formulaic_beam

- Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich (1871) by Camille Pissarro

My draft is currently 6k words and I'm maybe halfway there. I don't know where my newfound verbosity came from but I'll credit the oldtimey register. It's difficult to write lean-Victorian. When I was writing my modern AU, some chapters were complete and posted at 1k words or less. I don't write toward word counts, I write toward balanced emotional arcs, but I thought the difference was interesting.

Please accept my humble offering of the following train car excerpt, as a promise that this chapter should be complete within the next week or two.

The first two quotes are from The Hunger Games before she'd ever spoken to Peeta:

Chapter 1 - The talk in the meadow before the reaping. Katniss's own assessment of Gale, based on her own observation.

Chapter 3 - The goodbye at the Justice Building. Again, Katniss's own thoughts and feelings. "Lean and hard-muscled against my own" is her literally feeling his attractiveness.

And yes, the Boggs quote from Mockingjay chapter 6 and her thoughts surrounding it prove that she's no longer attracted to Gale at all, but she can still acknowledge that he looks striking in the uniform, grudgingly.

I'm not trying to prove Everthorne. These quotes actually help to disprove Everthorne at the same time as proving that Katniss has agency. She doesn't need other people to tell her what she thinks or feels. She isn't clueless.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

Weird Al on womens clothes and truck driving

I come to this post with rare dual credentials: I am both a well-endowed woman and the former owner of a light pickup truck.

On bras. I work from home and live in comfy lounge wear most days. I gave up daily bras years ago.

Counterintuitive result: at first, the girls missed the bra. Then they got used to it, and now they sit higher on their own than they ever did on scaffolding. Bras actually feel uncomfortable now when I have to put one on. There's real science behind this, too: a fifteen-year French study out of the University Hospital of Besançon, involving 330 women, measured with actual calipers, found that going braless produced measurable lift year over year, firmer tissue, and no downsides, because a bra does the ligaments' job for them and causes the ligaments to slack off. No bra = strong ligaments.

The researcher cautioned that his results were preliminary and probably wouldn't help a woman my age. My girls did not read the study. n=1 confirmed anyway.

I do still wear one in public, for two reasons. One: a lot of women's clothing is cut to be worn with a bra and won't fit right without one. Two: nipple concealment, because as every woman knows, nipples are a bit like the penis in that they will get erect suddenly, unbidden, with zero regard for context.

Honestly, there's a third reason too, and it's one random guy at a bus stop circa 1998. I was 21, slim and small-chested then, braless, running to catch my bus, and some young man yelled "put on a bra!" at me. Excuse me sir, but fuck you. He spent one second of his day on that; I've carried it for twenty-five-plus years. His voice got installed in my head that morning, entirely without my consent, and it still pipes up every time I consider leaving the house without a bra. Most men would never. That one did, and his one second is still freeloading in my head. (Readers of Beast of Casterbridge: he's part of why chapter 10 goes the way it does. Katniss gets laced into stays she didn't choose, so she'll serve as a trophy on a rich man's arm. Same voice, Victorian evening dress. Bus Stop Guy is the crass street edition; Mr Hawthorne is the genteel private one.)

On the truck. I owned a 2012 Ford Ranger, light truck, rear-wheel drive, nothing over the axle. It was a great little truck and I loved it for hauling things and gas mileage, but every winter I genuinely feared for my life in it. Even the best winter tires and multiple large bags of cat litter over the rear axle could not get that thing to handle on ice and snow. I fishtailed and spun out constantly. 

The Ranger finally met its demise on black ice one rush-hour morning. This was back when I still commuted to an office. I changed lanes and lost control. Steering dead, brakes dead, nothing responsive. It was a standard, so I slammed it into neutral to bleed off speed, and then there was nothing left to do but sit in the driver's seat, helpless, drifting toward the sidewalk. The whole thing took a few seconds, but it felt like much longer, one of those moments where time goes slow and syrupy and you notice everything in sharp detail: for me it was the wooden fence around the house I was sliding toward, and the bundled-up woman standing at the bus stop in front of it, wide-eyed, frozen, watching me slide toward her sideways. We made eye contact and she got out of the way. I took down the bus stop sign, which is what finally stopped me short of the fence. No one was hurt, including me. MPI wrote the truck off, and now I drive a compact SUV that actually handles in Manitoba winters.

(Yes, both stories feature a bus stop. My life has motifs. I'm a writer; I notice these things.)

I'm a guy who can't drive stick so I'll take your word for it on both counts. :P

Driving stick gets so you don't even think about shifting before long. And also when you get into an automatic after, your left foot looks for the clutch. I like it, but you're right, there's enough on the road to look out for and the less distractions the better. I drive an automatic now.

I always wondered about the talents too. Your Peeta theory makes a lot of sense, and it got me thinking. Collins has a background in TV, and I wonder if part of it is as simple as a talent being a quick engagement hook. The victors are recurring characters in the Capitol's ongoing show, so Peeta the Painter™ gives the audience an easy identity to latch onto and remember him by.

And painting is authentically Peeta. He's a born artist. We already have the elaborate cake decorating and him camouflaging himself after his leg wound. The Capitol takes something real about him and turns it into content.

But now I'm thinking about Katniss's supposed fashion designing, because that's the opposite of anything she'd choose. Her actual talents are hunting, archery, trapping, identifying plants and generally being very difficult for the Capitol to kill.

They can't exactly make that her cute victor hobby, so Katniss gets a fabricated talent while Peeta's is authentic.

So her fake talent is used to cover her real talents, which are all illegal, banned, and get people flogged and killed. The Capitol constantly rewrites her, repackages her, reframes her, changes her to fit into the image of what they want a 16 year old female volunteer/victor to be, and not who Katniss is.

For the arena she is the Girl on Fire, she's in pretty dresses and makeup and elaborate hairdos, and after the games she's a... fashion designer.

(And, it's not a talent, but even when she's the Mockingjay as a rebel, which is much closer to real-Katniss, Coin transforms her into beautiful formidable warrior woman, which is Katniss with the edges smoothed. Everyone wants to claim her and rewrite her. Everyone except Peeta.)

So maybe the talents are part of turning victors into recurring TV personalities? Image management? Peeta's real self is camera-ready. Katniss's needs a smokescreen.

Weird Al on womens clothes and truck driving

I come to this post with rare dual credentials: I am both a well-endowed woman and the former owner of a light pickup truck.

On bras. I work from home and live in comfy lounge wear most days. I gave up daily bras years ago.

Counterintuitive result: at first, the girls missed the bra. Then they got used to it, and now they sit higher on their own than they ever did on scaffolding. Bras actually feel uncomfortable now when I have to put one on. There's real science behind this, too: a fifteen-year French study out of the University Hospital of Besançon, involving 330 women, measured with actual calipers, found that going braless produced measurable lift year over year, firmer tissue, and no downsides, because a bra does the ligaments' job for them and causes the ligaments to slack off. No bra = strong ligaments.

The researcher cautioned that his results were preliminary and probably wouldn't help a woman my age. My girls did not read the study. n=1 confirmed anyway.

I do still wear one in public, for two reasons. One: a lot of women's clothing is cut to be worn with a bra and won't fit right without one. Two: nipple concealment, because as every woman knows, nipples are a bit like the penis in that they will get erect suddenly, unbidden, with zero regard for context.

Honestly, there's a third reason too, and it's one random guy at a bus stop circa 1998. I was 21, slim and small-chested then, braless, running to catch my bus, and some young man yelled "put on a bra!" at me. Excuse me sir, but fuck you. He spent one second of his day on that; I've carried it for twenty-five-plus years. His voice got installed in my head that morning, entirely without my consent, and it still pipes up every time I consider leaving the house without a bra. Most men would never. That one did, and his one second is still freeloading in my head. (Readers of Beast of Casterbridge: he's part of why chapter 10 goes the way it does. Katniss gets laced into stays she didn't choose, so she'll serve as a trophy on a rich man's arm. Same voice, Victorian evening dress. Bus Stop Guy is the crass street edition; Mr Hawthorne is the genteel private one.)

On the truck. I owned a 2012 Ford Ranger, light truck, rear-wheel drive, nothing over the axle. It was a great little truck and I loved it for hauling things and gas mileage, but every winter I genuinely feared for my life in it. Even the best winter tires and multiple large bags of cat litter over the rear axle could not get that thing to handle on ice and snow. I fishtailed and spun out constantly. 

The Ranger finally met its demise on black ice one rush-hour morning. This was back when I still commuted to an office. I changed lanes and lost control. Steering dead, brakes dead, nothing responsive. It was a standard, so I slammed it into neutral to bleed off speed, and then there was nothing left to do but sit in the driver's seat, helpless, drifting toward the sidewalk. The whole thing took a few seconds, but it felt like much longer, one of those moments where time goes slow and syrupy and you notice everything in sharp detail: for me it was the wooden fence around the house I was sliding toward, and the bundled-up woman standing at the bus stop in front of it, wide-eyed, frozen, watching me slide toward her sideways. We made eye contact and she got out of the way. I took down the bus stop sign, which is what finally stopped me short of the fence. No one was hurt, including me. MPI wrote the truck off, and now I drive a compact SUV that actually handles in Manitoba winters.

(Yes, both stories feature a bus stop. My life has motifs. I'm a writer; I notice these things.)

Redraw of old art to get used to Photoshop Ig

The safe choice was Gale. Period. They had shared interests, shared backgrounds. Their families knew each other. She’d been hunting with him for 5 years. He was predictable. A marriage to him, at least before she became a victor, would have been a logical, obvious choice. But to read these books and still come away with the feeling that she wasn’t attracted to Peeta makes no sense. Who keeps tabs on someone you don’t talk to? Who takes notice of how someone’s hair falls in waves over his forehead, and the details of his eyelashes? I met my ex-husband in 2005 and I couldn’t tell you a thing about his lashes to this day. She calls him shiny. She calls him beautiful. She dreams about him. She keeps momentos from him. She describes the time in the cave as a happy time even as they were on the verge of death. She tells him she needs him and MAKES HIM STOP TALKING SO SHE CAN KEEP KISSING HIM. She is devastated when she believes he no longer loves her. Like, what?