#someone just asked me about cornish history | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

writingfairycat · 4 years

Text

Help My Mind Shut Up

Help My Mind Shut Up - Carlos x Reader (Read here on ao3.)

1,445 words

Summary: You can’t sleep, so you call your boyfriend Carlos for comfort and help.

Additional Tags: gender-ambiguous reader, school stress, phone call, grounding methods, anxiety

As you lay in bed, yawning, you stared at the ceiling of your dorm room. It wasn’t smooth in texture; it had small bumps and ridges like a landscape. Your eyes strained in the darkness to trace the lines. Some of them were neat waves. Sine and cosine waves. The sine of theta over cosine of theta equals tangent theta—

You had been falling asleep for a minute there, but now you were wide awake again. You rolled over and looked at the time on your phone. You squinted at the bright screen and read 2:15 A.M. How was that possible?

Across the room, your roommate slept soundly. You pouted. It wasn’t fair. You wanted to sleep but your mind wouldn’t shut up. You would gladly let Queen Rapunzel hit you in the head with her frying pan if it knocked you out. Maybe she could also sit down with you and review the reasons for Corona’s alliance with Arendelle—augh! Shut up!

It wasn’t time to think about that. It was time to sleep, and it had been for a while. But you couldn’t.

You squinted at your phone again. You didn’t want to disturb your roommate’s slumber, but maybe you could talk to someone else. Yawning, you opened your contacts and tapped to call your boyfriend.

The phone rang thrice before you heard Carlos de Vil’s groggy, perplexed voice say your name on the other end.

“Hey.” You spoke softly so you wouldn’t wake your roommate.

“Hey.” Carlos’s voice was equally soft, probably so he wouldn’t wake up Jay. “Why are you calling so late? Is something wrong?”

The worry in your boyfriend’s voice brought tears to your eyes. Well, it was a combination of his worry and your stress. Ugh, the stress was enough that pretty much anything could’ve made you cry right then.

“I can’t get to sleep,” you said.

Carlos let that sit for a beat before replying. “Something’s upsetting you. Do you—yawn—want to talk about it?”

“Um. I guess I could?” You stayed on the call but returned your eyes to the ceiling. “I can’t stop thinking about schoolwork.”

“Mm,” Carlos hummed. “Any class in particular?”

“Mostly precalculus and history.”

“History of Auradon?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you still have homework to do?”

“No, I . . . I mean, I attempted all of it, but I’m pretty sure I got at least half my precalc homework wrong.”

“I can help you find a tutor in the morning.”

“Do you know someone who could tutor me?” you asked.

“I’ll be able to find someone,” Carlos said with a yawn. “Remember, I’m friends with the king of Auradon, and he knows a lot of people. I’ll find someone to help you.”

“Thanks, hon. That’s so sweet of you.”

“And you said HIstory of Auradon was bugging you, too?”

You sighed. “Yeah. There’s a unit test at the end of the week and I’m so not ready.”

“There are definitely people who can help you with that,” Carlos said. How he managed to sound so confident while also sounding sleepy, you couldn’t figure out.

“Thank you,” you said.

“Are you still feeling bad?” Carlos asked.

The lines on the ceiling turned into royal family trees. You squeezed your eyes shut to block them out. “Gah! Yes!”

“What can I do to help?”

“I don’t know,” you grumbled. “My mind won’t shut up.”

“Hmm.” Your boyfriend was silent on the other end, but you could hear the gears turning in his head. “We need to find something for you to focus on so your brain won’t be able to think of schoolwork.”

“What do I focus on, though?”

“Um . . . have you tried counting sheep?”

You laughed. “Oh, I tried. I can’t count normally anymore. I try to count, but my mind goes to pi over six, pi over three, pi over two, two pi over three—”

“Okay, okay,” Carlos said. “Let’s stay away from numbers. And lines. And curves. And . . . what is the test on Friday about?”

“Royal alliances,” you said with a groan.

“Then let’s stay away from royalty, too.”

“Hard to get away from around here,” you said.

Carlos laughed. “You’re right about that. On my first day in Auradon, every other person I met was royalty.”

You laughed. “I’d love to go far away, maybe second to the right and straight on till morning, if it meant I never had to look at royal lineages ever again.”

“Oh!” Carlos almost interrupted. “I have an idea! Tell me five things you can see right now.”

“Uh . . . it’s dark.”

“Oh, well, um.” You could picture the adorable sheepish look on his face. “Well, it’s not completely dark, is it? You can still see a few things? Maybe five things?”

You looked around the room. Your roommate’s bed appeared colorless in the dark, but you could see its outline. “Bed.”

Between the two beds, the moon shone through the window. “Window. Moon. Curtains. Five things?”

“Five things.” You could hear the smile in his voice.

“Um . . .” You looked at your desk. “Desk.”

“Good,” said Carlos. “Now what are four things you can touch right now?”

“Uh . . . phone. Bedspread. Pajamas. Um . . .” You switched your phone to your other hand so you could reach out to touch something, anything. The wire of the phone charger brushed against your fingers. “Phone charger.”

“That’s good.” He yawned. “Can you tell me three things you can hear?”

“Your voice,” you said, smiling. Carlos chuckled on the other end of the line. “Your laugh. And . . . um . . . oh! My voice.”

“Good job. What are two things you can smell?”

“Hmm.” You thought about it. You were so used to how your room smelled now, in contrast to the beginning of the school year, that you couldn’t smell it anymore. “Does my room count if I can’t actually smell it?”

“I don’t think so,” Carlos said gently. “Is there anything in the room that smells different?”

You inhaled deeply, trying to focus on your surroundings. You smelled . . . pencils? “Pencils,” you whispered. “I sharpened my pencils not too long before I went to bed.”

“All right. Anything else?”

You sniffed the room again. “There’s a faint smell of laundry detergent on my blanket,” you said.

“That’s your two things,” said Carlos. “One more: what’s one thing you can taste?”

“One thing I can taste,” you echoed. You opened your mouth to taste the air. Nothing. Wait. No. There was—

“There’s still a bit of garlic taste in the back of my mouth,” you said, trying not to giggle. “From dinner. I guess I didn’t get it all when I brushed my teeth.”

Carlos laughed. “Don’t you brush your tongue?” he teased.

“Shut up,” you said between laughs.

“Sounds like I’ve woken you up more,” Carlos said. “Sorry.”

“Maybe, but it’s okay.” You yawned. “Or maybe I’m not more awake?”

Your boyfriend let out a soft, warm chuckle. “Is your mind quieter now?”

“Yeah, but . . . I’m worried it’ll become noisy again. And what if I run out of things I see and hear and touch?”

“I’ve found it helpful to list other things,” Carlos said. “I would list, just to myself, all the dog breeds I can name.”

“I could probably only name five,” you admitted.

“It doesn’t have to be dog breeds,” he said. “It could be anything you know well that gets your mind focused on one thing. Cat breeds, moons of other planets, celebrities with blond hair, InstaRoyal models.”

You laughed and yawned again. “I might try cat breeds, at least at first.”

“That’s good. I hope you get to sleep soon, babe,” Carlos said in his gentle voice.

“Thank you, hon.”

“Good night. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

Your phone beeped, signaling the end of the call. You placed your phone back on your nightstand and returned your unfocused gaze to the ceiling.

Cat breeds, Carlos’s voice echoed in your memory. You imagined cuddling with him on Evie’s couch, his arms encircling you as you listed off cat breeds.

Siamese. Persian. Burmese. Tonkinese. Oriental Shorthair. Oriental Longhair. Himalayan. Him a sittin’. Him a standin’. Oh, he a-comin’. Heheh. Focus. Cat breeds, cat breeds. Uh, Ragdoll? The rexes, the rexes. Cornish Rex. Devon Rex. British Shorthair. Russian Blue. The blue one from France, what was its name? Bordeaux? Or was that a type of candy? Maybe you would have candy tomorrow.

What were you thinking about?

Right. Cat breeds.

The swimming one, the swimming one—the Turkish Van. Persian. You already said that. Abyss . . . Abyssinian? Yeah. Sphinx. Wirehair. The ears, the ears ones. Scottish Fold. American Curl. Amer . . . American Shorthair. Norwegian Forest Cat. Maine C . . .

You had fallen asleep.

#disney descendants #carlos descendants #descendants carlos #carlos de vil #carlos de vil x reader #descendants fanfiction #carlos x reader #reader insert #my content #original posts

163 notes · View notes

margridarnauds · 4 years

Text

pagan-soul replied to your post “My absolute HATRED for the term “Celtic Mythology” VS my desire for...”

Why do you hate that term? ��

So, I decided to give this its own post because I really feel like it does deserve it, since it’s the kind of thing that I think most people outside of the field don’t really think about and you deserve the best answer you can get, though I’m not sure how clear I’m being. If there’s a point that I’m not clear on, please ask me to clarify, since I can never tell if I’m being entirely coherent. I’m not sure if I can give you a FULL answer, since some of this is slightly outside my pay grade (given I don’t get paid, that isn’t hard), but I’ll try to do what I can.

For most of us in the field, I think, we generally hate it because it’s very, very imprecise and a little misleading. There really ISN’T a singular “Celtic Mythology”, just like there was never really a singular “Celtic people”. There were a vast variety of Celtic-speaking groups, spread as far out as modern-day Turkey, and each one of them had a unique cultural environment. Cernunnos, for example, does not have anything to do with, say, Bres mac Elathan or Rhiannon. And, in fact, in terms of the times that each one of them would have been popping up, there’s a SIGNIFICANT difference in ages.

(Taken from David Stifter’s Sengoidelc)

At some point, as you can see on the linguistic map.....during the Proto-Celtic period, they WOULD have had roughly the same cast of characters, BUT that is a time that we really know little to nothing about, and even then, I do believe there would have been localizations depending on family group and region. We can TRY to reconstruct it by comparing different figures/names and then putting them in an Indo-European context. If, for example, you see similar things pop up in India, Ireland, Greece, etc., you can be fairly certain that it is [1] A pre-Christian survival and [2] Specifically, a Proto-Indo European survival, aka going back to really some of the EARLIEST belief systems we have. If you have the same things popping up in Irish and Welsh contexts AND you have the name popping up in Gaulish inscriptions, we can be fairly certain that the figure is a REALLY old ass Celtic figure. Figures like Lugh, Ogma, and Nuada.....they are probably VERY old. Not that we won’t argue over it. Because Celticists argue over everything. (If you want to know about some of what Celticists have conjectured, I highly recommend Proinsias Mac Cana’s ironically-titled , given the topic of this post, book, “Celtic Mythology”. Now, some of what he said has been debated, because.....see above. Celticists. Arguing. We love it. BUT he’s a respected figure in the field, and my supervisor likes him so I’m legally required to like him too.) WHICH brings us to our next problem, which is that the way that each figure developed. Lugh, in an Irish context, is not Lleu in a Welsh context. They probably share the same root figure, at some point in their shared history. Their names match up TOO PERFECTLY for them not to. But the way they developed was specifically in the cultural context of Wales/Ireland. Lugh in particular is a VERY malleable figure. You can read three works where Lugh is in and get a VERY different reading of him in each one. (Good king? Machiavellian schemer? Flawed pragmatist trying to unite a people who won’t be united? A figure who’s more a symbol of kingship than an actual CHARACTER? Depending on the source and the time/context, you can get any combination. For what it’s worth, in the Early Modern period, there is quite a bit of matieral that shows a darker side to Lugh.) Saying, “Yes, these two are related” SOUNDS like it’s admitting a lot, but in reality, that still doesn’t really tell us anything about this hypothetical figure. If you put a knife to my throat and made me GUESS, I would say that he had some connection to kingship and sovereignty. Possibly, in relationship to that, sacral kingship, given that both Lugh and Lleu are betrayed by a woman to their deaths. But that is HIGHLY speculative and again, doesn’t really SAY anything. Lugh is Lugh and Lleu is Lleu. It’d be like trying to say that, because you and your cousin come from the same grandma, you’re exactly the same. Now, you might be able to INTUIT certain things about your grandma from any common traits you and your cousin have, and that’s a valid line of inquiry, and it’s definitely one that plenty of solid Celticists have done, I am NOT denigrating their research, but you’re still you.

Finally, “Celtic Mythology” really is.....rather bombastic, as a term, for a group that almost always consists of Irish Mythology (and, sometimes, Irish folklore, which is VERY different from the mythological texts), with Medieval Welsh literature sprinkled in for a bit of flavor. (Even the term “Welsh Mythology” is controversial, simply because, really...it’s much harder to pick the MYTHOLOGY from the literature. Even harder than the Irish.) And, in the field, even saying “Celtic Studies” is something that we kind of do through gritted teeth because we don’t really have a better term for what we do. See that big-ass linguistic family tree up there? Yeah, I’m not too proud to admit that there are exactly two languages on there that I am in any way equipped to talk about: Middle Welsh and Old Irish. Now, an IDEAL Celticist, aka some of the best in the field, is a jack of all trades, someone who can talk about the linguistic evolution of at LEAST Old Irish and Welsh (including their modern descendants), with a solid background in Proto Indo European and the ability to at least comment on the various other Celtic languages. (There are some scholars who specialize in, say, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish, and Manx, but they are basically a niche in a niche. The field, as a WHOLE, is VERY much dominated by Irish, both modern and medieval. Which suits me very well, but does make me feel very bad for the other languages that get left out of the mix.) But that is a VERY small number of people in the field. Hell, I got met with basically crickets when I said that I wanted to study Breton, not because people didn’t WANT me to, but because the resources simply weren’t available, much less as an English speaker. (I still want to take it up, though.) I know of some professionals in the field who NEVER would call themselves a Celticist, simply because the term doesn’t really fit them. My paleography professor was, incidentally, one of them. Personally, I DO use it, because again, I don’t have another term.

But, and I can’t emphasize this enough, what I study isn’t a SINGULAR Celtic Mythology. What I study is Medieval Irish Literature, with a focus on the Mythological Cycle and, when needed, I can sometimes comment on the similarities to Welsh figures. I don’t LIKE it, because I feel like I can’t do the richness of the Welsh material justice, but I can do it if you put a knife to my throat. With stuff like, say, Gaulish Mythology....we can make very educated guesses based off of inscriptions and things that the Romans/Greeks said and comparing them to Irish/Welsh material, but we don’t really know. Can’t really know. And with others...there were no written materials during the medieval period, or at least none currently surviving. (This is why Old Irish and Middle Welsh to tend to dominate mythological discussion: The bulk of our medieval material does come from those sources. People can say all they want about the scribes who wrote down the Mythological Cycle, but the simple fact remains that, if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be studying these texts.)

For me, the term “Celtic Mythology” kind of lumps all the individual Celtic materials into one massive soup bowl, regardless of time, context, culture, or any other distinguishing features, and, most of the time, would be just as easily done by saying “Irish Mythology” or “Welsh Mythology”. There are very few times, unless you’re talking about the ENTIRE POSTULATED HISTORY of a figure, that “Celtic” is really needed and it tends to assume that Irish = “Celtic” (most of the time, I see posts where Irish, in particular, is treated as being the same as “Celtic”, and my ire in this instance is directed towards them) instead of admitting the full variety of what that term actually means. Irish IS a Celtic language, yes, absolutely, but it is not the be-all, end-all, and the two terms are not synonymous. “Celtic” is a very broad term that can only really be useful in a few contexts, mainly linguistic, and is insanely controversial in the field as it is.

On a religious perspective, since I know that this is inevitable in conversations like this, does this mean that I’m saying, going back to my original example, “No, you cannot worship Rhiannon, Bres, and Cernunnos at the same time?” No. I am VERY firm on my stance that I can only speak from the perspective of my knowledge of the field, NOT on other people’s belief systems. This is similar to if someone was to ask me about the function of a given postulated deity, where I can only say “The material as it was written down indicates x, y, or z, and most of us in the field are VERY hesitant to apply a solid function to these figures, but if you feel that this figure is guiding you to a given conclusion, that’s fine. It isn’t ‘inaccurate.’ I don’t believe that there’s any way for a religion to be ‘inaccurate' so long as it’s harming no one.” (Use Celtic Studies as a smokescreen for white supremacy and I WILL roll down your throat faster than a hot dog on the 4th of July, though.) If all three of them are calling you, that’s something that I have no call on. I personally think that it’s a HELL of a combination, and I’d wish you the best of luck, but....it would certainly be an interesting one. If you want to take the reconstructionist root and try to figure out how they would have been worshipped in the Proto-Celtic times, that’s fine (though I do strongly advise against human sacrifice.) You’d have a devil of a task, but it’s certainly a fine one, and in many ways, not too unlike what scholars like Mac Cana did. And, if you want to worship them as they appear in the texts or how they’re personally guiding you, that’s not something that I can make a call on one way or another. Again, this is about my own personal feelings, from inside the field, on the term and how it can be rather misleading.

#pagan-soul #long post #celtic studies #celtic mythology #irish mythology

141 notes · View notes

captainkippen · 4 years

Note

Hi Aaron, I read your writing tips tag & found it really helpful, but I was wondering if you had any other advice for me. I used to write original works years ago but I lost a lot of motivation & stopped. Recently I've thought about getting back into it, but this time trying to write fanfiction as well. I've never written fanfic before. How do you come up with ideas and, more importantly, share your writing & open yourself to critique from others (i've never shared my writing publicly before)?

Hi, Anon! First of all, thank you! I'd forgotten all about that tag. I'm glad it's been useful for you!

Loss of motivation is tough, and getting back into the swing of things can be difficult, but it's never impossible as long as the desire to write is there. Good on you for wanting to get back to it and I'm excited for you to delve into the world of fic writing!

Brainstorming ideas

Music

To answer your first question, there are a lot of ways I personally come up with ideas. First and foremost for me is music, I like to sit down with my headphones in and let my thoughts wander while I'm listening. A lot of inspiration can come from lyrics, or from the tones of songs, and sometimes even just letting yourself drift results in ideas popping into being. That's not for everybody, but it definitely works for me.

Imagery

Another is imagery. Try looking at Pinterest or on other social media for pictures that might give you a spark. I like looking at specific aesthetics I enjoy and building scenes in my head from there.

Prompts

On Tumblr, or even just googling, you can find a lot of writing prompts which might give you a start for ideas. Try looking at those, or even asking people you talk to for prompts, and use it as an exercise to see where you end up.

AUs & Borrowing Storylines

That might be a misleading subheading — I'd like to clarify I do not think you should commit plagiarism. What I do mean is, when it comes to fanfiction at least, a lot of stories are borrowed from books and films. Sometimes it's fun to write an AU based on a romcom or a fairytale, in a lot of fandoms you can find a 10 Things I Hate About You AU, and as long as you're using your imagination (not copying the OG source word for word) and clarifying that your story is loosely based on something else that's fine!

Many fics are set in AUs (alternate universes). You could try looking at types of AUs and seeing if any of them spark an idea for you. AUs are the best thing about fanfiction in my opinion. Ranging from Canon Divergence - set in the canon universe but taking a different course of events according to the writer - to Coffee Shop AUs, they give you a lot of scope and room to breathe. You can have fun with AUs, and the best part is that, even if someone else has already written a particular AU, fanfic readers are always hungry for more. I'd once again like to underline the importance of not plagiarising — stealing other's work is not cool. There's a line between taking inspiration and straight up copying.

Looking For What's Missing

I would have a think about the kind of fics you love to read, and ones that you haven't yet seen in the fandoms you want to write in. If there's a hole you think needs filling, especially if it's very niche and just for you, then go for it. Be the one to bring that story into being. It's a great feeling.

Research & Artefacts

I've found in the past that looking at specific objects or events can often inspire ideas. Say I had a tin of tea, or saw an old sign on the road pointing to Polperro, I might decide to look into the history of those objects and find myself several hours later up to my ears in research on the tea trade of the 1800s or Cornish smugglers. Researching things that catch your interest is a great way to develop new arenas, characters and narratives in which you want to tell your stories.

Have a look for news articles or interesting nonfiction books you have lying around and flick through them, they might contain that first spark of an idea and lead you down that research path for yourself.

Writer's Notebooks

Leading on from that, the next thing I would recommend for generating ideas is writing things down. Ideas will pop into your head more than you think and it's important to get them on paper (or in the notes app on your phone - mine is an absolute mess) because you never know when two ideas might link and turn into a full story.

Another way to use a writer's notebook is through observation. Go out and pay attention to your surroundings. Make notes on any people, places or events you come across which catch your interest. This way, if you're ever stuck, you have a bank of inspiration ready and waiting.

Sharing Your Writing

Offering up your work for others to read can be really nerve wracking. I'm doing my MA in Creative Writing and I still find it downright terrifying to share my work with my classmates, however critique and feedback are really useful tools for developing your writing skills.

I like to think of my fics as writing practice. When I publish them, the feedback I get is helpful in figuring out any chances I need to make to the story or to my style. The best thing about fic readers is they're generally very friendly and understanding. I find that focusing on that fact makes me feel a little more confident in posting. This confidence will help you develop your original works too, you'll be more open to sharing with others and getting feedback. It's especially interesting to share with other writers when developing ideas because sometimes you just need a different perspective to bounce your thoughts off.

Taking that first step and hitting publish is the most difficult part, but once you've done it once it gets less scary. My advice to you is just to write something that makes you happy, make sure it's edited to a readable standard (I am often guilty of giving up and pressing publish without giving it a second glance, sorry guys, you don't want to be me with this), and it's something you want to share. Having other people read your work and talk to you about it can be really fun, you've just got to dive in headfirst.

This answer for away from me a little. Anyway, thank you again for your kind words and I hope my advice is helpful! Enjoy your fic writing endeavours, wishing you the best.

#writing tips

5 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 4 years

Photo

Life in Film: Ben Wheatley.

As Netflix goes gothic with a new Rebecca adaptation, director Ben Wheatley tells Jack Moulton about his favorite Hitchcock film, the teenagers who will save cinema, and a memorable experience with The Thing.

“The actual process of filmmaking is guiding actors and capturing emotion on set. That’s enough of a job without putting another layer of postmodern film criticism over the top of it.” —Ben Wheatley

Winter’s coming, still no vaccine, the four walls of home are getting pretty samey… and what Netflix has decided we need right now is a lavish, gaslight-y psychological thriller about a clifftop manor filled with the personality of its dead mistress—and a revival of one of the best menaces in screen history. Bring on the ‘Mrs Danvers’ Hallowe’en costumes, because Rebecca is back.

In Ben Wheatley’s new film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling 1938 novel, scripted by Jane Goldman, Lily James plays an orphaned lady’s maid—a complete nobody, with no known first name—who catches the eye of the dashing, cashed-up Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer).

Very quickly, the young second Mrs de Winter is flung into the intimidating role of lady of Manderley, and into the shadow of de Winter’s late first wife, Rebecca. The whirlwind romance is over; the obsession has begun, and it’s hotly fuelled by Manderley’s housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas, perfectly cast).

Each adaptation of du Maurier’s story has its own quirks, and early Letterboxd reactions suggest viewers will experience varying levels of satisfaction with Wheatley’s, depending on how familiar they are with both the novel and earlier screen versions—most notably, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Best Picture winner, starring Laurence Olivier Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson.

Why would you follow Hitchcock? It’s been 80 years; Netflix is likely banking on an audience of Rebecca virgins (the same kind of studio calculation that worked for Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born). Plus, the new Rebecca is a Working Title affair; it has glamor, camp, Armie Hammer in a three-piece suit, the sunny South of France, sports cars, horses, the wild Cornish coast, Lily James in full dramatic heat, and—controversial!—a fresh twist on the denouement.

A big-budget thriller made for a streamer is Wheatley coming full circle, in a way: he made his name early on with viral internet capers and a blog (“Mr and Mrs Wheatley”) of shorts co-created with his wife and longtime collaborator, Amy Jump. Between then and now, they have gained fans for their well-received low-to-no budget thrillers, including High-Rise, Kill List and Free Fire (which also starred Hammer).

Over Zoom, Wheatley spoke to Letterboxd about the process of scaling up, the challenge of casting already-iconic characters, and being a year-round horror lover. [The Rebecca plot discussion may be spoilery to some. Wheatley is specifically talking about the du Maurier version, not his film.]

Armie Hammer and Ben Wheatley on the set of ‘Rebecca’.

Can you tell us how you overcame any concerns in adapting a famous novel that already has a very famous adaptation? How did you want to make a 1930s story relevant to modern audiences? Ben Wheatley: When you go back to the novel and look at how it works, you see it’s a very modern book. [Author Daphne du Maurier is] doing stuff that people are still picking up the pieces of now. It’s almost like the Rosetta Stone of thrillers—it tells you everything on how to put a thriller together. The genre jumping and Russian-doll nature of the structure is so delicious. When you look at the characters in the book, they’re still popping up in other stuff—there’s Mrs Danvers in all sorts of movies.

It remains fresh because of its boldness. Du Maurier is writing in a way that’s almost like a dare. She’s going, “right, okay, you like romantic fiction do you? I’ll write you romantic fiction; here’s Maxim de Winter, he’s a widower, he’s a good-looking guy, and owns a big house. Here’s a rags-to-riches, Cinderella-style girl. They’re going to fall in love. Then I’m going to ruin romantic fiction for you forever by making him into a murdering swine and implicating you in the murder because you’re so excited about a couple getting away with it!”

That’s the happy ending—Maxim doesn’t go to prison. How does that work? He’s pretty evil by the end. It’s so subtly done that you only see the trap of it after you finish reading the book. That’s clearly represented in Jane Goldman’s adaptation that couldn’t be done in 1940 because of the Hays Code. That whole element of the book is missing [in Hitchcock’s Rebecca]. But I do really like this style of storytelling in the 1930s and ’40s that is not winky, sarcastic, and cynical. It’s going, “here’s Entertainment with a big ‘E’. We’re going to take you on holiday, then we’re gonna scare you, then we’re gonna take you around these beautiful houses that you would never get a chance to go around, and we’re gonna show you these big emotions.”

After High-Rise, you ended up circling back to more contained types of films, whereas Rebecca is your lushest and largest production. How was scaling up for you? Free Fire does feel like a more contained film, but in many ways it was just as complicated and had the same budget as High-Rise, since it’s just in one space. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is literally a contained film, that’s right. What [the bigger budget] gave me was the chance to have a conversation where I say I want a hotel that’s full of people and no-one says you can’t have any people in it. You don’t have to shoot in a corner, so that scale is suddenly allowed.

Elisabeth Moss and Tom Hiddlestone in Wheatley’s ‘High-Rise’ (2015).

The other movies I did are seen as no-budget or, I don’t even know the word for how little money they are, and even though High-Rise and Free Fire were eight million dollars each, they’re still seen as ultra-low budget. This is the first film that I’ve done that’s just a standard Hollywood-style movie budget and it makes a massive difference. It gives you extra time to work. All the schemes you might have had to work out in order to cheat and get around faster, but now it’s fine, let’s only shoot two pages today. We can go out on the road and close down all of the south of France—don’t worry about all the holidaymakers screaming at you and getting cross! That side of it is great.

You had the challenge to cast iconic actors for iconic roles. What were you looking for in the casting? What points of reference did you give the actors? I don’t think we really talked about it, but [Armie Hammer] definitely didn’t watch the Hitchcock version. I can understand why he wouldn’t. There was no way he was going to accidentally mimic [Laurence] Olivier’s performance without seeing it and he just didn’t want to have the pressure of that. I think that’s quite right. It’s an 80-year-old film, it’s a beloved classic, and we’d be mad if we were trying to remake it. We’re not.

The thing about the shadow that the film cast is that it’s hard enough making stuff without thinking about other filmmakers. I’ve had this in the past where journalists ask me “what were your influences on the day?” and I wish I could say “it was a really complicated set of movies that the whole thing was based around”, but it’s not like that. When you watch documentaries about filmmakers screening loads of movies for their actors before they make something—it’s lovely, but it’s not something I’ve ever done.

The actual process of filmmaking is guiding actors and capturing emotion on set. That’s enough of a job without putting another layer of postmodern film criticism over the top of it—“we’ll use this shot from 1952, that will really make this scene sing!”—then you’re in a world of pain. Basically, it’s my interpretation of the adaptation. The book is its own place, and for something like High-Rise, [screenwriter Amy Jump] has the nightmare of sitting down with 112 pages of blank paper and taking a novel and smashing it into a script. That’s the hard bit.

Armie Hammer and Lily James in ‘Rebecca’.

Current industry news is not so great—cinemas are facing bankruptcy, film festivals in the USA are mostly virtual, Disney is focusing on Disney+ only. How do you feel about a future where streaming dominates the market and the theatrical experience becomes, as we fear, an exclusive niche? Independent cinema was born out of very few movies. If you look at the history of Eraserhead—that film on its own almost created all of cult cinema programming. One movie can do that. It can create an audience that is replicated and becomes a whole industry. And that can happen again, but it needs those films to do that. They will come as things ebb and flow. The streamers will control the whole market and then one day someone will go “I don’t want to watch this stuff, I want to watch something else” and they’ll go make it.

It’s like The Matrix, it’s a repeating cycle. There’ll always be ‘the One’. There’s Barbara Loden in 1970 making Wanda, basically inventing American independent cinema. So I don’t worry massively about it. I know it’s awkward and awful for people to go bankrupt and the cinemas to close down, but in time they’ll re-open because people will wanna see stuff. The figures for cinemagoers were massive before Covid. Are you saying that people with money are not going to exploit that? Life will find a way. Remember that the cinema industry from the beginning is one that’s in a tailspin. Every year is a disaster and they’re going bust. But they survived the Spanish Flu, which is basically the same thing.

Two months ago, you quickly made a horror movie. We’re going to get a lot of these from filmmakers who just need to create something this year. What can you identify now about this inevitable next wave of micro-budget, micro-schedule pandemic-era cinema? I’ve always made micro-budget films so that side of it is not so crazy. There will be a lot of Zoom and people-locked-in-houses films but they won’t be so interesting. They’re more to-keep-you-sane kind of filmmaking which is absolutely fine. Where you should look for [the ‘pandemic-era’ films] is from the kids and young adults through 14 to 25 who’ve been the most affected by it. They will be the ones making the true movies about the pandemic which will be in like five years’ time.

People going through GCSEs and A-Levels [final high-school exams in England] will have had their social contracts thoroughly smashed by the government after society tells them that this is the most important thing you’re ever gonna do in your life. Then the next day the government tells them “actually, you’ve all passed”, then the next day they go “no, you’ve all failed”, and then “oh no, you’ve all passed”. It’s totally bizarre. Anyone who’s in university at the moment [is] thinking about how they’ve worked really hard to get to that position and now they’ve had it taken away from them. That type of schism in that group will make for a unique set of storytelling impetus. Much more interesting than from my perspective of being a middle-age bloke and having to stay in my house for a bit, which was alright. Their experience is extreme and that will change cinema.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers in ‘Rebecca’.

It’s time to probe into your taste in film. Firstly, three questions about Alfred Hitchcock: his best film, most underrated film, and most overrated film? It’s tricky, there’s a lot to choose from. I think Psycho is his best film because, much like Wanda, it was the invention of indie cinema. He took a TV crew to go and do a personal project and then completely redefined horror, and he did it in the same year as Peeping Tom.

There’s stuff I really like in Torn Curtain. Certainly the murder scene where they’re trying to stick the guy in the oven. It’s a gut-wrenching sequence. Overrated, I don’t know. It’s just a bit mean, isn’t it? Overrated by who? They’re all massively rated, aren’t they?

Which film made you want to become a filmmaker? The slightly uncool version of my answer is the first fifteen minutes of Dr. No before I got sent to bed. We used to watch movies on the telly when I was a kid, so movies would start at 7pm and I had to go to bed at 7:30pm. You would get to see the first half-hour and that would be it. The opening was really intriguing. I never actually saw a lot of these movies until I was much older.

The more grown-up answer is a film like Taxi Driver. It was the first time where I felt like I’d been transported in a way where there was an authorship to a film that I didn’t understand. It had done something to me that television and straightforward movies hadn’t done and made me feel very strange. It was something to do with the very, very intense mixture of sound, music and image and I started to understand that that was cinema.

What horror movie do you watch every Hallowe’en? I watch The Thing every year but I don’t tend to celebrate Hallowe’en, to be honest. I’m of an age where it wasn’t a big deal and was never particularly celebrated. I find it a bit like “what’s all this Hallowe’en about?”—horror films for me are for all year-round.

What’s a brilliant mindfuck movie that perhaps even cinephiles haven’t seen? What grade of cinephile are we talking? All of the work by Jan Švankmajer, maybe. Hard to Be a God is pretty mindfucky if you want a bit of that, but cinephiles should know about it. It’s pretty intense. Marketa Lazarová too.

‘Marketa Lazarová’ (1967) directed by František Vláčil.

What is the greatest screen romance that you totally fell head over heels for? I guess it’s Casablanca for me. That would be it.

Which coming-of-age film did you connect to the most as a teenager? [Pauses for effect] Scum.

Who is an exciting newcomer director we should keep our eyes on? God, I don’t know. I would say Jim Hosking but he’s older than me and he’s not a newcomer because he’s done two movies. So, that’s rubbish. He doesn’t count.

[Editor’s note: Hosking contributed to ABCs of Death 2 with the segment “G is for Grandad” while Wheatley contributed to The ABCs of Death with the segment “U is for Unearthed” and also executive produced the follow-up film.]

What was your best cinema experience? [Spoiler warning for The Thing.]

Oh, one that speaks in my mind is seeing The Thing at an all-nighter in the Scala at King’s Cross, and I was sitting right next to this drunk guy who was talking along to the screen. It was a packed cinema with about 300 people, and someone at the front told him “will you just shut up?” The guy says “I won’t shut up. You tell me to shut up again and I’ll spoil the whole film!” The whole audience goes “no, no, no!” and he went “it’s the black guy and the guy with the beard—everyone else dies!” That made me laugh so much.

Do you have a favorite film you’ve watched so far this year? Yeah, Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Related content

Classic Gothic Literature to Film—Jennifer Boddaert’s list

Ava’s Dark Romance list

Ben Wheatley’s Life in Film list

Follow Jack on Letterboxd

‘Rebecca’ is in select US theaters on October 17, and streaming on Netflix everywhere on October 21.

3 notes · View notes

esmemarion · 4 years

Text

regarding my recent callout

Yes, I was a cunt to Cecil and I apologize for being aggressive, I was just absolutely fed up with the discourse.

However, I do not apologize for defending Cam’s chart. As we’ve had to state multiple times, we asked two very close Jewish friends (for the sake of not wanting to rope them in here, I will refer to them as “EP” and “MJJ”) about the research Cam put in, and gave us the OK to do so. We are not speaking for and over them. EP in particular does not like getting her toes dirty in discourse due to their budding art career and hate for drama in general and MJJ provided helpful information - such as the only “real” instance of goblins in Judaism is this one Hannukah story called “Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins”- a story about a Jewish man fighting off one goblin per night. According to MJJ, this is actually a really well-known story.

(for context: people think the character Goblin Cookie is racist for... just being a goblin. This is actually just a result of a mistranslation of old Cornish folklore that got spun into... well, JK Rowling being a bitch - you can view Cam’s chart here )

So after I kinda went “hey Cecil are you proud of the chaos you caused?” (kinda anime-villainy, I know) Cecil was like “okay imma end this ralts’s career” and took it to tumblr, all this while I was asleep.

I got a bit angy, since I’d rather NOT have someone immediately take things to TUMBLR of all places, where rationality goes to die and with a community of people who do not know me besides this. I showed what went down to some pals, and MJJ joined the conversation, saying “Hey, that’s Ridley (Cecil). Esme, avoid them, they’re not a good person” - she mentioned that Cecil had a history of misgendering trans friends and acussing MJJ of whitewashing, even “fIXing” her art :I

Oh and get this, apparently Cecil is a hypocrite, as they wanted to make a greedy Hanukkah Cookie. Wow.

Anyway, read the receipts on Cecil’s actions here

#esmemarion #esme #esme marion #callout culture

2 notes · View notes

mitchsenweek · 5 years

Text

MITCHSEN WEEK

DAY FOUR - MUTUAL PINING

Hello team! I hope you’re all enjoying mitchsen week.

Reminder that if you’re publishing anything of any kind to let me know - the tag is basically me and @imnotasuperhero and I keep refreshing it in case I find someone else there.

Day four fic below the cut!

Aubrey Posen was sitting at her desk stewing over the events of rehearsals that afternoon. She couldn’t pinpoint what was going on, but that little freshman with the piercings really bothered her. She had a bad attitude and she looked nothing like a Bella should. She knew it would be stupid to admit her but Chloe had talked her into it. Now, in one afternoon, she’d been proven right.

It still didn’t explain why she was sitting here obsessing about it hours later. She was roused from her funk by a knock at the door. Opening it, she was shocked to see the freshman in question standing there, looking hopeful. She didn’t let her guard down, just stared at the girl.

“Can we talk?” Beca said. “I kind of want to apologise.” Aubrey opened the door wordlessly and Beca entered nervously.

“Um,” she said, settling against the edge of Chloe’s desk. “I know I went off on you today, and I’m sorry for that. I can be very defensive... without going too far into the backstory it’s pretty much how I handle most confrontation. But it wasn’t cool, so I apologise.”

“Apology accepted,” Aubrey said. Beca wasn’t done though.

“But I want to make it clear, that regardless of what I said, you made a couple of snap judgments on me, none of which were correct,” she said. “And you don’t know me, you’ve barely spoken twenty words to me. I feel like that was unfair, especially since you’re in a position of leadership in that group. Whatever you say about me in that setting can seriously damage not only my reputation, but group cohesion, and that’s not what the Bellas need.” Aubrey was flabbergasted. Nobody had stood up to her before like this. Because she was right, essentially. But most people just apologised and bailed, but Beca was still there awaiting - an apology of her own?

“That’s true,” Aubrey said. “I’m sorry. I guess I can get a little single minded. I’ll make it clear that what I said about you was unfounded, I promise.”

“And finally, I want to assure you that the whole Treble thing is not going to be an issue,” Beca said. “I work with Jesse at the radio station but we are not ever going to be anything more than friends.”

“How can you guarantee that?” Aubrey asked. “He looks at you like he wants more.”

“Yeah well I’m like, ridiculously gay, so that’s never gonna happen,” Beca said dryly. There was a pronounced silence. “So can we start again?”

“Sure,” Aubrey said. “Let’s start again.”

“Great,” Beca said with a smile. “I’ll see you at rehearsal tomorrow then.” She headed out and left Aubrey sitting where she was. About thirty seconds after the door closed it hit her like a ton of bricks.

“No,” she whispered. “I can’t... have a crush on her?”

Beca was walking back across campus, her hands shaking slightly. She wasn’t very good at conversations like the one she’d just had, but it was important to her that she set things right with Aubrey.

In reality, she’d barely stopped thinking about the senior since she first encountered her. And she knew she had a tendency to prickly and defensive, so when it became clear that she and Aubrey were at loggerheads, she knew she had to do something. Because she didn’t want to fight with someone who made her insides swoop like Aubrey did. She didn’t want to grow to resent the other girl, not when she kind of spent a lot of time daydreaming about her.

So she sucked up all her courage and pride and apologised. It at least seemed to have gone well, which was a good sign. Now to work on reigning in her temper and holding her tongue. She smiled to herself as she recalled what Aubrey’s face had looked like when she’d casually tossed out that she was gay. She’d been surprised, and just a little bit curious. Beca hoped that meant Aubrey might actually be into girls, or she was about to spend the year crushing hard on a straight girl.

Aubrey was at her desk on her laptop. She felt like an absolute creep, but she was scrolling through Beca’s facebook and trying to learn whatever she could about her. She skimmed the basics - a couple years younger than she was but not problematically young, had come to Atlanta via the Pacific Northwest. There was nothing telltale in her history at all, so hoping even just for a tiny bit of background, she clicked on Beca’s high school page to see if she was mentioned. Feeling a tiny bit guilty, she moved over to her bed. If Chloe was to walk in she could see anything on Aubrey’s laptop if she were at her desk, but here it would only be her. She put Beca’s name in the search bar.

“Wow,” was the first thing out of Aubrey’s mouth. Beca was mentioned on her high school’s facebook page a lot. Like, a lot. Winner of Pacific Northwest Region songwriter’s competition. Winner of Oregon State Arts scholarship, three years running. Winner, Young Composers Award Cornish College of the Arts, Carnegie Mellon Music Award Finalist, Philadelphia University of the Arts - Highly Commended in summer session. There was a stream of news articles about any one of a million music awards the girl had won during high school, junior high.

Now she felt bad for discounting everything she said out of turn during rehearsal. She clearly knew what she was talking about. Closing her laptop and pulling out her acapella binder, she looked to see if Beca had filled in the space to mention her major or if she was undeclared. Nope, she’d declared. Music Theory & Comp, plus a second major in Production & Engineering. Impressive, was the first thought Aubrey had.

Chloe came in at that exact moment, so she casually closed up her laptop and set it aside.

“Hey,” her roommate said. “Beca find you? She was looking for you earlier.”

“Yeah, she was here,” Aubrey said. “She apologised for going off during rehearsal. And then I apologised to her for making assumptions and dragging her in front of you guys.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Aubrey said. “She made valid points. Plus she also said that she and the treble are never getting together ever in a million years.”

“Well, duh,” Chloe said. “She’s gay.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No, but she didn’t need to,” Chloe said. “She’s gay, so is Cynthia Rose and Stacie is definitely not straight.”

“You sure about that last one?”

“Uh, considering I made out with her over the weekend, yeah, I am.”

“Oh, are you two together?”

“No,” Chloe said. “One time thing. She’s cute, but she’s not interested in a serious thing and neither am I. It won’t make anything weird at Bellas, promise.”

“And you can just tell that the others are gay?”

“Same as I could with you,” Chloe said. “I’m not about to start waving rainbow flags around the group and announcing other people’s business, mind you. Stacie won’t care, she’s pretty much uninhibited in every sense of the word.”

“Yeah she strikes me as such,” Aubrey said. Chloe was right though. Nothing remotely changed between the girls during rehearsals. She watched them, looking for a sign, but there were none. She hoped the crush she had on Beca was equally as unobvious. She decided that the easiest way to make sure nobody was clued in to the way she felt about Beca was to avoid looking at her unless necessary.

It worked okay for a while. But as Aubrey learned more about Beca’s musical capabilities and how she could help the Bellas, they began to spend more time together. They worked on arrangements and talked about music, and Aubrey knew she was going to slip up one day soon. She was enamoured, plain and simple, but she didn’t see what she could possibly offer Beca, so she kept it to herself, except for when she vented it to Chloe. Which was often. Chloe tried her hardest to convince Aubrey to take a chance, but Aubrey couldn’t hear it.

Beca was trying just as hard as Aubrey to mask her feelings, and she was just as sure that she wasn’t going to keep it up for much longer. Aubrey was beautiful, and she was smart, and passionate. Yeah she was definitely bossy, but Beca kind of liked that too. She liked everything about her, to be honest, and she was not good at hiding it, which she discovered when she was busted staring at Aubrey during rehearsal by Stacie.

“Dude are you staring at Aubrey?” Stacie asked. “Like are you into her?”

“Of course I’m staring at her,” Beca said, after conceding that she couldn’t really deny the obvious. “Let’s just tally this shit up. First off, she’s gorgeous. Like get the fuck out of here with your face gorgeous. Second, she’s hella smart. She’s ambitious and she’s got a nice voice, she’s funny, confident... but she is like about ten leagues above me. So yes I’m staring but I’m okay knowing it’s not going any further than that. I’m nothing if not a realist.”

“Aw, don’t sell yourself short,” Stacie said. “Is she even gay though?”

“Don’t actually know,” Beca said with a shrug. She stopped listening to Stacie’s badgering after that. She was too busy watching Aubrey.

She knew she was in a world of trouble with this crush. Even the scent of Aubrey’s perfume was enough to send her head spinning. She wanted to know what it would be like to lean in close to her, breathe that smell in as she kissed her. She almost snorted as she registered her own creepiness.

“You okay?” Aubrey asked her. Beca feigned ignorance so she wouldn’t have to explain.

“Fine,” she said. “I should be able to get the next bit of the arrangement down in about ten minutes.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Aubrey said. “Stacie, can you come give Chloe a hand with choreo?” The freshman got up and made her way down to where Chloe was at the front of the room, leaving Beca sitting on her own.

Aubrey couldn’t help but watch Beca as she worked. She’d said she leave Beca to it, but she wasn’t able to tear her eyes away. There was something about the confidence of her right now, the way she knew absolutely what she was doing. She’d never seen anyone write on music charts the way Beca was doing, laying line after line on the page and barely ever going back to question what she’d done.

Plus she had this habit of poking her tongue out just a touch through her lips. It was cute. Beca was cute. She couldn’t believe she’d almost destroyed any chance of even a friendship with the girl the first practice they’d had. Thank god Beca had enough balls to stand up to her and they were able to start again.

Now the girl was writing mind-blowing vocal arrangements and dropping by her dorm to kick ideas around every other day. They were friends, but Aubrey kept feeling this tugging low in her gut telling her that she wanted more. She knew she was crushing hard, but she needed to ignore it.

“Dude, stare harder,” came a voice.

“Sorry?” Aubrey directed to Cynthia Rose.

“You’ve got the smitten face,” she said with a smug expression. Aubrey blushed a little. “Look I get it. Little B is an interesting character and whilst she isn’t exactly my type she definitely qualifies as a total hottie.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aubrey said dismissively, but the red of her cheeks betrayed her.

“Sure you don’t,” Cynthia Rose said. “Whatever. Your secret is safe with me. But for whatever it counts, you two would actually make a hot couple. If either of you sacked up enough to make the first move, that is.”

Aubrey just shook her head dismissively. Cynthia Rose wasn’t one to pry, so it wasn’t brought up again. Until she was back in the safety of her room, with only Chloe there to hear as her reliable safety net.

Chloe didn’t mind hearing Aubrey go on about Beca. It was actually kind of adorable, she thought. Aubrey wasn’t the type to get all soft and swoony over anyone or anything, but she was so far gone for Beca it was crazy. So her only real problem with the entire situation was that despite her very earnest suggestion that she do something, say something, Aubrey kept saying no. That Beca wouldn’t be interested in a girl like her. It was maddening.

Beca was less restrained about her crush on Aubrey as time went on. She only really spoke openly about it with Stacie, normally at Stacie’s encouragement, but all of the Bellas could tell Beca was into Aubrey. She had absolutely no poker face so whenever they were in the same room as each other, Beca’s feeling were written all over her face. Aubrey flustered her with even the slightest of glances, and if the captain gave her some kind of praise or compliment during rehearsal she got so goofy and happy that it was visible on her face for hours.

When Stacie told her over and over that she should go for it with Aubrey, Beca would always counter that she wasn’t the kind of girl who ended up with someone as amazing as Aubrey. Stacie told her she was being ridiculous, naturally, but Beca was never going to take that step. So Stacie decided that she and Chloe should do something about it.

“I’m going to ask you something point blank here,” Stacie said. “And I know it might be breaking the best friend code on both our parts to be having this discussion but I think it’s important.”

“Oh this sounds interesting.”

“Now I only have suspicions, because Aubrey is pretty secretive, but am I going mental or does she have a massive crush on Beca?” Chloe looked surprised.

“Um....”

“Chlo.”

“Yeah, she does,” Chloe admitted. “Huge. Aubrey doesn’t do crushes. She’s head over heels, though.”

“Okay, good,” Stacie said. “Because it’s all too obvious that Beca is ridiculously into Aubrey. She’s not very good at hiding it and the only drama is that she is extremely gun shy about making a move.”

“Bree, too,” Chloe said. “So what do we do?”

“Leave that to me,” Stacie said. “Tell her the four of us are having lunch Saturday. Let’s meet here. I’ll take care of it.”

Chloe managed to convince Aubrey to come out with the girls for lunch by the weekend, so the two of them headed to meet Stacie and Beca at the Bellas auditorium.

“So where’s lunch?” Beca asked from her seat in the front row.

“We’re not going,” Chloe said.

“What do you mean?” Aubrey asked. “Isn’t that the whole reason we’re here?”

“Sit down,” Chloe said, gesturing to a seat near Beca. Confused, Aubrey sat, whilst Stacie got up and confronted the two of them.

“Okay,” Stacie said. “This thing between you two has gotten beyond a joke. All Beca can talk about is how amazing you are, Aubrey. How smart and beautiful and all of those nauseating things that a girl with a full blown crush notices. And Chloe here tells me that all she hears about on the regular is how unbelievably smitten Aubrey is for you, Beca. You’re so talented and confident and gorgeous and so on. So now that I’ve sufficiently embarrassed you both, Chloe and I are leaving so you two can do something about the super dramatic mutual pining.”

The two of them sat side by side with scarlet faces for an awkwardly long time. In the end Aubrey decided she was going to have to go first.

“So what Stacie said about me is true,” she said. “About how I feel. I’m kind of very into you.”

“Huh,” Beca said. “And it’s not exactly low key that I’m super into you. I think everybody can tell.”

“So... if our friends are shoving us toward this point,” Aubrey said, “maybe we could like, go on a date?”

“Before you suggest that though,” Beca said, her face going scarlet all over again, “it’s only fair that you should know I’ve not done this much. The dating thing. I’ve only had one girlfriend before.”

“I’ve never had a girlfriend,” Aubrey said. “One boyfriend. So inexperience isn’t just on your side. But even if it wasn’t, I’d still want to go out with you. I haven’t stopped thinking about you since you came to my room and apologised after the first practice.”

“I haven’t stopped thinking about you since then, either,” Beca said. “So yes. Please. Let’s go out.”

“Now? I mean, we did have lunch plans and they just left, so we may as well.”

“Yeah,” Beca said. “Um, I know a decent place if you’re okay with me driving?”

“Lead the way,” Aubrey said. Beca navigated them both toward her car and opened Aubrey’s door for her. They sat in silence for a few moments during the trip until Beca thought to put the radio on, the both of them singing along for a few songs.

“You have such a gorgeous voice,” Aubrey couldn’t help but saying.

“Thanks. Yours is nice too,” Beca said.

“I’m flattered that you would call mine nice, but honestly, my brain sometimes stops when I listen to you,” Aubrey rambled. That compliment brought a blush to Beca’s cheeks.

Beca ended up taking Aubrey to a simple sort of restaurant, nothing super weird or adventurous on the menu and it wasn’t too romantic for a first date.

“Hope this place is okay,” Beca said after they’d ordered. “It feels kind of coupley but not like overly so?”

“It’s fine,” Aubrey said. The two of them slipped into talking while they waited for their meals, and they admitted to each other just how far their crushes went. It was a relief to both of them that they seemed to be on the same page, but they also lamented that they hadn’t done anything sooner.

Once the food was gone and the bill had been delivered, Beca reached out for the slip.

“You should let me pay,” Aubrey said.

“I’ll get this one, since I picked it,” Beca said. “You can get the next one?”

“There’ll be a next one?” Aubrey said hopefully.

“Lots of them, I hope,” Beca said. “I’d really like that. Dating?”

“So would I,” Aubrey grinned at her and they got up and paid the check before heading outside.

“Wanna walk for a while?” Aubrey said. Beca nodded and slid her hand into Aubrey’s. Their fingers locked, both of them smiling as they strolled along the shopfronts.

It was a nice way to waste a little time. They just walked, and talked a little as they moved. But mostly they were both quietly appreciating the way even just holding hands felt, the racing in their chests every time their eyes caught a little. After a while they figured they should probably head back to campus, so they walked back to the car.

Beca slowed them to a stop right next to Aubrey’s door. She wanted to kiss her, provided Aubrey was okay with that. She looked up at her, almost hopefully, and saw that Aubrey was waiting, it seemed. So she bit her lip for a split second and then moved in to kiss her.

“Ow shit!” Aubrey exclaimed. Beca realised that in her eagerness she’d trodden directly on Aubrey’s mostly bare foot, thanks to the ballet flats she was wearing.

“Shit, sorry,” Beca said. “Real smooth, Mitchell. I’m sorry, Aubrey, truly. I’m just nervous.”

“Nervous?” Aubrey asked, her head tilting slightly. “Why would you be nervous?”

“Because I’ve been thinking about this, about you and me, about this moment for like... months,” Beca shrugged. “And I wanted it to be perfect. But instead I stood on your foot with my heavy ass boots and ruined it.”

Aubrey swooped in and kissed her soundly. Beca’s hands fluttered at her sides for a moment before she came to her senses and slid her arms around Aubrey’s neck. As she breathed in she could smell that perfume that drove her mental on every other day but it was a tiny, inconsequential thought when compared to the very idea that she was kissing Aubrey right now.

She felt hot everywhere. Her face was surely pink and she could feel a heat coursing through her and settling in her stomach. And when Aubrey pulled back she just knew she was smiling ear to ear.

“See? Nothing’s ruined,” Aubrey said. “I’m completely okay, I promise.” They shared a handful of kisses, softer and shorter than the first, but no less euphoria-inducing, before Aubrey was ready for them to head back to campus. Beca got back into the drivers seat and steered them back, Aubrey’s phone chiming just before they got there.

“Everyone’s hanging out to see how this turned out,” Aubrey said. “They’re all waiting in the auditorium.” Beca rolled her eyes.

“As much as I’d love to just not deal with that shit,” Beca said, “they’re going to be torturous whether we deal with it now or tomorrow or some other day. Let’s just do it now. While I’m still riding the high of finally getting to kiss you.” She parked the car and Aubrey was at her door as she got out.

“Hey,” Aubrey said. “That whole high feeling, that happiness at this finally happening?” Beca nodded.

“Not just you,” she continued. “I just want you to remember that. I can’t believe we just went on a date. My brain is melting down as we speak. I’ve wanted this for months, too.” Beca kissed her, soft and easy, letting herself take her time with it.

“Okay then,” she said. “Let’s do this.” Aubrey’s hand immediately found hers. They didn’t have any need to speak while they walked. Beca paused for just a second outside the doors, long enough to take a deep breath. Aubrey squeezed her hand tightly and opened the door. They walked in together, hand in hand.

Immediately their friends began clapping and cheering. Beca was blushing, she could feel it, because it was mortifying that all their friends had been so clued in to the immense crushes that they’d both been sporting. But Aubrey was slightly pink in the cheeks as well.

“So,” Aubrey said, “as you can probably see, Beca and I have decided to do something about the - what did you call it Stacie? Oh yeah, super dramatic mutual pining.”

“Largely that it’s no longer pining,” Beca said. “It’s more like dating. So yeah. Uh, thanks for shoving us toward this point, I guess.”

“And now we’re leaving,” Aubrey said. “Text if there’s dinner plans or something.” Amy wolf whistled at them as they left, neither of them turning back as the doors swung closed.

#mitchsenweek2019 #aubrey posen #beca mitchell #mitchsen #mitchsenweek #day four

19 notes · View notes

blankdblank · 5 years

Text

Anaticula Pt 9

Pt 1 - Pt 2 - Pt 3 - Pt 4 - Pt 5 - Pt 6 - Pt 7 -

…

In the chair beside you Harry watched as you copied down the weight and other measurements of your cub with a dictating quill, eventually catching your eye as he said, “Aunt Petunia keeps crying at your letters.”

“All I did was wish her a happy holiday and fill her in on what she’s missed so far. She still hasn’t written me back.”

Harry wet his lip and offered a piece of diced turkey to the cub, “She’s tried.”

“I guessed as much.” Looking him over you asked, “You and Dudley get along?”

His head tilted to the side, “They spoil him. He likes to be in charge.”

“No doubt he’ll grow out of it.” Harry looked up at you with raised brows and you giggled, “Hey, it’s all pain and insecurity. No doubt if he’s puffing himself up someone is knocking him down. It’s hard growing up, magic or no magic, people can suck and rain on your parade. He’ll see it when he’s older, then he has a choice.”

His brow twitched up again, “Choice?”

“To keep hurting others to keep himself from getting hurt or to do the hard thing and drop his guard and take the pain of letting others in.” He blinked up at you and you smiled at him, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Giggles and snorting laughter filled the table as Charlie read out on his schedule, “Head boy. Why the bloody hell would I be named head boy? On top of everything already?!”

Percy grinned saying, “Perhaps you could use it as a chance to test your task management skills.” Making Charlie raise a brow at him only to catch his sarcastic smirk back before he glanced at you in your weak giggle.

Charlie glanced at you asking, “Et tu, Jaqi?”

You giggled back and nodded, “Perce has a point. You can do it. Besides, who else would they pick for top boy, Hensen Slickworth?” Making him narrow his eyes at you playfully, “Suck it up buttercup.”

Again on the train you were squeezed into a tight hug by Cedric, who grew a staggering five inches and beamed proudly about it as it proved he was set for another in the next summer as his dad had at his age. Giddily he shared about the last couple weeks of summer he wasn’t able to write about in his family trip to Paris for a professional quidditch match.

Wide eyed for your first ride up in the carriages beside George you watched the Thestral pulling it that kept glancing back at you feeling your eyes on it with Fred and Cedric behind you. Holding in your giggle you set the black cone hat on top of your head and turned your attention to the sorting hat in its odd song of the best of adventures coming through the hardest endings leaving you bewildered to what it could mean. Then when it was through you sat back listening to the sorting of the group of students a third smaller than yours.

At the table you eyed your new schedule trying to memorize where you would be heading off to after your breakfast.

DADA 8 am

History of magic 9

Herbology Mon, Wed, Fri 10

2 free

Lunch at 1

Break 2

Break 3

Potions 4

Charms 5

Transfigurations 6

Dinner 7:30

Curfew at 8

Astronomy Wed 12

In a glance over at Tonks down the table you asked, “Tonks?” Her eyes turned to you as her mouth was full of pie, “Who does your double DA course say as Professor?”

In a dig in her pocket she pulled it out and mumbled back with stuffed cheeks, “Dumbledore.”

Turning your head while the twins and Cedric looked at theirs checking the name you held your schedule up catching the headmaster’s eye and gaining a confirming nod when he noticed your nonverbal questioning tap against the time schedule. “Hmm.” You mumbled turning back to the table missing his plotting gaze scanning over the tables, “Wonder how that’ll go.”

Unicorn’s Folly tucked safely in an enchanted dome circle that would cover it in darkness set to the enchanted clock you charmed for it on your desk down in the chamber you settled into bed with your cub on a special pillow near your head it refused to sleep without. Sunrise came soon enough and groggily you made it out of bed to your alarm with the boys joining you to your shared bathroom. Each claiming one of the enclosed toilets before hurrying to wash your faces and brush your teeth and fix your hair into something a bit more tolerable before dressing.

In the odd packing job you had to do with your cub trying to insist on playtime you could only find one of your floral tops you pulled on over a black pair of mid thigh length shorts. Tall socks and boots later you pulled your Puff robe on over and shouldered your bag easing the egg into an outer pouch with your cub in one of your robe pockets.

Through the mingled chatter of breakfast you ate and planned to stop in on Tulip for your first early morning feeding after your two months of set up transports of prey into the chamber allowing her to continue hunting freely on a healthy supply of animals in your absence. After that you three raced up to join Cedric on the path to your first course with Dumbledore.

Through the double doors you all eyed the classroom without a single desk in sight as Dumbledore stood in the center of the room. Waving his hands he ushered you closer, “Come in, come in, file around. As you may not know some decades ago I was, in fact, Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor. Since then as you know we’ve had a number of Professors, and from time to time when others are, reluctant or unable to assume the position I step in. Though, I have recently taken up an interesting take on teaching. I will instruct the first two lessons, since that point you will all be assigned a section to study up on and present to the class. Today our lesson will be on these,” at a wave of his hand a sheet flew off a cage packed with Cornish Pixies. At his instruction you set your bags down on the floor along the walls then filed around the cage.

By the end of class you were all given origami phoenixes that flew over to you with your assigned topics and dates you would be presenting them written across their tail feathers.

Cedric, “Trolls.”

Fred chuckled, “Vampires.”

George, “Full Body Bind Curse.”

They all looked at you as you sighed and stated, “Werewolves” before looking at the twins who joined you in wondering if he knew about Remus and that was why you had been chosen or if it was truly random. Either way you had a week to prep.

Next was History of Magic and Herbology after and again you slipped seamlessly into your schedules and usual work patterns in getting your assignments done early to grant you more time for your extra projects your cub kept making more difficult. Occasional glances of Charlie chasing his Diricawl could be found keeping you from his usual snatch and snog game with you.

But at your Wednesday morning breakfast you turned to hear Charlie recite, “Spoons, spoons, magnificent marvels wondrous, rare.” He turned the note in his fingers with an exhausted wide eyed gaze down at you as you shot him a wide grin splitting through your exhausted expression. “What the hell? Three in the morning?”

“If I’m going to be up so are you.”

“Seriously?! I was on my rounds as prefect and your owl comes out of nowhere-!”

“Well I have a set list of letters to keep her distracted. She’s been listless while my cub is settling into the new schedule and all these people around, even more so than usual. Besides, that plant keeps humming, I swear it’s even in my dreams, it was yodeling yesterday. I’m sure it was.”

Charlie rolled his eyes, “At least yours is still humming, I forgot to set an enchanted timer and mine started screeching, had to set a silencing charm around it, took a full day for it to stop.”

All day you managed through and again you struggled to get your cub to sleep while the guys were troubled with a run through on their own scheduled classes, so much so that a muffled mooing stirred you from your dream. Your late alarm snapped your eyes open and in a baggy sweater and shorts you leapt out of bed throwing your bag over your shoulder. In a flick of your fingers the still sleeping boys were turned into kittens while their bags floated behind you. Barefoot through the halls you raced until just as Professor Sinistra stepped forward to speak the hatch in the floor shot open and a trio of bags floated through followed by your awkward clamber through the hole while holding the kittens.

Flashing her a timid grin you stated, “Sorry, late alarm.” She nodded and watched as you shifted the boys back who sat up rubbing their eyes as you moved to their side while Charlie swapped with another boy to sit on the cushion by yours. It was good that he did so because near the last ten minutes you slumped onto his shoulder with your eyes shut stirring a smirk onto his lips and he made sure you made it down the ladder and back to your room safely before returning to Gryffindor tower.

One week blew by and with bright blue hair you stood in front of the class halting for a moment before reciting the paragraph you had memorized. Those same harsh words you had imagined time and time again stabbing into Remus’ heart at having to hear just what the world thought of people attacked by werewolves like he was as a child.

At the end of that paragraph you stopped then wet your lips breaking from the biased book definition, missing the grin spreading on Dumbledore’s face off to the side of the class. “For as long as we’ve known about werewolves they have been seen as evil vile creatures. But what people seem to forget is that past the initial few of their race there have been thousands attacked and savagely brutalized by these creatures spreading Lycanthropy.”

Students shifted uncomfortably in their seats except for a girl in the back from Ravenclaw and your roommates. “Thousands of innocent people are told that they are monsters and forced to hide from an illness they have no control over, told that they should all be hunted down and killed. They all deserve lives, friends, families, safety, things everyone else deems them unworthy of having. The vast majority of werewolves today are victims, innocent bystanders forced into this disease.”

After a pause you added, “For them there are little options past the Wolfsbane potion and locking themselves away once a month.”

At the side of the room Dumbledore asked, “And what would your solution be?”

Wetting your lips you dug into your pocket and drew out a pair of inconspicuous chain bracelets, “I’ve been working with Fred and George on a stronger version of the potion and a prototype for chains that would hold their transformation at bay.”

His brow inched up as the girl in the back scooted to the edge of her seat, “And just how would they work?”

You eased them onto your wrists and they coated the back of your hands with a layer of silver, “When placed on a person’s wrists with lycanthropy it releases a trigger dulling charm to enhance regular Wolfsbane potion users so their body doesn’t shift at all. Plus, if their transformation is triggered by missing a dose it will curl their fists keeping them from scratching anyone while one of the charms on the wrist unleashes a powerful hibernation charm.”

His head cocked and his lips parted through a grin, “Impressive.”

You nodded, “Also, for people without the gene can also use them to restrain those changing, of course they can protect your hands if you need to defend yourself while also being able to be tossed at one in a shift or attempting to render them incapacitated.”

Dumbledore, “Any side effects you are aware of?”

“Pain. In the onset of their shift, the enchanted silver burns them when it forces their change to stop, more than just on their skin. When out of the full moon week no pain at all, during it, constant tingling, the day of, just searing pain unless they take the stronger potion exactly on schedule.”

The girl in the back raised her hand, “What is the difference between the potions?”

Turning around you moved to the board claiming the chalk. You wrote out all the ingredients and steps for the original. Went into the usual unattainable prices for each ingredient leaving most to do without or go bankrupt in buying it, “The new one halts the shift completely, and is a fourth of the price-,”

Making her mouth drop open, “But they taste metal all day and under direct moonlight their bodies ache everywhere and they experience numbness in their feet and lower legs somehow. Though if they eat pineapple every morning the metal taste is tolerable and the aching lulls after five hours with the second dose. We are working on the side effects but past those the irritability paired with the week wanes over continued use.”

She wet her lips as Albus asked, “Would this potion be able to be shared with others who require it?”

You shrugged, “If any are willing to tolerate the symptoms until we can work on something stronger, sure. Since they are forced into hiding it’s not likely if advertised for sale in public would sell well, but we’ve placed a few ads since the second potion in a few anon group meetings for secret deliveries. Only had a few requests to try it so far.”

Dumbledore, “Secret deliveries?”

“When we get an order request and enchanted safe is sent to them, they slide the coins into the slot on it and it opens releasing their supply. They collect it and it zaps back to us, discrete and safe for them.” In a reach into your pocket you pulled out a set of cards you sent out to each of the students, “The summoning chant for the safe. I’ve ensured they’re posted in each dorm common room.” As if to memorize it the girl in the back stared at the card in her fingers she then slipped into her pocket as Dumbledore stepped up to your side to instruct on a few stunning spells and a charm rumored to shift a werewolf back to their regular form for the last ten minutes of the class as you took your seat again easing the bracelets back into your bag.

…

First break at Eleven found you on your way to the library only to see that same girl from Ravenclaw that had asked you questions in your presentation nipping at her lip as she eyed you and the trio around you. The curious expression on her face stopping you in your tracks and bringing you over to the empty hall she was in.

After wetting your lips you flashed her a weak grin, “Hey, Nita, right?”

She nodded, “Nita Berdine.” Wetting her lips looking between the guys, “I had some questions, about the potions.”

You nodded and caught her looking around at the passing students before Cedric said, “RoR?”

You nodded your head as the twins said, “Follow us.” A winding path later she watched you pace summoning the doorway she timidly followed you through.

Behind you she asked, “This isn’t where your Basilisk is?”

You turned around with a giggle, “No. This is the Room of Requirement. Anyone can summon it, into anything they require. We use it for studying mostly. Professor McGonnagall said it was best to keep my Chamber private.” She nodded and closed the door behind her, “So, what questions did you have?”

Across the round couches you lounged leaving your bags on the table between you and she asked anxiously crossing her ankles, “You’re not a werewolf, are you?”

You shook your head, “No. But we know someone who was attacked by one if you were curious as to why we started to improve upon the original recipe.”

“How can it be so cheap?”

“Because it has a lot to do with snake venoms.”

Her eyes went wide, “Not Basilisk?!”

You shook your head with a giggle as Fred replied, “Whisptail Cobra.”

George, “Known to feast off werewolves.”

Both, “Deathly hard to catch, even worse to handle.”

You chuckled, “But of course, as a Parseltongue gathering their venom is far easier, even managed to get an egg for one for my collection. Only takes a drop or two for a months batch, attacks it in the blood. Something about the bat wing acting with the Gypsum root causing the numbness.”

George, “Still a work in progress.”

Fred, “Only found the snake last summer so it shouldn’t take long for us to perfect it.”

Cedric eyed her asking, “Were you attacked?”

She paused for a moment then shook her head, “No, but my Gramps was.” In relief she stated, “Mum has it the worst. My brother and I only have cravings for meat around the moon cycles.”

“I know it’s scary, trying something new, and yes we’re just three students, but we’re the only ones it seems to try and work on this glaring problem no one seems to talk or even care about.”

She wet her lips again, “Mum, Mum’s heard of a few groups. Most seem shady,” from her pocket she passed you the information, “maybe you could zap some of these cards there too.” You accepted the paper the boys leaned around you to read and she asked, “How well is the bracelet able to be, hidden?”

Fred, “We’ve got a bead one.”

George, “The charm bracelet ones seem to be the most effective though so far.”

When her questions had run out she gave you one last look over and you all smiled at her as Fred said, “We won’t tell anyone.” She wet her lips and you added, “If it helps I went to Azkaban rather than turn over my Basilisk to be killed and these guys knew where to find her. None of us are going to do anything to jeopardize your family’s safety.”

That eased her smile out and she nodded thanking you and promising to let you know what her mother and grandfather thought of trying the new potion and possibly the bracelets just in case. Another week passes by and the boys teach their classes.

Cedric on Trolls bewitched clumps of clay to demonstrate the charms and spells used to distract, confine and avert enraged trolls. Fred’s was a bit more laugh inducing at his Vampire set topic with his take on a few of the dated techniques before giving some of the newest his father had sent him a copy of straight from the Ministry Aurors were given along with a Hemoglobin potion to help sate their urge to feed on others and ease their weaknesses. But hands down George’s was the most interactive as with the Full Body Bind Curse you were split up into pairs to demonstrate the effects of the incantation with Dumbledore on the side ready to cushion your falls and to guide the students in the reversal spell.

Three weeks had bled by and your egg still sat cracked without any other sign of hatching just yet while your cub had grown over a foot already. The cumbersome cub still insisting on sitting on your lap in class stirred more than a few eyes in his wide eyed gaze watching your pen dart across the page and at each flip of the page in your book his spike coated paw would inch up to try and tap at the pages only to be gently nudged back down again. Lowly he would grumble and curl up in an angry ball with spikes bristling between stolen glances at you until you would draw out a crumpled ball of paper you would levitate under your desk for him to lay back and swat at. Already his curls nearly all gone thanks to your nightly brushings and bi weekly baths turning the curls into shimmering scales folding around your growing big footed cub always trotting after you or standing on your shoulder with his chest on top of your head with Opal hiding in your hair below his belly.

On the first crisp day of October you stood looking over the oddly shifting forest after the older students had left for Hogsmeade for the day, the twins and Cedric along with them to test your discovered hidden pathway. Though as your eyes narrowed at the forest waiting for what you had seen in your dream you spotted the same pair of foxes trotting through the snow stealing glances at you on their path away.

One, two, three, four, before you could get to five the same loud roar erupted from the Chimera dwelling wild on these grounds that Professor Kettleburn had been failing to discover the den of since its arrival five years ago. Gently you set down your satchel your cub and egg were resting inside beside you. Racing down the hill through the thick mud the week of rains had stirred you cut off the group of first years formerly trying to catch tiny insects for Professor Sprout’s aquatic plant lesson homework in their fleeing. Thundering hooves concluded their fiery path in a mud flinging skid halting it ten feet from you with smoke pluming from its mouth in its rage fueled panting.

Stepping forward you drew its attention from the first years you waved on to run drawing its eyes back to them until you shouted, “HEY!” Loudly it snarled at you in your forceful step forward urging it to turn to face you fully, your fist unclenched as your hair turned from green to bright blue at your nerves, “Right here. Look right here, at me.” Slowly your hands rose at the faint licks of flames flowing from between its open jaws like a lion’s. Again it roared at you in your next step forward as you said, “Show me what’s wrong. I know you can understand me.” Again it roared at your next step and you spotted the Professors already pouring out into the fields while Hagrid hurried from his hut remaining in its blind spot ready to assist you as you lowered to your knee.

Her head turned to peer at the Professors and you said, “Hey, right here.” Her fear and pain filled eyes locked on you again through another roar, “Tell me what’s wrong.” Steadily you focused your mental will on tapping out to hers making her snarl and hesitate on fleeing as her mind tapped yours then rushed away only to timidly come back and tap it again in time for you to say, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

All at once while Hagrid inched closer to you both the memory of a cone burrowing vine bush flooded into your mind in its attacking her while she drank from a stream in the forbidden forest. Wetting your lips you raised your dropped knee saying, “You’re hurt. I can help you.” Again you moved closer and she roared baring more of her teeth while the barbs on her dragon tail rippled in its rise above your head. In a move around her side you spotted the patch of blood as her roar broke and weakly her goat legs gave out leaving her on her stomach in the mud whining between failed attempts at growls in turning her head to watch your move around her side to kneel beside her.

Lowly Hagrid crept closer to you remaining a few feet away with hands exposed for her to watch him as he asked, “Jaqi. Kelpie?”

You shook your head, “cone burrowing vine bush.” With a motion of your fingers you mentally shifted her thick fur back careful not to touch her still bleeding wounds while the barbs spreading inside her continued to grow against her struggle to fight, clearly having been burned off the rest of the vine in its attempt to gain freedom.

Hagrid nodded, scanning his eyes over the ground before stating, “Lemons!” mumbling to himself he drew out his wand and tapped his bare palm only to summon a pineapple making him mumble and drop it, “Blast it all!” Wetting his lips then trying again with brows furrowed. This time successful and he inched closer floating them to you along with a jar he floated towards you, “I’ll summon some more.”

You sliced the lemons in half and caught her eye saying, “This will hurt.” Weakly she gave another weak wine and you wet your lips covering the ends of the barbs with the lemon halves, holding them in place while Hagrid moved in to help you coat the last set with the crowd of Professors looking on. Kettleburn inched closer with another jar in hand through her pained roar and burst of flames erupting from her mouth at the barbs shifting inside her to turn and burrow into the slices of lemon that turned a dark brown and were snuck inside the jars. Weakly your cub stood peeking out behind Snape’s legs giving a rumbling then shrill roar for you asking if you were safe urging the Professor to drop and cradle him in his arms to keep him from going closer.

All the halves and barbs were in the jars while you eyed the still bleeding wounds. Kettleburn eyed them saying, “We’ll need a powerful healing draught for these and fast poor thing.”

Inhaling deeply your eyes that flashed to a muddle of colors closed and you focused on an odd rush. All at once fire seemed to course under your skin in your rippling transformation. Open mouthed they all looked on at your seeming burst into white and blue flames that rippled over your skin covering with white and blue feathers. Gasping softly in the flapping on your wide wingspan in your phoenix form Minerva whispered in proud awe at the near impossible animagus form to master, “That’s my girl.”

Folding your wings your foot landed on her side holding her in place as your tear filled eyes blinked your enchanted tears to drop onto the wounds that healed through her pained roars at the powerful yet excruciating healing draught. Retracting your foot at the last tear steadily she stood and took a few steps to circle and lock eyes with you before racing off back to the forest out of reach of the other professors. Inhaling deeply again your eyes closed, and you missed to your bag at its turn as your egg with flame doubling in its roll towards you. Again your wings shifted and in your burst into flames to shift back again the egg lit up, rotating in the air. In your settling onto your knees again your eyes shot open at the shrill cheep sounding from the powder blue egg now coated with cracks that split open over your now raised palms.

Inside the dimming flames was a chick similar to a peacock with shimmering blue eyes, its body covered in fluff, white near its body shifting to blue and tipped in gold, a small tuft of blue sitting longer in top of its head in a dip to the side tipped in gold. Ruffling its feathers they shifted from gold to white and then back to their multicolored state. In the mud you sat down with him on your knee saying, “There you go Idris.” Waving your fingers to document his appearance and measurements onto the blank page the measuring tape in the spine of the book helped you obtain.

A cheep from him came with his tail feathers wiggling out to tilt up in his demand for your attention. Smirking at him you inched closer saying, “I bet you’re hungry.”

In a ruffle of his feathers that released a coating of flames coating him as you stood as Hagrid patted your back saying in the lift of the jar holding the used lemon slices, “I’ll get rid of these.”

Kettleburn grinned saying, “And see about sending out some fire crabs to eat those bushes.” Reaching out he flicked his wand removing the mud from your jeans and said, “You go tend to your Hoo-Hoo chick, I think your cub is about ready to nibble on Professor Snape.”

You giggled and neared the group as Minerva stated, “That was marvelous.” You giggled again accepting her partial hug while your cub in Snape’s arms urged him closer to you easing his hop onto your shoulders to lounge across them. With a grin Snape bent to pick up your bag he passed to you while saying, “I would imagine you would be among the first to have ever touched a Chimera as it was lucid. Impressive.”

Dumbledore chuckled turning to allow you to pass by, “No doubt she could tell there was nothing to fear. Racing here for aid knowing we would be able to assist.” Peering at Idris he stated, “Do not forget to copy down his first song if possible. Quite rare to capture them, and etching the notes into metal can form a protective seal I hear.”

You nodded, “Will do.”

Seated in the fire lit office in the Chamber you were finishing your measurements of your Unicorn’s Folly while collecting the next set of odd pustules in a vial when it turned an unrecorded burnt orange. Through the doorway Charlie charged, “A Chimera!”

Turning your head he crossed the room already with his hands on you in search of any injuries before his lips crashed into yours in a fiery kiss. Drawing back at the trio behind him his eyes turned to your plant giving out a near whale song, “What the-, why is it that color, and what is it singing? Mine is stuck on purple.”

“I can’t get mine to purple.”

He smirked at you stealing another peck on your lips, “I’ll tell you, if you tell me how to get to green.”

You let out a faked gasp, “Of course you want my coveted green.”

He chuckled and Cedric asked, “Ok, where’s the chick? I’ve only seen Hoo-Hoo’s in books.”

You giggled pointing to the nest along the wall above your cub’s hammock he was contently purring in for his second nap of the day before his lunch time feeding. Your visit was short lived as a notice from a set of judges had arrived to inspect your choices. The six judges each eyed your creatures and plants alongside your ledgers. All of which was impressive on their own at the doubling of sizes on all of them. For your plants samples of each item able to be sourced from the plant were examined thoroughly with your vial of orange pustules now hardening into Spessartite garnets. Leaning in they all asked, “Are those gemstones?”

They looked to you and you shrugged, “It just changed like that this morning for the first time.”

More impressively the group eyed your Idris only to have him keep apparating onto your shoulder under your hair until you held him in your palm for them. Unreadable expressions spread across the faces on the judges as they turned to leave. Rolling your eyes your hair pooled into your face at the crossed front legs from your cub laying on top of your head. Blindly with Opal’s aid as she borrowed the sight from one of your eyes she led you through the school back to your common room where you decided to write home briefly.

One letter to Neville on the status of your plant while asking for a recap on his followed by another to your father and uncle about the Chimera. The final one was to Remus asking if his potion you had made a few tweaks to was proving less irritating for him than the batch the one for the month before, each one steadily improving upon the last brightening his mood greatly.

…

October held another drop in visit noting the doubling of your cub again and the odd fresh set of feathers seeming larger than Idris’ body often adding to his awkward waddle until he grew used to it. A late night study session left you with a clear view of the shooting stars reflected across the lake with you, your cub and Idris to watch the light show spurring on his first song. A twitch of your finger had the pen beside you copying down the notes to the heart warming song stirring a warm tear across your cheek at the overflowing feeling of hope flowing through you.

A few weeks blurred by and each night he formed a new song, each one more beautiful than the last always with him on your chest as if he was trying to lull you to sleep into peaceful dreams while your cub slept in the ever growing hammock above your head softly purring in his sleep.

The end of November brought on an urgent letter from home and allowed by Dumbledore after your week of early exams at the news sent on ahead by Sirius at Alice’s nearing her due date. You were allowed to travel with K, taken straight to the midwife station you were shown into the waiting room where your family was in various stages of lounging across the irritatingly stiff chairs. Two hours and a visit from your over eager owl you sent back to Hogwarts with a letter for Charlie to startle him on his rounds again.

Eventually a cry sounded and in his startled jolt awake Regulus fell from the chair he was in and jumped to his feet while Neville stirred from his place sprawled across your chest onto his feet in front of you. A few minutes passed and finally you were shown in with Neville at his refusal to let go of your hand, his timid grin spreading at the yellow blanket wrapped infant with dark brown hair. An awkward grin spread on Alice’s face while saying, “Neville, come meet your baby sister.”

At the shifting of your hands you helped him onto the bed beside her on his knees to peer at her when he let go of you a giggle left you and you moved to the end of the bed waving your fingers to summon the camera from your home. Raising it higher you said, “Big smile.” Their eyes landed on you and with Neville shifting to settle between Frank and Alice they grinned as she propped up the bundle and you snapped the picture you made copies of and passed out between them and pocketed one for yourself then sat on the end of the bed watching as Neville bit his lip in his first time holding her. Alice grinned settling beside him smiling at the both of them through your snapping another picture as she said, “Neville, what do you think of Nellie?”

A grin eased onto his face nodding, “I like it. We can match.” Making them chuckle and nod wrapping closer around their children, both starting to feel the bond settling in even deeper. By noon she was taken home and Neville was taken back with Regulus so he could finish his final weeks of schooling as you finished yours.

Pt 10

#Harry Potter #oc x charlie weasley #Hogwarts #LIFE IN HOGWARTS #Neville Longbottom #Frank and Alice Longbottom #Head Boy #HP Crossover

12 notes · View notes

shepherd-of-the-trees · 6 years

Note

8 (top five trees), 27, and 28 :)

8 - top five trees: Not sure if you mean individual trees or species, but Ima just go with the latter and hope for the best! In no particular order...

1: Lawson cypress/Port Orford cedar (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana) - had a few of them in the garden on my childhood home, and spent a huge portion of said childhood playing underneath and climbing amongst their evergreen, scented foliage and limbs. Simpler times!

2: Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) - very similar to Lawson cypress in appearance and scent! No cliched childhood memories, but they do remind me a lot of my time Canada instead.

3: Grand fir (Abies grandis) - tall, mighty, fast-growing trees! The bark is covered in resin blisters that are easy to pop, and the resin smells absolutely gorgeous... I’ve always considered mixing it something like an alcohol to turn it into an aftershave.

4: Hazel (Corylus avellana) - not the biggest trees, but more than makes up for it! Its leaves are very soft, and have a very pretty, gentle shade of green to them. They add a lovely strata to a woodland of more mature trees, which combined with their nuts make a great addition where wildlife is concerned! They have a rich history throughout Europe as a valued coppice species, providing convenient greenwood timber products, and a ready supply of wood to make charcoal from. They even have cute lil’ catkins in the winter!

5: Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) - a versatile, prolific, economically and ecologically valuable species that has always been a staple of the British countryside. One of the few species giving broadleaves a chance in commercial forestry, and second only to oak in the amount of other species it supports here in the UK. Absolutely heartbreaking to see it all dying to ash dieback, and godspeed to the scientists breeding and hopefully eventually rolling out resistant seedlings.

I would say sorry for getting so carried away with that question... but you know me enough to expect an answer like this when asking me about trees 😉

27 - First celebrity you think of when someone says attractive: Genuinely not something that crosses my mind on a regular basis! Buuuut, come to think of it... probably Natalie Dormer 😍

28 - Favourite ice cream: Either Cornish or honeycomb I’d say.

Thank you very very much! I thoroughly appreciate the opportunity to ramble about trees for far longer than I’m usually allowed to do so 😘

#shadowsonata

3 notes · View notes

puckwritesstuff · 3 years

Note

13, 16, 17, 19

13. Do you outline your fics? How much of a headache would someone get if they just looked at an outline of yours without reading the fic?

No headache at all! Because there are none.

Okay, that's not entirely true, I outlined "Nothing Like You" and I have some outlines for my original works, but I am a notorious and unrepentant pantser. I mostly use the discovery method of writing, and so my order of scenes is all over the place because I'm taking the most emotionally raw moments and writing those first.

16. Do you research for your fics? If so, how deep of a rabbit hole have you gone down by accident when researching?

I mean, I've researched Cornish swearing, maps of post-war partitioned Vienna, the usage of Nordic runes, Final Fantasy magic systems, water-cooling systems for computers, electromagnetic locks, how to build a proper Sand/Fairy Yu-Gi-Oh! deck, and about a million other things that wouldn't seem to make sense to anyone watching my Google search history.

That being said, and I have said this before, while I will research more than I need to write the story, what I end up using is only what I need to write the story. You can bend or break the rules of pretty much anything, even the laws of physics, if it better serves your story. The key word there being "better". I have no idea how magic in Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy works, but I still wrote "Feelings I Can't Fight", "When It's All Over", and "Nothing Like You" anyways. It's fine.

Just try not to break your own story's rules that often.

17. How obsessively do you sit and stare at your fic after you’ve just posted and wait for feedback?

Heh, heh. *pulls my collar like an old vaudeville performer*

please tell me what you think of my writing i promise i don't take it personally but also don't feel any pressure, like, seriously, this is a hobby for all of us i don't want it to feel like it's homework or something

19. Do you edit your fics after you write them, or do you prefer to just hit post and run (because it’s someone else’s problem now)?

Yes, I do edits-- mainly because of the aforementioned pantser style of writing that I do, I tend to end up with a large collection of scenes that need to be strung together. I worked with my first beta reader for my most recent fic-- shout out to the fantastic SarunoHadaki over on AO3-- and I self-edited the "Take On Me" series. I try to make sure that, at the very least, the grammar and typos are gone, and I do major edits to "completed" works for pacing, continuity, theming, and all of the other things that your English teacher liked to talk about. Just because it's fanfic/pulp (my original content is very pulpy), doesn't mean I can't take everything I've learned from reading the Classics and the Western English Canon and put them in my pulp. I'm serving full pulp juice over here, none of this strained stuff.

Thanks for the ask!

#meta #asks #writing #writing advice #fanfiction

1 note · View note

old-long-john · 7 years

Note

james flint for the character ask meme thing! and/or madi! and/or miranda! and/or....GATES! idk if gates was alive long enough for you to have an opinion on him tho lol

So much choice! Thank you! I’m doing them all, because why not.

Flint

1: sexuality headcanon: Can I say Complicated Gay? Because gay, but also everything with Miranda is difficult. I have various feelings about the way this show depicted sexualities as fairly person-based and malleable and deliberately difficult to label, but I don’t know how well they’d go down.2: otp: Silverflint. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯3: brotp: Flint & Gates.4: notp: Flint/Vane.5: first headcanon that pops into my head: Again with the accents, little baby Dimples McGraw had a reasonably strong Cornish accent that he deliberately got rid of when he joined the Navy, because you can’t be an officer if you sound like a bumpkin fisherman. 6: favorite line from this character: How to choose? I love the way he delivers this part: “When I lost Thomas, I raged. I was distraught. I wept. But with you. I’m ruined over you.”7: one way in which I relate to this character: I also think books make the perfect gift.8: thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character: He has no chill. Sometimes he really needed to calm the fuck down.9: cinnamon roll or problematic fave? So problematic, but such a fave.

Madi

1: sexuality headcanon: Straight.2: otp: Ughhh, I don’t even know. I don’t particularly think she should’ve settled for Silver, given how broken everything was at the end. 3: brotp: Madi & Flint.4: notp: Madi/being a tavern owner’s wife?5: first headcanon that pops into my head: She absolutely had those pirate outfits ready to go before Flint and co even landed on her shore. 6: favorite line from this character: That entire speech where she wrecked Rogers.7: one way in which I relate to this character: If I were a no good pirate, I’d follow John Silver anywhere too.8: thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character: It’s not really embarrassment, but that whole ‘when I speak, my men listen’ thing I find a bit...I dunno. Less compelling and amazing than others seem to. She’s royalty. Of course they fucking listen. They don’t have much choice, given how plausible it apparently was that Kofi could’ve beaten the shit out of someone who disrespected her. She is awesome, but they’d still have to do what she said even if she wasn’t. 9: cinnamon roll or problematic fave? Pretty cinnamon roll-ish.

Miranda

1: sexuality headcanon: Pretty straight, tbh.2: otp: London OT3. /happiness. /living.3: brotp: Does Miranda & Abigail count? Adoptive mum-tp?4: notp: Miranda/Pastor Quick Draw5: first headcanon that pops into my head: Moving to Nassau was a steep learning curve for her. She’d always had servants to do almost everything for her before then. James brought her any books he came across that listed recipes or instructions for growing fruit and vegetables, and he showed her how to do a lot of things around the house like making beds and lighting fires.6: favorite line from this character: All the stuff in the carriage in 2x03, but particularly: “I was going to say... that perhaps you're more concerned with whether or not people talk about what you and I may be doing behind closed doors... than with what we actually are doing.”

7: one way in which I relate to this character: I’m also trapped and frustrated with my life.8: thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character: The fucking the pastor thing a little bit, but mostly it just makes me feel horribly sorry for her.9: cinnamon roll or problematic fave? Beautiful, complicated, angry, cinnamony fave.

And Gates!

1: sexuality headcanon: I don’t even know. Straight, probably?2: otp: None really.3: brotp: Gates & Flint.4: notp: I don’t think I’ve ever even seen gates shipped with anyone.5: first headcanon that pops into my head: Once when they were drunk together about a year after they met, Flint slipped up and sort of mentioned Thomas, not by name but by pronouns. Gates noticed, but he didn’t point it out and never mentioned it again, because he supposed (rightly) that Flint hadn’t meant to do it and he’d been at sea plenty long enough to be unfazed by that sort of thing, so it’s not like it changed anything anyway.6: favorite line from this character: “There are no legacies in this life, are there? No monuments. No history. Just the water. It pays us and then it claims us. Swallows us whole. As if we'd never been here at all."7: one way in which I relate to this character: I’m completely Done about 95% of the time too.8: thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character: Nothing really. He’s a good egg.9: cinnamon roll or problematic fave? Sort of cinnamon roll dad.

#ask games #thank you!#themightytapirofindecisionand

16 notes · View notes

hashtagtransanthology-blog · 8 years

Text

Contributor Interview: Gabriel D. Vidrine

Next up: Gabriel talks about their essay on The Crow, YA novels, and what they watch on Netflix on Friday nights.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you generally write.

First and foremost, I am a scientist, but I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I wrote my first full-length novel at 16 (it was terrible, don’t ask, but it was cyberpunk). I entered short story contests before then, as well, but didn’t win. I never thought I’d be any good at it, or be able to make a living off of it. So scientist it was. I write what I like to read. I primarily write fantasy (epic and urban) and horror (paranormal and survival), but I’ve dabbled in science fiction, erotica, and essays. Out of nowhere, I wrote a trans YA summer romance story. Not much has been good enough to publish yet, but I keep hoping!

2. What is your essay for #Trans about?

My essay is about how I realized I was trans through the help of pop culture and media, specifically movies, comic books, and video games. It took me a long time to be okay with how important pop culture was to me (at least, the pop culture subgroups I enjoyed) and how it affected what I thought about my gender identity. It’s also a comment on how difficult it is to find those identities that are liminal – in between – like being bi and nonbinary.

3. Katherine Cross describes her realization of being trans (and a feminist) as a series of 'clicks' on a keyboard in online space. What was your 'click' moment when you realized you were trans?

I didn’t have much of a click moment (though she does describe it as a series of them, and I can see that). I’m a horror writer, so it’s probably easiest for me to describe it as something like the creeping dread. There was not one moment, but many small ones, building up over time, until I could no longer deny what I was experiencing. I never noticed my feelings until I was looking back over them, drowning in them, and just couldn’t ignore them anymore. I had always felt boyish, but it wasn’t until many things fell into place that I realized I was actually trans.

4. What is your next project?

Getting fiction published! My trans YA romance is nearly ready to be shopped around, so I’m hoping that I can find an agent or a publisher who is looking for something like it. (Shameless plug: it’s an ownvoices trans boy m/m fluffy summer camp romance!) I’m also working hard on getting my dance career revived and vlogger career started. It hasn’t left as much time for writing, but I keep trying. I’m currently writing a trans epic fantasy

5. You're given a time machine. Do you go forwards or backwards in time? Why? What do you do?

Forward. Definitely forward. I want to see how humanity turns out, if we survive the coming years. More importantly, does the Earth survive us? How have we all fared, and what direction did we take? If things look good, especially for trans people, I want to stay there. If things look bad, I’d come back and see what we could do to avoid that fate (provided we don’t run into any Oedipus-like problems).

6. What is your favourite book written by a trans or nonbinary writer?

I’m a bad trans person. Admittedly, I have not yet read that many books by trans or nonbinary writers. I’m a sucker for genre fiction and I’m super picky about it. There isn’t as much written by trans people in the genres I enjoy as there are in regular fiction, non-fiction, and YA genres. I have read Elliot Wake’s (writing as Leah Raeder) Cam Girl, which has beautiful writing but just isn’t my genre. I have also read If I Was Your Girl, Some Assembly Required (which was probably the most important for me), and Rethinking Normal. I just bought Peter Darling but I haven’t started it yet. I haven’t yet read anything that has spoken to my soul, a “Yes, this,” but I have enjoyed what I’ve read so far. I have made it a priority this year to read as many trans-written books as I can, even if they aren’t my genre, so I’m actively looking for books I will hopefully enjoy.

7. What historical figure--trans or cis--would you like to have dinner with? What would you ask them, and what would you order?

These sorts of questions are so hard, lol! I tend to find history boring (unless it involves dragons or something) so I don’t really idolize any historical figures. I’ve met a few people I’ve idolized before and it’s always underwhelming (you find out they’re human, just like everyone else, with prejudices and weird habits and such). There are a few people I think I want to preserve my interior image of instead! The only person I can think of would be Anne McCaffrey. Her work changed my life and started my dragon obsession. A lot of it went over my head when I discovered it (I read my first book of hers in fifth grade), and I think a lot of her work is deeply misunderstood today. I would like to talk to her about it, about why and how she was able to sneak in gay people without being too obvious, and still have her work be taken seriously in the 60s and 70s, especially as a woman author writing science fiction (with gay people!). Since we’d likely be in Ireland or England somewhere, a good British pub sounds about right. I’m fond of Cornish pasties. It makes me incredibly sad that I never got to meet her before she passed.

8. What's one message, image, or feeling do you want people to take away from your work?

A lot of my work is about pain. Internal pain, external pain, the suffering it causes. I want people to know that pain doesn’t have to stop your life. That when you feel overwhelmed by it – no matter its source – that there is someone out there to help you, to share it, to take it away. That none of us have to suffer alone, and to reach out to those who love you when you are in pain. I know that’s hard; I have suffered a lot of emotional, psychic, and physical pain in my life. I’ve struggled with reaching out. I try to bury it, to suffer alone, to not bother anyone with it. Please, bother someone with it. It’s worth it.

9. It's Friday night and your plans fall through. What do you do instead?

Either I spend my night dutifully sewing a new dance costume while listening to a documentary on Netflix (old castles, LGBTQIA, or true crime) or I tell my guilt to go to hell and spend all night playing video games.

10. Finally, what is your social media of choice? How can people contact you?

I’m on Facebook the most, but I use that for mostly private, personal interaction with irl friends and family. Twitter is the best way to contact me otherwise, but I’m all over the Internet. I have an Instagram where I post pictures of my silly cat and weight loss progress, if that’s of any interest, or they can email me at [email protected] or contact me through my Tumblr (though I don’t use it as much as I should).

Thank you, Gabriel! Up next: Shawn Dorey.

#interview #transgender #trans #nonbinary #LGBT #spilled ink

5 notes · View notes

mexico-et-al · 8 years

Text

Not touristy but certainly worth visiting. Following the Agustin monks from Mexico City to Metztitlan part 1.

Traveling by car in México can be daunting, and a trip to the Huasteca region in the State of Hidalgo is tiring and not particularly well known among tourists. However, let me assure you that even though it is a two-lane highway with a considerable amount of traffic, it is worth the effort. If you ae doing the entire route from Mexico City to Huejutla, plan at least a week so that you have time to appreciate all that this itinerary offers.

If you only have a weekend, the first part of this adventure is an excellent option for people living in Mexico City. We start off by heading to Pachuca. Most people bypass the capital of the state, and we will do so now, but for those who are interested in mining and photography, a couple of hours in “windy Pachuca” is time well spent. However, the English cemetery of Mineral del Monte awaits and nothing can beat visiting it on a chilly foggy morning. (Nota Bene: the pictures related to this article can be found in the Spanish versions Please follow the links for more information on the places mentioned.) If the cemetery is shrouded by the fog you will feel that you have become a character in a gothic novel. If you are more into VIPS then rest assured, you will be visiting a place recently visited by Prince Charles and his wife Camila.

In Mineral del Monte, also known as “little Cornwall” you would not be too surprised if a Cornish miner suddenly appeared and said, as he passed by you, “buenos días”. After all, they were here during the XIXth century; the houses still have their red tin roofs, and “pastes”, nothing other than Cornish Pasties, are still eaten practically every day. Grant you, perhaps not with their afternoon tea. Anita Desai the Indian author writes about this area in her book The Zigzag Way. Talking about minors why not visit La Dificultad now transformed into a museum?

Both Mineral del Chico and The National Park of El Chico. are ideal weekend getaways. There is something for everyone: history and nature. But if you have more time, drive on, fantastic convents and nature at its best await you.

We are following the route of Agustin monks. Even though you have not traveled many kilometers, you have already gotten a feel for the highway. Now imagine that you are a monk in the XVIth century starting off from Mexico City with a dream, but there you are, the vastness of Hidalgo, and just you and your burro! Daunting to say the least. But they had faith!. Even though I will skip speaking about the monastery, they are an obligatory stop. How can you drive by and not admire Atotonilco el Grande, San Pedro Tlaltemalco, the grandeur of Metztitlan, or the magnificent paintings found at Santa María Xoxoteco.

So you decided to drive on, our next stop will, therefore, be Atotonilco el Grande. Look in any guidebook, and you will read that this XVIth century monastery should be visited and I will not argue with that statement. However, for those of us who are privy to the real Mexico, we would not dream of not making a "pit stop” at the Panificadora Rocio where the smell of freshly baked bread will tingle our taste buds. Your dilemma here will be which delicious art form should you chose: the wooly lamb? The turtle? So many mouthwatering possibilities. Now all you need is a nice cup of foamy hot chocolate, and you can dunk to your heart's content. Our human hunger satisfied, we can now feed our soul. Let´s visit the convent, afterward take a seat on one of the benches. Don´t be surprised if someone comes along and overcome with curiosity starts a conversation. Aren´t you glad you took those Spanish classes?

But there is still so much ahead, that we should continue our journey. Shortly after leaving Atotonilco there will be a dramatic change in the landscape. We are entering the biosphere reserve of Metztitlan. This is truly a paradise for nature lovers. There is an incredible variety of cacti, but learn more by following the link above. Continuing on the highway, you will soon see a deviation on your left that will take you to the town of Metztitlán. This road follows the riverbed so you must not be surprised if it is flooded. On the left side of the road there will be fertile fields with many nut trees and on your right, San Pedro Tlaltemalco that has sunk so much that the windows are practically touching the ground.

Metztitlan is a small peaceful town that can serve as a base for many hikes, mountain biking, bird watching, etc. The San Cristobal is Mexico’s largest lagoon and a haven for many birds. emigrating from Canada. If you love cacti be sure to visit the Cactus Museu, you will walk in their natural environment so take good walking shoes and perhaps a walking stick. Please note that it is illegal to pick or transport cacti if it does not have the necessary traveling papers. There are a few small, clean hotels, nothing luxurious in Metztitlan but a great restaurant with a very friendly owner. Rincón del Jardín and Juan Antonio Mora, the owner, will guarantee that your stay will be delicious and highly enjoyable. Ask him for information on renting bikes and finding a guide. Obviously, you must spend a couple of hours visiting the very imposing monastery probably the most magnificent in this entire route.

The monastery is simply fantastic and its altarpiece of the Three Magi, a work of art finished by Salvador de Ocampo in 1698 is breathtaking. However, I must mention that the lighting is very poor and that it is absolutely prohibited to use a flash. From the few stops that we have made, you will, without a doubt, agree with me that there is much to see and remember that our trip is just starting and that we are not that far from Mexico City. Remember fotos are posted in the Spanish version.

#agustinmonks, #hidalgo #metztitlaninsearchofalostparadise #atotonilcoelgrande #cacti, #monasteries, #englishcemetery #mineraldelmonte, #englishminors

#Englishcemetery #CornishMinersinMexico #pasties #MineraldelMonte #El Chico #AtotonilcoelGrande #agustinmonks #metztitlan #cactusmuseum #biospherereserve.

1 note · View note

letterboxd · 5 years

Photo

Lucca.

Doug Dillaman runs into gremlins and replicants at the Lucca Film Festival.

When I arrived in a small Tuscan village last month, our movie plans didn’t stretch far beyond the 4:3 television at our apartment, and a possible road trip to Florence to see Avengers: Endgame in its version originale. (Subtitled versions of films are few and far between in Italy generally, and in Tuscany particularly.)

Imagine my delight, then, to discover that just over half an hour from our bucolic doorstep, the walled town of Lucca was hosting a film festival, with guests including actor Rutger Hauer, Gremlins director Joe Dante, filmmakers Mick Garris, Philip Gröning, Paolo Taviani, and French animation director Michel Ocelot.

The Lucca Film Festival brings high-profile filmmakers to its city gates every April, along with a competition featuring up-to-the-minute titles and other special screenings, all for a low cost of 20 euros for the week. Before booking your tickets, do bear in mind that the festival is optimized for locals, which means that without a European language or two up your sleeve it can be a challenge. Hence, we gave a pass to the stacked Rutger Hauer retrospective (including Nighthawks, Eureka, Ladyhawke and Spetters), but we weren’t going to miss the opportunity to see the legend in person, and showed up for a Hauer “masterclass”.

Rutger Hauer and Joe Dante steal a private moment together. / Photo via Lucca Film Festival.

The term was a loose one, as the event that ensued was a barely moderated Q&A, with Hauer tending towards a rambling conversation style, avoiding specificities in most of his answers. When asked what he looks for in a film that he’s considering acting in, for instance: “Something that pulls me in … but I don’t know what it’s called.” On the directors he has worked with, he did manage to reveal: “Paul Verhoeven, who I did my first five features with, made me walk. I was a baby. He taught me how not to act. Ridley [Scott] taught me to dance. And I danced like a motherfucker.”

Still from Mark Jenkin’s ‘Bait’ (2019).

More rewarding was the competition lineup, particularly Bait. Englishman Mark Jenkin, who shoots on black and white 16mm film, has produced his first feature following several shorts. Set in an unspecified Cornish fishing village, Bait chronicles the tensions between the “old way of life” and the modern, where locals are edged out by out-of-towners buying investment properties to run as Airbnbs, and fishing boats give up their trade to host stag parties.

It takes time to adjust to Jenkin’s stylistic flourishes, but he’s relentlessly attuned to the emotional truth of his characters, even as the celluloid flares and ripples; call it kitchen-sink unrealism. Shot on a Bolex with the 13,000 feet of film negative hand-processed, Bait has a solid 3.5 on Letterboxd at the time of writing—a good indication that the Lucca Film Festival has its eyes open beyond the usual suspects. (Other competition titles include Eternal Winter, Those Who Work, A Family Submerged, and Nicole Brending’s winning film Dollhouse.)

Joe Dante and Mick Garris in Lucca for the city’s 2019 film festival. / Photo via Lucca Film Festival.

My film festival jaunt ended with a highlight: Mick Garris and Joe Dante, in town for the Italian debut of Nightmare Cinema, an anthology horror film which Garris produced and which both of them directed segments for. They proved an excellent double act in their masterclass. Dante is a walking encyclopaedia of film history, needing only the slightest prompt regarding the history of Italian cinema to reel off a string of names that influenced him (including Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti, and the “three Sergios—Leone, Corbucci, and Sollima”), as well as a trenchant analysis of what killed the Italian film industry in the mid 70s.

Dante is also unafraid to call it as he sees it, labelling the current Italian cinema a shadow of its former self, slamming the original Blair Witch Project an “exercise in emptiness”, and expressing concern about the future of film, noting that “Netflix has ended the Hollywood movie industry” and “the dream of making movies people will see on the big screen the world over is pretty much dead”. He was shocked that an audience member had seen his last full feature film to date, Burying the Ex, a film that he noted was flawed. Someone give this man some money for his Roger Corman biopic The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes now!

Mick Garris, meanwhile, is the quintessential “glass half-full” character. Noting that filmmakers have to “evolve or die”, he pointed out that TV has gotten really good, and a lot of feature films have gotten really shitty. In spite of Nightmare Cinema’s 12-year gestation period—a film that finally came to exist due to the support of streaming services, incidentally—and having taken his share of knocks, including having his anthology Showtime series Masters of Horror cut short when it was sold to NBC after its second season (becoming Fear Itself), Garris seems fully aware of what a lucky man he is.

This was illustrated best with his story of being hired by Amblin Entertainment to write the first episode of Amazing Stories when he was surviving on food stamps. Both Dante and Garris recognize their Amblin experience as a special time, in part because Steven Spielberg’s supportive presence offered a buffer between them and the studio.

Joe Dante poses with visitors from out of town. / Photo via Lucca Film Festival.

A Joe Dante masterclass without a few Gremlins stories would be a sad thing indeed. He indulged us: the film’s original puppetry was insanely complicated and required 100 people; moreover, after principal photography had wrapped, Dante had to spend an additional month and a half on insert shots of gremlins. He was offered a sequel the weekend it opened, but couldn’t stand looking at those creatures again so soon, and only came back to the project after several failed attempts to develop the sequel by others.

Offered a chance to direct “anything you want” if he made a sequel, Dante drew inspiration from Hellzapoppin’, a fourth-wall-breaking, genre-defying, wildly under-seen comedy. While the puppetry was easier the second time around (25 puppeteers this time), a last-minute release date shift by the studio from May to August—to combat Dick Tracy—wound up hamstringing the film’s success.

If you’re desperate for more, both Dante and Garris have deep Internet presences: Dante runs Trailers from Hell, with commentaries from dozens of filmmakers on various trailers as well as interview podcast The Movies That Made Me, and Garris hosts the Post Mortem Podcast. A few of these stories, in fact, are taken from a special episode of the podcast recorded at the film festival after the Masterclass.

And if you’re looking for some anthology inspiration, Joe Dante gave us four of his favorites; check out his list. Next stop, Cannes!

Reporting by Doug Dillaman.

#lucca film festival #rutger hauer #joe dante #gremlins #mick garris #nightmare cinema #mark jenkin #bait film #letterboxd

1 note · View note

networkingdefinition · 5 years

Text

New Year's Eve Quotes

Official Website: New Year's Eve Quotes

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

• A flower is a daisy chain, a graduation, a valentine; a flower is New Year’s Eve and an orchid in your hair; a flower is a single geranium blooming in a tin can on a murky city fire-escape; an acre of roses at the Botanical Gardens; and the first gold crocus of spring! … a flower is a birth, a wedding, a leaving of this life. – Jean Hersey • A happy New Year! Grant that I May bring no tear to any eye When this New Year in time shall end Let it be said I’ve played the friend, Have lived and loved and labored here, And made of it a happy year. – Edgar Guest • A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding… and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this. – C. J. Cherryh • All of us every single year, we’re a different person. I don’t think we’re the same person all our lives. – Steven Spielberg • An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. – Bill Vaughan • And New Year’s Eve is very, very important to me. – Debbie Harry • And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been – Rainer Maria Rilke • Another fresh new year is here. Another year to live! To Banish worry, doubt and fear, to love and give – William Arthur Ward • Approach the New Year with resolve to find the opportunities hidden in each new day. – Michael Josephson • As a standup comedian, I’ve worked almost every New Year’s Eve of my adult life. It’s the best-paying night of the year. – Elayne Boosler

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'New+Year', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_new-year').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_new-year img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man. – Benjamin Franklin • Calgary wins for my coldest New Year’s Eve gig. That’s when I learned Fahrenheit and Celsius cross at 40 below. I could see callers’ breath coming out of my phone. – Elayne Boosler • celebratin’ New Year’s Eve is like eatin’ oranges. You got to let go your dignity t’ really enjoy ’em. – Edna Ferber • Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right. – Oprah Winfrey • Dieting on New Year’s Day isn’t a good idea as you can’t eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second. – Helen Fielding • Do what you do. This Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Eve, Twelfth Night, Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras, St. Paddy’s Day, and every day henceforth. Just do what you do. Live out your life and your traditions on your own terms. If it offends others, so be it. That’s their problem. – Chris Rose • Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. – Brooks Atkinson • Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer. – Walter Scott • Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time. – Jean Paul • Every New Year’s Eve, I have a pact to do something I never thought I’d do. So I created this list. You have to free your mind to do things you wouldn’t think of doing. Don’t ever say no. – Carl Lewis • Every time the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, We toast to more money, we smoke to more cheese. – Prodigy • Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress. – Charles Kettering • Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith. – Henry Ward Beecher • For a new year to bring you something new, make a move, like a butterfly tearing its cocoon! Make a move! – Mehmet Murat Ildan • For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. – T. S. Eliot • For the millennium [New Year’s Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I’m choosing option B – Tom Morello • For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work. – Antonella Gambotto-Burke • From New Year’s on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining. – Leonard Bernstein • Games were moved to New Year’s Eve as part of a plan by college football executives where they want to create a tradition of watching football on New Year’s Eve. – Audie Cornish • Glory to God in highest heaven, Who unto man His Son hath given; While angels sing with tender mirth, A glad new year to all the earth. – Martin Luther • God, do I hate my little fat tits. You ever pinch your little meat tits and wish you were dead? You ever just stand naked in the mirror. “You little fat-titted mediocre failure!” You ever do that for 3 hours on New Year’s Eve. – Jim Norton • Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. – Oscar Wilde • He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool. – Farquhar McGillivray Knowles • Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering ‘it will be happier’. – Alfred Lord Tennyson • I always work on New Year’s Eve, no matter what. – Debbie Harry • I don’t even drink! I can’t stand the taste of alcohol. Every New Year’s Eve I try one drink and every time it makes me feel sick. So I don’t touch booze – I’m always the designated driver. – Kim Kardashian • I get myself a gig somewhere, whether it’s in a club, whether it’s in a bar, it doesn’t matter, and I just work on New Year’s Eve because I always feel it’s very symbolic for me for the next year, for the new year. – Debbie Harry • I had a terrible fight with my wife on New Year’s Eve. She called me a procrastinator. So I finished addressing the Christmas cards and left. – Robert Orben • I hate New Year’s Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven’t yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn’t matter. – Gregory Maguire • I have no way of knowing how people really feel, but the vast majority of those I meet couldn’t be nicer. Every once in a while someone barks at me. My New Year’s resolution is not to bark back. – Tucker Carlson • I have spent every New Year’s Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It’s a place with meaning for me. – Paulo Coelho • I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes…you’re Doing Something. – Neil Gaiman • I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something. – Neil Gaiman • I like to work on New Year’s Eve. It has a nice spirit; a nice feel about it. If you are all about the ‘year-end’ thing at all, then laughing with fellow human beings is a great way to start the new year. – Paula Poundstone • I love watching ‘Twilight Zone.’ New Year’s Eve they do the marathon; I watch it every year. – Gerard Way • I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me. – Anais Nin • I saw Ronnie Hawkins play near my hometown, Port Dover, Ontario, and I saw him play there on New Year’s Eve and the following spring I booked myself to be his opening act on maybe five shows, and he hired me after the first night. – Rick Danko • I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the years’. – Henry Moore • I was a total nerd growing up. I’d rather sit home and read a novel on New Year’s Eve and say, ‘Wow, I read the whole thing in one night!’ That was my idea of a big time. – Beth Broderick • I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‘I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,’ and I actually meant it. – Dave Grohl • I won’t be going to any New Year’s Eve parties because I think they’re naff. No one over the age of 15 should bother going to parties. – Julie Burchill • i would like to remind the management that the drinks are watered and the hat-check girl has syphilis and the band is composed of former ss monsters However since it is new year’s eve and i have lip cancer i will place my paper hat on my concussion and dance – Leonard Cohen • I would rather receive a Pap smear from Captain Hook than venture out on New Year’s Eve. – Jen Lancaster • I would say happy new year, but it’s not happy; it’s exactly the same as last year except colder. – Robert Clark • If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year’s Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates–the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes–have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. …After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. – Janine Benyus • If you asked me for my New Year Resolution, it would be to find out who I am. – Cyril Cusack • If you feel compelled to give a New Year’s Eve party, don’t invite people to arrive too early or they’ll go off the boil before midnight. – Jilly Cooper • If you over plan New Year’s Eve it’s going to be a disaster so you have to be alive to changes. – Cate Blanchett • I’m usually at home and in bed by 10 o’clock. I do not want to be out at anybody’s New Year’s Eve party. – Andre Leon Talley • It goes Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day. Is that fair to anyone who’s alone? These are all days you gotta be with someone. And if you didn’t get around to killing yourself at Christmas or New Year’s, boom! There’s Valentine’s Day. I think there should be one more after Valentine’s Day just called, ‘Who could love you?’ – Laura Kightlinger • It was February sixth: eight days until Valentine’s Day. I was dateless, as usual, deep in the vice grip of unrequited love. It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year’s Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids in their windows by January second to rub it in. – Joan Bauer • It’s hard to say what I meant by “as we know it.” I’m not about to go up on a mountain on new year’s eve and wait for the lightening to strike. – Hunter S. Thompson • I’ve had some lovely extraordinary experiences on New Year’s Eve. – Debbie Harry • Let each new year find you a better person. – Benjamin Franklin • Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word. – Goran Persson • Let the dead Past bury its dead! – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Let this coming year be better than all the others. Vow to do some of the things you have always wanted to do but could not find the time. Call up a forgotten friend. Drop an old grudge, and replace it with some pleasant memories. Vow not to make a promise you do not think you can keep. Walk tall, and smile more. You will look 10 years younger. Do not be afraid to say, I love you. Say it again. They are the sweetest words in the world. – Ann Landers • Let this coming year be better than all the others. Vow to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t find the time. – Ann Landers • Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Whatever you’re scared of doing, Do it. – Neil Gaiman • Make New Year’s goals. Dig within, and discover what you would like to have happen in your life this year. This helps you do your part. It is an affirmation that you’re interested in fully living life in the year to come. – Melody Beattie • Make your mistakes, next year and forever. – Neil Gaiman • Many years ago I resolved never to bother with New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve stuck with it ever since. – Dave Beard • May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. – Joey Lauren Adams • May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! – Aleister Crowley • May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall! – Aleister Crowley • Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential. – Ellen Goodman • My look is always glitzy for New Year’s Eve, even if I am at home. – Gloria Gaynor • My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace. (New Year’s Eve, 1947) – Patricia Highsmith • My New Year’s Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That’s the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone. It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I’m just being realistic. – Tracey Emin • My New Year’s resolution was to stop saying ‘You go, girl’ to myself. – Zach Galifianakis • My parents used to throw great New Year’s Eve parties. They invited such an eclectic mix of showbiz people. All those cool people were always hanging out at our apartment. – Ben Stiller • Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it’s twice as onerous a duty. – John Selden • New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday. – Charles Lamb • New Year’s Eve always terrifies me. – Charles Bukowski • New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. – Hamilton Wright Mabie • New Year’s Eve, we’re going to be doing a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Symphony Hall. It makes me feel good, because of all the people they could have had, they wanted me! We do have to do a little work with the rhythm section. – Barbara Cook • New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive. – Jay Leno • New Year’s Eve. It’s a promise of a night. Single, married or widowed, in love, loveless or lovelorn, we all leave our apartments and pick through snow in high heels, or descend subway stairs in tuxedos, lured to wherever we’re going–whether we know it or not, would deny it or not–by the kiss of a stranger. – Jardine Libaire • New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. – Mark Twain • New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time. – James Agate • Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. – Mark Twain • Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you’ve met your New Year’s resolution. – Jay Leno • Of all sound of all bells… most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. – Charles Lamb • On New Year’s Eve he ould make a resolution to recover some his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at people even if he disapproved of them – Nick Hornby • On New Year’s Eve, my dear friend lost his battle with depression . . . Though he wasn’t the first friend I’ve lost to suicide, I sure hope he’s the last. I wish I had the chance to go back and tell them what they meant to me. I wish I had the chance to beg them to seek help, to keep fighting. I wish they knew that they were surrounded by countless others who struggle on a daily basis. – Jared Padalecki • One of the many reasons I love living in New York is that we get a front row seat to the innumerable thrills that take place here – from conventions and awards shows, to parades and U.N. assemblies. But my favorite New York tradition is the annual New Year’s Eve ball-drop on Times Square. – Marlo Thomas • One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: ‘To rise above little things’. – John Burroughs • Only sad sacks and conformists need things like no kiss on New Year’s Eve to remind them to feel lonely. They’re as bad as the people who need St. Patty’s Day as an excuse to get drunk or Halloween to wear slutty outfits. You can feel sorry for yourself and dress like a hooker all year round: Hallmark never needs to know. – Julie Klausner • Ring out the false, ring in the true. – Alfred Lord Tennyson • Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. – Alfred Lord Tennyson • Shaving my head was a millennium ritual, to not let it pass as just another New Year’s Eve. A lot has happened to me in the last couple of years, personally and spiritually. I wanted to mark it for myself. – Joan Jett • So I started shoveling Bob’s driveway, which is a strange thing to do at a New Years Eve Party – Stephen Chbosky • So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life. – Neil Gaiman • Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to. Stay home on New Year’s Eve if that’s what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story. Make a deal with yourself that you’ll attend a set number of social events in exchange for not feeling guilty when you beg off. – Susan Cain • St. Patrick’s Day is the fourth biggest drinking day in America. It’s not the biggest. It’s right behind New Year’s Eve, Fourth of July, or any Secret Service party. – David Letterman • The feeling I have reminds me of New Year’s Eve, when the countdown is coming and I’m not quite sure whether to grab my camera or just live in the moment. Usually I grab the camera and later regret it when the picture doesn’t turn out. Then I feel enormously let down and think to myself that the night would have been more fun if it didn’t mean quite so much, if I weren’t forced to analyze where I’ve been and where I’m going. – Emily Giffin • The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. – Eleanor Roosevelt • The last thing I stole was a box of Coca Cola from a parked truck in Adelaide. I was nice and drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. And that was about 28 years ago. – Ronald Biggs • The merry year is born Like the bright berry from the naked thorn. – Hartley Coleridge • The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows. – George William Curtis • The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals. – Melody Beattie • the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. – W. H. Auden • The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to. – P. J. O’Rourke • This leg will be known as Christmas, and this leg will be known as New Year’s Eve! Ladies…why don’t you all come visit the Big Valbowski between the holidays. – Val Venis • Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn. – Delmore Schwartz • To me, doing a gay pride show is one of the most fun things. My first show that paid more than $10,000 was in a gay club on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. – Queen Latifah • To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. To throw away books after reading them so theydon’t have to be dusted. To go through boxes on New Year’s Eve and throw out half of what is inside. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of flowers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life. – Maxine Hong Kingston • To this day, on my cheat days from my diet, which are New Year’s Eve and my birthday, I buy luxury foods that are very indicative of my class. – Sandra Cisneros • Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one. – Brad Paisley • Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. • We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential. – Ellen Goodman • We’ve made mistakes, But we’ve made good friends too. Remember all the nights we spent with them? And all our plans, Who says they can’t come true? Tonight’s another chance to start again. It’s just another New Year’s Eve, Another night like all the rest. – Barry Manilow • What you do for Jewish New Year is you go down to Times Square. It’s a lot quieter than the regular New Year. It’s just a few Jews walking around going, “sup?” – Jon Stewart • When I go, I’ll take New Year’s Eve with me. – Guy Lombardo • When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He’s responsible for my favorite New Year’s memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the showroom, sending champagne glasses and gamblers flying. – Elayne Boosler • When I stopped wanting my New Year’s Eve to be perfect, to bring in the New Year right, is when it started working out right. When I was young, I was always looking for the best party to be at, to ring in the New Year, and I always ended up in the car going, “Happy New Year.” – Hilary Swank • Whether we want them or not, the New Year will bring new challenges; whether we seize them or not, the New year will bring new opportunities. – Michael Josephson • Women get a little more excited about New Year’s Eve than men do. It’s like an excuse: you drink too much, you make a lot of promises you’re not going to keep; the next morning as soon as you wake up you start breaking them. For men, we just call that a date. – Jay Leno • Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right. – Oprah Winfrey • You staying home all alone on New Year’s Eve? Unthinkable. Take my advice the countdown should be shared with someone, or it’s just another set of numbers passing you by. – E. A. Bucchianeri • Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties”.- Helen Keller, American author, political activist, and lecturer “Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word. – Goran Persson Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. -Steve Jobs • Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to. – Bill Vaughan

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'y', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_y').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_y img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

0 notes