#when will len ever publish anything she writes probably never

[lenle-g]

Gordon thinking that John knows nothing about diving, etc, until John gives Gordon pointers, and he is right, and Gordon wants to know how John knows, and finding out about the NASA pools and what training John had to go through, and John kind of knowing what it's like to be trapped underwater.

I assume this is in response to my tags: #Gordon and John probably have the least in common of them all at the core of it. They’re like chalk and cheese. #The sun and moon. #Gordon is wild and exuberant; untameably colourful and John is quiet and clever; bleached out by life in space. #but gold rank in NASA pools is not as different from Gold in the Olympics as you’d think  #and Gordon and John are as similar as they are different #Sea and Sky #at the core of it #they're both International Rescue blue

and i have a lot of fEELINGS about John and Gordon being so wildly different and yet so bizzarely similar.

The one thing they definately have in common is a shared interest in swimming. If Gordon can take advantage of that to see more of the brother he sees least of, then he sure as hell won’t pass up the opportunity to get John in the water. Of course John knows how to dive - he’s absolutely spent hours and hours repping scuba dives, simulating perfect EVA sessions, in his time at NASA. There are huge similarities between under the sea and being up out of the atmosphere. Both of them live their lives reliant on oxygen tanks and strict rules and the fear that if even the littlest thing could go wrong it could present a life threatening problem. John is so terrified for Gordon when he activates his emergency beacon because he knows what it’s like. He’s been there, floating helpless and weightless with his oxygen running rapidly out and having to rely completely on his own brothers to save him (Thanks for that Eos). But 22,400 miles into orbit there’s not a lot John, specifically, can do for Gordon, except to be the constant voice on the other end of the silent Comm line, praying to hear anything, anything at all, and that feeling of helplessness is about as crushing as the pressure of the depths of the sea and about ten tonnes of rocks.

So yeah, John is very used to neutral-buoyancy diving and its similarity to the weightlessness of space travel and if they’re going to take a swim off the reef they’re more likely to stick together as diving buddies than ever go alone. It’s their thing and Gordon really does need their thing because their spaceman’s really not home nearly often enough - to the point where it’s become almost weird to see him in the flesh, and not just as a pale blue hologram.

[in-tua-deep]

Oooooo the red bock au sounds so interesting! Does Five caught himself thinking of his brothers just as numbers and weapons like Reginald talks in his book? Does he read Vanya book to remind himself that they are still human even though he reads it through lens of someone hurt by them all? And I feel like the handler would know either way about the books but o it's so much fun to see five being paranoid

I think having both books and both perspectives reminds Five that... he’s getting some very biased accounts of his own siblings. I think that when he’s still young, he writes down as many memories as he can remember because... he starts to forget, at some point. 

Vanya’s book talks about how volatile Diego and Luther’s relationship is, and so Five writes down the time Luther and Diego teamed up to toss Five off a balcony when Five kept switching the pens in their hands with pipe cleaners during a lesson (and he will maintain until his dying day that he was just practicing his control, c’mon guys!)

when Reginald’s notes call Allison an “insufferable, narcissistic creature,” Five remembers Allison bribing him to cause trouble and distract Reginald so that she could use the microwave unobserved to heat up some water bottles as makeshift heat packs for Luther’s sore muscles

when Vanya calls Ben “easily manipulated,” Five recalls Ben arguing theories with him at 2am after one of Ben’s training sessions where Ben almost flipped his bed when Five jokingly suggested that he could use the horror’s tentacles to bounce up and down like a pogo stick before Ben tackled him and tried to beat Five to death with an encyclopedia of sea creatures (affectionately)

I think having Reginald’s journal actually helps in a lot of ways, because Five automatically autocorrects literally all of Reginald’s thoughts to be like, mostly inaccurate and much harsher than they need to be. So when he reads Vanya’s journal he also autocorrects and is able to recognize that it is a very biased and somewhat harsh view of his siblings

(he doesn’t distrust them as much as he does in canon, with only Vanya’s harsh words to cling to with no reminder that they were all raised by a man capable of unfathomable cruelty, no reminder that authors can be oh so biased)

outside of his equations, there’s notes to himself written in the margins of Vanya’s book. Sometimes they’re just small, pointing out that Klaus had fought to include Vanya in trap week (Klaus then proceeded to team up with her and managed to catch Five in a snare - he actually still has a scar around his ankle from his upsidedown thrashing before he managed to steal one of Diego’s knives to cut himself down) or pointing out that Luther’s chilly attitude when they were ten was probably the result of Vanya outperforming him in every standardized test they took because of Luther’s ridiculous inferiority-superiority complex

at the very least he has comparison, because Reginald’s book calls Klaus an absolute failure while Vanya’s book called him “sweet, as a child at least”

As for the Handler... she’s aware that he has Vanya’s book and a red notebook, but I don’t think she actually knows what’s in the red notebook! Reginald was notoriously secretive, after all

So the Handler assumes that the red notebook is where Five keeps his time travel equations because aw, he hasn’t given up! how cute!

She makes an assumption that, logically, makes sense. Of course Five is still trying to figure out time travel, no matter how much he denies it! Of course he’s writing the equations down! What a silly boy, thinking that he could hide this from her, of course she knows about his little plans to save his siblings ;3c

And because she’s so powerful and knowledgeable and one step ahead all the time, she makes an assumption and assumes that it is fact. Because she’s so smart, of course she isn’t wrong! She’s had Five clocked from day one!

(The Handler thinks she has Five all figured out, a creature so based in sentiment. Why would he carry a book around that details the torture his siblings went through? He hates his father, why would he ever carry around his father’s notebook! The Handler has a fatal flaw, and it is that she doesn’t understand loyalty and sneers at sentiment and those are two of Five’s most powerful driving factors. Five lives for his siblings and would die for his siblings, almost his entire life has been dedicated to saving them. Not the world, just his family.) 

(She understands that Five considers his family to be exceptionally valuable, but doesn’t comprehend that Five is 100% willing to die for them should it come down to it. Why on earth would anyone value something like siblings over their own life? Absurd. I genuinely believe that the Handler thinks she could get Five to betray his siblings with the right leverage, and so she fundamentally does not understand Five as a person)

To be fair to the Handler, the whole academy’s morals and just. completely and utterly fucked. Luther condemns the murder of innocent civilians even if it would save the planet but doesn’t blink an eye at killing the ‘bad guy’ Commission agents. Diego stabs criminals as a pastime while still holding himself at a moral high ground for saving people, despite the fact that too many criminals are forced into crime by unfair circumstances. Allison used her powers to bolster her career without even blinking but now refuses to use her powers at all because of the manipulation of one (1) child, not even against ‘bad guys.’ 

I mean. Vanya wrote an entire salt book without consulting her siblings that had lasting impacts on at least one of her sibling’s career in the public eye and potentially impacting her siblings relationships with everyone who had every read the spark notes on her book, without the opportunity for reprisal. Publishing your entire family’s dirty laundry as personal emotional catharsis is... kind of a dick mood, lets be real. Especially when you were all abused children raised in an environment of excessive violence and rigid structure. 

Like yeah, of course Allison is good at manipulation and lying - she grew up with an abusive and over-controlling father. She probably lied as easily as breathing about where she’d been, who she was with, what she was doing, etc. The only privacy they got in that household was what they seized with their own hands and carved out for themselves! Is it fair to say that Allison’s superpower is dishonestly?

Is it fair to say that Klaus got crueler as he grew? He was tortured and turned to drugs as an unhealthy coping mechanism, and then he sat down at a table and looked at all the other little kiddies who did not get locked into a crypt overnight. In fact, there was one child who never got any extra training at all! Can you imagine the jealousy? The bitterness? Klaus might have been exceptionally cruel to Vanya as a teenager, she had everything he wanted and dared to complain about it. Can you imagine listening to someone wistfully wish they could join in on missions when you know that the cost for doing so has been carved out of your soul?

My point is, none of these little bitches have anything that resembles a sane moral compass. They’re unpredictable as fuck! It’s like herding cats! You never know what they’re going to do next! Oh? Are they going to investigate in any logical pattern? No, because Diego just remembered Patch exists and helping her print flyers for the annual police ball is more important than saving the world or whatever lol

Luther is over there investigating the moon! The moon! Meanwhile Allison is breaking and entering her sister’s student’s house because she got shady vibes off of him one time and she has never heard of a proportionate action in her life. 

Meanwhile Vanya is going through the phone book trying to call up psychiatrists who have any familiarity with whatever fucked up meds Dad put her on because like, she would like to Not Be On Them (fuck you dad) but also understands that danger of quitting cold turkey something you have been taking for years and would like a professional opinion on how to safely decrease and eventually eliminate her usage, thanks (Klaus is hanging over her shoulder pointing out the ones who will sell you non-prescription drugs for a price and Vanya mentally crosses those ones off of her list to call)

Five is probably joining on the breaking and entering because Allison promised she would sweet talk to eye dude if he did her this solid 

(Five complains at length about how investigating the apocalypse should not be a solid because she would 100% die as well if the apocalypse came to pass)

[sapphic-luthor]

fic writer review!

thank you for tagging me @hrwinter !

1. How many works do you have on ao3?

twelve which really doesn’t feel like enough because i have at least twice that many in progress in my google docs woops

2. What’s your total ao3 word count?

65,278 hahahaha

3. How many fandoms have you written for?

mmmm i think two ... point five. ish. there were some rough attempts when i was quite young but i didn’t get anything readable up until one or two for orphan black-- all of my actual work that i’m proud of is here in supergirl.

4. Top 5 fics by kudos?

a six-day exercise in denial 

lip drawn constellations and pen marked kisses

accidental kisses and ill-timed visits from the deo

kryptonian tradition, or something like it

musings from 504

5. Do you respond to comments? Why/why not?

very very rarely, and mostly that’s just because i never really know a way to provide a meaningful response that doesn't just boil down to “thank you!!!”

and tbh i feel weird about this all the time because receiving comments makes me smile like an idiot at my phone and i go all squiggly and happy and excited so i probably really should be answering them but i just . i never know what to say that doesn’t look very impersonal!

6. A fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending

in which a half-confession breaks them both by a mile

7. Do you write crossovers?

nope

8. Ever received hate on a fic?

nope!

9. Do you write smut?

god yeah but a lot of it never makes it to the publish stage and i should really change that because sex is what gets all the hits lads

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

not an entire fic, no, but i’ve had some scenes and paragraphs taken and hidden behind very thinly veiled reworks

11. Ever had a fic translated?

yes! a lovely person called R_H_Felidae_Athena actually translated a bunch of my little minifics into Mandarin which i think is the loveliest thing in the world

12. Have you ever co-written a fic?

i haven’t! i’m not sure i’d be any good at it because i’m shit at deadlines and i also have very very little structure to my writing process and it’s a lot of “idk it just feels this way in my head” lmao

13. All time fav ship?

every ship feels like your all time fav ship when you’re in it doesn’t it? so right now absolutely supercorp-- i’ll admit i’ve put more time and work into this ship than others but i’ve had some that really really touched me and that i’ve put a lot of my heart into in the past

14. WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

ah jesus i have so many. almost two years ago i started writing an au (based on one throwaway line in s5) where kara and lena meet because lena’s running through national city and has a security team following her at a distance and kara thinks she sees a woman being followed followed and steps in and beats the hell out of the security team and lena can’t stop laughing hard enough to tell her they’re hired and then kara takes her to lunch as an apology

15. Writing strengths?

girl honestly i don’t even know i’m winging it every single time

16. Writing weaknesses?

fucking TENSES. i tend to swap between them here and there and then it confuses the focus or the intimacy of the scene and sometimes it’s very difficult to tell how far of a lens the reader is supposed to be watching through and it’s just gggaghhhhhlgjddj one day i’ll learn to write in past tense i swear

17. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in a fic?

i’ve not really found myself needing that very much but if i did run across a scenario where it was unavoidable i’d probably try to find a native speaker before i wrote anything of substance so as not to be deeply embarrassing lol

18. First fandom you wrote for?

does the teen titans script i handwrote in a notebook when i was 9 count

19. What’s your fav fic you’ve written so far?

i have a soft spot for this one because i wrote it all in one manic go and it just poured out of me in a way that worked so well on the first try and it got really nice reception and it’s by far one of my proudest even though it’s but a short little thing :’)

tagging @itllsetyoufree @contagiousiridescence @littlemousejelly @gaydisasterdanvers

[richincolor]

Interview: Michelle Quach

We have a special guest today. Michelle Quach was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about her debut, Not Here to Be Liked. It's being released today so you can grab it right away.

Summary: Eliza Quan is the perfect candidate for editor in chief of her school paper. That is, until ex-jock Len DiMartile decides on a whim to run against her. Suddenly her vast qualifications mean squat because inexperienced Len—who is tall, handsome, and male—just seems more like a leader.

When Eliza’s frustration spills out in a viral essay, she finds herself inspiring a feminist movement she never meant to start, caught between those who believe she’s a gender equality champion and others who think she’s simply crying misogyny.

Amid this growing tension, the school asks Eliza and Len to work side by side to demonstrate civility. But as they get to know one another, Eliza feels increasingly trapped by a horrifying realization—she just might be falling for the face of the patriarchy himself.

Crystal: First off, I read Not Here to Be Liked all in one gulp. You had my attention from the first page and I absolutely needed to know what was going to happen next. The plot was intriguing and the romance had me smiling so many times. On a side note--I also seriously considered simplifying my wardrobe.

From the title, it's fairly obvious that likeability is not Eliza's priority. How do you think likeability plays out along gender lines?

Michelle: Aw, thank you so much—I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed the book!

I think it’s possible for people of all genders to be unlikeable, but it plays an outsize role in the way a girl’s worth is determined. Being liked isn’t always a requirement for a man’s success, but it is almost always for a woman’s. On top of that, the standards for female likeability are quite fickle. Your appearance factors in disproportionately, as does your ability to make others feel comfortable. Sometimes you can even become unlikeable just for being too popular (think of basically every young female celebrity ever). And the worst part is, these expectations can continue to shape your behavior even after you’re aware of how absurd they are.

Crystal: Are there unlikable female characters in other novels that have caught your attention in the past?

Michelle: Probably my favorite of all time is Harriet from Harriet the Spy. She’s self-absorbed, judgmental, and nosy—but she also learns, which mean there’s hope for all of us. More recently, I also found Ivy from White Ivy by Susie Yang to be terrifically unlikable. I won’t say whether she learns anything, though.

Crystal: What kind of relationship do you have with the term and concept of feminism?

Michelle: I definitely consider myself a feminist, though my relationship with the concept has evolved a lot over the years. In fact, I’d say it’s still evolving! What makes sense to me right now is the idea that feminism needs to be as inclusive as possible, which means it should dismantle not only sexism but also all other forms of structural inequality, including racism and economic inequality. That said, I do also support all kinds of progress, even if it’s incremental.

Crystal: What was the most fun aspect of writing Eliza and Len's story?

Michelle: Their banter! I love writing dialogue in general, but it’s so fun to throw two well-matched characters together and just let them go at it.

Crystal: Were any of the characters more challenging to write than the others?

Michelle: I would say Winona, because her experience as a Black teen in a majority Asian and White community is most outside my own, and I wanted to do my best to make sure her story felt authentic.

Crystal: Can you tell us a little bit about your journey to publication?

Michelle: I started writing Not Here to Be Liked about four years ago, after almost a decade of not writing anything at all. Before that point, I’d basically given up on my dream of even finishing a draft, let alone getting published. But I gave it another shot as part of a 100 days challenge…and this time I made it to the end! Everything happened really fast after that: I got my agent through PitMad, we went on submission a month later, and then the book sold at auction within a few weeks.

Crystal: If you're able to share, what's up next with your writing?

Michelle: I’m currently working on Book 2, another YA contemporary romance, and trying to read and watch as much as possible to get inspiration for Book 3!

Crystal: We wish you the best with the book release and look forward to reading more of you work in the future. Thanks so much!

Michelle Quach is a Chinese-Vietnamese-American who also spent a lot of time working for student newspapers--including The Crimson at Harvard College, where she earned a BA in history and literature. Currently a graphic designer at a brand strategy firm in Los Angeles, Not Here to be Liked is her first novel.

[gophergal]

ASK ABOUT YOUR FIC?! I CAN DO THAT! SO! I am so fucking curious about your Myers fic and Jane. What was your inspo for starting the fic? Is there anything you do to get in the right headspace or vibe for writing it? I am very curious about Jane and anything else you wanna tell that you haven't yet would be so cool. I am also wondering what you like in particular about them being together, I know that we haven't gotten there in the fic but anything you are willing to share now!

HDBGCISVXYN HEY THANKS BEX

Wow, where to start!

(that's your warning that the post got away from me a bit)

Well, for one, this is actually the second iteration of the same basic fic from nearly two years ago! I've probably mentioned that before. The old one is from 2019, and can still be found on my AO3, though it's not as good. I've had a lot of improvement since I wrote it. I'm actually almost caught up to the old one plot wise while also nearly surpassing it in word count. Which is fucking hilarious to me

I started the original almost immediately after I joined the fandom in August 2019. I realized that my interpretation of Michael is a bit in the middle of the two major fanon Michaels.

At the time, I saw most people would do

A.) Cute Bishounen Michael Did Nothing Wrong UwU

Or

B.) This Man Sucks, He's Absolutely Evil, And He Will Stab You After You Fuck

Which are both valid! Both fun!

But neither really fit what I was looking for. My interpretation revolves around exploring Michael's abuse by Dr Loomis and his actual motivation for killing Judith because those don't seem to be explored very often. Which, also valid!

(Sometimes you just want to see him as a big murder hunk and that's cool)

Which means I kinda have to go on a tangent about my tinhat idea of what goes on in Michael's thick skull

I always thought that his first murder was very much the action of a young child experiencing jealousy (Judith hadn't been spending time with him anymore) and expressing it in a very extreme way. He didn't understand how badly he'd hurt his sister, only that he wanted to make her hurt too. That's admittedly a lot of projection on my part, but stay with me.

I don't think he ever got a chance to work through his feelings of jealousy or the sudden loss of his sister. Sure, Loomis "helped", but it's more or less confirmed that he saw a young boy suffering from mental illness, and become obsessed. There's a part in the novelization where Loomis confirms that he was obsessed when he first saw Michael and heard of the case. And then he called the boy evil.

Loomis said that he tried to help for years, but considering how other staff react to him and how he treats Michael, we can tell that his heavy sedation of a man he's meant to be treating is not a new development. Besides, mental health care in the 1960's-70's was... not great to put it lightly.

So I wanted to write a story which explored that through the lens of romance. I wanted someone to knock a hole through his walls and find the scared child inside, then I wanted her to spiral into a deeply unhealthy and fucked up relationship with him.

Jean's not exactly the peak of mental health herself. She's also got a bit of my experience in her (wow how shocking), and struggles with building relationships, asking for help, and making decisions overall. She's a bit of a shell of who she could be. And she's clingy. She's lost many people in her life and that causes her to latch on to any semblance of normalcy.

I believe I mentioned on my Gophercast that she was the result of a teen pregnancy and her father dipped out on her mom. Her Grandpa, however, was very supportive and helped raise her while her mom went to college. Her mom passed away from a sudden illness when Jean was a young teen and her grandpa continued to raise her after that. At the start of the story, it's been about three ish years since he passed away.

She projects onto Michael, aware of the danger of him, but unable to tear herself away. He's whatever she wants him to be. A blank slate. When that doesn't work for her, she gets angry, which puts her in danger.

I think Michael has two reasons for keeping her alive: she's useful, and she's new. He's not really interacted with someone like her before, but then again, he's never really had the chance to interact with anyone.

But that's enough of that lol. That pretty much explains why I like Jean and Michael together anyway. It's more of a thought exercise lol.

To get in the headspace to write this, I read the last chapter I published of it, then listen to a playlist I've made. I won't drop the whole thing, but most of the songs on it are obsessive and dark. I really enjoy songs sung from the pov of a stalker for this. I might list a few songs later if anyone's interested

Other than that, I just put some long winded and boring video/podcast on in the background and start writing. I might sample other folks' fanfic while taking a break, but I try not to steal their ideas

Anywho, I think I'll end that here for now since this is so wordy lol. I'll def talk about it more if anyone wants to know about anything else!

[paraclete0407]

Stuff I might never get to do (from books I read after I thought I had mastered the Bible / Scripture)

1.

Theories of ‘political vision’ - ex. Obama’s ‘A Promised Land,’ or from someone I miss, UKPM David Cameron’s ‘For the Record.’  Also records of military careers and the consequences and lessons therefrom, particularly Gen., Prof. Stanley A. McChrystal’s ‘My Share of the Task’ - decades of one meal a day, utterly excellent love-letters and wisdom-writings to his wife, sweeping reports, culminating in the operation that ‘extrajudicially or para-judicially executed’ bin Laden.  I also never forgot the NYTimes photo of the SEAL operator’s back-muscles.  My giant Obama critique, however, was one of those ‘grandfather Hall of Presidents’ books that I want to postpone.

2.

My mistakes and wishes.  Ex. the woman I wanted to marry in early 2011; I had cut off my parents for 6 months and called one night my mom; she got really drunk that night, flirted with foreigners from [ultra-mercenary cram-school that hires anyone], got terrorized by [b/Black man of the type who clearly believes ‘As I am b/Black I know everything worth knowing and can terrorize, antagonize, demonize anyone and anything for the greater glory of my own ego / Chairman Mao].  Culminating in me in the ladies’ room telling her to get up and I told her so, going back to the pub-room and threatening the mercenaries, and finally being ‘mogged,’ masculinity-compromised or eclipsed / overpowered, by the man who was either her surrogate father-figure, rapist, seducee-turned-wrist-breaking-controller, no one really knew, and my ex-father-figure who however either a) failed to bait the trap properly and/or b) failed to communicate the true meaning and message and purpose of his love for me, to me.  But, it was instrumental in blowing what was probably the best job I ever had, and the only job that ever asked me back. 

After that I started honestly trying to live for either a) the younger generation b) ‘just me.’  I also made a number of hard or soft promises to students involving me writing stuff.  Don’t say ‘will’ or ‘might’ to Koreans b/c it kind of spiritually translates in to ‘shall’ or ‘must’ or ‘has to.’  They’re the poor in spirit from what I can tell.  

I also drove around California for a while, missed a job-offer from a Catholic university in [central Korean city], and thought a lot about F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Studied Emmanuel ‘ethics-as-first-philosophy love-of-wisdom-converting-into-wisdom-of-love’ Levinas a bit, read ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ and couldn’t sleep

3.

Sundry ‘Teacher Dream(s).’  I’d been hoping in a way that ‘Free Food for Millionaires’ author Min Jin Lee, JD Yale etc, would put this all in her ‘American Hagwon’ but she’s been baking fancy cakes and writing offside / deflective lit. about Japanese gays for like 10 years while NK marched on in real life killing people and Koreans were also dying from numerous causes, running away from home, economically induced suicide, amazing shame- and rape-culture: cashing in.  I remember my last night at the hagwon, a time of bonhomie, when I perhaps might’ve even said, ’Y’know, can I un-resign-in-protest?’  Boss, What’ll you miss most about Korea, Korean women?’  Me (playing the fool), ‘There are Korean women in America.’  Boss, (sforzando), ‘Gyopo women.’

My ‘best guess’ anyway at ‘edubusiness’ was sth I labored at off and on for now like 6 years called ‘Three Kings’ which is partly about a white ex-literary agent family named ‘Foch’ after the French Generalissime who actually won WW1, famous for his ‘moral factor’ theory of war as well as his remark, ‘This is not a peace but an armistice for 20 years.  He makes 400,000 dollars in his 1st year of college by advising his roommate to publish his ‘freshman’ novel with an extreme ‘point,’ not worrying about winning every possible reader, just let me edit all the sign-post-phrases and tell you what I firmly believe you were trying to write, sell this novel for 2million dollars, marry the Korean girl across the hall, forget RU, cultivate life and love with your stylus, and I’ll continue to march on simultaneously trying to promote love while reading everyone and everything semi-against or [angle / thrust-vector to] their grain (for their own good).  Later he starts a school with his two friends, an MD/PhD program dropout from LA and an MBA ex-Samsung Managing Director or something.  But in the end his MD/PhD friend can’t stop thinking about [student’s] amazing breasts and [MBA] friend can’t stop hating and short-selling himself w/r/t marriage and self-regard b/c he’s stuck in the other-always-has-more-money-always-more-money-to-make mentality.  In the end the protagonist resigns in protest from the company he himself designed, developed, planned, etc. but didn’t have the money to call his own after reaching the position of ‘Joint Department Head’ which is kind of like ‘Chief of Staff’ to a president at a much smaller scale.  He’s a devout literal Christian or at least Christianist who wishes the world were Christian and he reflects in the end on the Longfellow poem about the Three Kings who ‘know King Herod’s hate’ and had to travel back to their homelands a different way.  There is also a possibly-to-be-deleted ‘Interludio Meridiana’ where he happens across the molested constantly male-gazed student in Nonhyeon (a neighborhood South of the Han River but not at all like the PSY song), starts to hear Palestrina’s ‘Sicut Cervus’ (listen to it on YouTube - Palestrina’s polyphony philosophy is one of the crowns of human art) in his head, wanders down to the bus depot and finds that his thoughts / creativity etc. have become cathected, chained to, or at least led by memory, and he has joined a ‘chain of being’ that connects the past to the future.  

4.

‘Bethlehem Dream’ - kind of my homage to the forementioned Kim Minju of IZ*ONE, my last favorite pop-star before assuring Christian friend I’d stop following K-pop (I’m against BlackPink and their entire organization).  Connects to all my dreams and theories of education - including my extreme disillusionment with education, and sympathy for anyone made the ‘beneficiary’ of the latest theory or tool - as well my homage to the school that most closely approximates my dream school, Prof,. Pastor, Dr. Chancellor John Piper’s Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis.  And also, women’s desire to have children / babies, even without husbands, men’s desire to bear spiritual fruit with or without traditional fellowship.

5.

Masculinity in novels.  Not Norman Mailer Philip Roth stuff but novels that can lens reality from the top down and not get addicted to some or other cupidity or method of endearing / charming the audience, which often makes them stupider or causes them to regard hidden truth as an outright lie and/or triviality.  MJL’s ‘Free Food for Millionaires’ was pretty masculine; better is billionaire Michael Kim’s ‘Offerings,’ a novel I wish I could teach someone only I can’t find a good student / reader and maybe I myself missed the point and only thought I got it.

Thinking quitting while ahead - I really don’t know whether adding to people’s minds and knowledge at this point in Time is good or whether writing amounts to feasting the already glutted, furnishing them further excuses for disbelief and inaction and alienating / dividing them from the hungry and poor.  I like a song called ‘Love Song for No. 1.’  Remember talking about a walk in the woods I took, understanding something about the Other’s first language the authenticity of this language and its nativity to their understanding and ‘originary’ or ‘birth-mother’ identity or ‘self-system.’  Not something to tell your Anglo-but-ish-they-were-Teutonic biological parents because they will make like they want to backhand your head off then spend years denying they’re either racist, non-believers, or what I have come to call anti-believers; people who amid ‘Delta Covid Summer’ are trying to destroy the beliefs of others.  Also Dr. R.C Sproul Ligonier Ministries, ‘Forgetfulness is apostasy.’

6.

‘Flowers on Water.’  Kind of my homage to Krystal Jung Soojung of ‘hieroglyphic’ girl-group f(x) and later IMO excellent actress, her best moment perhaps the final episode of ‘My Lovely Girl,’ a shocking and awesome scene that appears to talk about Resurrection and Eternity.  The protagonist is another cynical edubusinessman who is thinking about mass-death, getting mad at mainstream American Christianity for singing songs while people were drowning, and finally on Google Books comes across a teacher-poem from 1881 titled ‘Flowers,’ for a group of rather hapless seemingly American Indian students in California as well as critiques of educational praxis which, in 1881, were identical to what they are today.  ‘God is sovereign in all things’ - such a difficult category.  I abandoned this novel for a number of reasons such as the belief that I might be able to reverse-engineer Brad Thor or something for a quick buck.  Went to Half Price Books (now closed) where they had a picture of the Jackson Five over the toilet in the men’s room.  I read a bit of a one-dollar Brad Thor book about Russia but on the way on home I once started once again dreaming mytically about Korean girls / women as it began to snow and thinking about ‘Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming’ (’Es Ist Ein Rosentsprungen) the German Nativity song which Michael Praetorius composed at least in part in response to the appalling Reformation Wars and out of a hope or wish that remembrance of Christ’s birth could somehow reunite the Church.  This also made me think about a high school I admire / respect and my old friend and his now-divorced wife with whom I many times fantasized about singing and talking with again; and whom I kind of wish I could tell the author of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ remarried his first wife eventually but IDK what good it is to give already-dreaming people more dreams either.  

It’s 9:35 AM and my ‘insomnia’ type notebook-postings haven’t made me any new friends in a while.  My last thing is just, if you care about Education or young girls / American women / culture / schools, achievement, heroines, stories, or for that matter Bible-translation or the latter-day odysseys of the nominal Episcopalian Church, with trembling heart, try to reflect on Headmaster Josiah Bunting III’s ‘All Loves Excelling.’  

One of my favorite Christian songs is ‘The Death of King David’

And God said that day shall dawn

to bring that flow’r newly born

from thy stem in fullness growing

in fragrance sweet night and morn

all My people shall adorn

with Breath of life bestowing

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

[ginnyzero]

The Discriminatory Werewolf Archetype?

I love werewolves.

I hate werewolves in most fiction. Werewolves in most fiction are abusive, out of control, OCD, monsters that are usually white males that promote things like incest and rape and well, there tend not to be female werewolves. Werewolves in fiction are representations of toxic masculinity at its worst.

So, why do I love werewolves? I mean, who doesn’t want to be nature’s answer to the chain saw every once in a while or have four feet and run in the forest. I had a wolf dream once and I was so at peace in that dream. Best dream ever. (I blame an old roommate and her love of old WW Werewolf: the Apocalypse Tabletop RPG too.)

But the representation of werewolves in fiction is problematic and that’s putting it lightly. In mainstream traditionally published fiction, female werewolves are rare or they don’t exist. They don’t lead packs. Forget black werewolves or Asian werewolves or Latino/Hispanic werewolves. They don’t really exist either except as “token” characters. And nine times out of then there aren’t gay werewolves, or if there is a gay werewolf they’re outcasts because somehow other werewolves just can’t handle them being aroused by men?

Then there’s the alpha to omega and submissive pack hierarchies that are easily abused. The fact that werewolves are so “grr” angry all the time they can’t form normal or healthy relationships. Then some writers buy into the cult and noble practice and sometimes downright redneck mentalities that to be stronger werewolves you have to marry your cousins. And men are always in charge, always.

You see these werewolves always based upon the French idea of the Loup Garou mixed with bad wolf science over and over and over again. You want the out of control monster beast in your kitchen sink urban fantasy? You include a werewolf. Vampires are urbane and controlled. Fae are aloof, businesslike, and mystical. (Makes me wonder what fae stories these writers are researching.) It’s become a trope, an archetype.

I mean, usually, the conflict resolves down to that no one can understand the monster that is the werewolf. They can never love or truly be loved by a human or other type of being, be they human or supernatural. Angst. Woe is me! And if it’s a horror story, the werewolf dies at the end.

The fantasy romance genre isn’t immune to this. Sometimes they’re a tad bit better. They include female werewolves more often. But even then, the general rules still apply that are sick and twisted and mostly are there to support the premise that even monsters can be loved in the end. (Yeah, I’ve read my fair share of werewolf romance novels okay.)

Archetypes are archetypes. Tropes are tropes.

But in this era of MeToo and men being called out for toxicity and media being urged to be more inclusive of people of all races and sexualities, isn’t it time for our media to catch up including speculative fiction where vampires, werewolves, mutants, elves and so on are used routinely to represent the other, the disenfranchised and the discriminated against.

Viewed in this lens, the portrayal of the werewolf is sickening. This is the worst of the patriarchy on display in speculative fiction form. When women, LGBTA and people of color are the minority and not the normal, disabled werewolves don’t exist (or are killed) and men are always in control and their behavior is excused because they are “alphas” isn’t right. It’s wrong. It’s grossly wrong. Why are those in writing and especially in publishing and in Hollywood still pandering to these ideas?

“People like monsters.” Ugh. Rejection right there. Werewolves can be cool without being downright nasty and out of control monsters. There are more werewolf types than the loup-garou. Beep. Exit stage left please. “It takes time.” You say. “People aren’t ready for werewolves that have control of themselves and can have healthy relationships and are female and are all races and all sexualities.”

Bullocks.

The ideal werewolf novel by CrockpotCauldron has over 68,000 notes. Assuming even half of those were likes, that’s 34,000 people who are interested in werewolves that are women, LGBTA, POCs, based on good wolf science that have healthy relationships with those and others around them. (And what would a disabled werewolf look like? Ponder. I might have to figure that out. I have so much to else to delve into why not add another thing?)

Most books don’t sell 20,000 novels in their first year. Sure, okay, so many of those people who noted that post aren’t going to buy a book. So if you go with the 3% conversion rate of all the notes that’s only 2000 sales. And I’m going to say people aren’t probably going to buy the book because they may not like the plot presented. But you have to get the book in front of those 68,000 note people in the first place!

The day I wrote after I wrote this post I found yet another person complaining about alpha-beta/dom sub dynamics in werewolf fiction! The people are out there!

So that means you can’t just put out one inclusive werewolf story, you have to put out multiple ones until you find the one with the plot and world building that people are going to buy across all age levels. You have to get it in front of influencers like CrockpotCauldron and others like her.

(She also has a list of werewolves she’s excited about. Sadly, I’m not on that list.) (Yes, I sent her my first book. Oh well.)

Fiction is a reflection of our reality. It disturbs me that werewolves are still being presented this way. That the art I see is all about growling and werewolves dripping in blood. That toxic masculinity parades itself across the page and most times isn’t called out for what it is, wrong. (Kitty Norville did, Women of the Otherworld did not, Patty Briggs is halfhearted about it. Butcher is, omg, let’s not even go into Butcher. I swear Jane Yellowrock series ignored weres most the time. Charlaine Harris didn’t help anything. Kim Harrison’s werewolves were, well at least there were females! That’s the most I can say.) Many times the sexist and horribly toxic tropes are written in as world rules that can’t be gotten away from. (Women of the Otherworld, Blood and Chocolate.)

By the time I came across CrockpotCauldron’s post, I’d already written my books. I was already disturbed as much as she was by this one dimensional portrayal of werewolves and their origin and their dynamics. I wrote Heaven’s Heathens MC as a revolt of what I was seeing in werewolf media in order to start portraying that wolves are families that work together and not domineering hierarchies where the “Alpha” is in charge. That there can be werewolves of many colors and skin tones because well, a) medieval Europe was not white, white, white. And B) this is the future, and many people have mixed their blood together enough that’s it can be difficult to know what race they are. I have female werewolves. I have nerdy werewolves. I have big buff mad scientist werewolves who enjoy DnD.

And honestly, I don’t mention character’s sexuality at all unless it’s important to the story. I don’t base my characters around the idea that they’re LGBTA and that defines them. It doesn’t. If there are LGBTA characters in my stories I want it to come up naturally and that “oh, they happen to be this” rather than “this is a problem.” Because I don’t want sexuality to be a problem in my werewolf pack. That goes against everything my werewolf pack stands for. (If it is a problem for werewolf packs that aren’t the Heathens in the story then you know those packs are bad packs. Bad! Bad wolf packs. No biscuit.)

I’ll admit, writing people in healthy relationships that share emotional labor is difficult due to lack of personal experience to some extent and that it cuts out what is the fall back conflict of most television shows and books, aka miscommunication. (I hate miscommunication personally. It’s one of those growing up things.) This is how insidious toxic masculinity is! This is how deep the patriarchy runs. That even when you’re trying your best to stay away from it, you feel like it’s slipping in no matter how hard you try!

And I know this seems an odd thing to be talking about with all the problems going on in the “real” world. But I think that if there are those that would defend these werewolf archetypes and tropes, they need to be looked at hard especially if they are in the publishing business. Because Media reflects reality and any trope and any archetype that is as discriminatory as werewolves needs to be dissected (and Vampires need to be dissected too because they represent another side of toxic masculinity. But I can only do one post at a time) and then broken down and transformed.

That’s what werewolves are really about, transformation! So, locking them into one rigid role seems awfully backwards to what they are.

Is it discriminatory? I'll leave that to you to decide. I know that I don't like it and am trying not to pander to it in my books. And if this blog post wasn't enough for you, I also talked about this on Twitter.

[gentlethorns]

1-31

JKJFLKJGDKLS did you mean. 1 through 31?? like. all of them?? LMFAOOOOOO okay but i’m sticking them under a readmore bc that is gonna be SO long

1. what is a genre you love reading but will probably never write? mysteries/crime. i love the technique and expertise it takes to expertly lay out and set up a plot twist, but i don’t think i could ever do it aptly myself.

2. which writer has had the greatest stylistic influence on your writing? probably stephen king, if we’re talking fiction, but even then i don’t think he’s influenced me a ton - my writing voice is pretty distinctive (or so i’ve been told). as far as poetry, i think reading @candiedspit‘s work has really caused me to stretch my expectations of where words can go and what they can do.

3. has a specific song/lyric ever inspired a work of art for you? absolutely! i’m super inspired by music, bc music is really important to me as a means of emotional expression. back in sophomore year of high school i was working on a story where all the chapters were inspired by songs from folie a deux by fall out boy. it didn’t pan out and i never finished it, but i still think the concept was neat.

4. a writer whose personal lifestyle really speaks to you? lmfao not to talk about him again, but stephen king’s lifestyle really appeals to me. his writing is widely known and renowned, but he just chills at home and watches the red sox games and takes pictures of his corgi and keeps turning out stories. that literally sounds like paradise to me.

5. do you write both prose and poetry? which do you prefer? i do write both! and i can’t say i honestly prefer one over the other - my interest bounces between them and waxes and wanes, but i don’t consistently indulge one more than the other, i don’t think. last year i went through a huge fiction phase in october and cranked out eight or nine different short stories/flash pieces, and then in november/december i went through a poetry phase and wrote multiple poems a day for a long stretch of time. it just depends on my mood and my mindset and what i need from writing (a kind of escape vs. emotional expression/release).

6. do you read both prose and poetry? which do you prefer? i do read both, and again, i don’t think i have a preference. i definitely read fiction more, i think, but like writing, it kind of depends what i need at the time.

7. which language do you write in? which do you want to write in someday? i write in english, since it’s the only language i know. i’d like to learn spanish at some point, but i don’t know if i could ever write in spanish - i’m so firmly married to english grammar and structure that i don’t know if i could ever exercise the same control and mastery over spanish that i could english.

8. share a quote or verse that has been on your mind lately. “you said i killed you - haunt me, then!” from wuthering heights.

9. a writer/poet whose life you find interesting. *sigh*. stephen king. i’ve read his memoir/writing workshop book (”on writing”) and his success story always fascinates me. i just can’t imagine living in a shitty one-bedroom apartment with your wife and two kids and working days at an industrial laundromat and spending nights writing on a shitty wobbly desk in the laundry room, and you get your first manuscript accepted for publication, and eventually the paperback rights go up and you think you might get $60,000 if you’re really lucky, and then one day while your wife and kids are visiting the in-laws you get a call from your agent telling you that the paperback rights for your book sold for $400,000 and 200K of it is yours. that’s just literally. unfathomable to me lmfao.

10. what do you feel about the idea of someone unearthing your unseen or discarded drafts someday, long after your death? what about your personal journal? it’s really hard for me to imagine that happening, i think bc i tend to see myself as really like. insignificant or unimportant in the grand scheme of things, so i can’t imagine any part of me lasting beyond my life. also, it’s very hard for me to imagine someone i don’t know personally reading my work, probably because my work (especially a personal journal) is a window into me, and i have a hard time even letting people i trust see into that window sometimes, much less a stranger.

11. do you prefer to write in silence or listen to something? what do you listen to? i definitely prefer music in the background, although i can work in silence. i tend to gravitate to music that goes with the scene i’m writing, if i’m writing fiction (often i work music into my fiction, so if there’s a song playing in the scene, i’ll listen to that song), and if i’m writing poetry i tend to just listen to laid-back music (unless i’m writing from a place of grief or sadness, in which case i listen to sad music lmfao). i do also love writing when it’s storming outside and just listening to the rain and the thunder as i write.

12. has an image ever impacted your artistic lens/inspired your work? absolutely! less often than music, but visuals can inspire me on occasion. i once wrote a poem based on this image. i just couldn’t get it out of my head, so i decided to figure out what it was saying to me.

13. how would you describe the experience of writing itself? as in putting the words to paper, not planning or moodboards etc. do you agree with the common idea that the satisfaction lies in reading your work after you are done with it, rather than the process of writing itself? i think the process can be arduous sometimes, and other times it can be incredible. sometimes i write very slowly and haltingly, sometimes i write at a normal pace and it feels like the work it is (bc i am trying to write professionally), but sometimes the magic tap in the mind turns on and it starts flowing. that being said, i don’t necessarily agree that the satisfaction lies only in reading your work rather than also in the process. there’s a certain fulfillment in watching everything come together and knowing it’s going to be good.

14. how often do you write? it varies. i would like to write more often than i do, now that i have a full-time school schedule and work part time friday-sunday, but i think i still get a decent amount of writing done, when i can actually sit down and motivate myself to get the words out.

15. how disciplined are you about your writing? not very, in the creative sense - as discussed above, i don’t write as often as i should/would like to, and don’t hold myself to much of a schedule. however, as far as the business side of it (submitting to magazines/contests), i’m pretty disciplined, and i’m usually pretty good about keeping all my “good” pieces in circulation at a couple of places at a time.

16. what was your last long-lasting spurt of motivation? maybe last night? i worked on a couple of pieces and then submitted a few groups of poems to some magazines. i also did some decent work on thursday while i was in my campus starbucks waiting for my zoom class to start.

17. have you ever been professionally published? are you trying to be? i have been professionally published! i got my first acceptance back in 2018, and now i’ve had poetry published multiple times and fiction published twice. i’m still trying to publish more of my work, but i think i’ve had a decent start.

18. do you read literary magazines? not regularly, although i entered a fiction contest for into the void last year, and since it came with a year-long subscription, i’ve been browsing the fiction there periodically. into the void tends to publish good short/flash fiction, so anytime i feel like reading some new stories, i head there.

19. a lesser known writer you adore? idk if she’s necessarily “lesser-known,” but i loved ally carter’s gallagher girl series when i was younger. the first four books were immaculate (although i do remember that the last two books seemed almost unnecessary, and the ultimate end of the series was anticlimactic).

20. do you write short stories? do you read them? i write and read them! up until october of last year i could never figure out how to write a short story and effectively resolve a conflict in 5000 words or less, but then suddenly (like. literally overnight), a switch flipped in my head and i could do it. as far as reading them, i don’t read a ton anymore bc of my busy schedule ( :( ), so sometimes if i’m in the mood to read i’ll opt for a short story online or a book of short stories instead of a full-length novel.

21. do you prefer to involve yourself with literary history and movements or are you more focused on the writing itself? any favourite literary movements? i’m typically more focused on the writing itself, although i do love to learn about the horror boom from the 50s-80s (if that counts as a literary movement lmfao). i also do particularly love work from the era of deconstructionism, which i think took place in like. the 40s-60s, if i’m not mistaken. i enjoy that era bc of its symbolism and abstract nature - a lot of the work leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

22. are you working on anything right now? not particularly? i have a few works in progress that i tinker with now and then, but i’m not seriously working on anything in particular.

23. how did you get started with writing? i honestly don’t even remember. i remember the first time i realized that i really liked writing and had fun doing it (in fourth grade, for a school competition), but i know that even before then i was writing stories and poems.

24. do you have any “writer friends”? most of my mutuals are writer friends! but i don’t have any irl. i almost made one in my math class last semester, but we lost contact when our university shut down in march.

25. what is your earliest work you can remember? the earliest work i can remember is when i was really young (maybe like. five or six?). it was about our dog being pregnant (which she was at the time) and able to talk (which she was not).

26. have you found your writer’s voice yet? does your work have a distinct tone? absolutely. i’m very confident in my style and the distinctiveness of my voice - it’s been there pretty much since i first started writing. i’ve improved since then, honed my voice and made it more sophisticated and effective, but at the core, it’s still me, like it always has been.

27. do your works share themes/are commonly about certain topics? or are your subjects all over the place? in poetry, i think i tend to write about grief or loss of some sort or another often, bc it’s something i tend to feel often - either that or a false bravado (but ig that’s more of a tonal device). as far as fiction, i like to write about religion gone wrong (false religion, religion as a front for personal gain and corruption, religion gone too deep into obsession and mania, etc.), and i like smart underdog-type characters that fight and have a lot of grit to them.

28. what does writing mean to you? to me, writing is catharsis, a bloodletting. this particularly applies to poetry, but it also applies to fiction. poetry shows you the things you’re regurgitating up-front, but fiction does it slyly, in a mirror or through a distorting lens. regardless, both stand to offer release and healing.

29. in an alternate universe, imagine you had not found writing. what do you think would be your fixation otherwise? honestly, i’m not sure. probably acting or theater. something creative, for sure.

30. do you feel defined by your work? maybe a little, but not to a large or limiting extent. like, in a new class, my interesting fact about myself will probably always be “i’m a writer and i’ve been published a few times,” but i think that i’m a well-rounded person and that once people get to know me, my writing is just a part of me, not my whole identity.

31. have you ever written/considered writing under a pen name? if you would be okay saying, why? no, i don’t think i have. while a pen name can be a good tool, depending on your goals and what you’re writing, i have a Thing about getting credit where i’m due credit lmfao. i don’t think i’ll ever use a pen name bc if i know something i do is good, i want my name on it.

[tessatechaitea]

Young Heroes in Love #1

Simon Bisley was busted for drawing a penis in Lobo's musculature but it's okay for Dev Madan to draw this filth?!

Obviously I picked up this comic book because the first word on the cover was sex. Also the drippy post-sex penis bottle. I'm not the only one who sees that and immediately thinks, "Oh yeah. That's a penis going flaccid after sex and leaking the last of its cum shot," right? And the wine glass full of jizz is, well, I've gotten too graphic already! Kids read this blog! Nasty, dirty pervert kids. What if I really did care about kids reading this blog? What kind of pressure do people put on themselves when they're constantly thinking of the children? Or do people only consider the children when they see somebody else doing something they don't approve of? That feels more like the society I know. Out in Portland, we currently have billboards for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Being an adult person without kids and never thinking of children at all in any way (my home is probably the least child safe space on the inner three planets), I never would have thought twice about the title of that musical. But apparently my 11 year old niece asked her mother, "What's an angry inch?" I didn't find out how she explained it but I would have said, "It's a sideways grimace on an eyeless face. Just a little bulge, honey. Now shut up." My point is that it's a complicated, adult world out there and anybody who ever uses the argument, "What about the children?", can go fuck themselves. Besides, you can't hide stuff that you think is inappropriate from kids. The simple act of trying to hide something or expressing disapproval of something to kids will cause the kids to suss out the thing you're keeping from them. Back in 2nd Grade, my class was in the yard flying paper airplanes. Mine was terrible and when it crashed instantly, I yelled, "Mine sucks the big one!" I had no idea that was somehow a dirty phrase until my teacher yelled at me for having said it and punished me by sitting on the bench for the rest of the activity. Sitting on that bench confused, I had plenty of time to work out in my head what could have been so filthy about the thing I said. I had no knowledge of oral sex or sexual pleasure, for that matter, but I'm pretty sure I worked out that "the big one" was probably a penis. Especially since I couldn't imagine why somebody would suck on a penis which must have been why the phrase was used for something terrible. Who would want to suck on a penis? Especially a big one! It's entirely possible that I didn't completely work that out back then and my memory of the moment has changed through the lens of adult knowledge. But I definitely know that I didn't know what I was saying was wrong until I was punished for saying it. It probably wasn't long after that that I wrote on the sidewalk in front of Peter Martin's house, in pencil, "Fuck Peter Martin." Why? Who the fuck knows?! Do you need a reason to do anything as a kid? Kids are fucking chaotic, man.

If I had to rate this comic book after reading just the first page, I'd give it an A+.

The three characters being introduced on this page are Off-Ramp, Thunderhead, and Monstergirl's ass. I'm super into one of those characters. These young heroes not yet in love are waiting for more heroes to arrive so that maybe they can fall in love. Also, "fall in love" is probably a euphemism because DC wouldn't let Dan Raspler call this comic book "Young Heroes Sucking Each Other Off and Fingering Buttholes." The next three members of the team are Hard Drive, Bonfire, and Junior. Hard Drive has telekinetic powers which doesn't match his name so I'm assuming "Hard Drive" has to do with his sexual potency. Bonfire is a woman with fire powers and a skimpy suit. Junior is a teeny tiny guy who maybe has no powers? He's just the size of a mouse. He calls himself "The man of several inches" which is probably a sex joke but not a very good one? Off-Ramp is a teleporter, Thunderhead has super strength, and Monstergirl turns into a monster. So she's even sexier than I first thought! I'd bang the Loch Ness Monster if it had an ass like that. Bonfire and Monstergirl rush off to the side to talk about the boys the way all female characters do because that's what females do in real life. At least I think it must be because that's what all female characters do and why would female characters be so different than actual females? That would be incredibly damaging! Just imagine boys growing up reading women written by men if men weren't trying to accurately portray women! Do you realize how that could cause them to objectify women and treat them as lesser beings without any personal agency? I mean if they had any! Obviously they don't because I've been reading women characters written by men my whole life and all they do is talk about what boys they want to smooch. They're so adorable!

The final member of the team: Pierced Erect Nipple Boy!

Frostbite is so gay that Off-Ramp just teleported his dick straight up Frostbite's asshole. Oh yeah, Off-Ramp is gay too, if I remember correctly. I have a terrible memory for comic books but I have a great memory for gay characters due to my letter writing campaigns telling DC Comics they were going to Hell for publishing this filth. "Dear DC," I would say politely before becoming a raving bigot, "I am perplexed as to why you think us macho straight readers would want to read about two gay men doing things to each other that no woman has yet allowed me to do to them. It's terribly upsetting and makes me think being straight is a mistake and a huge waste of my time. Imagine how many times I would have been laid by now if I were gay! Probably a lot because other men are probably a lot like me and want to have sex too with whoever will let them. The trouble is that no women are letting me! Especially the ones I want to let me! And now I have to see Frostbite and Off-Ramp jerking each other off and licking each other's balls and putting things in each other's butts and kissing passionately and falling in love and having a real, intimate connection with another human being. How unfair is that to me, a virgin heterosexual?! Please do not do anymore gay things in your comic book until I have had sex. Although I would not mind seeing Nightwing fuck Deathstork because that would not be gay at all. If it's super hot gay sex, it transcends being gay or straight and becomes gayterosexual. Is that a thing or am I just gay? Please respond!" After they pick up Frostbite, Monstergirl and Bonfire rush off to prove that they're individuals by engaging in a conversation that doesn't involve which hoobaloo they're going to stick up their thingablob.

Oh wait. Maybe I was thinking of a later scene.

To be fair to whomever it seems I'm not being fair to, Thunderhead and Junior rush off to discuss in which thingablob they're going to stick their hoobaloo. Hard Drive gets Bonfire alone and uses his psychic powers on her to make her attracted to Thunderhead. It seems ominous, especially since he keeps saying, "For the good of the team," but maybe he's just trying to save her feelings so she doesn't fall for the gay guy. Or maybe he's just afraid if the fire powered woman and the ice powered man have sex, something other than sexual organs is going to explode. After Hard Drive gives his big speech to rally the troops, he rushes off to fuck Monstergirl.

"Dear DC," my letter began, "I am perplexed as to why you think us virginal comic book readers would want to see two heterosexuals doing things that no woman has yet allowed me to do to them. It's terribly upsetting...".

Young Heroes in Love #1 Rating: A+! Happy Valentines Day!

[crazyfreckledginger]

The Girl’s Pack ~ Chapter 30: A Plan Of Attack

[Princess][Archer][Wolf][Wally][Jason and Roy][Dick]

Her breathing was ragged as she morphed back into her human form and leaned against a tree.

Desperately attempting to control her breathing and make less noise as her lungs burned, she sat down on the ground. The Mount could be seen from where she was sitting.

What am I doing? She thought. The girl came back on instinct and didn’t even took the time to think, she was supposed to go back to her kingdom to be coronated and here she was, going back to the people -- most of which she called friends and somehow thinking she could save the whole team -- who had been unsuccessful to take down three villains.

After everything, (Y/N) definitely had to try, because she has the same advantage the villains had when they attacked the place: the element of surprise.

****

“You? Really? You had to keep an eye on one weak little girl and none of you know where she is?” Deathstroke roared in mock laughter.

“Even you, Batman, that’s disappointing,” Lex sighed, “this means you are all useless to us now,”

“Having Lilith as an asset would have been useful if those stupid muts didn’t kill her,” Slade sighed, “how inconvienent,”

The girl heard the conversation as she crawled through the air vents in her kitten form, who knew this form would become useful. She was light enough to not make a single sound but still have the benefits of her tweaked senses.

Seeing everyone in cages or restrained to stop their power made her feel an incredible weight of guilt, this was her fault.

Her kitten eyes scanned around the big, common room for anything that might be helpful to do anything.

Suddenly, a great idea popped in her mind as her feet rushed down the way she came through in the air vent towards the security room. Shifting into her jaguar form, she blended into the darkness as she jumped down in front of the door and sniffed it.

An unfamiliar smell, probably one of the criminal’s men. Scratching the door, she growled softly once she heard that she had caught the man's attention and backed away from the door slightly, positioning herself to pounce on the man.

Her heart raced in her chest as she heard the footsteps increase and the door opening. Without a moment of hesitation, as soon as she perceived his confused face, she jumped on him, headbutting the man in the chin and scratching his chest as he fell on the ground, swiftly, she turned back into her human self and slammed the nearest object into his face, knocking him out cold.

The girl released a shaky breath as she stood back up cautiously, pulling the man against the chair and slowly closed the door after peaking through it to make sure no one was coming.

After tying up the man and placing him against the wall with tape on his mouth, she sat down on the chair and examined the screens.

In the room, she was just in, were still the same people. She perceived another room with the rest of the team. Her fingers tapped nervously against the desk as her teeth chewed on her lip, trying to come up with a plan.

The girl suddenly remembered her training, what Black Canary had told her over and over again when they were sparring.

To “make sure to use your power to her advantage,”

****

“We told you already that we don’t know where she is, why are you being a complete asshole about it!” Red Hood cursed, holding his rib that had been stabbed with his cuffed wrists.

His best friend gave him a side glare to get him to shut him up, earning a grunt. The red helmet antihero sighed softly, leaning his head back against the wall and peeling his attention away from the men that were laying out a plan out of ear reach.

Black Canary, Shazam, Batman and Red Tornado were all out, having been knocked out cold in the most appropriate way possible. The less official or younger team members were barely controlling their breathing, still in an intense battle with the poisonous gas that was still in their system.

Jason was the only one that was fully conscious but very wounded, he had his helmet with air filters to thank for that.

A very sensitive whirring sound was somehow picked up from his helmet, he tilted his head upwards, watching the camera.

His eyebrows knitted together as he saw the camera’s lens move up, down and sideways until it zoomed in on him and out again.

So many ideas were rushing through his brain.

“(Y/N)?” he mouthed behind his helmet, more to himself than anything else. It must have been his imagination -- or the blood loss, how could she have come back to fast? How could she have known?

He shook his head, definitely the bloodloss.

Suddenly a loud alarm resonated, thumping loudly in everyone’s <eardrums.

Everyone flinched, the ones who hadn’t had restricted movement held their ears and were brought to their knees.

As quickly as it appeared, the whole system shut down and it was pure blackness, only the exit signs were lit up dimly.

This wasn’t really my imagination huh? Jason thought, wincing as he applied more pressure on his wound.

“What’s the meaning of this! Put the systems back on!” Slade roared, most likely shooting his arm in every direction. The sound of numerous footsteps echoed in the room as a result of his outburst.

****

Her paws were silent against the floor, watching from the shadows as disoriented men rushed through the dark corridors in search of the power room.

She kept herself hidden, making sure she could still get a peek without being noticed.

The girl hoped what she had set up wouldn’t kill them, just paralyse them for enough time.

Five men stormed into the big room, immediately searching for the source of the problem. Pouncing swiftly, she closed the door and morphed into her human form, keeping it shut and flipping the light switch on.

(Y/N) gritted her teeth as she heard numerous groans and moans, then nothing.

Turning the light off, she peeled the door open and scanned around the bodies that were laying on the water soaked floor. Stepping inside, she cautiously reached over to pull the open cable off the floor and tuck it away back where it came from.

Quickly, she bounded their limbs and put tape on their mouths before shutting the door and locking it using the key. She never took the key out of the keyhole, however.

Her hands held the top of the door, and she swung her foot directly towards the end of the small piece of metal sticking out, breaking the key off. The part that was still in the keyhole was still inside, unable to be taken off as the other part few to the floor. The girl then slipped the broken key under the door and pulled the ‘security’ sign off and also slid it under the door.

Turning into a smaller feline, her feet raced into the hallway, using her night vision to see clearly. There were two men around the corner, from what she could hear. She stopped before they could even suspect there was someone there.

The girl meticulously took out every henchmen around the Mount in a quick twenty minutes.

Now, was the moment she dreaded the most. Back in her black jaguar form, she darted towards the common area.

Suddenly, the defining sound of static reached her ears and she roared painfully. Her whines turned into moans as she was forced to turn back into her human form.

“We got you know you little rat.”  

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Torrential

I thought when love for you died, I should die. It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on. ~ Rupert Brooke

It’s been a long-running inner debate since the time I was born. Abandonment will do that to a child. It’s been my sickening suspicion that my life has been a waste. This suspicion was probably implanted in me as soon as my birth parents scattered from my presence. The fact that I was left in the care of strangers who couldn’t quite get past the impression that I was a stranger in their midst was never lost on me. With my identity as an adoptee not yet fully realized or solidified so early in life, there were days when I felt unmoored. Not knowing what it truly felt to be loved by my own blood, I would wish only to be expelled from the love and care that had been handed down to me by those who tried to convince me they only had my best interests at heart.

The residual resentment of not knowing whether my father and mother loved me and wanted me with them has colored the way in which I distrust myself with the feeling and act of loving someone. I remain convinced that there is something wrong with the way I love and how I have sought love from others. Even allowing love for myself was never an expectation. Love is a thing that people always said they had for me but could neither show nor explain to me because how can you describe something that seems to be only pulled out of thin air at one’s own convenience. As a youngster I grew up with the nagging feeling that I was thrown in with a lot of people to live in a random place that I didn’t share a history with, but was coaxed each and every day to respect and appreciate by saying “I love you” whenever it was my turn to speak. Affection and companionship were thrown at my feet with the admonition to take them or leave them. I mirrored customs, expectations, and incentives to love, but what was missing was a genuine and clear-headed comprehension of what it means to love and what happens to your mind when you decide to show love and receive love. Absent any key discussions and explanations, my young mind could only play along and follow the unwritten rules when it came to familial bonding, early crushes, and soul-mating.

Because of my pretend existence and ignorance of my innate truths, I conducted myself like a laboratory technician whenever the atmosphere softened around me and I started to tingle all over when my eyes settled on a girl at school or in casual passing. In my head, I had all the flasks, tubes and chemicals available to concoct a love potion that I could sprinkle over the brow of the one who had caught my eye at the time. The sad, self-defeating thing was, though, my feelings, thoughts, words, and so much of my personality resided solely in my head. This self-imposed silence, masquerading as humility and reservedness, had the effect of extracting sympathy from a potential lover. I then used this sympathy to position myself as the man who could rescue them from pain that others had inflicted, from histories of spouse/partner abuse and from their own self-destructive habits. My ego always got a kick out of playing savior, exalted as it always was by any reciprocal affection. Selfish were these gambits, nay, habits of involving myself in a person’s life so as to ostensibly use them to help me remind myself that I am a good person, even though I feel myself drifting out of humanity’s fold as each year passes.

I’ve come to believe that the universe is so expansive that it’s no wonder I’ve felt so tiny inside of it all these years. I feel I’ve complicated the essentials of my life to the point that I cannot explain any facet of it to anyone else until I can explain it satisfactorily to myself. At times, I have been so ashamed of my reticence to openly communicate with people that I just throw up sheets of tarp over the windows into my soul to block out anyone’s prying curiosity. Consequently, I have developed a distaste for casual social interactions because I grow anxious at the thought of having to save others from the embarrassment of revealing unexplored chasms of my psyche that not even I have gotten around to navigating yet. So around 2004 I started blogging on Yahoo! GeoCities to start documenting my mind’s wanderings. Gradually, I switched to other blogging platforms once I heard about their improved ease-of-use features. Writing about my life didn’t come naturally to me. Diaries were never my thing and I only dabbled in journaling when I was contending with a prolonged bout of loneliness during my year of study abroad. In spite of the novelty of it, I found that blogging was the ideal medium for me to go at my own pace and provide as much detail as I pleased when it came to explaining what was preoccupying my mind at any given time. By around 2005 or 2006 I began blogging under the title “Borrowed Notes” on WordPress.  

Shortly thereafter is when I came across another blogger, let’s call her “Ede”, who would stir in me a feeling of ureka. My experience reading her blog was ethereal, even magical, because I felt I had finally discovered someone else on this vast earth who processed ideas and life’s conundrums just as I did. Intellectually and emotionally I imbibed Ede’s words as if I were sitting right there beside her and watching her type on her keyboard, deep in thought. It was a true feeling of kinship that went beyond even family or shared humanity. I began to (mistakenly, as it were) create a romantic aura around her words and the images she posted of herself. She and I were both adopted from South Vietnam when the end of the War was still far from certain. It was this shared tumultuous past that initially garnered my attention and from which sprung a fondness for someone I didn’t even know existed up to that point.

It was phenomenal how Ede explored the psychology of the transracial adoptee mind and adapted her analyses to her own lived experiences as a young woman of color raised in a rural Southern town and all the travails and absurd ironies that this social construct entailed. Each time she published a new post, I constructed a kind of fairy tale in my head that told me Ede was dropping bread crumbs just for me to find in a thick, dark forest both of us wish we didn’t have to inhabit. I seemed to hear her telling me to handle them with care until we could be together as One and live on in an enlightened destiny.

If I recall correctly, after I asked her a question in the comment section of one of her blog posts, Ede emailed me and told me she’d be open to talking about it on the phone. It was one of many doors she created for me and through which I eagerly entered. I became more and more enamored with her voice and the worldview she so deftly elaborated on. What heightened my regard for Ede was her constant encouragement for me to keep on shining through my words and maintain a critical lens through which to view our stations in life. She told me that she thought of us as equals and we both deserve an audience that appreciates our willingness to subvert the nationalist narratives we were forced to cherish for so long. We seemed to be replenishing each other’s self-respect reserves and recognizing all the communal encouragement and psychological survival skills we had been lacking in both our lives that would have placed us on surer social footing. It was as if this meeting of hearts and minds was inevitable and singularly etched in the cosmos, and we were only continuing a conversation with each other that had spanned eons and lifetimes.

Ede became the trigger I pulled when I thought the time was right to kill off my 5-year-old marriage to a woman whom I knew from the start I shouldn’t have agreed to marry. The beginning of the end of my marriage was when Ede and I turned our hours-long phone conversations and pages-long instant messages into a transgressive, paranormal love connection. Soon enough, we sensed a growing sexual tension, starting with well-placed flirtatious innuendo and then deepening into riveting, torrid sex talk late into the night and then, more and more, streaming into the very early morning hours. I had dabbled in flirty erotic chatter before with exes, but it was never more than tongue-in-cheek missives that were more cute than perilously addictive. However, with these pornographic-infused telephonic encounters between Ede and me, we both wanted to up the ante on how hot and bothered we could get each other. We reveled in pushing each other’s sexual buttons in order to flood our libidos to their respective bursting point.

Suffice it to say, when I finally received the divorce decree in the mail, Ede and I soon made plans to meet in person. We eventually consummated our remote relationship in the summer of 2008. As soon as Ede picked me up at the airport and drove me to her apartment and I set down my duffel bag, she turned her head toward me to tell me something and I immediately planted a deep kiss on her lips, the type of kiss I wanted her to know I had desired to give her the first time I had felt entwined in her words. Over the course of a week, our repeated coital sessions plumbed the depths of our loins and climbed the peaks of our lust, aiming for what we had been missing all of our lives. If ever the phrase “We are One” meant anything to anyone, it was at this moment in time when we seemed to touch the epicenter of each of other’s souls.

Ede knew how this utopian coupling would end, though, long before I had even imagined it in my mushy brain. Months before we had even physically met, at my request, she mailed me two handwritten letters. This was because one of our conversations revolved around penpals and penmanship. I simply wanted an example of her handwriting, something palpable in this overwhelming digital space, something that harkened back to our younger years. In them, she presciently explained to me the ways in which we would separate and feel regret, and that I would stop thinking of her as someone I could spend my life with and instead end up thinking of her as someone I once knew way back when and under a much more jaded light. What I should have gleaned from her words was a realistic foreshadowing of where and how we were going to fall over the cliff that was awaiting us. It was a gentle warning that my heart could not heed.

The atrophy of the fantasy of “Us” began as soon as I returned home from my first trip to visit Ede and her two kids. I should’ve been well aware of how desperate it made me look trying to come up with a plan to fly her and her kids to Seattle so that they could settle down with me in my one-bedroom apartment. The logistics of a move clear across the country and the fact that she was still legally married to her estranged husband barely registered in my love-addled mind. Thinking back, though, love hardened into an obsession with me, and I became preoccupied with keeping Ede in my orbit so that we could continue to build our creative endeavors into a juggernaut of a partnership. We always talked about doing photography together, travelling together, writing together. As I recall, one of our flights of fancy that we enjoyed bringing up regularly was the dream of us settling down and living in Vietnam together; such an elegiac homage to our orphanhood, but also a fervent defense of our right to exist in the very nation that birthed us.

To feel so lovelorn and idealistic is nothing new for human beings anywhere and at any time. But, for me to keep on climbing mountain peaks without so much as a map, a sufficient amount of rope, and the barest minimum of oxygen, with the foolhardy belief that if I make it to the summit everything will turn out all right and life will be perfect, it is surely a testament, at least in this respect, to what an idiot I became and what an irresponsible savior mentality I carried around with me, like a captain’s cutlass. It’s like I cultivated the traits of an all-around good guy who, on the surface, values common sense, practices deep respect and cherishes intellectual rigor but also embodied the “nice guy” persona so well that I was ultimately blind to the devilish impulses that only served to satisfy my childish self-interest. This dual pantomime ended up blowing up in my face and leaving me to confront an existential crisis that I can only wish will never recur in my waking life.

Meanwhile, Ede was struggling mightily against an inevitable total disruption of her and her kids’ living situation because of her estranged husband’s almost weekly threats to cut off all financial lifelines to her unless she agreed to move to the Middle Eastern country he had moved to with their other two kids a couple of years ago. In a show of solidarity and to insert a level of normalcy in an untenable situation, I returned to visit with her and her two kids during the Thanksgiving holiday and to celebrate my birthday in early December with them. Coincidentally, my parents were a couple of hours away, where my father was receiving experimental treatment for the cancer he was to succumb to just a few years later. They wished to visit us, since my parents only got to see me once each year. I never divulged to them the real reason I was there visiting this woman and her kids, let alone why this virtual single mother had allowed a recently-divorced man to share a bed with her in her household. I knew it would have just been one more fact of my life that didn’t make sense to them.

Both as a way to stay involved in Ede’s life and to stay on the impossible path of co-habitation with her, I avidly applied for jobs in the urban area she lived in when I returned to Seattle. But it was too little too late. Her “S.O.” — significant other — (as she always mockingly referred to him) refused to pay the rent for the apartment where she and the other two kids had been holed up for the last few years, due to the fact that her S.O. had discontinued paying the mortgage for the house they had previously lived in because he had secured a job outside the United States and planned to move his entire family there. Knowing full well that such a move to that miniscule Middle Eastern nation offered only a life of a covered and sullen housewife without the benefit of any emotional or material support, Ede entrenched herself in the two-bedroom apartment refusing to join her S.O., even though it deeply pained her not to be with her other two sons who had decided to live with their father. Knowing full well these difficult circumstances surrounding her and the choices she was being forced to make, I should have backed away for both of our sakes, even though I wanted to promise her the world. I really should have understood from the get-go that the lifestyle I wanted to create for both of us would have been just another excuse for her not to evolve into herself and to not fully take control of her own life. I ultimately should have realized that Ede was going to make me pay for my well-meaning hubris because she warned me countless times of the end result.

After the axe came down on her homestead, in disgust, she packed up everything in a U-Haul van and in her personal vehicle and grudgingly moved in with her father and stepmother in the rural Southern town she grew up in. That treacherous upheaval must have sliced her already thinning spirit into a million crosscuts that bled out at different volumes and rates.

Out of guilt for not being there to help Ede and her kids pack and move and, admittedly, out of a selfish concern with whether or not I still factored into her life after such a traumatic rift in her living situation, I continued to act as if our communication routines were consistent and intentional. Due to my overblown confidence in who I thought I was to her and that I actually figured into her future plans, I promised Ede that I would start searching for jobs in the region she had relocated to. I promised her that as soon as I established myself there, then she and her kids could move in with me to get away from the toxic situation that had exponentially increased between her and her father. I promised her that once I could nail down those particulars then we could finally pursue the life we’ve always wanted for us. Promise, after promise, after promise. And what did Ede always tell me about “promises,” especially when they fell from the mouths of the men who insinuated themselves in her life?

While my lack of humility proudly blinded me to what was really going on, I continued to live life in denial and boldly envisioned a smooth transition for myself from the moist and overcast Pacific Northwest to the hot and dusty environs of a Southern town I couldn’t even fathom. I wasn’t just taking one shot in the dark; I was taking more than I could ever handle, and never really noticed that I was shooting into my own reflection. In the meantime, our correspondence became more infrequent, condensed, and increasingly strained. Ede had promptly secured a job at a local retailer, which ostensibly got herself out of the house and away from the manufactured chaos caused by her father and her siblings who had plenty of their own unique issues. Our phone conversations would trail off into cold zones and I would plaintively listen to her sigh in resignation as if she were desperately signaling to me to quit putting any more time in our relationship. I had the distinct feeling that any good thought or memory of me, prior to her forced relocation, was slipping through her fingers, so I made the rash decision in my head to fly down and visit with her again. As I put out that suggestion, Ede told me she wouldn’t be opposed to it and that she couldn’t stop me even if she tried. Her less than enthusiastic response to my proposal and our continuing flummoxed interpersonal communications should’ve finally tipped me off that not only did the dynamic between us radically change, but that I had fell into the well-worn rut of hearing without really listening and allowing my interpretation of reality to overlap hers.

The mock execution my paramour had planned for me took place at an IHOP about an hour before midnight in the middle of the first full week I was to stay there. And I should have seen it coming from a thousand miles away as soon as I had landed at that hulk of an airport, picked up the rental car and drove to the motel in the tiny town near where she lived. The two of us first re-connected at a small diner, and she brought along her two kids and a “friend” whom she had increasingly mentioned in our phone conversations leading up to my visit. (Yet another sign I chose to ignore.) I can’t recall his name, but I remember him as a tall, portly guy with long bouncy, curly hair and a bushy goatee and he wore thin wire-frame glasses that seemed to soften his features. I immediately sensed that the connective tissue which had once held the two of us so closely together had been hacked at and was hanging by only the thinnest of sinews. Sitting diagonally across from me in the booth, I remember Ede’s eyes betrayed both surly contempt and pure pity for me. I recognized the look she was giving me, but I hoped against hope that it was not real and that we could share some time together after being away from each other for several months and everything that had come to pass. However, her blatant displays of affection toward her friend confused me and warded me off from initiating any form of meaningful contact. From her friend’s reactions and the looks he slyly gave me, he was enjoying her attention and playing along with her but also seemed to take pity on me because of what her actions were intent on doing. It was as if she had told him all about our history and that she, instead, wanted a future with him.

Skip to that fateful meeting at the IHOP later in the week, and I was anticipating having a real sit-down discussion between her and me in order to come to a heartfelt understanding of where our relationship was headed and whether either one of us wanted to continue gliding on the path we had established. I was expecting just the two of us so we could really talk things out and listen to each other. And, to be completely honest, I still held onto the fantasy that we would eventually end up in my motel room to make love like we had done so ravenously in the past. I arrived at the well-lit restaurant to find not just her sitting in the booth, but also her co-workers, one of whom was the same large, burly “friend.” I was immediately placed on the spot. I had nowhere to hide from the terse questioning about the true reasons I came to this small Southern town and the grave feeling that I had failed to recognize I was being set up for emotional evisceration, in public no less.

At last, Ede placed the proverbial gun to my head and pulled the trigger by accusing me of being undeniably selfish in wanting to stay in a relationship with her and only wanting “to fuck” her while I had the freedom to go out galavanting around town, oblivious to the hard-scrabble reality she had to confront each and every day and the tsunami of hurt that had washed her back into the hometown she had escaped from so long ago. Even though the salty iron of her bullets were winding their way in slow motion into my bloodstream and down through my nerve endings, agonizingly hollowing out any shred of ego I desperately wanted to cling to, it became abundantly clear to me that she estimated me to have become just another man in her life who subconsciously thought he could wave a paternalistic wand over her head, whisk her away from all her troubles and softly set her down in a life devoid of any pain, while simultaneously wiping away any semblance of vice from her past. Ede shot another round into my head by telling me that she and her “friend” were hooking up and she was glad she didn’t have to hide it from me anymore.

Feeling sick to my stomach and slightly faint, I quickly slid myself out of the booth and eeked out the phrase, “Because I love you,” in response to her questioning my motives for visiting her that past Thanksgiving. At that exact moment, it was difficult for me to comprehend what had transpired because my inner voice was incessantly muttering to me in my echo chamber that I’m done as a human being. I bee-lined it back to my motel room, determined to get online and reserve the earliest flight back to my empty apartment in Seattle. I had resolved to disappear into a world of pain that I had, once again, created for myself. The next day, though, after finishing up my breakfast sandwich at the nearby McDonalds, one of the workers commented on the Metallica sticker on the lid of my laptop, and we commenced with some brief friendly banter about the band and their music. Never would I admit it, but that conversation with a complete stranger made such an impact on how I was viewing the world at the time that I decided to stay a few more days. When would I ever get to visit this part of the country again, I asked myself. If I were going to join a subset of the Walking Wounded, so eviscerated I felt at the time, then I would just make myself tinier than a tadpole for the rest of my trip and push on.

This past April marked the 10th anniversary of my fateful trip and bizarre resolution of my intense relationship with Ede. I’m still alive and she is still alive. There are times when I still don’t know what to make of those events or how to shape them inside my head when they materialize in my memory and play themselves back. During the period when so many jittery love cues were passing between us at such a break-neck speed, and the decision to leave my wife was building to a crescendo inside of me, Ede shared a music video called “Run” by Snow Patrol with me. Like so many significant communications she sent, this song contained a multitude of surreptitious messages that underscored her feelings toward me and what she thought she needed to impart to me to not only understand her, but also myself. In other words, “Run” was meant to help me sort out the difficult decision to either run from my marriage, or run into the arms of Ede, or just run toward whatever else was waiting for me on the edge of nowhere while I had the chance. I think she wanted to guide me around all of the constraints I believed were holding me back from realizing all my true selves that were in need of being expressed with all my vigor, all my talent and all my self-worth. Instead, I turned my love for Ede into a thing to set on top of a pedestal and admire. I mistook love for a reciprocal assurance that if I embrace it, then it will embrace me back.

Ten years on, and at the beginning stages of middle age, I am at a unique vantage point where I’m developing the talent to see in many directions and dimensions. In many ways I’ve changed, but in some very primal respects I haven’t. I have learned, though, to keep those raw aspects of me from worming their way into my practical day-to-day while honing the more mature and wisened parts so that they can better express themselves in my life. Love has a role in my life, but it has no hold on how I live my life. It sings its many tunes and pitter-patters in the backwood transoms of my mind. However, I’ve learned now that love is not there for me to have or to seek. It’ll be there no matter where I am.

[patheticphallacy]

This is going to be a really difficult introduction to my wrap up.

Unfortunately, on September 18th my dad passed away. He was only 50 years old. I won’t go into details because of how personal it is, but he was in hospital a majority of the month before he passed. I’ve taken a year suspension from University for the time being.

It has been a really difficult time for myself and my family. I’ve turned a lot to books and blogging to offer a way to occupy my mind which is why so many things still seem to be coming out, but I cannot say that this will hold up after the funeral.

As I schedule so many posts, a lot of what came out this month has been written since around mid August and I did not find the time to stop the University posts before they were released. I won’t be deleting them.

I hope you’ll all understand.

THINGS I’VE READ

    An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley– My sister gave me her copy she used for her GCSE’s. Such a great play with revelation after revelation, left me on the edge of my seat. While I knew the core plot twist, I didn’t predict that ending. 

Mob Psycho 100 Volume 1 by One– This was kind of meh. It’s one of my best friend’s favourites, so I’ll carry it on eventually, but I don’t really feel the urge to pick volume two up just yet. I will say I like how the anime tackles the same events in a different order to save major revelations for backstory– that was really interesting to pick up on. 

I Call Upon Thee by Ania Ahlborn– I really didn’t like this! Lacklustre and very cliched, feel like it doesn’t really offer anything other than annoying ending and characters who go through absolutely no development at all. 

Kissing Tolstoy by Penny Reid– An OK romance that actually has discussions surrounding reading and books that don’t feel forced. I found this easy to read even though I’ve never read any Russian Lit, and I actually want to read it more now. Like that it discusses age gaps and issues of the power dynamic too. 

    Seven Tears at High Tide by C.B. Lee– Finally finished this one, and it only took me 3 months. A very cute and heartwarming story about a boy who makes a wish and falls in love with a Selkie. Does get ridiculous at the end, I must say, but I was happy with the payoff. 

The Tea Dragon Society by Katie O’Neill– Katie O’Neill creates such amazing narratives that have wonderful messages about society and being true to yourself and your wishes, pursuing something that you love and encouraging others to do the same. 

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin– How can I ever trust a single man or old person after this book? Tell me. 

Please Undo This Hurt by Seth Dickinson– Don’t really rate this short story. It bored me and I hated the main characters, not even in a good way. Just perpetuates the ‘I can save you from your mental illness’ narrative that is dull and overdone by this point. 

    My Hero Academia Volume 20 by Kohei Horikoshi– Gentle Criminal and La Brava was so boring, the School Festival arc was fabulous, and Endeavor finally got his ass kicked! Yay! 

Aphrodite Made Me Do It by Trista Mateer– I have a review of this coming out soon for National Poetry Day in the UK, but if you don’t want to wait, I have a review here!

The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca– I read this after watching the trailer for Antlers, and I thought it was pretty neat! Very thrilling, although I’m bothered by changes being made in the film that I feel could detract from having Julia as one of the main characters in the film. 

I Am Not Your Final Girl by Claire C. Holland– A collection of poetry centring around fictional women from horror films, exploring their empowerment and agency in a genre and a wider culture and society that seems willing to beat them down until they break. 

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink– I have a review of this linked later this post! Full of body horror and emotional trauma, this is a really solid read great for fans of the podcast and Welcome to Night Vale. 

    In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant– I love this terrible cover! Keep an eye out for my review of this, it’s coming out soon. 

The World’s Greatest First Love Volume 1 by Shungiku Nakamura– The publishing elements and the main character were GREAT, but there is prevalent sexual assault in this that is never addressed and is incredibly insensitive in its treatment, so I don’t recommend this manga. 

Dead Voices by Katherine Arden– I didn’t enjoy this one as much as Small Spaces, but it’s still really freaky and a great middle grade read. I love that Coco gets her own POV in this, too, and that it doesn’t take stereotypical routes with some of its plotlines. 

No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg– This is a collection of speeches Greta Thunberg has made addressing climate change, as well as her own position as an advocate for the cause. Moving and a must read, in my opinion. It’s only £3 in Waterstones at the moment for anyone who wants to pick it up!

    Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury– A fascinating collection of essays written by Bradbury about his writing process and some of the more popular works he’s published. I honestly felt really inspired and motivated after reading this, I highly recommend it especially for creative writers, but just be warned it is very oriented around the white male experience.

Heartstopper Volume 2 by Alice Oseman– I adore Heartstopper and I love this second volume. Great progression in the relationship between Nick and Charlie, and we’re getting to see more outside of their relationship and into their friendships and family dynamics, too. I still love Tori Spring!

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle– Finally got a hold of the MASSIVE audiobook where Stephen Fry narrates all the Holmes stories, and it honestly made the experience so much more enjoyable. I think Doyle’s skill lies more in shorter fiction than longer fiction, I think there’s less opportunity for… not useless, per se, just unneeded waffling. 

Giant Days Volume 9 and 10 by John Allison– These two volumes take place around the tailend of the girl’s second years and follows their accommodation location, the progression (and breakdown) of relationships, and them finally making it to third year intact. I honestly can’t believe there’s only three or four volumes left in this series, its been a constant companion for me since 2016 when I first started and I really don’t want to let it go. 

  No Touching At All and Even So, I Will Love You Tenderly by Kou Yoneda– Of the ‘older’ manga I’ve read that focus on the relationships between two men, these two are definitely in the ‘recommend’ pile. Other than the beautiful names for the volumes and the artwork being really pretty, I really enjoyed the developing relationships and the conversations had about workplace homophobia and ostracization in Japan, although that wasn’t the main focus. They do include some questionable attitudes towards identification of sexuality– two characters in both volumes are probably bisexual or on that spectrum, but are referred to as straight more than once for liking women and only the man they enter the relationship with. It’s complicated, but nothing in either volumes ever feels targeted or hateful, just lacking education on the nuances of sexuality. 

Articles

I found this article about Friends great as it breaks down issues I’ve had with the show for years. I don’t have a lot of attachment to it, honestly, I mostly just put it on in the background, but I think I’ll stop now. I’ve always found the handling of gender and sexuality damaging in Friends, as well as the overwhelming fatphobia.

I really enjoyed looking through this list The Guardian did of the 100 best books of the 21st century. I don’t know why, I’m just a big fan of lists!

Before reading this article, I can honestly tell you I knew nothing about Susan Sontag beyond her name. It’s deconstructing her queerness and how her aversion to accepting her own sexuality ultimately ruled a lot of the work she produced in her life.

God, this article was fascinating. I can’t even tell you what it’s about, really, other than that it’s an interview with Christeene, a punk drag artist who is just really cool, honestly. There are some buttholes for anyone who… wants to avoid butts? Or reading this at work?

There was a massive conversation in August that carried into September regarding the rise in men adopting pseudonyms to get their thriller novels published. This Atlantic article particularly captured the issues I have with men who do this, who are almost trying to fool an audience of women who trust women writers to not approach the suffering of women through a misogynistic lens, as is so common in modern society.

An older article by The New Inquiry, Coming out of the Coffin offers an insight into the fraught relationship between Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde. A really interesting read, I’m just sad I discovered it 7 years after its release!

THINGS I WATCHED

I don’t do music sections on these wrap ups anymore, so I’ll put this here: the GRAACE cover of ‘Complicated’ by Avril Lavigne completely transforms the song and adds such an amazing depth to it

I decided to binge watch Fleabag and it’s most definitely the best decision I’ve made all year. Fleabag follows the titular woman as she navigates her life as a thirty year old woman whose entire life is in flux, and has been since the death of her mother. There’s a lot I could say about this show, honestly. What really stood out to me was how much I could relate specifically to the emotions Fleabag and her older sister Claire feel in relation to each other, and their grief. Seeing them still come back together even after such a significant loss, their dependency, really gives me strength to get through what I’m experiencing at the moment, so Fleabag has been something I can relate to and look at as hope for a future where I can begin to wrap my head around the terrible things going on around me.

THINGS I POSTED

August Wrap Up

TTT: Books Outside My Comfort Zone

50 Bookish Questions Tag

Music I Enjoyed This Summer

Connie’s Personal 101 Guide For Personal Survival of University

Bookshelf Tour Part 3: TBR & More Manga/Comics

Book Review: I Call Upon Thee by Ania Ahlborn

TTT: Books on my Fall TBR

Book Review: Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink

Bookshelf Tour Part 4: CDs&DVDs

If you liked this post, consider buying me a coffee? Ko-Fi. 

Goodreads|Twitter|Instagram|Letterboxd

September Wrap Up This is going to be a really difficult introduction to my wrap up. Unfortunately, on September 18th my dad passed away.

[hcpefulmarshmallow]

Hello friends, this is just a thing that I wanted to mention real quick (you: “stop it Jenny, we know you don’t do real quick”) because it’s been playing on my mind for some time. Trigger warning for mental illness.

 To begin, a (somewhat) brief preface. When I talk about what’s a ‘real’ diagnosis and what’s not, I’m referring to what exists in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-V); and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

 The most recent edition of the DSM-V was published in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association, and the most recent edition of the ICD-11 in 2018. They are both common diagnostic tools for mental disorders, offering clear, standardised criteria. The DSM is more commonly used in America and is more universally known, while the ICD-11, despite being less common knowledge, actually has a wider reach professionally and is used more in Europe and other parts of the world. It also has a broader scope than the DSM, covering overall health instead of just mental disorders.

 Please bear in mind that I have not read either resource in their entirety, this is just what I can work out from more general research of the two, compared to patterns in writing that I see all the time. And just know that I’m not calling anyone out or trying to police anyone’s creativity. Consider this an information dump, and inspiration to research what you write.

 So, with all the boring stuff out of the way: what’s my damn point? Why did I take on the mammoth task of reducing a complicated and very nuanced issue to a single post? In fact, what is the issue at hand? 5 paragraphs in and I’ve still not addressed it, I’m a great essayist.

 Well, it all started with the song  “Sweet But Psycho” by Ava Max. And no, I don’t know it -- and neither does my sister who seems to think she does, because I hear the first four lines sung out loud more than I ever needed to: “Oh, she's sweet but a psycho / A little bit psycho / At night she's screamin' / I'm-ma-ma-ma out my mind”. And when you have that catchy but annoying tune in your head, the things you hate about it are inescapable. 

 At this point, you’re probably thinking this is another rant about the glorification (or even, gasp, the cutesification) of mental illness around us and, uh...sort of? Like I said, I’m not here to police anybody. And I don’t think almost anything is truly bad in isolation -- it’s the trend that scares me. There’s not much I, a lowly internet dweeb, can do about the mainstream, but I do think I can educate my fellow peers. And what I want to educate you on today is the use of words that don’t mean what we think they mean, as an example of why we need to mind the subject matter we handle.

 So. ‘Psycho’. In terms of writing, most people use it to refer to their characters who are your batshit off-the-wall cutesy crazy types. Your Yanderes and Jeff The Killers of the fandom world. It’s usually short for two different terms: either Psychopath or Psychotic, and in neither case does this do anybody any favours. Let me explain.

 The term ‘Psychopath’ is often used to describe someone who is cruel, violent, has no care for others, and is often bloodthirsty. These characters are usually presented in one of two ways: as someone who can blend into wider society until their true dark nature is triggered, at which point they become deadly and dangerous; or as someone who is simply unapproachable at all times. Psychopath also has a sister term it’s often treated as interchangeable with, of which I am sure you’re aware: Sociopath. A ‘Sociopath’ is someone who cannot or simply does not experience empathy, sympathy, all those wonderful emotions that make us caring and considerate towards others. As a result, a ‘Sociopath’ often winds up doing radically hurtful things to other people.

 The trouble with both of these words is that, medically, they do not exist. Not how we think they do. We just made them up to be mean to each other. That’s right, you can’t be diagnosed as a Sociopath, or a Psychopath. Yeah, I was shocked too. I got so used to hearing people described like this, I thought they must be real.

 And I’m not saying that these words are invalid, just because they’re not real diagnoses. That’s not how words work. The beauty of language is that we invented it, and we can keep on reinventing it. If people use the term ‘Psychopath’ in this way, it will inevitably come to mean this exact thing, no matter what psychology says. And that’s fine. The trouble is that they are often conflated with real mental illness. Used in the place of a genuine diagnosis so we can still have our crazy villain type without the constraints of real, attributable illness. Because you gotta keep ‘em guessing!!1! In the same way they become real words if we use them like they are, they become interchangeable with actual mental issues if we use them that way. The ‘symptoms’ of being a Psycho- or Sociopath are oftentimes just exaggerated forms of symptoms belonging to actual, diagnosed illnesses. And like I said, trends are worse than individual problems, but when we see a combination of symptoms in an illness, whether that illness is given a fake name or not, in exclusively characters who we’d never want to meet in real life, the real sufferers suffer. It puts a stigma in our minds whether we mean for it to or not; it closes us off to conversations, to understanding these people and how to help them.

 The worst cases are when writers take the opportunity to justify their use of the word by ‘diagnosing’ the character themselves, which takes on a whole new level of Yikes. We’re in such an awkward place in terms of representation at the moment, and I know it’s hard to navigate. I have all the love for people who do so with pure intentions. If, for example, you have a straight character, it’s easy for that character to be themselves. But if you have a gay character, everything they do is Gay, and it’s a representation of the Gay Community, and you will be held to a higher standard because of that. That is the lens through which we look at media right now, and it sucks for everyone, and is so easily exploited, but it is what it is. In much the same way, if your character is the only character in your story with a certain illness and they’re also your Big Bad, or someone who would be genuinely terrifying to approach -- well, I don’t think I need to explain why that could be seen as a major disservice. And of course, if your character is the only one in a whole darn genre...yeah. This is why trends matter. And why the trend of mental health getting misrepresented is so troublesome.

 But I digress: because remember, I did say there were two uses of the word Psycho, and the second is grounded in reality. The word ‘Psychotic’ is, medically speaking, a real thing. Again, used to mean someone who is deranged, possibly murderous - and like I said, if a word is used a certain way, it will come to mean a certain thing. But the term has a psychological basis. Psychotic describes someone experiencing Psychosis - a mental disorder in which the sufferer experiences a break from reality. The most classic case is a war veteran who thinks he is suddenly back on the battlefield.

 But obviously, a sufferer of a serious and damaging phenomenon isn’t what we think of when we hear ‘Psycho’ or even ‘Psychotic’. I don’t want to lean too much into the impact on mental health as a whole; that the idea of being neurodivergent is subsequently glamourised and demonised at the same time; that people latch onto labels that have real, practical use, all for the sake of feeling special. I want to keep it basic now. I want to ask: do terms like these have a place in writing? Specifically, in RP, since that is the form with which I am most acquainted right now. Obviously I can only answer with my own opinion, since there’s no Holy Doctrine to tell us one way or another.

 I’m not going to sit here and demonise everyone I think has mishandled subject matter. Believe me, I’ve not always been good at it -- I’m still not always good at it. And as someone actively playing a character whose mental issues are a major part of his characterisation, and who does things that make him unlikeable because of those mental illnesses, I know the pressure to get it right all the time. That unsteady balance between realism and demonisation, glorification and representation. The desire to put labels to traits, to have an understanding of what’s going on in such a complicated mind. It’s tricky. Everyone’s experiences are different. And I’m not saying we need to get rid of “crazy for the sake of crazy” characters, or view everything through the lens of “but who will this hurt??”; or get rid of these terms altogether. Like I said, societal meaning is still meaning. And I personally like to believe that most authors have good intentions, even those with poor execution. And I’m certainly not trying to shame anyone for falling for societal opinion. Everyone has about something at some point.

 If there’s a point to this at all, it’s this: research. Learn. Adapt. Not even my information is perfect and correct. I’ve seen everything above done a million times in so many ways, good and bad. If you want to follow a trend in writing or in storytelling, do, but try to understand it first so you can execute it better. Give it a purpose, and a place. Seize your right to be creative, by all means, but also take the opportunity to learn something new. And in turn, use your art to not only express and entertain, but educate.

 Tl;dr: The best premise in the word can still be executed poorly, but likewise, a poor premise can be executed well. No subject matter has to be wholly off limits, and not everything has to be a statement about something. But handling matters, so handle your work with respect. Do your research and understand what you’re saying before you say it. Make something you’re proud to stand by.

[starspatter]

WIP Challenge

Tagged by: @summertime-children

Tagging: @astrologista, @atsushishelteredinmoonlitjasmine, @benditlikegumby, @cryptoriawebb, @ibmiller, @iceperialprincess, and @otherwise-uncolonized

Challenge: post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.

I'll also do what deta did and post comments + short fragments.  (Be warned it'll be very long though, and most of these are actually Pokémon fics since I was a much more prolific writer when I was younger, and that was the fandom I wrote mainly for.)  I also won't be including "Heroes and Thieves" on here (or any DC/superhero stuff really since I’ve essentially “done” everything I had planned for now), as *technically* it is all already completed in draft form, and I'd like to keep things a surprise for whenever I do end up posting~

Hero and Seek

“Well, we’re all together now, so let’s have some fun, all right?  Don’t worry, it’s really simple.  One person is the ‘demon’, and the others have to hide from him.” “Eh?  A ‘demon’?  But that’s scary!” Three pairs of eyes turned up to her in fear.  Those eyes, which screamed and streamed the stark color of blood the first time she saw them – not just from tears, but from the ‘monster’ they believed dwelled deep within.  She thought for a moment, then removed her scarf. “How about this then?  Whoever’s the ‘hero’ has to find and rescue the others.  It’s a very important Blindfold Brigade mission!”

I’ll start with the one Kagepro fic I did attempt at least, which I described previously here, but is basically about Ayano + the Meka Trio playing “Hide and Seek” for the first time.  (I actually had it originally titled as that but just came up with this new version on the spot lol I’m so clever~)  For some reason I’ve always been hesitant about reading/writing Kagefic, but I actually got a fair bit farther in this than I thought, so perhaps I should try to finish it someday... Princes and Frogs

“K-Koizumi-senpai… Um… Please go out with me!” Itsuki stared down at the tiny underclassman, watching a rose mantle spread slowly over her cheeks as she gazed back with shy, but determined hope in her bespectacled eyes.  The older boy could make out his own handsome face reflected off the lens, a virtual image embellished by sparkling hearts and stars.  With dim satisfaction and relief, Itsuki ensured that his bright, patient smile betrayed no hint of the weary sigh that whispered behind it.

This is an intro excerpt of the first chapter I planned to write for an ItsuHaru fic from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which I only ever posted the prologue for.  ItsuHaru was my first obsessive OTP, and I still think about returning to this story someday (especially since I have now proven to myself I *can* finish a full chapter fic if I put my mind to it), but it’s been so long I feel like I’d need to refresh my memory of the whole series/am still holding out hope for a Season 3 to motivate me again. *shot*

Fall to Pieces

As Itsuki stared at Yuki’s vacant visage, his resentment kept building.  His hands clenched, rigidly gripping the edge of the table.  Somehow, it just didn’t seem fair.  That she could so easily ignore the madness fate had dealt them, never reveal any signs of suffering or bitterness towards her situation, and yet always, always wear the same damn expression on her face. How could she possibly stand it? He can’t stand it. (any more)

An ItsuYuki one-shot, where Itsuki basically blows up at her from pent-up frustration over having to wear a mask all the time and his hidden feelings for Haruhi.  The two start to form a connection over their respective “unrequited loves”/understanding of each other’s pain, and one thing leads to another...  Like “Heroes and Thieves”, this is in fact technically “complete”, since I actually used the leftover steam from the former towards finishing at least one thing I started a long time ago - although I’m still not sure I’m totally satisfied with it/kinda want to wait to figure out what I’m doing with my other ItsuHaru fics before I publish it by itself.  (Incidentally the working title comes from an Avril Lavigne song lol.)

Little White Lies

“Perhaps the best thing for the princess would have been to fall in love.  But how a princess who had no gravity could fall into anything is a difficulty--perhaps the difficulty.” -George MacDonald, The Light Princess - Haruhi Suzumiya was walking on air. Itsuki could tell by the way she glided into the clubroom, sailing like a paper airplane – or a balloon with an inflated ego to match.

...Yeah that’s as far as I got with this.  This was meant to be a “White Day” story, which is Japan’s “answer holiday” to Valentine’s Day, where guys reciprocate by giving gifts to the girls who gave them chocolates.  I always wondered how the boys actually responded in-universe, and I imagine Itsuki secretly stressing out a lot about taking care to not upstage Kyon, but at the same time wanting to sincerely express his genuine appreciation and feelings towards Haruhi - whatever they may be.  In the end, he settles on a copy of “The Light Princess” by George MacDonald, which I highly recommend reading since it reminds me so much of this pair, and in general is such a fun and snappy “tongue-in-cheek” take on the fairytale genre. Sora in Wonderland

But wait- this one was a bit different from all its brothers and sisters.  For one thing, it was wearing a fancy waistcoat with pockets- and sleeves that were far too long for it.  As soon as it passed by her head, it stopped and slowly turned its head around to stare directly at her with its huge circular yellow eyes.  Sora stared vacantly back for a full five seconds before the information registered in her brain and she suddenly yelled, “Hey!”, and sat bolt upright.  The Heartless panicked upon hearing her voice and fled at top speed across the white sands, headed towards an opening in the rocks; Sora jumped down off her perch and immediately chased after it, no longer caring about the heat.  The Heartless hastily disappeared inside the cave, and Sora soon followed after, determined to catch the freaky little thing and ask it some questions, like what it was doing on the island at this time, and where on earth did it get a waistcoat.

OKAY SO I TOTALLY FORGOT THIS WAS A THING but apparently I tried to write a Kingdom Hearts parody of “Alice in Wonderland” lmao.  I’ve never actually played the games (aside from half of CoM), but it was probably inspired by a crossover art my friend drew? ^^; Also Sora is a girl in this bc that’s my headcanon and I’m sticking to it. XP *shot* Note: The following fics are all Pokémon-related so I’ll just be listing them in roughly chronological order (from most recent to ancient, although they’re all pretty old at this point). Stranger

The elder slowly rose to his feet, gazing at the boy, the champion, the stranger.  “In all this time, why didn’t you come back?  You could have seen for yourself how she was.” Lance wanted to yell something defiant, like a child.  But he wasn’t a child.  Children were forgiven for their mistakes.  And he didn’t want to be forgiven. The professor’s ancient hand came to rest on the boy’s shoulder.  “It’s the way this town works.  We don’t talk about things that happen outside our own world.  Maybe it was too long ago – too late for you to understand.” Lance didn’t say anything. “At least talk to Delia.  She’s been wanting to see you.” “Sorry.  It’s too late.” “You’re a bastard.” “I know.”

So this looks to be among the last things I’d written before taking a long break from fanfiction circa... 2007, jeeze.  Over 10 years, huh.  But, I think it speaks a certain amount of maturity that it’s the piece I liked most upon rediscovering.  It’s based on an idea I once had that Lance was (unknowingly) Gary Oak’s father, and he was friends/rivals with Ash’s father, who originally won the title of Champion but relinquished it so he could be with his “wife” and kid (or rather, then-pregnant teenage girlfriend).  *Something* happened though (I forget what I had in mind) and he ended up dying, leaving Lance bitter and depressed so he refused to return to Pallet Town because of too many painful memories.  (Though he *cough* “comforted” their other female childhood friend for one night of drunken grief before he left. ;()  What I like most about it honestly is the parallels bw Lance’s relationship with Ash’s dad and their sons’, and that amidst all the angst I enjoyed portraying the earnest energy and optimism of Ketchum(?) senior (”like father like son” after all).  I was definitely inspired by Mitsuki’s father in Full Moon wo Sagashite/Maes Hughes from Fullmetal Alchemist by making him a total “dork dad” who’d brag about his (illegitimate) family on national TV during the championship tournament lol.

Ihavenoidea

Either way, I get the feeling this really wasn’t what I had in mind when I made my decision to quit training.  I mean that in an intuitive sort of way.  Like, sometimes I feel as if I’m not meant to be here, like my life should have ended up differently someplace else.  Perhaps this is just one of those weird inconsistencies I told you about.  Perhaps not.  Even after all that’s happened to me recently, I still can’t really be sure about it.

...No seriously, I have no idea where I was going with this.  As far as I can tell it’s written from the POV of Gary Oak, whom I’ve always had a lot of... “complicated” feelings towards.  It probably has something to do with another concept I’ll discuss next, although for some reason it sounds like I was going for some sort of AU? *shrug* By contrast to the above, it reads like a whiny teenager complaining about his life - which makes me cringe but is probably an accurate portrayal of who I was at the time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This one was actually dated a little after the previous, so my best guess is it was some kind of vent rant where I would “give up” writing/creating and “childish” ideals for a while, as I was wont to do - but I still always come back to it somehow... RainbowMolly

Molly stepped out from the car and onto the dusty road, her heart beating wildly.  She could hardly believe she was actually here, of all places. The ride had been long and mind-numbing with anticipation, and now that they’d finally arrived at the destination, it all felt somewhat surreal to her. A small bear clambered out from the vehicle, joining her as she stopped to take in the rustic view that met her bright blue eyes.  She smiled and picked up her Teddiursa, cuddling its warm, fuzzy body close to her own. Her gaze traveled down the road which stretched in both directions, houses lining up against its margins. She followed it with her eyes towards a hill in the distance, on top of which sat what looked like a quaint little farmhouse with a windmill, turning in the summer breeze.  She breathed in the country air, catching whiff of a faint salt smell from an ocean in the distance. So this was Pallet Town.

...Why I didn’t actually name the file “Chasing Rainbows” - which was the title I had planned for this - I don’t know.  This dates back to an old idea I had where I believed Molly Hale from the third Pokémon movie was secretly the true “God” of the Pokémon world - in the sense that the entire universe was an unknowing fantasy of her own creation, similar to Haruhi Suzumiya (ok fine this was totally a crossover/rip-off of the same concept so sue me OTL).  In a place where children never seem to grow up and can go on grand fantastical adventures forever, Gary always struck me as an anomaly who willingly *chose* to forego such a life to pursue more “adult” interests by becoming a researcher.  So I saw him as filling the role of “Kyon” - the cynical narrator who was destined to ground “God” and bring her back down to earth, but at the same time be won over by her innocence and charm and learn to appreciate “kids’ stuff” again.  However, the Legendaries were actually aware of the power Molly holds, and so saw Gary as a threat to their very being - as by “waking” the dreamer and having her face reality meant erasing their kinds’ entire existence.  As the “apocalypse” nearly occurred in the third film, Mew and Celebi took on human disguises (in the form of May and Max respectively) to investigate Ash, who was able to calm Molly and “save” the world by “perpetuating” the delusion (and whom Molly totally has a crush on btw *shot*).  So it’s a bit of a love triangle lol, with Mew and Celebi (*cough* an alien and a time traveler, get it? *shot*) acting as mediators/interference.  (Although Mew might’ve secretly shipped Gary and Molly herself. ;O)

Betrayal

And these blades, these damned scythes that attached themselves to my arms when I was born, a curse upon me since birth, though it had not been apparent up until now.  They were covered with blood, the vital crimson liquid that flows through our bodies, now dripping down the steel surface in a webbed pattern, drops beginning to splatter the pure, emerald grass below.  The arm felt heavy and weak as I tried to lift it, as if it did not belong to me, but that was only a wishful thought.  I gazed calmly at it, inspecting the intricate designs the flow of the substance had created, as if it were an abstract piece of artwork. Tentatively, a pink tongue rolled out and caught a small droplet of it just before it fell from the sharp edge, just to convince myself that it was real.  The semi-sweet, metallic taste confirmed this.  I had indeed taken these men’s lives, just as I had taken hers.

So I remember this was written from the POV of a Scyther who seemingly went on a murderous rampage.  I only know that I wanted to give him an “Edward Scissorhands”-like story, since the idea of having such sharp objects attached to one’s limbs so that one could never directly “touch” another without being a danger is pretty tragic.  I suspect “her” was someone (a human?) he cared about but killed by accident, and after that he was only seen as a symbol of power/treated as a tool to incite fear before eventually rebelling against his “master”... Roses

“If you love someone, you should give them something that’s yours. That shows how much you care for them.” In the darkness, I pictured his smiling face, explaining to me as he wrapped a present for his girlfriend. His blue eyes were shining with a sort of spirit unfamiliar to me; I guessed, a feeling of love.

Another “dark” take on a Pokémon’s biology (I really liked writing explorations of those back then lol), this time of Roselia.  The idea was that a Roselia was so in love with her trainer that she would do anything for him - including allow him to cut off her arms so he could give them to his girlfriend.  I actually ended up turning it into a poem at one point:

Love is like a rose they say, And affection leads to grief they warned. For in the end love betrays, Its Beauty maimed by a poisoned thorn. You gave me pure water with a smile. Your cheerful face became my sun. I offered up my blood to you, And in return demanded none. Chop off my wrists, and tie them together. I’ll gladly bleed myself to death. In order to give you that which I hold most dear. My dear, my dear, Won’t you accept this bouquet? You take it, smiling warily. A blush creeps onto your face. And in those eyes I can see A garden of roses stretched out, Composing a wondrous place. Then you bound my hands in lace, And brought them to the girl next door. You presented them to her with grace. … My blood continued to pour.

Fanfic

She smiled at me, although something about her expression indicated something wasn't quite right.  I watched as she glanced over towards the west, her gaze lingering momentarily on the setting sun.  The glowing, orange sphere was slowly sinking behind the distant mountains, peaks cloaked in a pale, lavender haze illuminated by flickering beams of gold and scarlet cast across the horizon.

More accurately, I found this buried in a “catch-all” file where I had several (mostly finished) fics saved.  This was meant to be from the POV of an Eevee who had just evolved - supposedly into an Espeon due to happiness and bond with her trainer, which is what both wanted.  However, since it took place at sunset, she didn’t realize she had become an Umbreon instead, and her trainer ended up abandoning her for it. ;( It was a warm

Children’s shrieks and laughter echoed across the park as they flocked towards each other, and soon were chasing one another round the playground, weaving in and out between the swings as they partook in an innocent game of Tag.  One child was It; she was trying desperately to catch one of her friends so that they would take over the job instead.  Then it would be her turn to run away, for none of them wished to play the loathsome role of It.  Or was it because they feared being tainted by the person’s touch?  It must have been one of the two, for while she would struggle to reach them, catch hold of them, they would only flee, thoroughly enjoying the fact that they were vexing her.  Twice she nearly caught one.  Her fingertips were almost within reach of one of the other girls’ dresses, whose russet tresses were flowing wildly from the rush of movement and shining with golden highlights as the rays of the sun struck individual strands.  The target shrieked and shook her head, whisking her skirt free in time to escape capture, laughing with glee at the sight of the girl left behind, miserable and alone. 

Yeah I totally just went with the default beginning of the first sentence lol.  I guess this comes full circle with the first Kagepro fic I mentioned (although I’m not even sure I was aware back then that the Japanese version of the game literally called “It” a “demon”, which is even more fitting).  I believe this was part of a Pokémon series I was writing involving a creepy little girl and Mewtwo who would bring about the end of the world or something like that, but generally I guess I was just going for a “Catcher in the Rye” feel. *shrug* Golden Lights

The pale, rosy fingers of dawn were filtering in through the Granite Cave entrance, basking a small area near the opening in pinkish illumination.  Just out of reach of its expanse sat little Mika, huddled in the gloom of the shadows, watching the light creep steadily towards her as the glowing ball of fire rose slowly towards the East.  She knew about the Light that came from Outside.  There were plenty other small apertures broken into the cavern walls and ceiling that allowed some thin streams of gold brilliance to trickle through.  She had always done well to avoid them.  The brightness was like poison to her skin.  But they weren’t the Lights she’d had described to her by the old Crobat that always resided now deeper within the underground chambers, dozing now, most likely.  He wouldn’t awaken until night came round, and she did not wish to rouse him and perhaps disturb him from a pleasant dream.  She was very wise about things like that, being the young child that she was.  Still, she would have liked to hear a story to comfort her just then.

Last one I could find, about a Sableye who, like Icarus, literally “flew too close to the sun”.  In this interpretation I imagined that Sableye were creatures who could not stand sunlight at all, as it would cause their skin to burn.  But Mika (pronounced like “Mica”) always dreamed of going outside to see the “Light” anyway.  She was eventually tempted by Mew to leave the cavern under her angelic PROTECTion and step into the Light, who was acting as Ho-Oh’s messenger to “recruit” souls to “live eternal as an element of Ho-Oh’s Guarding Flame“, as the PROTECT faded and a “holy fire” began to spread.  I guess I was going for a Biblical/”Rapture”-esque reference.  (...Man I sure was obsessed with the endtimes as a kid. *shot*)

[obsidianarchives]

Black Woman Creator: Britteney Black Rose Kapri

Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a poet, teaching artist, petty enthusiast, and Slytherin from Chicago. Currently, she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. She is a staff member for Black Nerd Problems and Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat. Her first chapbook titled “Winona and Winthrop” was published in June of 2014 through New School Poetics. She has also been published in the Breakbeat Poets volume One & Two, Poetry Magazine, Vinyl, Day One, Seven Scribes, The Offing, Kinfolks Quarterly and her number on many dive bar bathroom walls. She is a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient. You can probably find her on twitter talking shit about all the things you love, in a classroom talking shit about your kids, or at a barstool just talking shit. Her forthcoming book Black Queer Hoe is set to be released September 4th, 2018. We spoke to Britteney about her book and being an artist.

Black Girls Create: What do you create?

My biggest export is poetry. But I’m a playwright, essayist, a writer in general. I’m also dabbling in songwriting.

BGC: What made you start writing?

The short version of the story is that in 2nd grade I stopped speaking, basically because I was bored. Even though I had perfectly fine test scores, they put me in a special needs class where the instructors there never asked me to talk. They just had me write and write and write and I bonded with them. I ended up joining an after-school program they created called Kuumba Lynx, which is now a grassroots organization. I haven't stopped writing since I was eight years old.

What was the impetus for writing Black Queer Hoe?

I spent the past six years really focusing on myself as an educator, I’m a teaching artist at Young Chicago Authors, and I didn’t really spend enough time working on myself as an artist. I would write for shows or for something specific but not for myself or to better my craft. I read a lot and all of my friends are putting out books that I think are great, but I just really wasn’t on my shit. [YCA Artistic Director] Kevin Coval asked me what do I want out of my artist career? I always saw myself with a book and I put my chapbook out in 2014.

But a lot of people who engage with me on social media kept asking for a coffee table book of my tweets, and so that was the catalyst for this book. I looked at what tweets or social media posts people are often engaging with and how to get that to a larger platform. So most of the poems in the book started off as tweets or Facebook posts. But really, it’s that I don’t think you can be a quality educator if you’re not actually engaging in what you’re educating. So how am I teaching students to be artists and writers if I’m only writing for a gig or a slam? This was really just to get my shit back on track.

BGC: What are some of the themes that come up in Black Queer Hoe?

"I’m a Black woman, I’m a sexually liberated woman, I am a queer woman, and if you can’t rock with all of that, then you’re not rocking with me."

Intersectionality and sexuality. As a Black woman, you’re often asked to put aside parts of you for someone else’s liberation. White women want this from you, Black men from this from you. No one wants anything from queer folks except for silence. The theme in the book is that all three of these things are me. I’m a Black woman, I’m a sexually liberated woman, I am a queer woman, and if you can’t rock with all of that, then you’re not rocking with me. The book was really to talk about those things in what I consider a humorous and vulgar way because I think women are hilarious and vulgar. And I’m not a lady. Lady shit is boring. I consider myself to be a funny bitch and I wanted to write a funny bitch book and that’s what I did.

BGC: Why do you create?

Because everything around me is so chaotic. Even though I’m very well spoken and articulate and a scholarly person, sometimes I can’t get out what I want to get out unless I’m creating, whether that’s writing or painting or drawing. Sometimes something can only be expressed in a strange or abstract or different way than what is expected.

I think everyone is a creative. Some of us just embrace it more. If you’re an accountant and you just run numbers that’s cool, but if you’re trying to get a new client you have to have some showmanship, you have to sell yourself. Anytime you sell yourself in whatever business, you’re doing it as a creative. When you dress yourself, when you style yourself, when you present yourself, the way you talk, it’s all done through this creative lens, though not everybody embraces it the way poets or playwrights or muralists do.

BGC: Who is your audience?

My audience is hoodrats who went to college but don’t necessarily know why they went to college, outside of their mama saying “you either going to college or getting a job.” I’ve always been a scholarly person, I’ve always done well in school, and I love school but I also grew up in the hood. The hood is exactly who I am, it’s where I came from. Whether people can see that or not when they talk to me doesn’t matter. My roots are here and my poems are for scholars that still know what it’s like to play basketball with a milk carton or have to be in before the street lights go on. Or really even though you had an AC in our house you put a fan in the window because you couldn’t afford to turn on the AC in your house. My poems are for people like that.

BGC: Who inspires you?

Samantha Irby, who is probably my number one inspiration right now. She’s an essayist. In real life I’m vulgar and I put a lot of stock in humor but my writing up until this point really wasn’t that way. It was always straightforward but I leaned on ideas of what poetry was, and Samantha Irby was like you can be a badass writer and talk about gross shit, raw shit, exactly how you talk to your homies in a bar. And when I read Meaty I was like wow, I don’t have to sound like these other people, I can sound like me and it is a poem. If I write it and say it’s a poem, it’s a poem. Whether you see a poem in it or not, that’s up to you I don’t care, especially if you already bought the book.

I’m also inspired by Patricia Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jamila Woods, Joseph Chilliams. I’m currently being inspired by two of my students right now, who are inspired by me but they’re just so much better than I was at their age. Ari Appleberry and Kennedy Harris, both from Brooks College Prep. It’s been crazy to watch their growth, but as young Black writers they’re just so dope to only be seventeen and eighteen and it makes me feel so good to see their writing and to see them embracing all of these things that it took me until I was in my late 20s to embrace.

"Because everyone is always creating our image for us."

BGC: Why is it important as a Black person to create?

Because everyone is always creating our image for us. If you leave the states people have this idea of what Black is, and particularly what Chicago Black is, and if we are not telling our stories, our stories will be told without us. It’s the same reason boxer braids exist. Extensions instead of tracks. All these ways people double talk and double speak. Erase our faces but keep our shit. If we’re not creating, then what’s being created around us is just garbage. So you have to.

BGC: How do you balance creating with the rest of your life?

I don’t. I either go super into work mode or super into writing mode. I also have the inability to turn down projects so I take on a bunch of shit and am up at like 3am finishing a book because I know I have 17 meetings the next day and somebody else wants me to mentor them so I’m doing that. I get everything done all at the expense of my health. Balance is not my forte, I’m working on it. But I also have a really strong circle of folks around me who tell me when I need to chill out — and that’s really where my balance comes from, the folks in my life telling me “you’re burning yourself out and you’re not being the best that you can be at any of these things because your spread yourself thin between all of these things.“

BGC: Any advice for young creators/ones just starting?

There is no one path in which this happens. You can go through slam, publishing, journals, open mics, TV, YouTube. Whatever it is, there is no one path to success and if one person takes a path and it works for them and not for you that’s okay. If a door closes, you climb through the window. You dig under and go over and whatever it takes to get there, you get there. At the same time you can’t be creating if you’re not consuming what’s around you. If you’re only ever listening to yourself you’re not going to get any place. You have to be engaging in the art around you so you know where the movement’s going, what people are listening to, what people are looking for. Are you writing the exact same poem that this person is writing, and if so, is yours better? You have to engage in other folks’ art or you’re not going to get any place.

BGC: Any future projects coming up?

Black Queer Hoe comes out September 4th. I am in the very budding stages of an anthology, probably with Haymarket, but can’t give too many details about that. I’ve been sort of joking that I might want to try to get involved with stand up of some sort, but I don’t really know how outside of just roasting folks. I don’t know how to craft a joke that has a punchline unless the punchline is somebody. So if people want to sit in a room where I just talk shit about them, that I can do. But I don’t know if I can create a storyline the way comedians do, that shit’s hard, it’s a really dope skill. But I want to get involved with that as well as songwriting. I want to branch out what I’m known for as a writer.

[personalcoachingcenter]

Leadership Coaching - Being Empowered vs. Limited

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/leadership-coaching-being-empowered-vs-limited/

Leadership Coaching - Being Empowered vs. Limited

A Coaching Power Tool By Debora Hofmann, Leadership Coach

At the end of last year, our family had to move back from Beijing, China to Frankfurt, Germany. That meant a move across continents in the middle of a pandemic that neither was planned nor wanted by us. It was a huge challenge for me to walk alongside our kids through these tough months following the move, helping them through their emotional ups and many downs. It also meant that we had to face many more months of lockdown, as Germany was finding it much more difficult than China to gain control over the virus.

Here are a few of my thoughts from that time:

I don’t want to be here.

I don’t want to be the stupid mum that is stuck at home having to care for the kids and everyone is just assuming that I’ll keep doing this while business travelers don’t even need to quarantine or need to have negative tests results for staying in a hotel.

The measurements are not enough/don’t make any sense.

Germany has no idea how to bring this virus under control.

I don’t have enough time for anything important to me right now.

It will stay like this forever.

School staff is stupid and they are not able to organize the easiest things.

It was in this very challenging time that I tried to write my research paper on limiting beliefs for ICA and there were a couple of times when my research was speaking directly into my situation. For me, the big realization was: These thoughts are LIMITING to me, not so much because they were untrue or because there is no evidence for them. They are limiting to me because they are NOT HELPING me to move forward or making it any easier to find my way. Since realizing this, it almost became a habit to try to find new perspectives in my thoughts that are helpful and empowering for me.

Here are a few thoughts, perspectives, and action steps that have helped me:

I forbid myself to complain about the measurements. It felt like wasted energy because I realized that I couldn’t do anything about it anyways. Conversations were sometimes interesting because some people didn’t have anything else to talk about. But I started to like the challenge there.

I focused on the stuff that was in my zone of influence, stuff that I was able to change or at least do something about it.

I searched and looked for the benefits of this time like a lot of flexibility, hardly any social obligations, having an unbelievable amount of time with my 13-year-old son, establishing good habits like regular running.

When I got frustrated with my kids’ school, I tried to decide whether it was better to contact someone from school and try to change it there, or if it was a chance to teach my kids to cope with challenging teachers and situations.

For me, the difference between a limiting and an empowered mindset became very obvious.

Empowered vs. Limited Explanations

“Limited”:

Restricted in size, amount, or extent; few, small, or short (Oxford Languages)

“Empowered”:

Give (someone) the authority or power to do something (Oxford Languages)

Both definitions sound like someone else is in charge of our life. And that was very true for me. I did feel like I was the victim of a really big company that wasn’t willing to find a way for us to stay in China. I was the victim of a worldwide pandemic. I and the kids were the victims of overstrained teachers and we were victims of a government that had no idea what to do. I blamed people and situations for my misery and that gave them a lot of power over me. I allowed them to limit me in what I saw and what I felt was possible for me to do. And yes, they did limit me in many ways. But the more I was focusing on these limitations the smaller I felt.

The definition of “empowered” sounds actually like someone is giving someone else power.   Having a look at the use over time graphic (Google Books Ngram Viewer 2021), we can see that it was used about 100 years ago much more often than today, which reflects the idea that certain groups were limited and restricted in their rights. Someone else had to give them rights and “empower” them to do things.

In Coaching, clients are seen as resourceful and capable and that they don’t need someone else to empower them. They need to do this for themselves. Our job as Coaches is to support them in this process.

If they do feel limited and not in charge of their life, which shows up in their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, they can change this perspective. They can stand up and give themselves the authority to do something. Or, as the unbelievable successful Coach Marie Forleo says: “The power isn’t out there, it’s in you.” (Forleo 2019)

My coaching niche is female leaders between 25-40 years. To identify someone as a leader, this woman doesn’t have to hold a certain position in an organization. Instead, I follow Brené Brown: “I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who dares to develop that potential.” (Brown 2018)

With that definition in mind, I could also say: My coaching niche is aspiring female leaders.

Brown’s definition lets us think of “empowered” women that don’t wait for someone else to give them a certain position so that they can execute the ideas that they have. Instead, they take what they have and try to use it in the best possible way.

Women are still underrepresented in the workplace, especially when it comes to senior and executive positions. This makes it much harder for them to use their voices even before they have any sort of official leadership position. They easily fall into a limiting perspective about their possibilities. Experiencing discrimination because of their sex or their age (“oh my gosh, she might get pregnant in two years”) can be a tough challenge to feel empowered in these circumstances.

Typical sentences from a limited perspective, in this case, might be:

“I cannot make a difference anyway.”

“They’ll never see what I am doing.”

“They don’t want women to climb the latter anyways.”

“I have to wait till I get promoted.”

“I have to stay in this company for at least two years because anything else will look bad on my CV.”

Questions that I could ask while coaching them might be:

“What would the most empowered version of you do in this situation?”

“If the CEO of your company would come to you tomorrow morning and say: Hey, you’ve got permission to change anything that you find necessary to move this company forward, what would you do?”

“If you think about yourself in five years from now, what do you need to give yourself permission to do, so that you keep developing and growing?”

Going One Level Deeper:

Supporting aspiring female leaders to find a more empowering perspective for their current situation is only the first step. As I am coaching through the lens of storytelling we are working on their leadership story here. This is a fantastic place to start.

BUT what they will have to do at some point is to go deeper and ask about their purpose in life or more specific about their life story.

They might start to think about questions like:

What am I here for?

What bigger life story is calling me?

Whom do I want to serve? For whom do I want to make a difference?

When they are asking deep enough and are willing to listen long enough and find the first little answers to these really important questions, they’ll find their first few steps to bring this life story into reality, they will feel more empowered than ever before.

The Nagoski twins talk about connecting with your “something larger”. Science shows that this “something lager” might typically arise out of three areas:

Pursuit and achievement of ambitious goals that leave a legacy (“finding a cure for HIV”)

Service to the divine or other spiritual calling (“glorifying God with my words, thoughts, and deeds”)

Loving, emotionally intimate connection with others (“raising my kids so they know they’re loved, no matter what”)

While I deeply love the idea that clients in coaching are resourceful and capable and can achieve almost anything, this can also become a dangerous perspective to have.

Probably rooted in me being the 2nd child in a lovely row of six, probably fed in my years of studying sociology, I always think in systems. Clients always exist in systems as well, they are not buzzing around in orbit without any connection to the earth.

And those systems are unfair. Although the use of the word “empowered” might have decreased over the last century we still have many marginalized and underrepresented groups in our societies and organizations. People of Colour, Immigrants, the LGBTI+ community, people with disabilities, and yes, Women in general. These groups are limited. They are limited by people acting in certain systems and doing everything to keep these systems stable. And this needs recognition in coaching as much as in therapy if we don’t want to run the risk of retraumatizing them (Varanasi 2021).

In my opinion, we as coaches need to live up to this tension: Yes, we can help our clients to find more empowering perspectives about themselves and the situations they find themselves in. We can support them in overcoming obstacles from the outside and fears within them. But we also need to address that the systems might be rigged when they try to change something and get stuck again and again. And that the fight to overcome a whole system might not be worth the sacrifice of their mental and physical health.

I am deeply grateful for the change in perspective that I was able to take over the last couple of months and I am surprised by how I moved through this last year. I had no idea how resourceful and capable I am. Noticing the deep shift in myself is something fulfilling and I feel more empowered than ever before. I hope that I can use this experience to inspire lots of aspiring female leaders to shift their perspective as well, leave their limiting thoughts behind, find empowerment within themselves and connect to their “something larger”.

References

Brown, Brené: Dare to Lead. Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

Forleo, Marie: Everything is figureoutable

Google Books Ngram Viewer: Empowered

Nagoski, Emily & Amelia: Burnout. Solve Your Stress Cycle

OxfordLanguages: https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

Varanasi, Anuradha: Decolonizing Therapy. Why an Apolitical Mental Health System Doesn’t Work https://www.rewire.org/decolonizing-therapy-mental-health/

Original source: https://coachcampus.com/coach-portfolios/power-tools/empowered-vs-limited/