#literally my entire job is reading about the decisions that local authorities make and how they spend their (our) money

[jakeperalta]

hello people in england this is a reminder that there are local elections coming up soon on 4th may!!

I know councils don't feel very interesting or important compared to central government but they really do make so many decisions that impact our daily lives (also this election acts as a bit of a popularity test ahead of the next general election, with the tories currently predicted to lose a load of seats!)

put in your postcode here to check whether there's an election in your area

if you're not already registered to vote at your current address, you can register here until 17th april

you will need to take ID to be able to vote!! this is the first election requiring voter ID (more info here)

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

The inimitable Noralities did an excellent video on being Tired of 1000-year-old Lolis.

I feel like a similar handwaving I'm getting sick of is Isekai Protags Who Buy Slaves.

There's a basic, and then a separate meta, level of handwaving there. And it gets really gross really fast.

A lot of them play it as, "well, he buys her and he releases her and she's grateful so she sticks around" and that's still got some notable problems and that is the least offensive of what I've seen.

Far more of them keep the girl as a slave and she buys into the social expectations around that so he doesn't have to maintain the aesthetics of her being enslaved - he doesn't have to keep her locked up at night so she won't slit his throat in his sleep. The slave girls in these stories never seek freedom. After all, they have one of the good masters! He's one of the good ones, ladies. And this is the thing. It's a callback to an imagined good ol' days when women submitted and this arrangement of kindly male masters and subservient wives clearly made everyone happier.

In some of these the guy even leaves on a magic mark that would act like a shock collar if she were disobedient. But she won't be, so it's no problem! Don't think about it. It's fine.

Some of them also dip into the Born Sexy Yesterday trope, with the girl having spent all her time in a filthy cage and therefore being socially inexperienced (oh but also having perfect skin. Didn't you know that being beaten and spending all your time sleeping on straw and stone gives you perfect skin?)

Anyway the meta bit is, of course, that part of why the protagonist is treating it as okay is because the world is often a close relative of some game he's played. Which means his real-in-the-narrative gross morals are being derived from his own poor reading of the moral situation around how to treat game systems if they become real?

Like, there's an argument to be made that if you could discern that you were in a simulation and the simulated entities were really not thinking or feeling, then acting out bad impulses wouldn't be harming any actual people. But a) these slaves are always treated as real people by the narrative and b) they're also treated as real people by the protags who buy them and then treat them as property. There is not an attempt made to judge whether they're false people, before the decision is made that it's fine to treat them as property. The protag just decides it's okay because everything else is running on game logic, so why not follow the local moral mores too?

My opinion is that the trope does well because of some pretty rampant sexism: a desire to treat a woman as property and have that be seen as morally acceptable - possibly even righteous - by the community. But this "righteous" vibe generally requires the slavekeeping system he decides to partake in to be more monstrous, and then most of these authors do a bad job of making the protag even show distaste toward the whole slave trade. Not even a "Wow, that's fucked up. Can't do anything about it as a level 2 fighter. Maybe I'll put a pin in that one and come back to burn this industry down when I'm more powerful."

To be entirely honest, I feel like fucking OVERLORD is on more stable moral ground on this front. He's got a bunch of obedient waifus, but that's because they see him as God, because he literally created them. Any sexism there is much more "man of the house" kind of stuff, and Overlord does a nice job of undercutting all the sex stuff attached to the trope by making the protagonist Magically Ace (seriously, when he encounters sexual situations a magical effect he has no control over snaps him out of being aroused automatically).

I dunno. I could probably keep going but I think I've penned enough of my thoughts for the moment.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Thoughts on Mistborn Era 2 (Wax & Wayne):

My main take on these was “ah, looks like Brandon’s taking some time off from his magnum opus to write pulp Western/detective/crime novels”, and I was very amused to look up Brandon’s comments and see a ton of interviews with him saying, “so, this is absolutely me having some fun writing pulp Western/crime novels”. It’s nice to have a writer who’s not too proud to - accurately - describe his own stuff as pulp yet still do a good job of it. They remind me a little of the Dresden Files in terms of the mystery aspects, the urban fantasy tone, the wit, the lack of diplomatic/political subtlety of the protagonists and, of course, the rampant property destruction. But Brandon’s a much more thoughtful author than Jim Butcher, and treats his female characters better.

On the topic of gratuitous property destruction: Wax, for goodness’ sakes, stop shooting the ground! That’s infrastructure, Wax! Fixing the streets takes work, Wax! You’re not a dusty dirt road in the middle of nowhere any more, Wax! Just drop a coin like they dud in the old days! Or a shell casing or bullet if you desperately need to be hardcore. But rampantly firing off weapons in urban areas just to get a base for your Allomancy is a terrible idea.

This was a wonderful follow-up to Mistborn because it was a lot lighter and the stakes were a lot lower, which is nice for a change. I was reading the intro to Elantris where it was talking about people in Brandon’s early writing group telling him he needed to raise the stakes, and personally, I like low stakes. Well of Ascension/Hero of Ages were a grind, much as I liked the ending, and I would be up for more stories like Dawnshard, with low stakes and the heroes resolving the plot by non-violent means.

Marasi and Steris are both very well-done characters - I was definitely shipping Wax/Marasi in the first book and had no expectations of the Wax/Steris engagement lasting, so I was quite surprised, but the switch was well done and I liked it. Marasi and Wax’s feelings were a crush/hero worship and a rebound, respectively. And it’s nice to see a relationship grow gradually like Wax and Steris’ did. What Brandon did with Steris, starting out with a portrayal readers are unlikely to lije and letting her grow on them, is risky (especially with female characters) because readers may hold to first impressions, but I thought it worked very well.

Wayne’s backstory and reaction to it hit hard and was one of the best elements in the series. Another entry in the diverse array of Sanderson redemption arcs. It’s interesting because Wayne both is and isn’t haunted by it - he takes it seriously, it affects him deeply, but he doesn’t habitually brood, and it doesn’t prevent him from being a generally lighthearted, funny, silly person most of the time.

Wayne is absolutely right about the value of certain goids being an arbitrary thing invented by rich people. I’ve had caviar, once (as a garnish on a nice pasta dish at a fancy restaurant). It tastes like nothing. Entirely nodescript. The sole purpose of caviar is to communicate “this dish is fancy (and so, by connection, is the person eating it)”.

I’m deeply protective of Sazed and get very affonted when characters criticize him. I think he’s done an excellent job. It’s hard to wrap my head around the sheer scale of Bleeder’s overreaction to the possibility of her boyfriend moving back to the city. Though on one level it makes sense in that the kandra are of Preservation: she is going to see maintwnance of an existing situation as inherently better and more desirable, even if a change could still turn out well and be something Wax enjoyed. And I don’t feel like Sazed telling him about Bleeder being Lessie would have helped anything - it just would have made the decision to kill her harder, not less necessary, because she was incredibly malicious, destructive, and dangerous and there was no other way of containing her.

The resolution of Shadows of Self is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see, politically: the mass protests and risk of riot over poor wages, unemployment, and mustreatment of workers is resolved by a committment to address those problems, because the workers’ anger is legitimate and their cause is just.

I’m heartily frustrated by Wax, because it is his responsibility - it is literally his job, he has employees and a Senate seat! - to address the major political and economic problems of Elendel, and he neglects them. I don’t care if you’d rather be out shooting things! You have resposibilities! The workers in your factories are the source of the money and prestige that lets you engage in your gentleman-crimefighter hobby, and you owe it to them to see that the city operates in their interests. You can do far more good in that way than by shootin’ bad guys. Do. Your. Damn. Job. Steris seems to be nudging him in that direction, at least.

In general I’m impatient with a lot of the law-enforcement attitudes. Miles is a villain for whom I have absolutely no sympathy. Oh, so you’ve turned evil because, despite your 15 years of work in law enforcement, crime still exists? Yeah, maybe that’s because your belief that crime will stop existing if you shoot and/or hang enough people was never realistic. Likewise with Wax’s skepticism regarding Marasi’s ideas on how crime can be reduced through better urban planning and social policies - no, Wax, it won’t entirely eliminate crime, there will always be people who are just plain malicious, greedy, venal, or violent, but if you can reduce it by, say, 50-70% by better social policy, that would still be a good thing, right?

The period newspapers are great fun. I want a TenSoon plushie! Come on, Brandon, you’re musding out on a fantastic marketing opportunity! The one thing that bugged me was the ‘Pewternauts’ in The Bands of Mourning. In the first place, it’s a nonsensical name - real-world dreadnaughts, of which these are obviously supposed to be the equivalent, were called that because it literally meant ‘these having nothing they should fear’. The apex predator of military warships at the time, if you will. You can’t just create a random fantasy portmanteau amd pretend that it works - it’s like calling a scandal in a fantasy novel something-gate even though the Watergate scandal doesn’t exist in that world! Secondly, dreadnaughts were part of a massive military arms race in a world where European wars had been commonplace for centuries. The Elendel basin had never had a war in 300 years - these aren’t something that someone would invent just off the bat. Having similar technology to turn-of-the-century earth doesn’t mean it will be applied in the same ways, not with a completely different political context.

In general, New Seran’s complaints seemed overblown. Yes, the transit system treating Elendel as a hub and lacking effective connections between the outlying regions in aggravating. (It’s a provlem that plagues urban public transit systems even now - most routes are either local or feed into the city centre, with relatively few goung from one suburb to another, even as trans-suburban commuting vecomes more common.) But it’s not remotely the kind of thing you fight a war over! I feel like Brandon’s trying to recall the American Revolution, a bit, but the distances are so small (Elendel and New Seran are about as far apart as Ottawa and Toronto) as to make that ludicrous. What they really need is some kind of equivalent to a regional district authority, where representatives of multiple local governments can get together to work on issues of regional planning.

[beloved-judged]

The inexpressible

This is going to be a bit... fragmented.

I should say, up front, that one of my degrees is an MFA--poetry and creative non-fiction. I have a license to poet, to be abstract and playful with language, and training in recognizing the internal structure of meaning as it is presented in language use.

I also took an absolute ass load of rhetoric courses, eventually taking Greek coursework (in addition to the mandatory Latin) in order to read the texts left us by various rhetors and their historians side-by-side with their translations.

I do language. It’s a different brain than I use on the daily in programming (and in fact, they’re oppositional for some subsets of use), but I’ve proved to the satisfaction of an academic committee that I can language just fine, even convincingly.

A confluence of events today: my papa releasing a blizzard of podcasts in the last two days, re-reading Snow Crash, and a bunch of random events have lead me to spend the last few days contemplating language.

It’s going to be here because it applies to the things my papa has been talking about.

When you choose to speak, take for granted you have already lost a lot of meaning--to render a situation into language is to make decisions about what it is, how it is, and how others may understand it, all of which are bound to your individual understanding (as well as whatever social rules, ideas, etc you have absorbed, because we’re not islands.) To make those decisions is to decide what is important and relevant, what others may understand, and what you want others to understand.

And to make those decisions is to decide not just what’s included, but what is omitted. This starts the second words come into play and before it, in the language we are inculcated with.

The latest podcast my papa released is a parable about one of the founding fathers of Sufism, which I will spoil and say the moral of the story is that the presence of someone who has achieved enlightenment is just as important as any attention they might give you (and in some cases, to not give attention at all, so as not to feed the ego.)

The presence, without language--to exist within eyesight and hearing, without direct interaction.

In Snow Crash, the author plays with an old, old dichotomy: religions of the book (that is, legalistic religions which base their principles on a written text which is required to take a form which does not permit as much individual interpretation) versus cultic religions, in which enlightenment is achieved through individual experience and is not subject to being ruled or shaped by the contents of a text.

Christianity is, at best, a mixed bag by that criteria, but tends toward a religion of the book rather than a cultic religion--as it is practiced in many places, it has elements of personal enlightenment, but is checked (at least in theory) against the text of the Bible, which is considered the authority on what it is and means to be a Christian. Again, in theory. This may not be true of individual Christian groups, churches, or Christians and it does not matter if it is true. Christianity bases itself on the Bible as a general rule.

A religion of a central text, against which all things are (supposed to be) checked.

One of the most haunting reads in my rhetorical studies was The Phadreus--a dialog on the nature of rhetoric (the art of persuasion). In the book, which is arranged as a long dialog, Socrates is talking to Phadreus about the nature of language, persuasion, and what makes a good versus a bad rhetor. There is a whole section where he talks about the relationship between writing and speech in rhetoric, remarking that he does not trust writing to do what it is supposed to do (to serve as an aid to memory, to make the idea immortal). He remarks that to read and write a thing is inadequate to produce experts, and that expertise requires something more in terms of experience and inspiration.

Or to put it a slightly different way: you might be able to write down instructions on how to do a complex thing, but the instructions by themselves are not going to make someone capable of performing the task well.

And, as he remarked, all too often when we commit something to writing, we promptly cease to make the effort to remember it--remembering becomes a problem of the medium we write in.

We wrote it down, now it’s the paper’s job to remember it.

This can, as he points out in The Phadreus and elsewhere in the texts produced by Plato during that period, lead to the state where people can take their speech--that is, the things produced from their mouth--and treat it as if it does not belong to them, as if, because they are quoting, they no longer ‘own’ the words they speak, and thus are not bound to the consequence of them.

You can see an awful lot of this in white, academic, and main cultures: if I’m quoting someone else, it’s not my fault. If I am sufficiently careful to quote, I can get away with saying all kinds of things and have a reasonable expectation that I won’t be held accountable for it.

In primarily oral cultures, as a quick side note and by contrast, what you say (the promises you make) is a profound reflection of you as a person, and you will be held accountable for it. Everything that comes out of your mouth, you own, and there is no shield of ‘just quoting’ or ‘just saying’ to save you from suffering the consequences of your speech.

Magic, where it concerns speech, often appears to me to inherit from that understanding of the word. That which issues out of your mouth is a spike, affixing you to consequence, that you cannot wriggle out of.

Trusting in the written word also, as Socrates points out, tends to lead to the state where the writer thinks they have been clear, and the reader thinks they have understood, but neither are right: the written word does not lend itself to clarity, but to deceptive equivocation. The appearance of clarity, but only if both parties do not think deeply or ask much of the interaction, and part of the inability of the book to produce experts has to do with the absence of expertise and inspiration to enforce clarity.

I find that is much on my mind--where we find clarity. I have about twenty years of training in academia, in finding clarity in books. I would be hard-pressed to count how many books I’ve read, even by genre. It is where my mind is ... comfortable. A confluence of training and natural inclinations.

The experts with whom I might study to understand rhetoric, say, are dead and dust in the ground, in some cases for thousands of years. They cannot be present with me, and while there are plenty of modern scholars with whom I might study, I am unlikely to ever have the chance to do so.

There is something tied to presence, something which governs learning. In Snow Crash, which is very much propaganda for literate societies, the idea that there is a pre-verbal experience of understanding or something that defies the ability to be verbalized within literature structures, is a virus analogous to herpes: something that represents an invader of the ordered, literate body, which subverts it and irreparably harms the health of the body and the mind.

Without the book to govern thought, all is madness, and those who are trained in specific kinds of literacy (in the case of Snow Crash, technical literacy) are susceptible to a madness which burns out their ability to think and their identity, their ability to appear rational to the literate society around them. They become as individualized as an insect, which is to say that they have no individual identity.

That is where I am going--to that non-verbal place. It’s a thought that fills me with anxiety, but also with relief. I cannot touch rationality but to notice irrationality in it, the vital absences which compose the underpinning of rationality, both in language and in concept.

Language is a slippery bastard.

Vodou is a cult, by the definition of the majority religion (Christianity), and by definition in general, in that it has no centralized authority (no pope), no central dogma (a Bible, say), and relies on individual experience with the divine (in possession, inspiration, or through witnessing a possession.) It is also a community-driven religion: mutual support, mutual aid, mutual living. It has authority figures (the priests), but the authority structure is very localized. A priest is the priest for his or her temple, not for every vodouizant everywhere. Authority is recognized, but not universal.

Atop that, it is also very much an oral culture: you are absolutely responsible for your words.

In my experiences with possession so far, both partial (someone else was using my body and I could witness but not interfere) and complete (black out), it has been a place where all my literacy, all my rationality (and I used to teach logic), all the things I would call my identity, were pointless. Either gently but firmly pushed aside, or gone altogether with the rest of me. And I have never, in my experience of being partially possessed, spoken.

Moved? Sure. Expressed something? Yes. Performed feats? Yep.

Fully possessed, however, I’m told my body has done a lot of speaking.

But the literate qualities of myself, the parts writing this entry, were either absent or entirely beside the point. It is not an easy thing to flirt with the destruction of these parts of myself. It’s deeply, deeply discomforting to recognize that where I am going, I am not. Where I am going, all that I am now will be beside the point.

Existential panic, I think, is about right.

What am I, without language? What remains in those spaces?

I cannot enjoy the wine of oblivion without reaping it--I cannot enter the waters of the void in meditation and not expect to have to perform the work necessary to come back and swim it.

What words, what shapes, what law is written on me in such places?

I hope the lwa will forgive me for being afraid.

The more I see of what I will be losing, the more... frightening the cost becomes. The fear of becoming a babbling adept, the fear of losing my ability to appear rational in rational society, the loss of those years building expertise.

The loss of myself, those endlessly reflecting mirrors of structure so painstakingly cultivated, and I know my papa would say “no, not yourself. What you think you are” but it is not entirely comforting.

And if I lose this, this speaking self writing these words...

And if I lose...

I struggle at this price. Does it seem dramatic? Only because this is the bastion I have spent my life defending against the attacks of family, colleagues, and a world determined to tell me that women cannot be rational.

I have been beaten for knowledge. Repeatedly. For daring to ask questions. I have been forcibly excised from academia, because I could not find enough support to defend myself against harassment. I have given up relationships and exposed myself to constant, crippling criticism and the many cruelties of people who found my presence intolerable. I have given up meals, a bed under my head, clothes, love, children, and the acquisition of wealth to know. There has been no easy path to knowledge for me, no family poised to encourage and protect, no social matrix to provide support.

This is the next price I will have to pay. Just a pound of flesh from nearest my heart.

What will be left of me, this babbling self ironic in the drive to cage in language what ultimately dissolves it?

I do not know if I can pay it. I can only... make myself try because I will keep my word.

And because anything else will never be enough.

My love, my love, the crown of my soul, papa, patron, master--you scare me.

[noonymoon]

JUSTICE FOR JESUS — Misconceptions & Prejudices about the Faith in the Biblical Jesus Christ.

INTRO

Jesus put it on my heart to write about one of the main factors that keep people away from Him nowadays and I feel qualified to do that since I was in exactly that peer group before Christ knocked on my door (the second time) and showered me with His Love. As some maybe have read in my first testimony, at first I had violently pushed Him away (and I was extremely rude, I remember how I sent a ten minutes audio voice message to a friend [i mean, who does that...??], and philosophized about how the God of the Bible could be the Devil Himself and that maybe it‘s a trap for the weak people who need Religion to cope in this life; looking back that was just entirely bonkers and also very wrong, and now that I know Jesus, I am ashamed that I‘ve ever thought something evil like this, but gladly He has a heart probably bigger than the Universe itself and will always forgive)

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven. — Matthew 18:21-22

and among all the outrageously horrible things I‘ve done in my life, this was probably the most bad error ever. God thought that by now I sure was humble enough to be approached (you know after my Mama died, I‘ve had 2 strokes, I‘ve been in a terribly traumatic violent relationship for over 2 years, I‘ve lost my apartment and almost lost my mind as well clearing out the apartment, was homeless for several months and received multiple thousands of Euros debts in my name because of the situation that was going on in my living community and with my Ex, people who have been following this blog know what I am talking about) but I was sooooo stubborn and DUMB. and not humble at all. I‘ve thought I had all the answers because „Spirituality“ is so much better than „Religion“ and because esoteric and occult knowledge is the Truth and that I would be „enlightened“ someday when I just kept „working“ to „spiritually grow“, meditate, doing divination about „my soul“ and my „past lives“ and „my future“, and „manifest“ my life however I wanted it to be.

A month after I‘ve pushed Jesus away and blasphemed His intentions, well, I was laying on my (new apartment) floor, having the worst seizure one can imagine, my brain was flooded in blood, the pressure and pain on me was extreme, my whole body clenched, the paramedics spoke to me very alarmed and dramatically, and I could hear and understand them but I was entirely paralyzed within my body, I could not speak, I could not move, I sweated so hard that my entire clothes were soaked from only 20 minutes of laying there, then I‘ve had to vomit twice, almost drifted off to unconsciousness, was freezing cold, got transported as fast as possible to the hospital... had a 6 hour brain surgery, was in a coma for 2-3 days and when I woke up I‘ve lived through almost an entire month of hospital „terror“ (I am very sure that I‘ve had something like an almost-psychosis in the first 2 weeks because really weird things happened in my mind back then that I cannot even explain) and it was already the Covid-19 panic, so I was literally alone all day, every day until I was stabilized and was allowed to leave the hospital at the end of April.

I‘m not saying that God punished me, not at all. But what He indeed does is disciplining the ones that He has chosen to be His child, just like an actual Father has to sometimes discipline his child for the sake of proper parenting. When I was stubborn and pushed Jesus away, Satan had legitimate authority to do whatever he wanted, except that I die. We see a similar situation in the book of Job 1:6-12

After I got home, I was still in horrible shape, I could barely walk (I‘ve used a rollator and later on I‘ve used crutches), I‘ve had a bad headache pretty much all the time (I still do, not all of the time, but very often), I‘ve done my daily rehab until first week of July, and now I am on weekly rehab. People would say I‘ve had enormous „luck“ or a „guardian angel“ but I know now that it was God who protected me. He needed to make sure that I meet Jesus AND accept Him before I truly die because death without Jesus means death eternal.

And so, Jesus approached me another time and I‘ve wrestled with Him and I‘ve almost pushed Him away again but THANK GOD, to the exact same time, an old friend from TUMBLR found me on Twitter (she was @spirit-mouse back on here) and also at the same time I‘ve heard of Courtney (@powerpriestess) turning to Christ, and at first I was like „?????“ and it was a huge struggle back and forth for days and I‘ve ALMOST pushed Jesus away again but ... talking with this old friend, who also felt a pull towards Jesus, I let it happen, because she let it happen, like a few days before me, and now I am just eternally grateful that my pride, stubbornness and idiocy didn‘t get a hold of me again and that I just let it happen and it was the best decision in my ENTIRE life. I am just filled with love and eternal gratitude for God and Jesus for not giving up on me, for humbling me enough to make it happen, and I literally don‘t go more than 15 minutes of my day without thinking of them, every single day, since July. It‘s just NOT possible to be born-again and to not think of God all the time *lol* - I have never been more satisfied, happy and peaceful in my entire existence and I could literally drop dead right now and I know it would be okay! (well okay, I really want to be baptized first..)

HOWEVER, - this was a long intro - the misconceptions about the Faith in the Biblical Jesus Christ are severe (!) and since I, myself, had aaaall the evil prejudices that one can have, I want to clear them aaaall up in this post series. My prayer is that people who feel a pull towards Jesus won‘t do the same mistake that I did and that maybe I can help to clear away the stigma and confusion about the faith in Jesus and following Him.

If anyone needs help along the way, you can contact me on Instagram @ noony.newborn - I know just how confusing EVERYTHING is when you start your relationship with Christ and how utterly confusing the Bible is, and sadly, these days, you can literally not trust a SINGLE pastor because Satan has infiltrated the institutional Church around 300 A.D. and ever since then, it just got worse and worse and worse with the blasphemy and deception.

I don‘t have an exact outline but some of the things I‘d like to talk about are the things you most definitely do NOT need to know, love, follow and obey Jesus Christ: Institutional Church, a Pastor, Religion, Creeds and man-made Doctrines, the Pope, Catholic Catechism, Rules, Bible Commentaries of religious Authors, nothing of that. The literally only thing you need is a Bible, Prayer and JESUS and that‘s all that you need. Of course a congregation is a nice thing to have but trust me, you rather want to be alone with Jesus than to be at your local Sunday Service and be entirely devoid of the presence of Christ, His Holy Spirit.

I will include a handful of testimonies of real people who met Jesus, were born-again and are absolutely in Love with Him, on each of these posts. The variety of people who come to Jesus is just incredible and I cry every time when I see such testimonies because I can so much relate to the emotional atmosphere and how everyone is just so grateful. I have been crying pretty much daily since July just because His love is so overwhelming and a human can not possibly hold it inside without shaking and wanting to burst, tears are the only suitable reaction for me (and as far as I’ve seen in the testimonies, every born-again believer feels the same way, it’s beautiful beyond anything).

I pray that you are open to this series of posts and that maybe God can reach you through them, so that you, too, can be born-again and just joyful and at peace with your life forever and ever.

May Jesus bless you ♡

TESTIMONIES

Melody Alisa -  From New Age to Jesus | My Testimony

Kyle -  Suicidal Atheist Finds Jesus | Testimony

Ayelet -  I am Jewish and I Believe in Yeshua - Jesus!

Shokit Ali -  A Muslim gets saved by Jesus Christ! Powerful Testimony!

Samuel A. Perez -  Gay Stripper Saved By Jesus | Christian Testimony

[brianc521]

For the Love of Books

13k+ words of CEO/Bookworm

It’s been a rough week. A long, dark, rough week. With not being able to afford the electric bill, all that was left for you to do was shut down for the week. If you can’t read in the dark, then how were you supposed to buy books in the dark?

While it wasn’t making you money you also weren’t losing any either, that was the double edged sword you were fighting with. You hated it, as the owner of the families bookstore, being closed for a week was not what you wanted. Especially since you were the first family member who has had to do so.

Your Pa left the store to you when he passed away four years ago. It was his Mama’s before him, she left it to him much the same as he left it to you. It was a shock to the family when The Will read out that it was yours, and yours solely until the day you decided to bring in someone else.

It created a pretty big rift in the family, your Mom and Aunt believing that it should have been theirs, but to be honest, you weren’t shocked. It had been a discussion your Pa had with you before he made the decision. He wanted to make sure that you actually wanted the store, and that you could handle the backlash of you receiving it.

Cornered Pages was only your entire childhood. While you’re Mom claimed she loved the store, you would live there if you could. With a single Mom, working at a diner during the day and the local bar at night, left you to growing up with your Pa since he watched you while your Mom worked. He raised you off chapters and new arrivals. Your weekends were book signings and cutting bookmarks.

So having to close for a week was not only disappointing to yourself and your Pa’s legend, it also automatically made you the families disappointment because you couldn’t keep the doors open.

“I want to seriously talk about it,” Shawn shrugs as he sits across from you at the dining room table.

Shawn Mendes, 21 year old multimillionaire of his very own Mendes Printing. Also sort of known as your boyfriend of 2 years.

**flashback**

You were freaking out, literally pacing the bathroom as you whispered yelled at Lauren.

Lauren had been dating Connor since high school, but since he started his new job he had started hanging out with some new people. One of his closest friends was Shawn, and when Lauren met Shawn she set you two up almost immediately.

But now, here you are, dressed in your khaki work shorts, a cute purple tank top and your tan sandals. His schedule was so tight for making a date that you literally had to leave straight from work to the restaurant. You felt about 1000 times under dressed when Shawn picked you up in slacks and a light blue button up shirt.

“Lauren you could have warned a gal that you were setting her up with a fucking multimillionaire.” You hissed, neck vein popping in your frustration.

“I didn’t know! I swear to you, when I met him he was in a Harry Potter shirt and was bragging to Connor about how he’d been able to watch the whole series in a weekend. He was speaking in Potter quotes and all I could see was you and him getting married. I didn’t fucking know!”

“I literally look so stupid right now. He’s in fucking slacks and has cuff links? While I’m in khakis and my hairs in a cute but messy bun. The valet alone was more than I would ever be able to afford for dinner.”

“Oh god.” She groaned.

“I fucking said ‘Literally Pizza Hut would’ve impressed me,’ and he snorted.”

“Snorted?”

“Laughed at me, found me amusing, literally a lowlife compared to him.”

“What did he do to become a multimillionaire?”

“He started his own printing company when he was 18 years old. Graduated high school and started working the next day. He’s the big office building on the corner of Main and Baseline.”

“Oh shit,” She gasps. “So he’s rich rich. Homegirl lock him up.”

“Um no, it’s time to run.”

“Don’t overthink it, he’s a sweetheart I swear. He was really interested when I talked to him.”

“I have to go, he’s gonna think I died or something.”

“You’re so dramat-” You hang up on her and start to rush out the door so you can escape this nightmare you’re living.

This man was literally so far out of your league that you thought these leagues were only in the movies. He will want nothing to do with you, ever.

You whip the door open, taking a deep breath and look up to rush out but stop short when Shawn stands up from his relaxed position against the wall.

“Um,” You gape.

“Okay,” He clears his throat. “I did this wrong,” He cringes. “I was really trying to impress you. I haven’t been on a date since I was in high school. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I was just really trying to impress you and I realize I went a little too far. How bad would it be if I asked if we could start over? My place? We can order pizza and talk and be well, normal?”

You giggled, because he couldn’t stop fidgeting his hands, and glancing at you and then back at his shoes. He was so nervous, and you could see it in his features that he was scared he scared you off.

“Shawn? Just because Lauren set us up doesn’t mean we have to do this. If you don’t want to go out with me you don’t have to. It’s okay, I understand.”

“No! Are you kidding?” He asks appalled. “I’ve been so excited and nervous, and my life motto is nerves mean you care. I guess I’m just, I’m not the best at dating because I’ve never really dated. But I do, I do want to go out with you, I just want you to be comfortable.”

“I want you to be comfortable too.” You grin. “I hear you like Harry Potter?”

His eyes go wide and he nods dumbly.

“I have the series on DVD,”

“Blu Ray,” He points to himself. “And a flat screen.”

“Your place it is.”

**

“I don’t know Shawn,” You sigh, slumping back in your seat at the kitchen table, check book on the table in front of you.

“Baby, if I bought the store you’d never have to have a month like you just had. You’d never have to close for the week just to save, that’s not how a business runs.”

You were trying to be calm, and hear him out. But you really didn’t want Shawn buying the company.

“And with the money I can put into it, we can really look into more marketing. Maybe revamp the place, add a little coffee shop, demo the whole place and start over. We can start doing online sales, and boosting revenue that way. Baby I think we can do so much with it-”

“No,” You stop him, “No.”

Shawn’s stopped, shocked at your firm answer. “Why?”

“I just don’t want you buying my company,”

“Baby, but think about how much we could do-”

“No!”

All you can see in your head is that note you have stashed in your file cabinet from your Pa. The one that explicitly says that it was yours until you were ready to share with someone. You could share with Shawn, but you didn’t want to have to. You felt like you just got the place and you don’t want to give it up yet.

“I don’t understand why you don’-”

“Because it’s mine!” You snap. “It’s mine!”

Shawn’s pulling back, but letting you snap.

“It’s mine, and I know I’m not the best owner, we aren’t making much money and I can barely keep the doors open, but it’s mine. And if you buy it then it’s yours, and not mine, and I can’t-” You shake your head. “I know I’m the disappointment of the family right now, because yes, I might have to close the shop soon-”

“Baby,” He stops you, taking your hands and kissing them. “I’m trying to give you a way where you won’t have to close.” He whispers. “You’re not a disappointment by the way, the markets shit, no one’s really making money.” He shrugs. “And I know it’s yours, and if I bought the bookstore, it’d still be yours, 100%”

“No it wouldn’t because you would own it.”

“Okay, so let's compromise, let’s make a deal, let’s talk it out.” He grabs his notepad and a fountain pen. “What if we partnered, you’d have half and I’d have half? That way it's still yours but I can help,”

“I don’t-”

“Let me finish.” He writes some things down. “I’ve been looking into it, and this is what I think you could make if you at least, did the online thing,” He passes you a note with an absurd amount. The bookstore has never made money like that. “And this,” He pulls the paper back, “Is what you could make by adding the cafe.”

“Shawn.” You gasp at the amount he’s scribbled.

“It’d be a study place, in this college town. It’d be a writing place, just down the street from a publishing house. And there are so many opportunities we could have with the publishing house alone. We could work out a contract to say that we’d sponsor their new authors for a certain amount, we’d be helping them and ourselves.”

“You’ve really thought this through.”

“Yes I have, because I love you, and the bookstore, and I don’t ever want to see you have to close the doors. I want to help, and finally, I know how.”

You smile, looking down at the other ideas he has listed on his notepad.

“Can you just think about it. Let’s have a meeting, I want this to be serious. I’ll do some more homework, and you do some too. I want you to think up and draw up everything you’ve ever wanted to do at the store. Everything okay?” He waits for a nod from you, “We’ll have a meeting and discuss what we’ve both thought up and then come to a conclusion.”

“Okay.” You whisper, nodding at him.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You look up at him as he stands and walks around the table to you.

“Okay, I’ll have my people call your people about the details.”

“You mean having Jackie call me in the morning at the store so she can tell me that you’re free Friday at 9:30 to 10:45?” You smirk up at him.

He rolls his eyes, “Yes, Jackie will be in touch. Better?”

You giggle, nodding as he leans down for a kiss. “Where are you going?”

“Home? I’ve got a meeting real early.” He grabs his jacket, slipping it around his shoulders.

You pout at him, giving him your puppy dog eyes. “Stay?”

He chuckles, “Don’t give me those eyes, I can’t say no to those eyes.”

“Then don’t?”

“I have to, seriously I have to be up at like 4, and I don’t want to disrupt you. It’s your first day back at the shop and you need to be rested. I love you, and I’ll stay over tomorrow okay? Maybe I’ll stop by the shop at lunch if I have enough time?”

“Okay.” You sigh, deflating back in your seat.

“I love you.” He steps back closer, leaning down for a kiss.

“Mhm.” You hum, turning your face to the side so he kisses your cheek.

“Miss,” He grabs your chin softly, turning it back towards him, “You got something to say to me?”

“I love you too I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I think I’d know if you were staying the night.”

He laughs, kissing your lips softly sucking your bottom lip, pulling a moan from the back of your throat.

“Now you really can’t leave.”

“See you tomorrow.” He grins, grabbing his phone and keys, blowing you a kiss as he walks out your door.

**

You laughed to yourself when you saw Jackie’s line number run across your cell.

“Hello Jackie.” You answered.

“Morning,” She cheerfully responded. “Okay, so, care to explain why I’m scheduling a meeting for you and Shawn? And not like a date or something, like an actual meeting? Here? At the office?”

“Has he said anything?”

“No he never talks about his meetings. I’m lucky if I get a ‘Mornin’.” She imitates Shawn.

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“Yeah,” She laughs. “Well except for the meetings part. He really doesn’t talk about them, which is fine. It’s his business, I just schedule the meetings.”

“Well if he hasn’t said anything then I don’t think I should, but I’ll talk to him about it. He knows we’re friends, so if it’s not like confidential then I’ll let you know.”

“Alright fine,” She sighs. “He’s open, um you know, actually. When are you free?”

“Well, I just opened again this week.” You look around the store. “And I really don’t want to have to close just to go to the office for a meeting, but if I have too I will.”

“Tell me when you want the meeting, I’ll work it in his schedule. He can work around you this time around.”

You grin, mentally making a note to send her some flowers soon. “Well I usually close at 6 week nights, but I know he tries to be out of the office at 5.”

“Wednesday night at 6:30 good for you?” She asks, you can hear her typing away at her keyboard.

“Um, yeah, we’ll have to push our date back,” You giggle. “But I think this is an acceptable situation.

“Alrighty then, it’s been inputted into his calendar. Would you like me to input anything else in while I have you?”

“Yeah can you check that major birthdays and anniversaries are in there.”

“I know for a fact they are, he personally has input those. May 3rd is labeled with your name and a heart, just so you know.”

You blush, looking down at your counter, picking at the edge.

“It’s gonna be three years right?”

“Yeah.”

“He better go all out.”

“He could literally just come home with no work, and actually stay and I would be over the moon.”

“Oop, here he comes, wanna speak to him?”

“Um if he isn’t busy I guess.” You murmur.

“Alright, you’re gonna be on line 1, he’ll be with you in a moment.” Jackie says, “Meeting at Wednesday at 6:30, have a nice day!”

Before you can even respond the line clicks and you hear a husky, “Hello Beautiful.”

“Hi Handsome.”

“How’s your morning?”

You look around the store, books stocked full but empty of customers. “Slow.” You sigh, pulling your stool closer to the counter and taking a seat.

“It’s still early, got the whole day ahead of you.”

You love his ability to pick you up whenever you need it. He brought the positive to your life and always had you looking at the glass half full.

“Are you gonna be able to stop by for lunch?”

You hear him sigh, and clicking onto his computer. “No, I don’t think so Baby. Jackie penciled in this new intern? I guess it’s time for an eval, and it was my only open slot this…” He trails off, the clicking becoming louder. “Wednesday? But we have a date.” He speaks up.

“I know, but-”

“I made the reservations for 6:30.”

“Can you push them back? Or we can always have a dinner meeting I guess. Or you know what, tell Jackie to just put me in where it’s convenient for you, she tried to go by what was for me but I knew we should have gone off your sche-”

“I’ll push the reservations.” He hums.

You shut up quick, waiting a beat before suggesting, “Or we could just cancel them and go home with take out and watch The Act?”

Shawn hums again, and you can just imagine him scratching his chin as he swivels in his chair. “Or we could do that. I like that, let’s do that.”

You smile, “Okay! Since you aren’t coming to see me today can you at least come over tonight?”

“Told you last night I’d stay over.”

“I just didn’t know if that changed.”

He sighs, “I know I had to cancel the last time, and the time before, but that’s not gonna happen. I promise okay?”

“Okay.”

“I have a meeting Honey, I’ll see you tonight.”

“Okay.”

“I love you, sell some books!”

“I love you!”

The line goes dead and you sag in your stool. This was going to be a long day.

Maybe if you had more appeal to the store, like if you could see it better, or like if the sales that you had going on were noticeable from the window.

You slide your notebook over, grabbing your pen, titling the new page; ‘Meeting Ideas’.

**

You were rushing around the store trying to clean up the last bit that needed to be done before you rushed out the door. You got a little lost in building a new display for the Divergent section you had. You made some faction signs and little displays for them and before you knew it, it was time to close and your art project was all over.

You are just locking the door when your phone rings in your purse. Hands full, and keys dangling from your fingers you answer, slipping your phone between your shoulder and ear.

“Hello?”

“Hey Gorgeous,” Shawn’s voice flows through.

You sigh, knowing what this call was gonna be, cursing yourself for believing his promise this morning.

“Hey,” You sigh, unlocking your car but leaning against it for the bad news. “Not coming over?”

You hear a gasp from his end, and then him clearing his throat. “Um, I was calling to see if you wanted to make dinner or go out?”

“Oh!”

“Did you really think I was calling to cancel?” He whispers.

“Studies go to show-”

“Okay Bookworm, well let me show the studies that I am coming over, without any work, and I’ll be staying the whole night.”

You giggle at his defense game. “Okay, okay I’m sorry.”

“Dinner? Am I picking something up? Am I making you something? Are we meeting somewhere?”

“Can you just pick something up? I literally had the longest day, and I just wanna snuggle.”

“Okay, so a plate; orange chicken, teriyaki chicken, and fried rice with cream cheese ran goons?”

“I fucking love you.”

He chuckles, “I love you too Honey, I’ll see you at home with your food and a medium Coke.”

“You literally are perfect.”

“Goodbye,” He calls, laughing as you sigh.

**

The TV played softly as background noise to your cuddle session. It wasn’t often that you felt like you had time with Shawn like this. He rarely promised time without work, and you took advantage when he did.

The last few times he’s promised that he’d be yours for the night he’s gotten called in, or never even made it out of the office long enough to feed himself. You’re slowly started to become accustomed to being stood up, half the time you barely even get ready knowing that the dreaded text is bound to come through.

You shift a little against his chest, cuddling closer and humming as you look up. But you pull back a bit when you notice that his face is illuminated by his phone, and his free hand is typing away at his email, letters flying across the screen at a rapid pace going to prove how much he is on his phone.

You sigh, and roll your eyes discreetly as you pull away from him. He notices you leaving quickly, the arm that’s wrapped around you curling tighter so you can’t get away.

“What are you doing?” He mumbles dropping a kiss to the top of your head, eyes never once leaving his phone.

“You said no work.”

“I know, but I have to read this.” He answers, pointing with his chin to the device in his hand.

“It can’t wait till morning? It’s the first night we’ve had together in almost two weeks.” You sit up, turning to look at him.

He glances at you and then back at his phone as it buzzes with four new emails. You slump, blinking at him tiredly.

“Babe it’s just a few emails, and we’re watching a movie we’ve already seen. I’m not missing anything.”

You shake your head at his reasoning, as if spending time with you wasn’t even on his radar at all, he’s not missing anything new so what’s the harm?

“Fine.” You sigh, sitting back against the couch.

He clicks his phone off with a huff, “Don’t be like that.”

“I’m gonna get ready for bed.” You say as he starts to turn towards you. You stand from the couch quickly, walking off to your bedroom to start your routine before he can suck you in with his puppy eyes.

He joins you in the bathroom a few minutes later, after he’s locked up your place and turned the lights off.

“You’re so beautiful.” He murmurs into your shoulder as he hugs you from behind, watching you take your makeup off. You give him a glare in return to his comment, letting him know that trying to sweet talk you isn’t gonna help. “Don’t be mad, it was just one email.”

You scoff, “It’s not just one email, we both know that you’ll stay up to answer the rest and draft up even more.”

“I wait until you’re asleep though.” He points out.

“That’s not my point.” You whisper, tired of having the same conversation every night.

“You say that every time and then never elaborate what your actual point is, so can we get to that part already?”

“My point or question I guess is if I’ll ever come first?” You shrug, looking up at him.

His heart just about breaks when he sees your bottom lip quiver. He never ever wanted to make you feel like the work comes before you, it’s just so much is weighing on his shoulders right now, and it’s become easy for him to just know that you’re there even when he’s not and he’s taken that for granted.

“You do come first.”

“I don’t,” You shake your head, “We can’t even watch a movie with you checking work.”

He watches you turn and walk out of the bathroom, crawling into bed. You let out a deep shuddering breath as you relax with your back facing the side he usually lays on.

Biting his lip he flips the light off, following you to bed.

“Might as well go get yourself set up at the dining room table, or just go ahead and sneak out to go back to your place now. No point in staying.”

His eyes snap to you, his chest tightening, guilt panging as he realizes just how much you know what he does while you’re in bed. He didn’t think you knew about the night that he needed to be in his office to get something done, so he made your place look like he had left early in the morning and not at 11:47 pm.

He curses himself at what he’s done to make you feel this way.

“No Baby,” He slips under the covers, arms wrapping around you and pulling you flush against his chest. “I’m right here.”

He lets the sound of your deep breathing and scent of your mint and rosemary shampoo soothe him into the most peaceful sleep he’s had in a long time. He finally allows his overactive brain to slow for a minute, and for his body to relax against yours.

That night, he dreams of his forever with you.

**

Shawn was already in the conference room when you arrived at the office, Jackie meeting you at the door offering to take your jacket and a beverage of your liking.

You decline, to both, pointing to where you thought Shawn was, smiling at the confirmation nod she gives you in return.

You walk down the hall, holding your notebook of homework and ideas. You knock, slowly entering the room and smiling at Shawn, who’s head whips up from his papers.

“Hey!” He greets, standing up to welcome you in. He leans in for a quick hug, pecking your lips as he pulls away. “I’m professional I promise, but you’re my girl and deserve a hug and a kiss hello.”

You giggle, shaking your head at his antics. He pulls your chair out, the one next to his, and helps scoot you in after you’ve taken your seat.

“Okay, well let’s jump right into business.” He starts, flipping through his pages of notes as you do the same. “What to do you have there?” He points to your notebook.

“My notes?”

He chuckles, “I know they’re your notes, but what are the notes?”

“Oh,” You clear your throat, “Um well, these would be my terms and conditions.” You slide your notebook over, letting him read through it.

It’s impressive, how much thought you’ve put into every single detail.

In the end it’s decided that Shawn will invest with a 15% stake, and with his connections and his company itself now partnering with yours it’s well more of a deal for you than for him.

Next steps are to get the balls rolling with what your plans are. A website that allows your customers to order online, a cafe, and a whole store remodel. It was scary, especially because you really don’t want a whole lot to change, but it’s what needs to happen to be successful.

“Pizza or pasta?” Shawn asks as he starts to pack his briefcase up.

You stare at your notes, and the copy of the contract you both just signed. It’s like your frozen. This amazing guy was investing in your company, out of the love from his heart. This literally does nothing for him but give you the room to grow.

“Hey?” He sits back down, hand landing on your thigh. “Are you having second thoughts?”

You look at him with watery eyes.

“Baby if you’re having second thoughts then rip up the contract, we’ll-”

You quickly press your lips to his, shutting him and his anxious mind up for a moment.

“Not having second thoughts, just needing to take a moment to let this all settle in.”

“Okay,” He nods, pulling on your hand to have you stand up so he can hold you.

“I’m not gonna disappoint him anymore.” You whisper into his chest.

“Who?”

“Pa.”

Shawn sighs, kissing the top of your head, “You never disappointed him. I promise you that.”

**

“Hey Babe!” Shawn’s voice floats through the phone.

“Hey Honey.” You answer, clicking him to speaker as you box up some more books to prepare for demo day.

“So I’ve been looking into the perspective of revenue, and it might be time to start looking into some help.”

“Help?”

“Like some other workers.” He clarifies.

“Oh! I am, I have plans to meet with Lauren about the cafe this week.”

“That’s great Baby, but I’m meaning with you at the shop, not in the cafe.”

“Oh um, I don’t kn-”

“I emailed you the spreadsheet of the projected sales, take a look at it and let me know what you think okay? Just think about it? I have a meeting I needed to be in like 5 minutes ago,” He chuckles, “CEO duties. But I wanted to bring this to your attention. Anyway, I love you, I’ll see you for dinner.” He makes a dramatic kissing sound into the speaker and then hangs up before you can even think of responding.

**

The sledgehammer was a lot heavier than you were expecting now that you’re standing in front of a bare wall with a bunch of workers and your boyfriend staring at you.

You take a deep breath, take a step back, and let your years of softball takeover and swing for the fences. The wall splinters under the pressure and breaks, leaving a big hole in it’s trace.

“You did it!” Shawn cheers, running over to take the dangerous object away from you before you or anyone else got hurt.

“Holy shit, it’s real now.” You laugh as the rest of the crew then starts knocking the wall down. “That was so fun, holy shit!”

“It was really hot too.” Shawn smirks, wiggling his eyebrows at you.

“Oh my god, go away.” You push at his chest lightly.

“Hold up!” One of the workers calls, stopping everyone from there work and pulling something from the wall.

“Is something wrong?” Shawn asks, tucking you behind him.

“I found this,” He hands Shawn the note.

Shawn opens the note, coughing when the dust and debris flies around him.

“Oh Babe.” He sighs, turning to show you.

You gasp at the handwriting alone, yanking the note from Shawn’s hands and holding it close to your chest. The watery tears in your eyes as you look up at Shawn have him almost melting to the ground and vowing to protect you from everything.

“I’m gonna go-” You jerk your thumb over your shoulder to the door, indicating that you wanted privacy while reading this note.

Shawn nodded in understanding, turning to have everyone get back to work and talk some more with the contractor about the plumbing.

He really wanted to give you some time, really wanted to respect that you needed it. But damn it you were almost crying when you walked out the door, and staring at you from the window he can tell that you are crying now.

“Fuck it,” He mutters, stepping outside.

He slides up behind you, arms wrapping around your waist, chin resting on your shoulder.

“Are you okay?” He whispers into your ear.

“Yeah.” You nod, wiping your cheek. “Yeah, I needed this.” You unfold the letter so he can see.

It’s about time, this place needs the updates! I knew you had dreams for this place Pumpkin! Love Pa.

“Wait, he wrote that for you!” Shawn gasps softly. “How old were you when he redid the place?”

“I was three when he broke down the barrier wall and put in the new one,” You whimper.

“He knew all along this would be your legacy.” Shawn squeezes you closer.

“I was really struggling today with this decision, because I didn’t know if he would approve or not. But this was exactly what I needed to know I made the right choice.”

“Yeah?” Shawn asks.

“Yeah, you were the right choice. Pa would have loved you.” You turn and kiss his shoulder.

“You think?”

“I know he would have. Pa was particularly protective. You seem to have that same nature.” You grin. “I can just hear what he would say about you, and to you.”

“What would he say?”

“Well he’d sit me down and go, ‘that’s a good boy you got there, he treats you right and respects you. But if you got any troubles or doubts you let your Pa know, he’ll take care of it.’ Even though your friendship would be so tight he would side with you instead of me.” You giggle.

Shawn smiles, kissing your neck before sighing. “I wish I could have met him.”

“Can I ask you something?” You turn to face him now.

“Anything.”

“Would you like to?”

“Like to what?” Shawn’s brows furrow.

“Like to meet him?” You ask again. “Would you like to go to his grave with me?”

Shawn’s smile literally touches, ear to ear, and he squeals a little as he picks you up and spins you around.

“I’d love to.”

**

Lauren has been your best friend since you both started working at the local girls clothing store in high school. She’s a few years older than you and really was the person who showed you the love of running a store. She got you into the management aspect of the job and taught you everything you know.

She’s a big reason as to why you were so comfortable and willing to take over the bookstore for Pa when he passed away.

When you both left the clothing store she went off to become an assistant manager at Lou’s Coffee House just outside of town. She then went on to meet Connor there, and the story goes on to how she set you up with Shawn.

“So I have some news!” You squeal as Lauren sets her coffee mug down in front of her.

You’re out to breakfast for your weekly meetup at your usual diner.

“Are you pregnant?” She asks.

“No!”

“Engaged?” 

“Oh my god, no.”

“Okay then…?”

“So I’m remodeling the store.” You grin as her eyes go wide. “And I bought the toy shop next door.”

“Whoa!” She shares your excitement but then comes back to reality. “Wait, weren’t you like just closed for a week because you couldn’t afford the electric bill?”

“So about that, I, I um, I might have gone through with Shawn’s investment plan.”

“Finally.” She sighs.

“We worked through the details, sat down and had a meeting and everything.”

“Sounds very Fifty Shades here.”

“Oh my god shut up,” You blush and shake your head, no realizing that it kind of did.

“Okay,” She laughs. “So why buy the toy shop?”

“How much do you like your job?”

“Working as an assistant manager? Where I can’t make my own decisions? Where I have to get them okay’d first? It sucks, but it’s a job.”

“Wanna manage your own cafe?” You ask with a big smile.

“Excuse me?”

“I bought the toy shop to knock the dividing wall down and add a cafe.”

You’ve never seen her eyes so wide. “You’re joking?”

“And I bought it so you could run it.”

“You’re joking?!?” Her voice is starting to rise.

“Is that a yes?”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re you? You’re the best Lo, let’s be honest with ourselves.”

“I’d be in charge? Can do my own ideas?”

“Well Shawn and I have drawn up some ground rules since it’s mainly his name on it, but yeah there’s no one we’d want or trust more.”

**

Days got tough, times get hard, and people grow tired. It’s life, it’s what happens. Today was one of those days for you.

While finding Pa’s note helped, and the excitement of starting a new was distracting, you still struggled with the result that has come of you owning the shop.

It was hard to admit you needed help, and it was harder to receive it from Shawn. It was terrifying to give up some of the reign to him as well. So with his newest idea, comes your patience lost.

“You don’t get to do this.” You shake your head, putting the plates away in the cabinet and slamming the cabinet door shut in your frustration.

“You’re gonna need the help.”

“I don’t need help!”

“I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that at least one other person is going to make it easier for you. You’re gonna run yourself into the ground doing it by yourself.”

“We’ve agreed on cafe staff.” You cross your arms.

“Yes we have, but we’re not talking about the cafe. We’re talking about the shop. One other person, that’s all I’m saying. One more set of hands with you behind the counter. You’re gonna want it, gonna need it.”

“It’s my store Shawn, I can do it! This part of it is all I have left!”

“I’m not taking that away!” He raises his voice to your level. “I’m trying to give you some help here!”

“This!” You turn back to the sink. “This is why I didn’t want to do this! I knew this is how it’d turn out. You’d be Mr. Mendes, Mr. Know-it-All, and tell me how to run the store. My store!” You toss the dish towel on the counter, turning back to him. “Guess what Shawn, you’re not there. You never have been, you never will be. You don’t care enough to be there, and because of that you’re not allowed to care about who is.”

His condo is silent as your words settle. He blinks at you, face blank of an expression and your heavy breaths slow as you watch him turn and walk away from you.

“Shawn?”

He doesn’t answer, he just picks up his keys from the corner counter and walks right out the front door, leaving the slam of it to echo in your head.

**

He didn’t come home, he knew he should have and that he’d given you both enough time to cool down. But he didn’t come home.

Instead he hid away in the safezone that has become his office, his second home. He was too wired to go back and go to bed, but he was too drained to keep driving around all night, so he ended up here, checking emails and stewing over your words.

You were right, he never did spend any time with you at the store. And it wasn’t in his schedule to start doing so after the remodel. The store was so important to you, and it was so minimalistic to him that he couldn’t see how much it would mean to actually stop and enjoy the space with you.

He’s been fighting his own battle all night with how guilty and shitty he feels for walking through the doors of Cornered Pages and changing everything, flipping your whole world on its side, without actually thinking about how this truly is affecting you deep inside.

It was close to 5:30 am when he dozed off. Chin in his hand, elbow propped up on his desk. The sun had just started to rise, and he could hear Jackie out at her desk.

But it was 8:45 am when you stormed in. The banging of his office door against the wall startling him awake. His jump knocking over the framed photograph of you and him from your last anniversary.

He looks around quickly, looking for what woke him in such a way, but everything stops when his eyes land on you. Your hair was unkempt, you wore his old Harvard hoodie and some grey sweats. Eyes rimmed red with tears.

“Baby?” He cleared his throat, blinking a few times to wake himself up. “What’s wrong?”

“I need you, to come home.” Your voice shakes as you speak.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” He keeps asking, afraid something bad happened.

“Come home.” Your bottom lip quivers as he stands to come to you.

“What’s wrong? Baby what happened?”

“You didn’t come home!”

He wraps you up in his arms, kissing the top of your messy hair and breathing you in.

“You don’t just get to not come home Shawn.”

“Okay, okay.” He nods, feeling you start to relax. “Let’s go home.”

“You don’t get to not come home.” You repeat, some panic still coursing through you.

“You’re okay, I’m right here. Let’s go home.”

“I thought you were leaving, you can’t not come home.”

Your words are like a knife through his heart, he can’t handle the thought of you sitting in his home thinking he wasn’t ever gonna come back to you.

“Never, I’m never leaving you. I won’t do it again, I promise. Take me home.”

Jackie watches with concerned eyes as you both stagger out of his office, Shawn mumbling to cancel his meetings, that he needed a personal day. She didn’t ask questions, she just nodded and bidded you both safe travels back home.

Once seated in the car to go home the only thing you say is “You don’t just get to not come home.”

**

This is it, months of work, weeks of stress, days of insecurities, hours of arguing, and minutes of excitement has lead to this.

The shop was finally complete, and today was the reopening. You were nervous, the new keys sit in your hand as Shawn, Aaliyah who’s been hired to work in the shop with you, and Lauren your best friend who’s gonna manage the Cafe stand beside you as you unlock the door.

Shawn grins, pulling the new outdoor easel sign out from the entrance of the store and positioning it right out front showing that it was a ‘Grand Re-Opening!’.

“Li, can you count the register? Do you remember how I showed you?”

“Can you just watch to make sure I do it right? I think I remember, but I don’t want to mess it up.” She nervously giggles, walking with you to the counter to count the register to properly open the store.

Shawn and Lauren open up the cafe entrance, and you can see Shawn bouncing on his toes as he watches you and Aaliyah through the glass walls that divide the store from the cafe.

“Got it?” You turn to her with a smile, she nods proudly closing the register and slipping the receipt into the little accordion file you keep in a compartment under the drawer.

“Yep!”

“Perfect, now I think your brother wants to be the first dollar we earn from the cafe, so let’s go join him before we get to work.” You giggle leading her to the cafe.

“There you are! Get it taken care of?” He asks looking at Aaliyah, eyes sparkling with excitement.

“Yep! I did it all by myself and everything.” Her sarcasm drips heavily as she answers.

“Okay, what can I buy you for a celebratory drink?”

“Okay, so I have a medium black coffee for Shawn, a medium white chocolate mocha blended for Liyah, and a iced peppermint mocha, large, for the lovely owner.” Lauren sets three cups down, knowing everyone’s order before any of you have to tell her.

“And a iced vanilla cold brew, medium, added to his tab.” You give her a look eyeing her drink behind her on the counter.

“I was gonna-”

“Nope add it to his tab, I think he can handle it.” You pat Shawn’s shoulder, grinning when he nods, swipes his card and leaves a hefty tip.

“We just had our first sale!” Lauren cheers when his charge goes through.

You laugh at her excitement and lean into Shawn’s side, sighing as you let the day sink it. He leans down to kiss the top of your head and thread his fingers through yours.

It’s so weird to see him on a Monday, jeans and white t shirt instead of his slacks and a button down. He’s taken the day off to be here for the store launch, and work with you guys on the floor.

“Okay!” He claps his hands together. “Let’s get to work! What’s first?”

**

This is the slowest it’s been all day, there’s been a line practically out the door, and you’re thanking your lucky stars that Shawn wanted to be here today to help. He’s been helping people find books, or the right aisles for certain genres, he’s greeted every person that walks in the door, and talks up the cafe for those who don’t have a drink already.

You and Aaliyah are practically trapped behind the counter, not having a chance to even look to the other, that’s how many people are in line.

You’re ringing up Mrs. Cooper, gift wrapping a few books for her grand kids birthdays. “Caleb is just going to love that Harry Potter box set you had. His mother said he’s been looking for that since Christmas, and Katie has been non stop talking about that new Julie Cross book.”

“We just got that book in this morning, it came with my new shipment.” You nod, tying a ribbon around the box set. “I can’t wait to read it, the Juniper Falls series is one of my favorites.”

“Katie will be so excited.” Mrs. Cooper smiles, handing you the bills to pay for the books. You smile as you ring her up.

“Mrs. Cooper would you like to sign up for a our new rewards program? All you have to do is put in an email or phone number and we’ll track your points that way, with every dollar you earn a point. Every 100 points you get a free book or drink on us.”

“I’d love to, I’m gonna be in enough to make it worth my while.”

“Perfect!” You smile, clicking over to the page to sign her up. “While I get you signed up I’ll have Shawn take your things to your car.”

“Oh thank you Honey.” She smiles, watching you wave Shawn over.

“Hey Gorgeous,” He grins, kissing the side of your head and looking at the screen. “Need help with something?”

“Yeah can you carry Mrs. Coopers books to her car? I’m gonna get her signed up for the rewards program real quick.”

You watch Shawn’s eyes drift from you to the counter where two bags of books sit in front of Mrs. Cooper and her walker.

“Of course, where are you parked?” He asks taking the bags with a big smile.

“Right up front in the handicap parking Son, my husbands in the car waiting.”

“Perfect, I’ll be right back.” Shawn nods, winking at you before he walks away.

You get Mrs. Cooper signed up, ring up a few more people to finish off the line, and then look around at the mostly empty store to see how it looks after that rush.

It’s not too bad, but you notice it needs serious recovery and some filling of shelves. When you turn to start talking to Aaliyah to notice that she’s not standing at her spot behind the counter, but coming out of the back storage room with a cart of books, asking a few people if they’re finding everything okay.

You smile, knowing that Aaliyah was a perfect fit for your store, and everyone was loving her.

You take this quick chance to run over to the cafe and check in with Lauren, and see how she’s doing. The cafe is bustling with people, every table is full and all the chairs in the little nook are occupied with reading teens.

“Hey!” You cheer as you walk behind the counter to talk with Lauren.

She pats Becca, her extra set of hands, on the shoulder to let her know that she’s coming to talk to you.

“Hey Bigshot.”

You roll your eyes at the name, Lauren’s been calling you that since you told her about the remodel and asked her to be the cafe’s lead manager.

“How’s it going over here?” You ask, leaning against the wall, getting a glimpse of Shawn over her shoulder.

He’s talking to a group of men in suits, and you assume they must be his work colleagues.

“It’s going really good, Becca and I are working really well around each other. She’s so sweet and amazing that I’ve practically had her at register all day because she’s selling treats and the cafe card like crazy.”

“Oh yay! I’m so glad!” You nod, smiling at Lauren and then letting your eyes travel back to Shawn. “Do you know those guys?” You ask her, nodding to the guys who just made Shawn’s smile drop to a frown in less than a second.

“Oh I don’t know, they ordered a few minutes ago, kept whispering to each other and laughing as they looked around.” She shrugs, “Seems like Shawn knows them.”

“Yeah will you give me a second?” You ask, walking past her and over to Shawn. “Hey,” You lay a hand on his back, standing beside him as all three of the guys look down to you.

“Hey,” Shawn mumbles, letting his arm uncross from in front of his chest and wrap around you. “This is Tate, Blake and Zach.” He points to each of the guys.

“You must be the famous girlfriend?” Blake says with a teasing smile.

You squint at him as you try to figure out their game here, “Yeah, and you are?”

The boys look to Shawn in shock, “Um, we work at Mendes Printing.” Zach answers.

“They’re in charge of the orders and deliveries.” Shawn says looking to you.

“So, this place is, is something huh?” Tate acknowledges. “You must be so happy to have someone like Shawn who can just dump some change to those in need.”

Shawn stands up straight, jaw clamped shut. You watch as Blake and Zach snicker, looking at each other like they’re the funniest guys in the world.

“I’m lucky to have a supportive boyfriend who believes in my dreams and will help me accomplish them.” You fire back. “And you’re lucky to have such a wonderful man as a boss, who lets you take a break at what?” You pick up Shawn’s wrist to read his watch, “At 2:37 pm.”

All three boys deadpan as you give them a small smile. “We’re on our way to a meeting.” They stammer out.

“Well I’m so glad you are willing to be late to a meeting just to see our new cafe, did you sign up for the new cafe card? With every 10 purchases you get the 11th free. You can sign up while you wait for the drinks you’ve ordered.”

Shawn squeezes your hip, grinning as he kisses the top of your head.

“We’ve got to be headed back to the store, but it was nice to meet you, can’t wait to hear your stellar reviews of the drinks. Lauren’s the best barista in town.”

Shawn steers you away from the boys, smirking into your hair as he holds you close. “They didn’t mean any harm.”

“They practically said that you’re my sugar daddy and bought me my own store.”

“And we both know that isn’t true, you barely let me buy you dinner.”

“You deserved to be spoiled too, so no I’m not about to let you pay for everything just because you can. I can too.”

“I love you, you know that right?”

“I love you too.” You look up at him with a pout. His smile and blushing cheeks has you biting your lip, trying to stay professional in your business. “I really wanna kiss you.” You mumble as you turn away to help Aaliyah fill shelves.

“Oof the things I wanna do to you to celebrate the success of your store? Just wait until we get home Miss. CEO.” Shawn pinches your ass before walking away, tossing a wink your way as your jaw drops.

**

A week into the relaunch and things finally seem to settle back into the normal you’re used too. Wednesdays are always your slowest days, and while it’s not always good for business you take advantage of the free time to get some remerching done.

That’s what you’re up to this morning. You had a dream last night about what the store would look like if you redesigned the front wall and added some of the new signs Shawn’s company just dropped off the other day.

That’s why books are stacked in piles around the front of the store and shelves and knife brackets are scattered in empty spaces as you try plan out how you want it to look like. You’ve counted up 17 notches and slide a knife bracket in place, repeating on the next section. You use your right foot to help hoist the shelf up high enough to set on top of the brackets, but right as you go to lift the door opens, bell startling you and you drop the shelf.

The loud clang and yelp from you is enough to catch Mrs. Cooper’s attention as she walks into the store, eyes wide as she notices you hunched over in pain.

“Oh, Honey are you okay?” She tries to get to you as fast as she can, but with the piles you’ve set down for the time being her walker can’t get to you.

“I’m okay,” You wave her off, trying to play it cool as your foot throbs. “How are you this morning?” You clench your jaw, fisting your jeans to help hold off your scream of pain.

“Dear are you sure you’re okay? You dropped that shelf right on your foot. Where’s that boy who was here the last time I was in, he should be helping. Lord knows he’s got those muscles for a reason.”

“He’s actually just an investor, and well my boyfriend, but he’s got his own company to work for. That was just a one time thing, him working here.” You correct her.

“Is there anyone else here?”

“Not yet, but I’m okay I promise.” You stand up straight, hiding your pain behind a fake smile, to prove you’re alright and don’t need help.

“If you say so, I’m just in to get another one of those Juny Pond books or whatever that series was.”

“Juniper Falls?” You smile, trying to hide your limp as you make your way to your Young Adult sports section. “Which one are you looking for?”

Mrs. Cooper starts to tell you all about how Katie, her granddaughter fell in love with the new book she got her at the re opening, and how she wants more. You soon figure out that Katie has read all three books from the series so you go on to suggest the baseball book that Julie Cross has published that is just as good, and if not your favorite.

But as you talk with Mrs. Cooper Lauren comes in a little early, quickly notices that bare wall and everything a little disorganized up front. When she finds you two she immediately can tell something is wrong with you, and that you’re very uncomfortable.

Usually you’ll talk all day with Mrs. Cooper, but you seem to hurry her a little today and you’re limping in just the slightest bit. The second Mrs. Cooper is out the door to her husband you drop to the floor, letting out a long “owww”

“What happened Doll?” She asks, crouching beside you.

“I was rebuilding the front wall, all in my head and in my zone. The second I lifted the shelf to put it up Mrs. Cooper walked and the bell went off scaring the bejesus out of me and I dropped the damn thing on my foot.”

“Well you’re walking on it so it’s not broken.”

You slip your shoe and sock off, cringing at the deep purple and blue bruise that’s starting to form across your foot, the swelling already starting.

“Just severely bruised.” Lauren sighs.

“Will you help me finish the wall before you open the cafe? I promise to stay off it as much as I can but I can’t leave the front of the store like that.”

She agrees to help but makes you sit on the step stool while you tell her what to do and where to put things. In the end the wall looks really cool and the customers you have coming in after it’s built have nothing but compliments for it.

“Hey!” Aaliyah calls as she clocks in from the back.

“Hey Hon!” You smile as she comes out with a cheery smile, stopping when she spies you on the stool, you rarely sit.

“What’s up?”

“So, don’t tell your brother, but I got hurt today.”

“What? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine but, I might have dropped a shelf on my foot.”

“Oh my god,”

“She’s gonna sugar coat it but she can barely put pressure on her foot, so while I’m in the cafe make sure she’s being good and staying off it and icing it. Also because she’s limited to her chair she’s finally finished up the online order website and gotten all the merchandise in the website so that can launch soon!” Lauren interrupts you.

“Hey! I was gonna tell her that!” You glare at Lauren.

“Sorry, I got excited.”

“Why can’t I tell Shawn, he should know.” Aaliyah looks at you.

“He will.” You nod. “But I want to tell him later, he’ll freak out and blah blah blah.”

Aaliyah nods slowly, and you can see in her eyes, just like her brother, that she’s gonna do the exact thing you asked her not to do. So you mentally make a note that Shawn will be here in the next 15 minutes.

** 10 Minutes Later **

“Jackie, cancel it.” You hear Shawn say as the bell goes off indicating he’s just walked in the door.

“Sorry,” Aaliyah sighs when you look up at her. “He’d kill me if he knew I knew and didn’t say something.”

“It’s okay,” You smile at her. “I know I said I wanted to tell him later, but I’m glad he’s here. So thank you.”

“Emergency.” He hums as he looks around frantically for you, stopping when he sees you seated behind the counter. “Okay I will, thanks Jackie.” With that he hangs up the phone, walking right behind the counter and taking your face into his hands, eyes inspecting yours. “Which foot?”

“Right.”

“Level?”

“8.” You answer softly.

“Reason why you didn’t call?” He raises an eyebrow.

“I wanted to push through?”

“Try again.” He hums, crouching down to take your shoe off so he can see.

“I didn’t want to bother you,” You slump, telling the truth. “I promise I’m okay.”

“And what were you doing?” He asks as he softly caresses your foot, being careful not to touch too rough.

“I was building the front wall.”

He looks up at you, blinks, then turns his head to look at the wall noticing that what you’ve done is actually much cooler and seems to be attracting a lot of attention from bystanders outside.

“How’d you drop it?”

“The bell scared me when Mrs. Cooper walked in and I dropped it.” Your bottom lip pushes out at how lame your story is.

He shakes his head, letting a breath out as he tries not to laugh a little. “You kill me, you know that? How hard would it have been to wait to do that with Liyah here, or Lauren, or me?”

“You?” Your eyebrows scrunch.

“If you would have called I would have come to help.”

“But-”

“We talked about this,” He shakes his head, “We’re in this together right? You chose me to be apart of this with you? Then let me be apart of it. I know I can’t be here everyday, but I can be here to help if you need me to be. Building walls, or new displays that involve heavy lifting is something I can be here for. You just have to tell me.”

You nod, letting his fingers twine with yours on your thighs.

“Okay, next time I’ll call.”

“Thank you, that’s all I’m asking for.” He looks back down at your foot and bites his lip. “Level 8?”

You nod, showing off that you can wiggle your toes a bit but that’s about it.

“Can I take you home?” He whispers, hands sliding to the back of your calves, rubbing little circles with his thumbs.

“Can we stay till close? It’s just a two more hours? You can help me with inventory for the website launch.”

“Of course,” He smiles, jumping up to pull the other stool closer to sit with you and work on the website.

**

Shawn sets you down on the bed, convinced that you shouldn’t be putting any weight on your foot. He happily took on the roll of your right hand man, carrying your everywhere, bringing you things, spoiling you in many kisses.

“So,” He says, digging through his drawer to find you a shirt to wear. “I had a phone meeting with Horan Publishing today.” He smiles as he pulls out his Eddie Vedder, his favorite to see you in.

“Oh?” You hum as you take the shirt from his hands.

“Yeah, he wanted to discuss maybe partnering with us.” Shawn grunts as he starts to change his own clothes.

“With us?” You deadpan, looking up at him.

Shawn looks over his shoulder at the sound of your question, stopping his actions to turn and look at you.

“Yeah.”

“Us? I’m-”

“He publishes books,” Shawn grins, “We sell books.”

You nod dumbly, still confused that someone wants to partner.

“He was wondering if we might be interested in sponsoring a few of his new authors, maybe give them a shelf or two, the room to do a signing.”

“He wants to do that with us?”

“Yes,” Shawn laughs at your skepticism, “He’s an old friend but said he’s noticing the rapid success of your store and thought that maybe if he partnered with us the younger audience that your store draws might help kickstart a fanbase.”

You just blink at him.

“I’ll go over all the paperwork he sent over, but I think it’s a good deal, he’d be sponsoring us much the same we’d do for him.”

“If you think it’s a good deal then fucking do it, I trust you more than my own opinions here.”

Shawn grins, shaking his head, crawling towards you on the bed to plant a steamy kiss to your lips. “You’re so fucking cute,” He murmurs against your lips.

**

A month later your store is filled with a line out the door and wrapped around the building for the first book signing you’ll sponsor.

Niall is here, planted firmly in the cafe corner, laptop open, charger plugged into the wall to make sure he’s not gonna crash as he works through the signing.

Shawn’s here to support, ready to help in anyway he can. But the more you watch from a distance behind the counter the more you’re wishing he wasn’t here.

He’s getting quite close to the author.

She’s gorgeous, long brown hair, brown sparkly eyes, perfect eyebrows and cheekbones. She is an incredible author, and honestly you’ve become a big fan after reading the first copies of a few of her books that Niall sent over last week. But the more she’s making eyes at Shawn, touching his arm, and laughing at everything he has to say has her leaving a sour taste in your mouth.

But slowly your becoming hurt with the way he’s not pushing her off, and how he keeps stepping just a little closer.

You take a deep breath, turning to look at Aaliyah and seeing that she’s struggling a little with keeping up with the line of book hungry teens.

You decide that you don’t have time to stand and watch your perfect boyfriend flirt with the perfect girl in front of him, you’ve got work to do. So, you roll up your sleeves slip behind Aaliyah to get to the other register and start ringing up the next customer.

The store is crazy destroyed by the time you closed. Aaliyah was feeling stressed and little under the weather when you locked the doors to start the closing process, so you sent her home promising that you could handle it on your own.

Shawn had tried to kiss you goodbye, after walking Hailee, the author, to her car and giving her a big hug before she got in. You turned your head so he had to kiss your cheek, and then stalked off to start cleaning before he had the chance to ask what was up.

He leaves hesitantly, guiding Aaliyah through the door to take her home, but watches you from the windows, noticing the deep frown on your face and the way your shoulders are slumped as you start to count the registers.

“Was she like that all day?” He asks his sister, pointing at you once they’re both seated in the car.

“What?” Aaliyah looks up, and the sees what he’s pointing at. “Oh, um, she was fine this morning, really excited. But like as the day went on it was like something was constantly bugging her and bringing her mood down. I tried to talk to her about it but she just kept saying ‘I’ve got work to do, no time to waste on dumb things’.”

Shawn’s brows furrow and he watches you for a minute before driving away to drop Aaliyah off.

By the time he makes it back to help and pick you up his poor thumb nail is practically non existent, he wants to know what’s wrong and got you feeling down.

He knocks at the door, peaking through the window so you can see him to let him in. You turn and look over your shoulder with wide eyes and then they soften a bit when you recognize him.

You scramble for your keys and unlock the door, “What are you doing here?”

His eyes narrow on you in confusion, “I’m here to help, and take you back home?”

“Oh,” You look back at the cafe where Lauren was cleaning up. You had told her about Shawn and Hailee and how they had acted all day, and she offered to give you a ride home since you rode in with Shawn. “Lauren was gonna drive me.”

Shawn looks over your shoulder to Lauren, catching her glare, his heart beat picking up a bit.

“But I thought you were staying over?”

“I think I’m just gonna go back to mine, I’m really tired and just wanna sleep.”

“And what did you think you’d being doing at mine? Going to Vegas and staying up all night. I’m tired too, I just wanna go to bed with you.” He lowers his voice and reaching for your hand, but gasping a bit when you don’t let him hold it. “What’s wrong?”

You sigh, shaking your head as your turn to fix the front table display.

“Hey.” He grabs your wrist, turning to you back to him. “Talk to me, what’s wrong?”

“It’s stupid.”

He eyes you, knowing that you need some time before you really start to talk to him about what’s going on in your head. So he nods, “Well I’m here when you’re ready okay? I saw you got a few shipments in the back? Can I help move and unbox them for you?”

“Sure.” You shrug, going back to your work and trying to not let his cute little puppy look break you down.

So for the next hour, after Lauren leaves once you tell her that you can handle Shawn, it’s just the two of you. Shawn’s back and forth from the back to the front bringing out more books. But every time you go to start cleaning something else there’s a random book sitting in front of you.

The first time it’s ‘Beautiful Boss’ by Christina Lauren, and you look around confused why a romance novel would be in the Syfy section.

The second time it’s ‘P.S. I Still Love You.’ by Jenny Han, and you roll your eyes since it’s a Young Adult in the Cooking shelf.

The third time is after you’ve corrected Shawn on how he set something up, and you were a little harsh with how you told him. You giggle a little when you see ‘Disarm’ with a sticky note under the title that says ‘Please, I’m still learning.’

You look at him while he’s focusing on getting the sign just right, small pout on your lips at how hard he’s trying for you.

The final time you notice a book it’s ‘Lucky in Love’ with another sticky note that says ‘with you!!’.

You sigh, smiling as you look up at him. He’s watching you over a bookshelf, his height allowing him to spy.

“Stop being cute when I’m mad at you.” You whine, making him grin and rush around the shelf to you.

“Why are you mad?” He asks softly, setting the books he was holding down.

“I don’t know, why don’t you go ask Hailee.”

His eyes go wide and he sighs, “Oh Honey.”

“Don’t ‘Honey’ me, you seemed more interested in what she had to say than me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You know what,” You sigh, knowing that you sound ridiculous, “I think I’m just gonna go over to Lauren’s.”

“No, you’re not.” Shawn blocks your path to the counter.

“I’m not in the mood to fight.”

His eyes bug a little, “I didn’t realize we were fighting.”

“Shawn,” You sigh, looking up at him with hurt eyes.

“Baby,” He whines, wrapping his arms around you. “What’s really the matter?”

You take a deep breathe, “The real matter is that I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“I’m scared that one of these days you’re gonna meet someone like Hailee, who’s got her life figured out and is perfect and looks perfect, and you’re gonna realize that you need to be with someone like that and not someone like me. That you want someone who can challenge you, and be up to the standards that you live. Someone who isn’t prone to failing and needing you to bail her out of her life.”

Shawn’s heart drops when he hears you speak this way. He was absolutely in love with you, and he couldn’t stand the fact that you felt like he was bailing you out.

“Hey,” He tilts your chin up since your looking at his chest to avoid eye contact. “Listen to me okay?”

“Sure,” You sigh.

“No hey,” He dips his chin so you have to look him in the eye. “I’m in love with you. I’m in love with your passion, and opinions. I’m in love with the way your brain works, and the way you fight for what you want. I’m in love with the way that you don’t know what you want your life to be, because we’re fucking 21 years old, we shouldn’t have to know what our lives are. You think you don’t challenge me? You piss me off and frustrate me all the time because you make me think of things in a different way, you have different ideas to everything. And while I think one way you think another, and you’re always right. Always, so I love that side of you too, because it challenges me. Also, I really don’t care what you say, but you are perfect. You are my definition of perfect.”

“Shawn,” You whimper, looking up at him with tearful eyes.

“So no, you won’t be staying at Lauren’s because I’ve planned a late dinner and a romantic bubble bath to celebrate the first signing.”

You gape at him as he pulls you closer. Nuzzling into your neck, nosing right behind your ear.

“And we’re not allowed to just not come home, remember?”

**

Shawn wonders out of his room and down the hall to find you standing at his kitchen counter making coffee with a book in your hand. He can’t help himself but to stare for a moment. There you stand with your hair in messy bun, and his favorite nighty of yours hugging you tightly.

The tattoo on your hip teases him as you reach up onto your toes for your mug, but your eyes never leave your book, too entranced in the story to look away.

The fresh hickey on your neck flashes at him when he starts to move closer, taunting him to add more. He presses himself right behind you, reaching up for you to get your mug down.

“I love how you wear this when we fight,” He hums into your neck, planting a little wet kiss to your new purple temporary tattoo.

“It’s your favorite.” You whisper back. “And I’m sorry for insinuating the things I did.”

“Stop,” He hushes you, turning you so you’re facing him. “We did the apologies already.” He lifts you up onto the counter. “Had the make up sex.” He grins. “We’re good to go.”

“So you’re not in the mood for more make up sex?” You ask with a sly grin.

“How about some ‘you’re in my favorite negligee and I’m really in love with you’ sex?” He hoists you up, biting his lip as you wrap your legs around his waist, hands digging into his curls.

“That sounds so fucking perfect.” You moan as he sucks another bruise to your neck.

**

This time when he wakes up alone in bed he finds you in the little makeshift nook he made for you. The chair in the corner of his office big and comfy and you sink right into it.

“I’m gonna get you a house with a room line with shelves and a comfy spot for you to read in.” He sighs, flopping next to you on your chair, well it’s more of a loveseat, hand rested on your bare thigh, riding up his Sting t shirt you’re now wearing.

“Can your desk still be in the room with me? So you’re not too far away?”

“You can literally have anything you want.” He hums, taking your book from your hand, folding the corner on your page and setting it on the ground so he can lean you back and lay on you.

“Just you,” You whisper, leaning forward to kiss his nose. “Just want you.”

“Mmm, you have me.” He nods. “So let me spoil you.”

“You do.”

“So you’ll let me buy us a home? With a library ready to be filled with your favorite stories?”

“Are you asking me to move in with you?”

“We practically already live together Babe, it’s just a juggle between your place and mine.”

“So why can’t we just move into here, the condo?”

He sighs, dropping his head to your chest and groaning, “Because the house I bought has a room lined with shelves, enough room for your chair or a couch, or both, whatever you want.”

“Shawn?” “So can I give you the key now?”

“Does it have room for your desk?” You ask softly.

“Babe my office is conjoined to your library by french doors. You really think I can be away from you?”

“Really?” You let a small smile light up your features.

“And it’s got a kitchen island like you always talk about, and a room that can be made into a nursery at some point. The backyard is huge, plenty of room to build a treehouse.”

“You bought us a home?”

“I bought you a home.” He nods.

“Baby!” You sob, throwing your arms around his neck and pulling him into you. “You bought us a home!”

**

It’s early this Sunday morning, you and Shawn are walking around like the sleep deprived zombies you are.

This week has consisted of packing up your place, packing his place, moving to the new house in the neighborhood that’s exactly halfway from the store and the office, and unpacking.

Shawn through a little fit when you asked him to come with you this morning to the store to be there for the bookfair delivery, and to help you set it up for tomorrow. After you explained that you were a little nervous about how early the delivery was, and how the guy treated you the last time no one was convincing Shawn that he wasn’t going.

The back storage room is jam packed with boxes upon boxes, and displays for days.

The store was sponsoring the local elementary schools Book Fair, which is bringing in money for you and the attention from all the parents and teachers in tow.

You were standing in your new Young Adult section for the time being, replacing the John Green and making sure to have tons in backstock as well when Shawn came running by.

“Babe!”

“Yeah Honey,” You look up at his excited features.

“Check out the new printing.” He eyes the book he’s outstretched to you, ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’.

You’re a little confused because this copy looks pretty worn, the spine bent, pages creases, corners folded. “Okay?” You cautiously take the book, noticing it feels a little lighter than you were expecting. You flip open the cover and gasp at what you see.

There in the middle of all the pages, Shawn’s gone out and cut a square out of the middle of the book and placed a ring box inside.

“Oh wait,” He snaps, getting you to look up at him. “That’s my copy that I made after the night I met you and you told me that if someone ever proposed to you like this that you’d say yes times a million.” He grins as he sees the tears in your eyes.

He reaches inside and plucks the box from the book, dropping to his knee in front of you and popping the box open, revealing your dream ring. It’s a simple silver ring, cut to look like rope that meets in the middle to look like a knot.

“Shawn,” You gasp.

“Let me give you your happily ever after, the next part to your everlasting series, and the greatest epilogue to the best story ever. Baby will you marry me?”

**

It was finally the day, with the store and life changing between you and Shawn, you lost track of time since you’d asked him.

But today marks five years without Pa, and it was your tradition to have a picnic with him.

You sit between Shawn’s legs, back against his chest, head rested back on his shoulder as you trace the quote you had engraved on Pa’s tombstone.

‘Create your own happily ever after’.

Shawn kisses your neck as his hand sneaks around to rest on your small baby bump, hand just about as big as the bump itself.

“I did it Pa,” You whisper, smiling as you cuddle closer to Shawn, fiddling with your ring he’s wearing. “I made my own happily ever after.”

[amandajeanwrites]

A Love Letter to Knives Out

As my husband says, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out has been out for a long time now (aka two months, which I guess is a long time in Hollywood), but we just went to see it (took him long enough to take me!!!) and I can’t not talk about it.

For those of you who don’t know, Knives Out is the ultimate manor-house, family-values, murder mystery. One week after thriller novelist, Harlan Thrombey, commits suicide, the world renowned private investigator, Benoit Blanc, receives a wad of cash in the mail and a request to investigate the mysteries surrounding Thrombey’s demise. Thrombey’s family of white socialites are asked to return to the manor for further questioning in which you learn about the happenings on Harlan’s 85th birthday the night before he died. 

The film is a mash-up of perfectly timed flash backs, done in the hilarious point-of-view of the most recent character in question, but most of the film is seen through the stunning green gold eyes of Thrombey’s nurse, Marta Cabrera, who was the last person to see him alive. It’s an exciting who-done-it jampacked with family drama, white privelege, and sour (not to mention famous) faces, and I enjoyed every last morsel.

I’ll try not to get into spoiler land too much here, as I mainly just need to talk about how much this film inspired me. As a writer, specifically one who’s been struggling through writing mystery and thrillers myself, I was enthralled with every tiny decision Rian Johnson made, both with the screenwriting and direction. He knew the formula perfectly, implanting props and clues at the beginning that would definitely come to life later. 

I feel like before I even get into the writing though, I need to discuss production and set design, as the Thrombey family home completely blew me away. The outside of the house, besides being perfect for the kind of Clue-esque murder mystery novel, was merely unremarkable compared to the props and set dressing that was done inside. Before bed, I read every article I could interviewing the set decorator, David Schlesinger. I just had to know what informed all of the tiny details in this over-the-top, ornate home.

He said he based every single prop off of a novel that Harlan Thrombey would have written over the past sixty years. From there, he sourced the majority of antiques locally in the Boston area as the character would have done. I caught only a handful of odds and ends in the background, as the plot and characters keep sucking your focus back, but I can’t wait to see it again to see what else I can catch.

Okay, back to the writing. Rian Johnson’s attention to detail wasn’t the only thing I pulled inspiration from. The man clearly loves murder mysteries, as this story was reminiscent of all of those classics we all know and love, but he took so many major spins on those tropes, so nothing felt predictable. You really had no idea who to blame until the very last few minutes of the film. Every single character has a motive and not a one has an air-tight alibi. 

One of the ways he brilliantly diverts expectations is in the use of a main character. Marta Cabrera, played by Ana de Armas, the nurse, is the daughter of an immigrant woman, working hard to keep her family afloat and safe. She’s great at her job, forming a close bond with Harlan and his family. She seems to have a heart of gold. (She has a literal disorder where lying makes her vomit.)

She’s refreshing. I guess that’s what I’m getting at. Typically in these scenarios, we’re seeing everything through the eyes of the madcap detective (we’ll get to him in a moment), a strong-jawed, handsome gentleman who is seeing everything for the first time and is just learning the personalities of the characters through their faults and guilt. Through Marta, we’ve seen it before. We know them. We know how disgustingly obtuse the family is. We know they don’t care about her or where she’s from. We see the guilt before it’s ascertained. It’s just a beautiful twist. 

Also, someone pointed out on Tumblr that Marta’s character is refreshing, as woman, because she isn’t sexualized AT ALL. In the entire movie, never once do we see her in a revealing outfit. She’s often dressed as an innocent, middle class working woman, in normal, comfortable clothing. Not once do we see her snuggled up against the incredible sexy bad boy of the family, Ransom, an obvious pick for a love interest. She’s just a girl observing the family do horrible things, and not once is she sexually harassed for it. It’s incredible. This is what we want more of, Hollywood! (Louder for the people in the back!!!)

Going back to the point, however, that every character has a motive, Marta isn’t as innocent as she seems, and it makes for some incredibly poignant and emotional scenes which shockingly moved me to well up. That’s another part of the genius of this film, the emotions. One minute, you could be cackling out loud about a ridiculous comment made by the Alt-Right grandson, and the next minute you could be sympathizing for the characters who lost the patriarch of the family. 

It filled me with nostalgia, not only for other murder mysteries of this caliber, but because at one point, I leaned over to my husband and said “Oh my God, these are like my family get-togethers.” The family argued politics. They laughed and danced and partied. They told eat other to “eat shit” and got in fist fights. They cried, holding each other in apologies.

Aside from the family, comedic relief also came in the form of the aforementioned madcap detective, Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig. Blanc, a detective straight from Civil War era Georgia, comes into the family with new eyes but old wisdom through experience. He figures everything out within the first fifteen minutes but struggles through the details for the rest of the film in waxing monologues about baked goods that will have you rolling. He teams up with Marta, “Watson” as he calls her, to unsheathe the dagger completely, so to speak. Their chemistry together truly makes the film.

I could go on and on about the rest of the characters and their perfect imperfections, but I have to go on to why I wanted to write this post in the first place. If you want to talk characters and actors (Toni Collette though!?!?), hit me up on Instagram @amandajeanwrites and I will discuss it with you for DAYS. (Shameless plug.)

So the point, of all of this, was how I left the theatre feeling insurmountably inspired. Not only was the writing impeccable, full of details and heart and soul and emotion, rounded characters, a set beginning middle and end, but at the heart of it all was a man successful for writing dozens of mystery and thriller novels. I know that sounds wild, that I was most inspired by the character who dies at the beginning, but truly I was. 

Harlan Thrombey is everything a writer aspires to. He has amazing success. He lives in the dream home. He has a mostly healthy (although ridiculous) family who loves him very much. He took them all under his wings to support them financially because his success gives him the means to help. He takes Marta in, although as his nurse at first, and befriends her and takes care of her and her family as well. And he’s able to do all of this because of his imagination.

Throughout the film, one of the police officers on the case is geeking out about the various set pieces because he’s a huge fan of Harlan’s work. I think every author wants that sort of fandom. Someday, I’d love a mansion full of brats and a stranger to come in and tell me how proud he is of my work and how honored he is to be in my home. 

I don’t know, I guess that aspect of it just really filled me with joy, and it pushed me to keep moving forward. I will have that house someday. I could, you know, go without the murder part of it. Let’s leave those for the novels.

TL;DR, Knives Out was an incredible representation of the murder mystery genre, and it’s going up on my list of favorite films of all time. Rian Johnson deserves all of the awards this season, as do his cast and crew. Bravo to all. 

Oh, also, thanks as always, for reading xo

Let me know in the comments if there’s a particular film that inspires you to keep pursuing your passions. 

[erinptah]

The Secret Commonwealth review: It was...pretty underwhelming, mostly

Finally got the audiobook of The Secret Commonwealth checked out from my local library!

(Here’s my review of its predecessor, La Belle Sauvage, if you want to start there.)

It’s 20 hours long. Whoof.

As for the contents…look, it was well-written prose. I didn’t get bored while listening. (Rereading that last review, I realized I’d written the same thing about the previous book, too.) But in retrospect, there sure was not a lot that happened in those 20 hours. Some notable action bits, in between a lot of padding.

And my reactions mostly consist of…complaints. Not “this is hideous, time to ragequit the series, this is an unqualified anti-rec” complaints, more a low-level churn of frustration.

(There’s one scene I know has made someone else outright refuse to read it, though, and I think it’s totally reasonable. More on that later.)

So I’m gonna try to unpack a bunch of it here. Hopefully in enough detail that, if you haven’t read it yet (and don’t mind spoilers), it can help you make an informed decision about whether it’s worth spending 20 hours of your life on.

Spoilers start here!

The Story

We open with Lyra as a 20-year-old student at St. Sophia’s, a women’s college in Oxford. She’s made some kinda-friends, including former booty calls that she’s still on good terms with, but she’s badly estranged from Pantalaimon.

Their rift is exacerbated by a couple of books she’s read that are popular with young intellectuals lately. One is a philosophy book, one is a novel, both of them seem broadly Ayn Randian in the sense that “teens/college kids get really into these books and decide it’s smart and fashionable to adopt their moral framework, ignoring both the logical failures and the ways in which this turns you into a horrible person.”

She’s been staying at Jordan between semesters, but political drama forces her to move, and that’s when Oakley Street swoops in to make contact. They’re the secret Magisterum-thwarting spy organization that Hannah Relf worked for in La Belle Sauvage. Employees now include Alice Lonsdale and Malcolm Polstead, who fill Lyra in on the events of the previous book.

Lyra crashes at Malcolm’s parents’ inn for a bit, but her fighting with Pan gets so bad that he takes off, leaving a note. He’s going to confront one of the authors of the fashionable/terrible books — who lives in Germany, so this could take a while.

Since Lyra can’t just hang around and go through the motions of a normal life while her daemon is visibly missing, she takes off too. First on a detour to the Gyptians, then on a sorta meandering cross-continental journey of her own.

Along the way, both Lyra and Pan keep uncovering new details about this ongoing side plot:

It turns out there’s a place, I think somewhere in the Middle East, where daemons can’t go — same as the area in the North that witches use for separation ordeals. If a human crosses that area, they arrive at the growing-place of a type of rose that won’t grow properly anywhere else, whose oil has the same effect as the seed-pod sap used by Mary Malone in the mulefa world — you can use it to make a Dust-viewing lens.

This rose oil can also be used to make all kinds of super-cool products, like the World’s Best Perfume and the World’s Best Rosewater, so it’s valuable for lots of reasons. But a few researchers have caught on to the Dust-viewing power, and the Magisterium has caught on that some dangerous research is happening with roses, so they’ve started destroying every rosebush they can find in the general region — wreaking havoc with the global economy in the process.

(They’re also trying to convince the general population that God Says Roses Are Immoral now. If this book had come out 5 years ago, I could’ve made some great connections with “there’s widespread successful Magisterium propaganda about how nobody should like or respect the work of botanists.”)

And there’s a related plot where Lyra’s uncle (she actually has one! Mrs. Coulter had a brother!) is playing a long game to re-consolidate as much Magisterium power as possible under a single individual. It gets us some good dramatic sequences…which I feel no need to break down here, because they’re exactly the ones you would imagine, with exactly the outcome you’re already expecting.

One of Uncle Wannabe-Pope’s employees is Bonneville Junior, the son of the miniboss from La Belle Sauvage. He’s a trained alethiometrist, but is more interested in his personal vendetta against Lyra than his actual job. Takes after Dad in that he’s not very deep or complex, just a straightforward fun-to-hate villain.

Pan eventually makes his way to the Terrible Author’s home, where he discovers that things are weird and creepy, but not very specific. Doesn’t achieve anything in particular, either. Disheartened, he sets off for the Region of the Weird Roses, with the idea he’ll meet Lyra there.

Lyra, meanwhile, has a notebook they recovered from an explorer who went to the Region of the Weird Roses. It includes a list of other (non-witch) people across the world who’ve been separated, because apparently they’re more common than you’d think, and have a secret support network. So she visits a few of these people along her trip, with an endgame goal of Weird Roseville.

Malcolm also makes his own journey toward Weird Roseville. I think it was part of an Oakley Street investigation into “what does the Magisterium have against roses these days?” In the middle of it, Bonneville Junior confronts him (Junior is having trouble finding Lyra, but has a secondary vendetta against Malcolm for killing his dad, so this is almost as good). Malcolm talks him down.

At last Lyra, Pan, and Junior all hit the same “creepy deserted town in the general area of Weird Roseville.” But none of them manage to interact before the book ends.

…In my LBS review, I said it had serious middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome, a whole lot of setup for no payoff. TSC spends very little time following up on any of it. To be fair, the Original Trilogy has happened in the meantime and this book also tries to address some of the events from that, but the vast bulk of it is even more setup for no payoff.

Complaints, Broadly Organized By Theme, In Loosely Chronological Order

Lyra at St. Sophia’s:

I really like how the opening sequence involves Lyra noticing a friend is in distress and helping her out! (Friend’s dad is in the rose-using business, and his company is going under.) And then…that’s the last we see of any connections with female friends her own age. In the entire book.

One of the Terrible Rationalist Books is spreading the idea that “daemons are a collective hallucination.” This is not a “rational” idea in this world! It would be like saying that faces are a collective hallucination!

And Lyra is the least likely person in this world to buy into it, because she’s visited a world without visible daemons, and got empirical proof (via Will’s and John Parry’s separation ordeals) that even under those conditions, they still exist!

I can appreciate the idea of Lyra and Pan being traumatized and scarred and having trouble, but this, specifically, is a nonsensical thing for them to argue over.

The book also gestures (not very hard, thankfully) toward the idea that Lyra is doubting the existence of magic in general. Which, again, is the equivalent of someone from our world deciding it’s rational to doubt the existence of weather.

Also, it seems like Lyra/Pan haven’t had any contact with witch society through these years. Why not? If anyone’s going to have sympathy and understanding and support groups for their separation-related trauma, it’s the culture where every single member formally goes through the same thing! And I’m sure Serafina would be delighted to see them! But they don’t even consider the idea.

Lyra and Malcolm:

Yes, they’re being telegraphed as a future couple, and yes, it’s just as creepy and unappealing as the internet has been saying.

And, look, I’m not going to say “20-year-old Lyra is too young to date anyone she wants.” Not after we got through all of Original Flavor HDM without saying “12-year-old Lyra is too young to go on an interdimensional journey with no adult supervision and save the multiverse.”

But he was one of her teachers when she was 16, and his POV includes remembering how he had to actively shut down sexual interest in her then, and here in the present Lyra still thinks of him as kind of a distant authority figure, and that’s weird, okay?

They only have a couple days’ worth of actual interaction before being apart for the rest of the book. That’s not enough time to believably develop their dynamic into something believably-potentially-romantic. So the narrative doesn’t try.

…but it still has multiple people ask Malcolm if he’s in love with Lyra afterward.

The foreshadowing on Lyra’s side is all in how she keeps thinking about how similar he is to Will. (Cat daemon, killed someone when he was a tween, etc.) Because that’s what we all want for Lyra’s romantic future, a knockoff Will-substitute, amirite?

Separately: Malcolm and friends tell Lyra the whole backstory about the magical boat trip from La Belle Sauvage, but it doesn’t seem like she tells them anything about “that time I went on an interdimensional journey, built a group of allies from multiple worlds and species including literal angels, killed God, and permanently rewrote the nature of death.” I feel like that should’ve come up!

General daemon stuff:

There’s a moment in the early chapters when Pan, wandering alone at night, considers eating some small critter (the kind that an ordinary pine marten would eat). It’s not like he’s going through a species-identity crisis, either. It’s just written as…a thing a daemon might do. So that’s weird.

In the original series, daemon separation is a major, improbable ordeal. Under normal circumstances, a human and a daemon being dragged apart past their distance limit will just kill them. At Bolvangar they figured out a severance method that would leave you physically functional, but dead inside. Witch-style separation only happens at this special daemon-repelling place in the North (you don’t have to be a witch to use it, see John Parry, but they usually don’t tell non-witches it exists), or on the shores of the World of the Dead. So far, so good.

In this series, we find out that there’s another place on this Earth with the same daemon-repelling properties. It’s also remote and isolated and associated with Cool Weird Stuff (the cities in the Northern Lights vs. the Dust-revealing roses). Again, so far, so good.

…And then we find out that random people can just kinda do a separation ordeal anywhere. Okay, it already happened to Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage, but now it’s all over the place. Lyra keeps spotting people on the street without daemons! Pan teams up with a kid who got dragged apart from her daemon in a shipwreck, and it didn’t kill them! It’s too easy. It’s unsatisfying. It undercuts so much of the monumental feeling separation had in the original trilogy.

It also makes it even weirder that nobody was able to hook Lyra and Pan up with a support group. Oakley Street couldn’t suss it out? Her friends among the Gyptians couldn’t catch an underground rumor and pass it on?

Related: when we saw daemonless kids in The Golden Compass, they were treated like horror-movie monsters. Like zombies, ghosts, bodies walking around without heads. But when people clock Lyra as being daemonless here, they treat it like it’s something immoral. Like she’s walking around topless and needs to cover it up.

There’s just a general pattern of rewriting HDM’s established rules about daemons, and not for the better.

And speaking of rewriting established rules…general alethiometer stuff:

There is a New Method for reading the alethiometer. It involves pointing all three hands at the same symbol, which already seems like a gimmick, not a useful way to frame a question.

And somehow, that gets you the answers in the form of…magic visions. No intuition or interpretation needed! The sights and sounds just get funneled directly into your brain!

The reason this isn’t a Plot-Breaking Hack is because it makes the user super-queasy. You can only use it when you’re in a position to be sick afterward, and people would rather not use it at all.

Lyra spends most of the story with the alethiometer, and without all the symbology books that go with it. She avoids using the New Method because of the nausea, but she also avoids using the Classic Method, on the grounds that it apparently can’t get her anything without the books.

She’s been studying these books for years now! Couldn’t she at least try to read it, and make her best guess at the interpretation? Maybe sometimes she gets it right, maybe sometimes she’s wrong and things go sideways and she realizes in hindsight which of the symbols she misread, maybe sometimes she gives up and gets depressed and puts it away without drawing a conclusion at all…but nope, she just flat-out doesn’t interact with it.

Midway through the book, Lyra gets a tipoff about a kind of truth-reading cards. That’s fine; we know there are other methods of truth-reading in the multiverse, including the I Ching and Mary Malone’s computer. Makes sense as a new tidbit of worldbuilding.

But towards the end of the story, someone helpfully gifts Lyra a deck of the cards. And she spends some time trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the cards fit together. More time than she spends trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the alethiometer fit together.

The alethiometer didn’t need a New Method or a total replacement in the narrative…but apparently it’s getting them.

And what was the point of Lyra dedicating herself to studying those symbols, for years, if she can get better and more-accurate data from a set of symbols she’d never seen before until this week?

Pan’s international voyage:

This all started when Pan got the idea that Terrible Author had “put a spell on Lyra and stolen her imagination.” Which sounds like a figure of speech at first, but no, apparently Pan thinks this guy is literally magic.

And yet, somehow, not magic enough to be dangerous, even for a single lone daemon whose only plan is “confront him directly and demand that he fix it”?

Most of the trip is uneventful, since it’s a long string of Pan successfully keeping out-of-sight.

There’s one clever part where, once he’s in Terrible Author’s hometown, he finds a school for the blind to ask for information. That way he can say “my girl is totally standing right over there, don’t worry about it, now, any chance you know where Terrible Author lives?”

…of course, the first person he asks has exactly the right answer and is happy to share. Convenient, that.

As mentioned, Terrible Author’s setup is suitably creepy and off-putting, but Pan doesn’t figure out anything about why. Doesn’t investigate. Didn’t come up with any kind of plan beforehand about how to coax Terrible Author into undoing his evil spell. Pan just confronts him, demands he fix Lyra, realizes this hasn’t fixed Lyra, and leaves.

There’s a bombshell much later on when Lyra finds out that Terrible Author is separated! And, although there’s a daemon who hangs around with him, they don’t actually belong to each other! This is fascinating and disturbing and would’ve been so much more satisfying if, you know, Pan had figured this out and was actively trying to bring the information to Lyra. Or, heck, if anything had been done with it at all.

Shortly afterward, Pan runs into this girl who just happens to be separated from her daemon, and is available and happy to team up with Pan, so they can head off to Weird Roseville together. Convenient. Again.

Lyra’s Bogus Journey:

Lyra has a much harder time staying out of sight than Pan, so she gets a lot more interaction along her trip.

Most of it is a long string of the same convenient “running into people who are helpful and friendly and have exactly the information she needs to move the plot along.” (More details on that below.)

When this happened in the original trilogy, it was the alethiometer deus-ex-machining her in the right direction, which worked! But here it seems to keep happening by accident. (She brings the alethiometer, but, as mentioned, she doesn’t use it.)

The Conveniently Helpful People also keep telling her (with minimal prompting, and what seems like total honesty?) whole backstories. All of which are more interesting than the actual narrative she’s going through.

They also occasionally mention God/the Authority, and Lyra doesn’t have much of a reaction. I wish, just once, she had snapped “it doesn’t matter what the Authority thinks! Or rather, what he used to think, since my boyfriend and I killed him when we were 12!”

The convenience also could’ve worked if Oakley Street agents were being cool and clever and actively tracking her journey in order to help. She does run into a few of them, but that seems to be by accident too.

And it could’ve worked if there was other magic steering her along — she keeps dropping the phrase “the secret commonwealth,” meaning the world’s hidden population of faeries and other supernatural creatures — but as of the end of the book, none of Lyra’s friendly helpers have been revealed to be anything other than human. (Some are modified in exotic ways, but they were human to start with, at least.)

Even farther towards the end of the book, after this long string of people being Conveniently Helpful For No Reason, she ends up in a train car with…and I wish I was making this up…a bunch of soldiers who are Inconveniently Attempted Rapists For No Reason.

That record-scratch moment your brain just did? That’s how it feels in the book, too. The attack comes out of nowhere, there’s suddenly a big action sequence with Lyra fighting back, their CO shows up and makes them let her go, and then she leaves the train and heads almost directly to the next bunch of Conveniently Helpful People.

If anyone wants more detailed spoilers, either to be prepared before reaching the scene or to decide whether you’ll read it at all, let me know.

To be blunt about one thing: from the in-scene descriptions I would’ve said none of these guys actually managed to get their dicks out, but a few days later we get the book’s first and only reference to Lyra having periods. And she doesn’t think “oh, thank republic-of-heavens, I’m not pregnant,” which suggests she knew it wasn’t a risk, but the whole Narrative Reason you write that in after an assault scene is because someone is afraid it’s a risk, so, what are you even doing, Pullman??

Okay, switching tracks.

Some of the people Lyra encounters, usually with personal stories that are way more interesting, and I wish they’d been [part of] the actual main plot:

A guy who meets her at a train station, says he has a friend who needs her help, leads her out into a maze of city streets where she explicitly thinks about how risky this is because she’s totally lost…but she does the mission and it’s fine and he leads her right back to the train station afterward.

The friend is a human who’s been modified by “a magician” to be some kind of fire-elemental person, and wants Lyra to help find his daemon, who was modified into a water-elemental form — a mermaid! This is cool and fascinating and scary and raises so many questions —

— and they get killed immediately after Lyra reunites them, and we never find out anything more about it.

The killer is the magician, who had been holding the water-sprite daemon captive. (And is possibly also the guy’s father? Finally, someone who can beat Marisa and Asriel in a “Bad Parenting Juice” drinking contest.) Which, again, is fascinating and evocative — how do you become a magician? Or are they born, like the witches? How many are there? What kinds of things are they doing in the world? —

— yeah, we don’t find out anything about that either.

Murderous Magician Dad just gives Lyra some helpful plot information, then sends her and the train-station guy off on their way.

A couple of guys who intervene when Lyra is being harassed at a bar.

They steer her outside, she’s prepared for a fight, but they hold up their hands and say they’re friendly, and also, they noticed someone steal the alethiometer bag off her earlier, so here, would she like it back?

They give her some helpful rumors, too. Don’t remember which specific ones, but they lead her to the next plot point.

A rich elderly princess who’s on the Daemonless International Support Group list, because her daemon fell in love (!) with another woman (!!) and eventually ran off with her (!!!).

Lyra thinks to herself that she’s seen other situations where a daemon and their human have different feelings about a romance. Just thinks it in passing, and then it’s gone. I want to see these situations! I want on-page exploration of multiple ways they can work! How do they correspond to the feelings of people in worlds where all the daemons are internal?

As for the princess, I already knew it was going to be a big scandal — two human women in that day and age could never be a couple, at least not in public, and A Literal Princess is a very public figure —

but then, in spite of the scandal, the princess moves in with the woman! And they travel together, they work together, they share a bed, she explains to Lyra that she played the role so thoroughly she made herself fall in love with the woman!

…and then it falls apart for some reason, and the princess leaves, but her daemon insists on staying. So that’s how they get separated. Deliberately walking away from each other.

There’s a brief reference to the idea of him wishing he was the other woman’s daemon, instead of the princess’s. How does that work? How do you get so disconnected from yourself, and in such a skewed partial-match with someone else, that you end up with that kind of yearning?

In case you can’t tell, I want to read this novel. I would trade the entirety of The Secret Commonwealth for this novel. No question, hands down.

Instead: Princess says “if you run into my daemon, tell him I’d like to see him again before we die?” Lyra says “sure, can do, thanks for the brunch.” And then, you guessed it, that whole scene is over and done with and we never get any follow-up on it again.

A pair of agents from Oakley Street, who say “hey, Lyra, have you considered using some basic disguise techniques, like dyeing your hair and wearing glasses?”

And then they give her a lovely haircut and a dye job and a spare pair of fake glasses.

This isn’t anywhere near the beginning of Lyra’s journey, by the way! This is more than 80% of the way through the book. There’s no special reason she needs it more after this point.

It’s like Pullman suddenly realized a disguise might help, wrote the scene at the point he had reached, and then never went back and edited to put it in a more meaningful location.

The stranger on a train who shows Lyra the deck of “exactly the same as an alethiometer” cards, gives her a demonstration of how to use them, and then leaves the whole deck behind for her to keep.

A married couple who don’t share any languages in common with Lyra, and don’t seem to have a lot of money…but feed her and let her stay at their house overnight, for free, even daemonless as she is. They also give her a free niqab so she can move around less conspicuously (she’s still injured from the fight with the soldiers).

A priest who invites her into his church, isn’t bothered when she takes off the niqab, helps treat her injuries, and gives her a motherlode of useful details about highly-illegal dealings he’s not even supposed to know about, but will unveil to this total stranger who just wandered in, because she needs them for the next plot point.

This when Lyra finds out that someone in this region has resurrected the Bolvangar method. But this time they aren’t kidnapping random children for it. No, they’re paying for it. If you’re poor enough, and desperate enough, and can’t spare any more kidneys, these people will buy your daemon to sell on the black market.

The city has a whole secret underclass of illegally-severed people working in the sewers.

Meanwhile, rich people who’ve been deserted by their daemons can purchase a stand-in. This is what Terrible Author did. Of course, it’s not a true replacement, but the dealers boast about their ability to make an excellent match.

There are also people who buy separated daemons for other scientific/experimental purposes. Details left to our imaginations.

This is a horrifying sinister mindblowing discovery, as much of a bombshell as the original Bolvangar was. I mean, it would’ve hit harder if Lyra had uncovered it by spying, or tricking someone into revealing the information, or anything more elaborate than “asking straightforward sorta-related questions and getting this whole sordid story infodumped by the first guy she asked,” but it’s still big.

So it’s gonna shake things up something fierce, right? Maybe Lyra won’t go full-on “calling in the cavalry to tear the place down” until Book 3, but this would be her new “stepping through the doorway into the sky” moment — where the horror of what she’s learned galvanizes her into making a pivotal decision, where she starts laying the groundwork for the revolution —

— no, of course not, this is where she starts going around to the hideouts of various undercover daemon-sellers and asking if they can help her find Pan.

Come on.

And this brings us to the end of the book. One of the black-market daemon-sellers guides Lyra to the creepy abandoned town where the final scene takes place.

In these last moments, the audience (but not Lyra) finds out that this guy has ulterior motives. Which would make it the first time in the whole book when “Lyra or Pan takes a Conveniently Helpful Person at face value with total credulity” turns out to be a bad idea.

(And, I mean, he’s a black-market daemon-seller. If anyone on that list was obviously an unethical scumball who shouldn’t be counted on….!)

Finally, a few things that don’t fit into any neat lists, but annoyed me enough to mention:

1) People curse in this book. Which is notable because they didn’t in HDM, and it wasn’t just the adults watching their mouths around tween Lyra — we got plenty of scenes that only had people like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel in them. Those two would definitely be dropping f-bombs if it was a routine part of their world’s language, and this book reveals that it is.

So every time it happens it breaks your immersion, pointedly reminding you “this isn’t a real world, it’s a fake story where the author can switch the profanity-filter on and off at will.” Does it enhance the narrative in a way that’s worth the tradeoff? I don’t think so.

2) Before I read the book, I’d heard vague spoilers about “a character with a mermaid daemon,” and figured it was someone from a cool magical species — hopefully more expansion/exploration on the fairy from La Belle Sauvage whose daemon appeared to be “a whole flock of butterflies.”

But no, it’s a magically-modified human. His situation doesn’t get explored that deeply before he dies, or connect with anything else in the story. The fairy, meanwhile, does get mentioned when Malcolm tells Lyra about meeting her, but she doesn’t reappear or get any kind of follow-up.

In spite of the title, the only explicit appearance of any members of the “secret commonwealth” is some little glowing spirits, basically wights, that Lyra watches over the side of a gyptian boat one time.

3) There’s a scene where a bunch of people gather in a meeting hall to protest the Magisterium sabotaging their various rose-related livelihoods. A couple Magisterium reps are there. Malcolm is also there, and his POV basically goes “huh, looks like all the exits have gotten the doors shut. And barred. And suddenly they each have an armed Magisterium agent standing in front of them. That’s weird. Gonna keep quietly observing to find out what happens next.”

This guy is supposed to be a cool experienced anti-Magisterium spy! This is basically a giant neon sign flashing COMING UP NEXT: MASSACRE! (It is not a misdirect, either.)

And Malcolm sees it, but doesn’t read it, or take any action to try to subvert it, or even move to defend himself — it’s just like any cheesy horror movie where the audience is shouting LOOK BEHIND YOU at the unwitting character who’s about to get murdered.

Wrap-Up Thoughts

Whatever happens in the final volume of this trilogy, it might reveal things that redeem some of the problems in this book. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath.

And when I think about reveals that would address these problems, everything I come up with is stuff that should’ve just been in this book.

For example: let’s say the Fair Folk are directly involved after all, intervening to steer Lyra and Pan down the most convenient paths. In particular, the guy on the train who only appears long enough to give Lyra a set of alethiometry cards + a tutorial on how to use them — I really want him to be Fae. It’s so contrived and random if he’s not.

But the readers should know about it! Back in HDM, we would get scenes about the plans and activities of all the other factions at work. It might take a while to discover the exact details of (for example) the witches’ ultimate goal that Lyra was part of, but we knew they had a goal, and were supporting her in service of it. If the Secret Commonwealth is actively involved in the plot, we should’ve gotten that by now.

Semi-related: I feel like, if the rest of the book was better, then I’d have no trouble explaining a lot of the Lyra-specific issues as “she’s super-depressed, not in a place to make great choices or take a lot of decisive action.”

But it’s not like she’s drifting around in a trauma fog that hampers her ability to get things done. Her journey, while not perfect or threat-free, still comes together with improbable smoothness — as if the writing hasn’t noticed that she’s not being proactive and prescient and well-coordinated and overall super-competent about it. Meanwhile, other characters are underwhelming in the same way. (Looking at you, Malcolm “I Can’t Believe It’s Now a Bloodbath” Polstead.)

So it doesn’t seem like a conscious narrative choice to write Lyra this way. It just seems consistent with the complaints I have about everything else in the writing.

…let’s be honest, I’m almost certainly gonna read the third book anyway. I’m enough of a completist that it’ll bother me not to, I don’t have a lot of hard-stop dealbreakers that would make me bow out anyway, and, well, I do a lot of work that requires time-passing listening material. The Secret Commonwealth is nowhere near the most-frustrating audio I’ve used to fill that time.

But it hasn’t left me excited or optimistic or Shivering With Anticipation, either.

Mostly I just anticipate getting some useful stuff done while I listen, and then having a final set of reactions to work through in another one of these posts.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I was really struck by something I read in one of your earlier replies to an ask, which was "we’ll never know what Rachel would have done after the war ended", and I wondered if perhaps you may actually have some thought about what might have happened if she did? How WOULD Rachel, who thrived in war, adapt to the mundane life after?

Jake

After a while Rachel’s aunt and uncle get so used to her stopping by that they just make her a copy of their house key; it’s easier than answering the door all the time or leaving a window open for her, besides which they’re grateful because she’s there almost every day to bully Jake out of bed and into the world to go do something.  Most days it’s just attending Habitat for Humanity builds in the devastated areas downtown or visiting kids from the local hospital who idolize them both.  Rachel doesn’t mind dragging Jake out of his room at all, because while Tobias is good for taking random college classes or exploring new parts of the country with her, there are still plenty of stupid things that she can only talk Jake into doing.  Together they surf during hurricanes, skydive without parachutes, swim to the bottom of the ocean as orcas and throw themselves off cliffs as birds of prey.  

Rachel doesn’t pretend to understand what he’s going through, because she quite simply can’t—if she even tries to think about what it would be like if it was Jordan or Sarah she’d had to kill during that last battle, she tends to lose the ability to breathe.  But while she can’t give him empathy she can give him this: the scream of wind rushing past their bodies as they hurl toward the ground at nearly a hundred miles an hour, the incomparable thrill of the ground approaching them faster than an oncoming train, the moment of simple euphoria during that millisecond decision to once again open one’s wings and tell death not today.  He doesn’t smile much, and never laughs, but that’s always been true to some extent.  She doesn’t concern herself with making him smile, but with forcing him to gasp for air in his refusal to give up on life, to morph when not doing so would mean drowning in the cold Pacific, to swerve a second away from spattering on the ground.  Because she’s the only one who understands the power of those moments to make them forget everything in the world except the heady rush of being so goddamn alive they can barely even stand it.

Marco

It’s strange, really, how tough and showy they can be around each other most of the time… and how vulnerable they can become when no one else is around.  Rachel’s pretty sure she’s the only one who ever saw Marco cry after they all watched Eva’s body tumble hundreds of yards to its apparent death, and she knows for certain that she’s the only one to whom he says “it’s like we never really got her back at all,” the day his parents announce their divorce.  In public Rachel and Marco become even more themselves, one-upping each other to see who can come out with the most embarrassing story in round after round of interviews and bantering at lightning speed as live studio audiences laugh and cheer.  Rachel gives a hysterical, exaggerated account of Marco’s failed attempt at gatecrashing William Roger Tennant’s award banquet; Marco comes back with a heroic narrative of how his llama-self saved an entire television studio from the crocodile Rachel conveniently forgot to mention she had puked out backstage.  When talking about the time Helmacrons invaded Marco’s nose, they each manage to make the whole mess entirely into the other one’s fault.  

In private, they sit on the back porch of Marco’s primary house once a week and work their way through a bottle of triple sec they’re definitely too young to own.  It’s during those long evenings as the sun sets over the Newport Beach mansions that they air the things to each other they’ve never told a living soul before.  Marco talks about the hard bright-edged joy of watching 17,000 yeerks sucked into space and only being able to imagine their screams.  Rachel confesses to having cried herself to sleep after she and Ax dropped David on that island.  They air their sickest thoughts, lance their most pus-rotted wounds, spew poison at each other because they know that they are both strong enough (hard enough, cold enough, ruthless enough) to take it and give back in turn.

Cassie

Rachel’s honestly not sure how far Cassie would have gotten, politically, if not for her help.  Because that girl might have passion and conscience and common sense to spare, but Rachel’s not sure she’s met a more appearance-clueless person in her life.  The world of politics runs on fashion and makeup, though, especially if one happens to be a woman, and any time Cassie’s about to go tell the United Nations why they need to update the Universal Declaration of Human Rights today to include the hork-bajir and taxxons, or to scold Congress into giving the ex-hosts war reparations and not murder charges, Rachel is there in the background helping.  She shows Cassie the power of stalking into a room in a pair of towering heels, the ways to make a string of pearls or a Chanel handbag into a weapon of power.  Cassie laughs incredulously every time Rachel shows up at her house with a literal truckload of perfectly-tailored business suits and evening gowns, but over time she starts to understand just how much her reputation for being as elegant as she is fierce can work in her favor.  

Rachel, in turn, starts to put out patents for the kind of clothes Cassie would love: comfortable and practical items that can be worn for years without needing replacement.  Rachel figures that if she’s an international trendsetter already (and she is: her line of perfume makes millions every year, while black leotards are debuting on Paris runways) then she might as well have her best friend and the world of high fashion meet in the middle.  Of course Rachel doesn’t explicitly mention that her patent-leather pumps with arch support and heel padding are inspired by the experience of trying on Cassie’s Timberlands, or that her choice of size-16 models for all her advertisements comes from making dresses that would fit Cassie and sizing up or down from there.  But what’s most amazing to her is that the other dressmakers and shoe lines start to emulate her choices, emphasizing the comfort and sturdiness of everything they make even as they tout it as “cutting edge.”  If Rachel has dragged Cassie into being a fashion icon, then it turns out Cassie might just have dragged Rachel into being a social justice warrior along the way.

Ax

Ax seems somewhat dumbfounded when Rachel explains that there’s an Earth tradition that any ship’s captain can perform a marriage ceremony, and that even if there’s no law on the books about this particular power she wants him to do it anyway.  She’s not sure herself how her and Tobias’s small private ceremony (at least, that was the intention) has grown so much, but even she has to admit that somewhere between the 230-person guest list, the custom chuppah to be hand-embroidered by a team of local artists, the five-tier cake imported from a German bakery, and the dress which is personally designed by Alexander McQueen, things might have gotten slightly out of hand.  Ax takes the duties very seriously, practicing the strange mouth sounds he has to recite more than once in advance and promising solemnly that he will not eat any of the cake until Rachel and Tobias have had the chance to cut it.  

He serves as their best man as well (probably breaking with tradition, not that they care) and the speech he makes afterward is surprisingly heartfelt.  «There has been no greater honor in my life than to fight by your side,» he tells them, «and I owe you both my life many times over.  I owe you more than that, of course, for you have made this strange planet my home when I came to you lost and alone.  I am not sure what humans traditionally wish for each other with a bond such as this, so I will wish you this much: may your lives be long, may your battles be easily won, may you be loved and feared in equal measure, and may your chili always be perfectly seasoned.» 

Tobias

It’s not like they get jobs, or hold down formal obligations, or do anything more structured than attend occasional classes at UCSB or consult with the fashion agency that sends Rachel freelance checks.  So there’s really no reason they can’t continue their odd lifestyle, only in the same form at the same time for two hours at most.  At least, that’s how it is for the first several years… and then one day Rachel comes out of the bathroom, a tiny white stick in her hand, and they both realize their lives are never going to be the same again.  Tobias is terrified, of course: he’s been abandoned (voluntarily or not) by two parents, four guardians, and countless authority figures, and he’s got no reason to believe he’ll be any different.  But he knows what the first step will be in committing to raising this baby for real.  And so he morphs human for the very last time.  

In the years that follow, after their daughter eventually gets a little brother as well, Rachel and Tobias become more boring than they ever could have hoped for.  Rachel starts working full-time as a fashion designer, while Tobias finishes an advanced degree in graphic design and gets a job with the marketing branch of the same company.  They go to PTA meetings and teach their daughter softball, buy a sedan with good gas mileage and a two-story house in Mendocino County where the reporters can’t find them.  They still get restless sometimes, leaving the kids with Loren or Sarah for a week or two at a time to go white-water rafting on the Colorado River or to climb mountains in Tanzania, but they always miss the kids enough to come home before long.  They donate thousands of dollars to end world hunger every year, and they fundraise millions more.  Someday they’ll retire.  Someday after that they’ll die.  For now, however, they’re alive, and that’s enough.  

[willreadforbooze]

Hello!

Here’s our weekly wrap up from the WRFB crew =)

Linz’s Updates

Got drunk Friday. Got less drunk Saturday. Celery and sadness the rest of the week.

What Linz read:

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: Two figures, Red and Blue, fight for opposite teams in a war to change the course of time, and they start to fall in love. REALLY cool concept, but there’s a lot that was left to be explained–and I suspect they could have done so if this weren’t just a novella.

It All Comes Back to You by Beth Duke: I’ve been trying to make use of my Kindle Unlimited trial, so I read this novel that bounces between a nursing home aide writing a book about a now-dead patient’s life, and the actual events of the patient’s life. Meh–unhealthy relationships, questionable motivations, and a major fail of the Bechdel Test.

Now Entering Addamsville by Francesca Zappia: A rebel girl tries to prove she didn’t commit a string of arsons without telling the truth, because that would mean telling people she sees ghosts and fights demons. Review tk, but I really enjoyed reading this book.

Cursed by Thomas Wheeler (illustrated by Frank Miller): You’ve all seen the very catchy Netflix-toned ARC cover, you’ve all seen this at every book festival this year. Review tk, but…yikes.

What Linz is reading:

Recursion by Blake Crouch: I literally have no idea what this is about, I picked it up because I really liked Dark Matter and everyone else on our team has loved this book. I’m 2.5 chapters in and goddamn I may finish this today.

Ginny’s Updates:

Whatsup! I’ve had a great week. Went to see a Cirque du Soleil show for my Birthday on Tuesday with some of my amazing friends, and as always my mind was BLOWN! I tried to branch out this week and read a little more things outside of my norm. I’ll let you know how that went, but first:

Currently reading:

Breathless by Beverly Jenkins: This is the second book in a series, the first book was Forbidden which I covered in a previous weekly wrap up. This book focuses on one of Eddy’s nieces and one of the other minor characters. This series is charming and does a really nice job of creating the atmosphere of the old west. I’m really enjoying Portia’s personality and the way Kent is so laid back.

After the Flood by Kassandra Montag: This is one of the ARC’s we got from somewhere and it takes place in a flooded world. It’s pretty damn heavy on the dystopian. I’m about 70 pages in and I get the feeling this might get DNF’d, not because the book is bad, but just because I’m not sure I’m in the right place to read something like this. Myra is traveling with her 8 year old daughter and finds out that her 12 year old daughter (who had been kidnapped by her shitty shitty husband) might have been sold basically to slavers… It’ll be interesting to see which list this ends up on for me next week.

Finished:

Half-Off Ragnarok by Seanan McGuire: This is the third book in the InCryptid series and it switches focus from Verity, to her older brother Alex. Alex lives in Ohio with his grandparents working at a zoo which is a great cover for his interest in cryptozoology. I’m planning on writing a review for this one, so no more info here.

Lord Dashwood Missed Out by Tessa Dare: I think I’ve read other things by Tessa Dare and picked this one out because of a twitter thread about the “enemies to lovers” trope which I occasionally find delightful. As a note, this was a novella, so pretty damn short. But they were childhood friends and he was a bit of an ass to her before disappearing for years. She wrote a book about it and when he comes back she’s right pissed at him. Obviously it works out in the end. But a quick fun read. 3.5/5

My Best Friend’s Mardi Gras Wedding by Erin Nicholas: I have this book club where I read free romance novels from Amazon with a few of my friends. This one was a lot better than the ones that we usually read. Definitely had a few issues (starting out with the leads have painfully cringey flirtations at the beginning of the book and ending with the wrong person uprooting their entire life plus the addition of a probably too bitchy fiance of the heroines best friend). Regardless, the cast of this was pretty fun. 3/5

Trouble in Lafayette Square: Assassination, Protest Murder at the White House by Gil Klein: This book takes snapshot looks at pieces of history in one small square of the nations capital. The book follows a fairly linear timeline and especially early on there’s a fair amount of overlap. It was a good reminder for a local about the amount of history that is steeped in the vast majority of the city I walk through on a daily basis. 4.5/5

How to Lose a Bride in One Night by Sophie Jordan: This book had it’s moments but there was definitely a certain amount of sexual assault and I’m kind of in the camp of offering warnings for that somewhere.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards: This book starts in the mid-60s when a doctor and his wife has twins. The girl has downs syndrome and the doctor gives the baby away before his wife wakes up form the gas they used to give women who gave birth (gonna be honest, the “twilight” births sound kind of great. Wish they still did those) and tells his wife the baby died instead. The book follows the lives of the Dr, wife, and son, to be compared with the life of the nurse who took the baby and raised her as her own. It’s an interesting look at grief and the ways a single decision can ripple out. That being said I’m very conflicted about the way that I feel about this book and the way that the people with Downs Syndrome are treated. I think it could be a realistic portrayal, but I’ can’t tell whether or not it’s also infantalizing. 2.5/5

Sam’s Updates

It was a fun week! Ginny’s and Mama’s birthday, went to the show, it was awesome. Got drunk on Friday, and then also last night. I am hurting pretty bad this morning (she says, at 4:39 in the afternoon).

What I read this week:

Four Dead Queens by Astrid Scholte: In this story, the country is divided into four quadrants each with their own specialty, run by their own queen. Enter our everyday thief and she finds out about a plot to kill the queens. Off we go on our adventure. I listened to this on audio, and it was fine. not great, but not bad either. Insta-love was a thing and so was the “plot twist”.

Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel: This is the third book in the Themis Files. I was talking about this with Parker this week, while I LOVED book 1, and book 2 was alright, this one has shifted tone drastically. I didn’t mind the end at all. But I sorta wanted more from it.

What I’m currently reading:

Steeltide by Natalie C. Parker: This is the second book in the Seafire series, which I didn’t enjoy as much as I wanted to, but THIS book. THIS BOOK is significantly better than the first. I love it when that happens.

The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig: This story is about a girl on a pirate ship that can travel through time. Her dad, the captain, is tryna get back to Hawaii so he can save his wife, but it may mean that our lady may cease to exist. I’m doin ok with this. I think, like Linz, I struggle with this author. Audiobook format is helping though. Idk what the plot is supposed to be yet.

Minda’s Updates

What Minda is reading now:

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl – Based in the post-war American west, this woman and her brother-in-law are living a restless and divergent life on the road. Haven’t gotten very far yet.

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner – This story is about two sisters growing up in the suburbs of Detroit in the 1950s. As we follow them through their lives, things don’t go according to plan. Enjoying so far!

Weekly Wrap Up: September 16-22, 2019 Hello! Here’s our weekly wrap up from the WRFB crew =) Linz's Updates Got drunk Friday. Got less drunk Saturday.

[ruffoverthinksthings]

Auradon Improvement Initiative Explained! (Part 3): The Divided States of Auradon

Note: This is 1,800 or so words. It is a VERY long read.

“No one argues with Beast’s decision because he’s the best and the smartest and the most Good leader of all,” to paraphrase Melissa de la Cruz (author of the main Descendants book series), is the in-universe justification about how no one complains about Beast’s overarching decisions like the Magic Ban.

To me, it honestly sounds like propaganda from a totalitarian regime like North Korea, the kind of oversimplification and shielding from brutal reality that a parent would give a very young child, or a massive insult to the intelligence of the people of Auradon, especially egregious because I can name at least two Disney Princesses who have “incredible intelligence and studiousness” as one of their key traits, Belle (Beauty and the Beast) and Jasmine (Aladdin).

You could say this is actually even MORE insulting because one of them is actually married to the man, and would have unparalleled influence in his decisions.

This part of my long, drawn-out, and at times “very concerning for the sheer passion I’m putting into it” series of how I would improve Descendants advises doing away with the “United” States of Auradon.

Instead, it would make them the “Divided” Countries of Auradon, unified only by international agreements and trade, but otherwise each their own government.

As of now, Auradon is like a Federal Government, with a central government that enforces nation-wide policy and being the ultimate source of power (Auradon City, Beast, and eventually, Ben), but each state/kingdom has its own regional government that actually handles the nitty-gritty of day-to-day operations and their own unique local issues and concerns (the various monarchs who still rule over their dominions, such as Aladdin and Jasmine over Agrabah, the Emperor over China, or what remains of the Parliament of London).

The regional governments have been shown to have incredible scope of power, as with King Arthur being legally able to literally keep Camelot in the Dark Ages, and Ben is presumably unable to veto that for whatever reason, but as the above quote says, everyone generally falls in line with whatever Beast says because “he’s the King.”

I hate that.

I want disagreements between states, actual fucking politics, diplomacy, and compromise, show how difficult it is to get all of these vastly different cultures to agree on something as inane as the theme for an annual international event, much less trade agreements that could literally end with people starving to death, or dire emergencies like outbreaks of disease that could spread VERY quickly everywhere, largely because of Auradonians habit of gelling together and crowding in the streets for random dance numbers, all whilst singing at the top of their lungs.

Make it so that Ben is frequently shown or referenced to be in long, grueling meetings, constantly overseeing, reading and listening to, and making decisions for the government like an actual King in a modern, interconnected environment like this, and how it’s a delicate high-wire act with a lot of ass-kissing, self-sacrifice, and sometimes pandering to the most frivolous aspects of your fellow rulers and influential figures.

It may be ridiculous to knight a duchess’ dog, but it’s not so ridiculous when that act stands between you and solving a massive uprising in the farmers who demand to finally be able to own the land they’ve been tilling, rather than to still have to pay tribute to the lady of the estate AND taxes to the government.

And then show that this is just Auradon City level politics, that this isn’t even going into how deep, complex, and ridiculous it can get the individual kingdoms, especially a hub of international trade activity like Arendelle.

Make a reference to how they DID try to have Beast be the Supreme Ruler, but after a few months of his dictatorial, no compromises, “Obey me or I will yell at you until you do!” leadership style, everyone got sick of his shit, and realized this was a bad idea.

Teach kids that being a leader (especially a King) doesn’t mean you always have to fight for and get what you want, it’s figuring out the best solution for everyone, and is oftentimes an inglorious, difficult job where the criticisms are many and the praise is few.

And if you constantly throw tantrums and demand everyone bow down to you, that’s a great way to turn your allies against you, have them unite in their desire to kick you out, and make even more trouble for everyone.

(On a side note, I headcanon that relations, professional or personal, between King Beast and Queen Elsa are still strained to this day. The staff make sure they are never alone together in a room.)

All the realism aside, to make everyone hold hands and dance 24/7 is an insult to the classic Disney movies, which thrived on division between the people within a single kingdom, or even a small town.

To use Beauty and the Beast, would Belle and her father Maurice’s plight have been as interesting if they weren’t ostracized for their intelligence and bookishness? If they all got along just fine, and the mob heading up to Beast’s castle was just to politely ask what happened to Belle, not to “Kill the Beast!”?

It would also make the world extremely interesting by giving every individual state/country/kingdom their own identity and theme, a culture and a personality, rather than just be aesthetic choices like a “UN Pride Parade” with all-white, middle class, American paraders wearing traditional costumes of countries they may not have even heard of.

Make it so that Auradon City is like Washington DC, a hub of political activity and where the children of diplomats and politicians generally go to get educated, but it doesn’t have much else going for that—in fact, it would be nothing of value if Auradon didn’t exist.

After all, the value of the Silver Dollar is entirely dependent on there being a government that recognizes its value, otherwise it’s just worth as much as the silver, gold, or jewels it’s made of.

Make China, Arendelle, and Agrabah as the three major economic powers, having massive sway in all political decisions because they could bankrupt or cause untold damage to the World Bank, and be perfectly fine within their own borders as they are completely self-sustaining, or people would trade with them regardless.

Show the effects of a culture and a kingdom that lives and dies by trade and worships the Silver Dollar, what kind of people that would produce, what sorts of products they have going for them and the unique challenges in having all this money flowing around freely.

I can guarantee you that the crime rate wouldn’t be at 0% as Ben says in the novels.

Make Sherwood Forest and Corona the countries for “Gray” characters, the last stop between Auradon and the Isle, and a safe-haven for those that don’t fit in. Redo the Snuggly Duckling scene but on a larger scale, humanize the Islanders and show just how cruel and inhumane the Isle of the Lost is by showing the people that just barely the boats, and have them not be that different from what we’ve seen from the ones actually behind the barrier.

And I would love it if there is mention of rehabilitation centers to make offenders right their ways than leaving them to rot in jail, and these two are the most active states with social programs meant to help the marginalized, the outcast, and the poor—where most “criminals” and “Evil” people originate.

Make London, (Now-Not-So Ancient) Greece, and Atlantis* (not to be confused with the Atlantis in Triton’s Bay) as centers of technological advancement, because they were industrial revolution natives, are known for their artisans and their scientists already (Icarus and Daedalus, among others), and of course, are really intent in reviving their old technology and advancing it to fit the brand new world they live in.

Have the most blatant, fantastic shows of science and technology here, not just smartphones which are so everyday, but flying vehicles en masse, intelligent robots, and Icarus yet again flying to close to the sun, only this time, it’s with jet propulsion and a digital HUD telling him exactly just how high is too high.

Make Bayou de Orleans, France, and Camelot as centers of culture preservation, popular tourist spots that have embraced both the modern amenities of the internet and improvements in infrastructure while not completely (or sometimes, literally) paving over with concrete their rich histories and the natives.

Show people all the numerous bits of culture and history without all the commercialization (or alternatively, make commentary about how they got commercialized and disrespected because of greed), broaden the horizons of your viewers, pay homage to the many wonderful artists and arts that have sadly been forgetten, if not outright erased from history by abusive ruling classes.

Camelot would be particularly interesting as I would see it suffering from King Arthur’s phobia of technology, and even more so with the Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Beep-Boop headcanon before this post.

It could be a criticism of excessively conservative culture, but also acknowledge that people can suffer from “Future Shock,” and you should be helping them adjust to this new world, than claiming they just need to “get with the times” and demeaning them.

Make DunBroch, Neverland, Motunui, and Hawaii as their own independent countries, not part of the union, use them to really hammer in the tension and the problems that came with Beast’s unified rule, and how their “perfect leaders” aren’t so perfect, and banding together and joining hands may not always save the day—the world is much more complex than that.

Above all, though, I’m saying Descendants would really be improved by EMBRACING THE CULTURAL DIVERSITY DISNEY IS TRYING TO SHOW WITH THIS FRANCHISE.

A diverse cast of POCs and retroactively making White characters into POCs is a good start, but until the different cultures they all come from stop being a purely aesthetic matter, and start being a valuable, realistic, and integral part of who they are, we’re going to have problems.

There’s a world of difference about how someone will act, think, or do, depending on where in the world and what kind of society they’ve been raised into.

As of now, Auradon is WAY too “White Upper Class America” for my taste, and could do with a good deal of realism, and showing the other 99% that don’t live in unparalleled luxury, comfort, and privelege, than just exclusively the Royal 1%.

* Atlantis hover vehicles may have been hit by the magic ban, though. But then again, I would imagine they have a lot of exceptions, as full enforcement would mean that EVERY SINGLE ATLANTIAN (again, not to be confused with Ariel’s domain) would be immediately sentenced to death as their life crystals are why they’re still alive after all this time.

[womenofcolor15]

VOGUE DEBUT: Simone Biles Opens Up About Breakup With Boyfriend, Racism, Battling Depression & How She’s Handling The Postponed Olympics

The greatest gymnast of all time makes her VOGUE debut for the August 2020 issue! Get into Simone Biles’ amazing covers, spread, a video filled with all her beauty secrets and more! Get it all inside…

        View this post on Instagram

                  @simonebiles stars on the cover of our August issue! With the 2020 Olympics postponed and a shadow hung over American gymnastics, Biles–who is widely regarded as the greatest gymnast of all time—has had to be resilient as never before. When Biles was first photographed in February and interviewed in March for this cover story, America was also a different place. Since then, the coronavirus pandemic has upended regular patterns of life and #BlackLivesMatter protests have occurred from coast to coast. “We need justice for the Black community. With the peaceful protests it’s the start of change, but it’s sad that it took all of this for people to listen,” Biles said. “Racism and injustice have existed for years with the Black community.” At the link in our bio, Vogue reports on a champion looking ahead. Photographed in Feb. 2020 by @annieleibovitz, styled by @phyllis_posnick, written by @abbyaguirre, Vogue, August 2020

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 9, 2020 at 6:01am PDT

Olympic Gold Medalist. NY Times Best Seller. Gymnastics Game Changer. Dog Mom.

Simone Biles wears many hats, but she’s arguably the greatest gymnast of all time, toting 30 Olympic and World Championship medals. Sis is AMAZING and VOGUE is just now jumping on the bandwagon.

Shot by Annie Leibovitz, the 23-year-old flosses her incredible physique in a red Bottega Veneta bodysuit for the August 2020 issue of VOGUE magazine. It’s her very first time covering the magazine and - of course - she slayed it like she does her gymnastics routines. It’s rare to see a black female athlete on the cover of VOGUE, so this is a big deal. We’re gagging!

Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of all time, is the August cover of VOGUE. https://t.co/HnWCeoeiCc pic.twitter.com/CMZOHMZgN0

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) July 9, 2020

Perfection.

In the interview (that was conducted in early before the COVID-19 pandemic crippled the U.S.), the Olympic gold medalist really let her fans into her life, speaking of sensitive topics and making sure she was crystal clear on where she stands on certain issues.

The BOMB gymnast shares she and her gymnast boyfriend of nearly three-years, Stacey Ervin Jr., have called it quits during quarantine. Aww! After sharing with the world they were a couple, they often posted cutesy coupledom flicks on their social media accounts. However, it just didn't work out.

“It’s hard being young and having that long of a relationship and then ending it,” Simone tells the publication about her breakup. “But it was for the best.”

The Ohio native is making big moves. Literally. A breakup isn't stopping her glow up. She has a new home she's settling into and she recently gave her fans a sneak peek on social media:

A new environment is good for the young athlete, especially with everything that's going on right now.

“I think for athletes, it’s hard for us to be out of our element for such a long period of time,” Simone tells the magazine. “That kind of throws your whole balance off. Because you go to work out and you release endorphins. You get any anger out. It’s kind of our oasis. Without that, you’re stuck at home with your own thoughts. I’ve kind of let myself live in those thoughts, to read more deeply into them. At the gym, it’s a great distraction, so I never really live with my thoughts. Now it’s like, Okay, what are the depths of it? Sometimes I’ll write down little notes about how I’m feeling. Like, Today, it’s sh*t. Or Okay, I feel good, I feel content with this, this is the right decision, we need to make a plan. And then other days, I’m like, Are you joking? Another 15 months? I don’t know if I can do that. So it’s been nice to be able to live with them because I avoid them a lot of the time. That’s my way of protecting my mind.”

2020 has been SO insane and we're only half through the year. First, the COVID-19 pandemic literally shut the nation down and then the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd reignited the Black Lives Matter movement like never before. Simone shares her thoughts about racism, the BLM movement, and her disappointment after learning how black EMT, Breonna Taylor, was killed by police while sleeping in her home.

I last spoke to Biles in early June. The world was now exploding with outrage over the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and so many others, the disproportionate impact the pandemic was having on Black and brown people, and a horror show of police violence on display at protests from coast to coast. “We need change,” Biles said in response. “We need justice for the Black community. With the peaceful protests it’s the start of change, but it’s sad that it took all of this for people to listen,” she said. “Racism and injustice have existed for years with the Black community. How many times has this happened before we had cell phones?”

It was the morning of what would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday, and tributes to the emergency medical technician—killed in March by Louisville, Kentucky, police officers who barged into her home without warning just after midnight and shot her eight times—were flooding the internet. “With everyone speaking up and the traction that Ahmaud and George are getting,” Biles said, “Breonna will be remembered. She’s going to find justice. They’re already reopening her case. I’m happy for that. But I just don’t understand. She was sleeping. How do you feel threatened when you’re a police officer and they’re sleeping? Come on now.” Media debates over protest tactics also struck Biles as odd. “We tried peaceful protesting. Then Colin Kaepernick—he lost his job. He lost his career. They took his whole entire career away from that poor man. And look at us now,” she said. “It’s working. You just have to be the first and people will follow.”

The author talks about her important role in holding the governing body of gymnastics accountable, especially when it comes to sexual abuse.

Another asked, “Do you think you’re obligated to stand up when something bad is going on in society?” The question summoned the specter of Larry Nassar, the longtime USA Gymnastics doctor who is now serving a sentence of up to 175 years for the sexual abuse of athletes, including Biles. For two years and counting, she has been trying to hold officials in her sport accountable. “Personally, for me, I don’t think of it as an obligation,” Biles said. “I think of it as an honor to speak for the less fortunate and for the voiceless. I also feel like it gives them power.”

After the Nassar trial, Simone battled with depression.

That summer, Biles moved out of Ron and Nellie’s house and into a condo of her own—the beginning of an “adulting” process, she told me. For a while she could do little more than sleep. “I was very depressed,” Biles said. “At one point I slept so much because, for me, it was the closest thing to death without harming myself. It was an escape from all of my thoughts, from the world, from what I was dealing with. It was a really dark time.”

So glad that's behind her now.

The World Champions Centre, where the YBF gymnast trains six days a week, was shut down indefinitely due to COVID-19 and Simone was distraught she couldn't train/workout. Then, the 2020 Summer Olympics were postponed until next year, July 202! As you can imagine, this CRUSHED Simone.

“I felt kind of torn and broken,” she said. “Obviously it was the right decision, but to have it finalized—in a way, you feel defeated because you’ve worked so hard.” There is a science to “peaking,” timing your training to reach optimal shape at precisely the moment you are scheduled to, say, compete in the Olympics. Not only would Biles have to redraw the plan, she would also have to interact with USAG another year. “We were gripping at the bars, and I just started crying. Another year of dealing with USAG. That, I don’t know if I can take.”

At first, Biles wasn’t sure how she would stay in shape. Adria asked if she had any dumbbells at home. (“First of all, in the gym, I don’t even use dumbbells,” Biles told me. “Why would I have a dumbbell set at home?”) Eventually she started improvising. She did a “twerk-out” class she found on YouTube. She went to a local track and did 100-meter sprints (a first). She even participated in an internet meme—the handstand challenge, in which celebrities like Tom Holland and Jake Gyllenhaal did handstands against a wall and, while inverted, slowly put on T-shirts. Biles did a free handstand (no wall) and held it for nearly a minute, removing her sweatpants with her toes.

Biles settled into something of a routine. She had Zoom sessions with her coaches, Cecile and Laurent Landi, three days a week. She walked her French bulldog, Lilo. (Five weeks in, she adopted a second one, a puppy she named Rambo.) And she did more adulting, fully inhabiting a new house she bought last year and expanding her repertoire of slow-cooker recipes (burrito bowls, pork chops).

So, Simone Biles is learning to adjust to her new life as she prepares to snatch up all the gold medals at the Olympics near year. And we can't wait to watch and cheer her on. You can read more from her interview here.

Watch Simone Biles reveal her beauty secrets, from Epsom salt baths to show-stealing eyeshadow, training diet and more below:

We already know she's going to kill it at the Olympics next year!

Bonus:

  Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of all time, is the August cover of VOGUE. https://t.co/HnWCeoeiCc pic.twitter.com/CMZOHMZgN0

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) July 9, 2020

  Some folks were not happy a black woman wasn't chosen to photograph Simone for VOGUE. And most we're impressed with the photos that made it to the magazine. Peep the thread above. Thoughts?

Photo: Simone's IG

  [Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/07/09/simone-biles-opens-up-about-breakup-racism-in-gymnastics-depression-how-she%E2%80%99s-handling-th

[sheminecrafts]

Open sourcing analysis, plus US, China and HQ2

The big news today is that — finally — we have Amazon’s selection of cities for its dual second headquarters (Northern Virginia and NYC). Then some notes on China. But first, semiconductors and open sourcing analysis.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at danny@techcrunch.com or Arman at Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com if you like or hate something here.

Pivot: Future of semiconductors, chips, AI, etc.

Last week, I focused on SoftBank’s debt and Form D filings by startups. On Friday, I asked what I should start to analyze next. There were several feedback hotspots, but the one that popped out to me was around next-generation chips and the battle for dominance at the hardware layer.

As a software engineer, I know almost nothing about silicon (the beauty of abstraction). But it is clear that the future of all kinds of workflows will increasingly be driven by capabilities at the hardware/silicon level, particularly in future applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, AR/VR, autonomous driving, and more. Furthermore, China and other countries are spending billions to go after the leaders in this space such as Nvidia and Intel. Startups, funding, competition, geopolitics — we’ve got it all here.

Arman and I are now diving deeper into this space. We will start to post once we have some interesting things to share, but if you have ideas, opinions, companies or investments in this space: tell us about them, as we are all ears: danny@techcrunch.com and Arman.tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

Open-source analysis at TechCrunch

Since I launched this daily “column” last week, I have included the text near the top that “We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch.” One of those forms is what might be called open-source journalism. Definitions are fuzzy, but I take it to mean working “in the open”: allowing you, the audience of this column, to engage in not just feedback around finalized and published posts, but to actually affect the entire process of analysis, from sourcing and ideation to data science and writing.

I am thankful to work at a publication like TechCrunch where my readers are often working in the exact sectors that I am writing about. When I wrote about Form Ds last week, a number of startup attorneys reached out with their own thoughts and analysis, and also explained key aspects of how the law is changing around SEC disclosure for startups. That’s really powerful, and I want to apply it to as many fields as possible.

This thesis is ultimately intentional — now I have to operationalize it. There aren’t good tools (yet!) that I know of that allows for easy sharing of data and notes that doesn’t rely on a hacked together set of Google Docs and Github. But I’m exploring the stack, and will publish more things publicly as we have them.

Amazon HQ2 – the future of corporate relations with cities

Amazon’s long process for selecting an HQ2 is finally over, and the official answer is two: Northern Virginia and NYC. Tons of words have been spilled about the search, and I am sure even more analysis will strike today about what put those two locations over the top.

To me, the key for mayors is to start using these reverse searches (where a company seeks a city and not vice versa) as leverage to actually get resources to fund infrastructure and other critical services.

This is a theme that I discussed about a year ago:

Take Boston’s bid for GE’s new headquarters. Yes, the city offered property tax rebates of about $25 million , but GE’s move also pushed the state to fund a variety of infrastructure improvements, including the Northern Avenue bridge and new bike lanes. That bridge adds a critical path for vehicles and pedestrians in Boston’s central business district, yet has gone unfunded for years.

Ideally, governments could debate, vote, and then fund these sorts of infrastructure projects and community improvements. The reality is that without a time-sensitive forcing function like a reverse RFP process, there is little hope that cities and states will make progress on these sorts of projects. The debates can literally go on forever in American democracy.

So if you are a mayor or economic planning official, use these processes as tools to get stuff done. Use the allure of new jobs and tax revenues to spur infrastructure spending and get a rezoning through a recalcitrant city council. Use that “prosperity bomb” to upgrade old parts of the urban landscape and prepare the city for the future. A healthier, more humane city can be just around the corner.

Take DC. The city has seen one of the best-run Metro systems deteriorate to abysmal levels over the past few years due to a complete dumpster fire of organizational design (the DC transit agency WMATA is funded by inconsistent revenue sources that ensure it will never be sustainable). Here is an opportunity to use Amazon’s announcement to get the tax framework and operations figured out to ensure that real estate, transportation, and other critical urban infrastructure are designed effectively.

China’s mobile internationalization

Timothy Allen/Getty Images

Talking about second headquarters, the technology industry clearly has separated into poles, one based around the United States and the other based around China. Two articles I read recently gave good insights of the benefits and challenges for China in this world.

The first is from Sam Byford writing at The Verge, who investigates the native OS options that Chinese consumers receive from companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, and others. The headline is much more shrill than the text, so don’t let that frighten you.

Byford provides an overview of the lineage of Chinese mobile OSes, and also notes that what might look like design gaffes in Western consumer eyes might be critical needs for Chinese buyers:

But what is true today is that not all Chinese phone software is bad. And when it is bad from a Western perspective, it’s often bad for very different reasons than the bad Android skins of the past. Yes, many of these phones make similar mistakes with overbearing UI decisions — hello, Huawei — and yes, it’s easy to mock some designs for their obvious thrall to iOS. But these are phones created in a very different context to Android devices as we’ve previously understood them.

The article is perhaps a tad long for what it is, but Byford’s key viewpoint should be repeated as a mantra by any person connected to the technology sector today: “The Chinese phone market is a spiraling behemoth of innovation and audacity, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to be on board with the already exciting hardware, it’s worth trying to understand the software.”

Of course, while China may be a huge country, its leading technology companies do want to globalize and expand their user bases outside of the Middle Kingdom’s borders. That may well be a challenging proposition.

Writing at Factor Daily, Shadma Shaikh dives into the failure of WeChat to break into the Indian market. The product lessons learned by WeChat’s owner Tencent could be applied to any Silicon Valley company — cultural knowledge and appropriate product design are key to entering overseas markets.

Shaikh gives a couple of examples:

Another design feature in the app allowed users to look up and send add-friend requests to WeChat users nearby. During initial onboarding when users were just checking app’s features, many would tap the “people nearby” feature, which would switch on location sharing by default – including with strangers. Once location sharing with strangers was switched on, it wasn’t very intuitive to turn it off.

“Women used to get a lot of unwarranted messages from men, which was a major turn off and many of them left the platform,” Gupta says. “China probably didn’t have this stalking problem.”

And

In China, where the internet was cheaper than in India in 2012, sending video files of, say, 4 MB was not a challenge. WhatsApp compresses a 5 MB photo to 40 kilobytes. WeChat did not compress the files and took many minutes and data to send and receive media files.

Internationalization will never be easy, but the lessons that Silicon Valley has slowly learned over the past two decades will need to be learned again by Chinese companies if they want to export their software to other countries.

Reading Docket

Eliot Peper’s new science fiction novel Borderless

Daniel J Hopkins’ The Increasingly United States (about how U.S. elections are more national and less local than ever before).

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2zMaHhA via IFTTT

[theinvinciblenoob]

The big news today is that — finally — we have Amazon’s selection of cities for its dual second headquarters (Northern Virginia and NYC). Then some notes on China. But first, semiconductors and open sourcing analysis.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at danny@techcrunch.com or Arman at Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com if you like or hate something here.

Pivot: Future of semiconductors, chips, AI, etc.

Last week, I focused on SoftBank’s debt and Form D filings by startups. On Friday, I asked what I should start to analyze next. There were several feedback hotspots, but the one that popped out to me was around next-generation chips and the battle for dominance at the hardware layer.

As a software engineer, I know almost nothing about silicon (the beauty of abstraction). But it is clear that the future of all kinds of workflows will increasingly be driven by capabilities at the hardware/silicon level, particularly in future applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, AR/VR, autonomous driving, and more. Furthermore, China and other countries are spending billions to go after the leaders in this space such as Nvidia and Intel. Startups, funding, competition, geopolitics — we’ve got it all here.

Arman and I are now diving deeper into this space. We will start to post once we have some interesting things to share, but if you have ideas, opinions, companies or investments in this space: tell us about them, as we are all ears: danny@techcrunch.com and Arman.tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

Open-source analysis at TechCrunch

Since I launched this daily “column” last week, I have included the text near the top that “We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch.” One of those forms is what might be called open-source journalism. Definitions are fuzzy, but I take it to mean working “in the open”: allowing you, the audience of this column, to engage in not just feedback around finalized and published posts, but to actually affect the entire process of analysis, from sourcing and ideation to data science and writing.

I am thankful to work at a publication like TechCrunch where my readers are often working in the exact sectors that I am writing about. When I wrote about Form Ds last week, a number of startup attorneys reached out with their own thoughts and analysis, and also explained key aspects of how the law is changing around SEC disclosure for startups. That’s really powerful, and I want to apply it to as many fields as possible.

This thesis is ultimately intentional — now I have to operationalize it. There aren’t good tools (yet!) that I know of that allows for easy sharing of data and notes that doesn’t rely on a hacked together set of Google Docs and Github. But I’m exploring the stack, and will publish more things publicly as we have them.

Amazon HQ2 – the future of corporate relations with cities

Amazon’s long process for selecting an HQ2 is finally over, and the official answer is two: Northern Virginia and NYC. Tons of words have been spilled about the search, and I am sure even more analysis will strike today about what put those two locations over the top.

To me, the key for mayors is to start using these reverse searches (where a company seeks a city and not vice versa) as leverage to actually get resources to fund infrastructure and other critical services.

This is a theme that I discussed about a year ago:

Take Boston’s bid for GE’s new headquarters. Yes, the city offered property tax rebates of about $25 million , but GE’s move also pushed the state to fund a variety of infrastructure improvements, including the Northern Avenue bridge and new bike lanes. That bridge adds a critical path for vehicles and pedestrians in Boston’s central business district, yet has gone unfunded for years.

Ideally, governments could debate, vote, and then fund these sorts of infrastructure projects and community improvements. The reality is that without a time-sensitive forcing function like a reverse RFP process, there is little hope that cities and states will make progress on these sorts of projects. The debates can literally go on forever in American democracy.

So if you are a mayor or economic planning official, use these processes as tools to get stuff done. Use the allure of new jobs and tax revenues to spur infrastructure spending and get a rezoning through a recalcitrant city council. Use that “prosperity bomb” to upgrade old parts of the urban landscape and prepare the city for the future. A healthier, more humane city can be just around the corner.

Take DC. The city has seen one of the best-run Metro systems deteriorate to abysmal levels over the past few years due to a complete dumpster fire of organizational design (the DC transit agency WMATA is funded by inconsistent revenue sources that ensure it will never be sustainable). Here is an opportunity to use Amazon’s announcement to get the tax framework and operations figured out to ensure that real estate, transportation, and other critical urban infrastructure are designed effectively.

China’s mobile internationalization

Timothy Allen/Getty Images

Talking about second headquarters, the technology industry clearly has separated into poles, one based around the United States and the other based around China. Two articles I read recently gave good insights of the benefits and challenges for China in this world.

The first is from Sam Byford writing at The Verge, who investigates the native OS options that Chinese consumers receive from companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, and others. The headline is much more shrill than the text, so don’t let that frighten you.

Byford provides an overview of the lineage of Chinese mobile OSes, and also notes that what might look like design gaffes in Western consumer eyes might be critical needs for Chinese buyers:

But what is true today is that not all Chinese phone software is bad. And when it is bad from a Western perspective, it’s often bad for very different reasons than the bad Android skins of the past. Yes, many of these phones make similar mistakes with overbearing UI decisions — hello, Huawei — and yes, it’s easy to mock some designs for their obvious thrall to iOS. But these are phones created in a very different context to Android devices as we’ve previously understood them.

The article is perhaps a tad long for what it is, but Byford’s key viewpoint should be repeated as a mantra by any person connected to the technology sector today: “The Chinese phone market is a spiraling behemoth of innovation and audacity, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to be on board with the already exciting hardware, it’s worth trying to understand the software.”

Of course, while China may be a huge country, its leading technology companies do want to globalize and expand their user bases outside of the Middle Kingdom’s borders. That may well be a challenging proposition.

Writing at Factor Daily, Shadma Shaikh dives into the failure of WeChat to break into the Indian market. The product lessons learned by WeChat’s owner Tencent could be applied to any Silicon Valley company — cultural knowledge and appropriate product design are key to entering overseas markets.

Shaikh gives a couple of examples:

Another design feature in the app allowed users to look up and send add-friend requests to WeChat users nearby. During initial onboarding when users were just checking app’s features, many would tap the “people nearby” feature, which would switch on location sharing by default – including with strangers. Once location sharing with strangers was switched on, it wasn’t very intuitive to turn it off.

“Women used to get a lot of unwarranted messages from men, which was a major turn off and many of them left the platform,” Gupta says. “China probably didn’t have this stalking problem.”

And

In China, where the internet was cheaper than in India in 2012, sending video files of, say, 4 MB was not a challenge. WhatsApp compresses a 5 MB photo to 40 kilobytes. WeChat did not compress the files and took many minutes and data to send and receive media files.

Internationalization will never be easy, but the lessons that Silicon Valley has slowly learned over the past two decades will need to be learned again by Chinese companies if they want to export their software to other countries.

Reading Docket

Eliot Peper’s new science fiction novel Borderless

Daniel J Hopkins’ The Increasingly United States (about how U.S. elections are more national and less local than ever before).

via TechCrunch

[technicalsolutions88]

The big news today is that — finally — we have Amazon’s selection of cities for its dual second headquarters (Northern Virginia and NYC). Then some notes on China. But first, semiconductors and open sourcing analysis.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at danny@techcrunch.com or Arman at Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com if you like or hate something here.

Pivot: Future of semiconductors, chips, AI, etc.

Last week, I focused on SoftBank’s debt and Form D filings by startups. On Friday, I asked what I should start to analyze next. There were several feedback hotspots, but the one that popped out to me was around next-generation chips and the battle for dominance at the hardware layer.

As a software engineer, I know almost nothing about silicon (the beauty of abstraction). But it is clear that the future of all kinds of workflows will increasingly be driven by capabilities at the hardware/silicon level, particularly in future applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, AR/VR, autonomous driving, and more. Furthermore, China and other countries are spending billions to go after the leaders in this space such as Nvidia and Intel. Startups, funding, competition, geopolitics — we’ve got it all here.

Arman and I are now diving deeper into this space. We will start to post once we have some interesting things to share, but if you have ideas, opinions, companies or investments in this space: tell us about them, as we are all ears: danny@techcrunch.com and Arman.tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

Open-source analysis at TechCrunch

Since I launched this daily “column” last week, I have included the text near the top that “We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch.” One of those forms is what might be called open-source journalism. Definitions are fuzzy, but I take it to mean working “in the open”: allowing you, the audience of this column, to engage in not just feedback around finalized and published posts, but to actually affect the entire process of analysis, from sourcing and ideation to data science and writing.

I am thankful to work at a publication like TechCrunch where my readers are often working in the exact sectors that I am writing about. When I wrote about Form Ds last week, a number of startup attorneys reached out with their own thoughts and analysis, and also explained key aspects of how the law is changing around SEC disclosure for startups. That’s really powerful, and I want to apply it to as many fields as possible.

This thesis is ultimately intentional — now I have to operationalize it. There aren’t good tools (yet!) that I know of that allows for easy sharing of data and notes that doesn’t rely on a hacked together set of Google Docs and Github. But I’m exploring the stack, and will publish more things publicly as we have them.

Amazon HQ2 – the future of corporate relations with cities

Amazon’s long process for selecting an HQ2 is finally over, and the official answer is two: Northern Virginia and NYC. Tons of words have been spilled about the search, and I am sure even more analysis will strike today about what put those two locations over the top.

To me, the key for mayors is to start using these reverse searches (where a company seeks a city and not vice versa) as leverage to actually get resources to fund infrastructure and other critical services.

This is a theme that I discussed about a year ago:

Take Boston’s bid for GE’s new headquarters. Yes, the city offered property tax rebates of about $25 million , but GE’s move also pushed the state to fund a variety of infrastructure improvements, including the Northern Avenue bridge and new bike lanes. That bridge adds a critical path for vehicles and pedestrians in Boston’s central business district, yet has gone unfunded for years.

Ideally, governments could debate, vote, and then fund these sorts of infrastructure projects and community improvements. The reality is that without a time-sensitive forcing function like a reverse RFP process, there is little hope that cities and states will make progress on these sorts of projects. The debates can literally go on forever in American democracy.

So if you are a mayor or economic planning official, use these processes as tools to get stuff done. Use the allure of new jobs and tax revenues to spur infrastructure spending and get a rezoning through a recalcitrant city council. Use that “prosperity bomb” to upgrade old parts of the urban landscape and prepare the city for the future. A healthier, more humane city can be just around the corner.

Take DC. The city has seen one of the best-run Metro systems deteriorate to abysmal levels over the past few years due to a complete dumpster fire of organizational design (the DC transit agency WMATA is funded by inconsistent revenue sources that ensure it will never be sustainable). Here is an opportunity to use Amazon’s announcement to get the tax framework and operations figured out to ensure that real estate, transportation, and other critical urban infrastructure are designed effectively.

China’s mobile internationalization

Timothy Allen/Getty Images

Talking about second headquarters, the technology industry clearly has separated into poles, one based around the United States and the other based around China. Two articles I read recently gave good insights of the benefits and challenges for China in this world.

The first is from Sam Byford writing at The Verge, who investigates the native OS options that Chinese consumers receive from companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, and others. The headline is much more shrill than the text, so don’t let that frighten you.

Byford provides an overview of the lineage of Chinese mobile OSes, and also notes that what might look like design gaffes in Western consumer eyes might be critical needs for Chinese buyers:

But what is true today is that not all Chinese phone software is bad. And when it is bad from a Western perspective, it’s often bad for very different reasons than the bad Android skins of the past. Yes, many of these phones make similar mistakes with overbearing UI decisions — hello, Huawei — and yes, it’s easy to mock some designs for their obvious thrall to iOS. But these are phones created in a very different context to Android devices as we’ve previously understood them.

The article is perhaps a tad long for what it is, but Byford’s key viewpoint should be repeated as a mantra by any person connected to the technology sector today: “The Chinese phone market is a spiraling behemoth of innovation and audacity, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to be on board with the already exciting hardware, it’s worth trying to understand the software.”

Of course, while China may be a huge country, its leading technology companies do want to globalize and expand their user bases outside of the Middle Kingdom’s borders. That may well be a challenging proposition.

Writing at Factor Daily, Shadma Shaikh dives into the failure of WeChat to break into the Indian market. The product lessons learned by WeChat’s owner Tencent could be applied to any Silicon Valley company — cultural knowledge and appropriate product design are key to entering overseas markets.

Shaikh gives a couple of examples:

Another design feature in the app allowed users to look up and send add-friend requests to WeChat users nearby. During initial onboarding when users were just checking app’s features, many would tap the “people nearby” feature, which would switch on location sharing by default – including with strangers. Once location sharing with strangers was switched on, it wasn’t very intuitive to turn it off.

“Women used to get a lot of unwarranted messages from men, which was a major turn off and many of them left the platform,” Gupta says. “China probably didn’t have this stalking problem.”

And

In China, where the internet was cheaper than in India in 2012, sending video files of, say, 4 MB was not a challenge. WhatsApp compresses a 5 MB photo to 40 kilobytes. WeChat did not compress the files and took many minutes and data to send and receive media files.

Internationalization will never be easy, but the lessons that Silicon Valley has slowly learned over the past two decades will need to be learned again by Chinese companies if they want to export their software to other countries.

Reading Docket

Eliot Peper’s new science fiction novel Borderless

Daniel J Hopkins’ The Increasingly United States (about how U.S. elections are more national and less local than ever before).

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2zMaHhA ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/