i'm so stressed that sunlight hurts,

Other performers have literally said since, “Freddy basically changed live performance forever and left us NOTHING.” (affectionate)

I am convinced he was blessed by the gods. He was a fucking herald for said gods or something. Hell, there’s that vid of the Green Day fans waiting for the concert to begin and fucking singing in perfect fucking harmony to Bohemian Rhapsody! Freddy isn’t even alive and he still fucking commands a crowd!

Full performance:

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.

the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?

The owner of the bookstore was this grand old dame of 76 who had been in the business for 40 years. She'd had three kids with a husband who was extremely gay, and as soon as those were old enough, they split up. She read on an epic scale, was an avid follower of the opera, sang in several choirs, and scheduled arts programming for a private club. She had gentleman callers (so they styled themselves) at the store continuously the entire fifteen years I worked there--yah, into her NINETIES. She never took up seriously with any of them, because they couldn't keep up. She was impeccably dressed and put together every single day of her life, drank regularly, and said they would pry her estrogen supplements out of her cold, dead hands. She had a gang of elderly single lady friends, though, and they went out every night of the week. They knew everything and everyone, collectively. She got her first smart phone in her mid-80s and became extremely Online. I bet she's on Tumblr now. She is 96.

This blew my mind. Life didn't have to be over...ever.

We worship youth in our culture. Only the young have futures, and the aged exist to enable the lives of the young. We act as if by the time you hit forty, you've had your chance. You are now expected to step aside and scede life to others.

FUCK THAT. I have a lot of life ahead of me. I have places to go and books to read and people to fuck and food to eat and music to dance to and emotions to feel and nazis to punch and stories to tell and hearts to break and ventures to capitalize and empires to conquer. I am going to be doing this for the next fifty years, minimum.

god this is such a satisfying feeling. out of the 95 words in this, 71 of them are completely unique.

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes)