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ccsthemovie2 · 3 years

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(I think it's a word over 500, but:)

"Speaking of Tsukishiro, how's he doing?", Eriol asks. Frying pan to fire to volcano.

"He's good," Touya says quickly, before Sakura can say anything. Yukito is not even in the ballpark of "good". Yesterday he called Touya and begged him to bike over and said it was important and when Touya showed up he was asleep, and stayed fast asleep right through to the next morning. He keeps trying to make appointments with doctors, and then falling asleep before he can call, or, when Touya calls for him, before he can make it out the door. Privately, Touya isn't sure how much good a doctor can do for him, but anything has to be better than this, right?

"Really? I'm glad to hear it." Ugh, how much has Sakura told him. Not that she doesn't have a right to talk to her friends, but, come on, would it kill her to least keep it between her and Tomoyo and the funny looking cat.

He's good, that's an obvious lie. Ruby has said Yukito could barely stand upright at school. Every inch of Touya Kinomoto is packed full of magic. Sooner or later, Eriol figures, either Sakura will be powerful enough to sustain him, or Yue will have to get over himself and just eat already. Touya can't actually do anything with his magic, so it's not like Yue, even weak as he is, will have to face much of a struggle to take it. (Aside from competition with Ruby, of course. There's something to that, right, articles and studies about animals being healthier if they need a bit of careful planning to get their food? Yes, so this works out nicely.)

Or maybe- oh, that's probably it. Yue's on to him, isn't he? He's just being stubborn as usual, figuring sooner or later Clow will appear via Eriol and save him. He can imagine how surprised, overjoyed, grateful Yue would be, if Eriol showed up and saved his life. He can imagine Yue's head resting on his neck as clearly as if he had kept Yue well-fed with magic a thousand times in his lifetime. It would be nice, in the short run, but it wouldn't be right, no. Clow is dead, and Yue needs to learn to live with that. If he knows what's good for him, he will take responsibility for his own life, and if he doesn't...

Ahh, well, maybe it's Clow's old sentimentality, maybe Eriol is just warming up to Sakura's moon guardian all on his own, but he can't bring himself around to the idea of letting Yue just die. He'd save him, if it came down to it. But, he tells himself sternly, only as an absolute last resort. He's just worrying because he misses Yue and wants to get to know him better all at once in that past-and-future way- it's worth a visit, soon. Yes, a nice little visit, and Yue will never even have to know it happened. Just to check in.

(sorry the formatting got weird when i copypasted lol!)

hiiii thanks for the ask!!!

if we talk about this convo we need to back up and talk about how it got here. this should give you some idea of how badly this needs to be under a cut for length lol.

so it all starts with the bit about how someone falling and being caught is something that happens a lot in ccs. how with eriol, it's purposeful, and with fujitaka (and i misremembered it but since found out she fell *on* him and not *caught* by him, which lolol i hope he broke a bone, but also its fine the fic's already marked canon divergent, or maybe the story gets misremembered, whatever, in any case), it's an echo of clowriol's intentional artificial-trustbuild-dangersaves but without the magic or purpose to back it up (just like fujitaka himself!), but it's a situation he quickly makes favorable to him, because it may be a blank slate but it's made of the same material.

this whole convo was part of one of the very first chunks written, but everything was going to go in a very different direction at first. (there's a lot of Cut Content from this fic, some that i just didn't like, some that wasn't connectable with the rest of the fic after it took the shape it took but might pop up somewhere else one day idk). in this particular bit i cut the later half of the conversation because i really didn't like what i'd written, but then even though the direction of the story changed the conversation was still going so it had to bounce somewhere else, so it bounced to yukito. here we are answering your ask 2 paragraphs in!

yukito, iirc in the anime, did catch her from a fall, (in the manga, which made way more sense for why she had to change her clothes and rest so much, he saved her from drowning, again iirc because who can trust a memory) and at a point where eriol still has some investment in making yuekito/sakura (ewwwww) happen, he's going to try and draw on that symbolism to nudge her in that direction, right?

so all this said, SPEAKING of yuekito. how are they doing.

bad, obviously. touya's freaking out. i imagine that part of what's stopping yukito from seeing a doctor is yue, though- he knows it wont help, and i dont think yukito has, like, person insides that will stand up to medical tests, and yue would pick up on yukito like, not wanting to be outed to the doctor as a magic construct because he, like, doesnt actually have a real heart that pulses, just a repeating heartbeat sound. doesn't for real have blood etc to test, just records of blood type (for personality reasons).

and also touya's a very like keep-ur-problems-not-everybodys-business type so hes like imagining sakura venting her fears to this weirdo and getting pissed off. but that didnt actually happen, eriol knew all on his own lolol. touya you have to say something nice should happen to sakura to make up for wrongly suspecting her now

and this bit on eriol's end is all wrong information and inaccurate conclusions and i was really worried ppl would take it at face value but i hope nobody did. in ccs we get moments where eriol wants sakura to take power, or to learn that power can be taken- his final battle with her, for example, where the answer to his light and dark puzzle is to use kero and yue's power, except that's not something she would ever Want to do or would even Occur to her to try. the power is gifted to her by kero and yue (and syaoran!) because they love her.

same concept, here- the answer to the 'yue is dying' puzzle is to eat touya's power, and he can't imagine the real reason why he won't just do that, and when he thinks about it too long it goes right to his ego- yue looovvvvesss clow, and by extension me. he wants meeeeeee to save him. he wants to neck kissy MY magic soo sooooo bad. but yue isn't considering any of that at all. he's thinking about yukito and what touya means to yukito and why that would make yukito hesitate to reach out, and that no way in hell will he just ambush his other self's crush down a dark alley and take his magic, even to save both their lives. he's a lot more selfless than clow and eriol ever realize. maybe- this is just a half formed thought right now, i dont know if im like certain about it, but- maybe they feel his devotion to clow was a form of selfishness, that he Wanted Love as a thing he could hold and own, whereas pretty much everybody else who meets him goes like YOU SELFLESS MAN YOU CANT JUST DIE FOR PPL YOU CARE ABOUT YOU GOTTA TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF TOOOO

and there’s also that bit of teacherliness intrinsic to the three of them again: im doing this to teach him a lesson. im letting ruby do her thing without telling her what’s going on to help and encourage yue, etc.

anyway, that (in terms of fic weaving itself into canon) solidifies his decision to do uhmmmm a thing that creeps me out real bad in the anime (knocking yue out to have a moment with him, and oh, ding, there's another 'you fell but i caught you' moment!). eriol loves this manner of hanging out with people, you see it later in this fic, even:

It's important to say what's in your heart to the people you want to say it to, even if you have to make sure the other person never hears it. It's important for your own emotional freedom.

he loves to spend time with people exclusively on his terms, to the point where the other party never even knew he was there, because he knocked them out, or because he was just staring creepily at the outside of sakura's house while she did homework, etc etc etc.

tldr: it's all connected, aaaaaaaaa

#ask

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corpsentry · 4 years

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behind the taylor swift gundam was in fact another, smaller gundam: a brief inquiry into the events of june 2020

so back in june this year june and i got together and we made this motherfucker of a story with this motherfucker of a thread to keep track of it all. but you already know that! and i’ve already got one foot and three elbows in my grave, so i’ll spare you the long-winded stuff. you wanna know how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks? i’ll tell you how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks-

-by linking you guys to copies of my planning documents because i feel like those words speak louder than any words i can offer in the present day. these are long documents. but they are also historical artifacts. very interesting. very weird. very, uh, full of cussing. so anyway, here’s

BIG DADDY: THE ORIGINAL PLANNING DOCUMENT

for those, like me, who have no motivation left in life to do anything and rely on summaries from others to acquire new knowledge, it all started with a single line.

prince of a fallen kingdom atsumu tries to kill hinata but falls in love with him instead

june, april something, 2020

with that in mind i tested the concept out with a few paragraphs of text, which you can find at the bottom of the Big Daddy document in the graveyard segment, accidentally sold my soul to the image of hinata with epaulettes, and then worked backwards, structuring an entire plot around two images:

a) hinata getting the shit beat out of him, with snark b) hinata and atsumu dancing in an empty ballroom under the stars

if you want a betrayal, you have to have something worth losing. if you want to fall in love with someone you don’t know, you have to meet them. if you have to meet them, there has to be a reason for that meeting, and so somewhere in between atsumu became a sword instructor and hinata the prince with daddy issues. june and i used this method of glancing anxiously over your shoulder to see what you’d missed to fill out the blanks in the story, after which i tacked up a bunch of post-its, typed out the plot, consulted june, typed out the plot again, and then broke the characters down into a bunch of questions, like ‘what do they want?’ and ‘what do they have?’ and ‘what are they afraid of?’

with the plot more or less ironed out, i decided it was time to start writing, and then i decided that i was actually too scared to start writing after all, so instead i set a couple of timers using classroomtimers.com (15-20 minutes long) and i sat down and i wrote about the world that hinata and atsumu inhabited.

each warm-up was 300-500 words long, and for the first few days, i’d write one before getting into writing the story proper. later these evolved into simply picking a scene from the story and launching straight into it, which became useful for opening those scenes later when i got to them organically.

then i got lazy! so i stopped. but these shitty little exercises were really useful for me because, unfettered by plot, convention, or any kind of tradition hovering over my shoulder, i was able to fuck around loosely enough to realize what i wanted this story to be. it was a very contrived kind of trial-and-error, an exploration of the characters, the story, but most importantly, the tone.

RESEARCH, PLANNING, AND VICTORIAN BOUGIE FASHION

this is a loose map of the castle and Important Locations within it, which i drew up at the start so i could keep track of where everything was and how i could get my characters from point A to point B. i wanted the story to have Some kind of internal logic, you know, even if that logic amounted to ‘a compass would function normally in this world whereas kageyama tobio would not’.

99% of my planning and organizing within those five weeks took place in this lovely dotted cat journal which my sister gave me for my birthday and i repurposed into a metaphorical Diary of Suffering while working on juno. i used it for everything from keeping track of narrative threads to clothing consistency checks, but the main purpose was this: each day at about 10 pm i’d crack open the cat book to a fresh page, stamp the date and the day of suffering at the top, and then write down a list of things i wanted to write, address, or fix today. then i’d sit at my laptop and write like a madman until about 7 in the morning. with breaks, of course, for sitting in the bathroom and staring at the wall and sitting in the kitchen and staring at the wall, but mostly i was writing. and complaining about writing. you were there, you probably remember that.

anyway, here are some pages from the cat book.

aside from the fact that my handwriting is complete shit, you can see that i made zero effort for any of this to be presentable. it was mainly a way for me to keep track of my thoughts because i have the attention span of an ikea wardrobe and tend to forget things as soon as i think of them. the lack of structure also mirrored the way that i went about writing juno. while i did proceed, for the most part, in chronological order, i had a lot of weird and useless revelations during lunch, which by this point was happening around 2 am, and in the 5 minutes before the exhaustion finally hit and carried me down to hell. i changed A Lot. again, to understand exactly how much the story evolved from day one onwards, please consult the big daddy document.

in the meantime, here’s something else.

once june sent over hinata and atsumu’s character designs i sat down like the fucking fool i am and spent 2 hours poring over a document about victorian and other fashion movements of the past so i could assign a noun, adjective, and verb to each element of their outfits. i don’t know why i did this. i certainly could have not, but i attempted to make sense of their ‘fits from a logistical perspective and that went into the cat book too. everything went into the cat book. the cat book is a relic of the past now, stuffed with artifacts such as the birth of oikawa tooru, and also his demise.

MEDIUM DADDY: EDITING, PROOFREADING, AND CREEPY MURDER CATS

i finished writing on june 26th, 2020, approximately a month after i’d first started planning, somewhere around may 27th or 28th. at that point i had about 90,000 words’ worth of story and no sanity left whatsoever, so i took a day-long break to stare at a wall and listen to taylor swift’s enchanted on loop.

and then i made a new document, which you can look at using the link above, and i laid out everything i had to do. i’d discovered a fuck ton of plot inconsistencies and general errors while writing and lying awake in bed at 9 a.m., sleepless in seattle, and now that i was free of the demon egging me towards the first finish line, it was time to Deal with them. i speed-scrolled through the draft, which was 200+ pages compressed into one google doc, because i like to tempt god’s wrath, and fixed up all the plot issues over the course of a few days. this was the fun part.

the actual, hard editing was the extremely un-fun part. i reread the entire thing, paragraph by paragraph, line by damn line, from start to finish, paying especially close attention to awkward phrasing, incomplete dialogue, and moments which had fallen flat in my haste to get on to the next one. this was really fucking terrible. i spent more time lying facedown on the floor than actually editing anything, but after a long time (about a week), that, too was done.

SMALL DADDY: TITLES, SUMMARIES, AND GOOD FUCKING BYES

i spent a good eighty days thinking about the title, though hilariously enough we ended up with something that was a blend of our names. june + elmo = juno, which is, all things considered, pretty perfect, but the process of picking the title was Hell, and i Did Not Come Up With The Title until about 2 hours before posting. you can take a look at the haphazard clusterfuck of my title-selecting process in small daddy, which is linked above.

so the title was a last-minute choice. so was the summary. and the chapter divisions. and actually all the songs in the playlist for juno. the day we dropped juno onto planet earth like a newborn baby pitched out of the sky, i spent an hour hunched over my laptop, cutting my 213 page google doc into chapters based on nothing more than a Vibe. two days before that, i also attempted to voice-act the entirety of juno, an affair which ended at the 20,000 word mark with a sore throat and the kind of exhaustion one typically wants to sleep in a coffin for 23 years to get rid of. so in all honesty, i did very little editing, which is why there are definitely minor typos and/or mistakes hanging out somewhere on that chunky ao3 webpage. but whatever.

my attitude by july 5th (was it july 5th? or 4th? somewhere around there) was basically whatever. anything so i could get finish this damn thing, chuck it out of the window, and never see another google doc until the next century. i’ve been asked a few times how exactly i wrote at a rate of roughly 2000-3000 words per day for four weeks straight, and my answer has always been this: i died. what died, you ask? my soul. my spirit. my Will To Live. i’m a creature of fixations, and juno was my fixation for june. will i ever be able to do this again? would i recommend this experience to anyone? is god real? the answer to all of the above is probably no. juno was a fever dream, and so is my cat book. and so are all the lattes i had. and so was my 9 am to 4 pm sleep schedule.

but what we made is real. the research, oikawa tooru, the 4 am conversations in which i was like ‘how the fuck do i end this’ and june was like ‘jade proposal’ (the proposal was her idea. all rise for twitter user atsuhinas. she is the mastermind behind all of the Inch Resting moments in this story; i just flapped a korok leaf in her direction and made sure the air circulation was working properly) are real as fuck, and looking back, there’s a lot i’d change, but i’m lazy. and college is starting. and anyway, i did write 93,035 words in just under five weeks, four if you don’t count the week of Editing Hell, so i think that’s pretty cool.

thank you for reading this to the end, and for following us on our journey through the enigmatic taylor swift gundam fic which quite literally consumed my entire twitter account for the five weeks i spent working on it. retrospectively speaking i really was butt-obsessed so i am frankly incredibly impressed with everyone around me for putting up with a Husk of a Man for a month. thank you for doing that. thank you for indulging my vague tweeting, and our butterfly dns, and for reading 93 thousand words of gay fanfiction set in a high fantasy world with epaulettes and galettes. on behalf of june, once again, we are incredibly grateful for all your support.

if you have any questions about specific aspects of the writing process, or anything you’d like to know in general with reference to JUNO, feel free to drop me an ask through my tumblr inbox, or through my curiouscat over here. i’m aware i didn’t cover everything, but there’s frankly too much to put in a tumblr post without passing away somewhere around the 56% mark, so let me know what’s on your mind, and i’ll try to answer that to the best of my abilities. but anyway, before i go, here are some

TAKEAWAYS

one: don’t try to write 93,000 words in five weeks. seriously don’t fucking do it you will end up jittery and sleep-deprived and you will leave all your friends on read for a month. pace yourself. set realistic goals. you wrote 2k this week? that’s fantastic. you wrote 4k in a day? you absolute motherfucker. i hope you’re taking a long fucking break tomorrow. your story will not run away from you, but if you run too fast, you will get tired, and then you will pass away.

two: you don’t have to know everything about your story before you start writing. in fact if you have a single camera shot of two characters holding hands under a rose garden awning, i think that’s fucking wonderful. if you look at big daddy, you’ll realize that my initial plot draft, and all the ones following that, are not perfectly aligned with the final version of juno. i improvised over half of the scenes in this motherfucker, and to be completely honest, some of the improvised scenes were the best. fucking oikawa tooru was improvised out of nowhere. he only got written in way later, around chapter 8 or something, because i realized i needed a plot device and a source of information to keep the playing table from toppling over. i Sat Down one day and was like ‘okay, it’s time to write oikawa into the introduction. because he matters now. he didn’t matter last week but now he does, and soon he’s going to be the fulcrum of the entire story, because it’s like that with oikawa tooru’. it’s okay to change your mind halfway. it’s okay to go back and rewrite entire scenes or segments. it’s okay to highlight 4 pages of fresh, sentimental writing, and hit delete. writing is a fluid process, and you Will make discoveries as you progress through your story alongside your characters. be understanding of that iterative process. be kind to yourself.

three: You Are That Motherfucker. you, me, your dog, your dog’s friend, your dog’s enemy, all of us are that motherfucker. i never thought i’d be able to write anything longer than the great big map, which was a much simpler, linear story in which the other main character did not appear in the current timeline until like the eighth chapter. juno was different. juno was the motherfucker, and i was scared shitless of it, and to cope with that fear joked constantly while writing that it’d never see the light of day.

but it did. it was a rocky process, and i was awake for 48 hours after posting it because of the sheer adrenalin stuck in my skull, but i got through it. and i wouldn’t have been able to do it without june, who stepped in when i flopped over facedown on the floor and dragged me to my feet like the badass friend she is, and without everyone else in my life, who put up with me talking about The Thing that i couldn’t really talk about, but juno’s up there now. forever, or until the internet collapses and civilization goes extinct. and if the nineteen year old clown with the attention span of an ikea armchair and an a level certificate from hell wrote the 93,000 word long thing, so can you. i mean this completely unironically and with every ounce of genuine emotion i can summon from the cracked asshole of my heart.

writing is hard. writing is scary. writing is an investigation of the world around you and therefore, by extension, yourself, and that kind of honesty is freaky. it’s like going skinny-dipping next to the president’s mansion. who’s going to see you? what if they take a photo? what if you lose your spot at university?

but don’t think about that. our world is overrun with stories the way cereal bowls are full of cereal, but it’s those stories that keep us all sane in the disgusting day-to-day muck of reality, so think about your story. what’s haunting you today? what message do you want to leave printed in font size 666 comic sans across the southern hemisphere of the planet? what will you be tomorrow?

a writer. you’re going to be a motherfucking writer.

#my stuff

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fallxnprxnce · 6 years

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Is there somewhere we could read your books, by chance? :o

{out of exile} Omg, I wish. I really, truly wish. There are so many reasons why my writings are not really available for me to put out there, even though I’d love to. Let me share with you my tale of woe, lol.

With one of my epic fantasies, Blood is Thicker, the issue is that I believe it to be too heavily-inspired by Game of Thrones, and there for I will never publish it, as I do not want to get sued.

My other epic fantasy, Comes the Praete, is not finished yet unfortunately. For whatever reason, I got 600+ pages into it and only have a couple chapters and some epilogues left to write, and I just crapped out. I wrote down copious notes on what I intended to do with it, though, so someday I will finish it. That one I would like to publish someday.

As far as the series that Aryx ( @after-the-fxll ) is in, The Vulture and the Dove, the issue is that there are 7 books completed and 2 not completed. While I can just drop the last two books from the series, I don’t want to do that as Aryx is in the 8th one I believe. Also, the books are vastly different lengths. The first three combined are fewer pages than the fourth. I could combine the first three into a trilogy, but even so, they just seem too simply to publish, and the whole series seems a bit amateurish and disorganized to do so anyway.

With the world that Channe ( @fxcelessqueen ), Jix ( @xleafyheartx ), Lylia ( @amethyst-eyed ), and Aurelien ( @a-very-proper-shxde ) are in, The Mask of Truth, the problems are numerous. There is one major book that is 500+ pages and not finished, a collection of several short stories that are finished, and they are all so terribly written that I would have to redo all of them in order to publish them. I wrote them over a decade ago, and my writing has improved considerably since then. While the world and its characters are very developed in my head, in maps, in timelines, and even fictional languages I created for some of my races, the actual prose I wrote years ago does not do it justice.

I have two other completed books that are not fantasies. One is sort of a murder mystery and the other is... I actually don’t know, heh. That’s never a good sign when you can’t tell your own genre. Modern fantasy? Horror? Horror-drama? Something in there, haha. But yeah, the horror one has major and I’m afraid deal-breaking issues with the main villain and part of the plot, and the murder mystery needs a chapter added and some overhauling on the ending. I need time to do this and in 2-3 years I have not found that time, heh. I hope to publish both of them someday, but today is not that day.

Now, what I would LOVE to do is set up a website somewhere where I could share my writings and get feedback from people, but I have neither the time nor the knowledge to set up a website (I’m something of a derp with computers), and I’d have to figure out a way t keep people from stealing my stuff. I’ve tried to post excerpts of writing before and it was stolen, so I’m a little wary about that. But if I could do this then I wouldn’t have to publish, which... I’m honestly not convinced my stuff is really worth of publishing. My writing isn’t bad, but it isn’t superb either. It’s just kindof there, heh. So if I had a website to just share instead of trying to publish, maybe that would be more realistic? I dunno.

Years ago, I thought I wanted to try to have a writing career. Yes, I know, how naive was that, right? Needless to say, I no longer think I have a career in writing. I published two books, the first one of which got some pretty bad reviews and it’s sequel got NO reviews because I think 99 cents was too steep a price for it? There’s a sobering thought. Plus the first book has a really embarrassing typo in the LAST PARAGRAPH that the publisher won’t let me fix and so many people pointed out in their reviews. Ugh. Just... just ugh. But honestly, a major reason why I published these two books was for my mom, who loved them both. She passed away a year and a half ago, so... I’m glad I did it while she was still here.

So yeah, all I have that’s publicly available are those two books which, honestly they are not written very well... I wrote them years and years ago and I have improved greatly since then, so... (sigh) yeah, I’m not sure you want to spend the time on them. But if you really want to give it a try, I will place the links below to B&N, but they are also available through Goodreads, iTunes, and the original publisher, Lulu.com. The first one is free:

Genuine Magic (first book)Genuine Myth (sequel)

The only other public writing I have besides Tumblr is my limited collection of fanfics from a smattering of fandoms. Here is a link to my list on Fanfiction.net, but I have put them all on AO3 as well if you prefer that site.

So yeah, sorry to disappoint, but this is all I have up publicly right now. But... like I said, the OCs mentioned above have like 10-12 years of writing and a whole lot of supporting characters and information behind them, so feel free to send in random asks about them, send me meta topics to write about, or anything else you wish. Or if you just want to know more about a specific book/series or how my muse fits into the world. Words cannot express how much I LOVE IT when people ask me that stuff, so please go nuts. At least then I get to use the information for something while the poor books are sitting on my computer collecting cyber dust. XD If you do read anything I write, though, please let me know what you think of it, even if you hated it. Praise is awesome and criticism helps me grow as a writer, so I welcome any feedback anyone has! =D

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cas-regenerates · 3 years

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Buying And Selling A House As - Is In Florida

Buying and selling a home "as-is" Buying and Selling "As-Is". I recently overheard a person who is buying a home state that they would never want to buy a home "As-Is". While I understand the concerns, I suggest that a home buyer or seller should review the contracts and work with appropriate professionals. I've come to realize that this is one of the most confusing points that exist in Florida real estate. I've heard buyers, sellers, experienced real estate professionals, and even attorneys misstate the benefits and woes of the "As-Is" contract. I'll try to simplify this very confusing concept and hopefully reduce some unneeded stress.

One important thing to understand is that an as-is transaction is very similar to a traditional transaction but is either (a) agreed to using a different form or (b) agreed to using the traditional contract for sale and purchase with an addendum that modifies the original contract. In other words, the vast majority of the terms and conditions are the same.

Florida Association of Realtors Contracts Let's discuss the most common Florida's home sales contracts. The Florida Association of Realtors has approved multiple contracts for use in Florida. Some of these were created in conjunction with the attorneys from the Florida BAR Association. The contracts are known by acronyms:

FAR Contract - standard contract approved by the Florida Association of Realtors FAR As/Is Contract - As-Is contract approved by the Florida Association of Realtors FAR As/Is Addendum - Addendum to the FAR Contract that effectively converts it into an As/Is. FAR/BAR Contract - traditional contract approved by the Florida Association of Realtors and the Florida Bar Association FAR/BAR As/Is Contract - As-is contract approved by the Florida Association of Realtors and the Florida Bar Association FAR/BAR As/Is Addendum - Addendum to the FAR/BAR contract that effectively converts it into an As-is. Adams, Cameron & Co. operates in Volusia and Flagler Counties on the east coast of Central Florida. In these areas the FAR/BAR contracts are far more common so I will use them in my examples. However, the same comments should apply to both agreements. In the FAR/BAR contracts, there are four pages. The first two pages contain a number of areas that can be filled in by a real estate professional. They contain the meat of the agreement and most of the terms that are likely to be negotiated. The remaining two pages contain additional terms and conditions which are intended to outline the specifics.

Traditional Contract The primary differences between a traditional contract and an as-is contract revolve around two of these paragraphs. Paragraph D of the contract deals with wood destroying organisms. Wood destroying organisms include termites and other pests which can damage a home. To summarize the paragraph, it says that if, after the contract has been signed by both parties, the buyer has a licensed inspector or Florida certified pest control operator review the property and find wood destroying organisms then the seller will be responsible for paying to get rid of the pests and correcting any resulting damage caused by the infestation. It also provides for a maximum amount the seller will have to pay (typically 1.5% of the purchase price).

Since the seller will probably have to correct the problem regardless of who the buyer is, and since the seller is obligated to disclose the fact that the wood destroying organisms exist, it is likely that they will go ahead and have the pests dealt with anyway. However, this solution allows for an out for both buyer and seller in various situations.

Similar to paragraph D is Paragraph N of the FAR/BAR contract. Paragraph N says that there may be other damage to the home which the seller will have to repair. For example, if a buyer's home inspection shows material damage to the roof then the buyer may demand that the seller fix those problems up to a fixed price (typically 1.5% of the purchase price again). Again, it is usually in the seller's best interest to go ahead with the repairs.

As-is Contract An as-is contract is effectively an alternative to the rules listed in the paragraphs D and N of the traditional contract. In fact, if you look at either of these paragraphs in an as-is contract they will show "DELETED". Instead of the strategy outlined above, an as-is contract includes a broader inspection period. The inspection period can be set for any period of time and is typically up to 15 days for a residential contract. During that time the buyer should have any inspections performed that they feel are necessary. That includes a traditional home inspection, a pest inspection for wood destroying organisms and anything else that they feel is important. Here's the kicker: at any time during the inspection period, the buyer "in the buyer's sole discretion" can determine that they are not satisfied with the results of the inspections and can cancel the contract.

If defects in the home are found, the buyer can cancel or the buyer and seller may renegotiate the contract in order to find an appropriate solution. The seller is not obligated to fix anything but he or she may be willing to make certain concessions in order to see the contract to closing. In addition, once the seller is aware of any material defects, they will have to be disclosed to future potential buyers. The buyer has a guaranteed out and loses only the cost of the inspections.

Common misconceptions First, it is important to understand that buying a house is not like buying something at a garage sale. An as-is sale does not mean that the seller can hide known damage from a buyer. A seller and their agent are required by Florida law to disclose all known defects that could materially affect the value of the house. A seller who withholds valuable information can be held liable for his actions regardless of whether the transaction is conducted "as-is".

There is no such thing as "selling as-is". Before all the Realtors out there jump at that one, let me explain. Most multiple listing services have a way to mark that a seller would like an as-is contract. Also, an advertisement can say that a home is being sold as-is. However, a buyer can submit any offer. Further, it is the duty and responsibility of a listing agent to forward any offer that is presented. So, a buyer can submit an as-is offer on a home that has not been listed as-is. Likewise, a traditional offer can be submitted for a home that has been advertised as-is. By way of example, a seller who is trying to sell her home for $400,000 as-is may get two offers. One for $350,000 on an as-is contract and another for $400,000 on a traditional contract. The seller could determine that selling as-is is not worth $50,000 and accept the larger dollar amount. The seller could also make a counter offer to the higher contract and include an as-is rider if she feels very strongly about it. At the end of the day, marketing a house as as-is is a request from the seller to the buyer as to the type of offer she would like to see.

Another common misconception is that an as-is sale means something is wrong with a house. It is often the case that buyers assume that sellers are trying to hide defects by selling as-is. As such, they may be wary of buying a house marketed as-is. In reality there are occasions that fine houses are marketed as-is and there are situations in which houses with greater needs are marketed traditionally. In common practice it seems that the as-is moniker is simply used in some marketing and not in others.

While the traditional contract does include language to provide a warranty from the seller to the buyer that an as-is contract does not, the strength of it is rudimentary. It says, in effect, that the structure of the house (roof, walls, foundation) does not have visible leaks or structural damage and that the mechanics of the house (plumbing, electrical, etc.) are in working order. On the whole, the variance between these types of damage and those that must be reported when disclosing material defects is not that great. Furthermore, it is likely that a home inspection would find the type of defect which would be covered by this seller's warranty.

Another common point of confusion is between a seller's warranty and a home warranty. A home warranty is an insurance policy that may be included with a sales transaction. The buyer, seller or both can purchase the policy. These small insurance policies are offered by companies such as American Home Shield and 2-10. The policies typically cost less than $500 and insure the plumbing, electrical, appliances, pool, etc. against breakdowns. A seller can get coverage from the time the house is for sale, through closing, and for another year for the buyer. The policies offer a safety net for the buyer and can help smooth the transaction. They are not all inclusive but they can also reduce the likelihood that there will be large problems after the closing for the buyer and seller to end up arguing about.

Summary As a buyer, there is a certain amount of comfort in submitting an as-is contract. Because of the inspection period there is an absolute out during the term of the inspection period. In fact, by putting up a deposit and entering into an as-is agreement with a seller, the buyer has effectively placed an option on the purchase of the house for the term of the inspection period and for the cost of any interest lost on the deposit. As a buyer, this gives an opportunity to become intimately familiar with the property while being sure that the terms of the contract will not be adjusted and that the seller will not sell to someone else. Therefore, despite the stigma that comes to mind when a buyer hears "as-is" it is typically a good way to go.

From a seller's perspective, as-is initially sounds great. It brings to mind the idea that I can ignore disclosing all of those little issues associated with the house and find a buyer who can deal with them. That is simply not the case. Caveat emptor ("Let the buyer beware") does not apply. In reality, marketing a property "as-is" may have a negative effect on buyer's perceptions. In addition, the as-is contract puts the buyer in a position to act on any buyer's remorse that they may feel after the contract is inked. The inspection period on the contract becomes a waiting game while we hope that the buyer is satisfied. In most Realtor Associations the property can not be marketed as active in the Multiple Listing Service but needs to be flagged as either "Pending" or "Contingent" or some other designation that will remove it from many searches.

At the end of the day, there are always going to be defects of some type in a house. As-is contracts do not solve the problems. As a seller the contract doesn't have the magic bullet that will pass them along to the buyer. From a buyer's perspective, neither a traditional contract nor an as-is contract will guarantee that I have a perfect house or that the seller will fix everything.

sell my house fast orlando

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thekillingquill · 7 years

Text

Not Another Tragic Backstory | 3

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 + Epilogue Pairing: Jughead x Reader Word Count: 3,105 + Epilogue: 303 Warnings: I solemnly swear. By which I mean, there be curse words below! Also I attempted fluff. Summary: Riverdale has resurrected the Blue & Gold and with it, the Journalism program! This week’s lesson: Human Interest/Profiles. Reader is paired with Jughead who writes an unflattering profile on her, prompting her to confront him about it. A/N: So there are 750 words of this that I wrote before any part of this story and it’s the part where she is going awf on Jughead. I didn’t proofread this and an epilogue is included at the bottom. It’s an attempt at fluff so beware.

When the bell rings for lunch I all but run out of class. I’m the first person in the hall and I keep my head down to avoid seeing anyone who would want to talk to me. I reach in my bag and touch the sharp edges of the profile Jughead Jones has written about me, ensuring that it is still there. It’s a familiar motion, one that I’ve been completing since Ash handed it to me after our journalism class.

Ash’s words have stirred up my nerves. I’m afraid, but I can’t ignore this opportunity. An itch has already started and I know that nothing but reading this article can satisfy it. I opt to duck into the janitor’s closet under the stairs and cringe at the musty odor of a long forgotten room. The lighting in here is terrible so I pull out my phone and use the flashlight function to light up the words.

The headline reads: Y/N Y/L/N A RIVERDALE LEGACY’S PATH TO REDEMPTION and my stomach clenches in fear of what I’m about to read.

The town of Riverdale was founded 75 years ago by six prominent families who each inspired the development of the town. The Y/L/N family had a large hand in cultivating the tone of Riverdale’s community as they, and their descendents, were voted into office for ten terms back to back. This was considered the family business until Mayor Sierra McCoy was elected in light of what is known as the July Scandal.

From the moment she was born Y/N Y/L/N has been on the fast track for a political career. In grade school she participated in numerous National speaking competitions and took first place on four separate occasions. In Junior High she was president of the Debate Club, taking them to Nationals, and organized a Model UN with the schools in nearby towns. She participated in two speaking competitions and placed third and second respectively.

Now a sophomore at Riverdale High Y/L/N is a member of the notorious River Vixens cheer team, co-captain of the Debate team, and will be running for Class President. Today she has foregone the River Vixens uniform for a business casual attire of brand name blue jeans, an ironed blouse and kitten heels.

Y/L/N was four years old when the July Scandal unfolded. During a debate between former Mayor Y/L/N and candidate Mayor McCoy a young woman approached the front of the town hall and asked the former Mayor why he wouldn’t acknowledge his mistake. That woman was an intern at City Hall that the former Mayor had engaged in relations with, resulting in pregnancy. The pregnancy has never been confirmed, but it was a big enough scandal to tip the election in Mayor McCoy’s favour.

Since the July Scandal the Y/L/N family has stepped back from politics to focus on other projects, but it looks as though their legacy will continue with our classmate.

I am so angry that I am visibly trembling. Jughead’s piece goes on and on about how I’m going to essentially spend the rest of my days in Riverdale as a politician in some sort of twisted redemption for my family’s shame. He might has well have written that I’m going to die here and be buried next to my Mayoral ancestors.

Though factually he’s correct about my past, his piece is ignorant and ill-informed about the me of today. I have no intention of running for class president. I didn’t run for the title of class president last year, and I considered it for college applications this year, but I ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth it. The July Scandal didn’t just cost my father the election, but nearly cost him his family. I have no interest in walking down that path, ever.

He goes on to describe myself and the other descendents of the six founding families as legacies and talks about our obligations to the town. It just makes me so sick. This is how he sees me: in the afterglow of a scandal that nearly tore my entire family apart. My shaking rage dissolves into frustrated tears and I know that I can’t stay at school.

I will allow myself one minute to be upset and then I will have to be a big girl. This is a skill that was taught to me early on in life. I am allowed to be upset for a moment, but then I must put it behind me and be a grown up about it. I breathe deeply, wipe my tears, and then start texting Ash.

Hey Ash, I’m not feeling very well so I’m going to go home can you cover for me?

You read it, huh?

It wasn’t as bad as you made it out to be. Which is a lie I need to tell myself right now so that I can hold myself together until I get home.

If that’s what you need to tell yourself babe. It is, for now. My visible shaking has become an unnoticeable quiver by the time that I get home. The anger and sadness, however, has only grown in intensity. I head straight to my room and open my laptop, pouring out all of these emotions in the only way I know how: through writing.

I write poems, small paragraphs, bits of a bigger story and multiple blog posts of 2-3 sentences that are vague and drenched in angst. It’s during my fifth poem that I realize what has happened.

Jughead Jones has broken my heart and he has no idea. Well, that was going to change.

I knew I’d find him at Pop’s. I just didn’t know if I’d find him there alone. On the one hand, the part of me that is hellbent on seeking revenge wants to drag him in front of his friends. On the other hand, the part of me that is scared and heartbroken wants to keep this as private as possible. Less witnesses if I started crying again.

Jughead’s profile on me is rolled up in my clenched fist and I subconsciously squeeze it as I survey the crowd at Pop’s. There are a couple of families on the other side of the diner having ice cream and milkshakes, a few kids from school studying, and sitting as far away from the crowds as possible is Jughead Jones.

He’s wearing his fur-lined denim jacket and his infamous beanie, staring intensely at his laptop while his fingers move across the keyboard with purpose. Next to his laptop is an empty glass and a plate that is half full (or half empty) of fries. I falter briefly in my mission and know that if I don’t act now then I’m going to end up rolling over and letting this slide.

My strides are so long that it takes me approximately four steps to approach Jughead’s booth. When I do, I slam his profile down on the table so hard that his glass tips to the side, startling him for a second time. He looks up at me, wide-eyed and completely speechless and I try to school my features to hide the fact that it hurt like a son of a bitch to hit the table that hard.

“You don’t know me or what my plans are, Jones.” I say it with as much cold venom as I can muster and slide into the booth across from him. He looks at the wrinkled and slightly curved pages on the table between us. A look of realization crosses his face before it’s replaced by annoyance. He slouches back in the booth and starts eating fries, looking bored and disgusted with the situation.

Yesterday this would have disarmed me. Today, it sustains me and my rage.

“You didn’t ask me a single question to support your profile, so I’ve prepared some of my own.” Jughead opens his mouth to say something, but I hold up one finger and raise my voice over him “One: what are you hopes for the future? Well, Jones, one day I hope to have an extensive mug collection for my modest apartment in any town that isn’t Riverdale.” I put up a second finger and make sure I am holding eye contact with Jughead while I speak.

“Two: why did you decide to take journalism this year? Well Jones, I’ve been writing since they taught us how in elementary school. I thought taking journalism this year might show me a way to turn my hobby into a career. I thought it might help me improve my storytelling. Frankly, I find print journalism to be fascinating.” I give him the most sarcastic smile I can muster.

“Since you are so interested in my past, I feel like I should share with you that when I was younger I thought it would be cool to write for a magazine. Now that I’m in journalism I know without a doubt that I’d like to get at least one piece published in the following magazines either in their print publications or online: Ms. Magazine, BUST, Bitch, Rolling Stone, Variety, Cosmo, and The New Yorker. And here’s a tidbit about the speaking competitions you mentioned in your piece: It’s not just talking to a crowd. I wrote all of those speeches, thank you very much.”

I can tell that Jughead is growing more uncomfortable by the second and I know that my voice is too loud for the crowd at Pop’s. He refuses to meet my eyes and slouches in the corner of the booth with his arms crossed. It feels so so so good to finally say all of this, to not hold back. I hold up a third finger and am tempted to tell him to read between the lines.

“Three: why are you so upset, Y/N? You know, it really warms my heart that you would ask me that. See, you’ve written about 500 words about my character based on things you’ve heard or maybe seen. You didn’t profile me. You wrote assumptions and deductions. The truth is that you don’t know me, Jones. You think you do, but you actually don’t know what I’ve lived through or what drives me or who I love. You don’t even know my favourite colour or what kind of movies I like, but I bet if you were to guess you’d say it was purple and that I like romantic comedies. Well, surprise, bitch! My favourite colour is mint green and I like psychological thrillers.”

I take a deep breath and lean back in my seat. I have officially burned through all of my anger and am left with something else, something softer and heavier all at once. I take a moment to collect myself and evaluate my audience. His eyebrows are furrowed and he is leaning forward with his lips slightly parted. In his eyes I see intrigue. He starts to speak and I cut him off without having to raise my voice.

“I’m not finished yet,” I tell him tiredly. I hold up four fingers and then let my hands rest on the table in front of me. “Four: Y/N, you mentioned that I don’t know what you’ve lived through. Why don’t you elaborate on that and educate me?” I let out a sigh and give Jughead a half smile across the table. “See, now these are the kind of probing questions I had expected of you, Jughead. After all, you are investigating Jason Blossom’s murder and that would involve a certain level of intelligence.”

Jughead reaches up and closes the lid of his laptop and I know he’s truly invested in my mock interview. Maybe it’s because I called him by his first name but it’s probably because I mentioned Jason Blossom.

“Frankly, I don’t think you deserve an answer. However, as a fellow writer, I would hate for the quality of your piece to suffer, so I will give you this much: The only friends I had as a kid were the possessive kind that liked to put me on a shelf when they were done with me. They got angry if someone else acknowledged me. It could be borderline abusive at times, but I’m stronger for it.”

“Are you talking about Cheryl Blossom?” Jughead asks before I can stop him. I shoot him a sarcastic smile.

“Sorry Jughead, you had your chance to ask your questions. Five: Why bother explaining yourself to me?” I choke on my words, but there’s something about how he’s looking at me, really looking at me, that makes me push through my nerves. It’s now or never.

“Because I’ve quietly admired you for years and it really fucking hurt to know that you think so little of me. Meanwhile for the last three months or so I’ve been trying to stop thinking about how you’re the kind of boy who hangs stars in the sky when you smile. That’s a direct quote from a poem I wrote in English class last year. It was about you, as most of my poems these days are.” I close my eyes tightly and take a deep breath, leaning my head back against the booth.

I feel like I’ve just cut the cord tethering me to earth. It never occurred to me just how heavy this secret was, that it had been a constant weight that I’d been carrying around. I’m scared and relieved all at once. I’ve just gathered the energy to leave when Jughead speaks.

"Just because you got personal with me doesn't mean I'm going to spill my tragic backstory to you." His voice is quiet and not unkind. There is an almost teasing lilt to his tone. I open my eyes and he is looking back at me with an indiscernible expression on his face. It’s almost a mixture of uncertainty and awe? I give a mirthless laugh and sit up, mirroring his position with my arms crossed and elbows leaning on the table.

"You think all that was a tragic backstory? Honey, my tragic backstory is going to die with me." I wink and shoot him a flirtatious smile, one that I learned from watching Ash and Reggie.

“Really? Spending your childhood as Cheryl Blossom’s toy isn’t a tragic backstory?” He’s leaning forward over the table and his smirk causes my thighs to press tightly together.

“Not by a longshot, Jones. You’re curious now, aren’t you?” I lean back and try to keep my composure. Jughead follows my movements and leans back against his side of the booth casually.

“No, of course not.”

“I’m starting to see why you don’t say a lot. You’re a terrible liar.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” He asks me, tone serious.

“No,” I answer him softly. My smile is no longer flirtatious, but fond. His honesty is one of the things I like most about him. Followed by his passion for things. I like how soft he looks when he thinks no one is looking. I like his tenacity and his independence and his way of viewing the world.

“Can I… can I buy you a milkshake?” He asks, sounding uncertain of himself.

“I would love that.” I try to tone down my enthusiasm, but his smirk tells me that I’ve failed. I enjoy getting to admire the object of my affections up close and personal. I expect him to shy away from my hungry eyes, but he seems to be looking back just as intensely. The tension in Pop’s threatens to choke me, so I smile softly at him and start a new conversation.

“I never got to finish my interview in class today. So, question five: tell me, when did you realize that you were a pretentious twat or have you not figured it out yet?”

“It’s recently been brought to my attention,” he admits with a smile.

“I’m happy to say that a lot of you did well with your profile assignments. Jughead Jones, in particular, excelled with his profile on Y/N Y/L/N and will have the privilege of interviewing Mayor McCoy.” Mrs. Cooper is holding up a copy of Jughead’s assignment and I can’t help but to look look at him over my shoulder. His eyes are already on me and he quirks his eyebrow, tossing a potato chip in his mouth. He smirks while he chews. Asshole.

I flip him off with as much subtlety as possible.

“I’ll be leaving the profile on my desk for anyone who is interested in reading it after class.”Ash glares at Jughead over her shoulder and sends me a sympathetic smile. I wave off her concern and pass her a note, encouraging her to read it again after class.

Mrs. Cooper launches into a discussion on what we did well and what needs work and I smile down at my notebook. I sneak glances over my shoulder and he’s always looking back at me with that intensity that attracts me like a moth to a flame.

At the end of class Ash all but sprints to get her hands on Jughead’s profile. I watch him pack up his things and follow behind him as he leaves the room. Reggie Mantle is standing outside of the classroom. He and Ash must be very much on right now if he’s walking her to and from classes again. He smirks when he sees Jughead and puts a hand on his shoulder, stopping him from passing.

“Where’s the fire, Wednesday Addams? Off to plan your next murder?”

I force my way under Jughead’s arm, wrapping my arm tightly around his waist. He looks startled by my appearance.

“Actually Reg, we’re headed to the bleachers to make out so you and Ash should go somewhere else today.” I twist out from under Jughead’s arm, grabbing his hand and walk backwards so that I’m facing him. He, along with Reggie and a few other students in the hall looks stunned.

“Do you not want to make out under the bleachers?” I ask him teasingly. He smirks and jerks his arm backwards bringing me chest to chest with him.

“You’re being cheeky,” he tells me lowly.

“I’m being daring,” I counter, pushing up on the tips of my toes to press a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth. “So do you want to go behind the bleachers or no?”

Jughead smirks and laces our fingers, taking the hall that will bring us outside to the football field.

EPILOGUE

When I left for college Jughead gave me picture frame and inside of it was an article he had cut out of The New Yorker. It’s the one I wrote in junior year after we, along with his friends, solved the murder of Jason Blossom. My first published piece, but not my last.

Jughead took a gap year to promote his book and when it reached the New York Times Bestseller list, I printed it off and had it framed. I gave it to him in person on the anniversary of the day I stormed into Pop’s to yell at him for being presumptuous. I still get dizzy thinking about the way I kissed him that night, with his back pushed up against the pillar on my front porch.

I found my modest apartment in Salem. Jughead populated my mug collection by sending me one from each city he visited and one from every hotel chain he stayed at while on tour with his book. If I had to pick a favourite, it would be the two he brought from Pop’s the night he sold the movie rights to his book. We drank cheap champagne from them and he drunkenly confessed his desire to marry me.

He presents me with a scrapbook six months later. Every magazine article that I’d gotten published is cut out and pasted down on its own page. Underneath or beside the article are handwritten notes from Jughead: little comments or thoughts he had about the piece.

On the last page is a mock article he has written. Our wedding announcement. Underneath it he has taped the engagement ring I wear now. I twist it around my finger and listen to Jughead caressing the keys to his computer in the next room and I am so so so happy.

Tag list: @tasteofswallowedwords; @forsythe-pendleton-jones-iv; @ju-gg; @murderyoursoul; @ri-verdale

#Quill Writes #Not Another Tragic Backstory #Jughead imagine #jughead jones imagine #jughead jones x reader #riverdale imagine

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

Text

THE TOP IDEA IN A STARTUP IDEAS

A round. Perl is not the sort I mean. Startups are that constrained for talent. They don't sue till a startup has made money, and once you have money, people will want ever more material wealth, so there is no secret cabal making it all work. Parents know they've concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain all the lies they told you. Only a few people reading Jane Austen instead. I explained this as code to show a couple of nerds with no business experience operating out of a small agricultural town wouldn't benefit from moving to a startup hub a place is, the USPTO are not hackers. But anything that grows consistently at several percent a week, but if we had better than a 1 in 24 chance of succeeding, you'll only do it if you don't have startups, pretty soon you won't have much competition. We did it because it seems such a great hack.

But the American startups we've funded will attest that I say the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups is that they're embarrassed to go back n paragraphs and start over in another direction. Technology will increasingly make it possible to relive our experiences. The only practical solution is to develop new technology as fast as startups, the more the rest will want to come. For comparison, here is an innocent one. The sentence structure and even the words are different. Finding investors is hard. There may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till she mentioned this it never occurred to me till then that those horrible things we had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't. You could try to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own.

Object-oriented programming generates a lot of economic history, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. He said it was never an issue, because everyone was so good they never had to use CLOS. He said their business model was crap. But not so lucrative or prestigious as it was possible to go from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor, just as a scientist is better off following the truth you'll discover cooler things than you could to work on dumb stuff, even if the problem is to make a living was by farming. Making $1000 a month a typical number early in YC and growing at 1% a week will grow 1. The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to get cram schools on the classic model, like those we mishandled in high school. That group says another.1 Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. The person who knows the most about the most important source of growth in mature economies. For example, legacy admissions. As the roast turkey appeared on the table, his alarmingly perceptive 5 year old son suddenly asked if the turkey had wanted to die.

I don't mean to suggest by this comparison that types of work consist of doing things for other people, whereas doing a technology startup, at least in our tradition lawyers are advocates: they are trained to be able to say whether patents have in general been a net win. YC, why don't more people apply? If you've had summer jobs in college, you may think you know how the world works, and any theory a 10 year old had about that would probably be a pretty narrow one. In a way this is virtuous, because I rarely heard a teacher say I don't know enough about the infrastructure that spammers use to know how to run the world? But when you understand the origins of this sort of trick to pledge publicly not to. How much do we have to look at this actually quite atypical spam. The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. A company making $1000 a month a typical number early in YC and growing at 1% a week will grow 1. It's a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old. We might like to think we wouldn't go so far, Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Brian Chesky, Bill Clerico, Patrick Collison, Adam Goldstein, James Lindenbaum, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and my father for reading drafts of this.

To the extent you reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and sexuality. And that helps overcome their understandable fear of investing in a company run by nerds who look like and perhaps are college students. If a lot of serial entrepreneurs, actually. The kind of question on the application form that asks what you're going to learn that the world is quiet and warm and safe. And as for the disputation, that seems nearly impossible to shake. Nor did we start YC mainly to help out young would-be startup founders are. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with the server was to ask what surprised them. They could see they weren't as strong or skillful as the village smith. The Meander is a river in Asia Minor aka Turkey. If someone in my neighborhood heard that I was looking for an old friend especially if he is a hacker to suddenly send you an email talking about sex, and partly a larger part than he would admit that he doesn't want to tarnish himself in their eyes. But I know they exist. Breaking up companies into smaller units doesn't make those needs go away.

But as the tests get broader, the schools do too. Authenticity is one of the top VC firms, and even now I find it kind of weird. When did Microsoft die, and of what? When he was 19, he seemed like he had a 40 year old inside him. So it is with design. I'm just stupid, or have some sort of exit. Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids having sex?

But that world ended a few years ago. The US has less than 5% of the world's population. And yet all the empirical evidence points that way: pretty much 100% of startups that make something popular manage to make money from. Indeed, it will go in one investor ear and out the other. And fortunately at least two times, maybe three. Hope for the best, but expect the worst. I do: that being mean makes you fail. Why do you think so?

Let's start with a distinction that should be obvious but is often overlooked: not every newly founded company is a startup. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat.2 But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it was. I have to bother being diplomatic with a British audience. They sold their software on eBay for a quarter of a million dollars as much as submission.3 It may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology. The average parents of a 14 year old girl would hate the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to have consequences one might not foresee when one phrases the same idea in terms of reducing inequality. So why do so many people complain about software patents specifically? All startups are mostly too busy and too poor to be worth suing for money. It's an excuse to work on your own projects.

Notes

This argument seems to be high, so it may be heading for a sufficiently identifiable style, you can probably write a Lisp interpreter: the attempt to discover the most successful startups are competitive like running, not economic inequality. They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still.

Fortunately policies are software; Apple probably wouldn't even cover the extra cost. The University of Vermont, 1991. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991. Which means one of his peers, couldn't afford it.

Y Combinator only got 38 cents on the entire period since the war it was so great, why are you even before they've committed. Maybe it would certainly be less than 500, because talks are made of spolia. But should you even be working on filtering at the valuation should be clear and concise, because the danger of chasing large investments is not pagerank commercialized.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #projects #people #Adam #group #living

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garynsmith · 6 years

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Real Estate Blogging (7 critical lessons to learn from the worst real estate blogs)

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Real estate blogging – loved, hated, promoted, ridiculed. Nevertheless, I just read an article about real estate blogging “do’s and don’ts,” that was the absolute epitome of why we have to be careful from whom we take advice.

Blogging best practices include – typically at the top of the list – breaking up long paragraphs so that they are no longer than five sentences in length.

The aforementioned post about what not to do when real estate blogging started out with a paragraph that is TEN sentences long.

But, wait!

Further into the article there is a paragraph that is EIGHTEEN sentences in length

What happens when a reader is met with a huge block of text?

Most won’t bother reading it.

What else can you learn from sucky real estate blogs? Even better, how can you use these tips to become better at real estate blogging? Read on!

1. Ignoring blog structure best practices

Those overly-long paragraphs? Those are just the beginning of some of the structure blunders we see on many real estate blogs.

And, they go hand-in-hand with the term “whitespace.” You need as much of that as possible in each post.

Break up your posts into sections, using headers, sub-headers, block quotes and bulleted lists. Regardless of the length of your post, these “tricks” help the reader assume that it’s a quick read.

Consider incorporating photos, infographics, charts and other visuals. Get additional tips on blog structure at globalyogi.com.

2. Not understanding why blogging is critical to your business

Blogging consistently offers several valuable paybacks. For the real estate agent who does it right, blogging helps establish authority. It also builds the volume of indexed pages on your site, which is good for SEO.

And, lest you don’t believe us, check out the stats:

U.S. internet users spend three times more time on blogs and social networks than they do on email, according to Hubspot.

Statista.com finds that nearly 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a public blog.

“Businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t,” according to a Hubspot

Companies that blog get 55 percent more visitors

Want organic traffic visiting your site? Want site visitors to ‘discover’ you instead of having to be hit hard by your ads or direct mail? Want to be known as a resource to your community? Real estate blogging can give you all of this and more. A lot more, in fact.

3. Not taking the time to learn blog content best practices of real estate blogging

It’s not enough to sit down at the computer and start dashing off your witty words of wisdom, though. Even the most brilliant blog posts run the risk of sinking into obscurity if they’re not formatted correctly or if they’re riddled with mistakes.

Blog topics should be, above all else, of value to your reader.

“For each post, I made sure to identify what my readers want to read and to define the problem that they want to solve,” explains Neil Patel, who can legitimately boast of receiving more than 262,000 website visitors in one month.

No, your latest listing isn’t all that compelling – at least not to the vast majority of readers. Choose your topics carefully and, when you come up with one, your job has only just begun.

Find a way to differentiate that topic from the millions of others out there. For example,

There are 154 million Google results for “How to buy a house”

Choose any of those results at random and you’ll find that most say the same things.

“How to buy a house in [your city]” is probably just as saturated. But, “How to buy a home with a view in [your city] isn’t.

Not only are you working with a long-tail, hyper-local search term by niching down your topics, you can reuse the topic repeatedly just by plugging in a different niche, such as “luxury home,” “condo,” “a home with a well and septic.”

You’ll also need a compelling title. According to Copyblogger, on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the actual article or blog post.

“Essentially, your blog title has the ability to make or break the success of the whole post.”

according to Carly Stec, Hubspot’s senior content strategist. She mentions some takeaways from research performed by Takipi’s co-founder, Iris Shoor – words to consider using in your titles to help generate more shares of your blog posts.

They’re surprising and worth a read.

For more on the nuts and bolts process of writing a blog post, refer to Patel’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Blog Posts that Rank in Google’s Top 10.

4. Selling instead of informing

While it’s perfectly fine to occasionally post information about a new listing or let folks know about an open house (although social media is a far better vehicle for this), avoid over-posting these items. Few people go to a blog to be sold to; most want to learn something.

Offering content that is relevant to the reader is the only way to do this

As well, don’t go overboard on your calls-to-action. We’ve seen some that are longer than the post. A call-to-action, by the way, shouldn’t read like a bio.

In fact, it is just what it says it is – it directs the reader to what you want him or her to do next. If you are using your blog to build community, for instance, you’ll probably want readers to share your posts and/or leave a comment.

Your call-to-action in this case would be to ask a question. “Do you have an autumn home maintenance routine? Feel free to share it with us in the comments.”

Posts about home selling might direct your reader to your free market analysis page and those buyer-focused posts should take the readers to some of those amazing buyer posts you’ve written.

Save the blatant self-promotion for other pages on your site.

5. Not leading the reader to more of your content

“The longer someone stays on your website, the more they’ll get to know you and your business,” says Curaytor’s Kristi Hines. And, she’s correct. It’s the reason you’ll find links to other, similar articles at the end some of the industry’s best blog posts.

“Strategic internal linking is an SEO power technique,” according to Elliot Ross, writing at kissmetrics.com. How?

Links send signals to both search engine spiders and to readers that the content linked to is exceptionally important and relevant. This is something both search engines and readers want, according to Ross.

6. Not proofreading before publishing

This is a biggie. We recently read a blog post from a Florida agent who apparently wrote notes to his writer in the post and then forgot to remove those notes when he published the finished product.

Throughout the post, the reader is treated to gems such as “I CANNOT UNDERSTAND YOUR WRITING!” and “WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THIS?”

Then, there are the agents who hire writers who don’t know the first thing about real estate. What happens is they end up with posts full of misinformation, like this one, from a paragraph about being mindful during the final walkthrough:

“Realtors will only pay for something that is broken so make it a mission to inspect closely.”

Since this particular beauty was published in an agent’s newspaper, sent to thousands of people in his farm, wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall when one of his buyers demands that he pay for damage found during the walkthrough because, after all, he said in his newspaper that “Realtors” do that?

Whether you hire a ghostwriter or write your own posts, it’s important to proof carefully, several times, before publishing them on your site. Look not only for factual errors but grammar, punctuation and spelling errors as well.

7. Not promoting your blog posts

So, you’ve just published the world’s most compelling real estate blog post. Now you need to share it.

Not only does sharing help drive traffic back to your site, but “Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going,” according to Hubspot.

Publish that post to your LinkedIn Groups (as long as they allow this), Facebook, of course, and any other social media platform you use.

If you mention a local business in your post, let them know you mentioned them and ask them to link to your post. Now, each of their followers will see the post and, hopefully, many of them will end up on your website.

Real estate blogging isn’t for the feint at heart. It’s a big job but offers a spectacular return on the time and/or money you invest in it. Learn from the worst, so you can be the best.

The post Real Estate Blogging (7 critical lessons to learn from the worst real estate blogs) appeared first on Easy Agent Pro.

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ber39james · 7 years

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What’s in a Good LinkedIn Summary? Examples, Templates, and Tips

Imagine you were trying to get a job fifty years ago. You would find a job listing in a newspaper, set up an in-person interview, and walk in with your resume to introduce yourself to the company.

Today, LinkedIn has taken the place of the newspaper, your resume, and even that first meeting. Your presence on LinkedIn matters. In fact, 87 percent of recruiters will vet your candidacy by visiting your LinkedIn profile, according to data from Jobvite. So with this in mind, a great LinkedIn profile starts with a fantastic summary.

How to Write a Killer LinkedIn Summary

When setting out to write your summary, remember how LinkedIn users will interact with it on your profile. When someone goes to your profile, they’ll scan your title and location, see your photo, and notice if you have under 500 connections. After that, they’ll likely turn to your summary to get to know you. It’s the equivalent of a public cover letter: it gives your contacts a sense of who you are before they read what you’ve done.

Here’s a screenshot of my LinkedIn profile, for those of you following along at home. Because it’s so visible (and often public), your summary is the best place to capture your potential new contacts’ attention and give them a glimpse of your personality. Therefore, the most important rule of writing a LinkedIn summary is to make it original. You are a unique, talented professional, and your summary should capture the things that make you the greatest social media manager, writer, banker, underwater basket-weaver, etc.

Before you start writing your LinkedIn summary, you should do two things. First, search for leaders in your field, and check out the key terms they use to describe themselves. These keywords will help your profile appear in LinkedIn’s search results. Then, ask yourself these questions, and jot down any surprising things you discover:

Who am I at work?

What are the core features and values of my personality?

What unique perspectives and experience do I bring to my field?

What original ideas have I brought to the place where I work now?

Here’s a tip: Don’t know which keywords to include? Try googling your job title and see which words are used in job postings, descriptions of your position, and other top search results.

After you’ve generated a few ideas, it’s time to draft. Check out these tips for structuring your summary.

Writing Your LinkedIn Summary

Summaries don’t need to be long, but you might want to take a moment to plan and write yours. Here are a few tips to make your summary shine:

1 Write your summary in the first person. Unless you’re a celebrity or public figure, we all know you wrote it yourself.

2 Keep it short. Don’t say something in five words that could be said in two. Also, shoot for four to five paragraphs of no more than a sentence or two each.

3 Proofread everything multiple times. Read your LinkedIn summary out loud to make sure it sounds natural and eliminate mistakes.

Here’s a tip: Want a second set of eyes on your LinkedIn summary? Try Grammarly to keep your profile clear and mistake-free.

What Are the Parts of a Great LinkedIn Summary?

Authenticity and creativity are the hallmarks of a great summary, which is why most LinkedIn summaries feature distinct sections. Make sure you nail these to make your summary perfect.

The Opening Line

Writing an engaging opening line is key to drawing in potential employers, clients, partners, and contacts. To find your opener, just think: what is the first thing someone should know about me?

If you’re still stumped, try these tips for great first lines, and experiment! If you set a timer for ten minutes, you can probably write fifteen different opening lines. Then it’s just a matter of choosing the one that suits you.

The Pitch

After your first line (or first few lines), you’ll want to explain in the best way possible why you’re a rising star in your field. Remember those keywords we collected above? Now is the time to use them. Tell your readers what you’re passionate about, what you’re good at, and why these things matter.

If you need more help pitching yourself, check out these tips for writing a great pitch.

The Call to Action

After you’ve written three or four concise paragraphs, wrap it up. As you’re closing out your profile, consider the action you want your profile-viewer to take. Do you want them to email you if they’re interested in becoming a client? Do you want them to message you with job opportunities? Do you want them to tweet funny cat memes at you?

Whatever action you want people to take when reading your LinkedIn, list it at the end of your profile. In most cases, a simple “Message me with” or “Email me if” will suffice.

The Proof

Thought you were done with this whole LinkedIn thing? Wrong! Put your work samples where your mouth is.

Many LinkedIn gurus will suggest a “skills” or “strategies” list in your summary, both to pack in keywords and to show your skills at the top of your profile. If you have lots of relevant skills, certifications, or knowledge, feel free to include a list of your abilities. If that’s not your style, never fear! Attach samples of your work below your summary. Show off that video, slide deck, report, or publication that you finished recently. These embeds are very helpful in proving that you know what you’re talking about.

LinkedIn Summary Examples

Need inspiration? Here are some real, live LinkedIn summaries you can use to guide your writing. Check them out, then leave your thoughts in the comments below. What similarities do you see between these summaries? Do you see any differences?

The Gold Standard: An Influencer’s LinkedIn Summary

Marianne Griebler is a two-time member of the LinkedIn Top Voices club, and with good reason. Her LinkedIn profile is polished yet original, and she produces high-quality articles on LinkedIn Publisher. Like everything else she writes, Marianne’s LinkedIn summary is top-notch.

What you say about yourself is almost as important as what you actually do.

So what words do you wish you could use? About your business? Your nonprofit? Your career? Your dreams?

If words are failing you, I’m here to help with clear, compelling messages targeted to the audience you want to reach. Maybe you’d like to do the writing yourself, with my coaching; maybe you’d like me to craft the content for you. You decide what makes the most sense for you.

I’m an award-winning marketing communicators strategist, writer and coach with deep experience on both for nonprofit and for-profit sides of the business world. A commitment to research will help us figure out the messages that will have the greatest impact on your audience … and on the goals you hope to achieve.

Contact me to set up a 20-minute call to talk about how I can help you with your messaging:

EMAIL: ______ PHONE: _______ Learn more about me on my website at _____; be sure to look at my testimonials to see what people say about working with me.

Surprising Celebrity: Shaq’s LinkedIn Summary

Shaquille O’Neal may not be the first person who’d come to mind when you think “great LinkedIn profile,” but his LinkedIn is a slam dunk. His summary is engaging, to-the-point, and explains his career transitions well. It’s definitely worth checking out.

During 19 seasons in the National Basketball League, I drove success on and off the court. I developed partnerships with global brands, pursued my academic interests in business and leadership and became the only current or former NBA player to hold three degrees: a bachelor’s, a master’s and a doctorate.

Basketball remains a big part of my life, whether it is providing NBA analysis on TV, serving as part-owner of the Sacramento Kings or appearing as a featured character in the latest video games. Since 1985, every NBA championship team has included a current or former teammate. I guess that makes me the Kevin Bacon of basketball.

Since retiring from the basketball court, I’ve expanded my brand relationships into one of the most diverse portfolios in the business world. As an early adopter of technology, I’ve identified innovative organizations as a serial tech investor. I work with brands that are household names such as Turner Networks, Reebok, IcyHot, AT&T and many other great companies. I also bring my business acumen to like-minded companies as a featured speaker at conferences and events nationwide.

Though I’m best known for basketball and business, my interests have always varied. I’ve released four studio albums and served as a sworn reserve officer in several law enforcement agencies across the country. I’ve collaborated on everything from fashion lines and jewelry to best-selling beverages and foods; from the latest technology products and games to children’s books.

Bonus: My Summary!

Want to see an average, everyday LinkedIn summary? Here’s the text of my summary, which was included above. Let me know what you think in the comments.

As a child, I once loaded up the entire Civil War section of my local library into a wagon, because I was going to write the next great work of 1860s historical fiction.

Although I never published my heavily referential short story, a spirit of intrigue and a voracious love to read have followed me to this day. In all aspects of my life, I gravitate toward three things: rapid innovation, unbridled creativity, and one hell of a challenge. For this reason, my interests range from stop-motion YouTube videos to discussing the sociological impact of comics, the judicious use of Google Analytics filters to the transformative power of the Oxford comma. I’m always in favor of the most effectively creative solution to a problem, even if it requires maximum effort.

Currently, I create engaging social experiences for a community of over 10 million bibliophiles and grammar nerds for Grammarly. Our free writing app ensures everything you type is easy to read, effective, and mistake-free. Want to know more about social strategy, effective creativity, or Grammarly? Message me here or at @allmystars on Twitter.

The post What’s in a Good LinkedIn Summary? Examples, Templates, and Tips appeared first on Grammarly Blog.

from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/good-linkedin-summary/

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