Only time will alter your vision

one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they'd have jobs throughout the show's entire run... but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.

I recently described my second novel's (early) plot outline to a friend and without giving too much away, it's a horror-romance about a woman whose lover is slowly transformed into a dangerous monster due to forces outside of their control. She wrestles with her fear and love, how useful her monstrous lover is in their current survival situation, how dangerous her lover could become, and ultimately at the end of the story decides that monster or not, this is a person that she loves and who loves her back, and goes back to save them from a horrible death.

I'll add an obligatory addendum here which is that I don't think this is an issue with My Friend, who I love, but with the current Media Climate. Subtext is being scraped out of everything, readers and audiences aren't being asked to Think For Themselves or ask questions or mine meaning in the (mainstream!!!) art they're interacting with. I know from personal experience with pitching my first novel that publishers and agents are anxious when story elements are left deliberately ambiguous or without closure. Television shows and films are being written with dialogue that is overly literal, where characters say their thoughts and plans out loud to each other over and over again. Theatre revivals of old shows are having lines changed or added in to clarify what characters mean or how the audience should feel. It is not a flaw in the reader to internalise the structure of stories - that's how canons come to exist! It is, however, critical that storytellers resist this erosion of subtext and overly-precious need to police people's Interpretations of the work.

County roads

reminder to visit museums, even if you feel out of place. you feel out of place because there is an established concept of inaccessibility of "high culture" to the masses, purposefully developed to distinguish between social classes.

Ideal work schedule: