#i wrote it back in august but i'm in the midst of working on several fics for zines / big bangs / exchanges rn

[zukkaoru]

gonna post a fic for a fandom no one on here follows me for 👍

[galerymod]

HER ...... ROCKET MAN

HER

The story of HER is characterised by massive successes and tragic strokes of fate, by triumph and tragedy in equal measure - but ultimately it is above all the story of a friendship: that between Victor Solf and Simon Carpentier.

German-born Victor and Frenchman Simon met back in 2007 - they were still at school - and the two hit it off like brothers. When they started making music together, their sound was equally influenced by classic soul à la Otis Redding and hip-hop from the post-"Yeezus" phase. They gave their project the name HER in 2015.

Their music became instantly recognisable when the early song "Five Minutes" was used as the soundtrack for Apple's "Shot on iPhone" campaign - which ultimately earned them more than 6.7 million streams on Spotify. The duo from Rennes with Franco-German roots then released the EP series "Her Tape #1" and "Her Tape #2", which were peppered with highlights such as "Quite Like", "Union" and "Her" - which in turn meant more than 20 million additional Spotify streams for HER. Behind the seductively provocative visuals that adorned their covers was a subtly dreamy newer wave sound, minimalist, somewhere between pop and soul, in which jazz elements also flickered - and so the two best friends circled the globe several times, presented the EPs live and also made a decent wave in the States.

So much for the numbers, the impressive successes of the last two or three years - because in the midst of all the hustle and bustle, Simon lost a long, hard, silent battle against cancer, which hardly anyone outside his closest circle of family and friends realised: he died a few months ago, in August 2017.

"The whole of last year was incredibly hard because Simon was so unwell," reports Victor. "For example, it was incredibly difficult for him to do our tour - but he also thought it was important to carry on and give concerts! He just didn't want to give up, he didn't want to stop... he battled with this illness for six years. And we didn't actually talk about cancer or death that much during that time: We wanted to talk about life instead. And now, I think it's my job to continue this line and this approach. It's really difficult for me, but I'm doing my best - for myself and for him."

With the support of his late friend, at least in spirit, Victor went back into the studio and continued working on their debut album "HER", which will be released by Republic Records in 2018. He put the finishing touches to the existing songs and also returned to the stage in between: among other things, he played a stunning, deeply moving set at the Rock En Seine Festival in Paris - a festival, incidentally, where HER had always wanted to perform. More shows followed all over Europe and then the album was as good as finished: "Most of the songs were already finished beforehand; they just needed some fine-tuning on the vocals, the background vocals...", he reports. "It was just important to me that Simon's voice, Simon's vision and his guitar playing remained virtually untouched and really sounded exactly how he wanted them to in the final version. I worked on that."

With the single "We Choose", HER have already released a significant album harbinger in advance: Simon's unmistakable voice spreads out over an extremely minimalist, light and smooth production, meaning that his presence can be felt immediately and his signature is unmistakable. "The strange thing is that this was the very first song we wrote as HER - and also the last one I recorded with Simon," explains Victor. "We wrote it just as our previous band was coming to an end. We wanted to make a real statement with it: that you can't lose hope, that you have to hold on to what you love. We were working on new ideas every day back then, and this song just stood out because we were also about holding on and carrying on - after all, there were people back then who thought we were going to stop completely now that the other band had ended. Well, we didn't stop. And I think now is the perfect time to release 'We Choose': Because even when things are bad, there's still one thing - hope. The song is kind of the prologue to the next chapter. A chapter that will hopefully continue the way he would have wanted it to."

While the band started this new chapter with a sold-out concert at the Bataclan in Paris, the music of HER remains the best and most tangible proof of how unique the chemistry and bond between the two band founders was.

"It's just extremely important that this album comes out," Victor concludes. "It's the only way for me to come to terms with his death. This is music forever, for life."

[theteej]

We have to talk about white (and nonBlack) people posting August 5/chair memes

Sigh. Here we are again.

In December 2020, I wrote about why it was a problem, and so uncomfortable for white people sharing Twisted Tea memes.

For those who may not recall, the Twisted Tea memes were created in response to a Black person using the TT to push back forcefully against white racist violence. The images became particularly powerful because they represented a break from the normative lines of racist violence, as in white violence on Black bodies--this time it felt like rooting for the underdog. Black people, because we're clever and awesome, immediately made memes about it. Unfortunately, then white people began sharing them, and it was a profoundly uncomfortable experience. Here's why, again, briefly: Black people were sharing the memes as a cathartic experience about living under a daily lived racial terror that white people cannot ever understand or truly experience in the United States. On August 5 2023, something similar happened again, this time in Montgomery, Alabama, where a Black employee was quickly assaulted by a group of inebriated white boaters. This script is common and familiar to us as Black folks. What was different, however, was the subsequent response--a show of force from Black observers that overwhelmed and viscerally punished the white perpetrators. In many ways it functioned like a revenge fantasy, a cathartic release for people to watch the harm they regular endured or were threatened with daily, reversed in the faces of those who always felt safe. For more on the casual entitlement and innocence of whiteness, see my earlier piece here.

In the midst of the melee, a Black man wielded a folding chair and hit several white attackers. This became a moment of amusement and meme-ification, especially among Black viewers. When Black people share these, it is from a variety of perspectives: First, these are cathartic responses to the visceral, daily violences we suffer as dehumanized people in U.S. society. This disrupts the way we know it 'always goes' for us, and it is a powerful release. Second, the jokey retelling of it, also plays on Black creativity and reminds us of our truth, our stories, and our shared history of struggle and resistance. The problem is, that white (and generally non-Black) internet viewers, then also wanted to share these memes. This is a problem for a few reasons: First, these memes are generated SPECIFICALLY as a response to a type of day-to-day oppressive violence that white people (and to an extent non-Black folk, in other ways) do NOT experience. There is a reversing of racial terror that is meaningful for Black people that is not present for white users.

Second, what is also frustrating, is that this builds on a LONG history of white appropriation of Black cultural productions. Ever since slavery, white people have felt deeply entitled to the art, the work, the creativity of Black people and think that it is communal property. It is not. We are no longer legal property, and our works, our responses, our ways of being are also not communal. Third, what is also so tiresome about this is that white people sharing these images then participate in a messed up process where the white perpetrators-turned-victims in the video become 'ultimate racists,' the obvious type of bad that the white sharer of the video can psychically and performatively distance themselves from. "I'm not like THESE white people," the person can say, as they share the memes, investing in the insidious lie that racism is individual acts, rather than a vast and powerful superstructure that benefits ALL white people, albeit unequally, but at the expense of ALL Black people. In short, stop fucking sharing these memes, white people. They're not for you, and when you do, you both participate in a history of entitled theft AND you also do a shitty thing where you pretend that you don't benefit from daily white racist power. You do. Of course, after writing about this, I've already had multiple white people tell me I'm just being mean and 'reverse racist.' I don't even have time to respond to that any more, because I've already given enough of my free energy out of some misplaced goodness of my heart (and an equally misplaced hope that good faith can help us understand where we're going here.) DO better. Don't share those memes if you're not Black.

[ajoblotofjunk]

Hi! I've been reading you on Ao3 & wanted to tell you I'm SO impressed with HFoG. I have LOTS of things to say: mainly I was floored by how well you handled so many storylines/arcs while still keeping it clean & basic + tropey & never dumbing down complicated characters thru so many words! I think you outline but wondered if you could share more about your process? I'm in the midst of an 8book graphic novel script & the way you stuck the landing gives me hope! I am a huge fan of all of your work

Hi! Thank you for your lovely comment. 😊 I’m happy to talk about my process.

The way all of my stories start is an idea - sometimes a song will inspire me, sometimes a photo, sometimes a prompt, sometimes a “what if?” question. In HFoG’s case it was the video for Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire,” where I wanted to write a story where Jaime was the rich car owner and Brienne was the mechanic.

This gets long (SURPRISE) so the rest under a cut to save your dash. This is certainly way more than you wanted to know but hopefully there’s something helpful here. Hee.

Once I get an idea, I start expanding on it in general terms before I start writing - is Brienne his personal mechanic? (At one point she was, for his many, many cars.) Does she work at a garage? Why does Jaime have a car like this and why does he bring it to her? Etc. This is where my initial idea will often undergo the most changes and certainly for HFoG that’s what happened. I don’t really remember why I shifted to F1 - I wasn’t even an F1 fan when I thought of the idea. 😂 I’d watched some NASCAR growing up, but I didn’t want him to be a NASCAR driver and the more I looked into F1 as I became attached to the idea of Jaime as a racecar driver (oh I remember now! He was an ex-driver in initial renditions of the idea, and then I thought it would be great for Brienne to get to actually be a part of the racing world which is why I made him a current driver), the more I realized it fit him perfectly.

Once I have a solid enough idea to get me at least a few chapters in, I start writing, usually with only a vague idea where I want to end up (and often that idea is “they’re together and happy,” because I’m writing romances at their core). HFoG was quite different even from the start because I did so much research to get familiar with F1 that it bred all sorts of new ideas and plot changes even pre-writing. In my very very first version, the story was just a single year and Jaime got the championship and Brienne was happy as his Mechanic and they ended up happy together at the end, which would have been a perfectly lovely story! But once I realized I wanted to include Jaime’s hand injury, that changed a lot of the story and I did some brainstorming work and ended up having a pretty significant outline even before I started writing.

HOWEVER. If you look at even that outline now it’s SO DIFFERENT from where HFoG ultimately ended up. The first six months were the same, but everything after that was changed. Which I think is the fundamental key to how I write: start out with a really strong backbone (Jaime and Brienne falling in love while working together in F1), start writing, discover what the story is as I go along, and continually think about and update and add to my outline as I figure out what I’m really doing. So it’s like half-planning, half-discovery. 

In the original version of hand-loss HFoG, Jaime goes to Tarth in August but they don’t have sex, he crashes in September but he’s wounded like Robert Kubica and doesn’t lose his hand. Brienne ends up convincing her dad to start a team so Jaime can race and they don’t actually get together until the middle of year two, and then Jaime ends up winning the championship that second year.

The reason I changed all that was because as I started writing the fic I wanted more for both Brienne. Jaime, too, but he had a rich emotional plot to support the love story and I wanted Brienne to have that, too. I knew the story was going to be long (70-90k I thought; my longest fic before this was 70k and that felt like a damned novel to me!), and to support that length I wanted Brienne to have her own dreams and personal plot. Everything from the first August and after was something I struggled with CONSTANTLY even while I was writing the story. Brynn can attest to this - I sent her SEVERAL emails wailing and gnashing my teeth and changing my mind constantly about what I should do and where it should all go. I honestly don’t think I felt confident about it until I was actually writing the second year. I second guessed myself repeatedly.

But. I started writing with the original outline because I felt confident about the first few chapters and I trust myself enough now that I know the story will reveal itself if I keep working on it. I had this happen just yesterday with my JB Fic Exchange story, which FINALLY re-settled itself in my head after I kept writing even though I knew what I was writing wasn’t going to be it - that happens a LOT for me, actually, which is also why I write ahead for long stories, because I know things are going to change and I’ll want to go back to earlier chapters to add in moments to support later chapters and changed plots, which I can’t do if I’m writing as I go. Do I flail and freak out every time that I have no idea what I’m doing? Absolutely. Heh. But so far my brain has not let me down. Often I just keep relentlessly writing even though it all feels awkward and weird, because once I stop and re-read and determine WHY it’s awkward and weird, that tells me what I should be doing instead. I’ve thrown away SO MANY words, but they’ve all needed it.

My outline for HFoG was by month, with the idea that each month was a chapter. This is pretty typical for me when I do finally expand on my idea into an outline. All of my multi-chapter fics end up with at least a brief outline with vague, high-level ideas of what I want to happen in each chapter (plot, emotions, romance, whatever), and often one or two specific events or lines of dialogue that have come to me. I don’t write ahead, I write all in a row because of the discovery factor, but when I do get struck by a flash of a scene, I write that down for the chapter I think it’s going to be in.

What’s important for my process is that those scenes can be moved to wherever they need to go, and are often changed by the time I get to them. I do have things in in the final version of HFoG that had been in these early outlines, but not in the place or exact way I first wrote them down, and that’s because as much as I do outline, I have to tell the story I’m actually telling, and that will sometimes wind to places I didn’t expect as I’m writing it. So the outline guides me, but I don’t bind myself to it so tightly that I can’t be flexible when the story demands it. I also re-read the story a lot as I write (or at least the chapters nearest the chapter I’m working on, once it gets to a certain length), because that will often help ground me in where I’m going, too, by remembering where I’ve been.

One of the toughest parts about HFoG as I got deeper into it was juggling secondary and tertiary characters and when to use them and how. Jaime’s and Brienne’s arcs formed the backbone of my outline, but as I pulled in characters, I knew I wanted them to intersect with J&B throughout, usually in support of J&B’s storylines but with the weight of having their own lives going on underneath. To help with that, I had a list of characters who had recurring roles in the story and when I started each chapter, I would go through and remind myself of if I wanted/needed them to appear and what their purpose was for doing so (and a little about what else they’d been up to, so I could throw that in for color - like Pod finding a girlfriend; that had no “plot” effect, but it gave Pod, a character i care about, happiness and was something I could refer to in other scenes just for depth and emotional weight).

As for sticking the landing - I had tremendous anxiety about just that for weeks, most intensely the weeks I was writing the last chapters and right afterward when I was going to post them. I worried people would hate the final confrontation with Tywin, that they’d want more or something different, and in that case it was very reassuring to have Brynn, who was the only one who’d read the ending at that point, to talk me through it. I would HIGHLY recommend a beta who is good at the things you are not, by the way. I can’t tell you the number of times Brynn would make a point about the emotional arc of a scene and remind me to take a step back and look at how the characters were feeling in the moment, and that consistently made the story so much better.

SO. In summary my process is: initial idea; expand on that idea enough I can start writing (which sometimes involved lots of research); outline if I need it but not required as I write the first chapter or two; definitely need an outline after that, organized by chapter, with high points of plot and emotions and whatever else I already have in my head; use the outline as a lamp to illuminate the story I’m telling; keep writing even when it all feels wrong, knowing I will get to the right path EVENTUALLY, and update outline accordingly; lots of freaking out to a sympathetic and smart friend; side-notes about non-main characters so I don’t completely forget them/develop new plot points/expand on existing plot points because of them; hope it all works out in the end. Heh.

Hopefully there’s something helpful here. If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask! And best of luck on your own big project!! It’s a ton of work but the rewards are great in the end. You can do this!