#janes world. irrevocably altered

[mappingthesky]

not a prompt necessarily but I’m always down for planymphia angst 🙏🙏🙏

in response to multiple asks i’ve received for planymphia angst… here is this <3

i know baby, no attachment

None of this had been in the plan.

It was the first thing they’d talked about that first night in Jane’s apartment; Neither of them were looking for anything serious. They were both unavailable, incapable of making any promises. Not now. Not yet. It would be clean, simple, no strings attached. Just two people using each other. Innocently, admittedly using each other, but using each other nonetheless.

They’d been on the couch in Jane’s dimly lit apartment. Jane was an obvious sort of gorgeous. It was the first thing Nymphia had noticed about her, what drew her in on that first night they’d met: she’d been wearing something meant to lure you in, hypnotized by the clinging of her clothes to her body, the wave of her hair, her eyes tightlined and sharpened like knives. Jane was almost lethal to look at, all done up and primed to kill; the most magnetic friend-of-a-friend Nymphia had ever been introduced to. She was somehow even more gorgeous now, sitting on the couch in her casual clothes, her face aglow in the light of the television, her auburn hair pulled up into a messy top knot. She was painfully, effortlessly attractive, and, much to Nymphia’s surprise, only so much of a smooth talker. She came off suave at first, all punchlines and quick remarks, but after a while Nymphia could start to see her thinking. Jane would be in the middle of a sentence, flying through it, hurtling towards some revelation, and then she’d catch herself. She’d pause, freeze on a word and scoff at it, like she was considering whether whatever she was about to say would be worth the sentiment. And then she’d go a bit shy, averting her eyes and playing with the pilling on the upholstery, giving away just how carefully considered she was. And just when Nymphia was starting to think that Jane was completely nervous to her core, that Nymphia might actually have the upper hand in this situation, Jane would bring it back. She’d pick her head up and let the words go, say something so stunningly direct and devastating. It left Nymphia a little breathless, a little too endeared, a little too eager to kiss her.

They could have guessed at the chemistry, but it didn’t come close to the real thing.

What happened when Jane’s skin hit Nymphia was the sort of collision that produced suns and planets and supernovas, flinging particles off into space with enough pressure to form entire worlds. Nymphia could practically see the stars behind her eyes, fluttering shut when Jane was hovering above her, hand between her legs, finding some undiscovered place that Nymphia didn’t know had been there all along, waiting to be found. Jane turned Nymphia’s body into something more than it was before, transforming her irrevocably. Jane was a comet crashing through her atmosphere, and Nymphia was awe-struck, staring at the sky and watching the sparks shower. You can’t be prepared for such life-altering things, it's what makes them so devastating.

What neither of them could have predicted was the ease of what came after - the lying in bed, talking about it. The debrief. Nymphia was a bit too happily fucked, and unwilling to share the extent of her satisfaction. She was worried she would come off easy, inexperienced somehow. Jane, however, was endlessly attentive. She wanted Nymphia’s experience of the encounter, all the details - what she liked, what satisfied her the most, what she wanted more of. Her sheer desire to please was enough to pull the details out of Nymphia. She was rewarded when Jane allowed her to relive it, this time through Jane’s eyes. Jane’s gaze was far off with remembering, a smile playing at her lips as she recounted her experience of Nymphia in such erotic detail, every telling arch and shudder, and the whole thing was so overwhelmingly flattering that it sort of made Nymphia want to do it all over again.

Nymphia had known better than to pack an overnight bag. She thought she had, anyway.

Her eyes were closed and she was nearly asleep when she’d mumbled, ‘I should be going soon.”

Jane just chuckled. “You’re half asleep already.” Her fingers trailed up the curve of Nymphia’s thigh. “Just spend the night. If you want to.”

Nymphia's eyes were suddenly open, “Yeah?” Jane traced stars onto her hip.

“Mhm,” Jane hummed, eyes flickering up, then back to the curve of Nymphia’s waist.

Nymphia closed her eyes, savored in the feeling of Jane on her skin. A long moment passed.

“D’you cuddle? Or is that against the rules.”

Jane’s hum was an amused look at you asking so soon. She was already pulling Nymphia to her chest.

That first night turned into a three-day sleepover, because of course it did. Nymphia and Jane stretched themselves over the long arc of the weekend, sharing the sort of welcome, unexpected ease that you can’t put down, the kind that you’ll happily destroy your routine over and resign yourself to picking up the pieces after the fact. One weekend became another, and then occasional nights at Nymphia’s apartment with the door shut and her duvet crumpled at the end of the bed. And then they added the weekday rendezvous: Nymphia meeting Jane at her place after work on Thursday evenings, promising not to keep her up late and failing miserably, leaning her head on Jane’s shoulder in the morning as she locked the door on her way out. And then Nymphia was bleeding into Jane’s week, her Tuesdays and Wednesdays, her breakfasts and dinners, her late-night ice cream cravings and subsequent walks to 7-11. And then it was all too regular: Nymphia and Jane, Jane and Nymphia.

It's been a few months now, and there are so many things Nymphia loves about Jane.

She loves how Jane drives with one hand on her thigh, or with her fingers in her mouth. How she looks over to the passenger seat with that special look that's reserved just for Nymphia, and makes her feel like the only person she's ever wanted. She loves how she listens to her music loud, sings along when she’s drunk and tossing her hair, or when it's Sunday morning and she’s at the stove and there’s a record spinning in the living room. Nymphia loves how unabashed Jane is, how bold. How she never hesitates when it comes to the people in her life, how to be loved by Jane is to be fiercely defended by her. Nymphia loves how Jane kisses her in the middle of her sentences, especially when she's talking too much. She loves that Jane is so rough. How she can fuck her like she hates her. She loves how Jane can be so tender. How she can fuck her soft and slow, as reverent as religion. How Jane can make a mess of her, then put her back together again.

There are so many things Nymphia hates.

She hates that Jane is so impulsive, how she strikes so thoughtlessly, how she has to return to the wounds later to draw the venom out of them. How Jane is so stubborn, so set in her ways, so inflexible. How there’s two Janes - the one she’s with now, the one she is around her friends. The one who doesn’t kiss her, hardly touches her aside from a possessive arm around her shoulder or a tap on her knee. How the real Jane, Nymphia’s Jane, emerges as soon as they’re alone together, the one who will see her downturned gaze on the way home and coo what can I do, princess? Hmm? What can I do to see that pretty smile? Nymphia hates that she forgives Jane so easily, that she crumbles every time, that she loves Jane completely and entirely and beyond any measure of hurt that she could unknowingly inflict upon her.

She hates that she’s still sitting at this party, long after Jane promised they’d leave. She hates that Jane’s friends clearly like her; they laugh at Nymphia’s jokes, compliment her shoes, send knowing glances and winks across the room every time Jane so much as mentions her name. She hates how, when they ask what they are, Jane is all too quick to brush them off.

It's obvious that Nymphia’s upset by the way she pounds up the stairs, by the way she wordlessly digs through her purse for her keys, by the way the anger and the hurt and the disappointment emanate from her like poison.

“I just can’t believe they asked that,” Jane scoffs. Nymphia says nothing, gritting her teeth as she turns the key in the lock.

It should be obvious, but Jane is a bit too self-absorbed to notice.

“Like, we don’t even know what we are,” Jane says, and Nymphia feels sick, because she thought she did. “Why would she put me on the spot like that? In front of everyone?”

Nymphia pushes into the apartment, beelining for the kitchen.

“I mean, it was weird, right?” Jane continues, relentless. “Why do they need to know so bad?”

“Yeah,” Nymphia’s voice is hard, laced with venom. She chucks her keys onto the counter with a little too much force. “Why would they?”

“Right,” Jane doesn’t notice. “It would be nice if they could just let us-“

“I don’t know why they could possibly be so confused.” Nymphia interrupts, working off her thigh-highs.

Jane misses a beat. “Wait. Are you-“

“I can’t fucking imagine why they’d think that we’re together.” Nymphia lets her boots drop to the floor, one gut-wrenching smack after the other.

Jane blinks, brows knit together. Nymphia straightens up, fumbles with things on the counter that don’t need to be fumbled with. “Are you upset about this?”

“Why would I be upset?” Nymphia picks up a stray mug, sets it down again. “You just told all of your friends that we’re nothing serious. Why would I ever be upset about that, Jane?”

“I didn’t say that, Nymph,” Jane starts, already on the defense. “I said that we’re something.”

“Oh, right. My bad.” Nymphia scoffs. “We’re something. Let me know when you’re ready to illuminate me on whatever the fuck that means, Jane.”

Jane recoils at Nymphia’s profanity, unfamiliar with her frustration. She’s never seen her like this- so hurt, so ready to retaliate.

It's not funny. Jane shouldn’t laugh. She really shouldn’t, but she’s viscerally uncomfortable and horrifically unprepared for this situation, so she does anyways. “Are you really angry about this?”

The whole thing is white hot and embarrassing, and Nymphia has tears in her eyes when she turns and whips her purse to the floor.

Jane jumps. “What the fuck?” She’s wide-eyed, both hands held up in shock. “Nymphia. Are you serious right now?”

“I don’t know Jane,” Nymphia bites. “Are you serious?”

“What?”

“I kinda thought you might be,” Nymphia steps over her bag. “Y’know, because you cut me a key to your fucking apartment. I thought maybe that constituted we were more than,” she curls her fingers in the air, “something”.

Jane shakes her head, jaw tight and temple pulsing. When she speaks, it's in a lower voice, almost ashamed. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“You never want to talk about it!” Nymphia’s voice cracks, a desperate wail. Jane’s mouth opens, already halfway towards defending herself until she looks at Nymphia and sees her bottom lip quivering, the spilling over of her tears. Jane looked back with a concerned, almost panicked expression, lips frozen and slightly parted.

“Do you love me, Jane? Do you even fucking like me?”

Nymphia surprises herself with the question. She’s so amped up, so high on adrenaline that she lets it all out- the culmination of weeks of words she’d bitten back, suddenly pouring forth from where they’d been collecting in a lump in her throat.

“No, seriously, do you? Because I can’t fucking tell. I think you do, because- because you say all these beautiful things, and you spend so much time with me, and you take such good fucking care of me. So you must fucking love me, right? But when your friends ask, I have to sit there and listen to you tell them that we’re something. Like it’s so fucking confusing to you. Like it's a goddamn secret. Do you know what that feels like?”

Nymphia is fully pacing now, walking the length of the kitchen over and over again. Jane follows her with wincing, pained eyes.

What Nymphia hates, more than anything, is that she doesn’t hate Jane at all. Not for any of it.

“I’m fucking in love with you, Jane, alright?” Nymphia whines, hands whipping through the air with frustration. “I’m so in love with you, and everybody fucking knows it. Your friends, my friends, my mom, everyone! But no one seems to have any goddamn clue if you love me too. And you know what? I’m not sure if I do, either.”

When she finally expels the last of the words from the hole in her heart, Nymphia looks up through her tears. She can barely stomach the sight of Jane, lips parted and wordless, unsure of what to do with the outpouring of Nymphia’s heart. She stares at her, eyes twisted in pain, then looks to the ground, like Nymphia’s words have slid off her and collected in a puddle at her feet. Nymphia just cries, a pained and exhausted whimper on her lips as she pushes past Jane and into the living room. She collapses on one end of the couch, pulling her knees to her chest and hiding her face behind one hand, hot tears sliding down her cheeks and into her mouth.

Jane stands in the center of the room with her back turned, still facing the phantom of Nymphia’s words that may very well haunt her kitchen forever. Her head is spinning, because how the fuck did this happen. Nymphia is openly sobbing behind her, and the sound is so gut-wrenching that Jane is nauseated.

Nymphia makes a horrible, shuddering gasp for air and Jane finally breaks, crossing the room and dropping to her knees on the floor where Nymphia sits. She doesn’t even look at her, just sobs, and Jane can physically feel her heart fucking breaking.

“Nymphia,” she says, placing her palm on Nymphia’s knee. “Nymph. Hey.”

Nymphia shakes her head, face contorted with tears. She flinches at Jane’s hand like it fucking hurts, and Jane winces as the guilt slices through her. She exhales a sharp puff of defeat and drops her head in hurt.

Nymphia just cries and cries, and the reality of the situation sinks in Jane’s stomach with every sob. She’s sick to her stomach with concern, worried that Nymphia might actually fucking hyperventilate, and then she’s gently begging the girl to breathe. She goes to reach for Nymphia again and pauses, scared to reach out, scared to hurt Nymphia, scared that she’ll recoil from her again. It’s then that Jane knows, for the first time in all of her life, what she wants. She knows, right as it threatens to slip out of her hands.

“I’ve never done this before.”

Jane hears her own voice. Her words hang in the air for a moment, floating like smoke between Nymphia’s shaky, shattered breaths. Jane looks up.

“This,” she says, a tentative hand on Nymphia’s knee. “What you and I have. I’ve never-”

The words are hard for Jane to stomach. They don’t pour out like Nymphia’s do. They catch in her throat, feel wrong in her mouth. She’s not sure they’ll be enough.

“I’ve never had this with anyone,” she says. “I’ve never wanted to. Not until now.”

Nymphia wipes at her eyes, shudders a bit as her breathing quiets.

“I, um,” Jane glances down, scared to look. “I don’t know how.”

Nymphia finally looks at Jane, so small and nervous and crumbling at her feet. She wants to take her hand, to show her, to be endlessly patient even if it kills her. The desire is so enormous, even now. She almost hates herself for it.

“I know I’m fucking it up,” Jane says to the floor, her voice tiny and wavering. “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that.”

“I just need to know,” Nymphia whispers.

Nymphia swallows hard, and then Jane looks up and its so fucking harrowing, so moving, because Nymphia can see the guilt in her eyes, the desire, the glimmer of words she can’t figure out how to say. She watches as she considers, catches herself, lets it go.

“I do.” Jane says. Nymphia’s heart plummets, because she knows what she means.

“I don’t want to say it now,” Jane says. “I don’t want it to be an apology. I want you to know I mean it. Is that okay?”

Nymphia nods and Jane mutters over and over I do, I do, you know I do.

It's beautiful and tragic and overwhelming, and Nymphia wants to crash into Jane, to merge together and surpass the need for words entirely. It's too soon to know yet if it's for better or for worse, only that she does it - that she reaches out and takes Jane’s hand.

“I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it.” There’s a hint of a smile on her lips, a bit of Jane laughing at herself. “But I want to try.”

Nymphia just nods and feels more tears streaming down her cheeks, and Jane’s crying too, and then they’re crashing into each other. Nymphia is leaning down and throwing her arms around Jane, who is sitting forward and clinging to her like she’s scared to let her go. Like she caught a shooting star in her bare fucking hands.

It's a whisper against her hair, but Nymphia hears it. “Can I try again?”

Nymphia could hate herself for it for all of forever. She’s prepared to. Jane doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she doesn't either. Nymphia nods anyway.

It's a new world, one of their own making. It's unexplored, uncharted, and they’re venturing into it together, hand in shaking hand. It's dangerous. She’s doing it anyway. She might hate herself for it. It might be the bravest thing she’s ever done.

[therealvinelle]

Maybe this is bold of me to ask, but are there any deleted scenes from your fics, or scenes you had consideted writing but didn't? And if yes, would you be willing to share them someday?

Oh no problem!

Usually when a scene is deleted it stays deleted, so I don't have a lot to give you. There are a few things that were cut in betaing for various reasons, I can put a few of them below a readmore in this post.

There's the prologue that never was to Nebuchadnezzar's Dream, from back when the fic was supposed to be told alternately from Bella and Carlisle's respective points of view. In the prologue we saw how Bella, Alice, and Edward came to the point where they decided to overthrow the Volturi. Or, we would have, except I didn't actually like that prologue, and found myself jumping straight to writing chapter 2, the "Carlisle is at a party and gets attacked by a werewolf" chapter instead. My good beta @theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin asked why I didn't simply make the whole fic from Carlisle's point of view, I realized she had an excellent point, now here we are.

For that matter, this is nowhere near the only significant change that happened to this fic during writing. One example, in the original outline I never brought up Carlisle's gift. Two significant things in the last chapter were not planned until after I published chapters twelve and thirteen, respectively (Luckily for me it'll look like I plotted them all along, so yay for that). For a tightly plotted fic, this one has had a lot of leeway.

Slight caveat, as I’m self-conscious: with most of these you will probably be able to tell why they’re deleted scenes. Especially the prologue. God, that prologue.

(Also, for the record yes I do write other things, but due to 1. being betaed, and 2. being long, I really only have examples for Nebuchadnezzar's Dream.)

The prologue that never was. Apologies for the fluff saturation:

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II once had a dream.

There was a statue that was gold on top, then silver, then copper, then iron, then clay and iron. As he watched, a rock struck its feet, and soon the whole statue crumbled, leaving nothing but rubble. The rock then grew into a great mountain that covered all the world.

This, the prophet Daniel told the king, was a message from Jehovah.

The statue represented five great human empires, the golden head being the Babylonian Empire, and the following three being those who would come after. The last would be both iron and clay, a divided kingdom. It will fall, and then the kingdom of Heaven will come, crushing those empires in its path.

Thousands of years later, in 1453, the Byzantine Empire fell. The last of the Roman Empire, a divided kingdom, had fallen.

The Christian world trembled, because reckoning was surely near. With the fall of this last, great human empire, all the world would fall to rubble.

-

Fifteen years had passed.

The Cullens had left Forks behind, settling in the small town of Grafton, Idaho. Carlisle had quickly settled into the new hospital, and Esme had designed a beautiful new home for them while the rest attended the new school. Jasper and Rosalie were Carlisle’s younger siblings while Bella, Edward, Renesmée and Esme comprised another set of siblings. Alice and Emmett were the fosters.

Jacob wasn’t far, he still lived with his old .

«Did you hear they all scored an A on Mr Rosen’s test? Seriously, all of them!»

The words were uttered by Jenna Gilbert, a blonde sophomore who reminded Bella very much of Jessica Stanley. She was sitting on the opposite end of the cafeteria from Bella and her family, though

«Jen, it’s the Cullens, that’s just what they do. You should stop comparing yourself…» her friend said soothingly.

Bella ducked her face into her hand to hide her smile, and winked at Alice, who grinned back at her.

It was Bella and Renesmée’s first time going to high school as a vampire. It was exactly what Edward and Alice had said it would be, for better and for worse.

For the worse, because she spent her days pretending to be a human girl, never using her strength or speed, pretending Edward wasn’t her husband and Renesmée wasn’t her daughter.

For the better, because she got to spend every day with Edward, Renesmée, and the rest of her new family. The others had done the high school routine too many times to see things the way she did, and Renesmée had never known a life without the Cullens, but to Bella, attending high school as one of Dr. Cullen’s adoptive kids felt like she had truly come full circle since that first day she spotted Edward in the cafeteria. She was one of them, truly, irrevocably, and high school was nothing if not a promise of the countless years to come surrounded by the people she loved.

Edward caught her eye, and she smiled back at him. She lowered her shield briefly to show him how happy she was to be with her family.

His face softened into that beautiful, lop-sided smile of his, and he leaned in to whisper into her ear, «You’ll be less happy when you’ve been through English 101,» he said.

«Hey, hey,» Jasper said quickly. «Don’t you dare, Edward, I need all the happiness I can get in this place.» He locked eyes with Bella. «Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.»

Bella laughed, and rested her head on Edward’s shoulder. He placed his hand above hers on the table, and she smiled. «Not a problem, Jazz.»

Jenna’s voice caught her notice again. «Look at how they’re sitting! Try and tell me they’re not incestuous, Cam. Just try.»

Her friend didn’t reply to that one, although a quick glance informed Bella that the girl was staring at the Cullen table with a frown on her face.

Bella and Alice caught each others’ eye again, and this time they couldn’t hold back the giggles.

***********

Later in the day, Alice’s eyes lit up. «You’ll receive a letter from Stefan and Vladimir a week from now,» she chirped.

«Oh!» Bella exclaimed. «What does it say?»

«The usual,» Alice replied, her eyes slightly distant as she concentrated. «They hope we’re all doing well, and they included a new story of how things used to be before the Volturi. It’s the story of how they once built an entire temple for themselves in just one day. Oh, and they have a new phone number. O-seven nine six five nine six.»

Bella’s eyes widened as Alice talked. She hoped they had included drawings of that temple, it sounded incredible.

Bella hadn’t expected the Romanians to stay in touch, when they left after the thwarted battle with the Volturi she thought they would slink back into the old European shadows they had cloaked themselves in for that past several thousand few years, not to be heard from until some new threat to the Volturi loomed.

But no, that very next Christmas Bella had received a gift from them. It was an old, if flaked painting of Ivan the Terrible looking a lot like Vladimir, and a note from Vladimir explaining how he fooled all of Russia into believing he was their ruler for decades, all right beneath Aro’s nose. Carlisle had broken into a fit of uncharacteristic giggles when he heard that, and even agreed to put the painting in the hallway. To this day, he’d huff with silent laughter whenever he walked past it.

After that, Bella and the two Romanians had been in touch. They’d send her gifts, stories, and their own observations about the Volturi, and she’d respond fondly.

It was a very unlikely friendship, but she was was eternally grateful to all those who had stood with her family when the Volturi came. The Romanians were no exception,

«Are you going to call them?» Alice inquired.

Bella nodded. «They were going to tell me about their visit to Thebes.»

(Outline: Prologue of sorts. Status quo update, everyone’s happy except for the part where the Volturi are waiting to kill them. Alice, Bella, and Edward form their plan. Alice sees that she’s going to have to send Carlisle away, and coincidentally his hospital colleagues are having their Christmas weekend in Montana. PERFECT. She talks to him.)

***********

Heavily altered scene from chapter 7

Carlisle makes more jokes than he did in the final product, they're unfunny to the point where my beta said "you can't publish this", the plague joke in particular is a bit too dark for him so I gave it to Jane instead. More importantly, the chapter itself has a very weird, clunky start:

«Is it the gift of being profoundly unimpressed by ridiculous claims?» Carlisle deadpanned. «Because if so, Aro, I think you might be on to something.»

Several seconds had passed since Aro made his ridiculous claim. At first, Carlisle had burst out laughing. Then, as he realized he was the only person in the room laughing and Aro was staring at him in full seriousness, his laughter had trailed off and he’d been left to stare dully at Aro for several long seconds, waiting for Aro to crack up and say «gotcha!».

Aro never cracked up.

Carlisle had absolutely no idea what Aro was playing at, especially not immediately after Carlisle had very reluctantly decided against shutting him out of his life.

«You can’t be serious,» he’d said.

Aro had sighed. «I’m afraid I am.»

And now, at Carlisle’s deadpan guess, Aro only shook his head. «Not quite.»

Carlisle stared at him for another second, before he ventured another, scathing guess. «Are you hoping it’s the power of being highly suggestible? Because I definitely don’t have that, or I would have abandoned my diet centuries centuries ago.»

Aro just looked at him. «If you would let me explain-» he began, but Carlisle cut him off.

«No, no, you want to try and convince me I have some sort of gift, then I want to guess at what you’re going for,» he said, crossing his legs at the knee and propping his chin up on his knuckle in a faux-pensive look.

«Now,» he continued, even as Aro gave him the world’s most unimpressed glare, as if Carlisle was the one who was being ridiculous, «I’m pretty sure I would have noticed the power to throw fireballs by now, so it can’t be that,» he mused aloud. «Same goes for the power of…» he searched his mind, «turning into a bat. That one would definitely have come up at some point. Or maybe I should suspend myself upside down in a cave. See if it triggers anything. Just to be sure.»

«Carlisle,» Aro murmured, but Carlisle wasn’t done.

«Maybe I spread disease. My father certainly thought demons did. Maybe that’s why I get so many interesting patients. Those brain fungi,» he nodded towards Renata, who was still sitting with the book open in her lap, «I’ve had two in one year. That’s a lot.»

«Carlisle-» Aro tried again, but Carlisle held up a finger, a wide grin spreading across his face.

«The power to change my eye color. You see, yesterday they were black-»

Aro actually rolled his eyes at that. Of course, he made the insolent gesture look like a fluid, enchanting movement.

«Yes, quite funny, now if you would let me explain…» Aro tried again while Carlisle tried not to snicker at his own joke.

***********

Two deleted paragraphs from chapter 9. The alteration was made because it was a bit on the nose about what Renesmée does.

Humans were mammals, and mammals were hardwired to protect their young. This extended across species, making mother cats care for puppies and humans care for anything that was small and cute. The instinct to love and cherish anything cute and helpless was an evolutionary necessity, and had to run deeper than anything if a species wanted to survive.

Enter Jane, who was the smallest, cutest thing Carlisle had ever seen, but from a species humans instinctively knew to fear. Maybe the very fact that she was something that humans knew they should want to care for made their fear exponential, made it impossible to deny that something was very wrong about her, that they were looking at a predator.

Perhaps too there was something to vampires having retained some of that human instinct to protect their young, if the countless stories of covens dying to protect their immortal children was anything to go by. Carlisle himself had been no exception when the Volturi came for Renesmée, even as he found himself risking the lives of countless friends.

How far things had come, he thought, from preparing to die along with his loved ones at the hands of the Volturi to sitting across a café table with Jane and pitching costume ideas.

***********

Chapter 9 was heavily altered, mainly as it was too funny the first (and second!) time around and I kept having to return to insert more existential dread. A side effect of this is that Carlisle in the original draft was still undecided on whether he had a gift up until the very end of the chapter, whereas it's proven beyond a doubt much earlier in the published version.

Jane was looking a bit daunted, though it was nothing compared to how Carlisle felt.

Silently, they went to stand in front of one of the many sports stores that Whitefish had to offer.

«This could still be confirmation bias,» Carlisle whispered, and leaned against the wall. For all the human blood that was in his system, his knees felt oddly weak.

Jane let out a startled laugh. «You’re seriously still in denial?»

Carlisle shook his head quietly. «They reacted pretty reasonably, just because they didn’t run away screaming…»

«Reasonably?» Jane echoed dully. «Carlisle, you can’t actually…» she shook her head. «Remember that bubble we talked about?»

Carlisle put his head in his hands, and let his fingers move up, under the wig, pulling it off in one neat motion.

Jane shook her head at him. «You look even more glamorous with your real hair.»

Carlisle still said nothing, balling the wig together in his hands.

Could it be he actually had a gift?

***********

The chapter 11 outline originally had Renata and Carlisle failing to communicate like normal people because they've spent too much time with Aro, and unintentional innuendo keeps ruining their attempts to make polite small talk. Sadly (or happily) this is a lot easier to conceptualize than carry out in actual writing, and their conversation wound up being far too serious for that, so it was cut. Luckily for you I did pen Carlisle flashbacking to a time his foot got in his mouth:

The moment after the words were out her face scrunched up.

Carlisle snorted. «Aro is a horrible influence on us all.»

He remembered one of his first talks with Jasper, when they were still getting to know each other.

Jasper had been a little starstruck when he learned Carlisle’s friends in Italy were those Italians.

He’d asked Carlisle a lot of questions once he got past a misplaced sense of awe, wanting to put a face to the eternal, petrified, leaders of the vampire world.

During a hunt with just the two of them, Jasper had been asking about Aro’s gift.

«What do you even think about when you’re with him?» Jasper had marvelled aloud, and he would later explain that the way he say it, this was like the way the Egyptian gods supposedly measured souls.

Place your heart upon the balancing scale against the weight of a feather, and if your heart weighs heavier it is devoured by the demon Ammit.

Place your hand in Aro’s, and if he deems you guilty of breaking his law, you will be torn to pieces in the space of a second.

Being friends with the man sounded unbearably stressful to Jasper.

Unfortunately, Carlisle’s mind had gone in the opposite direction, and what came out of his mouth before he could stop himself was, «England.»

He’d covered well enough for that, or he hoped he had. Jasper never asked.

***********

Chapter 11 was also supposed to have Renata being brave enough to ask for a selfie with Carlisle when they're both in black robes, this because I just really want Edward to sift through the Volturi group chat after all this and finding that. Alas, I couldn't work it in there. (Determined to not lose the joke, I had Aro take the photos in chapter 12 instead.)

***********

Chapter 12, the fandom ghost requested I include another butt slap and offered me fanart if I fulfilled her wish.

And so:

He held up a hand, presumably to touch Carlisle’s arm in comfort, but just then Alec started retching.

«He ate human food,» Jane deadpanned to Demetri, Felix, and Renata. Shaking her head, she brushed Alec’s hair out of his face as he hurled into the river.

Aro grimaced slightly, his hand hovering in the air.

Carlisle felt all the bread, corn flakes, and water that he’d swallowed press uncomfortably against his esophagus. «I’ll do you one better, Alec,» he choked, before he span around, fell to his knees and started retching, much like a cat.

Aro, evidently not sure what to do with his arm but not about to let it drop purposelessly, gave Carlisle a supportive pat on the bum before kneeling beside him to hold his hair as he hurled.

It was funny, but simply didn't fit the tone considering what happened after. It had to go. But hey, I got the art.

[rockislandadultreads]

Sometime Lovers, Complicated Relationships, & Psychological Insights: a reading list

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

Jana. Brit. Daniel. Henry. They would never have been friends if they hadn't needed each other. They would never have found each other except for the art which drew them together. They would never have become family without their love for the music, for each other. Brit is the second violinist, a beautiful and quiet orphan; on the viola is Henry, a prodigy who's always had it easy; the cellist is Daniel, the oldest and an angry skeptic who sleeps around; and on first violin is Jana, their flinty, resilient leader. Together, they are the Van Ness Quartet. After the group's youthful, rocky start, they experience devastating failure and wild success, heartbreak and marriage, triumph and loss, betrayal and enduring loyalty. They are always tied to each other - by career, by the intensity of their art, by the secrets they carry, by choosing each other over and over again. Following these four unforgettable characters, Aja Gabel's debut novel gives a riveting look into the high-stakes, cutthroat world of musicians, and of lives made in concert. The story of Brit and Henry and Daniel and Jana, The Ensemble is a heart-skipping portrait of ambition, friendship, and the tenderness of youth.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

It's the early 1980s - the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy - suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

One Day by David Nicholls

15th July 1988: Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year that follows?

My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

Set amidst the breathtaking beauty of Oxford, this sparkling debut novel tells the unforgettable story about a determined young woman eager to make her mark in the world and the handsome man who introduces her to an incredible love that will irrevocably alter her future—perfect for fans of JoJo Moyes and Nicholas Sparks. American Ella Durran has had the same plan for her life since she was thirteen: Study at Oxford. At 24, she’s finally made it to England on a Rhodes Scholarship when she’s offered an unbelievable position in a rising political star’s presidential campaign. With the promise that she’ll work remotely and return to DC at the end of her Oxford year, she’s free to enjoy her Once in a Lifetime Experience. That is until a smart-mouthed local who is too quick with his tongue and his car ruins her shirt and her first day. When Ella discovers that her English literature course will be taught by none other than that same local, Jamie Davenport, she thinks for the first time that Oxford might not be all she’s envisioned. But a late-night drink reveals a connection she wasn’t anticipating finding and what begins as a casual fling soon develops into something much more when Ella learns Jamie has a life-changing secret. Immediately, Ella is faced with a seemingly impossible decision: turn her back on the man she’s falling in love with to follow her political dreams or be there for him during a trial neither are truly prepared for. As the end of her year in Oxford rapidly approaches, Ella must decide if the dreams she’s always wanted are the same ones she’s now yearning for.

[theatticoneighth]

Watching The Queen’s Gambit; on the Remarkable Unexceptionality of Beth Harmon

‘With some people, chess is a pastime. With others, it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then, a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then, a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity, at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl? A young, unsmiling girl, with brown eyes, red hair, and a dark blue dress? Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments, strolls a teenage girl with bright, intense eyes, from Fairfield High School in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet, well-mannered, and out for blood.’

The preceding epigraph opens a fictional profile of Beth Harmon featured in the third episode of The Queen’s Gambit (2020), and is written and published after the protagonist — a teenage, rookie chess player, no less — beats a series of ranked pros to win her first of many tournaments. In the same deft manner as it depicts the character’s ascent to her global chess stardom, the piece also sets up the series’s narrative: this is evidence of a great talent, it tells us, a grandmaster in the making. As with most other stories about prodigies, this new entry into a timeworn genre is framed unexceptionally by its subject’s exceptionality.

Yet as far as tales regaled about young chess wunderkinds go, Beth Harmon’s stands out in more ways than one. That she is a girl in a male-dominated world has clearly not gone unremarked by both her diegetic and nondiegetic audiences. That her life has thus far — and despite her circumstances — been relatively uneventful, however, is what makes this show so remarkable. After all, much of our culture has undeniably primed us to expect the consequential from those whom we raise upon the pedestal of genius. As Harmon’s interviewer suggests in her conversation with Harmon for the latter’s profile, “Creativity and psychosis often go hand in hand. Or, for that matter, genius and madness.” So quickly do we attribute extraordinary accomplishments to similarly irregular origins that we presume an inexplicability of our geniuses: their idiosyncrasies are warranted, their bad behaviours are excused, and deep into their biographies we dig to excavate the enigmatic anomalies behind their gifts. Through our myths of exceptionality, we make the slightest aberrations into metonyms for brilliance.

Nonetheless, for all her sullenness, non-conformity, and her plethora of addictions, Beth Harmon seems an uncommonly normal girl. No doubt this may be a contentious view, as evinced perhaps by the chorus of viewers and reviewers alike who have already begun to brand the character a Mary Sue. Writing on the series for the LA Review of Books, for instance, Aaron Bady construes The Queen’s Gambit as “the tragedy of Bobby Fischer [made] into a feminist fantasy, a superhero story.” In the same vein, Jane Hu also laments in her astute critique of the Cold War-era drama its flagrant and saccharine wish-fulfillment tendencies. “The show gets to have it both ways,” she observes, “a beautiful heroine who leans into the edge of near self-destruction, but never entirely, because of all the male friends she makes along the way.” Sexual difference is here reconstituted as the unbridgeable chasm that divides the US from the Soviet Union, whereas the mutual friendliness shared between Harmon and her male chess opponents becomes a utopic revision of history. Should one follow Hu’s evaluation of the series as a period drama, then the retroactive ascription of a recognisably socialist collaborative ethos to Harmon and her compatriots is a contrived one indeed. 

Accordingly, both Hu and Bady conclude that the series grants us depthless emotional satisfaction at the costly expense of realism: its all-too-easy resolutions swiftly sidestep any nascent hint of overwhelming tension; its resulting calm betrays our desire for reprieve. Underlying these arguments is the fundamental assumption that the unembellished truth should also be an inconvenient one, but why must we always demand difficulty from those we deem noteworthy? Summing up the show’s conspicuous penchant for conflict-avoidance, Bady writes that: 

over and over again, the show strongly suggests — through a variety of genre and narrative cues — that something bad is about to happen. And then … it just doesn’t. An orphan is sent to a gothic orphanage and the staff … are benign. She meets a creepy, taciturn old man in the basement … and he teaches her chess and loans her money. She is adopted by a dysfunctional family and the mother … takes care of her. She goes to a chess tournament and midway through a crucial game she gets her first period and … another girl helps her, who she rebuffs, and she is fine anyway. She wins games, defeating older male players, and … they respect and welcome her, selflessly helping her. The foster father comes back and …she has the money to buy him off. She gets entangled in cold war politics and … decides not to be.

In short, everything that could go wrong … simply does not go wrong.

Time and again predicaments arise in Harmon’s narrative, but at each point, she is helped fortuitously by the people around her. In turn, the character is allowed to move through the series with the restrained unflappability of a sleepwalker, as if unaffected by the drama of her life.  Of course, this is not to say that she fails to encounter any obstacle on her way to celebrity and success — for neither her childhood trauma nor her substance-laden adolescence are exactly rosy portraits of idyll — but only that such challenges seem so easily ironed out by that they hardly register as true adversity. In other words, the show takes us repeatedly to the brink of what could become a life-altering crisis but refuses to indulge our taste for the spectacle that follows. Skipping over the Aristotelian climax, it shields us from the height of suspense, and without much struggle or effort on the viewers’ part, hands us our payoff. Consequently lacking the epochal weight of plot, little feels deserved in Harmon’s story.

In his study of eschatological fictions, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode would associate such a predilection for catastrophes with our abiding fear of disorder. Seeing as time, as he argues, is “purely successive [and] disorganised,” we can only reach to the fictive concords of plot to make sense of our experiences. Endings in particular serve as the teleological objective towards which humanity projects our existence, so we hold paradigms of apocalypse closely to ourselves to restore significance to our lives. It probably comes as no surprise then that in a year of chaos and relentless disaster — not to mention the present era of extreme precariousness, doomscrolling, and the 24/7 news cycle, all of which have irrevocably attuned us to the dreadful expectation of “the worst thing to come” — we find ourselves eyeing Harmon’s good fortune with such scepticism. Surely, we imagine, something has to have happened to the character for her in order to justify her immense consequence. But just as children are adopted each day into loving families and chess tournaments play out regularly without much strife, so too can Harmon maintain low-grade dysfunctional relationships with her typically flawed family and friends. 

In any case, although “it seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it,” not all orphans have to face Dickensian fates and not all geniuses have to be so tortured (Kermode). The fact remains that the vagaries of our existence are beyond perfect reason, and any attempt at thinking otherwise, while vital, may be naive. Contrary to most critics’ contentions, it is hence not The Queen’s Gambit’s subversions of form but its continued reach towards the same that holds up for viewers such a comforting promise of coherence. The show comes closest to disappointing us as a result when it eschews melodrama for the straightforward. Surprised by the ease and randomness of Harmon’s life, it is not difficult for one to wonder, four or five episodes into the show, what it is all for; one could even begin to empathise with Hu’s description of the series as mere “fodder for beauty.” 

Watching over the series now with Bady’s recap of it in mind, however, I am reminded oddly not of the prestige and historical dramas to which the series is frequently compared, but the low-stakes, slice-of-life cartoons that had peppered my childhood. Defined by the prosaicness of its settings, the genre punctuates the life’s mundanity with brief moments of marvel to accentuate the curious in the ordinary. In these shows, kindergarteners fix the troubles of adults with their hilarious playground antics, while time-traveling robot cats and toddler scientists alike are confronted with the woes of chores. Likewise, we find in The Queen’s Gambit a comparable glimpse of the quotidian framed by its protagonist’s quirks. Certainly, little about the Netflix series’ visual and narrative features would identify it as a slice-of-life serial, but there remains some merit, I believe, in watching it as such. For, if there is anything to be gained from plots wherein nothing is introduced that cannot be resolved in an episode or ten, it is not just what Bady calls the “drowsy comfort” of satisfaction — of knowing that things will be alright, or at the very least, that they will not be terrible. Rather, it is the sense that we are not yet so estranged from ourselves, and that both life and familiarity persists even in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Perhaps some might find such a tendency towards the normal questionable, yet when all the world is on fire and everyone clambers for acclaim, it is ultimately the ongoingness of everyday life for which one yearns. As Harmon’s childhood friend, Jolene, tells her when she is once again about to fall off the wagon, “You’ve been the best at what you do for so long, you don’t even know what it’s like for the rest of us.” For so long, and especially over the past year, we have catastrophized the myriad crises in which we’re living that we often overlook the minor details and habits that nonetheless sustain us. To inhabit the congruence of both the remarkable and its opposite in the singular figure of Beth Harmon is therefore to be reminded of the possibility of being outstanding without being exceptional — that is, to not make an exception of oneself despite one’s situation — and to let oneself be drawn back, however placid or insignificant it may be, into the unassuming hum of dailiness. It is in this way of living that one lives on, minute by minute, day by day, against the looming fear and anxiety that seek to suspend our plodding regular existence. It is also in this way that I will soon be turning the page on the last few months in anticipation of what is to come. 

Born and raised in the perpetually summery tropics — that is, Singapore — Rachel Tay wishes she could say her life was just like a still from Call Me By Your Name: tanned boys, peaches, and all. Unfortunately, the only resemblance that her life bears to the film comes in the form of books, albeit ones read in the comfort of air-conditioned cafés, and not the pool, for the heat is sweltering and the humidity unbearable. A fervent turtleneck-wearer and an unrepentant hot coffee-addict, she is thus the ideal self-parodying Literature student, and the complete anti-thesis to tropical life.

[lifeinpurplestars]

“Tell me again, Teresa. What does a girl wanna know?”

 ‘And what does a girl wanna know?, asked Jane gazing at her intensely.

They observed each other for a moment, completely lost in each other’s eyes.

‘I wish I knew’, she confessed and neither of them stopped staring at each other until they were interrupted.

                                                    A few hours later

‘Jane? What are we doing here?’, asked Lisbon suspiciously at him.

The case was solved, but to his surprise, she hadn’t gone home  after that. She has decided to give him a ride home. He didn’t know what had come to her to act this way, it looked as if she didn’t want their day to end. And he’d lie if he didn’t admit he didn’t want it to end neither.

He looked at her as she parked at the restaurant again, the second time this day. He just left the car, went to her side and opened her door, offering his arm to her. She took it hesitatingly, her eyes trusting as ever while her body looked as if she was going to run away from him at any moment.

He led her to the restaurant where they took the same table they had used before. Unconsciously, they sat closer, their legs touching, their breathing a bit altered. He contemplated her, her wavy hair intoxicating him with its vanilla smell, her green eyes, bright and mysterious looking at him.

There was a time when he used to know what she was thinking constantly, but with the passing of the years, he discovered her mind was a riddle to him. Her intelligence, her compassion, the wholeness of her mind and soul intrigued him deeply. He’s told her earlier he loved her being predictable but he didn’t mention her that what he loved most was those moments when she would leave him speechless.

‘Tell me, Teresa’, he asked her as they were served their canoli, ‘ Would you dance with me?’

‘You wanna dance, Jane?, she asked him bewildered.

He took her hand, not caring about the food they were just given. He led her to a quiet space in the restaurant, reserved for those who dared to dance, a bit dark, perfect for a consultant and a FBI agent. One could not say it’s appropriate for them to dance, to have such an intimate moment in a public place in front of everyone. Least of all, if that FBI agent was going to move away with her boyfriend, and probably, her soon- to- be husband if things wouldn’t change. The mere thought of it hit him like a punch in his stomach.

Or, as a knife stabbing his bleeding heart.

‘Jane’, she whispered to him as they hold into each other, dancing closely, hiding in the shadows, their breathings tangled up with the smell of exquisite Italian cuisine, hidden emotions and the anxiety of not wanting to be separated again.

He heard it then, her mobile phone ringing in her pocket.

Before he had time to separate from her, he looked in delight as she turned off the device. Then, she embraced him even more tighly than just a moment. He swirled her around so he could hear her laugh, a sound he hasn’t heard lately as often as he wished. She returned to him, a wide smile illuminating her pure face.

It was in that right moment, after so many years fighting the evil in the world side by side, after so many time loving her, wanting her, longing for her, that he decided it was time. He would risk it all, his soul, heart and body.

‘Tell me again, Teresa, what does a girl wanna know?’, he repeated to her, whispering to her ear, as soft as the air surrounding them, ‘ Does a girl wanna know how much she is desired?

He turned her around so her back was attached to his chest and he put his arms around her belly, continuing their dance. He nuzzled her neck barely before going back to her ear as he listened to her heart beating loudly.

‘Does a girl wanna know how much she is adored? How much she is admired?’, he asked her as he lowered his head to kiss a freckle on her neck. He’s being obsessed with it since their first case together, more than 12 years ago.

He turned her around once more, so he could looked at her face. She looked flushed, aroused, her eyes completely focused on him as if he was water in a desert, as if he was the only human being left on Earth. He nuzzled her nose with his own, before kissing it softly, reverently as if she could break at any moment as a castle of glass.

‘Does a girl wanna know how she saved the life of a defeated man with her kindness, compassion, patience and love? Does a girl wanna know… ‘ he murmured to her caressing her upper lip with his fingers, moaning at the feel of it, ‘ Does a girl wanna know how that man fell, irrevocably, in love with her?

He closed the gap between their mouths, both of them moaning at the feeling of their lips joined. It felt as natural as breathing and heavenly as well. It felt as she was the reason of his existence, as if his fate was to kiss her and adore her.

‘Does a girl wanna know…’, he said as he broke the kiss, wiping a tear from her reddened cheek, ‘ how much this man loves her?  Because he does. He loves her more than life itself.

She kissed him then, passionately, without holding anything back. She pushed him to the closest wall, where they were completely covered by the shadows of the place. He kissed her back, trying to convey the depth of his feelings. His eyes opened then, he could feel tears in them.

She opened her eyes and looked at him compassionately and completely in love. She caressed his face, kissing each inch of it and he let her completely at her mercy.

‘I was such a fool, to think I could ever leave you’, she confessed to him, kissing him once more, passion overtaking them, both completely unaware of their surroundings, too lost in each other arms.

He smiled once more, knowing that whatever the future may bring them, would be a blessing.

[that-one-deaf-witch]

Fruiting Bodies by Katheryn Harlan

My Rating ⭐️⭐️ 2/5

I was so surprised I didn't end up enjoying these stories, usually I'm a fan of any short stories because it's always a good easy read. However these stories never got my attention, I found my mind wondering so much during this book.

Synopsis: In stories that beckon and haunt, Fruiting Bodies ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters—mostly queer, mostly women—on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.

In “The Changeling,” two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In “Endangered Animals,” Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,” a queer woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in “Fiddler, Fool, Pair,” an anthropologist is drawn into a magical—and dangerous—gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes’s body—until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.

Audacious, striking, and wholly original, Fruiting Bodies offers stories about knowledge in a world on the verge of collapse, knowledge that alternately empowers or devastates. Pulling beautifully, brazenly, from a variety of literary traditions, Kathryn Harlan firmly establishes herself as a thrilling new voice in fiction.

[whileiamdying]

In April of 2010, British Petroleum gave orders to speed up production on its colossal drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon. Despite the objections of many on the rig, safety measures were ignored or overlooked. On April 20th, the Deepwater Horizon exploded. Eleven men paid the ultimate price and countless thousands who call the Gulf Coast home found their lives irrevocably altered. Based on actual testimony and conversations with families, playwright Leigh Fondakowski has created a harrowing and intimate look at the lives forever altered by the tragedy. Includes a conversation with Jim Morris, Managing Editor for Environment and Worker's Rights at the Center for Public Integrity, one of the country's oldest and largest non-profit investigative news organizations. Spill is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series featuring science-themed plays. The Relativity Series is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, bridging science and the arts in the modern world. Directed by Martin Jarvis. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast recording, starring Elisa Bocanegra, Gilbert Glenn Brown, Nicholas Hormann, Travis Johns, Jane Kaczmarek, James Morrison, Darren Richardson, Kate Steele, and Mark Jude Sullivan. Production Manager, Nikki Hyde. Music Supervisor, Ronn Lipkin. Associate Artistic Director, Anna Lyse Erikson. Editor, Julian Nicholson. Recording Engineer, Sound Designer and Mixer, Mark Holden for The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.

[tindogpodcast]

TDP 982: Robots 3

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Villain-Venice-JANE-AIR-BOOK/dp/B0884MH4D6/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1590695078&refinements=p_27%3AMichael+Sinclair&s=books&sr=1-1

  Written by Robert Whitelock Lisa McMullin Guy Adams

  This title was released in December 2020. It will be exclusively available to buy from the Big Finish website until January 31st 2021, and on general sale after this date.

During the events of Doctor Who: Ravenous 2, Liv Chenka left the Doctor and the TARDIS behind. Just for one year. A year during which she would live on Kaldor, and get to know her sister Tula all over again.

But Kaldor is going through a period of tumultuous change. Technology is changing at an advanced rate - the robots are evolving, artificial intelligence is adapting, and with these changes so politics is altering too. Dangerously.

Can Liv and Tula make a difference during the most turbulent time in the world’s history?

3.1 The Mystery of Sector 13 by Robert Whitelock

Liv is investigating the Sons of Kaldor - looking out for any unusual activity on Kaldor. But when her hunt leads her to an abandoned warehouse, she may have bitten off more than she can chew... And while she’s away, Tula is finding that some problems lie a little closer to home.

3.2 Circuit Breaker by Guy Adams

Poul has returned to Kaldor City... and Toos is doing her best to help his recovery. After troubling events in a local hotel, he finds himself with another crime to investigate. But are there some mysteries that shouldn’t be solved?

3.3 A Matter of Conscience by Lisa McMullin

The Sons of Kaldor are stepping up their anti-robot campaign as Liv and Tula are stepping up their search. But even as they get closer to the survivors of Storm Mine four, their understanding of events on Kaldor is about to change irrevocably. 

A new Tin Dog Podcast

[gyrlversion]

DC’s ‘Doom Patrol’ is the rare superhero show that understands trauma

Superhero stories have taught us that surviving the worst circumstances can be powerfully transformative, like Tony Stark building the first Iron Man suit or Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. But the reality is not so glorious. There’s nothing noble about living with trauma. Usually, it’s messy and painful and littered with regressions and false steps.

Doom Patrol is a show all about the parts that aren’t so easily squared away. The titular superhero team may have remarkable abilities, but their unruly powers came at extreme cost. For each of them, their mutations are a result of a life-altering incident that irrevocably altered their life.

They’ve been brought together over the span of decades by Dr. Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton), dubbed “The Chief,” who saves them in one way or another, and brings them to stay in his mansion. He gives them a safe space surrounded by others as fragile as they are so they can regain their sense of self. 

When he’s captured by Mr. Nobody (Alan Tudyk) at the start of the season, the group is forced to move from fragile co-existence to co-dependence, throwing them into disarray as they contemplate facing the outside world without The Chief’s guidance and support.

During the team’s first excursion away from the mansion, Larry (Matt Bomer), wrapped in bandages head-to-toe to hide his burned skin, anxiously stares out from the safety of the team’s bus. He hadn’t left the mansion in years, and going out into society was never his strong suit to begin with. He gathers his courage and makes a move. 

It’s a process I’m very familiar with.

Image: Jace Downs / Warner Bros. Entertainment

When I was a teenager, I was bullied to the point of becoming suicidal. Starting as a friend’s boyfriend, my bully tore through my social circle in a violent haze of entitlement and adolescent rage over the course of a year, with me one of his main victims. I’d miss school because he was waiting outside my mom’s apartment to attack me. He’d send menacing texts and turn any interaction into an attempt at coercion. I’m still not sure why I became one of his foremost targets. I think a lack of self-esteem just made me easy prey. He knew he could, so he did.

Doom Patrol is a superhero show that understands that the longest, greatest battles we face are against ourselves.

Most of the Doom Patrol’s squad are products of questionable decisions, unfair choices and some astonishingly bad luck. Cliff’s (Brendan Fraser) adultery tore his family apart, the fateful crash that made him a brain in a robot suit tragically occurring as he and his wife were starting to reconcile. Rita (April Bowlby) may have been hard-nosed and manipulative, but she was playing by the patriarchal rules of classic Hollywood. Larry was living a double-life because being a successful Air Force pilot and queer were incompatible with each other in the 1960s.

Traumatic events can leave us wishing we’d done things differently, blaming ourselves within warped perceptions of who we even are anymore. There isn’t always a better choice, and victims are not to blame for the behavior of abusers. I wasn’t the nicest person, I’d a selfish streak not unlike Rita’s, but that doesn’t make what happened right or excuse the friends that sat idly by. “Ah, lads, be friends,” one quipped after I was told to kill myself. They probably didn’t think he was being serious, but I knew he was, and I have their indifference as mentally ingrained as anything my bully did.

He assaulted me twice – once punching me to the ground outside the local girl’s high-school when I lost my temper with him, and again at a Blink-182 concert three years later. Finding me in the audience, he blamed me for him ending up in prison and elbowed me twice in the face so hard it broke the skin. I still have the scar.

I’d considered fighting back that second time. I decided against it in the moment because I figured if I let him do what he was going to do he’d stop. I’ve seen him twice in the nine years since then, and despite him shouting to make sure I saw him, he hasn’t laid another finger on me.

Image: Bob Mahoney / Warner Bros. Entertainment

What makes the Doom Patrol remarkable is that, when we first meet them, they’re people similarly downtrodden. They’re broken and beaten down, taking life day by day with as little discomfort as possible, trying to get used to these weird powers they’ve been cursed with. Existence has become its own kind of morose punishment for who they were. 

Their triumph — their heroism — is in the slow march towards accepting that what they’ve become doesn’t lessen who they are and deciding to face their demons, and Mr. Nobody, regardless of the outcome. If it all goes wrong, well at least they tried, and did so on their terms.

Nowadays, I’ve become used to the tinge of fear when I leave the house. Most times I shrug it off, like Larry leaving that bus. But some days are like Jane (Diane Guerrero) defiantly screaming at the massive internal projection of her abusive father in “Jane Patrol.” Others, I’m too exhausted to bother. Doom Patrol is a superhero show that understands that the longest, greatest battles we face are against ourselves.

Our disparate protagonists resist connection because solitude is comfortable when living with this kind of anguish. Vulnerability might lead to people wanting to talk about it, like Cliff does to Jane after seeing the underground, and that means risking more manipulation and heartache. But being alone eventually becomes a cage from which you watch the rest of the world with only your pain for company. 

I feel Jane’s level of discomfort, though not quite with the same animosity. This piece, in itself, is an exercise in rebutting my own secrecy and making what happened to me known. Silence only favors the oppressive, and I am tired of keeping myself down.

“I assure you there are many monsters in this world, and none of them, not a one, is you,” Dr. Caulder tells Cliff in the opening episode. Perhaps Doom Patrol‘s most heroic accomplishment is making one believe that that just might be true.

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[larryland]

LINE-UP INCLUDES FOUR WORLD PREMIERES AND A NEW MUSICAL

SEASON TO INCLUDE S. EPATHA MERKERSON, JANE KACZMAREK, JESSICA HECHT, LONNY PRICE, HALLEY FEIFFER, LIESL TOMMY AND MORE

New York, NY (February 9, 2017) – Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield has announced the Williamstown Theatre Festival 2017 Summer Season, the 63rd Season for the Tony® Award-winning theatre company, which will include four world premieres, a new musical, the first production of a WTF commissioned artist, and much more.

The season, running from June 27 – August 20, 2017, begins on the Main Stage with a production of a new play by Jen Silverman, The Roommate, (June 27 – July 16) directed by Mike Donahue and featuring Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner S. Epatha Merkerson (WTF Debut)  and Golden Globe and Emmy Award nominee Jane Kaczmarek (4th season at WTF); continues with Sarah Ruhl’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist comedy The Clean House (July 19 – July 29), starring Tony Award nominee Jessica Hecht (10th season at WTF) and directed by Rebecca Taichman; and closes with a new musical A Legendary Romance (August 3 – August 20), with music and lyrics by Geoff Morrow and book by Timothy Prager and directed by Lonny Price.

S. Epatha Merkerson makes her WTF debut in “The Roommate.”

Jane Kaczmarek will join Merkerson in Jen Silverman’s new play on the WTF Main Stage.

Jessica Hecht returns for a 10th WTF season to star in Sarah Ruhl’s comedy “The Clean House.”

The Nikos Stage season kicks off June 28 with the world premiere of Jason Kim’s play The Model American (June 28 – July 9), directed by Danny Sharron; and also includes the world premiere of Where Storms Are Born (July 12 – July 23) by Harrison David Rivers, directed by Tony Award nominee Liesl Tommy, and starring Outer Critics Circle Award nominee Myra Lucretia Taylor (10th season at WTF); the world premiere play Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow (July 26 – August 6) by Halley Feiffer and directed by Obie Award winner and Drama Desk nominee Trip Cullman; and closes out the summer with Actually (August 9 – August 20) by Anna Ziegler, a co-world premiere with Geffen Playhouse, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. All four of this season’s Nikos Stage productions have been commissioned by or developed at Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Danny Sharron directs the world premiere of Jason Kim’s play “The Model American.”

Tony Award nominee Liesl Tommy directs the world premiere of “Where Storms Are Born.”

Obie Award winner and Drama Desk nominee Trip Cullman will direct “Actually” by Anna Ziegler.

“We are excited to share these productions – many of them homegrown at the Festival – with our loyal patrons, who join us summer-after-summer to experience the rare and special magic that happens in Williamstown,” Greenfield said.  “This summer, hundreds of theatre artists – expressing the full talent and diversity of our country – will converge in Williamstown to bring life to our 63rd season.  Together, through that most human endeavor of storytelling, these artists will aim to make sense of the world, give meaning to the world, and perhaps even provide temporary escape from the world!”

Additional programming and events, as well as complete casting and creative team information will be announced at a later date. Ticket Bundles are now available for purchase at www.wtfestival.org.

ABOUT THE SEASON

Main Stage

A NEW PLAY The Roommate | June 27-July 16 by Jen Silverman Directed by Mike Donahue with S. Epatha Merkerson and Jane Kaczmarek

Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner S. Epatha Merkerson and Golden Globe and Emmy Award nomineeJane Kaczmarek star in this absorbing comedy about self-discovery.  Empty-nested and alone in her Midwestern home, Sharon (Merkerson) takes on a roommate, Robyn (Kaczmarek), who has just arrived from New York City.  Before she has even unpacked, Robyn challenges everything about Sharon’s way of life.  Book clubs, 80s pop music, and the occasional shared toke complicate their unlikely but enduring relationship, even as they venture into dangerous territory.  Mike Donahue directs Jen Silverman’s new play which celebrates unexpected re-invention later in life.

A New Production of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

The Clean House |July 19-July 29 by Sarah Ruhl Directed by Rebecca Taichman with Jessica Hecht and Priscilla Lopez

Tony Award nominee Jessica Hecht leads the cast in this heartfelt comedy by Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl.  Lane, an accomplished physician, discovers that her sister Virginia (Hecht) — not her Brazilian housekeeper Matilde — has been cleaning her home every day.  Though never close, suddenly the sisters find themselves enmeshed in each other’s lives and in Matilde’s great passion for Portuguese jokes.  Rebecca Taichman directs this expressive and lyrical comedy about learning to live with life’s mess.

A NEW MUSICAL A Legendary Romance | August 3 – August 20 A New Musical book by Timothy Prager music and lyrics by Geoff Morrow Directed by Lonny Price

Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee Lonny Price directs an intimate new musical by composer/lyricist Geoff Morrow and book writer Timothy Prager that delivers us to the intersection of loyalty, love, and ambition.  Back in 1950, film producer Joseph Lindy was on top of the world, making hit after hit with the love of his life and leading lady, Billie Hathaway.  Nearly four decades later, retired and forgotten, he must approve for release a version of his abandoned, cinematic masterpiece, an autobiographical film now altered irrevocably by a young producer.  Haunted by the choices he made years ago, Joseph’s story hangs in the balance as he reconstructs the film, his memory and, ultimately, his legacy.

Nikos Stage

WORLD PREMIERE

The Model American | June 28 – July 9 by Jason Kim Directed by Danny Sharron with Laila Robins

In 2016, what does it take for an immigrant to achieve the American dream?  With humor and humanity, playwright Jason Kim (HBO’s “Girls”) explores this question in his timely world premiere play.  Directed byDanny Sharron and featuring Laila Robins, The Model American follows Gabriel, a young, gay, Colombian man, as he finds friendship, love, and ambition in the U.S.  Developed at WTF under the auspices of the Bill Foeller Fellowship Program in 2016, this play questions the price we are willing to pay for success.

WORLD PREMIERE Where Storms Are Born | July 12 – July 23 by Harrison David Rivers Directed by Liesl Tommy with Myra Lucretia Taylor

Obie Award winner and Tony Award nominee Liesl Tommy directs 2016 WTF Playwright-in-ResidenceHarrison David Rivers’ world premiere play.  Mourning the loss of her elder son Myles, Bethea (Myra Lucretia Taylor) tries to help her younger son Gideon through his grief.  But as revelations surrounding Myles’ incarceration and death emerge, both mother and son must decide whether to fight or let go.  With wit and empathy, this play reminds us of the courage and resilience it takes to chart a better way forward for the ones we love.

WORLD PREMIERE Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow | July 26-August 6 by Halley Feiffer Directed by Trip Cullman

You’ve known Olga, Masha and Irina for nearly one hundred and seventeen years.  But this summer, they are, like, unhappy for reals.  Obie Award winner and Drama Desk nominee Trip Cullman directs Outer Critics Circle Award nominee and Theatre World Award Winner Halley Feiffer’s world premiere: a contemporary adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.  As our heroes search for meaning in their work and love lives — all the while dreaming of their dear Moscow — we are invited to examine our own existential longings and unrequited yearnings. Feiffer’s bold, unapologetically millennial and bitingly comedic spin on this Russian classic newly reacquaints us with the emotional contours of the beleaguered and beloved Prozorov family.  You totes don’t want to miss it.

WORLD PREMIERE Actually | August 9 – August 20 Co-world premiere with Geffen Playhouse, Randall Arney – Artistic Director by Anna Ziegler Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz

Amber and Tom are freshmen at Princeton University, where their experiences so far have only two things in common: drunken parties and a desire to fit in.  But when they meet, their common experience becomes anything but, and their moral mettle is put to the test.  Lileana Blain-Cruz directs Anna Ziegler’s deeply felt and relevant world premiere play about intimacy and responsibility, power and provocation, privilege and protocol.

TICKETS AND SCHEDULE

Ticket Bundles are now available at www.wtfestival.org. Single tickets for the 2017 Williamstown Theatre Festival season will be available in April through the WTF website and by mail order using WTF’s season brochure (call 413-597-3400 to join the mailing list).  The WTF Box Office will open in June at which point tickets may be purchased online, by phone, or in person at the ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance Box Office at 1000 Main St (Route 2), Williamstown, MA 02167.

WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL

Since 1955, the Williamstown Theatre Festival has brought America’s finest actors, directors, designers, and playwrights to the Berkshires, engaging a loyal audience of both residents and summer visitors. Each WTF season is designed to present unique opportunities for artists and audience alike, revisiting classic plays with innovative productions, developing and nurturing bold new plays and musicals, and offering a rich array of accompanying cultural events including Free Theatre, Late-Night Cabarets, readings, workshops, and educational programs. With offices in both Williamstown and New York City, WTF creates vibrant work that feeds the wider theatrical landscape. The artists and productions shaped at the Festival each summer often go on to reach diverse audiences nationally and internationally. WTF is also home to of the nation’s top training and professional development programs for new generations of aspiring theatre artists and administrators. WTF was honored with the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 2002 and the Commonwealth Award for Achievement in 2011.

Williamstown Theatre Festival Announces 2017 Summer Season LINE-UP INCLUDES FOUR WORLD PREMIERES AND A NEW MUSICAL SEASON TO INCLUDE S. EPATHA MERKERSON, JANE KACZMAREK, JESSICA HECHT, LONNY PRICE, HALLEY FEIFFER, LIESL TOMMY AND MORE…

[whileiamdying]

In April of 2010, British Petroleum gave orders to speed up production on its colossal drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon. Despite the objections of many on the rig, safety measures were ignored or overlooked. On April 20th, the Deepwater Horizon exploded. Eleven men paid the ultimate price and countless thousands who call the Gulf Coast home found their lives irrevocably altered. Based on actual testimony and conversations with families, playwright Leigh Fondakowski has created a harrowing and intimate look at the lives forever altered by the tragedy. Includes a conversation with Jim Morris, Managing Editor for Environment and Worker's Rights at the Center for Public Integrity, one of the country's oldest and largest non-profit investigative news organizations. Spill is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series featuring science-themed plays. The Relativity Series is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, bridging science and the arts in the modern world. Directed by Martin Jarvis. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast recording, starring Elisa Bocanegra, Gilbert Glenn Brown, Nicholas Hormann, Travis Johns, Jane Kaczmarek, James Morrison, Darren Richardson, Kate Steele, and Mark Jude Sullivan. Production Manager, Nikki Hyde. Music Supervisor, Ronn Lipkin. Associate Artistic Director, Anna Lyse Erikson. Editor, Julian Nicholson. Recording Engineer, Sound Designer and Mixer, Mark Holden for The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.