hxh is really like the best anime of all time

How To Create A Video Sales Letter In Under An Hour

In this blog you’re going to discover how you can use video sales letters to get more buyers of your products, you’ll learn what a video sales letter actually is, and I’m going to show:

How To Create One In Minutes: So, first a bit of background. A lot of folks get confused about what a video sales letter actually is, and I want to clarify this because it’s important – and you really need to understand this, because when you implement a video sales letter , your understanding of it will actually affect how many sales you make because of the implementation, so this is really going to affect. You know what money you get in your pocket from the video you create. So when a lot of folks hear the term video sales letter, they think of a traditional sales letter, the long-form copy web page where the video may be at the top or maybe just a page with nothing else on screen, except one video. Now, when you think about that video in one of these pages, a lot of folks assume that what makes a great video sales letter is some 30 minutes heavily edited onslaught of video footage on multimedia that has, you know almost Hollywood production quality. Those kinds of videos are great, but they’re, not actually video sales. Letters in the true sense and, more importantly, those videos are incredibly expensive and time-consuming to produce. So a real video sales letter is actually nothing more than a pre-written script that simultaneously being narrated and shown on screen. At the same time, exactly like this video now, I know what you’re, probably thinking, why on earth would a video that essentially looks basic and ugly result in more sales than a big Hollywood mega-production kind of format? Well, the answer lies with a very well-known marketer called Ryan Deiss, who actually popularized the term video sales letter and, more importantly, has tested this format against other video formats to see what works best right found. This format works the best because, although it lacks visual appeal, it’s essentially attacking two of your senses, eyes, and ears with the same message making it very hard to ignore to use this format, you’ve really got to have a very, very polished, well-written script, and engaging audio narration, otherwise your viewers will turn off in droves, but if your message is concise, relevant and valuable, this format can really work. How Do You Produce A Video Sales Letter? To create a video sales letter, there is a tool called a one-hour video studio. This program is a piece of software you can get from us at compelling TV, and what you’re going to see is how quickly I can create a video sales letter with it. So I have written a script already for you and you can see what I’ve done is just break up each line of the script with markers. So you can tell the markers because of the square brackets and what’s going to happen is each of those markers is going to become a separate slide in PowerPoint. So what I’m going to do is just drag in the audio file. You can see it’s just down the bottom here, VSL to mp3, so I’ve got this media player that is going to playback my script. At the same time, what I’m going to do is synchronize the recording with the script. What that will then help me do is create slides in PowerPoint for each of these markers that coincide exactly with the script. How Do You Produce A Video Sales Letter? So accidentally click the marker later to put in 2:30. So you can see. All I needed to do was pause, rewind, and resynchronized just to get that timing. In perfect hope, this is making sense of what I’ve got here. I’ve got the audio file I recorded. You know it took two and a half minutes to record it. I probably spent another two minutes: cleaning up and you’ve just seen me do the synchronization, where I’ve just gone through and clicked on, each of these slides and now I’ve got timings in for each part. The script here comes the magical part. If I click produce PowerPoint file, this is going to give me a summary of what this is going to create. So I’m going to get 15 slides. I can see exactly how long. Why is the color-coding? There is just showing me slides that are quite long or very short, so that’s just giving me an idea of pacing and whether I’m gonna have any issues, but I’m happy with this, and I can set PowerPoint transitions. I wrote a little note, which is what I want to have on-screen, But then, on the slides from 6 to 15, I’ve written a hash script and you’ll see what that does in a minute, so almost ready to hit this button create PowerPoint file. So the last thing I’m going to do is just select a PowerPoint template, which I can do with this option here, got this one ready to go. So we’ve got this little summary of. What’s going to be created, it’s going to use this PowerPoint template and you can see it down there. It’s going to use that audio, recording so watch this save that, and powerpoints launching it’s just taking up all the screen because it’s huge. Video studio has created this PowerPoint file. It’s embedded in my audio narration. The marker text is now the main text on each slide until we get to slide 6 and then from slide 6 onwards. I’ve got this exact script from each marker on-screen. Exactly like a traditional video sales letter, so this has taken about 10 minutes to create the script. I wrote I probably spent about 10 minutes to be fair, but then from adding the markers doing the audio recording cleaning it up too. Finally, just to configure in PowerPoint builder there to select the template, etc. I��ve now got a PowerPoint file ready to go to convert into video, so very, very rapid. What I can now do is move to render video on what this will do is pick up that PowerPoint document and turn it into an mp4 file. So I can pick a range of formats adjust the quality hit, render and sit back and wait while one hour, video studio converts this into a video file, so very easy to do. The last part of this tool is the Youtube upload, so I can set the title description keywords exactly as the Youtube upload feature on the site. You’ll see at the bottom is: it’s actually added the script. I wrote in this transcript field. What this is going to do is actually upload this to YouTube for the closed, caption support or transcript, and that’s actually going to give me a little bit of help with search rankings because YouTube’s actually index this data, as well as the metadata that you provide in title description and keywords, so is what one-hour video studio does for you. This is a very very rapid way to create videos in the case of video sales letters. Looking for a video sales letter script? Contact us My Sales Script

what's a witcher headcanon you have but has literally nothing to back it up?

like i know eskel would be scary good at estimating times for a microwave and milva would be a god at jenga. why/how do i know this? who's to say

i can actually somewhat explain both of those headcanons. eskel either can cook (correct, wholesome headcanon) or can’t (wrong, stereotypical canon) and both of these possibilities mean he has to know how to use a microwave really really well. as for milva, butches love construction, jenga is practically the science of building houses but as a game.

as for my own... hm kind of difficult because a lot of my headcanons are based in canon so... some of these are more connected to canon than others, but they’re closer to my own uniqueness rather than sapkowski’s work:

dandelion

dandelion’s family (the de lettenhoves) paid for his college education in exchange that he would never use his true name and titles when he published his works, because they are a family largely involved in governmental appointments, and did not want any horrible saucy love poetry (most of what he wrote when he was nineteen) being linked back to them. to this day they’ve disowned him, he lost his lands, and he is forbidden from coming back to any of their estates if not undercover. it’s all very hush-hush. they tricked him into thinking that it was for his own good, telling him that his real name was far too famous, even more famous that he would be soon...

dandelion’s father died when he was young, which led his mother to guide his childhood (basically instructing the servants to raise him) in a strict and masculine direction... this obviously did not work out as planned. but it’s largely why dandelion is regarded as a disappointment by his family, because he was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps to stay at the estates (ha!) and marry (ha!) to create an alliance with another noble family.

dandelion and essi’s entire backstory that i’ve planned out: essi enrolled as a student at oxenfurt and as a first year she was appointed by the department to be under dandelion’s guidance. they hit it off on the wrong foot at first (essi thought dandelion was lazy and slovenly, dandelion thought she was prissy and stuckup). but dandelion quickly recognized that essi was extremely talented and had a gift for music, so he asked her why in hell was she directed for further guidance? she admitted that she had stage fright... horrible stage fright. he laughed, thinking she was joking. she wasn’t. the story that follows then is that essi’s stage fright was symbolized by her iconic hair which fell over one eye, which was mocked by her peers - dandelion advised her to own it instead and turn it into a persona - much like what he did when he was her age, his peers called him dandelion (buttercup) on account of his blonde hair that has a tendancy to fan out like petals, and he adopted it as his persona.

on a similar note, what dandelion’s office at oxenfurt looks like: it’s basically treated as a walk-in closet for outfits he’s purchased but doesn’t have a permanent space elsewhere for. other valuables that can’t be kept on his person or in his saddlebags are kept here too. it’s much less of an office to do work and way more of a storage room. the desk has many finished bottles of alcoholic drinks and a lot of manuscripts stored inside (his own, because of the works he admires, he can recall from memory precisely what was written in them)

milva (sorry all of them are about her being a lesbian)

the dryads of brokilon adore milva more than they would ever let on. they find her very interesting because she’s a human, but she’s also one of them, but she also works with the scoia’tel. when milva comes back to brokilon after a journey, she finds herself crowded by dryads asking her how she is doing and what happened on her trip. because of this, milva’s quite good at storytelling, in her own colloquialisms and manners of speech. the dryads are captured by her stories of the world beyond brokilon, and very much enjoy her company, though milva was unaware of exactly how much they enjoyed it (if you get what i’m saying). 

milva realizes she’s a lesbian in toussaint because of her encounter with the baron de trastamara, in which she rebuked his marriage proposal and cried at the kitchen table and in the stables. she appreciated the baron’s friendship more than his romantic advances, and she was crying because she was upset that she couldn’t find true romance in her heart for him. angouleme states at the kitchen table that the hunting trip was overnight, suggesting that the baron asked milva for sex. i headcanon that he did, and milva couldn’t find it in herself to say yes. when the baron became upset at this and pestered her a little to find out why she refused his advances, she had an emotional outburst at him and left at once, for she herself didn’t really know.

additionally, many of the women shopkeepers in toussaint flirted with milva but she didn’t understand their advances. particularly a fishmonger and a fletcher, both of which are OCs... it wasn’t until angouleme (not giving milva an option on whether to accept her company or not) followed milva around on errands one day that she witnessed their interactions and then (in a very annoying little sister manner) bugged milva about how cute of a couple they would be, to which milva took shock and offense. but this got milva thinking about the subject.

regis

regis took on a variety of ridiculous titles when he was younger. “the prince of darkness” and things like this. it added to his already quite-long name. it sounded as stupid as it does with me explaining it.

regis has never paid rent or taxes. he acquired the house and shop in dilingen because he came to the city after he had rehabilitated himself, and found it in a state of disrepair and abandonment. he fixed it up very nicely (perhaps much like as he did with himself... symbolism!) and grew flowers in the windowsills. when city officials came to investigate, accusing him of taking up residence illegally, he simply placed them under a vampire’s spell and told them: “nonsense, i’ve always lived here!” to which they replied, “oh, of course you have, master barber-surgeon! apologies for bothering you!”

in his house and shop in dilingen, the layout is like this: the first floor is the shop, which carries a variety of medicaments, herbal remedies, and also has a setup for surgery. behind a hidden door is the stash of mandrake brew that only select customers know to request (regis only tells them about it if he has vetted them beforehand - i.e., known them well and known them well enough that he knows he will not start an addiction for them, i.e., he doesn’t sell to the young and stupid, or horribly depressed and afraid, but just those looking to enjoy life). the second floor is his house, which is decorated sparsely much like his cottage nearby fen carn. it’s nicer, with furnishings sourced from around the city, but is still humble. the attic is the setup for barber-surgery, but for birds - mostly corvids but other urban birds as well, that have injured themselves or are having other troubles. he welcomes them to roost and come to him with any problems they may be having.

angouleme

angouleme’s biological mother was young(ish) when she had her, which also pressured her into giving her up to relatives - she was an unmarried maiden, and being a noble, that is significant for making political alliances with other noble families. they pretended she was a virgin so she could remarry and bear children in marriage; however, because she and the other nobility of cintra were slaughtered, caught right in the crossfire of the nilfgaardian massacre of cintra, she didn’t survive into her first pregnancy, so angouleme has no bioligical half-siblings.

angouleme is trans and likes dressing femininely, but on account of her situation was never able to on the road, until she got to toussaint and had not only the safety but the finances to do so. somewhat based on canon that she was happy to get out of riding pants in lady of the lake, the narration calls her a “pretty girl”... it’s just nice to imagine her happy and with gender euphoria instead of dysphoria

regis is a good mentor and guardian to her in toussaint. it started as them both being up late in the kitchen and regis (as he does) giving advice, without suggesting any shame or judgement. after a while, angouleme trusted him enough to ask him for help when she got into trouble with local banditry. thens he invited him to help her on heists. he was hesitant at first but agreed, citing that she needed supervision for such activities. he brings a book to read while she does whatever she needs to do, but perhaps is more involved than he would admit - pointing out hidden safes and such in the darkness with his vision.

i didn’t do any for cahir or geralt because i feel like canon’s already gotten them enough? 

PROCESS, ONE: A READER’S JOURNEY

“The essays in this book were memoir until they couldn’t stand to be memoir anymore.” —Leslie Jamison

Had I read that quote even only six months ago (the book to which she refers is her much-lauded personal essay collection The Empathy Exams), I wouldn’t have known exactly what it meant. 

How can a piece of writing evolve from memoir? In terms of simple, unvarnished truth-telling, I thought the memoir, as a genre of literature, was pretty much the vessel. Yet here a case is being made for something that sounds like the opposite: it seems one can go beyond even the once terminally-regarded memoir. 

Let me think about this further, about my confusion. Maybe my framing is off. Maybe it’s not an issue of evolution or reduction. It’s not that the personal essay is somehow purer than the memoir, as far as autobiographical writing is concerned. The issue is not one of authenticity. It’s about application, or even misapplication, that the quest for truth for which one naturally uses the data of one’s own life could, depending on the circumstances, be more appropriately undertaken in a different genre. The two genres are merely looking at different subject matter. They’re examining completely different lifeforms on the slides, but they’re using the same authentic microscope, as it were. 

I relate to the sense of frustration in the Jamison quote, that there’s a feeling that the mission she started out on—writing a memoir—became so inadequate for the real task at hand that it became unbearable, that the pressure of working under a false guise gave way to a different form of transmission. 

The memoir became a personal essay collection. It had to. The questions she was exploring could not be undertaken by simply telling the story of one’s own life. Personal data was necessary for the full picture. But she needed other sources, the experiences of others, the realities of phenomena outside of her normal experience, even as they were phenomena that ultimately she ended up relating to in a deeply intimate manner. In her collection, she let us into those experiences, and then we were able to relate, by dint of her fearless storytelling and personal excavations. 

Now I’m getting it: a personal essay is fixed on some question and that is what drives the exploration. Personal, say, autobiographical, details are needed for the exploration, and this can vary depending on the subject. But the focus is the external question. That is the different lifeform on the slide. It’s about the question being pursued.

I.

But first, a look at where I started on this journey, with the memoir itself. 

The memoir as a work of literature was my singular focus while I was crafting my book proposal a couple of years ago. Simply put, it was what was on the table. Owing to my provenance as a musician and an actor, and my express interest in writing about my life, the genre of the memoir naturally became a thing for me. 

So I dove into acquainting myself, not with examples of celebrity memoirs or memoirs by politicians—perhaps the two most popular varieties—but with examples of the finer possibilities in those genres which—big surprise—happen to be written for the most part by writers. I found myself falling in love with the exercise of memoir writing, as opposed to, say, the gratuitous voyeurism that is often offered by the popular variants of the genre. 

For me, what became valuable was the quality of the writing; most of the time I was reading the life stories of people with whose work I had, outside of the memoir being read, little to no familiarity. These windows into life were captivating in their own right, these portals into raw experience, the possibilities of narration within the genre of nonfiction, the enlightened self-awareness made evident in sculpting large-scale timelines of one’s own life. 

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It’s difficult for me to overstate the degree to which these two books have influenced me thus far. 

Nabokov’s memoir is well-known. It’s a work of literature in its own right. It is a great example of the possibilities of the memoir to accomplish something other than realism: the whole thing is a kind of Proustian meta-narrative of his childhood and abrupt departure from Russia after the revolution, like a dream of family life written down. Mary Karr, in The Art of Memoir, heads her chapter on this book, “Don’t Try This at Home: The Seductive, Narcissistic Count.” Indeed, the book reads somewhat Transylvanianly, a bold, exotic yarn full of strange characters unfurled for an audience unfamiliar with that way of life. It reads as alluring and dark, and, yes, quite vampiric. But it is also profound and gorgeous. 

While it’s not really a memoir, more of an autobiography, and also not often regarded as exemplary of the form, My Lives, written by Edmund White is an incredible tour de force of portraiture of the most important people in his life, his therapists, his parents, his lovers, his friends, his subjects, they all get a chapter dedicated specifically to them. Imagine knowing a world-renowned painter who decides he wants to do a string of portraits of the most important people in his life and you are one of them. That’s what this is, in literary form. It’s less a story of him than of these people, but, by the end of the book, you, of course, end up knowing a lot about him. His ability to make you see the things that he is looking at, in a very concrete, physical way—the curves of a body, the angles of a face, the ambience of a train station—is unparalleled in my view. 

Is there a difference between an (a) autobiography and a (b) memoir? 

I think the difference is about scope. The autobiography is explicitly a functional genre that attempts to document a person’s entire life. It is a biography that is written by the person whose life is being written about. It does not usually try to invoke any literary devices and is intended to serve as an ancillary to consumption of the subject’s work outside of the autobiography. It is a kind of “reader” of the subject’s life. It’s main purpose is not to be written well (although if it isn’t it is a grave mistake), it is to convey the near entirety of the subject’s experience on earth. 

By contrast, good writing is a bit more called-for in the memoir; otherwise the whole premise falls apart. The memoir, in carving out a specific “slice” of a person, either a period of time or some type of encounter or some activity that they always do, is explicitly intended to amplify and interrogate aspects of being. In this way, the memoir has more potential for inspiration and edification irrespective of the reader’s interest in the subject’s life outside of the memoir. This, to me, is the crucial difference. 

For the most part, I am not explicitly a huge fan of the work of the writers below. But their memoirs have touched and inspired me. I don’t think I would have all that much interest in reading the autobiography of, say, Joan Didion. (I might, I can’t be sure, of course). But my point is that I’m not looking for her autobiography, whereas there’re a lot of Didion fans out there that would be waiting for said autobiography. 

In this way, autobiography is a kind of fan service, whereas the memoir is a thing unto itself. It is a work of literature written for the purpose of refracting aspects of being alive. To appreciate that type of writing you need not be familiar with anything else that person has done on this planet, anymore than that it is necessary to be familiar with Herman Melville’s entire oeuvre in order to love and appreciate Moby Dick. 

It was with the consciousness of the memoir’s self-sufficiency, the irony of its ability to communicate, in its more specific mode, even more broadly than the supposedly more capacious autobiography, that I continued my exploration of the genre and began taking notes for the writing of my own memoir (which is now a personal essay collection, but more on that later). 

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Two classics of the genre, here. 

Many of us have read Maya Angelou’s book in high school. Both focus on the same thing: a period of time starting from birth and leading just up to late adolescence. Both are written like traditional first-person stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, and, were it not for our knowledge of their source material, might easily pass as romans a clef. I also think that both are examples of “misery lit,” although I think that that genre is overly hip and reductive for Angelou’s work, which is about so much more than just her misery. But they both focus on their childhood traumas in such a plain, unadorned, simple way, it is shocking and, for those of us struggling with these same issues, healing. 

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The Apology and The Year of Magical  Thinking are examples of how the memoir can focus to a degree of incredible specificity. Both focus on pain but are concerned with different parts of experience. Didion writes only about one year of her life, while Ensler writes about almost the entirety of it, but with a focus on a single, prevailing experience. Both are harrowing in completely different ways and both are exquisite in the way they lift up their struggles to find meaning and truth, things that pertain to the reader’s own experiences and which he or she may also come into touch with in reading these books. They truly are gifts in that regard. 

In a manner of speaking, these two books are like two, very long, book-length personal essays. They rigorously explore and interrogate their premises and do their best to extract whatever possible that is meaningful out of that exploration.

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More “misery lit”! I actually don’t mean to be reductive in saying that. Both of these are fabulous stories concerning completely different encounters with mental illness and they are far beyond some hipster term of art. But there is a lot of memoir writing out there that explores the darker ways some of us were brought up and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with simply naming a certain type of writing that courageously explores how our childhoods might have been compromised. 

In The Glass Castle it’s about her father’s mental illness and in An Unquiet Mind, it’s about the author’s own journey discovering and treating her bipolar disorder. Walls writes her story very much like it’s a novel, like Angelou’s memoir, and, also like Angelou, she writes it from the perspective of her child self and it is a compelling account as a result, full of tragic innocence and complicated encounters far beyond the reach of a child to properly grapple with. 

Jamison’s book is very clinical, although she recounts her episodes frankly and shockingly and really brings you in to her subjective experience of insanity. These two books—not to mention Eve Ensler’s—have given me the courage to begin exploring my own encounters with mental illness and childhood trauma and to commit those experiences to writing. 

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As I continued to research I started coming upon a very interesting type of memoir, the experimental memoir. That’s really interesting I thought. How does one write a memoir as a form of experimental art? 

Not that this one is expressly experimental, but Robert Graves’ book is slightly off-putting in that fecund, experimental way: the bulk of it is dedicated to his experience in the trenches and it’s told with grit and harsh realism. But it starts with his schooldays and ends briefly, and curiously inconclusively, with scenes of fatherhood and tutelage. It’s a rather unique rendering of a life. Towards the end he admits that his original idea was to use the notes that he took on the frontlines for writing a novel but changed his mind after realizing that he would be desecrating his experiences and his memories and his sacrifices by layering a plot and storyline onto them. He then decided to write it simply as a factual account. 

Dark Back of Time, however, is a full-on experiment in autobiography and it is always slipping in and out of reality, imagination and historicization. He spends a large amount of time writing about an old soldier who died accidentally on a hotel balcony in South America but he gets to this through talking about the reactions that his peers in Oxford had to one of his novels which they suspected made use of their lives. Truly an eye-opening experience to read autobiographical material refracted in this way. 

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I haven’t read these three yet. They are “on deck,” as it were. Eat, Pray, Love needs little introduction, obviously. The Speckled People was highly recommended by a fellow writer and Lying came up in an online search as a prominent example of the experimental memoir. 

At this point, it was already clear to me that I was writing a different kind of memoir than any of these examples. I realized that I was in effect writing personal essays without knowing it. I knew very early on that I wanted to eschew responsibility for an overarching narrative of any sort. I wanted to commit myself to specific topics that could be covered discretely in one chapter each. When I read the Graves’ passage regarding the desecration of his time on the battlefield, I thought of my own “war stories” and thought similarly that trying to give them a plot, while not exactly a “desecration,” would feel unnatural and inauthentic. What was feeling natural was to pick separate experiences in my life and devote a chapter to those I felt were strong enough for further elucidation. The time I got stuck on a mountain overnight with a friend. The shock of coming to NYU. The decision to leave the music industry. There were so many other parts of my life that seemed to deserve specific treatment in this way. I naturally started coming upon essay collections as a result. 

II.

I took an online course by Alexander Chee called, “How to Write an Essay Collection” and afterwards it became much clearer what kind of book I wanted to write. I read about half of his reading list for the class and, along with the volumes I’d already dug into, I learned what a personal essay really was and what it wasn’t, and knowing this difference demonstrated to me quite clearly that the book I was writing wanted to be an essay collection in the truest sense of what an essay really is. The Leslie Jamison quote at the top of this blog post became true for me as well. My memoir could no longer stand being a memoir and had become a personal essay collection.

During the class, Alexander Chee recounted an irony regarding his own personal essay collection. He said that he found it curious when readers of his book would tell him that they found so much of him in it. “There’s actually not very much of me at all,” he said; and he mentioned this in order to illustrate what a personal essay collection is and what it isn’t. The reason why there’s not that much “of him” in his essay collection, nor, for that matter, why there isn’t much of any author’s life in any of their personal essay collections, is that a personal essay, despite being “personal,” is primarily geared towards externals not internals. “Pity the personal essayist,” the author Sloane Crosley writes in her New York Times review of Jamison’s latest essay collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, “fated to play with a reader’s tolerance for that most cursed of vowels. Too many “I”s and you’re self-absorbed; too few and: Where are you in this piece?” 

Self-absorption as a liability in writing is understood enough, though, when it comes to autobiographies and memoirs, the liability becomes unavoidable and, if anything, necessary. We read those books exactly for the purpose of the big drop into an author’s psyche, willingly diving down the subjective abyss, basically swimming in “I”s (the best ones allow us to do this gleefully). 

Not so in a personal essay, where the restriction on egoistic license holds. And yet: how do we include and implicate ourselves into the topic? without stepping on traps of self-absorption? This is what Chee was talking about when he said that there wasn’t much of him in his essays: not that he didn’t implicate himself in his narrations—he very much did—but that he skillfully observed this precarious balance. 

That balance is undertaken quite differently depending on the author (and in my synopses of the collections I’ve read recently I’ll try to speak about how they’ve assigned “percentages of self” into their essays, what the “lean-to-fat" ratio is, for example, when “fat” could be understood as the strictly autobiographical portion of the essay). It can also vary according to the essay. In some cases it’ll be necessary to fully implicate oneself. In others, perhaps only a passing mention of the author’s impression of the events is needed. But there’s an essential aspect to what makes for a great personal essay, irrespective of ratios of personal to objective, that Charle’s D’Ambrosio captures beautifully in the introduction to his own essay collection:

My instinctive and entirely private ambition was to capture the conflicted mind in motion, or, to borrow a phrase from Cioran, to represent failure on the move, so leaving a certain wrongness on the page was OK by me. The inevitable errors and imperfections made the trouble I encountered tactile, bringing the texture of experience into the story in a way that being cautiously right never could. 

This is kind of a Copernican revolution to me. I mean, it had never really occurred to me that you could be wrong and that would be a good thing. In writing I had always striven to make sure that I didn’t insult researchers, journalists, experts and scholars by misrepresenting the truth. Yet, here was basically a license to get it all wrong and admit it on the page and have that be a virtue of the writing. 

What this tells me is that what remains key in the personal essay is not some authoritative stance, but the very uncertainty of the perspective, and how that might invite opportunities for a much more intimate relational structure with the topic matter on the part of the reader. This isn’t about ingestion (of data, of info, of ideas, etc.) but about contact. I see that as being very similar to the relationship between reader and author in a memoir, this premium on relation. The only difference—and for me, a very consequential one—is that the primary target of a personal essay’s sight is not the self qua self, but some implication with the content of reality on the part of the self. That intersection is what fascinates me more at this time than simple self-narration. 

In this way, a personal essay can kind of be like a stop sign, a signal to halt the gyrating (mostly online) world, with its hyperlinks and ads and other pseudo-references. In fact, in his brilliant collection Proxies, Brian Blanchfield takes on this very task and turns the internet off when writing each of his essays in the collections. In order to take solace within the much more subjective account housed within the pages, an account at once open and tentative, based as it is in doubt, and hermetically sealed, shunning the greater world’s insistence on certification and realism, the essay becomes a prismatic utility for investigation, where perspective and subjectivity are king and certainty and objectivity are actually limiting.

The memoir offers something very direct to the reader: the author’s own struggle with, or journey through, some issue or period in life. The author is the chief protagonist in the drama, the star of, say, the cinematic adaptation of the book. The issues swirl around the protagonist but the camera stays trained on him or her. What I started to notice was that my mental gaze was always scudding away from the protagonist (me) and over to what else was in the frame. And so the personal essay as I began to learn about it became a much more appropriate vessel for these concerns, even as I knew that I would need to implicate myself in the action, keep myself in the frame. Striking that balance in a way that is both specific to me and my experiences and yet observant of the proper limits of the genre, so as not to veer away and “regress” back into memoir, has become my chief objective with each of the essays that I’ve been writing. 

                                ----------------------------------

These three collections might be my bible for this project. Each are very different in style and application, but each is similar in that joyous experience of reading a paragraph and being so stunned by the insight that one has to turn the face away from the page for a moment (or two) to let it sink in. Baldwin is, of course, the king of this sort of thing. There were times while reading his essays when I actually had to straight up close the book and put it down in order to absorb what was going on. The title essay which is about Harlem, his father, and his early awakening to the depth of his country’s racism, is perfection on both the level of content and form. It does what an essay does best: leave you with the unequivocal residue of human feeling twisting around the grander issues with which that essay is concerned. 

Each essay, in all of these volumes, is like a discrete nugget, a piece of writing, contiguous, open and alive, that can be read and reread, like an oracle you visit throughout your life, which, using the same words, speaks to you anew each time. 

Ambrosio’s essays are absolutely nimble and virtuosic; his language is muscular and sinewy; his sentences are lean and long and you can ride them effortlessly and when you finish them and their paragraphs, you are left with an image of a truth that was planted in your sight without you knowing. It’s an exhilarating experience. 

Blanchfield’s essays are a revelation of subjectivity. This volume was part of Chee’s reading list and I can’t express enough gratitude for having been directed to it. Perhaps Blanchfield is the master of nesting the autobiography within the confines of an essay. When he toggles between the external and the internal, you don’t notice it. It’s effortless.  His ability to tell a giant story in one paragraph is inspiring. The tone and delivery is somewhat sacral, he’s a poet, after all. But it is also delicate, graceful, poised and elegant. And deeply personal. How someone can title an essay “On Frottage” and turn the reader’s attention to the true significance of the topic—AIDS and the gay scene in the 80s and 90s—and all of the social significance intertwined in it, along with implicating himself in a nakedly autobiographical way, is beyond me, but I am happy to be in the audience for it.

                                ----------------------------------

What I love about these two collections are their stealth and form. Their stealth comes from how they read, not so much as casually but as without artifice or adornment, and how this aspect lets the reader’s guard down, only to have some extremely penetrating conclusion arrive at the end of each essay, in a manner that the more plainspoken style did not necessarily anticipate. Chee’s prose particularly comes across as either supremely and dryly witty or as modest plainness, but when you finish one of his essays the takeaway is anything but those things; it is profound. Jamison as well. As for their form, they tend to do some adventurous things. One of Jamison’s essays uses a kind of diagram of storytelling which she learned in a writing class to “tell the story” of a traumatic episode involving a horrific episode of violence she experienced in South America. The essay is called “The Morphology of a Hit.” It’s a perfect example of something else that I really love about personal essays which is their ability to take leaps in form when that form enables a type of storytelling that otherwise isn’t possible. Chee does this very thing in a somewhat humorous essay, the titular one of this volume, which is just a long list of life hacks and writing tips. I’m really grateful for the insight that this man has given me into the writing process. My copy of his book is signed, as I first became aware of him at a reading of his with Edmund White at NYU which my good friend invited me to. So I’m very grateful to that friend as well! He also introduced me to Edmund White so it’s a double whammy!

                                ----------------------------------

I would’ve never encountered these collections of my own volition without their inclusion on the reading list in Chee’s course, but I’m very happy that I read these. McCarthy’s essays are quite old, dating to the 50s and 60s, I believe, when they were originally published in The New Yorker. They’re all centered around her childhood years, either living with her grandparents or in an orphanage and they are remarkable portraits of intimacy and observation. The same with Ginzburg’s collection, although she writes in a much more enigmatic style. What inspired me most about her essays was how simultaneously aloof and vulnerable they are: she has a way of, say, writing about England, without ever even mentioning the name of the country, yet contriving a recognizable and incisive portrait of it, all from the vantage point of her own experience of the country during a certain time. Finally, there’s really nothing quite like Wojnarowicz’ book. It’s slightly Beat in tone, sometimes surreal and ecstatic, and then progressively more plainspoken and political. But it is all so very raw and pulsing with the heat of experience and desperation and anger. Wojnarowicz was an incredible artist, a sculptor and photographer and he lived in the East Village of the 80s and reports from the frontlines on the AIDS crisis. His work bears the stamp of a deeply tuned in artist confronting the hypocrisies and injustices of his time.

                                ----------------------------------

I put these three together mostly because these collections are explicitly comedic, although each has its own manner of using humor to communicate a deeper message. Jonathan Ames is well-known as a very funny novelist and the creator of the TV show Bored to Death. His essays are very short and very direct. There’s almost no commentary and he just narrates the events. The approach of leaving room for not knowing is very noticeable in his work, as he often qualifies his observations with humility and openness. The work comes across as very tender as a result. Irby is laugh-out-loud funny. I don’t know how she does it but she has a way of sending herself up and making fun of herself and her limitations that is both funny and painful at the same time. Commercialism, body positivity, and personal achievement are only some of the themes that are explored through that lens of self-effacement. Her ability to put herself under the most lacerating gaze of the authorial microscope and coming out the other end of that examination as a strong individual is unparalleled. I consider this volume must-reading material. In terms of exquisite construction and intelligence I would have to put Sedaris up high on the list, though his work is popular enough and his collections prodigious enough that his reputation for that kind of writing needs no further illustration here. 

                                ----------------------------------

Virginia Woolf is popular as an essayist for collections published much earlier than Moments of Being, such as The London Scene. The essays here are actually very raw and unedited and so very sprawling, though obviously of high literary quality. She wrote them down like diary entries and then they were found after her death. They feel similarly to McCarthy’s essays in their naked observations of early childhood and family life. Juxtaposing this collection with DFW’s Consider the Lobster is a bold choice on my part, but it’s for the purpose of elucidating my previous point about that delicate “lean-to-fat” ratio I spoke about earlier in this blog post. Woolf’s posthumous collection is “all fat,” one could say, in that her focus is almost exhaustively on her own life and personal upbringing and subsequent marriage. These essays are basically memoir writing in the guise of the personal essay. DFW’s essays, by way of intense contrast, are almost “all lean,” in the sense that he spends almost no time talking about his personal life. The closest he gets to that is his essay on 9/11 where he goes over the details of where he was when it happened. The rest are what you’d expect from the author: penetrating accounts of the subtleties and hidden motivations of the cultures and people he investigates. He is basically like the most intelligent wartime journalist where his “wars” are the John McCain presidential campaign of 2000, the AVN Awards Ceremony, or the Maine Lobster festival. 

                                ----------------------------------

I have yet to read these collections but I’m very much looking forward to them. Hemon’s essays are about his upbringing in the war-plagued Balkans of the Nineties and subsequent emigration to the US. Didion’s basically needs no introduction as its de rigeur for essay writing. I’ve included Benjamin’s because of his critical insight. He’s not writing about his personal life, but his gifts for analysis will be really helpful to be exposed to for anyone undertaking the task of writing a personal essay. I have not included a picture of Susan Sontag’s collection Against Interpretation because it’s on order, but that one is also on deck. As are two other collections not pictured: Mary Oliver’s Upstream and Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. 

Summary: When Lloyd falls sick, leaving the August Sky Repertory without a narrator, David Adams, a college student taking theatre on the side, gets thrust into the limelight.

Written for Day 1 of Shaperaverse Prompt Week!

David arrives late for rehearsal. It’s not his fault really, what with the rain slowing traffic to a crawl, and how he lives further from the August Sky Repertory Theatre than the rest of the group, and of course the bus is always late…

... is how he’s rationalising sleeping way, way in when Lloyd inevitably rakes him over the metaphorical coals for his tardiness. The company’s irritable stage manager detested when things didn’t go exactly according to plan, with lateness being a particularly egregious sin in his books. David thanks the stars that today’s rehearsal is only student-run, so he won’t have to deal with all that, on top of their director, William’s, trademark ‘I’m-not-mad-I’m-disappointed’ side glance that sometimes cut deeper than the worst of Lloyd’s tirades.

So when David barrels through the main entrance, sneakers squeaking on the polished marble floors, runs up the stairs to the auditorium on the building’s second floor, he’s fully prepared a barrage of apologetic excuses and half-truths. And when he pushes past the double doors, an ‘I’m so, so sorry' is on the tip of his tongue, ready to spill from his mouth.

And then he realises that Lloyd is, quite inexplicably, absent from their rehearsal.

His footsteps slow, and he proceeds at a steady trot downward, past rows of velvet-covered seats, to where Jill and Michael are, eating pizza with their legs dangling over the lip of the stage, spilling crumbs into the orchestra pit (something Lloyd and William would grow white hairs over, if they were actually there to begin with).

“Yo, Davey!” Michael waves. He scoots over two paper cups of soda, and pats the now-empty spot next to him. Taking his cue, David boosts himself up on the stage, plucking a slice of pizza from Jill’s hands.

“Hey. Sorry ‘m late.” He shoves half the pizza into his mouth, ignoring Jill’s protests.

“Damn, David, this your first meal of the day?” Michael balks, wordlessly passing a new pizza slice over to Jill, who accepts it with a huff.

“Yeah, actually.” David finishes off the crust, wipes greasy fingers off on his jeans. “Stayed up too late last night rushing a submission, so I overslept. No time for breakfast. I thought Lloyd would be ready and waiting to chew me out though. Where is he?”

As if on cue, Asha emerges from left wing, pacing the stage and chattering anxiously on her phone. “And you’re sure you’re getting enough water? Did you take a panadol? I could get some soup delivered to you.” Noticing David for the first time, she mouths a silent, Lloyd’s sick.

“You’re joking.”

Three pairs of eyes turn to David.

“What?” He puts his hands up in mock surrender. “He’s never sick. Don’t you guys ever notice he’s at rehearsal, like, always? He’s never late, never forgets to bring his script, and he never falls sick. it’s like he’s some sort of automaton. A weird theatre-obsessed automaton who runs on.. uhh..”

“Salt,” Jill offers, “and spite.”

“Yeah, that.” David holds out his hand to Asha, currently glaring daggers at him and Jill. “Can I talk to him? Just, you know, to be sure? And to wish him well and all.”

Sighing, Asha says a final “Take care, okay?” to the person on the other side of the phone, and passes it over to David’s outstretched hand.

“Lloyd?”

The voice coming through the Huawei’s tinny speaker is barely recognisable, raspy and low. “David. You’re late for rehearsal. You know-“ a series of hacking coughs interrupts whatever Lloyd (because it was, most unmistakably, Lloyd) was trying to say.

“Hey, hey, save it, yeah?” David’s own voice is threaded through with concern, but he can’t help a slight smile from crossing his face. Even when sick, Lloyd still can’t resist trying to lecture him. That sanctimonious idiot. “You’ll have plenty of time to yell at me once you’re better.”

A tiny chuckle. “That’s a.. all the incentive I need.” He clears his throat once, then twice. “Anyhow, I expect you all to continue rehearsal as normal. I’ve put Asha in charge. Just.. run through Janissary again, David, you’re taking over as Narrator, try to memorise your blocking, a-“

“-excuse me, what?!?”

“- I said, memorise y.. your blocking, and-“

“- no, no, the other thing. You want me to play the Narrator?!??”

“I don’t misspeak, David. There’s no one else to fill in for me, and we all know I narrate terribly.”

“B.. but Michael could, or I could call in his understudy. And who’s gonna work on lighting? I thought that was my job!”

“I-“ another coughing fit, “-I’ve arranged for Kate to take over the lighting, just for today. She should be arriving soon.” As if to anticipate the further protests forming in David’s mind, he continues. “You auditioned into this theatre program to sing and act, just like the rest of us. You can’t expect to keep hiding backstage and playing background roles. It’s time for you to step u-“ Lloyd’s voice gives out entirely, and Asha snatches the phone from David’s limp grasp.

“You’ve lost your phone privileges,” she says smoothly. Then, turning away from David, spluttering and panicking, she addresses the sick stage manager (and friend!) on the other end of the line. “Lloyd, stop trying to talk on a hoarse throat or I’m going to chuck Brija’s spear at you again. We’ve got this handled. Just sleep someplace cool, keep a cold compress someplace handy. We’ll all come over to visit you once we’re done for the day — nonono, don’t say anything — we will come in and take care of you, because gods know your dad’s not gonna do it, so hush. Go to sleep, and rest well.. Love you too.”

With that, she flicks her phone shut, pockets it, and turns toward the rest of the group, all staring silently at her. She colours a little, tucking a stray curl self-consciously behind her ear. “What?”

“He said ‘love you’?” Michael grins, forming air quotes around the words. “That boy is havin' a fever.”

Jill smacks his arm. “Don’t be an asshole. We know Asha’s more of his mom than anything, not... you know...” She and Asha shoot meaningful glances at David, who, for the record, looks entirely perplexed. Jill mentally sighs. David would come to terms with his crush on Lloyd eventually (or at least, she hopes so, the energy between the two of them is entirely too weird and awkward otherwise).

“Yeah, call me a mom all you like, we all know you’re planning on visiting him after rehearsal too. I just took the liberty of saying we’re all going to spare him having to argue with us individually. Speaking of.” She pulls her long, dark hair into a ponytail, the universal code for let’s get down to business, and claps her hands together. “Shall we begin rehearsing? Kate? Kate!”

The dark, silent theatre is filled with an electrical hum, as row by row, lights spark to life, growing brighter and brighter as they warm up. The control booth at the back of the theatre illuminates, revealing Kate, a freshman and the newest member of New Albion University’s theatre program, clad in a pair of headphones half the size of her face, waving at the group below.

“Sorry, sorry!” Her voice, mic’d up to the theatre’s speakers, bounces eerily around the room. “You guys seemed to be distracted, so I zoned out. Are we ready to start?”

Scowling, David asks, “Was she there the whole time? Was anyone gonna tell me I got replaced as lighting tech by the freshie?”

“Might want to cut the snark there, buddy,” Kate’s amplified voice warns.

“What she said. Also, take this as a valuable learning experience,” Asha says. “You do a good Vizier, but it’s about time you tried a bigger role.”

“And even if it ends horribly, it's fine, since this is just today’s arrangement!” Jill pipes up.

David groans. “Not helping.”

Michael claps him on the shoulder. “Heyyy, you’ll be fine, Davey. Just read through the script and remember where to stand. You got this, man.”

Nodding, David fishes out his Janissary script, and flings his satchel bag toward the seats, where it lands lopsided on the front row.

“Places, everyone! Jill and Michael, clear the trash from the stage!” Asha calls out. “David, stand here.” She ushers him gently to where a faint ‘x’ is taped, downstage right.

A chill runs up his spine. He isn’t hidden upstage, or holed up in the control booth, he’s here, standing at the August Sky Repertory Theatre’s unofficial ‘sweet spot’, a space on stage where even the softest voice can cut right through the cavernous auditorium, clear as crystal. A space reserved for soloists, for the most important characters to have their moment in the spotlight. For anyone but him.

Experimentally, he clears his throat, and almost winces when the sound travels through the vast performance space, silencing the others where they are standing.

“Are you ready, David?”

He turns to look at Asha. “I don’t think I’ll ever be, but I guess we gotta start sometime.” He clears his throat again, rocking nervously on the balls of his feet. “Okay. Act 1, Scene 1.”

The house lights dim, and narrow to spotlight David. He feels their warmth, looks out across the rows of empty seats.

There’s something special, about the moment just before the start of a performance. As one, the world comes to a standstill, and holds its breath in waiting. In the silence, David is all too aware of the thump, thump, thumping of his heart, the rustling of pages as sweaty hands flip his script open, to where the narrator’s lines lie, clean and unannotated. Tabula rasa, a blank slate, leaving only possibility.

The air crackles with anticipation, so thick he can barely breathe, and he can feel the others’ eyes upon him, watching, waiting for him to shatter that tension like glass.

This tale not all will attend, his first line reads.

He takes a breath, back straightening of its own accord. Addressing the invisible audience, he opens his mouth, and begins his performance.

Do you have any tips for how to become more of an ‘active’, thoughtful reader that can connect all the hints & small worldbuilding pieces?

Hello there! I’m going to be upfront and say I’m not totally sure exactly what you’re looking for with this question, so I’m sorry if I’m off the mark with this answer. (Not sure if you mean just like... in general, or about my writing, or what. If you can clarify, that would help me tailor my response!)

I don’t really know if there’s a knack to this kind of thing so much as it becomes a habit over time once you decide to cultivate it. For me, I’ve done close to a decade of tertiary-level English lit. study + a few years teaching English lit. at that level, so a lot of reading practices for me are pretty intuitive at this point and I’m very comfortable in this environment. 

But I don’t think you need a degree of any kind to be an active reader! For the most part, I feel active reading (or critical engagement, or however you’d like to call it) really starts with holding a couple of questions in your mind as you read and sort of checking in with yourself periodically to gauge what you think about what you’re reading. At a certain point, this’ll happen automatically when you’re reading, but to begin with if you’re struggling or finding it hard to like, read “mindfully” (for lack of a better term) it might help to just pause every couple of chapters and take stock.

I think probably the most useful question to ask basically at any time is “why.” A lot of the time, your answer is going to be speculation because you’ll never actually know why a writer does something--and also it kind of doesn’t matter what they mean (see: death of the author), because what you get from the text regardless of what the writer intended is still a valid reading. Something a lot of people don’t realise is that the act of reading is itself an act of co-creating: the writer writes the text but every reader brings the text to life in their mind using their own experiences and ideology and interpretation. In other words, the writer might make a puzzle but the reader puts it together and every reader will make a different design out of the pieces provided. 

Anyway, specific questions you might want to consider when you’re starting out  as an active reader include:

what does [this] do?--i.e., “this” might be a sentence, a word, a moment in the text. What feeling does it evoke for you? What information does it give you that you didn’t have before? You might also ask why is [this] here when you’re doing this kind of close reading. 

how does [this] work?--i.e., “this” might be a specific sentence that gives you a particular feeling. Try to figure out how it did that. Is it the word choice, a kind of imagery, even the sound of the phrase?  

how does [this] connect?--i.e., “this” might be a theme or metaphor or repeated word/phrase throughout the text. Try to trace through and keep track of repetition, notice when it is used and especially when the context or way it is used is changed or emphasised. 

where have I seen [this] before?--i.e., “this” might be a word, phrase, metaphor, description, cultural reference, theme, moment, etc. in the text. I feel that this one is especially valuable if you’re a creator yourself, because after a while, you’ll start to see how many works share similarities, and even reference each other. It’s a great question for picking up on extra nuance or significance. (For example, the simple act of a character giving another character an apple can take on new significance if you connect it to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, and so on). 

Writing is ultimately clever manipulation. Good writing will often pull you in quickly and make you forget that you’re even reading, because the story feels so real and vibrant in your head. The physical text of the book will often become “invisible” if you’re enjoying yourself, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s usually the sign of a very skilled writer! But if you want to be an active reader, sometimes you have to resist falling headfirst into the story and keep a part of your brain separate to think “I am reading ink on paper, this was constructed by another person, what do these words do, how am I being manipulated right now and why.” 

As for world-building specific advice, there’s not really a lot that jumps to mind except to sort of remember that the core duties (in my opinion) of most world-building in fiction are:

1. to describe a world in enough detail, nuance, plausibility, and coherency (or at least a veneer of these) that you (the reader) are able to be pulled into it enough to want to read the story without suspension of disbelief being pushed too far; and 

2. to shape and move the narrative in some way--i.e., be used as a vehicle to create conflict and obstacles, and influence characters’ options and choices, or even set the tone and theme of the story.

That first part most people parse sort of automatically: you know just by reading if you can “believe” in the world or not, or if you “enjoy” the world or not. Some people will pick up a book and adore the world-building; others will pick up the same book and find it asks too much of them, or bores them in some way. 

The second part is more a matter of paying attention to how information is delivered to you, both about the world and by the world. 

These are both important and, in well-written stories, they tend to work together in a very intuitive, subtle way. However, in less well-written stories, you usually get a disconnect between the two, where the narrator says “in this world, x happens” or “in this world, y is important” (first part) but you never actually get that information from how characters behave or how the narrative progresses (i.e., absence of second part). 

I have a lot of thoughts about what makes good world-building etc., but I feel like that’s not really what you’re asking here, so I’ll just leave it at this for now and I hope this is helpful to you! Like I said, please let me know if I missed the mark on this and I’ll see if I can address more specifically what you’re looking for. 

Writing asks, 32, 33, 39?

32. Copy and paste your top three favorite lines/jokes/sentences you’ve ever written. What fics do they come from?

Okay the awful truth is I just absolutely love my own writing, even when I know it is rough in places, even when I know it could have used another round of editing, I just love it. So asking me to pick 3 lines from over 300k words of fic is just HARD. 

With that in mind, the entirety of “A Hawke’s Breakfast” is my favorite, and this line in particular:

Anders broke the awkward silence, but only to make it worse. 

Bloodline was the first fic I wrote where I really found my Hawke’s voice, and though the subject matter is definitely not for everyone, I still really love her narration through it. Here’s a line of hers that was well-received:

“Yes, well, the Exalted March to deal with the Champion of Kirkwall didn’t really live up to the last one. More of an Exalted Stumble, followed by an Exalted Shrug, with the finale of an Exalted ‘Actually, Hawke, Turns Out We Need Your Help Again.’” 

And have an entire excerpt from First Contact, a Shakarian fic where I reimagined their first time to be funnier for me (although they are not planning on banging each other yet during this particular moment because WOW that would take it to a whole new level of awkward):

“Our lips are sensitive,” she told him, “That’s why they are a different color than the rest of our face.”

Garrus examined her, a frown on his face, and she realized he was using his visor to get information on her. “Increased blood circulation,” he murmured.

“Lotta nerve endings, Garrus. Sensitive. So just, you know. Poke gently.”

But he didn’t lift his hand again. He didn’t appear to be reading information off of his visor anymore, either. He was just frowning. “Ah, well, blood circulation, nerve endings… they’re not…” He turned his face away from her, muttering more to himself now, “I mean humans would be the species to have it right in the middle of their faces, wouldn’t they…”

“They are not genitalia. Jesus.” Garrus coughed, but Shepard could have sworn he was laughing. “And I swear to god if you scan me with that visor, I will snap it in half.”

“Noted. But just to, ahh, head off any awkwardness…”

“Between our legs, same as you, and if I see you aiming that visor at—”

He took it off and gently set it to the side with a conciliatory bow of the head. On glancing at her, he changed his mind, standing up and placing it on her highest shelf—the one that was empty because she couldn’t even reach it. “No need to take out our interspecies gaffes on valuable tech, Shepard.”

33. What do you like writing better: one shots or multi-chapter stuff?

ONE-SHOTS. Knowing exactly where I’m going and how I’m getting there? Amazing. Story arc, who? Nah. We’re going with just some stupid dialogue and one, MAYBE two emotions. 

39. What’s something about your writing that you pride yourself on?

Given that my sense of humor caters directly to my own sense of humor, the sad truth is that I find myself hilarious.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I love writing dialogue, and I do not care at all for describing things, and I think it shows in my writing. I probably could and should force myself to improve the quality of the less-fun parts of writing, but currently I do not. 

Does anyone know what my OCs look like? No, and they never will. Good luck. 

From this set of questions! 

so...... thoughts on the first ep?

**spoilers for start spreading the news**

What is UP you guys? The new season of Dimension 20 is out and your girl is back (implies I left, which is false) with only the hottest of takes.

Usually I vomit up my opinions with little rhyme or reason and, don't worry, I'm not changing that format any time soon. But, because of the structure of the episode, I think it'll be easier to use headings and go through each character/element of this. So let's do this y'all!

The Setting

I think the best thing you can do as a writer or a creative person in general is the make something that only you could make, you know? Like, make the thing that only someone with your specific life experiences and weird brain could have come up with. And I really think that this is that for Brennan. I already talked about this in other posts, but the version of NYC that Brennan created for this game is that to me. Like, magical NY has been done, but the specific details? Who else could have written, "The annual SantaCon is actually Santa dumping all of his defective clones into NYC where the magic barrier that keeps normals from seeing magic will disguise them and the protectors of the city will be able to deal with them"? That's so specific and so wild and so New York and so Brennan.

And I haven't lived in NY for so long but I've had one winter here and the way he describes what it's like to walk down the street during winter in the city is so real. Like smelling garbage then laundry detergent then sugared nuts from those corner stands and you're freezing and then baking in the subway in your coat. That was so so real. (I will be saying this phrase a lot so get used to it now)

And I like that he didn't make the obvious choices, you know? Like we've had three, like, magical figureheads across D20 and those are usually classic old, white, possibly British roles, you know? Like a Gandalf or a Dumbledore. But he had Aguefort in FH and now Esther and Alejandro in TUS. I just think it's cool that we're getting some different archetypes to fill these roles instead of the same dude c.p'd in again, you know?

Also, the fantasy NYC map is so dope. I wanna go back and try to read everything on it when I have the chance. 

Pete

Ally is a DRUG DEALER. I thought Pete was gonna be a stripper but he's a DRUG DEALER. Honestly, I could have figured this out sooner if I'd just checked Urban Dictionary like I did just now and found out that "plug" means "someone who is a resource for obtaining something valuable that would otherwise be difficult to obtain" or, more simply, "drug dealer". But I'm glad I didn't because it was much more fun to find out in real time.

Ally makes some character choices sometimes that are too specific to not be rooted in life experience and that whole microwave cheese monologue was one of them.

Pete's official diagnosis is that he has "a lot going on."

Ally almost won MVP line of the episode with, "Shot my tits off." Murph losing it in the background killed me almost more than the actual line.

I really, really want Pete's doctor to be a recurring character because he is wild in how wild he isn't. He has so much wild stuff happening around him and he is in a wild line of work but he seems like a relatively stable guy. I love him. Also, the completely wrong cadence he used to say, "lgbt ally" was gold.

Is Ally ever gonna have a character with a good relationship with their parents? One time? Ever?

I literally don't even know how to begin to address the wild magic trip Pete went on. Like, I don't think Ally knew what they were doing when they decided to be a wild magic sorcerer. I don't think they knew what kind of challenge they were issuing to Brennan. And after seeing the wild nonsense Brennan consistently came up with for Jer'ih'meh in Bloodkeep, I can't want to see the insanity he spits out for Pete.

"You're the one who they they wanted to play a wild magic sorcerer."

Also, Brennan just using lyrics from "New York, New York" for whatever dream demon or whatever was going on in that trip was, like, equal parts clever and hilarious. Sidenote, do you think all the ep titles are gonna be from songs about NY? I mean, there are enough songs I bet.

Pete has this thing where he constantly lands on the exact wrong part of the situation to focus on. Like later when he gets stuffed in the magic closet at the hospital and he's like, "Hospitals are so advanced, also go much is this gonna cost?" Ally's comic timing on that is always perfect.

WILD that that was the first intro. Like, way to kick off the new season with a bang.  I really wonder what this episode would have felt like if this was the last intro or if the intro for the two normal people hadn’t been right at the top. Actually now that I’m editing, I feel like we almost got the intros from least experienced w/ this stuff to most experienced. Because Pete is a total noob. Sophia is also a noob but she has met Kugrash at least once. Then you have Ricky who’s only been in this for about a year. Then Kingston who probably has more experience than Kug by years but Kug has been a rat man his whole life (presumably). Finally Misty who is probably like a BS amount of years old and steeped in this stuff. Honestly,  if I was DM’ing, I might have fudged the die rolls to look exactly like how it turned out. 

Sophia

Emily describing her character and slipping into her character voice gradually as she went on was so pro.

"Like if Fran Dresher went on an Amy Winehouse bender." I love her.

"Did you not want baby bangs?"

"She's a WHOO-OAR."

I'm gonna die if Brennan make than woman an actual succubus because of an offhanded comment.

My favorite thing is when Emily is saying some nonsense and she can barely even get through it without breaking. Also, Murph is so visibly amused by Emily's entire intro. It's great.

I love that both of the "normal" characters spent most of this episode intoxicated in one way or another.

So Emily absolutely won the episode in my eyes for coming up with one of the sickest burns I've heard and in real time. A dude tells her to read his dick and she, after only a momentary pause, says, "No I'm not gonna read your dick (beat) because I don't read short stories!" Brennan doesn't even make her roll. He just narrates her success. The table goes wild. The bar she's at goes wild. Zac specifically is cracking up. Like, I feel like this is gonna be a little bit of a deep cut reference but did any of you ever play the Monkey Island games and do the insult swordfighting? That's what that scene was. Amazing.

Murph's, like, entire posture and expression (@ 1:24ish) when Emily is saying Sophia thinks she saw a giant rat man who gave her an egg sandwich and Gatorade is total gold.

"Gotta kill some brain cells to kill the ones with the memory of Dale in them."

OK so funny story (funny to me at least) at the Fantasy High live show, I was talking to some other girls who were there and we ended up talking about how the small of a woman's back is basically the worst place you can casually touch them outside of the really bad places and how viscerally terrible it is so when Brennan said one of the trolls touched one of the girls there and Sophie/Emily was like BIG NOPE, I had a That's So Raven flashback to that conversation immediately.

Emily leaps into action...and rolls a nat 1 to fight a bunch of trolls. She actually does really well in the rest of the fight though so that's good.  

Oh, also Siobhan made everyone dope themed dice boxes!

Ricky

I hope Dimension 20 runs for the next 10 years and I hope Zac plays a good, big, doofus in every single season.

"He's basically like Superman if Superman were Japanese." Love.

Also, I love the distinction that he's 5' 8" but buff.

Ricky surrounded by a raging fire: First of all, that's a cool bear.

I like the way that Brennan skinned the cleric and paladin powers for this game so they're more about values than deities. I was wondering how it was gonna work in this setting and I think this was such a cool way to handle it.  

I really think Brennan has a great handle of presenting certain things in such a way that it's interesting for the players as well as the audience. Like, when Ricky is trying to escape the burning apartment, he puts an obstacle in his way that forces him to use his Paladin powers (to create water specifically). It's not really a hard "puzzle" or something he has to roll for, but it introduces to the audiences that he's not just a firefighter. I just think it's really cool that he's able to pull off narrative things like that without actually controlling the characters. (And, props to the players too, of course, for being so consistently entertaining).

"Mr. March."

Ricky in the middle of the winter: I'm not as tan as I used to be.

Ricky rooftop runs like a freaking superhero.

OK, this is barely related to what I'm talking about right now but it's important to me that you all know this. I commented in an earlier post that Ricky clearly had circus music playing in his head at all times and then I was like, "Hmm, I wonder what that one circus song is called." You know, the song that you think about immediately when you hear the phrase "circus music" so I looked it up and APPARENTLY it is a CZECH MILITARY MARCH known alternately as (brace yourselves) ENTRY OF THE GLADIATORS and THUNDER AND BLAZES. I kid you not. That's actually what that song is called. I called my brother and told him immediately. OK, back on topic.

Is a questing blade a thing? I feel like it's a Thing from legend or fairy tales or something but, when I Google it, I come up with basically nothing.

Does Ricky have a thing for Esther or is he just a super awkward texter and nice guy who does not want to be set up by his sister for a different reason?

I need Brennan to explain how the Santa Question works in this world. The question being, "Why don't parents freak about the gifts they're not buying?" and, side question, "Why don't poor kids get presents?" My go-to answers are always, "He Jedi Mind Tricks into thinking they bought them," and, "He has to work within each family's socio-economic means in order to not be obvious." So there are def plausible answers. But, like, this is something I like to see addressed when we're doing the "Santa is real," thing.  

"I grew up with twins and one of them was worse than the others so that makes sense."

"Is Santa good?"/"The ethics of it are alarming, I won't lie."

So, my paranoid thought for this episode is I'm a little Concerned that someone down the line (maybe Esther, but hopefully not) is going to take advantage of Ricky's Big Dumb energy and his "It's the right thing to do," mentality and manipulate him into doing something Not Great. Like, it's not based on anything besides mainlining a ton of media over the past 24 years but I'm just gonna keep an eye out.

Re the Santa/Peppermint Zombification: Hey Brennan, turn your location on. I just wanna talk.

I have to say, from the bottom of my heart, what the hell?

That creeped me out in the same way that episode of Adventure time where Princess Bubblegum (infused with the primal elemental candy energy or whatever) turned everyone into Candy people and everyone started singing Let Me Call You Sweetheart. What a weirdly specific body horror thing for me to encounter more than once. That one peppermint tooth thing is gonna haunt me. 

Kingston

I gotta say, props to Lou for pulling a complete 180 on the kind of character he picked this time around. He went from playing this super extra rich pretty boy to this salt of the Earth quasi patriarch and he's just as comfortable with it. Kingston is so real. I went to church with like 50 guys like him back home.

Why are you fighting so hard about free food Kingston? Take the free homecooked food Kingston!

The intensity of his, "I will be here until I die," was hysterical.

Mentioned this before but I love the flavoring of the cleric class where instead of being attuned to a deity Kingston is basically attuned to the entire city. Also, the perks are excellent. Bus service anywhere for free. Sign me up.

I like that Ricky's sister works at the hospital. It's a really cool potential connection for later.

"We're gonna take the thing outchyo butt. We're not gonna deny you medical services."

"Aint nothing wrong with being a freak." --Kingston Brown

Fantasy creatures having to deal with updated tech (like the Toll bridge trolls talking about EZ-passes) is one of my fave urban fantasy tropes.

"I've got a really sweet smelling man here!"

"Yeah, my tooth fell out and now it's a candy. Hey, how much is this gonna cost?" This is what I’m talking about. Priorities my dude.

I love that Kingston knows Pete's weird mob doctor. It seems like part of his deal is that he just knows everything about everyone in the city (within whatever parameters).

Pete says, in quick succession about Ricky, "I feel like he would bully me," and, "He seems like a golden retriever," which I feel are almost mutually exclusive statements.

Kugrash

Well, I asked what kind of druid nonsense was happening in Central Park and the answer is Murph apparently.

I really wish I could have been there when Murph announced he wanted to play a literal rat.

"I am the shit that feeds the flies. A dumpster druid."

"Wherever you are rat Jesus, I love you." You're killing me Brennan.

Aww Kugrash goes around feeding the homeless and stuff. He's like this grumpy ass rat man who really cares about the community.

"Santa you fucking bum." --Kugrash

"I'm sorry are you a rat?"

The idea of a roach with a hobo sack pisses me off because it's adorable but roaches are the worst.

"Is Santa dead?"/"I don't know. I'm not religious."

"Santa Claus is real and he's DEAD."

Brennan loves to use the modifiers "full" and "fully" and I have picked it up irl and in my writing.

"Let's get a little fucked up and go see if Santa's dead!"

Just that whole squirrel interaction.

The sixth borough huh? Interesting. I see you Brennan.

Also, the detail that Kug's clothes are made from old MTA vests is great.

Misty

Siobahn is playing basically exactly the character I thought she'd be playing but she's doing it so much better and more extra than I could have imagined.

"A lady would never say her age, so I won't."

Is her pianist magic or something too? I have my suspicions.

So Misty gets some kind of bard and/or fairy high from praise and adoration which is interesting.

What kind of weird, morally dubious and/or unpleasant fae thing is Misty gonna have to do soonish? It's not gonna be good. Fae stuff never is.

DON CONFETTI

"I don't study magic. I just *am* magic."

So many of these intro vignettes end with, "You don't know that...but you do know who does." Like I said before, I really love the weaving together of all the story threads to get everyone in the same place at the same time in an organic feeling way.

Also he makes all these transitions sound cinematic, like he's writing the description parts of a movie script and not narrating in person.

Public Library! I knew we'd end up here eventually but I didn't know it'd be pretty much immediately. Like, if you're going w/ the "NY is magic" premise, the library has to figure in, you know?

Emily immediately having Sophia recognize Ricky as Mr. March was such a funny and on point character decision. I love how one-off, spur of the moment lines end up being running jokes because other players pick on them and drop them an hour later.

"Are you a rat?"/"Yeah, I'm a rat man!"/"I'm sorry if that was rude."

Brennan: The lions are alive and they're boyfriends.

Misty and Siobhan both are genre savvy enough to want to nip a knights/knave door puzzle situation in the bud.

Ricky on escape rooms: I'm not very good at them but I can definitely try my hardest. (Guys, I love him so much.)

Love me some MC Escher steps.

Underrated Misty line: It's all infernal to me.

Misty's little, "Ugh" at learning they have to go to Times Square is the real NY experience.

Is this Alejandro dude gonna die? What's the over under on this dude eating it very soon?

Misty encouraging Pete to shoot Alejandro is so needlessly chaotic which is a common fae trait and I really hope this escalates.

I dunno what Murph rolled for initiative but he looks like he just shamed his entire family line.

And we’re fighting an army of crazed Santa clones next week! We have literally just started and we are already fully off the rails.  I cannot *wait* to see where we go from here if this is the *starting point*. 

Hey so random ask but, I see a lot of people calling Tim drake sexist, I personally don't think he is but what are your thoughts on that.

Oof. Okay.

Technically I can’t just say he’s not, because as the product of a sexist society he, like any other dude and to a lesser extent any person, has got some passive sexist attitudes baked in there.

It tends to surface in things like, when he went on that first big solo adventure when the Robin comic launched, that started in Paris? And he wound up hunting King Snake with Lady Shiva and this one rogue federal agent, a black man, and he got very decisive. Shiva says something cutting about white men, and she has a point, in that if either of his adult companions of the moment were also white men Tim would probably have been somewhat more conscious of the fact that he was thirteen.

That unconscious prioritization that DC’s sexist narrative tends to favor? That is sexism, and also racism, and it’s valuable to draw attention to it, though not, I feel, to blame it all on Tim because quite often he hasn’t actually done anything, the universe around him has just colluded to make him look good.

(Of course this doesn’t happen much anymore, but back when he was the Main Character it did. Comics is a sexist community in a sexist culture, so of course Tim got some of that muck on him.)

But most of the accusations you see going around are about tearing him down on Steph’s behalf, and that’s...murkier.

Because honestly Tim is less sexist than most of the men in his profession. Significantly less so than Bruce or Dick. I literally cannot imagine Tim talking about a loved one the way Dick used to talk about Kori, or a new acquaintance the way Dick did a lot of the one-episode women from his ‘90s Nightwing solo series. He wasn’t bad to them exactly, he was honestly very normal and probably above average, but the incredible, controlling arrogance and casual sexualization is still hard to get through, sometimes. Almost more so for how much more it comes out when he’s talking behind their backs. And Bruce...well, Bruce and gender is an entire deal I’m not going to try to unpack here.

And I cannot see Tim ever using ‘girl’ as an insult, the way Damian does.

Tim’s interactions with the ladies on Young Justice, for example, tended to be a lot less emphatically gendered than Dick’s interactions with the ladies of the Teen Titans, or even Bruce’s in the Justice League, though there are fewer women there and less casual interaction.

And to a considerable extent this was because the passage of ten years had modernized writing norms, and to a considerable extent this was because his demographic was younger than the Titans and therefore less sexualization was expected of the writers. Young Justice built on some stuff Marvel had been doing with young teams and broke some ground that Marvel has built on even further lately. (Seriously what is with Marvel’s young team books lately they’re incredible.) But there was also that Tim as an individual cares less about gender than most of his family.

(In some ways Jason may care even less, but he also leans really hard into performative masculinity and thought flirting was a reasonable way to interact with older women as a teenager, and he’s been being written by Scott Lobdell for ten years even if I have a hard time thinking of that as canon, so his data is mixed.)

Or take the case of this young freedom fighter (/terrorist) who happens to wear Robin colors, who Tim meets at one point in Europe. Dava. The story creates situations where Tim gets a weird mind-altering stimulant transferred orally to him by Dava, and then from him to Shiva when he’s giving her CPR, and Tim rather notably doesn’t have a single narration box or speech bubble that treats these as ‘kisses’ that he has somehow benefited from obtaining.

Later he crawl-drags Dava’s knocked-out-by-Shiva body out of the middle of the bloodbath Shiva is now staging, because he’s in no state to do anything to stop it, which he hates, and while this is certainly the comic arranging things to put Dava in a damsel status relative to Tim, Tim does not at any point frame it that way.

He is really good about not disrespecting Dava, honestly. It’s an interesting storyline partly for that reason, though it’s not the only time it comes up.

Tim was constantly meeting Troubled Young Women who could kick his ass and whom he respected considerably in most senses, but whom he was able to convince that their particular approach to violence was somehow flawed and needed to be re-thought. Thereby allowing there to be Strong Female Characters but keep the balance of the world in order and not worry the readership, by placing the male lead in a subtle power position even if he had gotten his ass kicked.

It was like. An entire genre. Tied to the way Shiva kept popping in as Incredibly Terrifying Supporting Cast.

This was a major way DC was using female characters in and immediately after the 90s and tbh in some ways it was more progressive than what they tend to do now, even as certain parts of the framing set my teeth on edge.

(Compare ‘Tim on drugs manages to hit Shiva hard enough to take her down because she didn’t expect lethal force from him so he has to do CPR’ to the more recent Red Robin story where we spend a couple of pages with him laying out to her face how she came to town to fulfill a contract on him but he brilliantly out-thought her and she ate the drugged chocolates he sent her so He Wins. Bleh.)

Steph stands out for hanging around instead of being a one-off appearance, and for not really rethinking her life in response to Tim much at all, while also not being a villain.

The crux of the issue is, Tim slid into talking down to Steph on a semi-regular basis, especially when trying to get her to stop vigilante-ing, which he’s getting backlash for some twenty-odd years later, mostly by people blaming him for her narrative deprioritization because it’s more satisfying than blaming DC.

And a major form this takes is declaring him generally sexist.

And the thing is, I’m sure his unconscious view of himself as more competent to make judgment calls because Main Character Demographic did play into the way he approached those conversations! I have never met a dude with any self-confidence whatsoever for whom that wasn’t a factor. Sexism, like racism, is the air we breathe, you have to actively extricate yourself from it and even then it will crop up at odd moments.

Classism played into it, too--especially once he knew she was a C-list villain’s daughter; there was that sense that often crops up in Batman properties that not only does greater access to resources make it safer and less self-destructive for the moneyed class to go vigilante-ing, noblesse oblige means it’s also somehow more just. The old ‘the outsider has a more objective approach’ canard. This was even more subtextual than the gender stuff, but I’m sure it was there.

Intellectual elitism is sort of a subset of both that and gender issues--Tim knows he’s smart, it’s the core of his pride, and Steph is not as smart in the same ways and has not had the same educational opportunites, and there are definitely moments of high-handedness tied to this.

And then there was the territorial aspect; it was official Bat policy to discourage all other Gotham vigilantes, usually in a much more absolute and commanding way than Tim ever tried, not to take them in and train them.

That might have been an option for Bruce if he’d wanted to, but it wasn’t really on the table for Tim unless he wanted to stage an intense campaign to totally disrupt his own life in order to bring this person who introduced herself by hitting him in the face with a brick after he mistook her for a villain into private Bat training and spaces. They’d known each other for a while and been having this argument in various forms most of that time, before they ever dated.

Please also remember that the last time Tim wanted to take a troubled blond under his and Bruce’s wings and show them the ropes and make sure they could do this safely as part of a personal healing process that would help everyone, that person took less than a week after starting to show signs of instability to have a complete psychotic break, beat him into the ground, build a brick wall in the Batcave to keep him out, lock down the computers, and start killing criminals with the knife-hands he added to the Batsuit, while failing to prioritize civilian safety.

This was not that long before Steph’s debut. If I were Tim I would not trust myself to sponsor further new team members either!

All of these things besides the Azrael trauma are directly from Bruce, who is often way more emphatic and more of an ass about them. Robin was mirroring Batman (consider the way he talks to Selina sometimes egad, sometimes it only doesn’t look awful because she’s playing along) and following Bat-policy; it is totally nonsensical to hold Tim accountable for this and not Bruce.

It’s also important to note that Tim wasn’t significantly less condescending to Anarky or the General, who were white guys around his age with roughly his class background whom he was trying to talk out of villainy, and honestly Lonnie’s motives were baller. (The original Anarky was a hacktivist based on a design somebody drew up for the third Robin, but Tim got made instead.) Tim’s entire character design back to his first appearance holds that when he’s trying to talk someone into something he tends to fall into a lecturing approach.

This can be very annoying! The first time he did it to Nightwing he got grabbed and shaken and snarled at. And of course it’s worse when he’s talking down a demographic slope, rather than up one.

I am very aware of how fucking annoying it is when guys do this, even if it is their normal mode of interaction. I have come very near to punching faces over it, when it’s really bad.

Tim doesn’t usually approach that line, but the problem is his writers didn’t seem to know the line was there, so if you’re reading some of his interactions with Steph from the perspective of having that chip on your shoulder already, especially if you’re not immersed in the narrative’s assumption that he is The Main Character, especially now that language norms have shifted slightly so wording that was considered neutral in the 90s is now obnoxious, it can ironically make a deeper impression than the much more blatant and decided sexism going on all around him.

So that’s my take on the situation. Tim has some mild passive gender prejudice which he has never taken enough notice of to seriously compensate for, made more visible by being in a deeply sexist world and by being kind of an annoying person sometimes, and this has been blown wildly out of proportion by people who feel that he and Steph are in competition to be The One Who Was Not An Asshole in that relationship.

This is not a winnable competition. They were both assholes sometimes, and even if you could prove Tim was a terrible boyfriend/person it wouldn’t validate all of Steph’s behavior--she was often forced to behave very badly or stupidly, because back then one of her major narrative functions was as a stick for the writers to hit Tim with.

And the thing is. If you’re going to exculpate Steph of awful behavior because it was ‘just’ the writers being sexist, let alone let Dick off the hook on similar grounds, I think it’s really unfair and messed up to then turn around and hold Tim-the-individual accountable for sexism that mostly wasn’t even situated in him so much as baked into the narrative, though to his benefit.

Like. When sexism (or other -ism) benefits people in real life it can be useful to draw their attention to their systemic advantages if they seem not to get it, but drawing Tim’s attention to his narrative prioritization would be extraordinarily meta (lol somebody write that fic). And in neither situation is it productive or fair (though I do know it is so so tempting) to treat the very existence of someone’s privilege as an offense they have personally committed.

They literally cannot help that. That’s how systemic works.

Of Infodumps and Information

Infodumps. The terror of many a speculative fiction novel. There’s something the author (and possibly characters) knows, but the readers don’t. Something pretty important to the story, in fact. The easiest way turns out to be just explaining everything, except then your readers’ eyes glaze over and if you’re lucky they skip it.

The problem: information needs to be conveyed

Not the solution: convey it all at once.

But what is the solution? 

Well, this post is going to address some of them.

Dialogue

This can be a fairly organic way of communicating information, especially if one character is as in the dark as the readers. Dialogue’s also very good for having a scene serve multiple purposes. However, this runs into the problem of unnatural dialogue.

Take this, for example.

“You know, Alice, I’m worried about our elderly neighbor Jane. You know she had that cancer screening last month...”

This isn’t egregiously wrong, but it doesn’t feel like something someone would say to somebody familiar with the situation. Alice knows Jane and her history with cancer screenings. Why is the speaker repeating that?

This could be reworked to:

“Hey, Alice. You remember Jane, right? The one two houses down, with all the cat knick-knacks - anyways, she got screened for cancer last month...”

Which implies Alice is not, in fact, familiar with Jane. Alice needs her memory jogged, and there’s enough information here to actually distinguish Jane to the reader. Maybe it isn’t obvious right away that Jane’s elderly, but you can bring that up elsewhere.

Or:

“I’m still really worried about Jane. She's been dodging questions about her cancer screening - I know you think I should drop it, but...”

Alice and our speaker know Jane equally well. Alice at most needs information about our speaker’s ongoing worry about the situation. This gives away less information to the reader than if Alice didn’t really remember Jane, but it’s still the plot-relevant information.

Now. I mentioned multiple purposes.

Dialogue about a world - or what happened last week, or a mutual acquaintance - shouldn’t just advance our knowledge about the topic. It should also present new information about the characters (the speaker is a worry-wart) and/or the plot (something’s up with Jane), and it should be dynamic. The story’s state should ideally be notably different before and after the conversation. Maybe Alice and the speaker have a fight about the speaker’s untreated anxiety. Maybe this conversation prompts Alice to visit Jane and instead Alice finds a supernatural mystery.

Feel like you need to recap a complicated and messy situation with multiple characters in different places who don’t all have the same information but need to get on the same page? Either skim over that, or, better yet, use that to highlight cracks in character relationships. Maybe Suzy objects to how merciful Peter is towards vampires, criticizes him for this during the after-action-report, and someone gets upset enough to storm out of the room.

Description

Another good way is simply for the narrator to describe what’s going on. Of course, this is where the dreaded hard science fiction three page long description of hyperspace can happen.

Consider: what does the reader actually need to know, right here, right now, immediately, to understand the plot and the characters? Is there something that can be revealed later?

(If you have a lot of really cool worldbuilding that doesn’t fit in the margins of the book but would deepen the readers’ understanding of the plot, I, for one, am a huge fan of Tolkien-style Appendices.)

Consider, also, how much you can get away with describing and leaving to your reader’s assumptions. “Alice tilted her head back to stare up at the enormous spaceship, her breath taken away” communicates plenty well that this is a science fiction setting with spaceships. Your reader, if they’ve willingly picked up a scifi story, presumably knows what a spaceship is.

And, related to that...

Trust Your Reader

Go ahead. Yeet them into the deep end. Your characters know the setting, you know the setting, and from there what the hell’s going on with the viewpoint narrator who keeps shying away from thinking about being not exactly human is a fun mystery for everyone else. 

You aren’t publishing this for aliens or for eleventh century Norwegians (presumably. If you are, I’d like to know). Your reader has as much background knowledge as you do, and if they don’t they have the internet.

Of course, this doesn’t mean “leave whether they’re on a spaceship or in an elven forest ambiguous” (unless you’re doing something fun with metaphors and confusion, in which case, rock on). This does mean you don’t need to explain how cities work, or to clarify immediately whether your character who keeps getting blood cravings is a vampire or a werewolf or just really iron deprived followed by a ten page digression about either anemia or vampiric history. 

And, most importantly...

Have Fun

Don’t worry about a single shard of this in your rough draft. That way lies Edit Hell. And if you’re super enthusiastic about this history lesson of the War of the Dwarves and Cthulhi, that’s going to shine through. (Though maybe try to make the history lesson a bit more plot-relevant.)

And all of this is relative to your genre. A fantasy travelogue is going to be written very differently from a hard science fiction story about spaceships throwing missiles at each other. A narrator who isn’t the PoV character, and can talk to the reader, can reveal information the same way any story-teller would (”Now, our dear characters didn’t know it at the time, but far away...”). People willingly picking up a book that looks like and is marketed as a hard science fiction novel have more tolerance for infodumps on How Spaceships Work, and might even really enjoy some well-written fictionalized nonfiction about that. People picking up a Magic Academy story expect some classes about How Magic Works.

So, go out there. Write. Edit. Sprinkle your infodumps across your pages like a chef carefully dolling out a valuable spice. Have fun.

The Beginner’s Guide: Can I write the same thing twice?

Recently I watched Ian Danskin’s video essay on The Beginner’s Guide called “The Artist is Absent.” In it, he uses (and flawlessly explains) theories of art, language, and storytelling such as semiotics, death of the author, and enunciation theory to propose his reading of the game. Danskin suggests that the game is warning us not to mistake The Beginner’s Guide’s author for its narrator. In other words, a work of fiction should not give a reader the sense that they now know about the person who wrote it; they only know about the work itself. And I agree with this reading wholeheartedly. However, I still stand by my analysis of the game, that Davey the Narrator represents an ego that constantly criticizes the self while Coda stands for the artist’s persona that is challenged by societal norms, audience expectations, and even their own ego’s chatter. So, to reconcile the two, I’d like to make some amendments to my past article.

But first, rather than simply editing the post, I’d like to discuss whether I have a right to change it, since this idea is thematically relevant to both the game and Danskin’s video essay.

To illustrate the concept of authorial intention, Danskin asks if The Sopranos’s creator David Chase should retroactively be able to determine that Tony dies at the end of the show. Danskin’s answer to his thought experiment: “Fuck this guy!” If Chase wanted to explicitly convey this in the first place, he should have put something in the show to indicate it rather than the vague ending he did write. Full disclosure, I haven’t seen the ending of The Sopranos, but we don’t need to have seen it to get the concept. Stories are meant to be interpreted by their audiences, and authorial intention doesn’t have to be considered. People can come to conclusions just from the evidence in the text. However, historical and cultural context along with author biography are incredibly useful tools for analysis, so a text’s readings don’t always have to be isolated to the text either. This is a more complicated question of art theory that I’m not going to try to argue. I’m simply presenting the reader’s (assumedly your) perspective on this question of whether I can change my article. According to this train of thought, I could say what I now believe and would like to change, but you don’t have to consider it relevant and should judge my previous work as it was originally presented. Fuck me, right?

Now, if I were to use The Beginner’s Guide as my guide on this issue, I think the game would support an antithetical position. For interpreting and even changing his games, Coda says to Davey the narrator “Fuck this guy!” (my paraphrasing). The Beginner’s Guide questions the role of the audience in interpreting art and the artist’s responsibility to its audience. Art is usually thought of as something that is seen, something that gains value once an artist lets an audience see it. However, I suggest that art that is unseen by the public can still be valuable, specifically for the artist. Put simply, art is expression, and personal expression can be valuable without anyone to hear what was said. Coda makes games just to make them. But do I write essays just to write them? In some sense, I write these for others to read them, to express my thoughts to others and test their credibility and clarity. However, these essays are most valuable to me; I get to conjure up concepts and realize them on the page through language. I get to look back on these records of my thoughts and see how I have changed since I wrote them. These words are much more valuable to me, since I know exactly what they mean while readers will only ever get close to understanding – that’s not a knock on you, that’s simply the nature of language (Danskin simply and elegantly explains this concept as well in his essay). The Beginner’s Guide offers a similar view, that art can be valuable without ever considering its accessibility or an audience’s enjoyment of it. Here lies another complicated issue of art theory which I will not firmly debate, merely present a school of thought on the matter. With this concept in mind, though, I do have every right to improve my work so that I may more thoroughly enjoy it, and I shouldn’t have to consider you readers when I change it. Fuck you, right?

Hey by the way, I just wrote all of that, and now I’m realizing I don’t actually want to change anything. I brought up the whole “I don’t know Davey Wreden” thing in the article too (and in the title; I feel dumb).

Hi, Will here. That last bit may have come out of nowhere. Let me explain. I wrote all that at around midnight on October 2, 2016, and I’m currently reading it all again on May 30, 2019. This is gonna get meta. I’m now responding to an article I wrote about responding to an article I wrote about responding to a game (about a guy responding to a game designer). This act of responding is what I wanna talk about.

This article means something completely different to me now than it did when I started writing it. I’ve been thinking about how people reinterpret art as we gain new life experience, and how we engage in conversation not only when we create art but when we analyze it. I’m thinking about this more especially as I’m getting older, like when movies from my childhood feel very different because I’m reading into aspects I had never seen before.

Danskin’s video essay has, funnily enough, guided my thinking on this topic. His video has taught me about the audience’s role in giving art meaning and how subjective that meaning really is. Since I wrote the first half of this, I’ve rewatched that essay every few months, because it explains ideas that are fundamental to my current understanding of art. Please watch it. Really, I don’t care if you read the rest of this, it’s more important that you watch this video. Watch it. Now.

So what is my article about? What does it mean to me now? It’s about the endless conversation good art can start between artwork and audience. If a work is complicated enough and speaks to a person’s experiences on a deep, profound level, that work can be interpreted an infinite amount of different ways. And each way can be just as important and meaningful to a person. On top of that, the responses to that art can be equally valuable. Maybe this response to myself is a bit self-indulgent, but I do think it illustrates my point. I look at The Beginner’s Guide differently now because of how I’ve reconsidered it.

This piece is also about a writer who constantly rethinks his work. He’s trying to improve his thoughts and compare them to essays and thinkers that he admires. This becomes a cycle of read, analyze, respond, repeat. I’m constantly re-reading what I’ve written and checking whether I still agree with myself. In this way I aim to improve my skills in presenting a position and convincing someone of its substance.

This process exemplifies the dialectic mode: thesis (presenting a thought) -> antithesis (questioning a thought) -> synthesis (a greater understanding of the thought and the next starting point, literally the “new thesis”). This process supposedly progresses humanity’s collective intellect, as if all thought moves us towards an end goal of “the truth.” I don’t agree with this idealistic notion of truth, because to believe that is to dismiss the subjective nature of individual interpretation like I was saying before. But I do think that my understanding has evolved since I wrote the first half of this, and it’s fun to enter my previous mind and see how I’ve grown since then.

Now, I do want to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this all: Should I or should I not edit my original post?

Right now, I say no.

All art is influenced by its moment in time as well as an author’s beliefs and experiences. That author can be one person or a collaboration of personalities, all contributing to a combined philosophy which comes across as one message to the audience. John Green once said in an interview that “Writing is always an attempt at radical empathy.” I’m gonna reference this in another article (coming soon), because this thought has defined the value I find in art. Even if just for me, this article can take me back to the moment I wrote it. And that is valuable.

So Will, next time you read this finished post, think about me, sitting in the corner of my mom’s living room, at the table you made into a gaming corner, having a kinda depressed day because I couldn’t get myself to do anything, until I starting looking through my folder of old “This Rocks” docs, and I was hit with a wave of inspiration to write this. Remember this feeling. Remember, things aren’t always as bad in your head as they are when you’re sad. Things get better. Just give it some time, and when you feel you can do something else, do it. It’s better to move on than wallow in the muck of a slow, disappointing day.

And to you, the reader that is not me, thanks for indulging me. I know this piece is really only for me. But if you learned something from this, or maybe had an issue with how I explained something, or thought about your own work or experience, or maybe you even enjoyed being in my head for a few moments as you read this, then you’ve engaged with these words, I’ve done my job, and art prevails once more.

Art is dead, long live art!

Jane the Virgin 1x11 Chapter Eleven

Spoilers disclaimer (please read before sending messages or writing comments.)

Stray thoughts

1) I get that Young Jane’s heart was in the right place, but by writing that letter she was deceiving both her mother and her grandmother and robbing them of the change to work things out on their own. They really needed to talk it out.

2) Oh, wow, Xiomara was on point, she knows her daughter too well…

XIOMARA: I don't want the fact that you didn't have this textbook family to make you go after something that maybe isn't right.

3) And it feels Jane is going to approach the dinner with Rafael and her mom in the same way… She’s going to coach Rafael into acting in a way that would satisfy her mother, right? Instead of letting them actually get to know each other and hope her mom comes around…

4) Of all the things going on in this show, this is by far the most unbelievable…

NUN: This is because I'd like to offer you a permanent job.

JANE: What?

NUN: Another teacher is pregnant. We thought you could trail her until you graduate and then cover her maternity leave. Then when she comes back, you can take yours with the promise of a permanent position in our Middle School when you return.

JANE: Wait, is-is this about the Jane the Virgin coins?

NUN: No, Ms. Villanueva. This is because the students gave you the highest score on your teacher evaluations.

I’m sorry, but this so far-fetched! I am a teacher, okay? Jane was doing her teaching residency, she hasn’t even graduated yet, right? On top of that, she has a full-time job, she’s pregnant, and she has all this personal drama going on which keeps her busy most of the time. It’s surprising she even managed to get through the student teaching assignment without failing spectacularly – there’s a lot of lesson-planning to do, materials to be prepared, notes to read, reports to write, and so on.

Moreover, the fact that you’re likable doesn’t mean you’re a great teacher. I don’t care how talented you are and how hard you study, you only learn how to be a good teacher in the classroom, and it takes YEARS. Jane is hardly there yet.

5) So, Jane is getting not only one but TWO amazing job opportunities she didn’t ask for and she hasn’t earned… Color me skeptical.

6) And now she’s being welcomed into the writers’ room? And they’re asking her for ideas? And they write her ideas into the show immediately? And she’s gullible enough to believe all of that could actually happen?

7)

8) And the second Rafael goes off script, he fucks it up.

9) Oh, I wish Xiomara’s dislike of Rafael wasn’t made to do with the fact that Michael confessed he still loves Jane. There are plenty of other reasons that justify why she’s entitled to feel iffy about their relationship, you know?

10) Petra opened up to Lachlan, but I’m not sure he’ll help her?

11) Why exactly did Xiomara go see Rafael? Just to tell him how much she doesn’t like him? It doesn’t seem fair. I have to admit, though, that even if she does seem a bit irrational I’m siding with her. He makes a good point when he says that Xiomara doesn’t really know him. But Jane doesn’t really know him either, and that’s the point.

12) Look, I love Rogelio, but he really needs to stop with these schemes…

JANE: Did you tell the writers to act like they liked my idea?

ROGELIO: Uh are you enjoying your new job?

JANE: Rogelio, did you?

ROGELIO: Yes, I did. But it was to give you confidence. You said you didn't know if you'd be any good at writing. And believing in yourself is the hardest part.

13) So, this is Xiomara’s strategy to prevent Rogelio from wanting to bone her…

But it didn’t work…

14) Now, that’s a turn-off…

I’d also go celibate after that.

15) Magda doesn’t trust Lachlan, and at first, I was like “yes, Magda, me neither!”, but then I remembered what Magda has done and maybe I should trust Lachlan if she doesn’t? I’m confused!

16) And this, among other things, is why Rogelio is my favorite character…

ROGELIO: I don't like it.

JANE: What?

ROGELIO: Well, I'm sorry. You asked me to be honest. You said it was important.

JANE: Yeah, yeah. It is, but what did you not like about it exactly?

ROGELIO: Well, a pirate would never say these things.

JANE: Oh, okay. I mean, do you know a lot of pirates or… ?

ROGELIO: And second and most importantly, telenovelas are all about drama. You know yelling, crying, scheming. And there's none of that in here. I'm sorry. Are you angry?

JANE: No. I mean, it stings, but I wanted you to tell me the truth. I have to make a decision. I just really loved writing it. I mean, I got butterflies.

ROGELIO: Well, that is important. You know, passion is important.

JANE: Yeah, but if I'm not talented –

ROGELIO: Oh, stop. Every new skill takes time. You can't expect to be an expert overnight.

I think he taught her a very valuable lesson. She was asking for his honesty but she was secretly hoping she would only get praise. Not only that, but he also gave her valuable feedback – she was clearly not writing in a style suitable for the genre, telenovelas. But the most valuable advice is what he tells her last – you can’t expect to be an expert overnight. She didn’t get it right the first time, so what? Now she knows what she needs to improve to make her piece better.

17) Oh, Michael completely misread the situation and now he actually has incriminating evidence to frame Rafael…

18) Uh-oh, Jane fell asleep while driving…

19) Awww, the butterflies she felt were the baby kicking!!! That’s so sweet!

20) So, Xiomara told Rogelio about the chastity vow, and OF COURSE, he was totally supportive. But she didn’t mention the fact that she’s remaining celibate UNTIL she gets married. I’m sure Rogelio would’ve dropped to his knees and proposed right there.

21) Uh-oh…

I’ll guess we’ll meet Milos soon.

Oh! On second thought, I’m thinking Lachlan left Petra the tulips, right? So that he can manipulate her and make himself the hero?

22) I actually felt kind of sorry for Michael, and also kind of agreed with him?

MICHAEL: Seems kind of like a sign, you know? You and me in the same hospital. At the same time.

NARRATOR: It felt like a sign to Jane as well. Only, a different one.

JANE: Michael, you're not waiting for me, are you? For us?

MICHAEL: Of course I am. I love you, Jane. I love you now, and I'll love you forever. And whatever's going on with you and Rafael, it's not gonna last.

JANE: You're wrong.

MICHAEL: Really? So you're trying to tell me that, at the end of the day, that's who you see yourself with? Rafael?

JANE: Yes, that's who I see myself with.

23) Oh, Nadine, that’s cold and mean! Turning in your partner just because you think he’s in love with something else and not you?

24) Alba came clean about pretending to be unconscious while Xiomara prayed, and it all led to them finding out Jane had been written “apology letters” in Xiomara’s name all her life, apparently. But there’s no confrontation about this?

25) Also, Jane chose the teaching job, but I hope that doesn’t mean she’s giving up writing just yet. The fact that she’s not talented at writing telenovelas doesn’t mean that she’s talented at writing, you know? She just needs to find what she’s good at.

26) Oh, that’s nice! They had the head writer encourage Jane, even if they didn’t keep her scene in the show.

27) YES! I WAS RIGHT!

28) I love jokes about my profession…

29) So she finally decided to take the internship because Dina complimented her writing.

30) What are these two up to? Why were they interested in keeping Jane around and why does Nicholas want to ruin Rogelio? I mean, I’m guessing that’s what he means when he says “Rogelio won’t know what hit him”. And how are they going to use Jane against him?

I agree, Rogelio.

Also, I’m disappointed in myself because I bought the good guy routine Nicholas put on? I actually thought for one second that Jane and him would make a nice couple? 

31) So… this was an episode, I guess? It was okay-ish, but I don’t feel it really moved the stories forward in any significant way, apart from the cliff hanger at the end, maybe? It felt kind of filler-ish, you know?

32) Hope you enjoyed my recap, and, as usual, if you’ve got this far, thank you for reading! If you enjoy my recaps and my blog, please consider supporting it on ko-fi.Thanks!

My idiocy, reading lenses, and GRRM

So, I was away all weekend with family things. But as I said, I wasn’t able to stop thinking about my most recent podcast and the feedback I’ve received in reblogs, @’s, my inbox, direct messages, and replies. Which like, an absolutely sincere thank you for anyone who took the time, in whatever capacity.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Julia and I recorded a UBS episode called “is GRRM literal garbage,” which we were using as a platform to talk about the flaws of ASOIAF, while sort of being playful about the way that online dialogue puts things in such, you know, black and white terms. People are perfect or they’re toxic and garbage, right? And because of that, there are a lot of times where we feel—or really where I feel, cause it’s just my own thoughts I’m vomiting here—like content creators who at least like, *try*, really do receive unfair criticism.

But yeah, most of the feedback we got was very negative. Particularly, Julia and I—we’re two white women, and we recorded a segment on racial portrayals and racism in ASOIAF, since there are so many problems on this front that we felt disingenuous not doing it. We made sure to call out how we are white before entering into this discussion, and also said something like, ‘hey, if we miss something or if you disagree with us, please tell us so we can engage, because we are limited by our own lack of experiencing racism.’ (And anti-semitism is...not at all of the same vein; nothing pisses me off more than when white jews try to distance ourselves from our racial privilege, to be honest).

Well, not surprisingly at all, we missed stuff! Because of course we fucking did. And it wasn’t just that, but we also put ourselves in a position of saying, “oh we’re apologetic of Martin” and then trying to like...come up with reasons for what are obvious problems through the lens of intent or some shit, which is just...so not what should do ever. Hell, it’s not what we should do with any topic, let alone one where we’re entering into the conversation from such a place of privilege. So yeah, we missed stuff and we sounded like we were apologizing for racism which is not only not our place, but not even what we set out to do.

This wasn’t unique to the problems of racism in ASOIAF either; I received a lot of asks saying that it really felt like I was trying not to let my lens of Martin be challenged. And really ruminating on all this the past few days...there’s a ton of truth to that. Which is a bit silly, because I never exactly thought myself as holding Martin up in the first place—just what I got out of these book series. So what was it I was resisting?

It was Gretchen ( @gnelliswriter ) who ended up framing everything to me in a way where these things that were concatenating—all this criticism that I trying to absorb and understand, finally clicked. Because she talked about the balance of the 3 lenses: Doylist, Watsonian, and Reader Response. Which is also like, viewer response and gamer response, of course.

When she said this, it was just like...“Oh.” Because, Julia and I focus a ton on Doylist vs. Watsonian, you know? Watsonian being a character-level analysis, like “Cersei did this because she was feeling X.” Doylism then looks at what the author is trying to say. “Martin had Cersei do this because he was making a point about Y.” Julia’s the one who explained this to me in the first place—my background is engineering and I hadn’t done any type of literary analysis until the Arianne reread.

However, in terms of dialogue surrounding media, there is quite clearly a third lens. Reader Response is the *reader’s* takeaway. “Cersei did X and regardless of what Martin wanted that to mean, here’s what the message was that I saw, here’s how I reacted, and here’s the implications of it” (or just some aspect of this).

Which...this is the most obvious thing, because it’s the ONLY THING I talk about with Game of Thrones, right? Like, I say GOT isn’t worthy of Watsonian analysis, because it’s not, but then the series of retrospectives Julia and I do where we’re desperately hunting for a Doylist rationalization also reveals that...D&D don’t really have much to say anyway, and they don’t seem to particularly care. Then in these essays, we always go on and say, “Well okay, regardless of that, HERE’S the implications, and they suck donkey dick.” And fuck, I wrote an entire piece on the difference between intent and result, and why results really really matter.

So this whole thing, like... I don’t know, I realize I’m not an English major or anything, but in some ways I kind of feel like Reader Response is actually the only lens that matters? (I can hear the gasps from my academic friends right now.) Or at least, it matters the most heavily, because that’s where engagement is, and that’s where the dialogue occurs that fosters empathy and understanding. I suppose most stories I consume do also foster empathy in some ways (unless they’re nihilistic piss slop), but they’re not ever going to replace the experience of hearing a diversity of voices and viewpoints on something.

For example, with Legend of Korra, which I love, I had zero problems the first time I heard the line in the end about how Korra “needed to know what true suffering was so she could become more empathetic.” I thought the intent was clear, and it was a powerful way of showing someone recontextualizing their trauma and finding a healthy state of mind. However, after reading what many women of color in the fandom wrote on the matter, I understood why that had felt offensive to others, and why it was so uncomfortable to have had two white men put those words into the mouth of a brown, bisexual female protagonist.

So now I’ve like, written fix-it fic of that moment. Because the Reader Response to Korra’s words created that dialogue where otherwise my own lens wouldn't have been challenged, even as a bisexual woman myself. White women simply don’t have a history with the trope of being beaten to “learn respect” that women of color have in media. That’s a privilege, so learning about it was really important. All I want in life is to somehow work towards a world where people don’t feel like shit. The more we learn about the shittyness that exists and try to understand it, the better equipped we will be to fix it. Why *wouldn’t* we prioritize a lens of analysis that can bring that about? 

Honestly, as soon as Gretchen labeled “Reader Response” a third lens, it’s like the clouds parted, and the sun shined onto my own striking idiocy with how I’ve been talking about everything and framing everything (I think we’re going to do a joint piece on this soon). Cause like, it *is* deeply hypocritical—my approach to GRRM compared against my approach to D&D. I say it’s because of “benefit of the doubt”, and that’s a thing, but that doesn’t really explain what was actually happening, it’s more of “I don’t really want to think about this cognitive dissonance”, and it certainly doesn’t help me grow from what went so wrong on the podcast. I was using it as a rhetorical crutch. 

Like, before Gretchen parsed this out with me, I kind of thought a laser-focus on the flaws of a story was just someone being “too Doylist.” But that’s not actually a thing. How would that be one? You can’t try and figure out what an author is saying ~too~ much, though I guess if you only care about what the author’s saying you may, idk, not feel as into the characters or something.

No, what it is, is Reader Response and how you felt interacting with media, which...media is not created or consumed in a cultural vacuum. If I believe media analysis matters, which I do, it’s because of Reader Response. I’m not trying to take “death of the author” to the extreme, but there is a point where whatever authorial intent exists just doesn’t matter. There are impacts reading stories have on people, and on conversations.

So all of this makes how Julia and I approached a podcast about ASOIAF’s flaws all the more stupid. Because basically what we did was read out a laundry list of problems, which are all Reader Response by nature; if we happened to think it wasn’t much of a problem we’d say so (like when I said that I didn’t think Arya and Sansa’s scripting as sisters was sexist, which like...I’m sorry, but I’m sticking to that one), but otherwise the conversation was kind of us going, “oh this is an issue, but here’s maybe a Doylist or Watsonian reason for it.” And that’s...not constructive? I mean, what does that even do?

What should have been a tip-off, too, is that the only time we didn’t do this was when Julia tried to come up with an explanation for Dany’s scene with Irri, and I got really pissed because I just didn’t see any value or justification in it. As a queer woman, my reader response to that was super, super negative, and I had no patience for anything else. Well, Julia and I are limited by our own lenses and backgrounds, so apply that to other issues, and we don’t have experiences where we would get pissed about stuff about which other people are probably seething. But that doesn’t mean the people who are seething should have to listen to the bullshit of “well here’s a point you can consider that makes this gross ass thing valuable!” What the hell do we know about it?

Which, it wasn’t really what we were trying to do, but it absolutely is what the podcast ended up being. And frankly, it’s not like I’ve ever gotten positive or worthwhile takeaways from the way Martin portrays race, with maybe a small exception being the in-verse prejudice against Dorne getting deconstructed within Dornish POVs. That’s just because it even further hammers on POV-bias and shines a lens on Westerosi perspectives in a rather stark light, though I still question its effectiveness. And sure, you can apply that deconstruction elsewhere in the story and assume everyone is an unreliable and biased narrator (they are), but what value is there in Dorne being the only place that actually gets a closer inspection?

And even if Martin is doing something to a point, that doesn’t make it a helpful point or a necessary point. Like, oh we now know Dany’s in way over her head, and doesn’t understand the political or cultural complexity of where she’s trying to rule or what she’s trying to accomplish. Okay, but I’m about 99% sure that same point could have been made with Essosi POVs?? And almost certainly a lot better and clearer???

For fuck’s sake, if we hadn’t had any female POVs for the first three books and people were telling me, “oh it’s to make a point on women’s place in this society,” or idk to prove how unknowable women are to our male protagonists or some shit, there’s no way I’d even be reading this series. And it’s not as though I have any patience for super stereotypical jewish portrayal; it’s just that that’s not exactly possible in ASOIAF. If it were, you can sure as hell bet that I wouldn’t appreciate two goys telling me it’s all for the greater good of writing a...really gross world, or showing how much a character appreciates jewish culture. That doesn’t make any goddamn sense!

Look. Julia and I have gotten a lot out of Martin’s critique of the patriarchy. You can bet your ass a large reason for that is because there’s so many female POVs, not to mention male POVs who are also victims of this horrible setting, such as Theon and Aeron being victims of sexual assault (Theon’s chapters being a much more intimate look), Jaime struggling to define himself in a martial world now that he’s lost his hand, Sam’s trauma from his abusive upbringing, and so on. Julia and I also give Martin leeway because looking at his work chronologically, things do seem to be improving. Which...yay? Snaps?

But really, it’s something @witabif said to me that stuck in my craw as I was talking this out with pretty much anyone in my proximity the past few days: I have a huge tendency to take *my* positive reactions and takeaways to ASOIAF and apply them to Martin’s intent. I think the conflation of Reader Reaction and Doylism is the largest part of that, but what’s funny is I work overtime to not do that, especially with GoT. How many times have I said “we can’t know what’s in D&D’s head,” or steel-manned some dumbass plotpoint of theirs?

At the end of the day, all we really have to judge content creators on are their bodies of work. It’s why I say “it’s the pattern.” And Martin’s pattern? It’s one of a dude who is a pretty skilled storyteller, but also very much out of his depth in a lot of departments. Does he do better than most other 69-year-old white cishet men living in New Mexico? Probably. Is he making an effort to be more thoughtful as times go on? I mean...it feels that way in some places, but that doesn’t erase what’s hurtful in the books now, or what’s ugly, or most importantly, what’s shaping a large part of our cultural conversation because let’s be honest here: these books are hugely successful and have that power. This is why I’ve talked over and over again about fiction mattering. Fuck, this is why I engage with GoT at all and think it’s worthwhile looking at its flaws.

Really, ASOIAF isn’t any different. I mean, it tells a coherent story, so it’s different on that front. And I do find some of the takeaways of the books valuable. I also stand adamant that what Martin does with close PoV is impressive, and he is a gifted writer who can tease out nuance quite well. The battle between good and evil truly is within the human heart, and the experience of reading the books, and then rereading them where you find these other depths, has been one of an engagement I haven’t quite matched elsewhere yet.

But, part of liking something and caring about something means a willingness to engage with its flaws, no matter how deep or uncomfortable they are. Engaging shouldn’t be excusing, and even if I’ve found ways to tease out meaning (for instance, Cersei and Taena’s scene lands one way for me, but not at all the same way for many other wlw readers), my personal reaction and truth is...just that? And I do suspect that a lot of times, I’m seeing something there he didn’t see at all. Which is a tension I should have been digging into this whole time.

Looking back at the podcast, it was a horrible fucking structure for it. I don’t even know if it should have been an episode, to be honest. Because like, aside from just explaining what these problems were, and maybe sampling meta of people who had written on specific issues, there’s not much to add. We can’t proclaim someone to be literal garbage (which was part of the joke of the title), nor can we we proclaim them to be good enough, because...who the fuck are we anyway? I think what we could have done is had discussion about how to engage with deeply flawed media, as kind of a “Here’s all that’s wrong...so, what now?” thing, but we didn’t even discuss our approach beforehand.

I’m thinking about pulling it out of the feed entirely, and please let me know your thoughts on that. On one hand, I think it’s important to not hide from our mistakes and to allow a pathway to grow from them. For that reason, and because I just really want to after taking in this feedback, I’m working on a direct follow-up episode to it for the near future. On the other, I don’t want subscribers still hearing a conversation that’s out-of-balance and problematic, and I can see no reason why the follow-up discussion episode would require the former episode in the feed. I’m leaning towards the latter, but definitely value everyone’s input in the matter.

After typing all this out...it’s not complicated: it comes back to me not wanting to challenge my views on Martin. I didn’t. But now they have been, and it has been because of how amazingly thoughtful this fandom is, as well as the responses and suggestions I’ve received. And you know what? Yeah. I’m disenchanted with the guy. It’s not like a lightswitch, but seeing the misalignment between *my* reader reaction and *his* pattern/messaging has been eye-opening, embarrassing, and frustrating. He’s just some dude with a fairly unique approach to genre fiction and a few good ideas; there’s areas where he excels, and areas where he needs a lot of improvement. A lot.

I’m still going to say stop bothering him about writing speed and stop consulting actuary tables, because that shit is creepy. But otherwise, he’s welcome to fight his own battles. God knows he has the resources. I still think I will land in a different place with how effective his scripting of women is, among other things, and I look forward to continuing to have spirited discussions about all of that. However, it’s now with full cognizance that it’s our reactions and experience to the media that we’re discussing, and my own has diddly squat to do with Martin’s intent.

Which I should have realized from day fucking 1.

Pages from the Life of a Criminal Cat

Among the various effects and detritus, I am first most interested in Cat’s own words, or those written to him directly by intimates, inasmuch as I would like to believe his take to be somewhat more unfiltered and, even when it appears to be non sequitur, valuable to untangling this affair. The journal entries are for the most part apparently complete, albeit it with lengthy gaps, and neither weighted nor organized according to any notable events, so far as I can see. His writing is startlingly lucid, despite certain flights of description which make it appear he is in fact narrating for an audience, though an audience of what ilk is manifestly unclear. There is a telling, relatively early (at least as far as the dates can be trusted) entry which sheds some light on his style throughout the pages available here. Before I reproduce any entries, though, I am compelled to mention if only so I do not forget, that these journals are distinct from another, cloth-bound volume labeled “Tails,” which I’ll need to address at greater length later. The last oddity, which I doubt very much I’d be likely to resolve even if I wanted to, is that the journals have a smattering of words redacted or emended in what certainly appears to be a distinct hand, as if they were edited somewhere along the way. It is difficult to say how much this practice alters the voice or style of the entries, but as it seems not to have any fundamental effect on the actual content, I’ll leave them intact. Discerning the finer points and justifications for these changes is a rhetorical project best left to someone else.

First entry:

“I have destroyed many pages of these, and I wonder if that was the right thing to do. I did it because I read some of them and every page I turned to was deeply sad. I could look at this a few different ways. I might have been writing the sadness out of myself, although I still felt it when I looked back. I remembered exactly the type of bad feelings arising within me. So if I didn’t get them out, maybe I wanted to remind myself of them. But that’s not very kind or useful either. If it is for other people to discover my sadness, then my ego is larger than even I thought! I think of these notebooks as a friend that I only want to talk to when I am feeling low. That is not good for me, and it is certainly not good for the friend. Perhaps there could be some joy in my sadness, somewhere. I think until I have a place I can rest my head for a week without readying myself to be stolen away, it will be hard to feel much else. But a record is still important, it might not be so sad later. It might be much later, but at some point in time.”

Second entry:

“I find myself sitting inside of someone else’s home, even though no one lives here all the time. There are people around, but no one is in front of me. They’re talking, trying to decide on the best way to proceed, knowing it has all been decided. There are bad feelings, and I’m not used to that. I do not sense that we will pull through this easily, and something might have changed. I can see the insulation on the ceiling, which is not necessary when it is warm, and the ceiling fan spins above me. It interrupts the light. I wonder why it moves so slowly, too slowly to do anything but push the warm air around. There is lots of air being pushed around here.

Around the corner, one of them smokes too quickly. She’s calm and nervous at the same time. She thinks always of the next move, which is smart, especially when you know the current move is going to be completed successfully. She has less and less time for what she calls “nonsense.” She says “no more nonsense.” I like how it sounds, but people get hurt. They need their nonsense, because it is not nonsense to them, not at the moment they say it. I can see the clouds of blue smoke through the open door. There are no windows to the outside here, they are all bricked over. But all the doors inside this place have glass in them, so they have to hang curtains when they want to be alone. So I can see the clouds but not the person. I can almost hear her drag on the cigarette, but there are other sounds.

Around the next corner, past the little smoking porch, is a discussion. It might be an argument, and it might be about the first person. It is beautiful out there, I know it because I was just out there to see the sunset over the fence. Beauty here is tricky, it can sneak up on you if you are not looking for it. I am always looking for it, which makes it hard to be taken by surprise. There is a feeling of mistrust and uncertainty in the air, it mixes with the humidity and hangs there. It is a feeling that is familiar to me, but not here. Here there are strong emotions, but they mostly concern the project, which is the project of getting me to a place where I can get on with some kind of life. That is what The Professor would say. Some kind of life. Let’s find you some kind of life.

This could get much worse. I can hear a voice crackle and another bubble in response. That usually is bad. It means someone is upset and someone else cannot bring themselves to take it seriously. So they console. This is the wrong kind of consolation. I am wearing my pointed burgundy shoes, red like wine, and the divan is a little sticky from the damp air. People in the crew know exactly what to expect when it comes time to work. Always. But tonight people do not know what to expect between now and the event, and that is scary. It may make for a bad job, or it might force us to concentrate even more. I trust them, that is important. But it is still a bit scary.

——————

The thing is done. I am spent out, there is nothing left of me. Enough maybe for a little pipe smoke and a few quiet words about it. The calm has been restored, but it is hollow. It is the calm of exhaustion alone. Still, people are lighter now. Aunt Sandy can celebrate, as she should. Precarious and she can embrace and we will think about the next one. We can ignore our errors and indignities to one another and concentrate on the next thing. It will take a few of these to get what we need. Caprese and Precarious are inspiring, in the way that two people in love should be. Sparkles and Reich and Moist disappeared, and that is right also. We are better off to have Billy One-Shoe hopping about somewhere. People should drink now, we can wonder about all the rest later. The fan is still spinning. It is not quite as beautiful outside as it was before. The couch is still a little sticky, and I should find my bed. Remember: do not take things so seriously. Or else take them much, much more seriously. It seems to be a waste of time to be somewhere in the middle.”

There are a variety of letters as well, few of them in envelopes, some of them folded up quite small. I include this one only because it was stuck to the back of the preceding journal page, which is about as good an ordering principle as any at this stage. It looks to be written in a different hand from the pieces above, although we already have the problem of two sets of handwriting interacting on those. As such, I present, again with minimal comment, a letter, most likely written to Cat In The Hat:

My Love,

Have I told you about that dream? It’s almost unreal, sometimes implausible at best, it’s the one that wonders about a better way, or what might have been, but it’s close enough that it still seems it might all come to pass? If I haven’t, now might be the time, because it’s nearly driven me mad how often it crowds my mind in the dark. In fact, that’s not even quite right: it’s true that I think about it, or it overwhelms me, when I’m laying in the dark, wishing it was darker, staring at the ceiling or the corners of the room. But then again, I’m not asleep now, I’m sitting in a sticky cotton shirt, scratching my head even though it doesn’t really itch, and staring at my own shadow projected from motion-activated lights behind me onto the white siding of my temporary home. It’s a dream whose focus sharpens when I talk about certain aspects of this life that make me uncomfortable, and reminds me that the fact that I’m even thinking about them signifies that it might be different, however unlikely that sounds as I say it. It tells me that even if fortune never smiles on us again, one day we might smile on each other in the knowledge that we everything we could think of to improve the parts of the world around us which needed improving. Sometimes the dream is warm and welcoming, other times it is cool and reminds me that it is a dream which will require effort to actualize. In all cases, we smile, and we kiss one another’s forehead. It is important to have an active imagination, you taught me that long ago. Those who toil against injustice and ugliness without being able to imagine another way are screaming into the wind. And those who create without purpose, and there are far, far too many of them, are dangerous in the worst ways. They are the sleepers, not the dreamers.

I know you’re with me, and if this finds you, then I am with you,

XxX

But what can it mean? Anything? Nothing? Just the remnants of a life lived? It is all collected, though, and that must be worth something. Someone thought enough of it for that. It is enough to make one wonder if their own corpus would be worthy of tabulation one day...what would that shoebox look like? What sort of picture would it paint?

5 Tips on How to Write Amazing Lyrics Instantly

Learn to Write Jaw-Dropping Lyrics With These 5 Tips

Being able to write amazing lyrics is essential for a song to be great! But first of all, before you put too much pressure on yourself it's important to understand that there is no right or wrong way of writing, you simply just have to put pen to paper and away you go! Songwriting and having the ability to write amazing lyrics is, after all, just another form of art. It's simply an expression and the application of your creative skill and imagination. The process of writing lyrics, as opposed to writing a novel, can be more personal and every writer has a different approach... What works well for one lyricist, might not necessarily work for another. Some writers will only take 10 minutes to write a complete song, whereas some will need days, weeks, or sometimes even months! Whatever time scale you're working to, don't worry, we've got your back... By the time you've finished reading this post, we hope you'll have gained some fresh knowledge and that you'll feel inspired and ready to get out of the songwriter's running blocks! Soon you're going to be able to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, or use a voice-to-text app!) and get some amazing song lyrics down to go along with a musical composition you may already have...or perhaps the lyrics will be the start of your song and if so, then the music production process can then begin! "Like any other creative process such as playing guitar or programming synth sounds, lyric-writing is a skill that can be learned and improved upon"Quote Source: 24 tips for writing lyrics By Chris Wickett on MusicRadar No matter how you currently find ways to get creative and write, whatever your style, you're probably looking to hone in on your lyric-writing skills and improve, so we've put together five pointers which you can use right away and begin to write amazing lyrics: Consider Common Themes

Typically, writing a song starts with an idea or inspiration. Our first tip for you is to practice relating your real-life experiences with common themes, as a way to develop a connection with your audience. You can develop an entwined way of writing, one that draws on both experience, and imagination to create a narrative for your song. To write amazing lyrics, just think back to some of your most memorable experiences in life. Writing about something that perhaps another human being can relate to is a powerful way to connect with your listeners. Lyrics can change you and when you write from a place of experience, it can make your innermost feelings and emotions known to everyone which might seem scary but putting your experiences and emotions out there is an important risk to take because Feelings are the 'why behind what we buy!'. To feel is to be vulnerable, and music based on emotion helps people to find hope and know they are not alone. By writing from this place, you can really engage your listeners and make them more responsive to your music, either through connecting with their imagination, own experience or it could possibly even relate their current phase in life. Common themes can include: . Love love losttrue love . Coming of age nostalgiapersonal growth . Death fear of the unknownloss of a loved one . Rebellion expectations of societyteenage angst . . Search for stories

Our second tip to write amazing lyrics is to search for stories. These stories can come from anywhere, a book, a newspaper, a film, or a movie, you could even think about a story that has been told to you by a family member or a friend. You'd be amazed by how a good story frequently revisits our mind and set's off our imagination. Many songwriters have told of how the inspiration for the lyrics they've written for a song actually came from a book they've read. Music has long been a way of handling all that life throws at us and like books, it can serve as a way to escape. Artists that write amazing lyrics by writing their emotions from experiences into melodies, can almost use it as a form of therapy, but if you feel like you don't have many experiences, use stories to draw ideas from, you can start searching and once you've found the one you like, write from the perspective as if you were the character in that story. . . Study rhyming schemes

Our third tip towards getting better at writing lyrics is to study rhyming schemes. Rhyming schemes are not always necessary in lyrics but for some strange reason, rhyming rhythms are especially enjoyable and sensuous to our ears. Having a rhyming scheme in your lyrics can give the effect of making your words flow better. Maybe because words that incorporate rhythm and include rhyme can reflect the natural rhythm and movements of the human body when pieced together and delivered correctly? There are several rhyming schemes that can help you to write amazing lyrics... Be sure to check out this 'Rhyme Scheme' article - just click here to head to Literary Devices website and learn 10 different rhyme schemes you can use and incorporate into your next song, they even give some short examples so you can really get it and understand how to make it work. . . Study song structures

Knowing about the different components that make up a song is essential. Understanding things like what's an intro? What's a verse? Where should the chorus go? Where can I put the bridge? or the outro? Knowing how to structure a song can lend valuable insights into the writing process and help you on the way to write amazing lyrics that can serve as medicine for the soul! Song structures do exactly as described, they give a song structure and organization. The structure is the setting of the different sections in a song. How a song is arranged can play a vital role in between whether the listener is invited into your world and immersed in the song or kept at arm’s length and unable to connect with it. A song’s structure is a way to allow your listeners to experience your story through techniques and formatting. MusicRadar explains the anatomy of an arrangement and the types of song structures that are out there, click here to have a read and you can also check out this Songwriting 101 article by MasterClass.com which explains all about common song structures. . . Tell a story

The final tip is pretty much what we've been hinting at and alluding to in this article the whole time...the unwritten rule of all communication and making a connection...tell a story! Conveying context and emotion without directly telling you what their characters really mean or feel is definitely one of the things that great songwriters do! Just think of Ed Sheeran's 'Perfect' for example, it depicts the naive innocence behind this friendship and he manages to tell us of his affection about this character without us even really knowing very much and it promotes love. Storytelling in lyric-writing can make way for using metaphors and you can create powerful lyrics with a great metaphor! "A metaphor is “a figure of speech that describes an object or action in a way that isn’t literally true, but helps explain an idea or make a comparison.” Often used in music, movies, poetry, and books, metaphors are used to deepen the color and imagery of comparisons."Grammarly - Metaphors A great story makes you feel and relate to the narrator and the key to great songwriting and having the ability to write amazing lyrics is when the author can make you feel an emotion without having to use many words. Fortunately, today most songwriters can use different tools to aid them in being able to write amazing lyrics. Apps for songwriting can be extremely helpful if you're out and about on the road and luckily for you, we've already compiled this list of The Top 5 Apps for Songwriters and Music-Makers if you're interested in finding out just click here. If you follow these tips, we can guarantee you'll be able to improve your writing and leave a lasting impression on your fans! . At Indiy, we believe artists should have complete ownership of their content.  We are an online marketplace for musicians, the place to buy and sell your music services. Read the full article

Knowledge Broker Blueprint Review And Bonus – Tony Robbins & Dean Graziosi

Personal Development And Self Education

Knowledge Broker Blueprint Bonuses

Tony uses seminars as well as self-help books to keep individuals motivated in their business trip. In spite of being such effective KBB Method, Tony still saw the requirement to partner with various other like-minded individuals something that has pushed him to elevations he could not obtain on his very own. Dean is an individual who understands how to construct success.

Dean has actually ever since climbed to become one of the prominent property business owner bring in a significant adhering to in his genuine estate TELEVISION program (Knowledge Broker Blueprint Reviews). The obsession with helping others prosper is what drove Dean to join other like-minded individuals to create something that would help individuals worldwide.

He joined Dean and also Tony to equip with people with methods that would aid them sell their ideas to others and also even persuade them to get the Mindmint software therefore enhance their profits. The three specialists collaborated to develop a solid entrepreneurship group that has managed to construct a realm producing millions of bucks in profits.

This training course, which is typically shortened as KBB, was originally called the Knowledge Business Blueprint. However, it has been renamed KBB 2.0 or the Knowledge Broker Blueprint, after getting upgraded. Create a mastermind Share knowledge with a workshop Start a subscription group In KBB Method 2.0, Dean, Tony, and Russell have tackled all the major obstacles you can encounter as a mastermind maker.

Dean, Tony, as well as Russell show just how effective a team of similar people can be. Tony Robbins. You will certainly find out how to make build a financially rewarding business and also revenue out of the mastermind teams you develop. Surrounding yourself with effective individuals will certainly equip you with what you require to come to be effective. You will have remedies to the troubles you might be encountering with your business because you are connecting with individuals with varying know-how.

The KBB Method Bonuses

The KBB MethodThis self-educating system collaborates with a Mindmint software program in aiding you to build impactful masterminds. Through KBB, you will discover exactly how to identify your experience and prospective consumers methodically. You will certainly be able to remove knowledge as well as show others and also get profits in return. The model will certainly additionally offer you advertising and marketing methods that will certainly assist you in marketing your suggestion to others and additionally encourage even more people to get the software which indicates more earnings for you.

Knowledge Business Blueprint: Knowledge Broker Blueprint

Mindmint software application includes this course to assist you run things efficiently. With this software, you can shape your occasions and develop a program by just dragging and decreasing in the Occasion Builder. Your events will certainly not be prone to disturbances as a result of the pre-loaded occasion list that is fitted in the software application.

Marketing is also streamlined because you have a web site building contractor loaded with website as well as e-mail layouts to obtain the task done. Given the support, you obtain from the KBB as well as the features from the software program, you will certainly not be called for to have any type of unique abilities to obtain the round rolling.

This program is divided right into 6 modules, with each module having different lessons covered. Bear in mind that it is described, yet simplified to make it easier for you to absorb the knowledge shared. This module shares keys as well as approaches used by Tony as well as Dean in creating successful mastermind groups from scratch.

Key takeaways from Tony Robbins success stories How to select a specific niche to target based upon your skills and also how to choose your suitable target market that will take advantage of your knowledge Exactly how to run effective mastermind utilizing the triangle design used by Dean and Tony The devices you need to run successful events. Tony Robbins.

You will also get real-life lessons from good example like Tony Robbins – Knowledge Broker Blueprint Reviews. Below, you learn what it takes to do well, consisting of exactly how to get an elite mentality that leads to success, and also a lot more. Effective people have particular characteristics that make them effective. You will find out these habits and attributes that will help you unleash your inner power and kill the inner villain.

Here, you will learn exactly how to transform your ideas as well as ideas into a course or a sensible talk that influences people. In this module, you will get contact us to actions that intend to evaluate if you have understood the crucial things discussed in this guide. In this module, you will discover just how to find up with your special proposal to ensure that you can attract attention.

Knowledge Broker Blueprint Review And Bonus – Tony Robbins & Dean Graziosi

You will understand how to identify your perfect target market as well as prospects that will prepare to follow your teachings. In enhancement to this, you will certainly discover the devices to make use of to train and drive your program with ease. This component also discuss mentor strategies to utilize so that you can make your occasions successful – Knowledge Broker Blueprint.

You will certainly additionally be shown how to be distinct to make sure that you can stand apart. In this lesson, you will get a particular niche tool you can make use of to more limit your target audience. This lesson worries more concerning the art of narration. Individuals like stories, as well as you learn how to drive your factor through stories.

You obtain to learn how to utilize the Quality Device as well as likewise the guidelines that reveal you are becoming effective. You will certainly additionally be instructed the things you shouldn’t do. This lesson instructs concerning the Limelight Device in addition to Conclude Tool as well as Link Device. Various other valuable lessons you will find below include how to work out with potential customers and just how to come up with ideas for your team conversations.

Tony and Dean redefine the policies of sales and advertising for you along with mastermind marketing philosophy. Below you will find out when to make use of a website as well as when to make use of sales funnels. Likewise, the authors teach you the art of charging carefully for your events as well as how you can produce touchdown web pages – KBB Method.

You obtain to find out the tricks of introducing your events, consisting of online and evergreen events. In this component, you get the keys of the system to target and also just how to do it right. Below, you are instructed regarding the elements of an advertising and marketing wagon wheel as well as likewise copy-writing tips. This lesson covers extra on how to set a foundation and also exactly how to obtain momentum.

You will learn how to secure free website traffic on social networks. Paid website traffic is often valuable, especially when you are introducing an event or starting out. You will be shown exactly how to kill it on Facebook and also YouTube. After you have actually exhausted your advertising and marketing alternatives, you need to think about email advertising.

Who Is Tony Robbins And russell Brunson

This is where points start to get functional. The ideal Mastermind Solution where you find out the psychology of running an effective mastermind. Digital Event Checklists. This lesson exposes the keys of running a virtual event as well as additionally establishing events with Zoom. In-Person Event Everything you require to arrange in-person occasions, consisting of picking the suitable location, space prep work, event logistics, etc.

Last Steps as well as Thank You This lesson covers just how to sign out from your occasions in vogue as well as exactly how to thank your participants the best method so that they can really feel valued. This is the last module, and also it covers points like just how to be a knowledge specialist, just how to produce a winning method, as well as how to get a YES from your target customers.

Yet the good idea is that it is written in a step-by-step method and also divided into lessons to make it much easier for you to comprehend its content. Success calls for preparation, knowledge, as well as work, and also the initial 2 demands are currently presented to you via this program. It depends on you to put what is gone over in KBB 2.0 to function so that you can establish your very own information-based business.

It will certainly show you just how to market your own knowledge. What’s even more, it is developed by 3 valued life trains as well as authors, as well as thus you can relax ensured that it is packed with beneficial knowledge. Knowledge Broker Blueprint can be what you have been looking to get your business expanding.

The even more well-informed one is, the less complicated it is to handle common troubles preventing companies from thriving (Knowledge Broker Blueprint Bonuses). When you choose to utilize this technique, you require to bear in mind it is not a magic switch to grow your business over night. Your dedication as well as effort will certainly be called for to provide you success.

If you’re still reading this, I know you have assumed concerning making more influence and generating more revenue in your life … I’m thinking if you haven’t acted yet to collaborate with these 2 great people that perhaps you don’t recognize where to begin? Well you’re not alone, and these men remarkably solved that concern with a they just added for those that take rapid activity prior to this deal is gone for good. I can inform you that, access to this exclusive team is priceless in my point of view. Not only you will certainly be able to get in touch with like minded people, you will certainly additionally obtain assistance and also suggestions from them when releasing your business. This is like an online mastermind for those who desire to run masterminds!I truthfully wish there was a way for you to see the private Facebook group where all the current members are sharing their successes.

What Is Mindmint Software

A lot of them are enjoying the incentive as well as creating the influence they preferred with the KBB method. Here is simply one of several many posts I saw in the team, and also I actually see lots of these every day … Some teams bill up to $30K annually as well as others like Tony and also Dean are even much more unique.

Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels, has nearly 1000 people in his $30,000 a year mastermind, that’s a whooping $30 million a year business!Any no, you WILL CERTAINLY NOT make that kind of cash when you’re initial beginning out. Those are experts that have actually been doing this for many years. As well as I am simply informing you those numbers simply to reveal you what is possible.

Because you will probably be the only one in your mastermind. Yet you likewise do not want it to be too economical either. Inside of the Knowledge Broker Blueprint, you will learn specifically what you should as well as can bill your optimal clients. Nonetheless, there’s no simple dish below of what one can and should charge.

That implies you only need like 20 participants to make it a sustainable business – Mindmint Software. Or you can bill $20 a month for a digital mastermind via video phone calls. Considering that it is on the internet, your cost is extremely marginal and also you can have people from throughout the world to join your group.

You can bill a few hundred dollars for a 2 day event. These are just a few options for your referral. Inside the KBB course, Tony and also Dean will go right into more information. You can actually do it however you like. Imagine you are running an one day mastermind or workshop in your area to teach individuals concerning exactly how you purchased your initial rental building a couple of years back, and it has actually been making you a consistent easy income stream.

Allow’s state you understand 20 people that would be interested in gaining from you. Knowledge Broker Blueprint Bonuses. Given that you’re new to this, so you only bill $200 each for a 2-day mastermind event. That indicates you simply made $4,000 in revenue!Not just that,. Just how awesome is that?And I am not composing insane numbers below … Offered you really have something of worth to provide, getting 20 people to pay you $200 each is completely workable if you follow the training in the Knowledge Broker Blueprint program.

Mindmint Software & Knowledge Broker Blueprint Review

That’s $10,000. If you were to raise the price to $500 per person, that’s $25,000 for one event!After you’ve done numerous mastermind occasions, you’re now confident adequate to charge $1,000 for the a 3-day event, and 100 individuals signed up with. That’s $100,000 in revenue in simply one event!I am not stating that’s just how much you will make, maybe less or maybe a lot more.

I am simply revealing you what is feasible. However allow’s assume that after you’ve undergone the Knowledge Broker Blueprint training course and had the ability to recognize your knowledge as well as you actually place in the job, do those numbers appear feasible to you? If so, after that the amount of of these masterminds would certainly you run a year? I suggest once a month is sufficient to be a 6-figure business … Replace making passive revenue with property to anything that you’re proficient at and passionate around.

Knowledge Broker Blueprint BonusesJust how would certainly you really feel if someday, someone approaches you and also state “Thank you …”” Due to you I was able to quit my job as well as have the liberty to do what I enjoy.”” Because of you I am now in the most effective form of my life and is healthier than ever before.”” Due to the fact that of you our kids still have both parents together.”” Since of you I didn’t quit.” The very best part of going into the knowledge business is that you reach discuss your passion and something that you really think in.

The KBB Method Bonuses

Knowledge Broker Blueprint Bonuses

I imply over 24,000 individuals have joined the activity given that it launched last year, so if it was a rip-off, you would certainly have discovered by currently .. – bonus. So why do I advise it?As a substantial follower of Tony Robbins as well as Dean Graziosi, I couldn’t be more excited to share the KBB method with you.

Originally posted on https://adamgarcia0.blogspot.com/2020/03/knowledge-broker-blueprint-review-and.html

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