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angelicamerlinbarnes · 3 years

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Songs that make me think of the Marauders (PART TWO)

(part one)

Everything Happens For A Reason (Madison Beer)

Remus, after the Prank, completely heartbroken and completely confused… when did Sirius stop loving him in that sweet, gentle way he’d always promised to?

When did Sirius start seeing him as the monster he's always sworn Remus isn't?

I used to believe That everything happens for a reason But I just can't find a reason You'd wanna hurt me so bad

Can't get no relief Time moves on with the seasons But I still can't find a reason You'd wanna hurt me so bad

And what in the world did I do to deserve such a pain in my heart? Guess it's true I'm never getting over you

I still love you I still want you I still love you

If You Love Her (Forest Blakk)

This is the song Sirius and Remus play during their first dance. Fight me.

She always has trouble falling asleep And she likes to cuddle while under the sheets She loves pop songs and dancing, and bad trash TV There's still a few other things She loves love notes and babies and likes giving gifts Has a hard time accepting a good compliment She loves her whole family and all of her friends So if you're the one she lets in

Kiss her with passion as much as you can Run your hands through her hair whenever she's sad And when she doesn't notice how pretty she is Tell her over and over, so she never forgets

Take it If she gives you her heart, don't you break it Let your arms be a place she feels safe in She's the best thing that you'll ever have On days when it feels like the whole world might cave in Stand side by side and you'll make it She'll love you if you love her like that

cowboy like me (Taylor Swift)

Sirius and Remus go on the run together after James’ death. Not at first - they meet up in a bar about three months after. But after that three months they’re inseparable again - desperately in love, playing Robin Hood, driving a blue Mustang into the sunset - they’re miserable, sure, but they’re also very good at pretending they’re not.

And you asked me to dance But I said, "dancing is a dangerous game" Oh, I thought, this is gonna be one of those things I've got some tricks up my sleeve Takes one to know one You're a cowboy like me Never wanted love, just a fancy car Now I'm waiting by the phone

Perched in the dark Telling all the rich folks anything they wanna hear Like it could be love I could be the way forward, only if they pay for it You're a bandit like me, eyes full of stars Hustling for the good life Never thought I'd meet you here It could be love We could be the way forward, and I know I'll pay for it

And the skeletons in both our closets plotted hard to mess this up And the old men that I've swindled really did believe I was the one And the ladies lunching have their stories about when you passed through town But that was all before I locked it down Now you hang from my lips like the Gardens of Babylon With your boots beneath my bed Forever is the sweetest con

And I'm never gonna love again I'm never gonna love again

no body, no crime (Taylor Swift)

Sirius Black’s soulmate, James Potter, is dead. And Sirius knows who did it.

He just can’t prove it.

(I rewrote it for y'all. You're welcome.)

Cell Block Tango (from "Chicago")

The Dark Marauders. James, Sirius, Remus, Peter, Lily, Severus, and Regulus - performing uselessly sensual dance routines in Azkaban because why the fuck not? Their Dark Lord is dead, and all they have left of him is their loyalty and a bout of snakes and skulls on their arms.

(Wrote this one too. Again, you're welcome.)

Broken Bones (KALEO)

Remus Lupin is a werewolf, and every full moon, this song runs through his mind as James and Sirius envelop his naked body in their arms and tell him he’s beautiful, and so so good, and they’ll love him forever and ever and ever, they promise. And for a single, measley second every time, Remus believes them.

Hoping things might go my way Some might say I talk loud, see if I care Unlike them, don't walk away from my fear I've busted bones, broken stones, looked the devil in the eye I hope he's going to break these chains

Another hard day, no water, no rest I saw my chance, so I got him at last I took his six shooter, put two in his chest He'll never say a word no more The devil got him good for sure

Ain't got no place to call a home Only chains and broken bones Ain't got no place to call a home So come on lord, won't you take me now? So come on lord, what you waiting for?

Oh, the devil's going to make me a free man The devil's going to set me free The devil's going to make me a free man The devil's going to set me free...

traitor (Olivia Rodrigo)

Sirius is innocent. Remus believes that. Remus knows that. He knows it. Because he doesn’t know how he’ll live if he’s wrong. Well, okay, he knows -

He won’t.

Brown guilty eyes and little white lies Yeah, I played dumb but I always knew That you'd talk to her, maybe did even worse I kept quiet so I could keep you

And ain't it funny how you ran And ain't it funny how you said you were friends? Now it sure as hell don't look like it

Ain't it funny all the twisted games All the questions you used to avoid?

Ain't it funny? Remember I brought her up, and you told me I was paranoid

You betrayed me And I know that you'll never feel sorry for the way I hurt Loved you at your worst, but that didn't matter

God, I wish that you had thought this through Before I went and fell in love with you When she's sleeping in the bed we made Don't you dare forget about the way you betrayed me

Never Not (Lauv)

The Marauders, slowly breaking apart over the years. James and Lily settle in London, and Sirius and Remus run off to travel the world. They split off somewhere in Asia and forget to call. Peter cleans dishes in Hogwarts’ kitchens and Severus spends his time in those dungeons, teaching potions and writing letters he never sends. Regulus holes up in Grimmauld Place, never marrying, never moving. James and Lily divorce when Harry is ten, and go their separate ways. They always move forward, but -

They also always look back.

I lost myself, seventeen Then you came, found me There's a room in my heart with the memories we made Took them down but they're still in their frames There's no way I could ever forget

For as long as I live, and as long as I love I will never not think about you From the moment I loved I knew you were the one And no matter whatever I do I will never not think about you

What we had only comes once in a lifetime For the rest of mine, I'll always compare To the room in my heart with the memories we made Nights on fifth, in between B and A

Didn't we have fun? Didn't we have fun, looking back?

We were so beautiful We were so tragic No other magic could ever compare...

Scared To Live (The Weeknd)

Sirius and Remus after twelve years apart, having no idea what to do with each other. They were in love once - are in love? - but those days are long gone. Sirius sees how Remus looks at Tonks, but knows Remus can’t ever really love her, much as he likes her, because his heart has forgotten every word but Sirius' name. And Sirius is happier than he thought he’d ever get to be without James, really, though he’s far from happy or even content - is this all there is? Is this how they die? Is this their ending?

No. No. No, after everything, this can’t be it - this cannot be it.

(But if he dies, well... he hopes Remus lives on without him. Happier.

I guess.)

When I saw the signs, I should've let you go But I kept you beside me And if I held you back, at least I held you close Should have known you were lonely

I know things will never be the same Time we lost will never be replaced I'm the reason you forgot to love So don't be scared to live again Be scared to live again No, don't be scared to live again

You always miss the chance to fall for someone else Cause your heart only knows me They try to win your love, but there was nothing left They just made you feel lonely

I am not the man I used to be Did some things I couldn't let you see Refused to be the one who taints your heart

I hope you know that I've been praying that you find yourself We fell apart, right from the start I should have made you my only

So don't be scared to live again I said, "don't be scared to live again"

I Know Where I've Been (from "Hairspray! Live")

Remus and Sirius, sad and happy together, alone in Grimmauld Place and dancing deep into the night as this song plays on the record player and they sway. Their whole lives have been war, but in these moments, there is peace.

Fleeting, hopeless peace, but peace nonetheless.

There's a light in the darkness Though the night is black There's a light burning bright Showing me the way But I know where I've been

There's a cry in the distance It's a voice that comes from deep within There's a cry asking why I pray the answer's up ahead Cause I know where I've been

There's a road we've been travelling Lost so many on the way But the riches will be plenty Worth the price we had to pay

There's a dream in the future There's a struggle we have yet to win And there's pride in my heart Cause I know where I'm going And I know where I've been

Brooklyn Baby (Lana Del Rey)

Sirius Black being himself, and James Potter and Remus Lupin being in love with him.

They say I'm too young to love you I don't know what I need They think I don't understand The freedom land of the seventies

I think I'm too cool to know ya You say I'm like the ice, I freeze I'm churning out novels like Beat poetry on Amphetamines

Well, my boyfriend's in a band He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed I've got feathers in my hair I get down to beat poetry And my jazz collection's rare I can play most anything I'm a Brooklyn baby

They say I'm too young to love you They say I'm too dumb to see They judge me like a picture book By the colors, like they forgot to read I think we're like fire and water I think we're like the wind and sea You're burning up, I'm cooling down You're up, I'm down You're blind, I see

But I'm free I'm free

I'm talking about my generation Talking about that newer nation And if you don't like it, you can beat it Beat it, baby You never liked the way I said it If you don't get it, then forget it Cause I don't have to fucking explain

Yeah, my boyfriend's pretty cool But he's not as cool as me Cause I'm a Brooklyn baby I'm a Brooklyn baby

I Can't Go On Without You (KALEO)

Sirius and Remus are lost to each other, for twelve years and then two more, Sirius locked behind bars and then a Veil and Remus on the run alone and then with a woman he’s somehow fooled himself into thinking he loves.

They’ll be together again. One day. But for now, there’s nothing to do but wait.

Alone.

Well, they thought they were made for each other Only thinking of one another Never thinking just for one second She would take a different attraction

We don't want that We don't want that, oh no I can't go on without you

Oh, so what's the point of breaking my sweet heart? She wanted me to let down my guard Well, you know what they say It's better that way So, you better hush and walk away

Well, was I supposed to wait for you sweetheart? And hide away the shame, yes I keep it all inside Though the thought had crossed my mind! To do all the things I'll regret, we don't want that

I can't, I can't, I can't go on without you I can't go on without you, oh, lord I can't go on without you, babe

Oh, she loves me She loves me not She loves me My love don't love me...

Oh, so what is left but a broken man? Cause nothing hurts like a woman can I can't go on without you...

happier (Olivia Rodrigo)

Sirius as he watches Remus fall in love with Tonks right in front of him, unable to love Sirius the same way after everything. Sirius loves his cousin - he does. He just kind of hates her, too.

There’s been a lot of things in this life he’s been afraid of, but Remus leaving him never even crossed his mind.

That was his mistake, I guess…

Fuck.

You've moved on, found someone new One more girl who brings out the better in you And I thought my heart was attached For all the sunlight of our past But she's so sweet, she's so pretty Does she mean you forgot about me?

And do you tell her she's the most beautiful girl you've ever seen? An eternal love bullshit you know you'll never mean Remember when I believed you meant it when you said it first to me? And now I'm picking her apart Like cutting her down make you miss my wretched heart But she's beautiful, she looks kind, she probably gives you butterflies

Say you love her, baby, just not like you loved me And think of me fondly when your hands are on her

I hope you're happy, just not like how you were with me I'm selfish, I know, I can't let you go So find someone great, don't find no one better I hope you're happy, but don't be happier.

That's The Kind Of Woman (Julia Michaels)

James left Sirius for Lily, and that was okay. Sirius loved Lily, and he loved James, so it was okay. At least he still had Remus.

Well, he did. Until Tonks came along.

It’s okay. Really. Sirius has gone his whole life feeling unloved.

He can die that way too.

James, Sirius, and Remus fell in love in fourth year, and it was wonderful. And then Sirius started to notice things - small things, little things. Like the gentle way James and Remus are with each other, the way they wake each other up with kisses in the morning and dance the night before the full moon, the way their hands fit together the way everyone expected Sirius’ to fit with them, but better.

The way they love each other more than him.

And that’s okay. That’s fine. He wants them to be happy, and they make each other happy. So he lets them go the last day of seventh year, and disappears into the wind never to be seen again, just like their love for him.

Childhood picket fence, smells like confidence Raised with a little more common sense Isn't always on defense Sits up straight and knows how to take a compliment Jealous but the right amount Isn't scared of missing out, missing out's scared of missing her Doesn't buy things to fill voids Doesn't hate the sound of her own voice

Doesn't cry when someone leaves Isn't contradictory Mind takes a break when she falls asleep Always takes her own advice Crosses T's and cuts her ties Figured out sympathize from empathize Doesn't keep those letters in a drawer Doesn't keep a closet full of things she bought and never wore Gives all her attention to the people that are with her She still loves to dance She still loves her sister

If the me I am Walked out that door Would I miss her?

Maybe, a little bit, sure Oh, I love myself, but I'd love her more Yeah, that's the kind of woman I'd leave me for

Quarter Past Midnight (Bastille)

The Marauders steal a Muggle’s pick-up truck and fly down the highway, literally. The lights are bright and the music is loud, and they’re screaming with laughter, dancing and kissing under the stars. It’s that one perfect moment, the one poets write about seeking their whole lives. This is that moment, this is their moment.

They’ll never be this happy again.

It's a quarter past midnight as we cut through the city The streets are getting restless Good times, bad decisions And the sirens are mending some hearts But we're the losers on our back seats Singing love will tear us apart

It's a quarter past midnight, still avoiding tomorrow It's a quarter past midnight, but we're just getting going We keep on running through a red light Like we're trying to burn the night away This is my favorite part Help me piece it all together, darling Before it falls apart

And the speakers are blowing We want the bodies on the billboards Not the lives underneath them And now we're crawling up the walls again And it's a quarter past twelve And you said we'd leave this place in dust And fall from heaven straight through hell We never know what we have We never knew what we had

We keep on running Why are we always chasing after something Like we're trying to throw our lives away?

And the secrets are flowing Our lips are getting looser I don't know what I'm saying We never knew what we had I never know what I've had

Home (Edith Whiskers)

The Marauders remember each other in a haze - well. The ones that are still alive do, that is.

Regulus, falling.

James, fighting.

Lily, screaming.

Sirius, smiling.

Peter, choking.

Remus, crying.

Severus, bleeding.

They all went, and not one peacefully.

If I close my eyes, I can still see them. Laughing.

I do love my ma and pa Not the way that I do love you Well, holy moly, me oh my, you're the apple of my eye Girl, I've never loved one like you Man, oh, man, you're my best friend, I scream it to the nothingness There ain't nothing that I need Well, hot and heavy pumpkin pie, chocolate candy, Jesus Christ Ain't nothing please me more than you

I'll follow you into the park, through the jungle, through the dark Moats and boats and waterfalls, alleyways and pay phone calls I've been everywhere with you We laugh until we think we'll die, barefoot on a summer night Nothing new is sweeter than with you And in the streets, we run afree, like it's only you and me Geez, you're something to see

Oh, home, let me come home Home is whenever I'm with you Oh, home, let me come home Home is wherever I'm with you

I Hate That You're Happy (Tiny Little Houses)

Severus is alone, alone again. Lily’s gone. She’s run off to marry James Potter, the prat, and Severus - Severus doesn’t hope for much in this life, but he holds out hope for her. Because everyone knows she loves James now, but she loved Severus once too… and she still keeps his green ribbon tied around her ring finger, almost like they’re still married in mind.

So Severus keeps his vows to her. He promised her forever - it’s okay, honestly. That forever can be spent apart. He’ll love her anyway.

He'll love her always.

I'm sorry if I ever hurt you And I never kissed you enough And I just have trouble unravelling sometimes The feelings that I kept locked up

And I know it's my own misfortune And I didn't hold tight enough But I found it hard to keep myself whole While drowning in my bitter blood

I'll stay awake again and start feeling The spot where you used to reside And I'll lay beneath these cold empty sheets Huddled and clutching my sides

And I know it's my own misfortune And darling, believe me, I do And you've got your problems, and hell I've got mine But I find it hard that we're through

And I hate when you're with him And I hate when you smile And I hate that for once you don't seem like you've cried And I hate that you've kissed him And I hate that I'm sore But most of all I hate that you're happier than before

And I hate when you're with him And at night you're entwined And I hate that I have to pretend that I'm fine And I hate that I miss you but you miss him more But most of all I hate that you're happier than before Most of all I hate that you're happier than before

Call Your Girlfriend (Clara Mae)

James knows Lily isn’t happy with him. It’s been months, she’s had plenty of time to come around, but she just - she doesn’t love him. She never has. He should’ve seen that, but he was too busy hating the greasy-haired git to realize that Lily has always loved him more than anything else.

Gently, he lets her go. He presses the green ribbon he found in her drawer around her hand, and he kisses her goodbye, and he tells her to go after her happiness, whoever that is. And she smiles at him, the tears in her eyes happy, and she runs away, crashing into Severus’ arms. And they look… they look so perfect together. Like they make so much sense.

It’s okay. James can take it.

Regulus is staring at him. James winks at him, and smiles.

Call your girlfriend It's time you had the talk Give your reasons Say it's not her fault Tell her not to get upset Second guessing everything you've said and done

And when she get upset Tell her that you never meant to hurt no one You just tell her that the only way her heart will mend Is when she learns to love again And it won't make sense right now But you're still her friend

Cloud 9 (Beach Bunny)

James, Sirius, and Remus. It’s an unconventional love story, but not one they feel the need to explain.

They can and will dance together forever, butterbeers in their hands and magic in their eyes, hearts colliding in a messy, three-way kiss.

I don't wanna seem the way I do But I'm confident when I'm with you Lately all I feel is bad and bruised Tired of tripping on my shoes

When I start to tumble from the sky You remind me how to fly Lately, I've been feeling unalive But you bring me back to life

But when he loves me, I feel like I'm floating When he calls me pretty, I feel like somebody Even when we fade eventually to nothing You will always be my favorite form of loving

the last great american dynasty (Taylor Swift)

The Most Ancient and Noble House of Black, and its last heir, Sirius Potter Lupin.

Fuck those assholes. He’ll be as mad as he likes.

Was the heir to the name, and money And the town said "how did a middle class divorcée do it?" The wedding was charming, if a little gauche There's only so far new money goes They picked out a home and called it Holiday House Their parties were tasteful, if a little loud The doctor had told him to settle down It must have been her fault his heart gave out

And they said, "there goes the last great american dynasty" Who knows, if she never showed up what could've been There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen She had a marvelous time ruining everything

Rebekah gave up on the Rhode Island set forever Flew in all the Bitch Pack friends from the city Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names And blew through the money on the boys and the ballet And losing on card game bets with Dalí

There goes the most shameless woman this town has ever seen She had a marvelous time ruining everything

They say she was seen on occasion Pacing the rocks staring out at the midnight sea And in a feud with her neighbor She stole his dog and dyed it key lime green Fifty years is a long time Holiday House sat quietly on that beach Free of women with madness Their men and bad habits, and then it was bought by me

Who knows, if I never showed up what could've been There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen I had a marvelous time ruining everything

I Don't Believe You (P!nk)

Regulus, alone after Sirius runs away. All alone in a giant house, all alone with his wretched mother and her Death Eater friends, all alone without the only person he’s ever loved.

Sirius never comes back, but Regulus waits at the door for him every day anyway.

(Sirius writes Regulus a million letters. He wonders why he never answers. Not even with a cursive fuck you. Maybe he should go back… maybe - no.

No, best not.

It’s not like Regulus misses him.)

I don't mind it, I don't mind at all It's like you're the swing set and I'm the kid that falls It's like the way we fight, the times I've cried We come too close, and every night The passion's there, so it's gotta be right Right?

I don't mind it, I still don't mind at all It's like one of those bad dreams when you can't wake up It looks like you've given up, you've had enough But I want more, no, I won't stop Because I just know you'll come around Right?

Just don't stand there and watch me fall Cause I still don't mind at all

No I don't believe you When you say, "don't come around here no more" I won't remind you You said we wouldn't be apart No I don't believe you When you say you don't need me anymore So don't pretend to not love me at all

Cause I don't believe you.

Little Miss Perfect (Annapantsu cover)

Regulus Black, the perfect child.

He and his brother are nothing alike. Sirius is rebellious, Regulus is obedient. Sirius is brash, Regulus is controlled. Sirius is bravery, Regulus is misery. They have nothing in common.

Well -

Except their hearts, bothing beating for a boy named James Potter with twinkling eyes. A boy only one of them will get to kiss.

Regulus is happy to be the one who’s lost out. At least, that’s what he tells himself as he stares up at the white light, the surface too far above to reach.

Straight hair, straight A's, straightforward Straight path, I don't cut corners I make a point to be on time Head of the student council I don't black out at parties I jam to Paul McCartney If you ask me how I'm doing I'll say...

Well, hmm Often I ask myself, "what did I do?" To get as far as I've gotten A pretty girl walks by my locker My heart gives a flutter But I don't dare utter a word Cause that would be absurd behavior For little miss perfect

No, I can't risk falling off my throne Love is something I don't even know Straight hair, straight A's, straightforward Straight girl Little miss perfect That's me You don't even know Rewind, induce amnesia Deny the truth, that's easier You're just confused, believe her When she says there's nothing there It's never worth it When you're little miss perfect

Achilles Come Down (Gang Of Youths)

Sirius, running from his family and his predetermined madness, his wildness carrying him so far he makes a circle.

Remus, hiding from love and freedom, his happiness stitched from his skin in ugly, painful scars.

James, watching his best friends tear each other apart, too blind with love to see the monsters they’ve made of each other.

Children, come down.

Achilles, Achilles, Achilles come down Won't you get up off, get up off the roof? You're scaring us and all of us, some of us love you Achilles, it's not much but there's proof You crazy assed cosmonaut, remember your virtue Redemption lies plainly in truth Just humour us, Achilles Achilles, come down Won't you get up off, get up off the roof?

The self is not so weightless, nor whole and unbroken Remember the pact of our youth? Where you go, I'm going So jump and I'm jumping Since there is no me without you Soldier on, Achilles Achilles, come down Won't you get up off, get up off the roof?

Hurt and grieve, but don't suffer alone Engage with the pain as a motive Today of all days, see How the most dangerous thing is to love How you will heal and you'll rise above

Achilles, jump now You are absent of cause or excuse So self-indulgent and self-referential No audience could ever want you You crave the applause, yet hate the attention Then miss it, your act is a ruse It is empty, Achilles, so end it all now It's a pointless resistance for you

Achilles, just put down the bottle Don't listen to what you've consumed It's chaos, confusion, and wholly unworthy Of feeding and it's wholly untrue You may feel no purpose nor a point for existing It's all just conjecture and gloom And there may not be meaning, so find one and seize it Do not waste your self on this roof

Feel your breath course frankly below And see life as a worthy opponent Crowned by an overture bold and beyond Ah, it's more courageous to overcome You want the acclaim, it's not worth it, Achilles More poignant than fame or the taste of another

Don't listen, Achilles, but be real and just jump You dense motherfucker (you're worth more, Achilles) You will not be more than a rat in the gutter (so much more than a rat)

You want my opinion (no one asked your opinion) My opinion you've got You asked for my counsel (no one asked for your thoughts)

I gave you my thoughts Be done with this now, and jump off the roof Can you hear me Achilles? I'm talking to you

Throw yourself into the unknown with pace and a fury defiant Clothe yourself in beauty untold and see life as a means to a triumph

Achilles, come down.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Taylor Swift)

Remus gets super drunk after the Prank and gives a fucking performance on top of the coffee table in front of the entirety of Gryffindor. Sirius is bright red. James is on the verge of tears. Severus is gaping. And Remus is seething.

You woke the wolf. Now watch it bite.

And there are no rules when you show up here Bass beat rattling the chandelier Feeling so Gatsby for that whole year So why'd you have to rain on my parade? I'm shaking my head, I'm locking the gates

It was so nice being friends again There I was giving you a second chance But you stabbed me in the back while shaking my hand And therein lies the issue, friends don't try to trick you And so I took an axe to a mended fence But I'm not the only friend you've lost lately If only you weren't so shady

Here's a toast to my real friends They don't care about the HE SAID, SHE SAID And here's to my baby He ain't reading what they call me lately And here's to my mama Had to listen to all this drama And here's to you... Cause forgiveness is a nice thing to do

Hahaha, I can't even say it with a straight face!

This is why we can't have nice things, darling Because you break them, I had to take them away This is why we can't have nice things, honey Did you think I wouldn't hear all the things you said about me? This is why we can't have nice things

right where you left me (Taylor Swift)

Remus is pretty sure he died on October 31, 1981. He’s not sure why his body’s still moving.

Friends break up, friends get married Strangers get born, strangers get buried Trends change, rumors fly through new skies But I'm right where you left me Matches burn after the other Pages turn and stick to each other Wages earned and lessons learned But I'm right where you left me

Help, I'm still at the restaurant Still sitting in a corner I haunt Cross-legged in the dim light They say, "what a sad sight" I swear you could hear a hair pin drop Right when I felt the moment stop Glass shattered on the white cloth Everybody moved on I stayed there Dust collecting on my pinned-up hair They expected me to find somewhere Some perspective, but I sat and stared

Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen? Time went on for everybody else, she won't know it She's still 23 inside her fantasy How it was supposed to be Did you hear about the girl who lives in delusion? Break-ups happen every day, you don't have to lose it She's still 23 inside her fantasy And you're sitting in front of me

At the restaurant, when I was still the one you want Cross-legged in the dim light, everything was just right

I'm sure that you got a wife out there Kids and Christmas, but I'm unaware Cause I'm right where I cause no harm, mind my business If our love died young, I can't bear witness And it's been so long But if you ever think you got it wrong

I'm right where you left me You left me no choice but to stay here forever...

Every Day a Little Death (from “The Count of Monte Cristo”)

Remus Lupin, waiting.

Waiting, waiting, waiting…

For what, he’s not sure. Maybe death. Maybe madness.

Right now all he’s got is lonely.

Lonely, lonely, lonely; la, la, la…

Come out, come out, wherever you are, Peter. Come out and kill me, you coward.

Another day, another week Another month, another year Another day, another night Until it’s day again The sun has fled, I go to bed And scratch a line on the wall Another day, where nothing changes at all

And everyday shuffles by like the day before! On its way to the blackest of skies And everyday a little death comes and paces the floor! And a little bit more of me dies... Another day, another week Another month, another year Another night I spend alone Until it’s day again Our little star has moved away And all the world is a blur I only see I am not me Without her

Everyday a little death for everyday I die Everyday a little death and still I know not why...

He will come back! Perhaps but still… He will return to me! Another prayer You’ve got to live for today I will live when we’re together again Everyday I will pray until then

And everyday another prayer will bring him close to me And every night out little star we will share The one day when I open my eyes He will be standing right over there, one day

There’s something I must say I wanted to protect you

I wish there was a way I could make it untrue I heard the news today I fear the worst has happened An accident occurred He is dead! Dead and gone Rest in peace may flights of angels sing him to his rest Let me hold and help to heal you!

Everyday a little death...

tolerate it (Taylor Swift)

Remus Lupin. Abandoned, alone, aimless. Unwanted, unseen, unloved. Mad, morbid, monster.

He wonders if in the next life, he’ll be dealt some better cards.

Best not hope. Best not be greedy. He could be dead -

Isn’t sadness better?

I sit and watch you reading with your head low I wake and watch you breathing with your eyes closed I sit and watch you I notice everything you do or don't do You're so much older and wiser and I

I wait by the door like I'm just a kid Use my best colors for your portrait Lay the table with the fancy shit And watch you tolerate it

I greet you with a battle hero's welcome I take your indiscretions all in good fun I sit and listen I polish plates until they gleam and glisten You're so much older and wiser and I While you were out building other worlds, where was I? Where's that man who'd throw blankets over my barbed wire? I made you my temple, my mural, my sky Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life Drawing hearts in the byline Always taking up too much space or time You assume I'm fine But what would you do if I

Break free and leave us in ruins Took this dagger in me and removed it Gain the weight of you then lose it Believe me, I could do it! If it's all in my head tell me now Tell me I've got it wrong somehow I know my love should be celebrated But you tolerate it

Téir Abhaile Riu (Celtic Woman)

Sirius being Sirius and Remus and James trying to reign him in. I don’t know. Just vibes, I guess - three soft little gays living out a domestic half-insane life on a little farm in Wales, not a mile from the ashen sea.

Stay here and never you mind The lights of the town are blinding you The sailors they come and they go But listen to what's reminding you Handsome men surrounding you Dancing a reel around you

Listen to the music flow I'm falling for the flow of home I'm home to dance till dawning

Stay awhile and we'll dance together now As the light is falling We'll reel away till the break of day And dance together till morning

No One Knows Us (BANNERS, Carly Paige)

James, Sirius, and Remus are queerplatonic partners. Well, James is theirs - Sirius and Remus are dating. In love. But they and James, they’re not. Not that it matters - every assumes, from their atypical affection, that they are.

James wishes he could be with them, sometimes. The way he wants. Like it’s normal. Without all the prying eyes.

He wonders if he stole a pirate ship and sailed them somewhere else, if it would be any different. Any easier.

Loving the right people shouldn’t be a burden.

Wish I could kiss you when I wanna Without all the fear and all the drama Kill to hold your hand in public I could try to fight the feeling Dull it down like sleeping without dreaming

I wanna push you up against the wall Want them all to hear me call you baby I know it's never gonna happen And I've learned to accept that I accept that

I need you closer Can we go somewhere? No one knows us Leave our world behind We can hole up in a motel room Where no one knows us

See You Again (Carrie Underwood)

The Marauders as they die, one by one. James too early, Sirius too soon, Remus too late. Reunited wherever wizards go when they die, after a long, hard road of what felt like a whole lot of goddamn nothing.

But here they are, at last: alone no longer.

Said goodbye, turned around And you were gone, gone, gone Faded into the setting sun, slipped away But I won't cry cause I know I'll never be lonely For you are the stars to me You are the light I follow

I can hear those echoes in the wind at night Calling me back in time, back to you In a place far away where the water meets the sky The thought of it makes me smile You are my tomorrow

Sometimes I feel my heart is breaking But I stay strong and I hold on cause I know...

I will see you again This is not where it ends I will carry you with me Til I see you again I will see you again...

Bloom (The Paper Kites)

James and Sirius and Remus, loving each other. And not knowing what queerplatonic partners are until Severus and Lily shove a Muggle book into their hands with sweet, manic grins.

“Oh,” James says, with wonder. Sirius kisses him. Remus takes his hand. James looks at them, his eyes wide and twinkling. “Oh, that’s us.”

In the morning when I wake And the sun is coming through Oh, you fill my lungs with sweetness, And you fill my head with you

Shall I write it in a letter? Shall I try to get it down? Oh, you fill my head with pieces Of a song I can't get out

Can I take it to a morning Where the fields are painted gold And the trees are filled with memories Of the feelings never told?

When the evening pulls the sun down, And the day is almost through, Oh, the whole world it is sleeping, But my world is you

Can I be close to you?

Me and My Husband (Mitski)

Sirius and James. Fight me.

(Oh, and Remus - hopelessly in love with them and chasing after their shenanigans as the world stretches out before them, endless.)

I steal a few breaths from the world for a minute And then I'll be nothing forever And all of my memories And all of the things I have seen will be gone With my eyes, with my body, with me

But me and my husband, we're doing better It's always been just him and me together So I bet all I have on that furrowed brow

And I'm the idiot with the painted face In the corner, taking up space But when he walks in, I am loved, I am loved And at least in this lifetime, we're sticking together Me and my husband, we're sticking together

You & Jennifer (bülow)

Regulus, angry and bitter, left alone in his big black bed wondering what’s so fucking amazing about Lily Evans that could make James want her more than him.

Remus, so fucking in love with his two best friends… his two best friends, who are so fucking in love with each other, who look at each other like they’re the world, who fuck Remus when the world is ending. His two best friends… assholes.

Listen, no, we don't need to be enemies Ain't got a vision of us in the future with a white picket fence and eternal decisions Now I'm sitting here wondering, when did this all start?

Would rather be the girl that got away than be under your thumb Don't need to spend no more time on you, not like I was in love Not that I'm having a nervous breakdown, I'm just let down You don't know what that's like though to wait up all night So I thank you for teaching me how I could live without you Never needed me, I don't need you

Fuck you and Jennifer, I know that you're out with her Go pretend that you're just friends I'll pretend that I'm not hurt I know all the shit I heard, you can take these bitter words Fuck you and Jennifer Go fucking make love to her

Soon You’ll Get Better (Taylor Swift, The Chicks)

James, surrounded by people he can’t fix.

James, holding a screaming Sirius against his chest as he sobs and shakes from the fifth nightmare that week.

James, brushing salve across the scars of a terrified and bruised Remus after yet another full moon.

James, trying to lure a quiet and cold Peter back to them with candy as he recedes even further away into Slytherin robes.

James, fucking Lily; James, kissing Severus; James, touching Regulus -

James, doomed to love people he can’t help.

The buttons of my coat were tangled in my hair I didn't tell you I was scared That was the first time we were there Holy orange bottles, each night I pray to you Desperate people find faith, so now I pray too And I say to you

I know delusion when I see it in the mirror You like the nicer nurses, you make the best of a bad deal I just pretend it isn't real I'll paint the kitchen neon, I'll brighten up the sky I know I'll never get it, there's not a day that I won't try And I'll say to you

And I hate to make this all about me But who am I supposed to talk to? What am I supposed to do if there's no you? This won't go back to normal, if it ever was It's been years of hoping, and I keep saying it because cause I have to

Soon you'll get better Soon you'll get better You'll get better soon Cause you have to.

Dance Alone (Blanks)

James Potter being his usual idiotic adorable self. (It’s just the vibes, man.)

Been staring at the wall today, to find some hidden meaning My momma called to ask me how I'm feeling I've been running out of things to think So what's the point of dreaming? Called all my friends cause I cant get along with all my demons And I've been watching from a distance how the seasons change

Been staring at the wall today, still looking for some meaning I tried talking to myself for a change to ask me how I'm feeling I've been running out of room to think I need a higher ceiling

I've been lost, lost in the rhythm lately I don't know, know how to dance alone

Strawberry Blond (Mitski)

James falls in love with Sirius first - make no mistake, it was absolutely Sirius first. Because Sirius was just so bright, and so lovely, and so daring, and he made James laugh as they ran and drove and flew for miles without a direction. Anything for a touch.

And then there came Remus - beautiful, sweet, kind Remus, his eyes so gentle and his smiles so pure, and James wanted to hold him forever, wanted to take his hand and dive right into the sun, wanted to burst into flames. Anything for a taste.

And then Sirius and Remus fell in love with each other, and now James watches them from the outside, grinning behind tears and thinking, Oh god. I’m happy.

I love everybody because I love you When you stood up, walked away, barefoot And the grass where you lay left a bed in your shape I looked over it and I ached

I love everybody because I love you I don't need the city, and I don't need proof All I need, darling, is a life in your shape I picture it soft and I ache

Reach out the car window, trying to hold the wind You tell me you love her, I give you a grin Oh, all I ever wanted was a life in your shape So I follow the white lines, keep my eyes on the road as I ache

Look at you, strawberry blond Fields rolling on, I love it when you call my name Can you hear the bumblebees swarm? Watching your arm, I love it when you look my way

FML (Arizona Zervas)

James has a habit of falling for people so fierce he can never refuse them. Regulus is just the last one - the one he keeps, even if he dies still trying to figure out how.

(This is the James and Regulus theme song, I’m calling it.)

I might let you drive me crazy Usually I ain't the type to stay Cause you could fall in, and go psycho Ain't no telling where this might go But I take my chances either way

You look like somebody that could really hold it down You look like somebody that would always stick around I know you probably crazy All my friends said stay away but that shit just don't faze me Got a little bit of sass, I like that You don't take no shit, yeah you fight back Never let a dude hit it on the first night I can't even sleep over til I wife that All these bitches in my phone, hit the boy But I've been curving everyone for you Girl I would give you every single password All you gotta do is let me through

Imma keep it honest, I know that you got a plan I know you ain't perfect, but basic bitches never last I don't usually do this type of shit So baby trust me when I tell you that I'm all about it Yeah, I might fall in love and let you fuck my life up Just so I could go and write a song about it

Last man left you brokenhearted, let me treat you right If you need me I could pull up any night You just say the words, girl, I don't need a reason Give me something more than just a lover on the weekend

Come and fuck my life up.

Lay Me Down (Sam Smith)

If James married Regulus instead, but the war still tore them apart and to shreds.

They still fall, they still die, they still lose… but James is captivated by grey eyes rather than green ones, at least in this lifetime. At least for now.

Yes, I do, I believe that one day I will be where I was Right there, right next to you And it's hard, the days just seem so dark The moon, and the stars are nothing without you Your touch, your skin, where do I begin? No words can explain the way I'm missing you Deny this emptiness, this hole that I'm inside These tears, they tell their own story Told me not to cry when you were gone But the feeling's overwhelming, it's much too strong

Can I lay by your side, next to you? You And make sure you're alright I'll take care of you I don't want to be here if I can't be with you

Forever (... is a long time) (Halsey)

Remus didn’t know anyone could love him, the way he is. You can’t blame him for letting James and Sirius slip through his fingers when he didn’t know they would’ve stayed forever.

He wonders if happiness still sounds like his name on their lips.

I spent a long time watering a plant made out of plastic And I cursed the ground for growing green

I spent a long time substituting honest with sarcastic And I cursed my tongue for being mean

Weightless, breathless, destitute Motionless and absolute He cut me open, sucked the poison from an aging wound Now fifty thousand walking deads would cower at this small brunette It's a nice surprise knowing six feet high Would reach and grab the moon if I should ask

Or just imply that I want you to be more light So I could look inside his eyes And get the colors just right

But love built provinces, callouses, break promises Cause I could never hold a perfect thing and not demolish it What am I thinking? What does this mean? How could somebody ever love me?

"Tell him he's got bad news coming..."

Used To This (Camila Cabello)

James and Sirius, crazy kids in mad love in a big Muggle city, dancing and kissing under the lights every night… and then meeting Remus, and wondering if all these years they’ve been mistaking magic for something else, because this, love, this is what magic is.

No, I never liked San Francisco Never thought it was nothing special Til you kissed me there No, I never liked windy cities But I think maybe when you're with me I like everywhere

It's the strangest feeling Midnight, I'm not leaving No, for once, I think I'll stay I say your name, just listen Doesn't it sound different? Never whispered it this way

It's gonna take me a minute But I could get used to this The feeling of your fingertips The feeling of another kiss Like every tattoo on your skin I'm memorizing every inch

The callouses on your fingers I admired them from a distance Now they're on my cheek

Oh, I've known you forever Now I know you better Let's just get carried away And it bears repeating Now my heart's bleeding When you tell me that you'll stay

It's gonna take me a minute But I could get used to this I could get used to this...

Love Me Like You (Little Mix)

You cannot tell me James and Sirius did not stand on top of the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall and serenade Remus with this while he covered his bright red face with his hands and damn near cried with embarrassment and laughter, because they did. I promise you, they did.

I solemnly swear.

Darling, he can't buy my love It's you I'm dreaming of

so baby, baby Come and save me

Last night I lay in bed so blue Cause I realized the truth They can't love me like you I've tried to find somebody new Baby, they ain't got a clue Can't love me like you

Come Home With Me (from “Hadestown”)

Sirius and James tripping over themselves trying to say hi the first time they meet Remus, his nose buried in a book in a small cafe, at a table by the window in a dress covered in sunflowers, his cheeks pink and his smile blinding.

James, tripping over himself to win Severus over, who just isn’t having it. (Fuck off, Potter.) (Please?) (No.)

You wanna talk to her?

Yes!

Go on. Don't come on too strong.

Come home with me.

Who are you?

The man who's gonna marry you

Is he always like this?

Yes

Your name is like a melody

A singer, is that what you are?

I also play the lyre...

Oh, a liar, AND a player too! I've met too many men like you.

Oh, no. I'm not like that.

He's not like any man you've met.

That's what I'm working on - A song to fix what's wrong. Take what's broken, make it whole; A song so beautiful, it brings the world back into tune, back into time. And all the flowers will bloom... When you become my wife.

Oh, he's crazy. Why would I become his wife?

Maybe because he'll make you feel alive.

Alive? That's worth a lot... What else ya got?

You Belong With Me (Taylor Swift)

Sirius and James, unable to figure out why they're so bothered by the amount of people who have suddenly started flirting with Remus after the summer of fifth year.

He's just... he's theirs. Their werewolf. Their scrawny motherfucker. Their Moony.

Just.

Theirs.

Oh.

She doesn't get your humor like I do She'll never know your story like I do

Walk in the streets with you in your worn-out jeans I can't help thinking this is how it ought to be And you've got a smile that can light up this whole town I haven't seen it in a while You say you're fine, I know you better than that

Standing by and waiting at your backdoor Oh, I remember you driving to my house in the middle of the night I'm the one who makes you laugh when you know you're about to cry And I know your favorite songs, and you tell me about your dreams Think I know where you belong, think I know it's with me...

Have you ever thought, just maybe, you belong with me? You belong with me.

Scrawny (Wallows)

I just really love Remus Lupin, okay?

Used to be level with all my friends Still wear the same shoes I did back then I don't think they've ever been untied I can't regret the things I don't try I'd switch it up but I don't like change Only content if things stay the same Don't care to watch the story unfold Hate feeling like I'm not in control I've been sleeping with the light on I tend to freak myself out Will you come a little closer?

I say the wrong shit at the right times If I'm offending them, I don't mind Maybe they all should listen to me It isn't all about what you see Question though, how do I look to you? Am I so thin that you can see through? I've been sleeping with the light off I wanted to remember Will you come a little closer now?

I'll be one of those people you remember They'll be looking at us when were together I'll be a mannequin you can dismember You don't like my clothes but you still like my smile Take me home to mom but it'll take awhile They might think they're cooler than me by a mile I can still have wisdom and look like a child

I'm a scrawny motherfucker with a cool hairstyle

Hate You (Seann Bowe)

Severus and Lily after the Incident. Still loving each other, but not knowing why or how. Having a million things to say, but never the words.

I'm sorry. What a tragic fucking joke.

Look at me now, such a pitiful place You found someone I thought that'd help erase These crazy thoughts that we were never broken You can't see red flags through rose colored glasses!

I killed you in my head now If I see you out with friends I'll just tell myself that it's a phantom or illusion Guess I haven't chosen which

I hate that I miss you, I hate that I'm lost I hate those dead flowers you taped to your wall I hate that you're okay and I can't move on I hate that somehow this is all my fault! I hate that I'm wide awake watching the door I hate these long showers sitting on the floor I hate in the end it was me who was wrong I hate that I don't really hate you at all

But I kind of wish I did...

I don't really hate you at all.

Bitter And The Sweetness (The Ready Set)

James and Sirius and Remus, dancing in the rain. Sirius is screaming up at the sky, and James is pulling Remus against him, quelling his shivering in an instant.

“I love you,” he whispers, and Remus beams, throwing his arms around his neck and kissing him as Sirius screams, “ELECTRIFY ME MOTHERFUCKER!” at the clouds.

That’s love, bitch.

Troublemaker look on your face Followed by a smile and I melt away It ain't always been this lovely We turn the ice and start a fire, melt away

It don't happen overnight It's laughing after fights Knowing which song I should sing to make you smile again Your favorite flowers How I know before you say, "It's gonna be okay"

Love, I think we got time to make mistakes Bitter and the sweetness, I just love the taste

You give me trouble in the best way When you let your hair down I can't look away You've just always been that lovely We turn the dark into light You'll be staying close

Like the time we got stuck out in the rain When you took my hand said, "Baby, we should stay."

Serenade (BANNERS)

James Potter's ghost, watching over Sirius Black forevermore. You don't just leave your soulmate behind. Never.

Stolen, some people stay a life, some for a moment Some hearts they set a light just to be frozen And so we're out of time, broken But now you've got the chance to travel oceans I hope the world's as wide as you were hoping Don't let heartache cloud your mind

If the days go darker, darling And you lose your way Go on, go on, I'm not beside you But I'll be the song there in the silence Let go, let go, darling, it's over now You're on your own, but I'm on your shoulder I'll always be your serenade, serenade, I I'll always be your serenade

They told you It's not the being drunk, it's being sober That's when it really hits you that it's over It's hard to say goodbye So you can keep me Somewhere out of reach but if you need me Just hum these memories and you can feel me I'm always standing by Go and write your story, darling You will find your place

You can always remember that I'm here to ease your mind I'm on your side and You can call me and just like that I'll sing a song to bring you home, babe

It's Quiet Uptown (from "Hamilton")

Remus, alone. His husband gone, his friends dead, his family murdered. Nothing left for him, until...

"Padfoot."

A sheepish smile.

"Hi, Moony."

Remus takes a deep breath. Sirius reaches for his hand.

They'll figure it out.

There are moments that the words don't reach There is suffering too terrible to name You hold your child as tight as you can And push away the unimaginable The moments when you're in so deep It feels easier to just swim down And so they move uptown And learn to live with the unimaginable

I spend hours in the garden, I walk alone to the store And it's quiet uptown, I never liked the quiet before And I pray, that never used to happen before

If you see him in the street Walking by himself, talking to himself, have pity You would like it uptown, it's quiet uptown He is working through the unimaginable His hair has gone grey He passes every day They say he walks the length of the city You knock me out, I fall apart Can you imagine?

Look at where we are Look at where we started I know I don't deserve you But hear me out That would be enough If I could spare his life If I could trade his life for mine He'd be standing here right now And you would smile and that would be enough

I don't pretend to know The challenges we're facing I know there's no replacing what we've lost And you need time But I'm not afraid I know who I married Just let me stay here by your side That would be enough

There are moments that the words don't reach There's a grace too powerful to name We push away what we can never understand We push away the unimaginable They are standing in the garden Standing there side by side She takes his hand It's quiet uptown

Forgiveness, can you imagine? Forgiveness, can you imagine? If you see him in the street Walking by her side, talking by her side, have pity They are going through the unimaginable

Dynasty (MIIA)

The Marauders are dead and gone, did you know?

But they were great once. Unstoppable. Invincible, young, in love.

Can you tell? Can you...

Remember?

Some days, it's hard to see if I was a fool or you a thief Made it through the maze to find my one in a million And now you're just a page torn from the story I'm living The scar I can't reverse And the more it heals, the worse it hurts Gave you every piece of me, no wonder it's missing Don't know how to be so close to someone so distant

And all I gave you is gone Tumbled like it was stone It all fell down, it all fell down

Thought we built a dynasty that heaven couldn't shake Thought we built a dynasty like nothing ever made Thought we built a dynasty forever couldn't break up.

Dancing After Death (Matt Maeson)

Oh. It's you. You're here.

I never thought I'd see you again.

Do I know better than this? You're a word that I can't forget Though the thought rattles my brain Will you fold or will you remain?

If I don't get better than this man in my skin If I let go, would you hold on? Would we fly? Is it safer if we just say that we tried? Are we laughing at the danger?

As the sun waits to eclipse And the taste teases my lips I'm too tired to wrestle with it Will we burn, or will we repent?

Are we dancing after death, you and I?

19 notes · View notes

alaina-achilles · 4 years

Text

((practice challenge - all prompts included here:))

Dreams.

Dreams are a funny thing, right? As a kid, you have so many dreams, I’m gonna be this when I grow up, I’m gonna wear this when this happens…

But how many do those actually happen?

I always feel like I dream differently than other people. Well, not all dreams, but some particular ones. And when I have a dream that I feel so strongly about (usually they are things that I actually dreamed about during my sleep), I write it down, in my dreams notebook. And well, there were so many of them.

Okay, I’m getting distracted again. So, right now, I’m standing in the middle of my bedroom, screaming.

Because I have just graduated from college and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing with. My. life!!

“Alaina?” Mila, my younger sister asks as she runs into my room and jumps onto my bed. “What happened? Who broke up?”

“The prince and Evie.” Another voice says and we both turn around to face our older sister.

“That’s old news, Lexi.” Mila drawls. “The Selection’s here already. Remind me again why aren’t you guys applying?”

Lexi rolls her eyes and pushes Mila to make space for herself on my bed.

“Well, back to the drama queen here. What happened?” Lexi asks, looking at me in confusion. Mila follows her gaze before they drop to the sheets of paper on my desk.

“What are those?” Mila asks in curiosity. She makes a move to take one of them, but I beat her to it by shoving them all into a messy pile.

“That.” I say as I shove them into a folder and slip it in between two books. “Is private.”

Well, they are actually job applications. I got a bit impulsive just now and flipped through my notebook of dreams, randomly selecting a few dreams, printed out the job application forms and filled them in.

“It’s not important.” I add as I see my sisters looking at me with narrowed eyes. “They were just weird random stuff that I did which I should’ve never done and I will throw them away tomorrow afternoon.”

“You can always be a teacher.” Lexi comments, knowing what I’m stressing about. “Mom likes her job a lot.”

“But I’m not Mom.” I point out as I flop onto the bed next to them. “I mean I love kids, but I just… I just can’t see myself being a teacher. Nor a lawyer like you.”

“I’m gonna be a psychologist. A therapist. A something related to psychology.” Mila replies happily. Sometimes I wish I was 13 as well. She turns around to face me. “And as a future psychologist, I think you should give writer another try. I mean you have published a book!!”

“But it’s not a best-seller. It’s only popular because it’s about a cliche bad boy story that many teenage girls like reading about.”

“That’s not true. I think there’s a lot of potential in your writing. You just need to have inspiration, write a good book and be famous.” Mila finishes with a smile.

“I think Mila’s got a point there. Just give it a go. One year. And if you aren’t writing a best-selling novel at the end of the year, just become a psychologist like Mila will be. You have the bachelor degree.” Lexi points out. I think about what my sisters said and decide they are right.

I’m gonna give writing another try.

----

“ALAINA LEXI MOM DAD COME NOW!” I hear Mila screaming from the bottom of the stairs. I put down my book in annoyance and go downstairs.

“What is it, honey?” Mom asks.

“THEY’RE GONNA ANNOUNCE THE SELECTION RESULTS!!!” Mila all but screams.

“Oooooh!” I cry. “I do wanna watch this! Dramaaa” I sing.

“I don’t know why you two are so excited for this! It’s not like any of us entered our name.” Lexi drawls, but sits down next to us on the couch while our parents sit down as well with an amused smile.

“I know many girls who did. I would like to see who’s gonna be on the tv screen for the next few months.” I explain, without looking away from the tv screen. The TV zooms to a closed up of the Prince who has a relaxed smile on his face that does not really reach his eyes. I don’t blame the guy though, it must be rough for him to jump from a supposedly stable relationship to well, 35 girls. Definitely glad I’m not the prince.

“Maybe it’ll be Delilah. She’s pretty and nice.” I comment.

“Or Faye. She’ll be quite the drama queen.” Lexi says.

“SHUSH!” Mila hisses. Lexi and I roll our eyes at each other and turn back to the screen.

“Miss Alaina Achilles of Atlin, Three.” The reporter announces.

Alain-

WAIT WHAT??

I vaguely hear my family screaming and questioning me, but I can’t hear anything except my heartbeat as I run into my room to check the folder that I meant to throw away a few afternoons ago but forgot.

It’s gone.

And then I scream.

Because, one of my dreams I made when I was six was to be in the Selection, to be a princess. And I thought it’d be fun to fill in the application a few days ago. BUT I NEVER MEANT TO SEND IT.

Then my eyes widen as I realize what must have happened.

“CAMILA DAISY ADRIANNA ACHILLES. I’M GOING TO STRANGLE YOU TO DEATH!” I yell as I run downstairs to kill my younger sister.

----

Four hours later. I’ve finally stopped screaming and attempting to murder my sister.

“How did you even do that, Mil? I thought you had to have your photo taken and everything?” Dad asks.

“Um… I kinda wrote a letter saying that Alaina isn’t feeling well and can’t make it to the applications and sent in a photo instead.” Mila explains in a small voice. “I swear I didn’t know they would allow that…”

“Wait…” I say suddenly. “If you sent out my application. SHIT MILA DID YOU SEND OUT ALL OF THOSE APPLICATIONS I FILLED OUT?”

“Language!” Mom cries but we all ignore her. It’s not like I ever swear anyways.

“Yeah… All six of them.” Mila admits in a quiet voice.

“AND THIS GETS EVEN BETTER!” I yell, throwing my arms into the air. “Do you know what those applications are? As an elf writing letters back to children for Santa Claus, and… and.. And… I don’t even want to rename the applications i filled out for. They were all crazy.” I mumble to myself. “Maybe the Selection is already the least craziest one.”

“See?” Mila says gleefully.

“Oh shut up, you little- I can’t even find any words to describe you. I’m not talking to you.” I yell in anger. With that I storm up the stairs into my room.

Oh no.

What has my little sister got me into?

----

By the time I am to leave Atlin, I am feeling slightly better about this whole thing. Thanks to Lexi and Dad. They convinced me that this will be a nice and unique experience and a change of scenery will probably give me more inspiration for my writing. And I finally get to be on a plane! I’ve never been on the plane before, not because we can’t afford it, but Mom has an extreme fear of flights. We usually went travelling in other means of transport.

My heart is pounding in my ears as I climb the stairs up to the plane. This is it. I’m going to be on a plane!

"Sorry if I'm bothering you, but I'm Sara Nguyen. I hope we can be plane buddies? And who knows maybe a permanent bud for the rest of the selection?" A voice says, interrupting my thoughts. I look up to see a girl smiling at me. She motions at my luggage. "Would you like a hand?"

My eyes widen as I realize she must be another selected. Wow, this is really happening, I’m really in the Selection. I quickly collect my thoughts and straighten my clothes to make sure it’s tidy. My parents have always taught us to be clean and tidy, especially in front of strangers.

“hi Sara! I’m Alaina Achilles! Sure I would love to!” I say to Sara with a bright smile. “and thanks for offering, but I think I got this!” I place the luggage to its place and sit down next to the empty spot next to Sara. I look at the two girls opposite to us, one is falling asleep and the other barely acknowledges us. Well, I guess not every Selected is nice. So I turn to Sara instead, she seems nice. “Have you ever been on a plane before?”

She tells me about the times she’s travelled and when she learns that this is my first time, she surprises me again by offering her hand for me to squeeze.

“I-“ l begin as I look at Sara’s hand hesitantly. “I mean thats very nice of you bu-“ the plane starts to move and my eyes start to widen and immediately reach forward to squeeze Sara’s hand. She is nice enough to pretend not to see my hesitation and just let me hold her hand while she talks me through the take off. I like this girl. I decide.

“Thanks. But you’re right, I’m glad I got on this plane! At least now I have a new friend?” I ask. I have never been alone without at least one of my sisters with me before and I know I will miss them very much.

"Just holler my name and I'll be there for anything. I've got tips for most things. If not I'll create one on the spot." Sara answers with a nod. I do a happy dance internally. "I think we are indeed friends. After all it would be rather awkward if two strangers held hands. Either way I'm glad we both get to be on the same flight." She proceeds to tell me about her favorite things about being on a plane and I look out the window and agree with her. The view is amazing! We chat more about the flying experience and being the writer I was, I tell her how lovely it’ll be to be able to write about this experience. My new friend immediately offers me her notebook, but I once again decline politely. I know once I start writing, I’ll ignore everything around me and I don’t want to do this to Sara and miss the opportunity to get to know her. So I just tell her that I’ll do it later and enjoy the moment now.

Sara asks me if I’ve ever written anything that she might’ve read. I hesitate as I thought of my published book. A few years ago, at 16, I wrote a cliche bad boy story named “the Bad Boy Ruined my Project” and published it online. Because it’s cliche and about bad boys, teenage girls immediately took a liking to it and two years later, I got a publishing offer. I was ecstatic and accepted it. Ever since then, my agent has been pushing me to write a new book. And that’s when it became complicated. I was 16 when I wrote that cliche book and at 18, I’ve matured and changed and honestly, my book wasn’t that well-written, it just suited the taste of what teenage girls wanted to read. I’ve tried telling this to my agent and she kept telling me that was bullshit and if I wanted to be a famous writer, I had to please my readers. This is one of the reasons why I decided to start thinking of pursuing another character. I want to write things that I want to write, not just things people want me to write about.

But at the end of the day, I am grateful for my book and its success. At least it got me noticed.

So I tell her about my published book and she tells me about her career. Sara is to take over her dad’s company. Sensing this isn’t her favorite topic to talk about, I change the topic and ask her about siblings.

We quickly get into a fun conversation about siblings and I can already tell we’re going to be the best of friends in the Selection. Hopefully.

And for a while, I feel like I’m home again as we laugh and joke about the Selection. About how dramatic it will be with 35 girls under the same roof, going after the prince. About how weird it will be to have a brother joining the selection! (Sara said her brother almost joined HAHA). We are enjoying our conversation so much that I don’t even notice we have landed.

"We're here," Sara breathes out as we both look out the window. I smile as I take in the surroundings around me. I’ve been here before during a long road trip, but the airport is totally new to me.

“It’s beautiful!” I exclaim. Then, I turn to face Sara and put out a pinky. “Okay before we get off, let’s make a pact. Let’s promise to let this selection ruin our budding friendship.”

"It honestly is. Last time I came here I was 13 years old." Sara replies with a shake of her head. She looks at me and smiles as she sticks her pinky out and links it with mine. "I promise that this selection will not ruin our friendship. You know you can call me by any nickname. I prefer them rather than Sara. My family call me bun."

And she manages to surprise me for the third time. Wow, a nickname. I can tell it’s not something she goes around letting people use.

I laugh and give her a hug. “Bun.” I say. “I love that. it’s so cute and so you!” We break away when one of the other girls clears her throat and tell us it’s time to go. I smile embarrassingly and roll my eyes at my new friend as we begin our journey to the palace. And because of Sara, I already feel a hundred times better about the selection. If all goes wrong, I know at least there will be one genuine friend who will go through all of this with me together.

"This is reserved for you. It's strange if someone else calls me that. So welcome to the Bun club." She says with a straight face but that didn't last long because she ends up giggling. She shakes her head as the other girls hurry us. "Well, let's see what is awaiting us." She smiles encouragingly at me.

I laugh at her words and nod. “Honored to be in the club.” I look at the other girls amusedly, as they check their makeup. “Let’s see!” I say as I pull my new friend along with me.

Sara nods as she links arms with me humming happily as we both get off the plane. "By any chance can I call you Al?" She pauses as she thinks about other nicknames. "Or Lai? Or Achi! Or do you already have a nickname you are comfortable with?”

I cock my head to the side and think about her question. I don’t really have a cute nickname or anything like hers.

“My sisters call me A.” I say with a giggle. “But Achi sounds so cool as well! Just call me either!” I add, like the sound of Achi.

"I'll call you, Achi then!" She replies with a grin. "It's my own personal nickname.”

“Achi.” I repeat quietly with a smile as I follow the guards escorting us.

Bun and Achi.

I like this combo.

----

Sara and I enter the palace together where we are immediately ushered into a huge room. People keep pushing me from stall to stall, asking me questions, but answering those questions themselves before I can even think of an answer. Luckily, they didn’t need to do too much to my hair and body as Mom always makes sure we are well um groomed. I only got my nails painted and fitted into a red dress. I’ve never seen myself as a red person, I’m usually more of baby pink, purple, white and dark colors. But I have to admit the red dress looks amazing.

I then proceeded to have an interview where I told them a bit about myself and then my makeover.

By the time, I finish the interview, I am so tired that all I want to do is go back to my room and read or talk to my sisters.

Oh wait, I’m still mad at Mila.

Oops.

====

((THANKS @itssara-oc ANA FOR THE WONDERFUL RP ♡ i love the connection between our two girls:))

#practice challenge #challenge #alaina #selection oc

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kentremendousblog · 7 years

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Tom and Lin-Manuel: An Appreciation/Jealous Rant

Every writer has a golden period – a chunk of time when her brain is ripest, when the veins he is tapping are the richest, when the ideas, big and small, spill out over the sides of the bucket instead of having to be patiently collected like drops of rain off a leaf. This is true for songwriters, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, anyone who writes anything in any genre. Go look at John Hughes’s IMDb page and marvel at his golden period, which I would bookend as 1983-1990. It’s outrageous. He wrote Vacation, Mr. Mom, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, and Home Alone in eight years. Eight years?! That’s absurd.

But then look at his next 20 years. You won’t find one movie that is better than the worst one he wrote in those seven years. The vein ran dry. It always does. That’s just the deal.

Tom Petty’s golden period never ended. Or, at least, the silver periods on either side of his golden period were seemingly infinite. No matter where you think he peaked -- Full Moon Fever, or Wildflowers, or Damn the Torpedoes -- the decades on either side were wonderful. He was great from the moment he released his first album in 1977 to the day he died last month. For forty years he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and the songs he wrote were good or great or amazing.

Tom Petty wrote “Breakdown” and “American Girl” in 1977. He wrote “You Don’t Know How it Feels” seventeen years later, in 1994. He wrote “You Got Lucky” in 1982, “King’s Highway” in 1992, “The Last DJ” in 2002. He wrote “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” Free Fallin’,” “Love is a Long Road,” “A Face in the Crowd,” Yer So Bad,” and “The Apartment Song,” and “Depending on You,” all in 1989, and they were all on the same album, and that’s absurd.

He wrote “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” in 1981 and “Big Weekend” in 2006. He wrote every song on Wildflowers – and they are all great – in or around 1994. He wrote fifty other great songs I haven’t named yet, like “Don’t Come Around Here No More” and “Jammin Me.” He wrote great songs you've heard a million times, and great songs you've maybe never heard, like "Billy the Kid" (1999) and "Walls" (1996) which was buried on the soundtrack to She's the One. He took a break from the Heartbreakers and casually released “End of the Line” and “Handle With Care” and “She’s My Baby” with the Traveling Wilburys in 1989-90. He wrote “Refugee” in 1980 and “I Should Have Known It” in 2010. Is there any rock and roll songwriter alive who wrote two songs that good, 30 years apart? (Paul McCartney wrote “Hey Jude” in 1968, and only 12 years later he wrote “Wonderful Christmas Time,” which is so bad it nearly retroactively undid “Hey Jude.”)

He wrote about rock and roll things, like ’62 Cadillacs, getting out of this town, and dancing with Mary Jane. He wrote about love and loss and heartbreak. He wrote legitimately funny jokes, and moribund memories, and personal narratives, and imaginative flights of fancy. One of his characters calls his father his “old man” and it somehow isn’t cheesy. He was from Florida and California and wrote about both of them, and every time I’m on Ventura Boulevard I think of vampires, because the images he wrote are indelible.

Petty didn’t just write songs directed at women, like most rock stars. He wrote about women, and he wrote for women, and he wrote with women. He treated the women in his songs as lovingly and respectfully as he treated the men. He cared about them as much, he spent as much time thinking about them, and he liked them as much, and all of that is rare.

He wrote simply, but not boringly. He made his characters three-dimensional, somehow, in a matter of seconds. There’s a famous (probably apocryphal) story about Hemingway bragging he could write an entire novel in six words, then writing: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I prefer the 18-word novel Petty wrote as the first verse to “Down South” –

Headed back down south Gonna see my daddy's mistress Gonna buy back her forgiveness Pay off every witness

When I was working on Parks and Recreation, whenever we needed a song to score an important moment in Leslie Knope’s life, we chose a Tom Petty song. It started with “American Girl,” when her biggest career project came to fruition. It was “Wildflowers” when she said goodbye to her best friend. It was “End of the Line” at the moment the show ended. For the seven seasons of our show, Tom Petty was the writer we trusted to explain how our main character was feeling, because he wrote so much, so well, for so long.

*******

It seems like a joke, Hamilton -- a joke in a TV show where one of the characters is a struggling New York actor, and is always dragging his friends to his terrible plays. Like Joey in Friends. There’s an episode of Friends where Joey is in a terrible musical called like Freud!, about Sigmund Freud, and you get to see some of it, and it’s predictably terrible. Freud! the musical is arguably a better idea than Hamilton the musical.

I’m far from the first person to say this -- I’m probably somewhere around the millionth person to write about Hamilton, and the maybe 500,000th to make this particular point, but it needs to be said -- a hip-hop Broadway musical about the founding fathers is an astoundingly terrible idea. Lin-Manuel Miranda should never have written it. As soon as he started to write it, he should’ve said to himself, “What the fuck am I doing?!” and stopped. And after he got halfway through, he should’ve junked it, gotten really drunk, and moved on with his life, and made his wife and friends swear to never mention the weird six months where he was trying to write a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton. I literally guarantee you that when Lin-Manuel Miranda first told his friends what he was writing, every one of them reacted with at best a frozen smile, and at worst a horrified recoiling. Some of them might have been outwardly encouraging – “sounds awesome bud! Go get 'em!” But then later, alone, they would call each other and say What the fuck is he doing?

There is a moment, in Hamilton, when what you are watching overwhelms you. (It’s not the same moment for everyone, but most everyone has one, I suspect.) It’s the moment when the enormity, the complexity, the meaning of it, the entirety of it, overpowers you, and you realize that what you are experiencing is new – new both in your specific life, and new, like, on Earth. The first time I saw it, that moment was a line in the middle of “Yorktown.” Hamilton sang the line And so the American experiment begins / With my friends all scattered to the winds, and I burst into tears in a way I hadn’t since I was 10 and a baseball went through a guy’s legs in the World Series. Something about how casually he says that – And so the American experiment begins – just settled over me, like a collapsing tent, and this thing I was watching wasn’t in front of me, it was everywhere around me, and it was exhilarating and transformative.

(If I could put this part in a footnote, I would, but I don’t know how to, so: I should mention that I am very far from a musical theater aficionado. I have seen maybe eight musicals in my life. Not only did I not expect to cry, hard, during Hamilton, I did not expect to enjoy it. I saw it like a week after it opened on Broadway, kind of on a whim, knew nothing about it, and the last thing I said to my wife, as the lights went down, was: “We’ll leave at intermission.”)

The second time I saw it, that moment came much earlier (I knew what I was getting into, this time, so I was more ready to be subsumed). It came barely three minutes in, when the entire cast of the show, in a piece of choreography that can best be referred to as “badass,” all walk down to the very front of the stage and stand, shoulder to shoulder, and sing very loudly about how Alexander Hamilton never learned to take his time. The cast has, to this point, trickled on stage, slowly, one by one, telling you Hamilton’s origin story, and then suddenly there they all are, all of them -- maybe 20? 50? It seems like 1000? – as close to the audience as they can get, and they are every size and ethnicity and gender, and their voices are loud, and I thought to myself, oh my God, this is a cast of people descended from every nation on Earth, all singing about the foundations of the American experience, and yes I “knew” that, intellectually, but holy shit, now that I see them all, I know it, like in my stomach, I understand it, and what a thing that is.

The third time I saw Hamilton, that moment was during “It’s Quiet Uptown,” when this enormous, sprawling, improbable, otherworldly, multi-ethnic, historical, art tornado presses pause on all of its historical-cultural-ethno-sociological-artistic investigations, and spends four and a half spare minutes with a couple who are grieving an unimaginable tragedy. Specifically, it was the lines

Forgiveness Can you imagine? Forgiveness Can you imagine?

What a thing to do, for your characters -- to give them four and a half minutes in the middle of an enormous, sprawling, historical swirl, to just be sad. What a piece of writing that is.

(Again, should be a footnote, but: as long as I’m talking about writers here, I should point out that if the late Harris Wittels were alive, he would, at this moment, text me and hit me with a “humblebrag” for writing about how I have seen Hamilton three times, and he would be right. Miss you Harris!)

In the hundreds of hours of my life I have spent thinking about Hamilton since I first saw it – far more hours than any other single piece of art I have ever experienced – I have revisited that same thought over and over: he never should’ve written it. It was an absurd thing to do. It took him a year to write the title song, then another year to write the second song, and how did he not give up when two years had gone by and he’d written two songs? He must’ve known in his heart it needed to be a 50-song, 2 1/2-hour enterprise, and he had two songs after two years, and he kept going. How did he keep going? I've been trying to write this blog post about two writers I admire for different reasons since the week Tom Petty died, and I’ve almost given up five times.

At this point, the entire musical is that "moment" for me. It's the whole thing, now – the thing that overwhelms me is the whole thing. The conception of it, the writing of it, the rewriting of it. The music and the motifs and the themes and the threads and the dramatic shape and the characters and their inner lives, and the eagle-eye writer’s view it took to keep all of that in his head, all of it, the whole time. The writing of it. The utterly impossible writing of it.

#writing #hamilton #tompetty #lin-manuel miranda

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shainas-story-secrets · 6 years

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How to Create Realistic Characters (Without Putting Your Friends in Your Novel)

When I was twelve, I started writing my first “real” book (that is, a book that was over 50,000 words). It was about a girl and her group of middle school friends who somehow got transported to another realm and had to defeat a bad guy who had kidnapped another friend of theirs. It wasn’t good.

There were many issues, but the most glaring was that the lead character was obviously based on myself, the friend characters were based on my views of my friends, and the villain was based off of another student I didn’t like very much.

They say “write what you know”, but there are a lot of problems with just inserting real people into your books. First of all, some real life people might have problems with you revealing their personal information, but also it can lead to oversimplifying your characters because you know the person so you don’t have to explain to your readers what they’re like. It can also lead to not wanting to be too hard on a character because you like the person they’re based on (the common Mary Sue/Marty Stu problem), or not being able to imagine them with different layers because you don’t want to think about the real life person that way.

Character building is hard. It’s probably one of the skills I struggle most with. It was a long time before I stopped basing characters off of real people. Even through college, a lot of my characters were still somewhat based on my friends, although with some changes.

Here’s some insight into how I create my characters, and I’m still learning.

1. Build a character from the ground up

Don’t start with a real person as a platform (“He’s just like Jimmy, but…”). Flesh out a character without basing them on people you know. Pick out their hobbies, their manner of speaking, their family, their fears, and their goals first. There are a lot of character sheets out there you can fill out, or simply create your own. One of my favorite things to do is come up with a fake quote my character “said” that gives insight into their personality (ahem). It also helps develop how they talk, which is just a headstart in writing believable dialog.

When I was developing Tales of Mundane Magic, I started with the basic concept of sisters and their ghost dog. One of the sisters had an accident with her eye that allowed her to see things that weren’t there (whether that be magic spells, ghosts, or the future), and the other collected enchanted hats. But I had to go deeper than that. What did each want to do with their lives? What hobbies did they have besides those basic facts? How old were they? These were all things I had to figure out before I started writing.

2. Find a reference image

This may or may not help you, but when I write I find I do such a better job being consistent with how I write a character if I have a reference image of that character. You could commission an artist to draw a character for you, give them a description of how you picture the character and let them run wild with it, or you can scour the internet for models or actors (that you don’t know) who give you the proper vibe of your character.

I put emphasis on “that you don’t know” because if you choose an actor you know from a TV show as your reference, you’re much more likely to base your character off of the TV show character.

The reference image doesn’t have to be perfect, but the most important thing is the vibe it gives off. Is your character tired and disillusioned a lot? Make sure that’s the feeling you get when you look at the picture. Does your character think he’s the funniest thing in the world? Get a picture of your reference laughing, or at the very least smiling.

3. Write a backstory for your character

Now you have all these facts about your character that you’ve come up with, either during brainstorming or as you’ve started writing your work. It’s time to piece them together and figure out how they came to be.

This is helpful because real people don’t just pop into existence. If a character knows how to lockpick, we need to know why. We might not need to know why a character loves mint chocolate chip ice cream, but if the reason is that her father also loved it and they would bond by being the only two people in the family that liked chocolate chip ice cream, then maybe it’s worth knowing the character’s connection to her father. If a character has trust issues, explore in the back story how that came to be. If you have the canon that they were betrayed by a close friend, then maybe that close friend can come back and cause problems further down the line. You never know what you’re going to discover by writing a backstory.

At the very least, a backstory fleshes out your understanding of your character. No longer do they look at the ocean and think ambiguously of how peaceful it looks. Now they look out over it and remember all the fun times they had at the beach before they broke their leg.

Also, it’s really fun.

4. Now write what you know, if you have to

Maybe you say your character Bob has a good sense of humor, but you’re not sure how to write that. Enter your hilarious teacher with a funny one-liner and you go - oh, Bob should have my teacher’s sense of humor.

But you’ve already built up character Bob so much that you’re only borrowing this one trait from your teacher. Bob isn’t going to be based off your teacher.

Maybe Bob has a younger sister, Lucy, and you’ve established that they have a somewhat antagonistic relationship. Maybe you can base their interactions off the interactions you see between your two younger siblings. Again, Lucy isn’t one and Bob isn’t the other, but some of the scenes where they argue can be inspired by real-life events.

The important things about borrowing from real life is to borrow pieces, and not all from the same source.

#writing advice #writing #character #writerblr #writers of tumblr #writers #character building #original character

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ashlyreads · 7 years

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82 Truths Tag

I was tagged by @theprintedgirl for this. Thanks so much love! Eeek, not to actually talk about myself. Well, here goes.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, write a post with 82 truths about yourself and then tag 25 people

My Favourites:

Animal: Penguin

Colour: Yellow

Drink: COFFEE (as I’m drinking my second cup of the morning...)

Food: Tacos

Time of year: Fall (Halloween in particular)

Films: The Princess Bride

Book: One is Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

Subject in school: English

Flower: Sunflower

Fruit: Cherry

About Me:

I’m on the upside toward 30, and I’m way too old to still be on tumblr.

I’m bi.

I’m a barista at Starbucks, I am working on actually finishing a novel, and I also do freelance writing work.

I travel a lot. Recently I went to the UK, in October I’m heading to Disneyland, I’m thinking about a trip to Machu Picchu this winter, and I’m also contemplating a trip to Amsterdam (and to revisit Paris) next spring.

I have a bookstagram and a travelgram which I love dearly. You can find me @ ashlyreads and ashlytravels.

I just bought a Voltswagen Beetle Convertible because it’s been my dream car for 5 years and I said fuck it DOING IT.

I once willingly jumped out of a plane.

I will literally point out every dog I see if I’m with someone.

I recently started cross stitching again. It’s something I enjoyed when I was younger, and I’m enjoying it just as much now.

I have OCD and depression.

Most recent:

Phone call: My mom

Text: A Tumblr post about The X Files to my two closest friends.

Food: Lucky Charms (Cereal)

Drink: Coffee

Book: Aquaman, Vol. 1: The Drowning by Dan Abnett

Purchase: A book.

Song I listened to: “Love Always Remains” by MGMT

Reason to be excited: I’m still excited about my new car!

TV show: It’s Always Sunny in Philidalphia

Obsession: Books (always!)

Memories:

Happiest: Oh my gosh how can I pick! Here’s one at random: Driving the 101 in California–windows down surrounded by coasts and mountains. It was bliss.

Saddest: It’s kind of cliche, but not being with a person that I care about because our timing was always off. I wish I could go back and make things different, but such is life.

Strangest: This one time I was at a music fest–some context: I’m kind of a hippy and dress all out for Summerfest–I had a flowery headband in and was having a few beers with a few friends and out of NOWHERE this guy walks up to me, doesn’t say anything, sticks a leaf in my headband, steps back to admire it, gives me two thumbs up, and walks away never to be seen again. It was one of the strangest and most wonderful experiences of my life.

Scariest: Skydidving. It was actually awesome, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared as when I was sitting on the edge of an airplane 13,000 feet above the ground.

Funniest: One time a friend and I went out for margaritas. On our walk back to our apartments, we decided to walk through our College Campus’ graveyard. She had to pee REALLY bad, and I somehow convinced her going in the graveyard was a great idea. It was probably more one of those you had to be there moments, but I still laugh about it often. BONUS: The same friend and I were on a mini road to trip to Cincinnati (Ohio) and we came up to this REALLY BIG and UGLY building. We were sitting at a stop light and I said something like I wonder what that building is and my friend really quietly and cryptically just whispered, “scientology.” Her and I have had some good times!

Exciting: Finally traveling to the UK, especially London. I’ve wanted to go since I was young and finally at 25 I made it there!

Proudest: Graduating college.

Boring: Anytime I fly. Flying is so boring, and I hate it.

Biggest Fears

Spiders.

Not living up to the standards and goals I have for myself.

Garbage disposals and blenders.

Heights.

Small spaces.

Excited for in Life:

My trip to Disneyland!

Halloween is nearly here.

Hopefully booking that trip to Machu Picchu.

Finishing my novel.

Coffee (anytime, anyday, anywhere).

Going to the Library next week.

Hopefully moving to California someday (soonish?).

I am always…

Reading

Writing

Drinking Coffee

Working

Hiking

Traveling

Browsing Bookstores

In Search of Stephen King Books for My Collection

Thinking

On Instagram

I wish I was, and I eventually will be…

A full-time writer.

A dog mom.

Less afraid.

Low-key famous.

Running a successful Etsy shop.

Even more well-read.

Living in California.

An actress (maybe). I would LOVE to get back into acting!

Living in a small apartment with a big window and a writing desk.

Happier.

Favourite Things about Myself:

I’m good at puzzles.

I’m strong.

I’m determined.

I face my fears frequently.

I’m a realist.

I deeply care about others and their well-being.

I’m funny.

My hair.

I’m comfortable being me.

Finally, my blog…

Makes me happy.

Is a great place to destress.

Keeps my writing skills tuned and polished.

Wow, that was a lot! I actually really enjoyed this though! Now, I tag:

@readloveandlive @nightmare-in-the-stacks @thebookrose @thechosenpages @art-of-storytelling @giannareadsbooks @resident-book-nerd @bookworm-of-camelot @bybookorbynook @that-random-bookworm

Feel free to do this or not. There’s never any pressure with me!

#tags #82 truths tag

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bitesizekorean · 8 years

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Mega Vocabulary List

Ready for the ultimate challenge? If you’ve been following from the start, then this year’s worth of vocabulary shall prove a mighty challenge for you - see how many words you can remember. Otherwise, if you’re new, here is a very long list of vocabulary to get you started! Good Luck!

꿈: Dream

여행: Travel

시험: Exam

계획: Plan

찾다: To find

기분: Feelings

쉽다: To be easy

고민: One’s worries

의자: Chair

차: Car

책: Book

탁자: Table

도시: City

건물: Building

잡지: Magazine

나라: Country

가방: Bag

선생님: Teacher

나무: Tree

창문: Window

문: Door

의사: Doctor

여자: Woman

남자: Man

소파: Sofa

침대: Bed

음식: Food

병원: Hospital

머리: Head

우리: We/Us

만들다: To make

크다: To be big

공항: Airport

버스: Bus

공원: Park

만나다: To meet

이해하다: To understand

다르다: To be different

새롭다: To be new

고르다: To choose

필요하다: To need

믿다: To believe in

실망: Disappointment

지다: To lose

이기다: To win

물어보다: To ask

날씨: Weather

비교: Comparison

인기: Popularity

준비: Preparation

밝다: To be bright

어둡다: To be dark

덥다: To be hot

춥다: To be cold

궁금하다: To be curious

경험: Experience

배우다: To learn, to study

집: Home, house

초대하다: To invite

시간: Time

방향: Direction

많다: To be a lot, many

실수: Mistake

집안일: Housework

피곤하다: To be tired, exhausted, to be tiring

사다: To buy

시계: Clock, watch

바꾸다: To change

늦다: To be late

신나다: To be exciting, to be excited

모자라다: To lack, to be insufficient

나이: One’s age

인정하다: To admit

손: Hand

비싸다: To be expensive

회의: Meeting

인터넷: The internet

취소되다: To be cancelled

산: Mountain

가위바위보: Rock-Paper-Scissors

내기: Bet

제한: Limit

시골: Countryside

사이: Relationship

확인하다: To check

주말: Weekend

점심: Lunch

좀: A little; please

나이가 적다: To be younger, to be young

맞추다: To guess

맛: Taste

더: More

성격: Personality; disposition

정말: Really

눕다: To lie down

열다: To open

듣다: To listen, to hear

닫다: To close

앉다: To sit

팔다: To sell

자다: To sleep

가깝다: To be close

귀엽다: To be cute

잡다: To grab, to hold, to catch

자르다: To cut

받다: To receive, to get, to accept

씻다: To wash, to shower

기다리다: To wait

놀다: To play, to hang out

살다: To live

어렵다: To be difficult

놀라다: To be surprised, to be shocked

웃다: To laugh, to smile

낫다: To be better, to recover, to feel better

보내다: To send

읽다: To read

멀다: To be far

도와주다: To help

멈추다: To stop

무섭다: To be scary

얻다: To acquire, to get, to gain

알다: To know

일어나다: To get up, to wake up

졸다: To doze off

피하다: To avoid, to dodge; to duck down

같다: To be the same

끝나다: To be over; finished

쓰다: To write

잃어버리다: To lose something

좁다: To be narrow

싸우다: To fight, to argue

취하다: To be drunk, to get drunk

화내다: To get angry, to yell out of anger

나가다: To go out, to get out

밀다: To push

달리다: To run

잊어버리다: To forget

떠나다: To leave

기르다: To grow; to raise

졸리다: To be sleepy

죽다: To die

울다: To cry

당기다: To pull

넓다: To be wide

정하다: To decide

때리다: To hit someone

싸다: To be cheap

작다: To be small

느끼다: To feel

느리다: To be slow

가르치다: To teach

영화: Movie

자꾸: Repeatedly, again and again

친구: Friend

앞으로: From now on

우연히: By chance

음악: Music

중요하다: To be important

학교: School

선물: Gift

연락: Contact

유학: Study abroad

고향: Hometown

키: Height

노래: Song

조용하다: To be quiet

신뢰: Trust

국제: International

장난: Prank

밤: Night

다음: Next

사람: Person, people

이야기: Story

의견: Opinion

나쁘다: To be bad

처음: First, for the first time

꼭: Definitely, for sure, make sure to (do something)

들다: To enter, to be in

데다: To burn oneself

드라마: TV drama

조언: Advice

후회하다: To regret

되다: To become

수다: Chatter

짧다: To be short

생각: Thought, opinion, idea

솔직히: Honestly, to be honest

아무한테도: To nobody, (not) to anybody

잠깐: For a moment, short time

어떻게: How

기억하다: To remember

여자친구: Girlfriend

남자친구: Boyfriend

뭐든지: Anything, whatever it is

문제: Problem, issue, matter

사랑: Love

소리: Sound

제목: Title

노래를 하다: To sing

추천하다: To recommend

춤: Dance

가수: Singer

요리하다: To cook

핸드폰: Mobile phone

스마트 폰: Smart phone

잠들다: To fall asleep

시끄럽다: To be noisy, loud

외국: Foreign country

기억: Memory

지루하다: To be bored, to be boring

아까: Earlier, before

잘못: In the wrong way

운전: Driving

맵다: To be spicy, to be hot

혼자: Alone, by oneself

들어오다: To come in

마르다: To dry, to be dried

연기: Smoke

벌써: Already

서점: Bookstore

거짓말을 하다: To lie

방법: Method, way

도움: Help

내용: Content, material

어젯밤: Last night

맡기다: To entrust, to leave something to someone

남: Other people, others

길을 잃다: To get lost, to lose one’s way

학생: Student

요즘: These days, lately

도움이 되다: To be helpful

열심히: Diligently, (to do something) hard

미루다: Postpone, delay

그만두다: To quit

야근: Working overtime

야근을 하다: To work overtime

제대로: Properly

건강: One’s health

챙기다: To take care of, to pack, take, to gather all together

신문: Newspaper

과제: Homework, assignment

난처하다: To be in an awkward situation

질문: Question

소설: Novel, fiction

보여주다: Display

재미있다: To be interesting, to be funny, to be fun

지하철: Subway

기사: Article

빌려주다: To lend

바보같다: To be stupid, foolish

질문을 하다: To ask a question

편지: Letter

다시: Again

재미없다: To be uninteresting, to be unfunny, to be boring

타다: To ride, to get on, to take (vehicle)

읽을거리: Reading material, something to read

이상하다: To be strange, to be weird, odd

개인적이다: To be personal

발표: Presentation

이메일: E-mail

보고서: Report

눈치: Intuition

속도: Speed

뭔가: Something (subject)

하루: One day

대답하다: To answer

바로바로: Immediately

이름: Name

최근에: Recently

걸음: (Walking) pace, step

제일: The best, the most

대하다: Confront, face

위하다: To do for the sake of

사회: Society, community

나오다: Come out

중: The centre, the middle

의하다: To be due to

복도: Hallway, hall

목적: Purpose, aim, goal

저기요: Excuse me

가만히: Motionlessly, still

해결되다: To be solved

잠꼬대: Talking in one’s sleep

케이크: Cake

뚱뚱하다: To be chubby, to be fat

아침식사: Breakfast

연습하다: To practice

위험하다: To be dangerous

못생기다: To be ugly

사진: Picture

박물관: Museum

비밀: Secret

기대하다: To expect

신발: Shoe

수도: Capital city

만지다: To touch

언덕: Hill

교장선생님: Principal

노력하다: To try

운동하다: To exercise

항상: Always

아래: Bottom

곧: Soon

착하다: To be nice

가격: Price

가족: Family

강: River

더럽다: To be dirty

정부: Government

가지다: To own

출발하다: To depart

넘어지다: To fall

속삭이다: To whisper

문장: Sentence

배우: Actor

보통: Usually

동안: During

요리사: Chef, a cook

미래: Future

부끄럽다: To be shy

소개하다: To introduce

여권: Passport

꽃: Flowers

간판: A sign

극장: Theatre

열: Fever

공장: Factory

겨울: Winter

가을: Autumn, fall

여름: Summer

봄: Spring

잠그다: To lock

계절: Season

교회: Church

과일: Fruit

방학: Vacation

담임선생님: Homeroom teacher

부엌: Kitchen

교육: Education

고객: Customer

소문: Rumour

밥솥: Rice cooker

출장: Business trip

주년: Anniversary

월급: Pay cheque

한식: Korean food

별: Star

태도: Attitude

후보자: Candidate

사실: The truth, fact

지나다: Elapse, pass by

영향: Influence

문학: Literature

환경: Environment

이웃사람: Neighbour

집중하다: To concentrate

연구하다: To research

주의: Caution

영화관: Movie theatre, cinema

악몽: Nightmare, bad dream

사탕: Candy, sweets

친하다: To be familiar with, to be close with

결국: Eventually

급하다: To be urgent

그림: Drawing, painting, picture

정장: Suit

자세하다: To be specific, detailed

구름: Cloud

경쟁: Competition

경쟁자: Competitors

구경하다: To sight see

날다: To fly

과자: Cookie(s), crackers, snacks, biscuits, candy

감독하다: To supervise

지우다: To erase, to remove, to wipe off

뒤처지다: To fall behind

이내: Within, in less than, no more than

이래: Since

깊다: To be deep

모든: Every, all, whole, entire

언제나: Everytime, always, all the time

모든 것: Everything

젓가락: Chopsticks

마다: Each, every, all, an interval of

어디나: Everywhere

기숙사: Dormitory, dorm, hall of residence

메뉴: Menu

지갑: Wallet

달: Moon, month

인사: Greeting, to bow (in greeting)

맞추다: To adjust, to fix, to set

흔들다: To shake, swing

따다: To pluck, to pick

꺾다: To break, to snap

어쩌면: Maybe, perhaps, possibly

아무래도: Probably

아마: Possibly, maybe, perhaps, probably, likely

위성: Satellite, moon

과학자: Scientist

비바람: Rain storm

끝없다: To be endless, boundless, eternal, never-ending

억양: Accent, intonation

발명하다: To invent

예정: Schedule

우표: Postage stamp

우산: Umbrella

수집하다: To collect

이야기하다: To talk with, to have a conversation

도심: Downtown

옛사랑: An old love, a bygone love, one’s old lover

옛추억: Old memories, the memory of one’s early days

게으르다: To be lazy, to be idle

교과서: Textbook, coursebook

옛날: Old days, the old times, the past

평소: Usual, ordinary, average, regular

새벽: Dawn, sunrise

해 질 녘: Dusk, sunset, sundown, nightfall

안타깝다: Regrettable, sad, pitiful, to be unfortunate

전공: University major, specialise in, major in, speciality

백과사전: Encyclopedia

계산기: Calculator

주인: Master, owner, proprietor

교수: Professor

사고: Accident

뉴스: News, newscast

소식: News

만화책: Comic book

헷갈리다: To be confusing, be confused

늘다: To increase, to grow, to rise, to swell

물론: Of course

사랑에 빠지다: To fall in love

통역하다: To interpret

번역하다: To translate

보석: Jewel, gem

귀금속: Jewellery

반지: Ring

펜던트: Pendant

목걸이: Necklace

팔찌: Bracelet, bangle

학비: Tuition (fees), schooling expenses, educational expenses

청소년: Youth, adolescent, teenager, teen

목적지: Destination

예술: Art, the arts

이유: Reason, cause, grounds for

점수: Grade, score, mark

메다: To carry on one’s shoulder

지구: Earth

공주: Princess

원인: Cause

채비: Preparation

실제: Reality, truth, actuality

고백: Confession, confess, make a confession

사명: Mission, calling, vocation

정의: Justice, righteousness

스타일: Style

철학: Philosophy

향수: Perfume, cologne, scent, fragrance

평화롭다: To be peaceful

봉사하다: To volunteer, to serve, service

왕따: Outcast

설레다: One’s heart flutters, for one’s heart to beat fast in excitement

여행자: Traveler, tourist

당국: Authorities

이사하다: To move house, to move

화장: Makeup

소방서: Fire station

부부: Married couple, husband and wife, man and wife

전쟁: War, warfare

발표하다: To announce

학력: Level of education, academic ability, academic background, educational background

물체: Object

보안: Security

번개: Lightning

천둥: Thunder

징그럽다: Gross, nasty, creepy

동시: Simultaneously, at the same time, at once

통일: Unification, unity

일시적: Temporary, momentary, transitory, transient, passing

그날: That day, the very (same) day

따로: Separately, in isolation

남기다: To set aside, to leave (behind), to save, to leave

지식: Knowledge, understanding

병: Disease, illness, sickness, disorder

분실물: Lost property, lost article, missing article

똑같다: To be identical, the same, equal

돌다: To turn, rotate, revolve

게임: Game

생일: Birthday, one’s birthday

생신: Birthday (honorific)

어울리다: To associate with, to socialise with, to get along with, to suit well with, to keep company with, to match with

꽂다: To put, to stick, to fix, to arrange

주차: Parking, park

잠바: Jacket, jumper

닥치는 대로: At random, randomly

계획적으로: Intentionally, deliberately, on purpose

다른: Different, diverse, dissimilar, divergent

유성: Shooting star, meteor, falling star

폭락하다: To plunge, to nosedive, to slump, to plummet, to steeply decline

급등하다: To soar, to jump, to sharply rise, to skyrocket, to rise suddenly, to shoot up

친절: Friendly, kindness, kind, hospitable, courteous

최악: The worst

업적: Achievement

갖다: To have, hold, to possess

가지다: To own, to have, to possess

비행기: Airplane, plane

복잡하다: Complicated, complex, intricate

글쎄요: Let me see, well…

허락: Permission, consent, approval

오전: Morning, a.m.

오후: Afternoon, p.m.

만안: Peace, tranquility, welfare

우주: The universe, space, the cosmos

등산하다: To hike, to climb (a mountain)

계속하다: To continue, keep on, go on, carry on

숲: Forest, wood, the woods, grove

의논: Discussion, consultation, deliberation

관심: Interest (in), attention, concern (for)

눈물: Tear

심각하다: To be serious, severe, to be grave, critical

반대: The opposite, the contrary, the reverse

무지개: Rainbow

불안: Anxiety, apprehension, uneasiness

안개: Mist, fog

서운하다: To be sad (about), to be hurt (about), to be regrettable, unfair, to be displeasing

독립심: Spirit of independence

극지방: Polar regions

비극적인: Tragic

별명: Nickname

환자: Patient, invalid, sufferer

화창하다: To be sunny, to be bright, to be clear

바다: Ocean, sea

더운 날: A hot day

가능하다: To be possible, to be feasible, to be practicable

탈퇴하다: To withdraw (from), to drop out (of), to break away (from)

이용하다: To utilize, to exploit, to take advantage of, to use, to make (good) use of

군주: Monarch

왕: King

여왕: Queen

바라다: Wish, hope, want

갈망: Desire (for), an earnest desire (for), a longing (for), an ardent wish (for)

열렬하다: To be passionate, to be enthusiastic, to be fervent

완벽: Perfection, perfect, flawless, immaculate

결함: Flaw, fault, defect

감정: Emotion, feeling(s), sentiment

상상력: Imagination, imaginative power

생생하다: To be vivid, to be graphic

어머니: Mother

아버지: Father

부모: Parents, one’s parents

친척: Relative, relation

오빠: Elder brother (when speaker is female)

형: Elder brother (when speaker is male)

누나: Elder sister (when speaker is male)

언니: Elder sister (when speaker is female)

사돈: In-law(s), family in-law(s)

동생: Younger sibling

형제: Brother, brothers [siblings]

자매: Sister, sisters [siblings]

사촌: Cousin

부인: Wife

할아버지: Grandfather

할머니: Grandmother

남편: Husband

배우자: Spouse

아이: Child (children), kid

딸: Daughter

아들: Son

남동생: Younger brother

여동생: Younger sister

외할아버지: Grandfather (on mother’s side)

외할머니: Grandmother (on mother’s side)

반찬: Side dishes

밥: Rice

수저: Spoon and (a pair of) chopsticks

사리: Extra ingredients

종이컵: Paper cup

앞접시: Dish, plate

집게: Tongs

주문: An order, place [give] an order

채식주의자: A vegetarian

다방: Coffee shop, coffee house, tea room

카페: Café

웨이트리스: Waitress

웨이터: Waiter

계산서: The check, the bill

맛있다: To be delicious, to be tasty

바비큐: Barbecue

포장: Packaging, wrapping

저기요: Excuse me

영수증: Receipt

냅킨: Napkin

물티슈: Wet wipes

탑승권: Boarding pass

신분증: ID, identification, identification card

게이트 번호: Gate number

도착: Arrival, arrive (at/in), reach, get (to)

왕복 여행: A round trip, a return trip

예약: Reservation, booking

출발: Departure, leave, start (off/out), set (off)

체크인 카운터: Check-in counter, check-in desk

관세: Customs

탑승구: Boarding gate

수하물 찾는 곳: Baggage claim

비행기표: Airplane ticket

환승: Transfer

국제선: International flight

국내선: Domestic flight

매표: Ticketing

기내 휴대 수하물: Carry-on baggage, carry-on luggage

분실물 취급소: Lost and found

환전소: Currency exchange, foreign currency exchange

세관 신고서: Customs form

공항 셔틀 버스: Airport shuttle bus

개: Dog

고양이: Cat

말: Horse

원숭이: Monkey

사자: Lion

토끼: Rabbit, hare

다람쥐: Squirrel

팬더: Panda

늑대: Wolf

펭귄: Penguin

여우: Fox

사슴: Deer

독수리: Eagle

거북: Turtle

염소: Goat

닭: Chicken

공작: Peacock

뱀: Snake

돼지: Pig

상어: Shark

돌고래: Dolphin

강아지: Puppy

멍멍이: Baby talk for dog or puppy

조랑말: Pony

얼룩말: Zebra

침팬지: Chimpanzee

오랑우탄: Orangutan

고릴라: Gorilla

표범: Leopard

하이에나: Hyena

치타: Cheeta

호랑이: Tiger

하늘 다람쥐: Flying squirrel

곰: Bear

코알라: Koala bear

영양: Antelope

수사슴: Stag

양: Sheep

수탉: Rooster

암탉: Hen

태풍: Typhoon, hurricane

맑은: Clear, pure

비: Rain

태양: The sun

바람: Wind, breeze

안개: Fog, mist

눈: Snow

가뭄: Drought

홍수: Flood

지진: Earthquake

토네이도: Tornado

진눈깨비: Sleet

폭우: Heavy rain

이슬비: Drizzle, light rain

폭염: Heat wave

일기예보: Weather forecast

서리: Frost

쌀쌀하다: To be chilly

흐리다: To be cloudy, overcast *

해일: Tsunami

고드름: Icicle

맑은 하늘: A clear sky

맑다: To be clear

성악가: Vocalist

작곡가: Composer

작사가: Lyricist, lyric writer

지휘자: Conductor

반주: Accompaniment

가락: Tune, melody

음표: Musical note

교향악: Symphony, symphonic music

악보: Music score, sheet music

장단: Rhythm, beat

클래식: Classical music

합창: Chorus, ensemble

관현악: Orchestral music

민요: Folk song

노래책: Song book

팝송: Pop song, pop (music)

작곡: Composition

기악: Instrumental music

연주: Performance

편곡: Arrangement

편곡자: Arranger

첼로: Cello

비올라: Viola

플루트: Flute

바이올린: Violin

하프: Harp

색소폰: Saxophone

드럼: Drum

탬버린: Tambourine

오르간: Organ

실로폰: Xylophone

일렉트릭기타: Electric guitar

콘트라베이스: Double bass, contrabass

우쿨렐레: Ukulele

단소: Korean short bamboo flute

징: Korean gong

아코디언: Accordion

현악기: String instrument, a stringed instrument

목관악기: Woodwind instrument, a woodwind instrument

오보에: Oboe

타악기: Percussion

금관악기: Brass instrument

소설가: Novelist

원고지: Manuscript paper, squared manuscript paper

교정: Proofreading

시인: Poet

행: Line

절: Clause

문단: Paragraph

평론: Criticism, critique, review

수필: Essay

편집: Editing, edit, compilation

시: Poem

비평: Criticism, review

편집부원: Editorial staff

장편 소설: Full-length novel, a novel

중편 소설: Novelette, a medium length story, a short novel

단편소설: Short story

단편 소설가: Short story writer

각본가: Scriptwriter, a dramatist, a scenario[screenplay] writer

장: Chapter

우화: Fable

공책: Notebook

입춘: Onset of Spring

새싹: Sprout

아지랑이: Haze

춘곤증: Spring fever, spring fatigue

입동: Onset of Winter

동면: Hibernation

환절기: The change of seasons

입추: Onset of Autumn

여름방학: Summer vacation

입하: Onset of Summer

봄방학: Spring break

연말연시: Year-end and New Year

노을: Sunset glow, glow of the setting sun

아침노을: Morning glow

폭염: Heat wave, sweltering heat, scorching heat

땀띠: Heat rash

땀: Sweat, perspiration

그늘: Shade

햇살: Sunlight, sunshine

자외선: Ultraviolet rays

추수: Harvest

입학: Admission to school

졸업: Graduation

퇴학: Expulsion from school, expel from school

강당: Lecture hall, auditorium

출석: Attendance

교훈: Moral

급우: Classmate

수상식: Award ceremony, an awards ceremony

집들이: Housewarming, housewarming party

취임식: Inauguration ceremony

잔치: Party

축하: Celebration

결혼식: Wedding ceremony

피로연: Banquet reception

전단지: Flyer, leaflet

광고: Advertisement

전보: Telegram

케이블 방송: Cable TV

주간지: Weekly Magazine

무선 인터넷: Wireless internet

통화: Telephone conversation

마녀: Witch

늑대 인간: Werewolf

좀비: Zombie

뱀파이어: Vampire

미라: Mummy

할로윈: Halloween

악마: Devil, Satan

거미: Spider

박쥐: Bat

개미: Ant

바퀴벌레: Cochroach

파리: Fly

매미: Cicada

곤충: Bug, insect

원: Circle

정사각형: Square

타원: Oval

삼각형: Triangle

직사각형: Rectangle

나선: Spiral, helix

오각형: Pentagon

계속: Continuously

가끔: Sometimes, occasionally, once in a while, at times, from time to time, now and then[again]

종종: Frequently, sometimes, occasionally, now and then, once in a while, from time to time, often

때때로: Occasionally, once in a while, at times, from time to time, now and then, sometimes

늘: Always, all the time, the whole time

즉시: Immediately, instantly, promptly, at once, right away, right off, on the spot, in an instant

갑자기: Suddenly, abruptly, unexpectedly, all of a sudden, all at once

침실: Bedroom

욕실: Bathroom

서재: Study, library

거실: Living room, sitting room

다락방: Attic

옷장: Closet

지하실: Basement

목도리: Scarf

모자: Hat, cap

장갑: Gloves

겨우살이: Mistletoe

요정: Elf, pixie, fairy

사탕 지팡이: Candy cane

종: Bell

시원하다: To be cool, to be refreshing

부럽다: To be envious (of)

질투하다: To be jealous (of)

그런데: By the way

미리: In advance, beforehand, ahead of time

달콤하다: To be sweet

편리하다: To be convenient

멍청하다: To be stupid, to be foolish, to be idiotic

즐겁다: To be pleasant, to be enjoyable

유치하다: To be childish, to be immature

크리스마스: Christmas

매력: Charm, appeal, attraction

돌아오다: To return, to come back

여러: Many, various, several, plenty of, a number of

달력: Calendar

끓이다: To boil, to heat

주근깨: Freckle

묻다: To bury

오해하다: To misunderstand

복: Good fortune, luck

하품: Yawn

짝사랑: Unrequited love, secret crush (on someone), one sided love

행성: Planet

수성: Mercury

금성: Venus

지구: Earth

화성: Mars

목성: Jupiter

토성: Saturn

천왕성: Uranus

해왕성: Neptune

명왕성: Pluto

행성 궤도: Planetary orbit

나사: Nasa

소행성: An asteroid

얄밉다: To be offensive, to be mean

상금: Prize money, cash prize

상상하다: To imagine

지식: Knowledge

일월: January

이월: February

삼월: March

사월: April

오월: May

유월: June

칠월: July

팔월: August

구월: September

시월: October

십일월: November

십이월: December

붓글씨: Calligraphy

변호사: Lawyer

전통: Tradition, custom, convention, heritage

중력: Gravity

중력장: Gravity field

#korean #korean language #korea #vocabulary #seoul #language learning #learn korean #studyblr #langblr #korean studyblr #bitesizekorean #korean vocabulary #hangul

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femslashhistorian · 7 years

Text

10 More Great and Long Kara / Lena Fics - SuperCorp Fic Recs

In this SuperCorp (Supergirl) Femslash Fanfiction Recommendation, I have collected ten long and excellent stories / series.

This is my contribution to Lena Luthor Appreciation Week in April 2017. @lenaluthorappreciationweek Day 3 (April 19): Favorite Headcanon/AU/Fics/Art/Videos

This is the second part, I did a first recommendation for nine Supercop fics in February 2017 [even more of my Supergirl fic recs here]

All of the stories were finished in early 2017 – before Supergirl episode S2E18 Ace Reporter aired. I did not include real AU (Alternate Universe), soulmate AU or stories dealing with (red) kryptonite - which I might come back to separately.

Overview of the ten Kara / Lena stories (scroll down for the detailed recs and links)

Firsts by writerstealth: The one that is a collection of firsts

Only Human by Khrat9: The one that is told twice

Sleep-flying by D_writes: The one in which Kara sleep-flies to Lena

I Just Want to Love You in My Own Language by lynnearlington: The one that is told through flowers

When You Least Expect It series by fritokays: The one that warms your heart and brings a smile to your face

Of Quirks, Eccentricities And Oddities series by jt4702: The quirky and funny series that starts with Kara being outraged and Lena does not understand why

We are what we pretend to be by C_AND_B: The one that is the ultimate fake-dating romcom

Unavoidable Dreams by C_AND_B: The one in which Kara has sex dreams about Lena and it’s awkward.

Two stories in which Lena has sex with Supergirl before she realizes she is falling in love with Kara Danvers: Not Afraid to Fall by prettyaveragewhiteshark

Exquisite by Cartecka

1. The one that is a collection of firsts

Title: Firsts

Author: writerstealth - @writerstealth on tumblr

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

14 Chapters, 18k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: Explicit

A love story told as a chronicle of its firsts.

Kara's and Lena's life together told by a series of firsts: covering first sight, first date, first kiss, the first time Kara cried on Lena's shoulder and many more. This fic is a bit in the middle between a series of short stories with a common theme and continuous short novel. Another great story by one of my favorite authors.

2. The one that is told twice

Title: Only Human

Author: Khrat9

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

2 Chapters, 16k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: Mature

Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

“Ah, well… I am human,” she says jokingly, cheekily looking at Kara’s blue eyes. She grabs the paper bag, Kara’s token of friendship and Lena’s joke feels like a confession. An admission of sorts or maybe a flaw. Because Kara laughs and Lena can’t help the smile from stretching across her lips. Kara brings her donuts and Lena feels content just to bask in Kara’s warm light. “Thank you, Kara.”

Begins with 2x12 Luthors and then it's AU

It's basically the same story told twice: First from Lena's and then from Kara's point of view.

Great, romantic and angsty. Both chapter give a unique perspective and are so well written, that I loved basically reading the same story twice.

3. The one in which Kara sleep-flies to Lena

Title: Sleep-flying

Author: D_writes - @thatsgaydanvers on tumblr

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

3 Chapters, 9k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: General Audiences

Stress and exhaustion are catching up with the Girl of Steel. So much that when she falls asleep, she starts sleep-flying though National City sky to land on a certain CEO'S bed, and it becomes a habit.

Kara sleep-flies every night to Lena's bed, and discovers they are both art hoes.

What if Kara was not sleep walking but sleep flying? To the one person she is secretly in love with? To Lena? This idea went round tumblr a while ago and I thought this could be a hilarious premise for a fic.

This story delivered everything I ever wanted about sleep-flying Kara - and so much more. Loved it.

4. The one that is told through flowers

Title: I Just Want to Love You in My Own Language

Author: lynnearlington - lynnearlington on tumblr

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

1 Chapters, 14k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: Teen and up

"In the center of it all, on her desk, is a gorgeous glass vase full of over two dozen lavender roses. “Pretty,” she murmurs as she comes around to look at them. In the middle of the light purple flowers is a small card, thank you written in elegant script over the surface.

There’s no name, but there doesn’t need to be."

A love story, told with flowers.

A beautifully written love story between Kara and Lena. No action and no saving the world, no distractions. It is very romantic and the flower themes works very well without feeling forced.

Considering that the story is less than 14k words long, the story spans a long period of time.

5. The one that warms your heart and brings a smile to your face

Title: When You Least Expect It series

Author: fritokays

Link to series: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

2 parts, 14k + 9k words (both parts are completed, the series not)

Published: 2017

Rating: Teen and up / Mature

1) When You Least Expect It

This is basically just tooth rotting fluff. It's the start and the beginning of a relationship between these two dorks. It's a bunch of snapshots of their early relationship. It's fluffy and it's cute and it's a lot of words because I couldn't stop writing it, but enjoy?

2) On My Mind

Follow up to 'When You Least Expect It'. It's more fluff and there's also smut because why not? And there's a little angst thrown in for good measure. It's basically just more snapshots of their lives together and of their relationship.

Well written, fluffy, romantic and cute. No action.

This is the perfect story when you had a bad day and want a sweet love story with warm feelings. Probably my favorite fluff Supercorp series.

The second part is episodic and fluffy and great.

6. The quirky and funny series that starts with Kara being outraged and Lena does not understand why

Title: Of Quirks, Eccentricities And Oddities

Author: jt4702 - @jt4702 on tumblr

Link to series: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

2 parts, 6k + 10k words (both parts are completed, the series not)

Published: 2017

Rating: Teen and up

1) I’m The One From Outer Space, But My Girlfriend Is The Alien

In the months since Kara and Lena have been dating, both have discovered little quirks about the other that while funny or odd, it has never rendered either of them speechless.

That is until now.

2) Try To Remember

Kara and Lena's relationship takes another step forward, leading Kara to find out that Lena, ultra-modern woman that she is, likes to use post-it notes for reminders to herself; which leads to Kara sneaking her own little reminders amongst the sea of post-it from Lena in order to get her girlfriend to relax a bit more and take time off.

Kara can't believe Lena is doing this ... this is outrageous ... Wait till you find out what Lena is actually doing. I couldn’t stop laughing for a minute.

Both parts of the series are well written, lovely, cute and funny.

I saw this wonderful gifset from dracoharry that noted that “supercorp is a romcom” (check out the original post – it is much longer).

The next two stories form C_AND_B are definitely fantastic romcoms. Fantastic and romcoms; and this comes from someone who usually is not into romcoms.

7. The one that is the ultimate fake-dating romcom

Title: We are what we pretend to be

Author: C_AND_B

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

1 Chapter, 25k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: Teen and up

After the unrestricted office access, and the flowers, and the surprise visits to Catco, everyone just kinda starts to assume Kara and Lena are dating, and maybe they should let them. (AKA, Lena and Kara really just date whilst pretending they're fake dating).

No distractions, no action or side plots. Just a few scenes with Eliza and the Superfriends, otherwise the story exclusively focuses on Kara and Lena and is told from Lena’s POV.

While there is some, this is not an angsty story. Some very funny moments, very romantic.

Great. Brilliant. Amazing. Very well written. This might be the best Supercorp romcom.

8. The one in which Kara has sex dreams about Lena and it’s awkward

Title: Unavoidable Dreams

Author: C_AND_B

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

2 Chapters, 12k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: Mature

"Kara had sex dreams. About Lena. Kara Danvers had extremely vivid sex dreams about Lena Luthor and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It comes in snippets, and flashes, and visions and then it slams into her all at once, so fast she can barely breathe through the palpitations in her chest. Then it lingers. It’s there when she blinks, and when she sleeps, and every time she turns and finds Lena by her side (which seems to be increasing with every passing day)."

Or, Kara has sex dreams and then just awkwardly fumbles through interactions with Lena.

Hilarious and super funny, more on the comedy side of romcom. One of the best awkward Kara depictions I have read.

In the next two stories Lena has sex with Supergirl before she realizes that Kara Danvers is Supergirl and that she is falling in love with Kara. The two stories are great and different enough - read both. Maybe not right after each other, but do read them.

9. Not Afraid to Fall

Author: prettyaveragewhiteshark - @prettyaveragewhiteshark on tumblr

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

12 Chapters, 38k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: Mature

Lena Luthor has a strictly sexual relationship with Supergirl, but when her feelings for amateur journalist Kara Danvers begin to grow, everything gets a lot more complicated. See inside for smut, feelings, rogue DEO agents, feelings, explosions, angst, and more feelings!

This story starts where many other stories end. It starts with sex. Great sex with Supergirl. Sex that is not supposed to mean anything for Lena, while she is falling for Kara. But Lena is too afraid to tell Kara bout her feelings. Lena nearly dies and Supergirl saves her, but even this is not enough to bring them together.

Cadmus and action are not a major focus of the story, but what is there is well written and constructed. This is an incredible fic. Very well written. Hot sex, well written feelings, so much angst and hurt. I love the scenes where Supergirl takes Lena flying - and they have sex while flying.

10. Exquisite

Author: Cartecka

Link to fic: [AO3]

Setting: Supergirl TV 2015 (DCU) AU-ish (canon divergent)

Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (Supercorp / Karlena) (f/f)

3 Chapters, 23k words (completed)

Published: 2017

Rating: Teen and up

Just another mistaken identity fic. Kara falls in love with Lena, but how could a junior reporter ever compete with Supergirl?

A wonderful, beautiful, romantic fic. Lots of angst that they can never be together because they really started this the wrong way: by Lena sleeping with Supergirl without being aware that Kara is Supergirl.

If you liked this, you might enjoy more of my SuperCorp / Supergirl femslash fanfic recs:

9 Great and Long Kara / Lena Fics - SuperCorp

5 Kara/Lena Christmas Fics

6 Angsty (with Happy Ending) SuperCorp Fic Recs

Or all of them

#supercorp fic rec #supercorp fic #supercorp fanfic #supergirl fanfiction #supergirl femslash #supercorp fanfiction #femslash fanfic rec #fanfiction recommendation #femslash fanfiction #dcu all femslash #dcu femslash

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amorremanet · 7 years

Note

top 5 movies? and why? no no TOP FIVE BOOKS

oh gosh, both of these are hard and my answers for them are probably so boring (they also come with the, “this is just how I feel right now because ugh, I am the worst at picking any all-time faves for broad categories”) — but!!

top “five” movies:

The Prince of Egypt — has some of the most beautiful art that I’ve ever seen, anywhere, and music that sticks with you, and it really shows the human drama and human stakes of such a classic story in ways that a lot of adaptations of Biblical mythology are afraid to do

Deadpool — because I’m garbage, the characters are great, the script is pretty good, and the movie makes me laugh. It’s not really a deconstruction (in the way that some people make it out to be, by way of justifying why they like it), and it’s not super-intellectual, and in a lot of ways, it’s like a giant #SorryNotSorry that makes fun of superhero movie tropes while continuing to use them (and there are some subtle ways it plays with some of said tropes and twists them around, but it largely doesn’t) — but it’s fun

But I’m A Cheerleader — is far from perfect, and I maintain that it’s actually much more depressing than the ending leads us to believe (I mean, Meghan/Graham and Dolph/Clayton get together and escape from True Directions and homophobic parents, and Meghan’s Mom and Dad at least try to do better by their daughter, but things don’t work out that well for anybody else), but it’ll always have a special place in my heart because it was one of the only lesbian movies that I had access to as a little gay baby

Female Trouble — I wouldn’t say that it’s the best thing that John Waters has ever done, just the one that I personally like the best, and I’ll admit that it’s probably an acquired taste…… but I love how it takes on celebrity culture in the story Dawn Davenport, and it gave us great lines like, “The world of heterosexual is a sick and boring life” and, “I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!” It also has a special place in my heart as one of my favorite, “gay AND weird” movies

—which probably makes sense, given that it was written and directed by the trash king of being gay and weird

……like, seriously. My (best friend who I call my) brother once asked me, “So is John Waters gay or is he just really weird?” and the only thing I could think of to say to that was, “Yes, both.”

the “Three Flavours Cornetto” trilogy — which is totally cheating, to put three in here, but I couldn’t pick between them. I do think that Hot Fuzz and The World’s End are more fully actualized than Shaun of the Dead, but I love all of them, and the reason is pretty much just, “Because they’re good mixes of being hilarious and making me FEEL things” (……less so in The World’s End, for several reasons; it’s a lot heavier on the feels, to the point that you sometimes feel bad for laughing at the jokes, but still)

and books:

Good Omens (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman) — This book was my introduction to both PTerry and GNeil, after I found a cheap copy in an airport bookstore when I was about twelve and immediately fell in love. It’s funny, the characters are vibrant and engaging, and it played right into my love of screwing around with Biblical mythology.

I’m periodically tempted to list different books for both of those men (with PTerry’s probably being one of the Granny Weatherwax books, or Faust Eric, and GNeil’s being either American Gods or one of his Sandman books — because yeah, he’s done other good stuff, but I’m more sentimentally attached to AG and Sandman. Also, Preludes and Nocturnes has some of the only non-movie or TV horror that has genuinely terrified me, so)

—buuuut then I never do, because Good Omens was my first book from either of them, and remains my sentimental fave, even though I admit that they’ve both written other books that are, “better” or, “stronger,” or whatever

Dry (Augusten Burroughs) — There’s a lot of fair criticism to be made of Augusten Burroughs, and he’s been one of the writers at the center of the debates about truthfulness or lack thereof in popular memoirs (like, how much an author is allowed to condense things before it stops counting as a, “real story,” and how an author remembers things happening vs. how other people remember them), but Dry nevertheless means a lot to me.

Like, I enjoyed Running with Scissors and his novel, Sellevision (which were the other Big Deals in his collected works, at the time I originally read Dry), but Dry fucked me up a LOT when I first read it. It has continued to fuck me up ever since.

There are passages in this book that I can’t even be jealous of, as another writer, because they’re so good that they skip right the fuck past, “I’m angry and jealous that I didn’t write this myself” and into, “Holy shit, THIS is why I write, the ability to do THIS KIND OF THING EXACTLY with words, I need to go write something right now”

Also, it means a lot to me for sentimental, “I read this book for the first time when I was in high school, and it made me feel less lonely and sad and scared” reasons

Dynamic Characters (Nancy Kress) — This is by no means the be-all and end-all of, “how to writer better” books, but it’s a personal favorite of mine, for two reasons: 1. there are some things that Kress doesn’t cover about creating characters and doing better by them in your writing, but she’s still pretty comprehensive and offers some solid illustrative examples, multiple perspectives on this part of writing (not as many as she could, but to be fair, she only has so many pages to work with), and a good mix of ��tough love” advice and gentler, more reassuring advice;

and 2. …it was the first, “how to writer better” book that I ever got my hands on. I picked it out specifically because I’d posted a completely ridiculous crack fic that was a crossover between Harry Potter and Sailor Moon, with a first-person protagonist narrator who was a hot nonsense self-insert power fantasy Mary Sue with no flaws and no nuance because, hey, I was 11.

And someone actually commented to go, “Hey, look, you have talent, but you could do better and one place to start is maybe with learning to build better realized characters” — so I picked out the Nancy Kress book and it seems like a really silly thing to call a turning point? But it was big a turning point for me

Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (José Alaniz) — okay, time for me to be a loser and cite an academic book. I’m also probably a cheating loser, since I just read this book for the first time recently…… but with that said? I’ve read a LOT of critical treatments of the superhero genre, some pretty good, others pretty bad (for example, I remain Perpetually Tired of Slavoj Žižek’s heavy metal Communist, Bane in Leather Pants bullshit reading of The Dark Knight Returns), and most of it somewhere in the middle

—but there’s this trend among people who write critically about superhero junk, whether they’re academics of not, wherein we act like we have to act like superhero comics are The Most Progressive Ever and oversell their sociopolitical impact in order to make them look like ~*True Art*~ That Must Be Taken Seriously (—and like, I’m not saying that they have NO impact on people at all, because that’s objectively false. But you also can’t try to claim that Superman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America comics are why the Allies won World War II)

(this is a pointless aside to note that I deliberately left the Goddamn Batman off that list, because while Supes, Diana, and Steve were all off punching Nazis, Golden Age Bruce and white boy!Dick were running around on the home-front, rounding up Japanese Americans and putting them in internment camps. So… y’know. There’s that.)

……or we have to take legitimate criticisms of problems in the superhero genre, both historical and current, and use them to go, “Therefore, the entire genre is pointless garbage that has no redeeming qualities at all and could never ever EVER be used to tell any stories that are worth telling, and frankly, you are all terrible, horrible people for enjoying it, how very dare you enjoy that X-Men movie or that Red Hood And The Outlaws comic, you’re basically a fascist now”

—which is hilarious, to me, because the people who write that sort of criticism almost always cite Fredric Wertham’s book, The Seduction of the Innocent (aka: the book that led to so much moral outrage over the allegedly very gay and fascistic, child-corrupting content of comicbooks that the Comics Code Authority was created), and they always go, “Well, obviously Wertham was OTT and totally full of shit, buuuut…… *argument that would not have been out of place in his book*”

So, one of the big reasons I loved Professor Alaniz’s book is that is does neither of these things. It offers some incisive, and occasionally kinda damning, critique of the superhero genre and its handling of disability and mortality, but he does so from a place of love and enjoyment, and never pretends to hate the genre, nor argues for throwing the whole thing out because it has problems.

Like, his underlying mindset is very much, “Yes, the superhero genre has a LOT of problems, but people could, in theory, fix them and try to get closer to realizing the full potential of what these characters and stories can do” — while never skimping on a detailed analysis of the trends and case studies that he presents.

Sometimes, I think he’s kinda reaching (and I, personally, never want to hear anything about Doctor Doom’s Oedipus complex ever again so long as I live, though it was validating to hear that my theatre kids AU version of him — who is a ridiculous mess, obsessed with taking selfies, and perpetually acting like he totally gets everything while missing some crucial detail, which is how he ends up thinking that Loki is dating Tony Stank [a suggestion that makes both of them want to puke] — is actually a valid interpretation of his character, based on some parts of canon)

Overall, though, my biggest problem with Professor Alaniz’s book is that he can be kind of a hipster and it can get a little bit annoying. Not enough to ruin the whole book, but enough that it does stand out.

Like, his chapter on Daredevil specifically analyzes an infamous Silver Age story that basically everyone hated — the one where Matt Murdock tells Karen and Foggy that he isn’t the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, but he has some heretofore unknown identical twin brother named Mike, who is not blind but *IS* actually that aforementioned costumed hero, and carries on a charade of pretending to be his nonexistent twin brother — and okay, we get some pretty neat discussion of how passing can work or might not with disabled people

…but you can still walk away feeling like his biggest reason for analyzing that story arc was less about its value to any part of his discussion, and more about going, “Other Daredevil stories are too mainstream, I care most about this one that was so infamously ridiculous that people have said even soap operas wouldn’t have done this plot”

Likewise, I’m not saying that there aren’t very fair criticisms to be made of the X-Men and how their stories handle disability in particular… but at some points in his chapter on the Silver Age Doom Patrol comics, Professor Alaniz seems to be less, “using the pre-Claremont Silver Age X-Men stories as an illustrative foil to the Doom Patrol, especially with regard to how Charles’s paraplegia is treated vs. how The Chief’s paraplegia is treated” and more, “using this discussion as a free excuse to bash on the X-Men for being popular”

To his credit, Professor Alaniz does kinda discuss some of the ways that the X-Men’s popularity might have been affected by the fact that things like their ableist handling of Charles make them feel, “safer” and, “less sociopolitically threatening” than he makes the Doom Patrol out to be (with a pretty convincing argument, actually)

He just doesn’t do it enough for me to feel like his “criticism” of the X-Men isn’t at least partially grounded in going, “Well, it’s popular, therefore it sucks” (—as opposed to my approach to them, which is, “It’s popular, and has a mixed bag of things that it does well vs. things it does that suck, but it does not suck BECAUSE it is popular”)

Anyway, good book, and it’s written in a refreshingly accessible way (it’s still an academic book and harder to get into than, say, Good Omens, but Professor Alaniz doesn’t make a lot of the more common mistakes that leave a lot of academic writing effectively incomprehensible)

and last but not least…… Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire (we all know who wrote this, okay, come on) — because I’d be lying if I didn’t include at least one HP book on this list, considering how important those books and that fandom have been to the course of my life and to my development as a writer, and it was either gonna be this one or POA, but this one won over the other because I’m garbage

#coeur gris #memes for ts #ask box tag #mine: asks #opinions for ts #top fives meme #longish post//#coeur-gris

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chooseandact · 7 years

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(These replies are making a monstrosity themselves.) Tagging @insectoid5, @frozenartscapes, @ultranos, @kalikoke, @hathor-frozen, @myfanfictiongarden, @mighty-meerkat, et al.

EDIT: (And again, I spawn another monstrosity. *sigh*)

@frozenartscapes reblogged your post and added: Don’t forget, I also brought in Yama and his cronies from Big Hero 6 (source). So there’s also the possibility of dragging gang activity into this as well.

(Also I now officially headcanon that all the recruiters for the Org are named Joe. Not as fake names, but real names. It gets confusing really quickly. It also doesn’t help because of Family Guy, but I also picture all of them voiced by Patrick Warburton.)

Don’t worry, @frozenartscapes, I didn’t forget Yama. I mentioned them in “DA!prompt #3” with the same source. You should’ve got a notification, but I mis-typed everyone’s “@”, so it didn’t send. :( Also, I really like the idea the male recruiters all sound like Kronk (That’s who I asssociate Patrick with; I never watched Family Guy.) More stuff below.

@myfanfictiongarden reblogged your post and added: […] Anyway, I see @chooseandact that you wrote quite a few characters down. While it would be fun to see all the HoND crew interact with Judge Frollo and our Frozen gang, add some BH6 and spy Rapunzel…. I´m for keeping things small. You can only devote so much time to one character, but with more then 8? Each of them has their own storyline etc. etc. it could be too much.

What I am with is a good funny spy-fic, with DA!Verse Elsa on a mission, Kristof, Tadahi and Anna along making things crazyer [sic], D standing somewhere, and the all evil trio Weaselton-Hans-Frollo (Frollo is such a bad guy even Hans can learn more from him-wait, is Frollo still a judge in DA!Verse? I hope so)

I hope, I could help and we could bring this baby to live :)

From one DA!rookie to another: Welcome to the club! I know I listed many characters, but that doesn’t mean we have to use everyone. They’re just some of the many people available to use in the background. Like I said, I thought adding HoND and the others strained disbelief. However, I think we can benefit by keeping just Judge Frollo and Phoebus, even if they make brief appearances:

With Frollo, we get a sense of some of the legal system’s failures (If any of us knows some basic legal stuff, it could help, but no need to go overboard [says the one who scoured the DA!depths for sources!]. If not, we can use Wikipedia or TV courts, e.g. any CSI, any Law & Order, etc.). Elsa has noticed most of the goons she sees are almost always the same people from Yama’s gang, even after honest cops have picked them up. She has suspicions but cannot act on them because of Org work.

With Phoebus, we get laughs as Sgt. Wesel tries to explain his theories to his superior, only for Phoebus to brush him off as (1) the force’s resident paranoiac, and (2) a Living Legend in the bad sense – from Phoebus’ POV, Wesel has been out of touch with reality for a while (we readers know he’s more right than he could ever imagine), but he can’t be dismissed from the force because he did Great Things in his past (and won’t let you forget it, to everyone’s ire) and has employment seniority, so he’s protected even more the local cop union. And we get a trio of good cops (Kristoff, Tadashi, and Phoebus) who sometimes simply meet just to talk, which counters your Evil Trio of Hans, Wesel and Frollo.

@mighty-meerkat reblogged your post and added: […] It’s been so long since I wrote any Mariselsa, but I kind of want Marisol at the party as well in some capacity. Maybe she’s on a separate search-and-destroy-information mission for a different handler, which immediately puts a massive spanner in Elsa’s works, because Marisol is…not very good at damage control. If she’s trying to set the place on fire, Elsa’s attempts at discretion are literally going to go up in smoke.

I like that idea! Here’s some more fic welding then: Hans is both terrified and furious at Elsa’s threat, as linked previously. He attends the gang boss’ party, as do Our Heroes, Marisol, Rapunzel (on loan from the German Org as a Field Test), Wesel, and Frollo (and Wesel’s two thugs, but as background only). Marisol has her own mission, which indeed counters Elsa’s goal and sets the building ablaze. Everyone escapes: Marisol goes her way, Elsa tracks the female target I mentioned in DA!prompt #3 (she can be the high-profile target or someone else in the hierarchy), and the rest of Our Heroes return to the Arendelle’s and await Elsa’s return. Everything unfolds as explained in DA!prompt #3, which ends in a fight that wounds Elsa, kicking off the beginning of @frozenartscapes’ fic Call for Help.

@insectoid5 reblogged your post and added: I commend you for thinking this through so thoroughly! That’s the sort of thing I don’t have the energy to do, usually […]

I love your idea of adding spy!Rapunzel, and we may as well add Cassandra (from Tangled: The Series), because I can totally see her fitting in at the Org. I can totally see Elsa being a spy, given her usual stealthy missions. Which will last up to the point where she falls out of a tree and spooks the person she’s watching. 😅

Maybe the Org has some kind of vocational cover story for banks and tax people. Like, I dunno… life insurance. 😂 (I volunteer @frozenartscapes to come up with a better one.)

[…] Also: every recruiter is named Joe: perfect! (Though how their superiors will know if all the Joes are doing a good job, if they don’t have some way of telling them apart, e.g., “tall Joe”, “short Joe”…). If a small, obscure Frozen ship can have an archivist/historian, I don’t see why this AU shouldn’t have one. You’re nominated! 😄

Why thank you! And it all started from a dress pic… In the words of Gord Bamford: “It ain’t your eyes, your lips, your nose, your hips / That got me in this mess / Blame it on that red dress” (If you didn’t notice, I think Anna’s dress/fan should keep the style but be fire-engine red bc red hair & all)

re: “Joes”: I was inspired by a scene in the Transformers 3 novel, where 3 secret agents appear. They dress the same and are not related despite all 3 being referred to only as “Johnson”, yet you still can tell who’s talking. The Org’s “Joes” are similar: they don’t need identifiers, even though “their appearance [has] been carefully conceived to leave no lasting impression on anyone who might see them.” (TF book) When someone calls for “Joe”, somehow they just know which one is needed. No one knows how or why. Elsa is unnerved and D is disturbed, even though he hired them. Anna tries to make the obligatory “take your average Joe” joke, but Elsa stops her preemptively, saying an unknown Org person did that the day after Elsa joined. Org rumor has it they were never seen again. The next day, all the Joes arrived 10 min. late with flecks of mud on their Men in Black-style suit pants’ cuffs, and Every. Single. File. with the person’s name (the digital/physical ones backed-up in triplicate, database, weapons logs, bank info, etc.) had the name wiped. Not black censor bar. Wiped. Eventually, they faded from collective memory and exist only as a rumor from senior Agents to rookies.

On the topic of the missing Org person, I found two more Org members: an unnamed duo who reviewed Elsa’s test scores and assigned her to “wetwork specialist” (from the same source as Chamomile Tea “Joe”)

Thank you for the nomination as DA!historian, and I accept the position! I’ll do what I can, when I can, but I cannot promise I will remember everything. As you can see above, I’m trying to make a coherent timeline of events for a chrono DA!blog master post. Still needs (lots of) work & is FAR from finished.

One last thought: would you all be willing to do this fic as a multi-author collab? One person writes one segment, and the next part is handed off to another, all while keeping the basic plot points as outlined above and elsewhere. I’m afraid I can’t do much beyond outlines atm bc Life™ & extreme unfamiliarity with writing fics/dialogue/scene-setting/etc (I know, get experience by writing whenever, no one is perfect the first time, etc.). Thoughts?

#Domestic Assassin AU

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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Soo like 6 days ago I started watching the Witcher stopped at ep 7 bought the Witcher 3 and have been playing it nonstop. The shows okay? I think? (From someone who only knows what the series is from a 4 hour critic video that I had no idea what was going on in BUT- the game is so funnnn. Like I barely know what’s going on, from that video and people discussing things online but WOW??? Like how was I not told about this shit earlier??? Dandelions realllllly icky thooo like I thought he’d be more fun and less “wow your straight fucking scum” but I mean at least he cares about his friends? Triss and yennifer are... Oof rough BUT I’m only just in the game, hope they’ll grow on me? Or change? But Ciri? Is adorable? Her parts are so fun to play her dodge is so fun.

The novels! Have You read them? Where does one get them lmao Ik they’re translated?

[old timey fisherman's voice] WE CAUGHT ANOTHER ONE, BOYS!

Ahhhh new Witcher 3 fan!! Congratulations, anon, you've unlocked my numerous Thoughts™ and Opinions™ on the matter that I am now going to dump on you in bullet point form. No spoilers though!

Okay, okay, yeah I like this game a totally normal amount. I've sunk at least 250 hours into it (so far) which might not be much compared to the Pro Gamers and whatnot, but it's an insane amount for someone like me who possesses the attention span of a goldfish. I don't do any of the same thing for 250 hours (except write things on tumblr, I guess)

I didn't know what was going on either when I first played. I didn't even have the show to sort of help me out, Witcher 3 was the first Witcher story I ever dove into. The great thing though is you can just... google stuff? See, idk if you've worked this out yet, but the games all take place post-book series. All the stuff in the series happened, then Witcher 1 starts with Geralt having amnesia, and everything else in the games is new content. Which means that though there's obviously a fair number of book spoilers throughout, it's pretty easy to google worldbuilding questions without getting game spoilers. So once I understood that I was able to supplement what I was getting via game osmosis with stuff like, "Who the fuck is Nilfgaard again and why does everyone hate them?" or "What did Triss do to Geralt?" without getting any quest-specific spoilers. Basic wiki articles with, "Such and such is related to such and such and once did This Thing" was super helpful.

Yeah, the show is just okay. I'm far less enamored with it a year later than I was at the start. I think I was trying to like it more than I actually did... Honestly, I'm actually somewhat wary of getting more seasons simply because of how TV shows tend to dominate fandoms. The Jaskier/Geralt dynamic is a perfect example: once the show does something, a very large portion of the fandom tends to take that as their preferred canon. Finding non-TV!Jaskier/Geralt content is more of a struggle now. Which isn't a bad thing, god knows I'm happy to have more Witcher content in general, it's just too bad that we have game and book dynamics that are, at least here on tumblr, largely overshadowed by the show. My fave in the whole franchise - Regis - is someone I'm particularly worried for because if the show does him dirty and the whole fandom takes that characterization as gospel, I may not recover lol.

Dandelion's characterization in Witcher 3 is, sadly, not what I'd hoped it would be. To my mind book!Dandelion is superior to both game!Dandelion and TV!Jaskier. It's his dynamic with Geralt that made me ship them in the first place. He does grow on you in the game though (or at least he did for me), but he's definitely presented as more annoying/inept/creepy than in the books. And don't even get me started on how they butchered that relationship in the show... Though I WILL say game!Dandelion remains pretty funny. There's one quest in particular that never fails to make me laugh. Also his fashion is on point for a flamboyant bard.

Oof Triss and Yen... beware, anon, that is THE debate in this fandom and the one you might want to steer clear of lol. Personally, I'm not a fan of either. Triss is fine, I guess, but not someone I really, actively like and Yennefer is... well. Let's just say if I could do away with any character it would be her. I absolutely despised her in the game, was told she was better in the books, started the books, hated her even more, tried to give her a chance in the TV show, and ended up hating her there too. I'm just not a Yen fan, at all, which basically makes me the black sheep of the Witcher fandom lol. You might warm to them though, the majority do, however, know that you don't have to romance either of them. My Geralt was quite happy being a single father to his amazing daughter Ciri :D

I've read the short story collections and read enough of the novels to realize it wasn't my cup of tea. Basically, there are two collections of interconnected tales as Geralt goes about his witchering and then a six book epic following the hansa and everything with Ciri. Personally, I couldn't get into the epic and dropped the novels early on. In my humble opinion Sapkowski, writing a character like Geralt, (much like Doyle writing Holmes) excels in the short story format and then struggles stylistically in novel form. I found his writing tedious, the themes not nearly as poignant (many outright uncomfortable), and the fact that Yen is a central part of the whole tale didn't help sell things for me. Reading a six book series where a good chunk is dedicated to the supposedly epic love story of a couple where you hate one half and find the whole relationship cringy (though not in a way the story is purposefully acknowledging)... doesn't make for great reading imo lol. But I want to emphasize that that's my take and god knows it's a minority one. Most fans adore the books - and I do heartily recommend the short stories - so definitely give them a shot for yourself some time.

They are indeed translated (I can't read a word of Polish lol) and are very easy to find in a bookstore, online seller, etc. The wiki article lists them all.

(Though know that you definitely can't download ebooks for free via the Z Library. Nope. Not possible. Don't know why I'm even getting your hopes up.)

Really though, Witcher 3 is my fave, hands down. Out of the books, the show, the other games... Witcher 3 is the version of Geralt and the world that I truly fell in love with. When people say "Witcher" that's the version of Witcher I'm eager to discuss. However, if you can stomach early 2000s games with pretty terrible graphics, I recommend trying Witcher 1 and 2 once you're finished (I was immediately ready for more gameplay content after I'd finished lol). Witcher 1 is, in many ways, a mess. God the combat system drove me nuts... BUT it has a strange charm that I, in all seriousness, really loved. Meanwhile, Witcher 2 (Assassins of Kings) is far stronger. You can easily see the building blocks of Witcher 3 in the narrative choices and worldbuilding. Plus, AoK has Iroveth who is just such a fun character. Wish he'd made it into Wild Hunt :(

Also the comics! I bought the omnibus a while back and didn't regret the purchase for a second. House of Glass (the first story run) also has one of the saddest Geralt moments for me. Just this single panel that lives in my head, rent free, making me Feel Things on occasion lol. There's a new run, Fading Memories, releasing this month (!!!) which I can't wait to get ahold of once the trade paperback is out.

Oh god I could ramble about Witcher 3 for ages but this is already getting so long. Do all the side quests! Return to places you've already been to for fun surprises! Replay decisions to see how differently things turn out! Play lots of Gwent! Enjoy the gorgeous landscapes! Be sure to get the amazing DLCs when you're finished! Play Hearts of Stone first because Blood and Wine has an ending-ending and I didn't realize that, so it was a little weird to get the emotional finish and then have like 10+ hours of gameplay left! Oh, and if you haven't figure it out already know that you can put points into any skill in the General Skills tab (you don't build on it like the fighting/signs/alchemy tabs) and I would snag the "Gourmet" ability ASAP because it has saved my ass so many times.

AND ENJOY PLAYING

I wish I could play it for the first time again, but diving back into more Blood and Wine tonight will have to do :D

#witcher #TW3

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firstdraftpod · 5 years

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Courtenay Hameister Asks: What is Objective Truth, Anyway?

First Draft Episode #227: Courtenay Hameister

Courtenay Hameister, debut author of memoir Okay Fine Whatever: The Year I Went From Being Afraid of Everything to Only Being Afraid of Most Things, and former host, co-producer and head writer of Live Wire Radio.

Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode

Books by Beverly Cleary (author of Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Beezus and Ramona, and The Mouse and the Motorcycle) and and Judy Blume (author of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Forever, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing) and The Crystal Cave series by Mary Stewart were some of Courtenay’s favorites growing up

Create More, Fear Less is an organization in Portland Courtenay volunteers with that works with anxious kids

While Courtenay went to New York University, she had the chance to work with legendary comedy group The State. The State — made up of Kevin Allison, Michael Ian Black, Robert Ben Garant, Todd Holoubek, Michael Patrick Jann, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Thomas Lennon, Joe Lo Truglio, Ken Marino, Michael Showalter, and David Wain — was formed in 1998 and had a self-titled comedy sketch show on MTV from 1992-1995. You can learn more about the history of the group in The Union of the State by Corey Stulce.

Members of The State went on to create Reno 911, which is coming back!

“The 7,000 Dollar Pyramid,” is one of The State’s sketches that Courtenay remembers Robert Ben Garant writing

Writing Movies For Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office, and You Can, Too! by former State members and co-writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant

The Joan Didion quote Courtenay paraphrases is, “I don't know what I think until I write it down.”

Some of Courtenay’s favorite guests from her many years of hosting Live Wire include: comedian, storyteller, director and actor Mike Birbiglia, who is best known for Sleepwalk With Me, which was also a comedy special and a New York Times bestselling book, Sleepwalk with Me and Other Painfully True Stories, and his new comedy special, The New One is also going to be a book, coming out in May 20202, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad; Carrie Brownstein, guitarist with Sleater-Kinney (who have a new CD in 2019, The Center Won’t Hold), co-creator and writer of TV show Portlandia, and author of memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl; director Todd Haynes (who has directed Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, and this year’s Dark Waters; Cheryl Strayed, author of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar and memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail; and David Rakoff, humorist and author of Fraud: Essays, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems

Courtenay’s friend Daniel H. Wilson wrote Robopocalypse: A Novel (which was optioned by Steven Spielberg, but after some delays has now been thrown over to Michael Bay) was the one who introduced Courtenay to his agent, Laurie Fox, who is an author in her own right, of The Lost Girls: A Novel and My Sister From the Black Lagoon: A Novel of My Life.

Jean Garnett at Little, Brown was Courtenay’s editor

Courtenay super recommends Sleepwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer (and, oh my god, would you look at that, he also has a TED talk!)

The Oprah and James Frey controversy which exploded over his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is an inevitable reference point for a conversation about what “truth” means in the memoir category

Courtenay’s recommendation for David Carr’s memoir, Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own, was so persuasive that I bought the audiobook that night!

I admit to being a complete comedy nerd, and having recently mightily enjoyed John Hodgman’s collection of personal essays, Medallion Status: True Stories From Secret Rooms.

Jennifer Pastiloff (author of On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard) and Lidia Yuknavitch (author of memoir The Chronology of Water and Verge: Stories, out Feb. 4, 2020!) teach a class called “Writing and the Body” that incorporates yoga and writing to enrich personal stories.

Humor writer Steve Almond, author of Bad Stories: What Just Happened to Our Country? and William Stoner and the Battle For the Inner Life: Bookmarked.

Writers Samantha Irby (author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays, Meaty: Essays and omg she has a new one coming out this year, Wow, No Thank You!) and Jenny Lawson, aka The Blogess (author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir and Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things), were bloggers before they had books, and they indicate the kind of conversational writing style that Courtenay tends to naturally align with in her writing

Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2009 TED Talk, “Your Elusive Creative Genius”

Dan Harris, author of 10% Happier Revised Edition: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story, and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book

Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and her TED talk on the subject of introverts

Courtenay admires Michael Ian Black’s evolution as a writer. Especially significant to her was his honesty in the memoir Navel Gazing: True Stories of Bodies, Mostly Mine (But Also My Mom’s, Which I Know Sounds Weird). His newest book, A Better Man, tackles toxic masculinity in the form of letters to his son as he goes off to college.

I have always dreamt of being able to link to an article about Jeff Bezos’s dick pics (just kidding but here we go): this incident was wild - The National Enquirer allegedly tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos, threatening to release intimate pictures of him unless he paid up. Instead, Bezos released the pics himself and told them to screw off. It was wild. It was great.

That incident calls to mind So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

“To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” the Modern Love essay by Mandy Len Catron, references Dr. Arthur Aron’s study, which included 36 questions to generate intimacy. (And hey, look at that, Mandy has TED talks about love stories, too!)

I want to hear from you!

Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998.

Subscribe To First Draft with Sarah Enni

Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; Linda Holmes, author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast; Jonny Sun, internet superstar, illustrator of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning, Gnight! and author and illustrator of Everyone’s an Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.

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topmixtrends · 7 years

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A. G. LOMBARDO’S searing novel Graffiti Palace revels in an abundance of language. I take pleasure in that approach, and so welcomed the play of sounds and images. Consider this description of shipping containers at the Los Angeles Harbor: “A city of iron cubicles latticed along the harbor, piled like a giant’s stairway in gravity-suspended steps rising toward the burnished sunset, or skewed in angles and intersecting layers; some pitched, half-toppled by long-ago extracted cranes and ship’s booms.” It resembles the scene it describes, dense with shapes, colors, and history; there’s rhythm to it, restlessness, and it modifies and complicates itself as it goes. It builds from concrete imagery, rises into abstraction, then topples back down into the real. Like Icarus, we might say — but here, the fall is intentional.

Graffiti Palace is set during the Watts riots, and concerns, mostly, a journey across Los Angeles by Americo Monk, an “urban graphologist and graffiti semiotician” who records the city’s illicit signs in a notebook he carries everywhere. As the novel opens, he’s at 112th and San Pedro studying a traffic signal. His pregnant girlfriend, Karmann Ghia (yes, like the car), is hosting a rent party at the Los Angeles Harbor, where the two of them live in a maze-like assemblage of shipping containers. In Watts, police use unnecessary force during a traffic stop, sparking civil unrest and sending the city into a spiral of destruction fueled by long-simmering racial tension. Buildings burn, news crews report on the “senseless violence that rules the night,” and the police respond with brutality, roadblocks, and curfews. Monk, trying to get home, makes his way south through a landscape of fire, ash, and smoke. But the riots — of which Monk is, mainly, a neutral though sympathetic observer — make progress difficult.

Monk’s travels are picaresque, zig-zagging through southern Los Angeles and throwing him into the company of gang members and cops, musicians and exterminators, seers and novitiates, artists and radicals. He traces a tricky line: he’s neither wholly black nor wholly white, and can appear, depending on the light and time of day, Mediterranean or African, Caucasian or Arabian — “a walking Rorschach mirror that perhaps reflects more of the beholder than the subject,” as Lombardo puts it. Monk’s notebook of graffiti makes him of interest to gangs and police alike. At various points, he is held hostage, given food and drink, interrogated, and offered various drugs, though he mostly refuses to partake. Meanwhile, Karmann grows increasingly worried. The party rages around her. Night passes into day, day back into night. She chases people away from her phone, hoping to hear from Monk, and fends off the approaches of multiple suitors.

Karmann is a latter-day Penelope, a baby Telemachus in her belly, and Monk is Odysseus, making his way back to the harbor while Los Angeles writhes in agony. Buttoning the story to the spine of the Odyssey serves the novel well. Without that structure, the story might collapse under its own weight, too many characters, too many details, too many vectors of movement. Instead, it is improbably resilient, deriving narrative energy from the series of trials Monk undergoes, many of which have clear links to Homer’s epic: lotus-eaters in Chinatown, a cyclops in the tunnels under Los Angeles, a fortune teller near the Harbor Freeway. These connections work best when they’re dense and layered, operating as conversations and arguments with the source; when they’re on the surface, or treated as jokes, they’re less effective, pinging the reader with the thrill of noticing them without doing the harder work of expanding the range of Homeric tropes. At one point, Monk is in the back of a Corvair when he hears angelic singing coming from a nightclub, “a soul aria that seems out of this world.” He tries to get out, but he’s strapped down by the unfamiliar mechanism of a seat belt, still somewhat new in 1965 — Odysseus lashed to the mast as his ships sails past the island of Sirens. “Honey, you don’t want to go in there,” the driver says to him. “Them girls are so hot you’ll never leave.” It’s funny, but feels a little gratuitous. Then again, the episode of the Sirens is among the most recognizable moments in the Odyssey, and treating it in an offhand manner is perhaps the best way of paying homage.

The interpretative framework of the book coalesces in Monk. He’s a guide to the city as much as he is a traveler of its streets, and his explications of graffiti illuminate the meanings hidden in the gang signs, murals, stencils, and culture-jamming stickers stuck over advertisements. But Monk is also aware that this world is unstable, precarious: “He knows that sometimes signs are like the new physics, that the rules break down; the semiotician struggles in the twilight of uncertainty: message, sender, receiver, meaning can shift, change in time and space.” Communication is always contextual, always contingent, and the discrete order of the system that makes interpretation possible can disintegrate at any moment. Recording the signs and stories is, therefore, also an attempt at preservation:

This city is always changing, shedding its skin of underground signs and languages in paroxysms of destruction and rebirth, seething in a secret war between the dispossessed, who write its street histories, and the cops and power structures, who destroy unsanctioned communication through anti-graffiti paint crews and incarceration and intimidation: he will be their historian.

Along with his catalog of graffiti, Monk collects stories, preserving the city’s counter-narratives. In Chinatown, Monk hears the story of the invention of the fortune cookie from a man named Shen Shen. On 127th Street, Monk runs into Miss Iva Toguri, who, once upon a time, was accused of being a “Tokyo Rose,” the name given by GIs to the English-speaking women who broadcasted propaganda over Japanese airwaves in World War II. In an alley off Athens Way, he stumbles into the home of a woman who calls herself Queen Mab (“I’m not Mercutio, am I?” Monk jokes). She spins a story of slavery and emancipation laced with magic, runes, and secret societies. These stories, as related in Graffiti Palace, cannot be taken at face value. It’s true the fortune cookie was invented in San Francisco; it’s true a woman named Iva Toguri was put on trial for treason, though her trial was a travesty of justice and she was later pardoned; Queen Mab, for her part, is Circe (maybe) by way of Shakespeare. But Lombardo’s versions of these stories are, like graffiti, exaggerated and colorful. His rendition of the history of fortune cookies mixes in haiku and the dozens. Miss Toguri’s story is supplemented by invented details. As for Queen Mab’s version of history, who knows? Even Monk is skeptical.

It would be satire — the exaggerated characters, the wild stories — if it were not so clear that the book’s empathy is with the disaffected. During the riots, Monk is accosted by a white newscaster, Brey King (the pun in her name — “breaking news” — is characteristic of the writing), who wants to know why people are rioting. Monk’s response:

“Ah, social inequalities, I guess,” softly. “The inherent racism of a police force that’s trapped in a Jim Crow past.” Monk, realizing that being interviewed about the cops on TV is probably light-years from cool, slinks away. He scowls back at the white woman: What’s the use talking to white people? He knows he shouldn’t think like that, boxing her into some kind of simple racial equation, but she and her kind, aren’t they doing the same thing to him? Most of the time the only communication between whites and blacks seems to be self-conscious, patronizing chatter about race … spoken words are signs too, and these feeble attempts at communication from the White Power Structure — the WhiPS graffiti copied in his notebook — are really miscommunication, static that walls in ignorance instead of tearing it down. Monk frowns: perhaps there is a limit to empathy, a gulf that can never truly be bridged between others.

The satirical impulse, however, sometimes wins out, and takes the writing too far in the direction of caricature, like when a Chinese character’s speech is rendered with l’s replacing r’s. This feature of speech is so charged, so coded, that presenting it in this manner seems unnecessarily provocative. Many other characters in the novel, who are of a vast rainbow of ethnicities and backgrounds, also have their speech rendered phonetically (and use slang and nonstandard diction to boot), and other Chinese characters in the novel do not have their speech written in the same way — so the impulse is both universal to all and particular to each, and, it would seem, not derisive or scornful. But this, in particular, could have been handled better.

Lombardo’s style is a heightened one: it’s noticeable, draws attention to itself, revels in synonyms, metaphors, and exaggeration. The idea is, I think, not to show off the writer’s skill, any more than other artists who work in styles that are insistently present. Instead, it’s staking an aesthetic and philosophical claim that fiction can represent the lushness, diversity, and overflowing-ness of life — the abundance of both good and bad, large and small. In this, of course, Graffiti Palace is not alone. It’s in a tradition that includes Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick (the Melville of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” less so), writers who otherwise have very different concerns and approaches. And that is only to name a few writers, and only American ones. But this aesthetic of linguistic plenitude runs counter to a significant strain of American thinking about fiction, which emphasizes clarity, compactness, and terseness, the Protestant ethic made manifest not just in stories but in the very way they are told. It is therefore refreshing to encounter a writer going against that minimalist grain, making an argument for an aesthetic based in something other than cold hard gems of closely observed fact, written sparingly — which is not to dismiss that style of writing, but to say fiction is large, it can (and should) contain multitudes.

This style is not a simple celebration of life’s variety and richness. It’s the plenitude of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: there’s a lot going on, often teetering on the edge of cacophony, threatening to plunge headlong into the abyss, with only a few stray lines of melody as a guide through the chaos. Lombardo’s most obvious literary forebear in this regard is Pynchon, and his text bears traces of Pynchon’s influence. Characters sport absurd, quasi-synedochical names; ellipses dot the text like pepper; and there are insinuations of unseen and unknowable forces at work. And, like Pynchon, Lombardo often elides dialogue attribution or replaces it with a participle: “‘Look, Officer Trench, you know me,’ Monk trying to control the fear in his voice, ‘it’s just graffiti, art stuff, a hobby.’”

The attention to the surface of the text echoes the book’s use of graffiti, which here becomes a multi-headed metaphor, a palace of possible meaning, and a method of subverting overarching narratives. Around halfway into Graffiti Palace, Monk comes across Jax GK — short for “Giant Killer” — and his partner, Sofia. Under cover of night, they attack billboards with spray cans, stencils, and stickers, transforming messages of domestic bliss and unthinking consumerism into indictments of the same. Out on a run with them, listening to the radio, Monk is perplexed by a white talk-show host’s anger: “What the fuck do they have to be angry at? People driving in their cars, isolated, through all these streets and freeways, listening to these fools … no wonder everyone’s pissed off and insane, afraid of everyone else.” Sofia’s response: “They clog all our senses with their propaganda. […] Eyes, ears … they’d inject their lies or wire our brains if they could figure out how, but we’ll take it back, one street at a time.”

Ultimately, Graffiti Palace itself is a performative resistance to authority, channeling the multiple contrasting voices and stories of Los Angeles into a mural exploding with color and contradictions. Or, perhaps, a building covered in illicit signs and arcane symbols:

Too many dots to connect … it’s vertigo, any patterns that seem to coalesce only fade like shadows: sometimes he’s sure the city is one giant graffito, a sprawling, urban uber-text that one day, with enough notebooks, he might unlock to reveal all its hidden codes. Sometimes the graffiti in his thoughts and notebook blur into the city’s spray-painted icons, until his mind and the streets seem like one vast network of rainbow messages, the convolutions of his brain and the corridors of the city fused into one myriad, fantastic structure, like a palace of graffiti.

John Flynn-York writes fiction, essays, and book reviews. He is a co-founder and editor of Automata Review, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside–Palm Desert.

The post Subversive Surfaces: “Graffiti Palace” by A. G. Lombardo appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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dapperkobold · 7 years

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Review at Random: Lego Batman 3

Yeah, really putting that ‘at Random’ to work today, huh? The lego games are something of a guilty pleasure for me, I know I’m not the target audience but they’re fun, clever, sometimes funny, and the breadth of characters and moments of... almost lucid absurdity are great.

So, let’s talk about the most recent (if still kind of old) Lego DC game!

Presentation

One nice thing about the lego games is that there generally isn’t a lot of advanced geometry, so my computer can handle them well. Not a lot to say, really, the interactive objects are pretty consistently separate from the non-interactive ones, the characters all look good, and the voice acting is all pretty fine.

Now, there’s moments of shakiness in all those, and the occasionally inconsistent bug that can be annoying, but at the same time there’s a fair amount of extra flourishes that can be great. Characters have differing body language, elements are only rarely re-used between them even with the giant host of extra characters, and someone clearly went and had a lot of fun with the joker’s extra outfits. However, that mass of characters means that basically everyone you don’t get in the main story has very similar animations and (mostly) generic voice grunts with few if any lines.

The environments all look fine, every area custom-made and hand-designed, even the big(ish) open world planets have some variance to their layout (Barring Oa, which is just racetracks). The interactive elements often integrate with the static ones well, and the end result is that every area is a joy to explore the first time and interesting even afterward.

Other than that, the UI is fine and the sound design is nothing to write home about. Now, the occasional reference-tastic line of dialogue is great, but there’s a few other things that seem great for a moment but get old fast. The first thing that jumps to mind is the Wonder Woman theme playing when she starts flying, which is hilarious the first three times you do it and then agitating from there. Superman has something similar, but the mellow brass of the beginning of the Superman theme is much less agitating than the whistles and choir of the Wonder Woman one.

I didn’t even know Wonder Woman had a TV show in the 70s.

Other than that, the scan effect covers the entire screen for several seconds whenever it’s used, something that annoys me to no end. It was faster in the the LEGO Marvel game, I’m just pretty sure! Of course then LEGO Avengers (A different game) added a stupid minigame to it, so...

Final Presentation Score: A-

While more certainly could be done, it’s a solid art style with solid art direction and fairly good production quality. Nothing amazing, but I don’t require games to BE amazing. The main thing keeping it back is the occasional honestly annoying decision or bug, but nothing so big that I want to knock it down a letter grade.

Gameplay

Analyzing the gameplay of a LEGO game is a little tricky because you need to keep in mind the thoughts behind the game: this is not a game for you, this is a game for kids. It’s not a ‘puzzle game’ like you likely think of, it’s a game where the ‘puzzles’ are a mix of figuring which character needs to push which button where and then doing that and watching strange things unfold as doing that doesn’t always have the result you expected.

So, there’s little point in gauging the combat, it’s there to give kids something fun to knock around. The puzzles are overwhelmingly effortless, completion is a matter of perseverance over cleverness, and challenges are made to be novel over being thought-provoking.

That’s all well and good; this is a game for elementary school or middle school kids. Sure, others can still have some ‘shut your brain off’ fun with it but if you want to push yourself in any way and you’re conscious of some kind of job or educational degree you should be striving for, this game is unlikely to satisfy you. Maybe the races, but they’re less hard because of tight design and more because of varying amounts of nonsense.

Using the abilities is pretty reliable, the targets are reliably identifiable and nothing important is hidden away where it can’t be found. Sometimes placement can be a little hit and miss but all said and done it does what it sets out to do.

Other than that, if you’ve played a LEGO superhero game, you know how this goes: Break, Fight, Build, use, swap to the other character, go in in freeplay and do it again. Sure, one mechanic may be missing and another may be present in its place, but nothing extreme. If you haven’t played a LEGO superhero game, it’s like other LEGO games but with superheroes. If you haven’t played LEGO games... just look up about any gameplay footage from a modern LEGO game on youtube. It’s like that but with more green lantern. With the flying and the hard light constructs and the lasers. Yeah.

The main really unique thing this game has going for it is the suit system, and even that isn’t really new: In previous LEGO Batman games Batman and Robin had a number of suits they could swap between to accomplish required tasks, giving those two the kind of absurd flexibility they should have when it comes to solving puzzles. It works, and in this game they’ve stopped hogging it: Cyborg, Lex Luthor, and Joker get in on the fun, too.

The issue with these characters is that in Free Play they’re an extra button press or two to get to a specific ability. As a result you avoid them in free play, unless you’re messing around some or are honestly drawing a blank on who has that one power you need right now. The suit goons are reliably near the top of the character select screen and one of them likely has it.

And let me tell you, when you’re not in the mood to mess around most of those characters will get ignored. In the end you’re going to tend toward characters toward the top of the screen, where the storyline characters are, and the bottom of the screen where the DLC characters are if you have them. There’s a few reasons for this; the characters aren’t organized in any fashion I can think of and so knowing that a character can do something doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t find them on the giant grid. Ever since the beginning the LEGO games could have benefited from some kind of sort, search, or favorite function, and as the cast size increases this lack will be felt more and more (Lego Marvel 2 is supposed to have over 300 characters!).

Something that the people at Tt have caught onto a little but only after this game is letting the player know who has what abilities. As is, you’re going to have to experiment, and with a lot of abilities being situation-sensitive it’s not easy to do testing. This further encourages a player to find a small team of reliable characters and stick with them.

My personal favorite characters in terms of mechanics are (alas) both DLC characters. Bizarro has fire breath (the most powerful combat ability in the game) and can do almost anything superman can do. Joker (Nurse) has a rocket launcher, maybe the best explosive weapon in the game.

On the other hand, if you want to discover more about the DC universe, choose a character you don’t recognize from this game and look them up. Polka Dot Man, Azreal, Bat-Mite, Ambush Bug, Cyborg Superman, Heat Wave, Manchester Black, Vibe, take your pick. There’s some weird stuff here.

At the same time, if you are too familiar with the DC continuity you may occasionally stumble across something that should work but doesn’t for no reason. Like Wonder Woman and strength handles. Also, Braniac has an entirely new skillset. This just makes experimentation that much more needed... and in turn, it that much more aggravating that there’s no way to do it easily.

However, there’s a few LEGO game rules this game breaks; There’s a few characters that have an ability unique to them: Braniac, The Atom, and Plastic man. Personally I consider that more than a little low, forcing the player to unlock specific characters to go about certain things. In LEGO Avengers there’s something that basically only Ultron can do, but there’s three kinds of Ultron one of which is pretty cheap. Plastic Man they at least give you for free, but HIS gimmick is that he’s the only way to get power bricks. And THAT is even lower.

Oh, one more thing: I wish I could turn off the hints.

Final Gameplay Score: B

For a LEGO game, this is fine. For a LEGO game. Sure, there’s trip-ups enough that I won’t go easy on it, but still it’s a good time if you’re into this kind of game.

Personally, the single character in this game I want to see more of? The Fierce Flame. I’m a little tired of Speed Force speedsters, let’s get someone who’s fast but not absurdly so and without a risk of making a temporal paradox by breaking wind.

Writing

Once again, this story is not aimed at you. It’s aimed at kids. It’s basically middle school-targeted writing.

Not that the basic idea is bad, in the setting of the last two Lego Batman games (which are not really needed to understand the plot here) Brainiac appears above earth and (after some opening intrigue involving mind control and a mob of villains) reveals his intent to shrink the Earth for his collection using the different colors of the emotional spectrum to super-charge his shrink machine. From there the different lantern cores need to be brought together and coerced into fixing the earth... much easier said than done.

I make it sound more complex there than it actually comes across: the plot is fine (other than the occasional minor plot hole) and works well enough. The place were the writing suffers is the character writing: A lot of characters have one angle and lean on it. Sure, we weren’t going to get well-rounded characters from this in any case, but they could honestly have done better than what they did. Martian Manhunter referring to everyone by their title is lame. Cyborg was given the generic teen attitude. Not like he was in the Teen Titans cartoon (though he does say ‘booyah’ as a random quip) but instead as a fairly generic tech-savy teen. Other characters either have too few lines to get a grasp on them or are just straightforward in presentation.

And don’t even get me started on the emotional spectrum personality shifts. That just makes everyone involved annoying. Sakes alive...

But, all the same there’s a few times when some comedy honestly shines through, like Wonder Woman putting Cheetah in the magic lasso... and Cheetah telling her that she doubts Superman likes Wonderwoman back. Those moments are pretty good, but they’re not as reliable in coming as I would like.

Other than that... I dunno, the quest writing isn’t bad, forming little plots and getting characters to interact on occasion. Don’t expect anything to be as complex or as characterized as you’re used to, but there is not-bad writing here.

Final Writing Score: C

...but “not bad” is all I can say. More could certainly have been done, the few plot holes are jarring when you notice them, the character writing is okay at most and agitating at worst. I kind of like it, but that’s pretty clearly because I default to positive emotions. Someone more critical than I am is more likely to have it hurt their enjoyment.

Overall

Well, it’s a LEGO game. It works fine, even if the writing is lackluster, and I enjoy it despite really not being the target audience. I just enjoy OTHER LEGO games more. That said, if you’re not the sort to enjoy things aimed at middle schoolers, likely just don’t bother. You wouldn’t be missing out on any writing or gameplay of note.

On the other hand, it’s not solidly bad.

Presentation: A-

Gameplay: B

Writing: C

FINAL GRADE: B

If you like the LEGO games, you could do worse!

Awards:

Batman Flash Can Breathe In Space

Bizarro #1

Super LEGO Experience

#reviews at random #lego batman #lego batman 3 #stuff i made #I'm 90% sure I could find someone else who could do shrinking #and in previous games clayface did the shapeshifting #so there's really no excuse for the exclusivity.

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jonathanmumm · 8 years

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5 minutes with Jonathan Mumm

(From gingernutsofhorror.com)

Jonathan Mumm is a 5 time Emmy winning former news reporter whose resume ranges from a just after college early job as a booth announcer with PBS in Washington, D.C to nearly 30 years with KXTV television in Sacramento. He also spent a number of years in Hollywood doing voice-overs and the occasional acting job. He wrote and directed two low budget feature films about the mythical creature known as the Chupacabras and is the author of the ghost story novel paranormal thriller Stop it. You’re Scaring Me, a Ghostly Tale of Vikingsholm.

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I have been interested in horror stories and ghostly tales since I was a little kid even though my parents wouldn’t let me watch such things. It didn’t matter. If there was a scary movie advertised on TV, I’d still have nightmares because I’d make up my own story based on what I had seen. In fact, I think I was probably a scary little kid, calling my mother into my room at night and asking her: “Mom, do you see those big green eyes over there glowing in the dark? They’re looking at you.” I always wanted to be a writer and ended up with a career in television news, but I also wrote fiction and freelance articles on the side. What do you like to do when you're not writing? I love camping, canoeing and hiking and also like to play racquet ball. I used to race go-karts and am a huge motor sports fan, particularly Formula 1 and Indy. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? I always loved to read and as a kid read almost anything I could get my hands on. I was a big fan of pulp fiction, especially the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the writer who invented Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. On the other hand, I also loved Mark Twain and Jack London. The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations. What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions?

That’s a very good question. I know in the past some authors have thought the term “terror” was a better fit, but in today’s world, “terror” has its own political connotations and is probably best left alone. I don’t really like the term “horror,” to be honest, because people immediately think of something gory, violent and dreadful (which has its place but doesn’t describe all horror fare). I know when we made the tongue-in-cheek horror movie Bloodthirst, Legend of the Chupacabras, it got scathing reviews on the internet because our distributor used a particularly gruesome looking creature on the poster and DVD cover that didn’t really look much like our version of the “goat sucker.” Still, my response to that was: “In the movie The Beast with a Million Eyes, how many eyes do you think the Beast really had?” A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years? Horror has gotten so extreme in some cases that, rather than see it getting even more extreme, I think we’re going to see it pull back into something more subtle, more unnerving. To me this is where the ghost story comes in. A good ghost story is atmosphere, uncertainty, suspense. The “Grand Guignol Theatre” in Paris couldn’t sustain itself after World War Two because the horrors it had depicted for years on stage had been outdone by the actual horrors of the war. What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author? The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux, The Count of Monte Cristo, By Alexander Dumas, Dracula by Bram Stoker, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and all the stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was also influenced by the old Gothic Novels, particularly those of Anne Radcliffe.

(Mumm Note: My favorite ghost story novels were The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle) As for films, Metropolis by Fritz Lang, Casablanca, all the old Hammer movies with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of?

I am particularly impressed with Erin Lyon, author of the funny science fiction romance

I Love You* *Subject to the Following Terms and Conditions. I also like Derrick Bang, but he has never published any fiction only non-fiction books about Charles Schulz and the Peanuts gang. (Although he has written a horror story about the Winchester Mystery House that he’s never had published).

How would you describe your writing style?

I think it’s lean and spare but with enough description to give you a good sense of the time and place and enough empathy to invest you in the characters.

Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you?

That’s for sure. One critic called Bloodthirst, Legend of the Chupacabras “the worst movie in the history of the world.” Luckily, notices for my book Stop it. You’re Scaring Me have been very positive with screenwriter David Koepp likening it to The Shining.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?

To me, the hardest part about writing is finding the time to do it. As a reporter, after I’d been writing all day at work I really didn’t feel like writing when I got home, so I would get up at 4:30 in the morning and do my writing before I went to work. I used to get bogged down with plot, but now I plan everything out before I begin and as I’m writing, I’ll engage in exercises where I’ll write out the answers to questions like: “if this happens, what would happen next? What would happen after that? How would that connect to this?” etc.

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?

I wouldn’t write anything sexual. I think that’s best left to a reader’s imagination. A bit of romance, however, that’s a different story. What would the world be without a bit of romance?

How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it ounds or the meaning?

I’m always collecting names. My Mom worked as a nurse in a hospital for the elderly and she would provide me with lists of names of the patients. I generally do pick the name for the way it sounds and if it seems to fit the character.

Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?

I used to be very impatient with my writing and hated to do any rewriting. I would just try and get things finished. Over the years, I’ve learned that the real work of writing is re-writing and revising. That’s where you can really craft your story and refine your style.

What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?

I think experience and empathy are important tools. The old saying is “write what you know.” You can write about anything you want, of course, but if you’ve experienced an emotion, it’s much easier to present it in a realistic way.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?

The best piece of advice I ever got about writing was when I was a reporter. I was told to treat the “sound bites” from interview subjects as if they were just part of the script. In other words, you don’t explain what’s about to be said, you present it in the flow of your story so that one idea flows into another. Every sentence has to organically extend from the one that precedes it. I have found this technique to be very helpful in writing fiction, both novels and plays.

Getting your work noticed is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve, how have you tried to approach this subject?

I was one of those writers who even as a kid collected rejection slips from magazines and pasted them on the wall of my bedroom. I was always inspired by Jack London who received 600 rejection slips before he ever sold a story. In today’s world, though, you don’t have to be turned down 600 times before you get anywhere. When you get tired of all that rejection, you can self- publish and run your own marketing campaign. The internet is key, but even with a publisher, marketing is hard work and a never ending job.

To many writers, the characters they write become like children, who is your favourite child, and who is your least favourite to write for and why?

I become invested in all my characters and try to give them all their own quirks and personalities (whether good or bad) so I don’t think I really have favorites in that sense. Although, I do admit I’m usually pulling for the heroes of my stories (both male and female) to win in the end.

What piece of your own work are you most proud of?

My current book Stop it. You’re Scaring Me

And are there any that you would like to forget about?

Well, I would say the two Bloodthirst Chupacabras movies, but I’m still making money off of them so I can’t really disown them! (Mumm Note: Just kidding. I had a blast making those movies and really do love them!)

For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why?

Stop it. You’re Scaring Me is my only published novel, but I do think it best represents my writing and the way I like to craft a story.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?

A low pitched rumble of thunder drifted through the house, and Kathleen suddenly caught her breath.

You aren’t alone.

At first she could barely see it, the outline of a figure at the end of the bed. No, it was her imagination. There was nothing there. A fragment left over from the dream.

It floated toward her.

Terrified, she backed up against the headboard, pulling the covers toward her, straining her eyes in the darkness.

It was the figure she had seen at the séance. His dark eyes were sad and brooding, his face was pale and translucent. His mouth was moving as if forming words but saying nothing. One arm was outstretched, the hand reaching for her – reaching.

Kathleen shook with fear. She tried to scream but no sound left her throat. Closer the thing came, and closer.

And then there was a feeling of sudden cold. A cool breeze seemed to permeate the room, rippling through the figure. And she watched it evaporate in front of her.

Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?

My last book was a science fiction tale called Falling off the Face of the Earth. It was about a honeymooning couple caught in the Bermuda Triangle. It was never published. (Mumm Note: I’m rewriting it now and it might be my next book)

If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?

I’m really tired of: whew, the thing (creature, maniac, monster, fiend, whatever) is dead and we’re saved. Oh, wait! There it is to kill us in a twist ending!

What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?

The last great book I read was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen. I’m never disappointed in a book because if I don’t like it, I put it aside and grab the next one.

What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer?

Actually, that is the one question I wish people would ask but they never do and this would be my answer!

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