#if I have to become the sole blogger for this series so be it

[bubblesandpages]

I’d forgotten Jesse Eisenberg plays Blu in Rio. This isn’t to say I’ve ever seen Jesse Eisenberg in anything else, no, but he does narrate all three audiobooks in Holly Blacks Curseworkers series and does a phenomenal job at making Cassel’s life sound absolutely miserable.

[nellasbookplanet]

Book recs: great, unique and creative worldbuilding in sci-fi

A note: most of the books on this list are ones I cherish very highly (some are on my all time favorites list!). A few had a lower overall rating for me personally but still stellar worldbuilding and are of what I'd consider good objective quality even if I subjectively didn’t super enjoy them.

For details on the books, continue under the readmore!

Other book rec posts:

Really cool fantasy worldbuilding

Mermaid books

Dark sapphic romances

Vampire books

Feed (Newsflesh series) by Mira Grant

Zombies and news bloggers and presidential elections, oh my! A look at the world post-post zombie apocalypse, when society has gotten back to its feet but the zombie virus is still very much active. Humanity as a whole has been forced to adapt to the ever-present threat. Largely political, character and worldbuilding focused. There is some zombie action, but it’s far from the central focus.

Shades of Grey (Shades of Grey series) by Jasper Fforde

Walking the very thin line of giving you just enough information to follow the plot and grasp the overall idea of the world, but not enough to create info dumps or hand you answers not yet earned, Shades of Grey presents a world in black and white, where your perception of color determines your place in society. Is it fantasy? Scifi? Post apocalypse? Who knows! I sure don’t! Occasionally it hands you a tidbit of information that seems like a remnant of our world and you feel like you're onto something, but then some pages later said tidbit is turned on its head and you're back to square one. It’s delightful.

This Alien Shore (Alien Shores series) by C.S. Friedman

Space opera in which humanity found a way to faster than light travel and began establishing colonies all over the galaxy, only to belatedly realize the method of FTL caused irreversible mutations and disabilities and leaving their nascent colonies to die. Much later, many of the colonies have survived and thrived, and one has found a new way of FTL travel, allowing an interconnected space society to grow. However, Earth is on the hunt for their method and is prepared to do anything to steal it. Aside from cool worldbuilding, This Alien Shore also features some interesting commentary on disability and accommodation. And there are extra-dimensional space dragons!

Ninefox Gambit (Machineries of Empire trilogy) by Yoon Ha Lee

Military space opera where belief and culture shape the laws of reality, causing all kinds of atrocities as empires do everything in their power to force as many people as possible to conform to their way of life to strengthen their technology and weapons. It’s also very queer, with gay, lesbian and trans major characters, albeit little to no romance.

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch series) by Ann Leckie

Another space opera, in which sentient spaceships can walk the ground in stolen human bodies, so called ancillaries. One of these ancillaries, the sole survivor after the complete destruction of her ship and crew, is one the hunt for revenge. This series also does very cool things with gender!

The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur series) by Hannu Rajaniemi

Place this one in the category of 'accept that you're gonna be confused as hell and just let the world wash over you'. The singularity has come and gone and humans can now easily upload, download and copy themselves into new bodies, not all of them human and not always willingly. Consciousnesses and time has become something close to currency. Follows a murder mystery on Mars.

Stray (Touchstone trilogy) by Andrea K. Höst

Young Adult. Cassandra accidentally walks through a wormhole and ends up on another planet, where she tries to survive in the abandoned ruins of a long since gone civilization. When rescue finally arrives, she soon finds her troubles are far from over as she gets embroiled in a war between her rescuers and monstrous creatures from dreamlike other dimensions. Mixes scifi elements such as space travel, vr and nanomachinery with fantasy tropes such as psychic powers, monsters, and interdimensional portals.

The Peacekeeper (The Good Lands series) by B.L. Blanchard

Alternate history in which Europe never colonized the Americas. Follow Ojibwe detective Chibenashi as he travels from his small home village to a city of living skyscrapers to solve a murder. While I found the mystery somewhat lacking, the worldbuilding and look at a contemporary North America never touched by European colonization is absolutely aces.

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden

South African-set scifi featuring gods ancient and new, robots, dik-diks, and a gay teen with mind control abilities. An ancient goddess seeks to return to her true power no matter how many humans she has to sacrifice to get there. A little bit all over the place but very creative and fresh.

Leech by Hiron Ennes

I mean, this is probably scifi? Like Shades of Grey it hands you only just enough information to get by, and whether its historical fantasy, an alternate timeline, or futuristic post apocalypse is hard to determine. A sentient hive mind have taken over the entire medical profession to ensure the health of their host species. One of their doctors is sent off to an isolated location where they’re cut off from the rest of the hive mind, only to realize they’re faced with a rivaling parasitic entity.

Children of Time (Children of Time series) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Millenia and generation spanning scifi. After the collapse of an empire, a planet once part of a project to uplift other species to sentience is left to develop on its own, resulting not in the intelligent monkeys once intended but in sentient giant spiders. Millenia later, what remains of humanity arrives looking for a new home.

Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre

A classic following a healer as she travels a post apocalyptic Earth with an alien dreamsnake to help people. When her snake dies, she must go on a journey to find a new one. The worldbuilding feels fairly vague, but not in an annoying way but in one that makes the world feel vast and mysterious and lived in. Just like in the real world you won’t get all the answers, but you do get the feeling of the world as a whole being much larger than the character and her quest.

The Outside (The Outside trilogy) by Ada Hoffman

AKA the book the put me in an existenial crisis. Souls are real, and they are used to feed AI gods in this lovecraftian inspired scifi where reality is warped and artifical gods stand against real, unfathomable ones. Autistic scientist Yasira is accused of heresy and, to save her eternal soul, is recruited by post-human cybernetic 'angels' to help hunt down her own former mentor, who is threatening to tear reality itself apart.

The Three-Body Problem (The Three-Body Problem series) Cixin Liu

While I felt the characters could’ve been better developed, this is undeniably a well-written novel featuring an alien race and culture developed on a planet vastly different from ours. Firmly in the realm of hard scifi, this is a realistic, fascinating and slightly terrifying look at how first contact may look.

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Eurovision in space! If you lose, humanity is doomed! Good luck! The sentient species of the galaxy have chosen to face each other not in war but in a musical contest, and now humanity is invited to partake. The problem? If we lose, our species as a whole will be exterminated. While I found this book as a whole slightly gimmicky, it’s a fun and flashy experience with some wild and creative alien species.

Escaping Exodus (Escaping Exodus series) by Nicky Drayden

Seske is the heir to the leader of a clan living inside a gigantic, spacefaring beast, of which they frequently need to catch a new one to reside in as their presence slowly kills the beast from the inside. While I found the ending rushed with regards to plot and character, the worldbuilding is very fresh and the overall plot of survival and class struggle an interesting one.

The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley

More fucked up biological spaceships, this time all women edition! It’s weird, it's gross, there’s So Much Viscera, it has biotech but in the most horrific way imaginable. Had I to categorize it I would call it grimdark military sf. It’s an experience but not necessarily a pleasant one. Features a mass of slowly dying world-ships, and the conflicts arising between them as they struggle to survive. It’s also sapphic but not what I'd call romantic.

Isle of Broken Years by Jane Fletcher

Young spanish noblewoman Catalina thinks she’s done for when the ship she’s traveling on is attacked by pirates and she’s captured. Things gets worse when the entire crew is stranded on an inhospitable island where time works strangely, dangerous monsters terrorize the woods and something alien stops them from leaving. Strong Lost vibes. Lesbian romance. Admittedly quite indulgent but very fun and creative.

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang

Slow and long and literary, Vagabonds presents a world a hundred years post a war of independence between Earth and Mars, after which two vastly different societies have grown. A close look at the impossibility of a utopia and how different circumstances allow for different cultures to grow, and how the two aren’t always compatible while neither is necessarily better or worse than the other.

Mortal Engines (Mortal Engines quartet) by Philip Reeve

Young Adult. On a barely survivable Earth humanity has taken to living on great wandering cities, hunting each other across the plains for resources. Tom lives in London, but when he intervenes to stop a murder, he falls off the city alongside a strange and hostile girl on the hunt for revenge. Aside from excellent worldbuilding this also features one of my most favorit female characters ever in Hester Shaw. If you’ve seen the movie, forget about it and read the book instead.

Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota series) by Ada Palmer

Centuries in the future, humanity has deliberatly engineered society to be as utopian as possible, politically, socially, sexually, religiously. Written in an enlightenment style and featuring questions of human nature and whether it’s possible to change it, and what price we're prepared to pay for peace, this book is simultaneously very heavy and very funny, and written in a very unique style. While still human, the society presented often feels starkly alien.

A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan duology) by Arkady Martine

Mahit, ambassador of a small station nation, arrives at the heart of the Teixcalaanli Empire, ready to battle for the continued independence of her people. In her head she carries part of the personality of her predecessor, there to guide her. A look at imperialism and the conflicting feelings of hate, fear and even admiration one can have towards empire. Also features a sapphic romance!

Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb series) by Tamsyn Muir

I mean, you're on tumblr, you probably already know about this one. Trust me when I say it's exactly as good as people claim. There are indeed lesbian necromancers is space (quite a lot of them, actually), but also incredible worldbuilding that keeps growing with every new installment, interesting political commentary, morally complex characters with fucked up dynamics, and well-thought out plot that keeps you guessing until the last.

Railhead (Railhead trilogy) by Philip Reeve

Young Adult. Listen, Philip Reeve is so good at absolutely wild worldbuilding, I nearly included a third series of his on this list (hey go look up Larklight okay!). In a future where humanity travel between the stars using not spaceships but a portal-connected system of sentient trains, a young thief and street urchin is hired to steal something off of the Emperor's train.

Bonus AKA I haven't read these yet but they seem really cool

The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

More AI gods!

A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White

Magic in space!

The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

Angels in space!

[codeblogs]

Reflections on Detective Conan, 2023

As a forward to this, I started watching Detective Conan with some friends midway through this year, and we are now nearly 100 episodes and 1 movie deep. Its been a long journey, and I see it continuing for a while, so I figured I may as well write up some thoughts on it.

Detective Conan itself is a mystery.

On the face of it, it shouldn't be too great. It's one of those standard Sunday morning kids TV anime, something that you'd probably imagine sitting alongside Anpanman, and its tight cultural grip on Japan would lead one to think that it might have some impenetrable barrier for western audiences. Mix in that Gosho Aoyama's prior works, at least in my experience, aren't that popular divorced from Detective Conan's explosive success (that last part was specifically to single out Kaito Kid), and generally aren't regarded as too great, and yet, Conan persists.

Too smug

Honestly, as someone who had already been a Detective Conan fan, reading all the way to the end of the Vermouth arc nearly a decade ago now, I really didn't expect to fall in love with the anime, especially considering how reliant it would be on anime original content as it went on. Yet, something about it manages to shine even when a mystery story isn't that great or is even outright bad.

There's something in these characters that makes it easy to latch on even when nothing is happening, even when the Black Organization has vanished from the narrative for too many episodes to even count after a point. The soft jazz and rocking climactic tracks keep everything feeling ethereal, like you've been dropped into another plane of existence solely to watch this show.

The childish antics of the Detective Boys, Kogoro's Mr. Satan like appeal with moments of genuine charisma and skill, Ran's often overprotective and harsh love, it's all fun. It's like this gooey inside you're rewarded with for overcoming the various barriers to this, whether it be the already mentioned aspects regarding Aoyama's prior works or the cultural barriers, or even just the sheer length or the odd concept.

But, what really makes this series is the titular character, Conan Edogawa, or rather, Kudo Shinichi.

After every session where we watch the anime, I tend to look through Conan related media. Whether it be old boorus to search for obscure fanart, the recent uploads for the tag here, or, my personal favourite, old independent blogs that happened to talk about it. In one of these ventures, I found someone describing their own experience with the anime, watching them fall in love with it almost in real time, and they offered this interesting insight, one that particularly resonated with me during Episode 78 of the TV anime.

The blogger had said something along the lines of "Kudo Shinichi isn't cool because he's an adult. He is cool because he is Kudo Shinichi." Even as Conan, even through all these childish antics, Conan still puts on a serious face and challenges every criminal with his idea of justice- and no matter the crimes committed he wants to ensure that nobody else will die or be harmed. The one time he was forced to watch someone die resonated with him, and seeing a follow up to that 67 episodes later, and seeing Conan make declarations about what it means to be a detective, that is cool. That is the heart of the show for me, and it just never gets old. Kogoro could get knocked out in every episode from where I am, Conan and the crew could be walking right into piles of suspicious dead bodies every session, and I would still love every single moment where Conan drops the act and becomes Kudo Shinichi.

I guess I really do love anime.

[fonkeloog]

"get to know the blogger":

Favourite TV show?

Favourite author?

Dream job?

(⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠❤

And here a cute Louis Gif to cheer you up:

Look at the ray of sunshine!!!!!! I love him so much 🥺

As for your questions:

Favourite TV show: does The Crown count? Wait no I think it might be Derry Girls. Both? I can't choose. NEXT QUESTION

Favourite Author: eeehhhhh I don't really have one? I love the Harry Potter series, but the author is shit. Other than that I just read whatever? The last book I finished was by Christina Lauren, so I'll go with her!

Dream job: as a child I wanted to become a dolphin trainer (so original), but now idk? I'm happy with my job at the Front Office, and I really like that. Maybe some day I'd like to be able to use my poetry as a sole form of income, or songwriting. I'd like that a lot

[josefsen95true]

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[salisbury59anthony]

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[thelivebookproject]

Talking Books With @josephconrads!

[What is this and how can I participate?]

Important note: I haven’t changed or edited any of the answers. I’ve only formatted the book titles so they were clearer, but nothing else. Because I’m incapable of shutting up, my comments are between brackets and in italics, so you can distinguish them clearly.

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[Image description: a square titled “Know the blogger”. Name & pronouns: Noah, he/they; country: United States; three adjectives to describe them: easygoing, sarcastic & meticulous /end]

1. What are your reading goals for this year (or the next one)?

Answer: I’ll be honest in saying I don’t have any. I rarely if ever set reading goals for myself other than the yearly reading goal on Goodreads. This year that’s 50 books. But yeah, I never set reading goals because I find that when I do and don’t reach them, I become disappointed and critical of myself. 

2. Last time you researched a writer's Wikipedia page to know something specific about them?

To look up something specific about them? Far too long ago to remember as I don’t tend to research authors much if at all. However I did look at Terry Brooks Wikipedia page a few months back in order to see which book was next in a specific series. I’m attempting to work through all of his individual novels and series set in the Shannara world and I’m going about them in publication order which often results in a trip to his Wikipedia for the Bibliography section.

3. Do buy books based on if the title sounds good or is that not important for you?

Not solely based on the title but title does play a factor. I mostly base my purchases off of the summary provided but if the title doesn’t appeal to me then I’m less likely to pick up the book to read the summary in the first place. There have been numerous times that a title has led me to buy a book but never without reading up on it first.

4. First book that comes to your mind when I say "autumn"?

The Child Thief by Brom. His name is Gerald Brom but everything he writes is under his last name. It’s a dark retelling/dark origin story for Peter Pan and a frequent reread for myself. Although I’m not certain why it’s the book that came to mind as, if memory serves me right, autumn isn’t really a mentioned or described season.

5. Have you ever read a writer's complete works?

On a technicality, yes. And by that I mean there have been a few authors who have published only one or two novels which I have read. I don’t technically count these as complete works as there is always time for any of these authors to write and publish more, which means if it interests me then I might read it. There are a few authors whose complete works I am attempting to complete although I’m not quite there just yet. 

Free space!

I’d also like to provide a list of 5 books everyone should read in their lifetime:

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Razor’s Edge - W Somerset Maugham

Little Bee - Chris Cleave

[I’ve only read Dickens’ off this...]

You can follow him at @josephconrads.

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

Thank you, Noah! This was very nice.

Next interview: Wednesday, 10th of March

[sukirichi]

Hello, just gonna drop by with a message for a number of the blogs I follow and I kindly ask you share this because it's been a hassle for me and a few other of my friends too:

If you use the small font toggle on Tumblr posts, especially on relatively long ones and on your masterlist, we ask you please be mindful of those who have trouble reading smaller fonts (i.e. those who have bad eyesight/eye problems/people with learning disorders such as dyslexia.)

We do not speak for everyone but we do know some people have font size preferences when they have dyslexia because it's easier to discern characters that way. For myself specifically, I struggle reading small fonts when written consistently in long paragraphs such as certain responses to asks and occasionally some authors will choose to use the small font toggle for lengthy fics, especially on my desktop.

As for masterlists, if people chose to link parts to a character or a series with numbers such as: "[Character] Soft HCs [1] [2] [3]" when it's condensed to the small font like [Character] Soft HCs [1] [2] [3], it becomes a challenge for readers to click the proper link, moreso on mobile than anything else.

We sincerely ask authors and bloggers to be careful when choosing to use the small font toggle because we sincerely want to support our favourite accounts but we can't when we can't read some/majority of the posts you share. Again, it's okay to use the toggle, we get it, but we would appreciate it if it wasn't the sole of an aesthetic because it doesn't make certain blogs and posts accessible for us.

Thank you <3

hey there, yeah i understand where you and your friends come from, i actually have really bad eyesight too and can’t really read without my glasses :( and yes i understand, i have a dyslexic friend and many friends who have eye strain, we know the struggle 

hmm i know this is a general message for multiple blogs, but i’ll just explain how my posts work. i received a message before that i flood the dash/feed too much with my long ass responses and i wanted to make my posts less of a bother to others

i don’t really want to make my replies shorter in asks so i opted for using small fonts when i know i’m going to ramble for the convenience of my followers but apparently, that’s still not convenient and i don’t really want to draft everything and put the ‘keep reading tab’ every time i reply long then switch to my laptop where the tab is available.

i get like 10 asks or more in a day & it’s troublesome for me to keep drafting everything then get the tab on laptop so yeah, i used small fonts 

my tumblr app isn’t updated tho, so i had to redownload/update it so i can make the keep reading tab work even on mobile. i’ll try and put the tabs on my longer replies from now on :) 

as for the lengthy fics, no worries! i don’t really write fics where the story is in the smaller text, except for the warnings/notes and those are usually aren’t very much anyway

for my masterlists, i’m sorry but i won’t be changing them. i’m not really choosing the small fonts for the “aesthetics” but because i have a long ass masterlist that’s mostly vertical (as you can access from my pinned post and bio, they’re in bullet forms)

it’s hefty for me to scroll down and look for the character i’m linking back to when they’re all big/normally sized. 

it’s for my convenience and i’d like to keep them that way because it saves me a lot of time since i have a lot of fics, but they’re very spaced out with color breaks so readers can access it better 

and yeah no worries! my VERY FEW thirsts are formatted with squirt emojis (check the naoya ones if u wanna see) for proper spacings that makes it easier to access. thanks for the note!

[jimlingss]

do u ever find that your following on tumblr kinda plateaus and it slows down for awhile even if ur active?

do u have any tips on how to avoid that from happening?

yes, I do. After being here five years, I can say for certain it does but I’m not sure if it’s actually because my viewership/readership has plateaued or I, myself, have merely gotten used to the routine - of receiving messages, of receiving the same amount of likes, reblogs, followers, etc. 

For me, it kind of feels like both. I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels like the BTS writing community on tumblr as a whole isn’t as prosperous as it used to be. Thus it’s natural that over the years, my following has plateaued. But also, a few years ago it felt like my tumblr was more popping. HOWEVER, if I look at the actual messages I receive and the feedback, I get way more now. It’s odd. How is it possible I can feel this way? But it makes sense. When I started I was so entirely ecstatic to get one message. And 100 followers made me celebrate. At the beginning everything is always new and exciting. But after months and years, it started to matter less and less to me. so in that sense tumblr is a lot less exciting for me. not to say I’m not appreciative but my own engagement has plateaued and I’ve become a lot calmer. Which isn’t necessarily bad. 

Not sure if that makes any sense, but to actually answer your question, there are blogs that definitely have more engagement or that I’m personally more engaged with and I’ve noticed several things they’ve done...

1 - Consistency. I notice that blogs that have consistent followings are because the blogger/writer themselves are consistent. They keep posting, they continue to write series, oneshots, etc. Being active isn’t just posting about what you’re doing that day or what you’re eating or merely giving updates, it’s also being active in whatever the purpose of your blog exists for. 

(+ using tags with your posts is the way you can pull in new viewers).

2 - Increase Opportunities for Engagement. I can only really give advice for writing blogs since that’s really all I know lol. But what I’ve noticed is the writing blogs that continue to receive messages/engagement are the blogs that have opportunities to do so. What I mean is do ask my muse tags - these are just great for readers to ask questions and get new readers to check out said story. also polls where writers can ask what should happen next really increase involvement. I’ve also noticed that releasing teasers for fics also heighten the excitement. 

These two methods are probably the best ways. I have some other methods but they’re a bit more...botched lol and should be taken much more lightly...

3 - Collabs. They’re pretty difficult to pull off, but by collaborating with another writer, you’re pulling viewership from both blogs together (or how many you collab with) so that really heightens viewership. The feasibility of this, however, varies. After all, group projects aren’t easy — and that statement is prob enough to explain the difficulty of collabs.

4 - Recs and Reblogs. In the past, whenever I got a spike in followers, it was because another notable blog reblogged something of mine or I was recommended somewhere. Fic rec blogs and networks are honestly great in this aspect. However, being reblogged and recommended is pretty much out of your own control. ((Unless you recommend yourself LOL)). But I suppose if you want your stuff to be reblogged, you should reblog other people’s stuff. Do onto others as you want to do onto yourself. This might even get you noticed by the people you reblogged.

5 - Friendships. This is kind of the underlying theme of #3 + 4 but obviously if you’re friends with other blogs, they’ll be talking about you and you’ll be talking about them and that’ll make your viewers check them out, vice versa. And when you post something, they might reblog it as a way to support you, and they’ll rec you when someone asks. HOWEVER, (high disclaimer lmao) being friends with other blogs for the sole purpose of increasing engagement is highly unethical and very exhausting. I’m acknowledging that this is a way. But I would not recommend this. Stuff like this never lasts. Plus no one likes clout chasers (lol do tumblr ppl even have clout??) 

6 - Write a (long) series with cliffhangers. On my time spent here on tumblr, I noticed that the times where my readers became most alive and my inbox is most chaotic, it was when I was writing a series and ended chapters with cliffhangers LMAO. honestly some of those times have become my best memories. As much as readers might detest cliffhangers, from the writer’s perspective, man you really get bombarded with messages when people are dying to know what happens next. and then people who are not reading your works become intrigued by the flood of messages and head over to check it out and see what the chaos is all about. It’s a win-win.

Hopefully this helps you out!! There’s probably more tips I can give but at the moment, that’s all I can come up with.

[ogmosis]

CRIME FICTION INTERVIEW: ROD REYNOLDS

Rod Reynolds is one of the best crime fiction authors to emerge in the last five years, his Charlie Yates trilogy set in the USA up there with other British writers such as Ray Celestin as well as Americans like Attica Locke and James Lee Burke. I had heard of Rod's work in the industry, but it wasn't until lockdown that I had the time to indulge in his writing. His ear for American dialogue from the 1940s is excellent, while his plotting and characters draw you in - the protagonists and antagonists constantly criss-crossing the line between good and evil. After moving on from Charlie and Faber for the time being, his latest book Blood Red City for Orenda Books is set in London - the city where he grew up as a council estate boy. Rod kindly took time out from working on his new book to talk about his career journey, inspirations and fitting writing in around bringing up young children.

How did a lad from Camden end up mining 1940s America for his first published novels?

I took a sabbatical from advertising in 2010 for a year to try and write a novel. I took a distance learning course with The London School of Journalism. I had never written anything, even though I have always been a big reader of crime. I grew up on a council estate in Camden and I didn't know anyone who had ever done anything like that. It was only as I got older, one of my old bosses was writing a book and he said, "You know what, why can't it be someone like us". I wrote a novel, sent it off to a million agents and got rejected, but got some really nice feedback saying, “This story doesn't work, but keep writing”. I went back to work with a new job, real life took over for a couple of years and it got to a point where I needed to decide whether I needed to do anything with this or put it away as a flight of fancy. I had the idea for the book that would become The Dark Inside after I stumbled across a real-life case that inspired it and I did some research into it. I had the voice at least that would become the character of Charlie Yates and it was quite vivid in my mind, so to give myself a shove I signed up to do the Masters course at City, University of London in novel writing. I was really lucky as it was the first year they ran a crime specific course with novelist Claire McGowan, amongst others. I had some amazing teaching that helped me develop the book and I ended up getting picked up by my first agent before I graduated then, not too long after, I landed with Faber. Lucky coming together of different circumstances.

How hard was it to change your mindset from advertising to novel writing?

I was a buyer in advertising, so that was a very social job. Great in some ways as you could get to take clients to drinks, dinner and parties, but I was working silly hours. I had reached my natural conclusion with advertising as I had done my 10-year stint. I wasn't passionate about it anymore. I was specifically dealing with newspapers, which was a declining sector of the industry. I was already looking at having to change my skill set if I wanted to carry on, so it wasn't too hard for me to walk away in that sense. I miss being around the office with the team I worked with. If I could have done the job from Thursday lunchtime to Friday evening, I would have happily done that forever. The rest of the week I could leave out. One of the reasons that I wanted to do the City of London course, because I was working full-time, I needed something to structure me and find that time in my week to write. I was also working on a deadline that we were due our first child halfway through the course, so I had to get that done. After I left my job, I swapped with my wife once she finished her maternity leave so I was looking after our little one at the time. It was helpful in a way because the only time I could write was at nap time or in the evenings. No time to worry about whether it was perfect, so I just got the words out and got the book done. Towards the end of the second novel, we were expecting our second child so the book had to be done again. My kids are school age now. I kind of look back and think, "How the hell did I work to those restrictions?" It is like anything - you get used to it and find a way.

I think Charlie Yates is one of the most flawed and interesting crime fiction protagonists we have seen in recent years, so how did he evolve?

James Ellroy was the big starting point for me, even after I got into Chandler, Hammett et al. Charlie started out as a voice that I could hear in my head, even if that sounds ephemeral or arty. I had this world weary, beaten down, over the hill journalist who kind of hated himself. I could hear how he would approach this situation whereby he is taken from being cynical in New York City and plunged into this seemingly nothing story in the Deep South which suddenly becomes very important to him, because he can see the effect on people in the town, the victims and their families. It is a matter of life and death. It is based on the real-life Texarkana Moonlight Murders in 1946. I wanted to fictionalise that scenario. The reason he comes from New York is that I read that a journalist from The Times in London was sent over to cover it, but it felt a little bit contrived so the next best alien place for me was New York as it was closer to understanding someone's life from London than somewhere else.

Did the clever FBI through line arrive at the start of your outlining?

Initially it was only going to be a standalone book, then I was going to write a second novel set in the same universe with different characters - something that Ellroy has done and I love. When Faber bought The Dark Inside, they asked for Charlie to come back and that wasn't too tricky. Colt Tanner came about essentially as someone I wanted to write to challenge myself and have fun with. He is unashamedly on both sides of the law. He is willing to do bad things, but he is on the side of the angels in his own mind. He is utterly convinced that the ends justify the means because of what he is trying to achieve. Charlie has got his own flaws and is riddled with self-doubt, while Colt is absolutely certain of his own moral rectitude.

How difficult was the Bugsy Siegel arc to write about?

I have been lucky enough to travel to Las Vegas a number of times over the years and I wanted to write something set there in the early days because it was such a sleazy, strange, literal desert outpost that became almost overnight this gambling mecca. I hadn't planned to involve it in the series and, when I travelled to Texarkana on a research trip and I was finishing up a draft of The Dark Inside, we were driving to Memphis to catch a flight to somewhere else and we passed this town called Hot Springs. I started reading up on the history of this town and how it had been run by this English gangster, who was sent down from New York and all this incredible history that it had. Bugsy Siegel was a regular visitor there and it looks like he took some of its influence as the blueprint for Vegas. Suddenly it just came together. That was book two sorted and I had a story I wanted to tell, and I can then link that straight to Bugsy finishing off the Flamingo in Vegas throughout book three. I was very lucky that Hot Springs, this town in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas that was really isolated in a valley fifty miles down the road from Texarkana, was Siegel's favourite location.

Are you a pantser or a plotter?

I love dialogue. I enjoy it the most and find it the most natural. I am a reluctant plotter. I started out as a pantser with a plan only really in my head but, with each book, the more I plan at the start the more it helps me at the back end. I was worried that it would stifle creativity and actually it is not really the case. I can now start with the synopsis and a route map I know I am going to try and follow. If I veer off from that and find better ways that is not a problem, but it is when you don't have that and don't know how to get from A to B or E to F in the middle of the story - that is when you can end up struggling.

Did you struggle getting back into a British groove for the new book?

All the stuff that I had written had been set in the States, even my first novel that was unpublished. You think it would be easy to write British as it is all around us and I am also writing in the present day without having to worry about anachronisms and regional dialects which was a tricky thing with the previous books, but it took a while to get those beats to make it sound authentic and the way I heard it in my head. I am not one for sharing my stuff until I am absolutely happy with it and satisfied it is as good as I can make it, then I am quite lucky in that I have a couple of trusted readers that I send it to. One will tell me if the story is good and then one will find any tiny mistake that I have made and picks up stuff even copy editors can miss. Karen Sullivan from Orenda Books is great. She does the first edit for Orenda, then we work with West Camel who is her editor and he goes through it a second time and incorporates his feedback. It is nice to have that two-stage process. Blood Red City is out in paperback and has done really well. Financial Times picked it as one of their summer reads. The reviews have been great and people have been getting in touch to say that they have enjoyed it. Orenda have a big network of bloggers and readers on board and that is helpful as it touches on themes that some people might find off-putting. It starts with financial crime and I didn't want to put it solely in that direction as it is about murder and London. Orenda have a small team, but they have built an incredible presence.

What are your hopes going forward?

The story I am working on at the moment has elements of a psychological thriller about it, even though it didn't start out that way. This new one was supposed to be a big departure. I was looking at something like a Sliding Doors thing with parallel lives, but at the start of lockdown I cut half the story, which was quite painful, but I am enjoying writing it. I also have a second book with Orenda, which is going through edits and is set in the present day in the States based on another real-life case. Hopefully that is out in 2021. As a community, you will do well to find a warmer or more welcoming bunch of people than we have in crime fiction. You think there would be some competitiveness, but I haven't seen any.

Find out more about Rod HERE.  Buy Rod’s Charlie Yates trilogy HERE. Check out his new book Blood Red City HERE.

[stillebesat]

okay, I ADORE "A Work of Art" but I have questions. Like... how did Ro and V meet? What was the start of their relationship like? What has V been posting about on his social media? How did V get popular on his social media? (Basically, if you ever felt like writing a prequel or something, I would 100% read it and gush)

^^;; I’m so glad that you enjoyed A Work of Art!! :D :D Sorry for the delay in answering, Y_Y;; but hey...you said maybe write a prequel so I went ahead and wrote a prequel of Virgil and Roman meeting for the first time! XD

You can find it here: Meeting Romeo

And to answer your other questions:

Virgil’s basically been dabbling in posting various Cryptid related things. His various social media outlets could be considered a cross between the “People of New York” picture page and the TV show Ancient Aliens. Depending on which media page he’s using he’ll post pictures of “Cryptids” (’People’ dressed in ways he finds ‘suspicious’) he encounters around the city or of haunting sites/landscapes that could be potential secret living places for these ‘non-humans.’ But he’ll also do vlogs and blogs talking about various conspiracy theories (both past, present, and potentially the future) about various Cryptids. Like where Big Foot might hide, Why the MothMan definitely have antennae like regular moths, How there must be cryptids working for Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, etc who’s sole job is to ensure no ‘incriminating, tangible’ evidence is found by people who stumble across their kind is found online. Etc.

He finds it fun to twist things and make arguments on how evolving technology, fashion, language, etc is often caused by different cryptid groups and how some events in history obviously have to be cover-ups of encounters with these beings.

However. Virgil ended up becoming one of the more popular bloggers after he did a vlog on one of the many Fashion Weeks, theorizing that certain elements of the collections showed that if the fashion designer was’t fae themselves, they definitely had recently encountered a fae judging by the amount of glitter and spangles and certain known fae patterns (rings, mushroom shapes, etc) they used and Virgil theorized that the designer was trying to please one of the high noble fae by having such a blinding collection. Virgil still has no idea why that particular vlog caught the world’s attention, (he managed to post the vlog when interest in faeries was peaking) but since then his views and followers have continued to skyrocket with everyone anxious to see what theory he’ll post next about cryptids that’s just crazy enough to potentially be true. Though currently his more popular series are the bi-monthly uploads he does of the antics of one Roman Prince that he catches on camera whenever his roommate is home. And after the events of A Work of Art, those videos become his most popular ones, especially after he and Roman began collaborating in them. (Aka Virgil shows Roman how social media can help his acting career.)

I hope that answered your questions! And hopefully you enjoyed the prequel as well!! Thanks for the ask, Anon! :D

[esonetwork]

Tiger Kings, Snyder Cuts, and direct-to-streaming blockbusters: Entertainment in the time of COVID-19

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/tiger-kings-snyder-cuts-and-direct-to-streaming-blockbusters-entertainment-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

Tiger Kings, Snyder Cuts, and direct-to-streaming blockbusters: Entertainment in the time of COVID-19

As an entertainment blogger, finding topics to write about this year has been somewhat of a challenge. Normally I have my blog schedule all neatly planned out, based on what movies are coming to the theater.

Of course, pretty much all the big spring and summer blockbusters have been moved to a later time, although of course due to the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, those release dates may have to be moved again if quarantine procedures must be reinstated.

I’d initially thought this time might be a great opportunity to do a blog series project similar to my Western blog-a-thon earlier this year, but pandemic anxiety and the loneliness of the quarantine have made staying motivated challenging. I find myself turning to entertainment comfort food (a.k.a. watching Star Wars again for the billionth time and then staring longingly out the window and remembering what it was like to go to a movie theater).

Return of the (Tiger) King

Anyway, I finally got around to watching one of the more unusual hits during this pandemic: Netflix’s “Tiger King,” a documentary about private zoo owner Joe Exotic. The show is billed as a tale of “murder, mayhem, and madness” and honestly that doesn’t even begin to capture just how wild this show is. At numerous points, I found myself staring at the screen and thinking, “There is NO WAY this can be real.”

Even if you gather all the world’s best creative writers and told them to come up with the most outlandish story possible, I don’t think they could top the true story of “Tiger King.” If this show had come out before 2020, I don’t think I would have made it past the first episode. But 2020 has been so crazy that somehow it fits right in. The fact we’re all stuck in our homes and the world is awful right now provided the perfect environment for this show to become a viral hit.

I don’t even really know how to describe this show, other than that it must be seen to be believed. It features a feud (which you’ve probably heard about, thanks to Internet memes) that takes place between Joe Exotic and tiger sanctuary owner Carole Baskin (who may or may not have murdered her husband). The disappearance of Baskin’s husband is just one of the many over-the-top subplots this show has. In fact, it’s not even necessarily the craziest.

Ultimately, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the show after I finished watching it. I wanted to see it because it was a viral hit and everyone was talking about it, but in the end it actually made me feel a little sad. Because once you look past the eyebrow-raising drama, the real victims are the tigers who are bred solely for the purpose of entertaining people and who are not always treated with proper care and respect.

While Joe Exotic is getting a lot of attention right now, I hope that everyone who watched this show came away with an increased awareness of why people shouldn’t be keeping exotic animals like tigers as pets and why the breeding of these animals should be left to licensed, accredited zoos that can take care of these animals and that have their interests at heart.

To cut or not to cut

Though this entertainment news was not a surreal as “Tiger King,” I was still more than a little shocked by the announcement that the mythical “Snyder cut” of the Justice League movie did, in fact, exist, and it will be coming to HBO Max in 2021.

If you’re a geek, you’ve probably heard about all the drama surrounding the so-called Snyder cut of “Justice League,” but just in case, here’s a quick recap.

“Justice League” was released in 2017 to disappointing critical reviews and box office returns. Joss Whedon finished up the project after Zack Snyder had to depart the production due to a personal tragedy. The final film felt like a mishmash of Snyder and Whedon’s very different personal styles, and for a while now, certain fans have been quite vocal about wanting to see a specific Zack Snyder cut of the movie.

I always saw #ReleasetheSnyderCut as a quirky social media trend that would eventually fade away, but apparently Hollywood was actually listening and now the Snyder cut is a real thing. They’re even devoting a reported $30 million+ to the project.

Is this new cut a cash grab that won’t be that different from the version we saw in theaters? Maybe. But I have to confess that I’m already hooked; I will pay my hard-earned money to watch this alternate version, simply because I’m dying of curiosity. I did not really enjoy “Justice League,” but I’m actually a “Batman v. Superman” apologist, so I’m interested in seeing what Snyder comes up with here.

“Batman v. Superman” is a deeply flawed movie, but there are moments of greatness that it doesn’t receive enough credit for. Maybe “Justice League: The Snyder Cut” will still be a raging dumpster fire, but I’m intrigued enough to check it out.

As a side note, I am a little troubled by the concept of fans demanding a redo of a movie they didn’t like. Blockbusters, by their very nature, aim to be crowd-pleasers, but there’s also a danger of film makers being so concerned by audience reception that they’re afraid to try anything bold or ground-breaking. I don’t believe that “fans making demands of creators” is a very healthy process for creating art.

On the other hand, one could argue that “Justice League” suffered due to studio interference, and if the Snyder cut is a success, maybe Warner Bros. will give more directors freedom to follow their own vision for a project.

Skipping the theater?

Finally, an interesting trend we’re seeing in terms of entertainment in our new COVID world is that more films are bypassing a traditional theatrical release and going straight to streaming.

In some cases, it may be a good thing, such as Disney’s poorly reviewed “Artemis Fowl” that probably would have flopped at the box office.

Even as someone who deeply loves the movie theater experience, I’m okay with having a mix of films, with some going straight to streaming and others that start in the theater. I still think a movie theater is the best place to see a movie, but not every film necessarily needs to be seen on a giant screen.

I hope that as theaters are able to safely reopen, the industry will find a balance between in-person and on-demand.

[the-bounce-back]

THE CONFIDENCE CHRONICLES PART V - CONFIDENCE IN YOUR CONFIDENCE

This is post 5/5 of my “Confidence Chronicles” series, in which I discuss the mindsets, actions and thought processes I’ve applied to build/rebuild my confidence in different aspects of my life. The goal of these 5 posts is for you readers to be able to apply relevant points to your own insecurities in order to combat them, and hopefully build your own confidence over time.

—————————————————————

So… we’re finally at the last post of the Confidence Chronicles. It’s taken its sweet (long-ass) time, but we finally got there in the end. Furthermore, it’s almost exactly a year ago since the idea for this series popped into my head, so this really has ended up coming full circle… albeit unintentionally. Not going to lie, it’s kind of a bittersweet feeling - it’s going to feel strange to not focus so heavily on confidence anymore, but on the other hand… I don’t have to focus so heavily on confidence anymore. Finally, I can bring my other post ideas that have been collecting dust in my drafts to life!

The funny thing is that although I started this series with a plan for what I was going to write about in each post, I never actually settled on what aspect of my confidence I wanted to end this series with. I figured that when the time came to write this, I would have a clear idea of what would be an appropriate note to wrap up the series on. 

Of course, at that point in time I didn’t know that the latter half of 2019 was going to turn my life upside down. I didn’t know that I was going to find myself in a massive slump due to stress, confusion and anxiety over my career, my direction and purpose in life and my role in the grand scheme of the world. I know it all sounds very melodramatic and like an excuse to not apply myself to complete my projects - which might be partially true - but the truth is that these questions have been weighing on me for a long time. Long before I started working on my mental health, long before I started this blog, long before moving back to the UK. I’ve been able to ignore these feelings for a long time, but lately they’ve been making themselves extremely hard to avoid. I think that the reason lies in that I’m soon going to be on what society likes to call the “wrong” side of 25, and that I still feel like I’m figuring out where my life is going… i.e. running around like a headless chicken.

However, this blog has really forced me to confront my fears in a way that counselling or confiding in someone I trust ever could - simply because it makes me work through my innermost thoughts and feelings alone. Attempting to address deeply buried issues in order to make my peace with them so I can move past it has been a very triggering process, and also extremely reliant on trial and error.

When you make an error in your healing process, it can be devastating and a major setback in your daily life. But when you get it right… the pain and hard work all becomes worth it. Trust me. There is nothing more satisfying than thinking of a past situation that used to make you feel like you had the weight of the world of the shoulders, and realising that although it felt like it at the time, it didn’t kill you. Hell, you’d even be able to go through it again and be confident you can make it through again, if you had to. One day you’ll even be able to laugh at the situations that once tore you down, and with your newfound confidence be able to realise that at the end of the day… it wasn’t that deep (or, at least, not deep enough to kill you).

For this reason, I want to tie the messages from the previous posts of this Confidence Chronicles series together to make this post - confidence in your newfound confidence. Once you build a solid foundation of confidence in all aspects of your life, the next step is learning to adjust to the newfound energy, positivity and motivation that this confidence manifests itself as. I personally learned (and - in certain cases - am still learning) how to harness this “power” in the following ways: 

1. Slowly but surely trusting myself to believe in my own capabilities.

Do you want to know something that’s funny but at the same time not  funny? If not, tough sh*t because here it comes: despite writing so extensively about confidence, my own levels of confidence are somewhat unreliable at best.

As I’ve mentioned countless times before, I never write blog posts when I’m in a bad place mentally. In fact, every single post (except one) on here is written when I’m in a great mood, my mind is clear, my confidence levels are unbeatable and I can write about my bad times in an objective manner that doesn’t end up making me sad. A quick scroll through my past posts prove that it’s so easy to assume that I’m 100% over the hard things that I’ve written about on here, simply because I’ve become so good at realising my own past mistakes and how I should move forward. However, in reality, there’s usually not a day that goes by without the topics crossing my mind.

I’ve been told many a time by friends that while I’m excellent at giving advice and knowing exactly what measures to take to get over a situation, I’m not very good at applying said advice to myself. It’s very true, and very frustrating - reading my own posts back makes me realise that I already have the tools and capabilities required to be able to heal, but so far I only seem to be able to use these tools when I’m in a good place. For this reason, I struggle a fair amount with self-doubt in my authenticity as a mental health blogger, because what’s the point of preaching about self-love, self-care and bettering your mental health if your own mental health is in a complete shambles from time to time?

However, it’s not all bad, because the more I apply myself to think of solutions, apply said solutions to my own life and start seeing the benefits of constantly working on myself, the more confident I become that one day I’ll get to a stage where I can confidently write about my issues without this nagging feeling that I’m a fraud. Additionally, g-checking myself from time to time and making sure that I am actually following my own advice makes me increasingly more secure in the knowledge that I am extremely emotionally intelligent and do have enough experience to change my own life, as well as others’. 

I think the main thing here is to keep on doing whatever it is you’re trying to improve upon, and allow yourself to appreciate how far you’ve come on your journey as opposed to solely focusing how long you have to go. Regardless of if you’re doubting your capabilities in the workplace, your body goals, your ability to adapt to new situations or your creative ventures - or a combination of all four - it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate your progress.

Giving yourself a well-deserved pat on the back and focusing on how far you have come since the beginning gives you the chance to fully appreciate the hard work you’ve put in towards bettering yourself - which leads to you gradually feeling confident in trusting the power in your own capabilities over time.

2. Stopping the negative self-talk.

As it so happens, I have quite a dark and self-deprecating sense of humour - and so do many of my friends and my sister. Calling myself and others every offensive name under the sun as a joke is something that used to occur on a near daily basis, under the guise that it was all harmless banter. I’ve literally been doing this for as long as I can remember, but the past few months or so, I’ve really been trying to stop for a few reasons.

The main reason is that regardless of how harmless belittling your intelligence and capabilities as a joke may seem, doing it on a regular basis can lead to you internalising these notions and gradually starting to believe them. Although I genuinely thought that I was mentally resilient enough to be able to separate jokes from reality, whenever I’d fall into a bit of slump the first things that would come into my head were the things I’d said about myself as a joke. They would sting a lot, because in those moments I would genuinely believe them.

“God, I’m such a dumb b*tch”.

“Ugh, when did I become such a d*ckhead?”

“I swear to God.... I f*cking hate myself”

“Oh, great, so on top of being a dumb b*tch - I’m also a fat b*tch. Excellent”.

The mad thing is that I’m actually laughing while writing this, simply because I’m in a positive state of mind and know that it’s all a joke. I know I’m neither dumb, a d*ckhead, or fat. Nor do I hate myself anymore. But as soon as that Sunday night sadness hits (I know you all know what I’m talking about!), there I am - trying to choke back tears because I’ve managed to delude myself into thinking that the above is, in fact, true. For this reason, I’ve also tried to stop doing it to my friends, because I’d hate to think that they may be internalising something mean that I’ve said to them as a jOkE.

It’s also interesting to think why self-deprecating humour comes so easily to a lot of us. I can only speak for myself and certain friends that are similar to me in this aspect, but I genuinely think it’s because we’ve - very sadly - grown accustomed to being verbally abused and/or having our weaknesses constantly being picked at during our formative years - either in our home environments, school environments, or both. Instead of devising healthier methods of coping with and eliminating these internalisations, we’ve become reliant on using humour as a source of escapism from our nagging insecurities cast upon us by people around us. 

When I started seeing self-deprecating humour in this light, it actually made me quite sad. There I was, thinking that I should get into comedy for being so hilarious, when really it turned out to be just me being too scared to deal with my own insecurities. That’s when I knew things needed to change, and I’ve been working on this ever since.

Personally, the easiest way for me to reduce my negative self-talk has been to try to visualise how I would feel if a stranger (it used to be friends, but then I remembered that most of my friends are as tapped as I am) was saying it to me. I soon realised that if it had come from anyone else but myself or my friends, I’d be ready to throw hands over this literal verbal abuse. I am now trying my best to speak to and treat myself in the same way that a stranger or acquaintance would - with dignity, respect, honesty and with a regard for my own feelings (because, lo and behold, it is possible to be brutally honest and kind at the same time).

Of course, this is so much easier said than done - especially if you, like me, love a cheeky self-drag and dragging others (out of love, of course). However, this doesn’t have to mean that you can stop having fun - I’ve found that an eloquently worded drag meant to act as a wake-up call for me/someone else to improve my/their situation without having to resort to insults and name-calling is infinitely more creative, satisfying and efficient. Furthermore, I’ve found that g-checks that are based on constructive criticism as opposed to cruel insults give you a clearer image of how to improve yourself moving forward - which can only be a good thing.

Basically, just be patient and kind to yourself and others. Take on the constructive criticism received from yourself and your friends/family to work towards bettering yourself, and your confidence will follow.

3. Learning to trust the feelings of positivity and self-love.

This is by far the hardest one for me - and for good reason. When you’ve spent a large part of your teenage years and early adulthood believing that your capabilities and strengths are inadequate, that you’re ugly, that you’re not worthy of love and happiness, that your life has no purpose and that your family and friends would be better off without you, it’s nearly impossible to break free from this toxic downward spiral and to unlearn all of the behaviours and thought processes that have manifested as a result of these feelings. 

The keyword here is nearly.

Obviously, I can only speak for myself, but I would like to think that this could be applied to others as well. When I started this jOuRnEy, I honestly thought I’d never get to a place where I genuinely love every aspect of myself. Despite this, I kept pushing myself through the extremely triggering task of unpacking my toxic feelings - until one day I suddenly didn’t have them anymore. Or, at the very least, they suddenly no longer hurt me. Seemingly out of nowhere... I felt okay.

The sad but still understandable thing about suddenly coming to terms with who you are, what you’ve been through and feeling confident enough to move forward is that you don’t trust the feeling at first. At all. You tell yourself that it’s just one of the little upswings before everything comes crashing down around you again, dragging you back to step one, and you try to mentally prepare yourself for said downfall to happen.

But it doesn’t.

Sure, you might have little dips every now and again. You know that healing isn’t a linear process, so you assume that these little dips will lead to you spiralling again. But, to your surprise, they don’t - and you find yourself picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and moving forward with your life relatively unscathed and with more experience and wisdom than before. You start to get suspicious and a little scared because things are actually going alright for once. You’ve become so used to your life being so riddled with anxiety, insecurity, sadness and chaos and the good times being fleeting, that this new reality is extremely alien to you. 

This is where things can go one out of two ways.

Either your anxiety kicks in and you start self-sabotaging in different ways because you’re afraid that the longer things are going well, the harder the fall is going to be - so you might as well save yourself the pain by not pursuing things that could allow you to be happy. Or, you are able to tentatively start trusting and accepting the waves of love and positivity as your new reality - making you find the strength and confidence to move forward despite the past pain and hurt.

Personally, it took several rounds of self-sabotaging before getting to the point of learning to trust the positive feelings and  my confidence in all aspects of myself. I try not to beat myself up over all the opportunities I’ve turned down simply due to genuinely believing that I’m not good/smart/pretty/talented enough, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t make me sad from time to time. However, the more time that passes I get more and more confident that new, even better opportunities will come up for me - and I’ll be confident enough to embrace them without any hesitation when the time comes.

To wrap up this whole Confidence Chronicles series, I want to leave you all with this simple but true statement:

It gets better - if you’re willing to put in the work.

Regardless of which of the posts resonated with you the most, I need you to understand that building confidence takes time. I would even go as far as saying that it’s a never-ending journey, and that the learning to fully love and trust yourself and your capabilities is a never-ending process as life progresses. However, the more you work hard on your own betterment, the easier and smaller the challenges that arise from time to time become.

My ultimate wish is that we all one day can get to a place where we can trust ourselves enough to be happy and confident, regardless of what life throws at us. That whenever things that would usually send us down that spiral again pop up, we can just take a deep breath, count to ten, and be confident in the knowledge that the situation no longer has power over us, and that we will easily be able to work through it.

Until that day comes - never stop fighting.

Love,

Liv

[beneaththetangles]

Welcome to the Gift of Condescension

We’re proud to present a guest post today by blogger and Yale Divinity School student James, who has written series of articles for us in past about Planetarian and Steins;gate. Note: this essay is based solely on the anime adaptation of Welcome to the N.H.K. rather than the light novel or manga, whose stories differ in some respects. All quoted dialogue is from ADV’s English dub.

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Humans bristle when they suspect someone is being condescending toward them. Either pride impels them to reject a condescending person’s claim to superiority, or their own sense of inferiority drives them to isolate themselves, anything to escape the critical gaze of others.

Sato, the protagonist of Welcome to the N.H.K., falls into the second category. Whenever he goes out in public he is convinced everyone is looking down on him. As a result, at the start of the series he is a hikikomori, a college drop-out with no job who lives on his parents’ money and has barely left his apartment over the past four years.

However, he meets a girl named Misaki who is going door-to-door with her aunt passing out religious tracts on the growing social epidemic of hikikomori. She later summons him to a local park and announces her intention to “rescue” him. Her motivation? “I’m just a sweet little girl who wants to help you out.”

Coming from a perfect stranger, this would be odd even if Sato’s only flaws were his social ineptitude and crippling paranoia. But given that after only a few episodes the audience—and, to some extent, Misaki—can see he’s a porn-addled pervert, her persistence becomes downright uncanny: “It’s all right. I still just want to help you get better, you know?” Sato is understandably dumbfounded: “What’s up with that girl?! What the hell’s going on?!” On further reflection he wonders, “What if she’s like some guardian angel sent here to rescue me or something?”

Sato’s turn to a divine explanation for Misaki’s inexplicable behavior might seem fantastical to some, but it is actually quite natural. While the condescension humans have for one another is contemptuous, there is also such a thing as divine condescension, an attitude of mercy and grace that is devoid of cruelty or self-interest. The Bible teaches that God shows humanity such divine condescension, for example in Psalm 113:6–7, “He stoops to look down on heaven and on earth. He lifts the poor from the dust and the needy from the garbage dump.” Small wonder, then, that Sato begins to see Misaki as an angelic figure and accepts her help.

But this image of Misaki soon begins to crack when she suggests he deal with the insecurity born of his own personal failings by looking down on others—i.e., by practicing the human condescension Sato suspects everyone of showing toward him: “If you find it too difficult to elevate yourself, you just have to put everyone else below you. Just look down on them. That way, even if they do think you’re stupid, at least you’re even.” Misaki then blithely admits she does this herself when dealing with Sato, which naturally angers him. She tries to placate him, but her facade has already fractured.

Eventually Sato begins to question Misaki’s motives: “I don’t know who she is! I don’t know why she’s helping me or if she’s helping me! I’m completely in the dark.” He even wonders if she intends to keep him a hikikomori forever.

Sato’s suspicions are later shown to be justified when he is on the verge of committing suicide and she attempts to talk him down:

Sato, you’re not a rock on the side of the road! You’re a human being! That’s right! You’re a flesh-and-blood failure of a human being! You’re special! You’re the only one! More useless and an even bigger waste of flesh than I am! A hikikomori like you is even lower than a stray dog! I need you, Sato! I can’t live without you! So please…Sato…you just can’t die now, you can’t!

In short, Misaki’s apparent display of divine condescension toward Sato is really a display of human, all too human condescension. Far from rescuing him, her purpose is to enable his hikikomori lifestyle so she can continue to feel better by comparison. All human relationships are defined by this sort of callous self-justification, or so an old classmate of Sato’s named Megumi subsequently tells him:

I know you’re not stupid, Sato. By now I’m sure you’ve realized that this world is looking down on you. That they think you’re scum. Don’t you understand, Sato? They’re using you for their own selfish needs. Society wants hikikomori like you to exist. It makes them secure. It gives them someone to look down on. Even if their lives are falling apart they can always say, “At least I’m better off than that guy.” Don’t you see? This world’s dog-eat-dog! It’s a zero-sum game! If you don’t look down on others then they’re going to look down on you!

As to how Sato and Misaki’s relationship ends up, that is not our concern here. Rather let us ask, what are we to make of Sato’s search for grace? I would say his instinct in associating disinterested mercy with the divine is sound. Still, he was mistaken in trying to find such mercy in a mere human, for as Megumi rightly observes, people always seek to justify themselves. So too in Luke 18:11 the Pharisee prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”

The question thus becomes, is there any divinity in which we can find merciful condescension? Misaki, for her part, is convinced that “if there’s a God, then he’s evil for sure” because so much of life is spent in suffering: “Logically there’s no way a God who created such a horrible, unfair world can be a good person. So God is evil without any doubt. It’s the obvious truth.”

This objection to God is prevalent in anime (and, of course, among religious skeptics in general). I will not address the charge here, as others wiser than I have already responded. Nevertheless, I will say this: humans desire above all else to be known and loved despite their repulsiveness, and more than that, to become truly better people, to overcome their sins and failings. In these respects Sato is representative and gives us an opportunity to look hard at ourselves, if we can stand it. Welcome to the N.H.K. illustrates that we cannot hope to find such mercy and aid in mere humans, whether friends or lovers, but it stumbles in suggesting that God is, if anything, the problem rather than the solution.

Misaki insists that God made the world full of suffering as a divine conspiracy of sorts, but it is the first humans, Adam and Eve, who chose to sin and thereby brought suffering upon themselves and all who came after. Similarly, Sato’s old senpai Hitomi claims “there’s no such thing as a bad person,” but in reality the world is full of nothing but bad people. In our sorry state we grasp hungrily for understanding and absolution, but the only one who says to us, “I know you completely, yet I love you” is none other than Jesus the Christ, God in the flesh. He does not simply love us as we are and leave it at that, though – he cancels all our sins, past and future, and changes who we are, if we will trust, believe in, and follow him.

Thus, Christians believe divine condescension is real, that such condescension can be found in the person of Christ, and that in following him we are not only forgiven but also perfected. As it is written in Philippians 2:6–8, Christ,

Being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

Even after confessing faith in Christ our lives will be riddled with regressions, just as Sato resolves to leave behind his hikikomori ways multiple times and just as many times falls back into them. But God, despite our many failures, will grant us forgiveness if we turn again toward him and seek it, as it is written in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In this truly divine condescension toward our persistent weakness lies the perfect sweetness, rest, and comfort we are all too liable to look for in fallen humans.

O God, no man or creature can help or comfort me, so great is my misery; for my ailment is not physical or temporal. Therefore You, being God, and the One always able to help me, have mercy on me. For without Your mercy all things are terrifying and averse to me.

But I beseech You of Your kindness to have mercy on me—not the lesser mercy which you show temporarily for physical distress, but Your greater mercy which You show for the distress of the soul. Have mercy on me, and forgive me my sin. Amen. –Martin Luther

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James is student at Yale Divinity School who loves thinking about theology and how it factors into his favorite stories. His writings on theology, philosophy, and other topics can be found on Wordpress, and you can also find him on Twitter.

[andrewuttaro]

State of the Support (S1: Ep 1): Deafening Silence

State of the Support will be a reoccurring series on the Rochester Rhinos Soccer team written from a fan perspective. This series will follow the ups and downs of Soccer Support in Rochester, NY in one of its most trying times.  

After going on hiatus for 2018, David and Wendy Dworkin, the owners of Rochester’s winningest soccer club, went public with their plans to leave the downtown soccer stadium and return to play in 2020 in the newly formed USL League One. In spite of the relief of knowing our club would survive the frustration of waiting another year was difficult; especially as the American Soccer world, particularly the USL System, continued to grow more accessible by the month.

The wait has become maddening… but hope finds a way.

The Dworkins set out late in 2018 to find a location for a new soccer stadium. Getting to work on a 2020 relaunch of the Rochester Rhinos would be handled away from the prying, often overly critical eyes of Western New York media. After the last of their public statements in September 2018, we have heard nothing more from the Rhinos owners for many months... publicly at least. The waiting has driven even a few of the legendary club’s diehard supporters to doubt if their club is in fact gone forever.

The truest answers in life are often not simple. Why did the historic club, owner of the sole US Open Cup Title of a non-MLS franchise since 1996, go on hiatus in the first place? Shouldn’t support for such a club be bursting at the seams? How we got here is a long story that could be summed up in the word frustration: frustration the original owners of the organization spent themselves into bankruptcy, frustration that bankruptcy killed the very real chances to go to Major League Soccer, frustration Rochester missed MLS as that league now seemingly arrives at some position of stability and respectability, frustration USL reaches a similar critical mass just as Rochester slips from its growing fraternity. Frustration has been driving away the casual fan for a decade. Once again, the truest answers are not simple. Neither is the reason for this deafening silence.

Some fans during those glory years of the Rhinos, 1996-2006, say they grew out of supporting the team and vanished to the winds that way. Fans of an older generation speak of the downtown stadium being in a rough part of town and not wanting to bring their kids there. Some older fans will tell you about how the organization soured the relationship with families through their Youth teams stealing players from local travel leagues eight years ago. Still other fans just couldn’t bear the disappointment and bolted for more stable Major League Soccer teams. If you dare broach the topic of the Rhinos in Rochester you’ll hear a wild buffet of frustrations, not all based in reality. All of this wasn’t helped by the fact that from 2008-2015 the club was owned by a Syracuse banker named Rob Clark who couldn’t really be bothered to invest in the team.

That lack of investment fed into a vicious circle. The lack of investment led to lack of fan interest which led to decreasing attendance figures even as the club itself climbed back into championship form by the mid-2010s. Low investment lead to low interest which lead to low attendance which lead back to low investment. The cycle ate away at the organization even as they lifted the USL Cup in 2015. The fan support spiked up that year before returning to its downward trajectory. Then David and Wendy Dworkin entered the picture.

Their purchase of the club came with the intention of reversing the toxic trends with the community and making the legendary brand viable again within the Rochester market. Their mission saw the club brand’s popularity beyond the greater Rochester area and so they began thinking creatively. I don’t often defend millionaires, particularly those who own sports teams, but when I say the Dworkins were best case scenario for the Rochester Rhinos I really mean it. The podium read “Return of the Rhinos” at their introduction and that message guided their investment in the team, giving the club their all for two solid years. They appeared at community events, City functions and other sports venues in town. They held Q&As and brought in as many promotions as they could. When the lines at concessions got too long they stepped in pouring beers and ringing up hot dogs. Unlike their predecessors they were on the field at games, circling over to the supporters afterwards to shake hands.

It follows then that after the hiatus set in they were not absent from the orbits of local soccer supporters. As the small circles of Rhinos supporters found each other and coalesced during the first 18 months of the hiatus the Dworkins answered Facebook comments, tweets and followed lowly bloggers like the one you’re reading right now. They continue to be here for the Flower City Faithful, to anyone and everyone seeking to be a part of the Rochester Soccer Family. While they’re still keeping the details of their work under wraps they often answer questions about the club we love. But once again: the truest answers are often complicated.

So what is it? Are they actually coming back in 2020? Where are they going to play if the downtown stadium is a no go? If they’re not going to fold and they don’t have stadium plans public yet then what’s going on? We don’t know. The silence will remain deafening for now against the echo of the questions we cannot have answered yet. That realization hit many Rhinos supporters as the hiatus dragged into its second year. While many Rhinos diehards emerged from the ranks of the legions of English Premier League supporters in Rochester, others shouted their support for the missing club into the cavernous expanse of the internet. At some point early in 2019 all those supporters found each other, and the ROC City Regulars were born.

Breaking the deafening silence those supporters formed something of a supporter’s group of supporter’s groups, a supporter’s association if you will. Emerging from varying pre-existing groups like the Flower City Reds, the Regs as we’ve made ourselves known have each other for support in the Rhinos silence until the next phase is known. United by a love for Soccer and the Flower City, the Regs are working to create one coalition to support Rochester soccer. Support for the Rhinos themselves isn’t lost on us, always attentive to the moves of former Rhinos players across the continent. We have been gathering at home matches for the NPSL side in town, the Rochester Lancers, in the meantime. While some of us just want to drink a beer and watch soccer, others come from the shouting, singing European style support of the Oak Street Brigade. There is no wrong way to support Rochester Soccer as a ROC City Regular. Whatever comes next, there will be one unified voice for Rochester Soccer Supporters for years to come.

Or at least that’s what we want you to think. There is a certain soccer frailty in Rochester right now. The same frailty that exists in supporters of soccer in this country’s many, far flung towns and cities not big enough or rich enough for a franchise of a higher caliber. The Oak Street Brigade is more or less on hiatus as well right now like the team. They are the last surviving Rhinos supporters’ group and in the limited conversations I’ve shared with that group they’re awaiting an announcement from the Dworkins to make their next move. If, god forbid, that announcement is a negative one… OSB probably takes a very serious look at its own existence. Though the ROC City Regulars is a young group, I struggle to imagine our reaction in such a scenario would be much different.

Our Rhinos-loving hearts are fragile right now. In the deafening silence they cannot be broken. When the silence is broken we can only hope our hearts won’t be broken too.

Run with us. Run with the Rhinos.

Thanks for reading.

[arabellaflynn]

So the confusing unexpected birthday party went pretty okay. And by 'pretty okay' I mean the room as a whole achieved a level of drunkenness that inspired everyone to share reminiscences of previous instances of drunkenness. It turns out that several of the old guard went to college together, so I got to hear tales of shit-faced shenanigans that occurred while I was still learning to walk. One of them brought his sister, with whom I had a thoughtful discussion about how tequila is a series of terrible decisions in a bottle. Helpful hint: When someone starts out their story with a trick question like, "Okay, if you were completely hammered, would you rather crawl naked into bed with [dude who is standing RIGHT THERE, participating in the conversation], or crawl naked into bed with a total stranger?" the only reasonable response is to pause thoughtfully for half a second and say, "Well, what does this total stranger look like?" I didn't get to hear the rest of the story, as they were both doubled over laughing, but it did keep me out of worse trouble. All of which is to say that I am now apparently part of this social circle, which is a difficult thing to wrap my head around, as one of the centerpieces of it is the Executive Artistic Director here at the studio. While there is no real separation between the volunteer corps and the clientele who teach and dance here -- which is lovely and a complete 180 from all the things that irked me about the church-based groups I encountered in Arizona -- there is a definite hierarchy that emerges in the people who run the place. The volunteers are at the bottom, mainly because they are almost all new kids and most of them vanish before a year is up; then the event staff and stage crew, who get contracts and are paid actual money; then the semi-permanent office staff, who have weekly meetings to which the lower ranks are not invited; then the EAD, who answers mainly if not solely to the board. The facilities manager is pretty integral, but also pre-dates literally everything except the physical building, cannot be forced into staff meetings if she doesn't feel like going, and is not argued with when she puts her foot down about the budget. And then there is me. I have been convinced for a while that I am the only person here who talks to all of the other departments, and have yet to see any evidence to suggest otherwise.  They like to put me in charge of things when someone else has an emergency and can't be here. Which is fine, until I point out that I need something in order to do that properly, at which time they remind me of my place in the world. Nobody is irreplaceable, and I do try to stay in my lane enough to make life easier on all of us, but if I got hit by a bus they would definitely notice. None of this is any particular secret, although for the sake of my sanity I've decided it's probably best to not mention any birthday parties to the randos at the desk with me. Explaining the whole thing would be stupidly complicated, especially to people who don't know who Mr. New York Producer is, why he's a VIP here, or what kind of God-given obliviousness prompted him to invite crew to the EAD's birthday bash. It genuinely is obliviousness, I've decided, plus for whatever reason he likes me. This is the third year running that someone has come barrelling out of the woodwork going HELLO, FRIEND! and I'm left going hello, er, what? When did this happen? Why do you know who I am? Once is a miracle, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action my annual springtime tradition, apparently. He has started hugging me on a regular basis, which is pretty normal around here, and also developed a habit of catching my hand briefly on his way out, which is less so. For those of you not in theater, hugging is a common form of communication. Most people use it for 'hello' and 'goodbye', much like the cheek-kiss common in Europe; many also use it for 'thanks' and 'congrats' and 'sympathy'; and some pretty much just default to 'we appear to be existing in the same room, and I don't particularly dislike you'. Theater people are a huggy bunch, is my point. It's not an especially cosmic sign, but it does mean I've transitioned from the Geselleschaft 'person who works at the venue' to the Gemeinschaft 'person I know'. The hand-catch is not common, and in fact I've been operating on the assumption that it's a bit of ballroom dialect, as the only people who do it regularly are Ye Ballroom Instructor and the Eccentric. It's a generalized acknowledgement whose exact significance depends on context, but one of its most common meanings is 'thanks for the dance', when the room is too noisy for speaking. How cosmic -- or not -- that sign is, I've no idea. The Eccentric does things like that a lot because he is very invested in his friendships, and I know that because we've had that discussion in so many words. Ye Ballroom Instructor is harder to get a bead on, since he'd really rather gnaw his own arm off than talk about any of this. (It's worth noting that the most overtly panicked I've ever seen him was when he was about to say something he was afraid would make me think he didn't want me hanging around, and the only time I've ever heard him raise his voice was when he was worried he hadn't gotten across that that WAS. NOT. TRUE.) I make most of my friends the normal way, by having conversations with them over time, but those two are the main examples I have for people who woke up one morning and decided to write my name on their list of Favorite People, and forgot to send me a notification. I find the English language fails here. This is yet another case of, "would definitely be flirting if it were not you," and there is no good way to talk about that. We have eighty million ways to describe the things you do to try to charm your way into someone's pants, but nothing fit for purpose when talking about someone who is just trying very, very, very earnestly to make friends. I also find it disconcerting when the people I pay attention to pay attention back. Were it not for the embargo I keep on the real names of people I have to interact with in person, I would post video of some of his performances. They are in many ways of a kind with the things I post about people like Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett, or Stephen Colbert and John Stewart -- one of his specialties, whether or not he is aware of it, is just to connect with whoever he's dancing with, and make that connection part of the piece. His group comes through 2-3 times a year, and I used to sneak off to the balcony to watch whatever bits he was doing. Things on stage are fair game for me to gawk at. Couldn't tell you how much of it is intentional acting and how much is just what happens when he performs, but given how he's behaving with me now, I'm guessing this is just sort of a running theme in his life. from Blogger http://bit.ly/2Wg6ock via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? 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