a big fat bag of nope

Happy World Book Day 🌧

Number one: Is it funny? It’s a network comedy show. If it’s not funny, we are blowing it. My number one fear is that people watching the show would suddenly feel, “Why are you lecturing me on how to live my life?” That is not the point of the show. The point is to raise questions and we need to do that in a funny way. So if the episode idea wasn’t funny, if it didn’t have enough comedy in it, it would go away. It is a specific goal of the show to never seem like it’s homework.

Number two: Are the characters being developed? That was a huge deal for season one. Knowing what we were gonna reveal at the end of the year, by the time we got there, we’d had to have explained to the audience who these people were and essentially why they ended up in hell. That was the big thing. If you didn’t understand why all four of them were being tortured, then the twist would seem random. It had to be properly set up in the Usual Suspects way.

Number three: Does the episode ask and answer a question about ethics, about good or bad behavior? Obvious reasons for that.

Number four: Is it compelling? I had this real fear that we were gonna seem like we’re spinning our wheels. This is something Damon Lindelof talked to me about because I consulted him a lot before while I was working on the show in the early days. One of the things he said was that they ran into trouble with LOST when they felt like they were spinning their wheels. They were adding new characters and kinda running in place and you get out an episode where Jack gets a tattoo, and that’s not compelling. This show has to be endlessly compelling and full of momentum in order for it to feel vital and interesting.

Number five: Is it consistent with the long game? The long game being they are all in hell and are being tortured. We couldn’t ever do anything that would contradict the big picture, the big secret picture. It was at the level of “you can’t ever see Michael, Ted’s character, alone.” You can’t ever see him because if he were alone, he would not be in character. He’d be evilly chuckling and laughing hysterically at the foibles that the humans were undergoing. So we had all these really specific rules like “Is there any moment in the entire show where - if you went back and looked - you’d go ‘Oh that doesn’t make any sense’?” Which was hard but fun.

And the last one: Are we making use of the premise? We set this show in the afterlife. If we didn’t have one insane thing - a dog flying into the sun and exploding - or something magical, Janet popping in and out, something that couldn’t happen anywhere but in the afterlife, if we weren’t doing that at least once an episode, then again, we felt like we were blowing it.

These are the six things that every episode had to do.

MARC EVAN JACKSON: I think you have a bright future in television.

Salted Double Chocolate Brownie Cookies

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

I’ve been seeing headass headlines this for the past few days, and I simply ignored it bc the media does shit like this for money and clickbait. But I realized this is more than the media tryna get their coins, this is a blatant attack on black women and other woc. So @ white women? I think it’s time we have a little chat. 

1. Beyonce has gone through a miscarriage, and thousands of other women have been through it as well. It is a terrible experience that no one deserves to go through. But Beyonce is a FAMOUS PERSON, and she has one of the largest fanbases in the world. So when she delivers news such as being pregnant with TWINS, of course the beyhive is gonna to go above and beyond when it comes to the reaction.  Ya’ll dragged her through the mud w/ her first pregnancy trying to say it was faked. Now that she’s pregnant for a second time, she’s doing all these photo shoots to further prove the accuracy of it. And now ya’ll are criticizing her for it????? Tryna cover your asses for how you treated her 5 years ago??????? Get the fuck over it, because ya’ll didn’t say shit when these women did THIS w/ their pregnancy announcements: 

2. Serena Williams has been demonized and ridiculed for her body type since FOREVER. People say that her body is “too masculine” and how she’s “built like a man”. It’s fucking gross because Serena is one of the most hard working athletes in the WORLD, and her body type shouldn’t be affiliated with the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into her career. White women, you can’t say that you’re an advocate for equality when you criticize a black woman’s photo shoot, deeming it “soft porn”, and yet you praise THESE photoshoots: 

When a white woman, or hell even a non-black woman does shit like this, ya’ll are so quick to write article about how “empowering” they’re being. But when a black woman does it ya’ll all of the sudden wanna further sexualize and make it about “soft porn”??? Get over yourselves and let a black women love herself after receiving massive amounts of slander for her body type. 

3. The role in Ghost in the Shell is definitely about race. If her character’s mom is Asian, then why tf couldn’t they just get an Asian person to play the character in the damn first place???? 

She should’ve just said “a woc deserves the role more than me, but unfortunately I can’t control who they cast” and then moved on. But nope, she had to make it about herself and disregard the fact woc are hardly ever represented in movies, especially Asian women.   

4.  You can’t criticize a movie you don’t even relate to on a cultural level. Moonlight takes the components of black struggles, black culture, black life, and puts it into a true cinematic experience. You don’t have to like the movie, but the movie itself is more about whether you “like it” or not. It’s whether you relate to it, whether you feel with it, and whether your experiences correlate with the character’s experiences. A “better plot” wouldn’t do shit Becky, you either get it or not. Not to mention Camilla Long was kissing La La Land’s ass: 

I usually don´t do this, but I read them and thought they are worth sharing.So here is 20 rules of writing by Stephen King:

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes “The meeting will be held at seven o’clock” because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know. ‘Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.’ There, by God! Don’t you feel better?”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence “He closed the door firmly.” It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.” “While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. “

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”

7. Read, read, read. “You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “Most exercise facilities are now equipped with TVs, but TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhard on CNN while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards on MSNBC, or the sports blowhards on ESPN, it’s time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I’m afraid, that Geraldo, Keigh Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success. “When I’m asked for ‘the secret of my success’ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. It’s a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.”

12. Write one word at a time. “A radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply—’One word at a time’—seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t. In the end, it’s always that simple. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord Of The Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing lik John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”

15. Dig. “When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.”

16. Take a break. “If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings that it is to kill your own.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”