asleep. Then my grandmother would take a picture of my mother “waking up.” Then, another picture of her theatrically delighted expression when she “remembers” that it’s Christmas. Then a picture of my mother entering the living room and exploding with joy when she sees the tree for “the first time”. Then pictures of the presents being opened, then etc...this whole completely artificial passion play of my grandmother’s little family having the perfect Christmas.

Much, much later, I would find out what all this debasement was probably really about. It had to do with my great aunt. I knew that this woman, who I have rarely ever met in my life, and her daughter both suffer from brutalizing clinical depression. The daughter actually has an electronic device in her brain that acts like a pacemaker for depressive episodes. I had never even heard of something like that before, but it made perfect sense to me that this person and I would be in the same gene pool. Naturally, though, my grandmother would not have found such a dour defect so sympathetic. My grandmother and her sister seemed to have some kind of amorphous feud going on. My grandmother complained relentlessly that her sister refused to spend enough time with her, and I usually thought about how unfair she was being to a woman who has had cancer multiple times, whose energy is leached away by depression, and whose daughter is also routinely sick and almost uncontrollably suicidal. Apparently there was a history of slights and passive aggressions between the two women, though none of it topped the thing I ultimately learned about their family. At some point in their lives, my long suffering great aunt admitted to her sister that she had been raped by their father. I never knew the man, but he was supposed to have been sort of a son of a bitch, and there were other reasons that this made all the sense in the world to me. I remembered a story about how, after he died, his daughters found years’ worth of private writing that he had produced. It sounded like they were really raunchy violent western stories, which my parents were naturally interested in seeing, until they discovered that my grandmother had burned it all. “It was PORNOGRAPHY!” she declared. It’s a little hard to tell whether she was simply appalled by this rather un-Rockwellian artistic deviance, or if she was especially bothered because she knew him to be real life predator. In any case, it would have been impossible to know, because when her sister confessed that their father had violated her, my grandmother basically gave her the finger. Or rather, she gave that whole upsetting topic the finger, and then insisted that her poor destroyed sister continue to be her faithful companion as if none of it had ever happened. “It’s so painful!” my grandmother cried when her sister refused her most recent invite to brunch, and it took everything in me not to say, “Yeah, well, can you think of any reasons by yourself why she might not be fucking dying to hang out with you all the time?”

So it became clear to me why my grandmother might be so controlling and belittling, why she might try to force everyone into a performance of endless childhood, why she might expel from her life anything that smacks of imperfection. It still remained very difficult for me to just suck it up and be what she wanted me to be, not so much because I’m especially proud of my personality--a personality that in every way would repel her if I were to reveal my private world of crime, horror movies, pornography, fetishism, occultism, anti-capitalist sentiment, and of course, suicidal ideation. I also had trouble being the granddaughter she needed because of this autism of mine; it doesn’t make any sense to me to dissimulate, I’ll never become a smooth enough liar to pretend to be somebody’s innocent little baby, even if it would benefit me to do so. Making things up makes no more sense to me, than it does for someone to say “I love you” without meaning “I’m impressed with your personality, your intelligence, your culture, your morality, your humor, your...” It doesn’t make sense to me for someone to say, “I don’t care who you are, I love you because you’re my baby.” I made my best efforts in her last years, but nothing will stop me from feeling guilty toward her for the rest of my life. The way that she died fucked me up so badly that I’m only beginning to realize it now.

[ceruleanvulpine]

Commentary on the statement sequence from can’t live on prayers like these?

Gladly! (The story in question is here.) 

The first thing about this statement is that it’s also about Jon and Martin. This probably is not necessary to point out, as I wasn’t very subtle, but that was my main goal in writing it: to tell a story with a similar enough dynamic that it would set both of them on edge, even if they didn’t explicitly think about it in those terms. (Elias picked the statement out. It’s not in the fic that he did this on purpose, but…) The second thing is that I absolutely do not know the rest of the story about Elise and her brother, or even what entity was involved; I didn’t want to write a whole horror story within this story, or I never would have finished it. I do feel bad for Caroline though. The third thing is that when I was almost finished with this fic, I broke my self-imposed catching-up hiatus and listened to Another Twist, and then got mad at Jonny for writing a much clearer parallel than I was. (I love Another Twist! I love it for reasons unrelated to Jon/Martin parallels, even. But at the time I was like… HEY…)

Some line by line notes under the cut:

> “Um, okay. Recorder’s on? Great. It’s been on this whole time. Wonderful.”

This is technically before the statement starts, but I want to point it out because I still think it’s funny, and also because I like Martin getting to be sarcastic.

> “I want to say something about Caroline was always weird, but that probably isn’t true — hindsight, right? No, to me she just seemed like your average severe female academic type, you know, short gray hair, very disciplined, dressed nicely enough in a don’t-notice-my-clothes way. No patience for people who didn’t take things seriously. I never saw her smiling, except when she was talking to Ben about their research. We got on fine at first, since I knew how much my brother wanted us to. But I started to hate that smile, because every time they made a breakthrough with their stupid theory something new would go wrong …”

So, writing in Magnus Archives statement style turned out to be very fun! I love how the actual statements mix casual speech with involved, weird as hell descriptions no one would ever say out loud, and it gave me liberty to fuck around. A+ do recommend.

Caroline is very much an archetype. Which I think actually sets her up as a character more effectively than Elise and Ben, who we don’t find much out about other than “suspicious” and “devoted” respectively. Scary Professional Woman With Secret Feelings is also … an archetype I am very weak to. Which might come through in the fact that she’s named after GLaDOS,

> He tries to look at nothing in particular, but his attention is drawn persistently towards Martin, and whether that is from some dread force or simple curiosity he doesn’t know.

Jon POV is also fun because when he’s not being drawn into things, he is still skeptical about what a weird life he’s having and thinks things like “some dread force” semi-sarcastically.

> “ … we used to tease him about having a crush on her, mostly because of how red he would turn whenever anyone —”

SORRY MARTIN. In hindsight I don’t know that this interruption is actually necessary — I think the idea was to break up the statement paragraphs and also emphasize how goddamn oblivious Jon is, but I don’t love it.

> “I think he really saw who she was and because of that he trusted her, more than she deserved. It doesn’t matter how clearly you see someone, if you won’t admit to yourself what you’re seeing…”

A thesis statement in the wild! It’s a little clumsy but I still like it. Martin knows Jon well and won’t let himself believe Jon is [unkind/beyond help/too fucking dumb to notice his huge crush]; Jon literally has supernatural seeing powers and yet does Not have a good grip on what Martin’s like or what he’s thinking at any given moment.

> He doesn’t know if she looked like this, or if he himself did, in the early days when he surfaced to Sasha or Martin’s interruptions. He can’t but think that if he had, someone would have made him stop.

Reading Statements Is Bad. I think probably Jon goes into a similar weird trance but doesn’t feel as drained and horrible afterwards.

> He doesn’t make Martin stop.

I love … implied self-recrimination. This is an acknowledgement of his own perceived selfishness even as he keeps doing it. It also leads into the next paragraph, wherein the prose starts to get weirder and more abstract as Jon stops being “a person sitting in a room listening to his coworker read a story” and starts being “the archivist listening to a statement” — it miIiight be too late for him to consciously make the choice to stop this?

> “Ben never would have shouted, of course, but he had this bitter, sulking tone in his voice that he always got if he couldn’t squash things down well enough to pretend he was okay with what was going on.” THIS IS A LINE ABOUT MARTIN THIS IS A LINE ABOUT MARTIN. Listen: I love Martin but he’s anxious and trapped and afraid and selfish and unpleasant to be around sometimes and I never want to write him solely as Soft Chill Dude. He gets to be (justifiably) short with Jon later, but he’s still expressing like .. futility, and giving up on communicating what he wanted to because What Was The Point Anyway, Everything Sucks And I Can’t Do Anything.

> Caroline didn’t sound sympathetic when she said, cold as anything, that he certainly couldn’t help her if he was dead.

I love this secondary character I made up, she’s terrible. She’s a little bit Gertrude, huh. I swear I did not do that on purpose.

> Jon watches Martin, but he doesn’t see him. He sees Elise and Ben and Caroline, standing in the kitchen and beholding something strange and new and fascinating. Caroline standing on the precipice of enlightenment and pressing on, needing to know no matter what sacrifice might be asked of her, not seeing that she might be made to sacrifice other than herself.

This is a little on the nose, literally using the word beholding and then describing a compulsion to keep digging for information. But needing to know is how Jon trips himself up at the end of the fic; he can’t accept a lie, and he doesn’t trust anything he doesn’t know everything about.

> The knowledge is an offering for Beholding, and he beholds it, and it is for him too.

> He is too far gone, here and not here, seeing and not seen.

I ended two paragraphs with this exact same sentence structure! What was I doing! I hate these sentences actually,

> If she doesn’t know what she did already, then me shouting at her wouldn’t help. I hope she knows. I hope she knows it’s her fault that Ben is gone, even if he volunteered. I hope she thinks about it every day, that she should have made him leave whether he wanted to or not. But she’s always been sure of herself. So I doubt it.

I know I said I didn’t know the rest of the story in this statement, but here’s a hint: Caroline sure does think about it!! She is not a happy person.

Returning to parallels, I realize that I added in this third narrator character to describe the action, and obviously she doesn’t match up directly to anyone; there is no one either telling Martin to get out or blaming Jon for letting him stay, except maybe, uh, Jon, who does a lot of telling himself he’s a monster.

But not a lot of letting that actually change his actions. At the end of the fic he concludes that his fear about doing this was right, and that Martin is horrified by him because of his increasing inhumanity; he totally fails to separate the statement reading — which is not good for Martin, and which the Elise-perspective on this would say is not something he should accept, but which was given willingly anyway — from the harm he does *in* freaking out and demanding information, which is a whole other problem, and which takes the dynamic from the statement in a different direction.

Whew, I feel sort of self-indulgent for typing all this up, so I hope you enjoy it! :)

[stealth-liberal]

Another crappy photo! Anyway....

This was meant to be the 3rd Creepy Reads for Halloween review that I posted on the 31st, but I ran out of steam, here it is now. From the back cover:

"The first screams came in January from the snow-bound railway man who felt the inhuman fangs ripping at his throat. The shrieks of ecstatic agony from the woman attacked in her cozy bedroom were heard in February. As the year progresses and the seasons change, scenes of unimaginable horror unfold in the isolated Maine town of Tarker Mills. No one knows who will be the next victim. However, one thing is certain- when the full moon rises, a paralyzing fear sweeps through the community. For snarls that sound like human words can be heard through the wind... and all around are the footprints of a monster whose hunger can never be sated...."

This is my favorite Stephen King novel, the only one that beats out Christine for my full affections. It's not long, at only 127 pages, but it is fully immersive. It is also illustrated by the late, great Bernie Wrightson in the style of the horror comics from the 1950's. In fact each of the 12 chapters, 1 for every month of the year, has a full colour, full page illustration, 1 full page black and white illustration and 1 small half page black and white illustration. This book fully walks a line between traditional novel and graphic novel and manages to be both and neither at the same time.

A werewolf has chosen Tarker Mills as it's home for the year and every month, someone dies. Is it someone hiding in the woods? Is it a trusted townsperson? Is a werewolf at all? Is it a pack of wild dogs? Is it a fully human serial killer, hiding his tracks with werewolf symbolism? The town doesn't know and it either ignores the problem or is terrified and hides locked in their houses each month.

Cycle of the Werewolf started life as a calendar project between King and Wrightson for a small publishing company. Every month there would be a lurid picture of a werewolf killing someone by Wrightson and a small narrative blurb from King. However, King being King couldn't contain himself to just a blurb and this book is the result. While much shorter than King's usual fare, it works for this story.

I love this book and recommend it highly. I used to read this every October until I lost my old copy in one of my many moves. There's always a box that gets left behind.... So I bought a new copy this year and have restarted my tradition!

However, just because I love this book doesn't mean it's perfect and there are 2 caveats I'd like to add:

Caveat 1 - King has no qualms about killing children and for some people that's a no go. I lost my oldest child and I cannot watch graphic child death onscreen or I am triggered in the actual PTSD definition of the word. However I can read about it. In the month of March an 11 year boy is murdered by the werewolf and the full page illustration is of a frightened and doomed child running away from said werewolf. The death isn't terribly graphic, but it does happen. While I am not triggered by this chapter, it is, nevertheless, an uncomfortable chapter for me. I think the reason I can read it is because I had been reading this book once a year for a long time before I even had my oldest or lost him. If this is the kind of thing that triggers you, either skip this chapter or skip this book. No one will blame you.

Caveat 2- King had a period in the 1980's where he had a tendency to describe overweight characters as stupid or pathetic. He acknowledged it as projection about his own weight issues back then and no longer does it. I bring this up because this book features 2 characters described like this, 1 female and 1 male. One of the 2 does end up being the meal of the werewolf one month, I won't spoil who.

With those things being said, seriously, go buy this book. It features an amazing disabled character in a heroic role, a werewolf who isn't tortured, and a fascinating look at a whole town with extremely evocative art work. Go! Buy it! Read it! Then come back here and tell me what you thought, I want to know!