#i love the way they make me engaged in even kinda simple anecdotes because the way they tell things brings out the comedy

[zeta-in-de-walls]

Tommy dipping his toes into live shows/ the stand-up comedy world is the most curious thing. I know he’s talked about wanting to try doing stand-up before as like a potential career goal and I definitely think he has the ability. I just really hope its able to manifest. 

As it stands right now, he’s already got the audience - his show’s already sold most of the tickets. (And yeah, doing a one-off show to test the waters is a sensible idea.) I imagine he’ll quickly get used to speaking in front of a live audience. He’s very used to interacting with fans and he’s good at entertaining an audience over live-streams and he’s pretty confident once he’s in his persona. I’m sure its still pretty different but I expect he’ll quickly shed his nerves, especially given he’s gonna be in front of an audience of fans plus he’ll have some of his friends supporting him. 

What I’m uncertain about would be the content. What I’d be really into is if he prepared anecdotes  - retelling a story like his apartment woes and the coffee shop girl story would be great. They’re funny and he’s good at playing up the drama and making it very compelling to listen to. Not sure how long the show would be, but if its around an hour then you’d want several strong anecdotes like that. (And yeah, some old stories that are sure laughs and some brand new stories so it’s not all the same would be great.) Honestly Tommy’s recent streams all have recently showcased his skill at telling compelling anecdotes really well and it makes me wonder if it’s been deliberate to prepare for something like stand-up rather than his standard improv comedy. 

My worry would be if he tried to go more in his vlog humour direction and antics like you laugh you lose. Those are workable in an edited video but it’d feel really cringey in actual concert hall. The fact that he’s doing it with friends means it might be more like that but maybe they’ll just help them to bounce off each other and have fun and Tommy will do at least a little on his own where it’s his job to keep the audience enraptured. 

Overall anyway, if it’s a planned out routine it should be great. I don’t think it’d be the space for too much improv, especially as Tommy will likely feel the pressure to be funny which would make it less natural. 

We feel like livestreaming is a different world but I’m confident there’s a lot of transferrable skills and I know Tommy is naturally entertaining. I’d honestly love it if he got advice from an established comedian just so it’s not all his friends who are also only experienced with livestreaming. I think this has the potential to bring out a great side Tommy and I just really hope it goes great.

#tommyinnit #ive been watching a fair bit of stand-up and panel shows in the last few weeks #i love british comedians #i love the way they make me engaged in even kinda simple anecdotes because the way they tell things brings out the comedy #and tommy can definitely do that #so him telling his funny stories is the best possible outcome #but maybe ill be surprised at something more left field as well #yeah random thoughts

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Harrow The Ninth

Harrow The Ninth is the second book in the four-and-a-half-book-so-far Locked Tomb trilogy by Tamsyn Muir, a New Zealand author, and to get the box blurb copy out of the way early, it’s as intricate as wristbones, multi-layered, wrought out of several kinds of deliberate excellence and also extremely bloody funny. It commands its venaculars and surgical terminology alongside one another to construct a narrative puzzlebox of regrets and rage and guilt and violence and queer shit and I loved it.

There are these healing moments of emotionally satisfying contact between people who you can maybe let your guard down and like because they don’t have to suck just because this situation sucks and maybe that’s the important thing, maybe it’s the friends we made along the way. Or maybe it’s really, really not. You’d have to get to the end of the book to start to find out what you think. I know what I think.

Now, it is a slight problem that Harrow The Ninth is a book that builds directly on the previous book, which is a book with a very distinct conclusion that leaves you wondering ‘okay, now how does this proceed,’ and Harrow The Ninth doesn’t actually give you easy answers. As a matter of simple necessity, then, and in order to discuss ideas in this book and why I love it, I am going to talk – even a bit obliquely – about the stuff in the book. Therefore, if you’re the kind of person who wants them, I put here, a SPOILER WARNING.

And you may think ‘oh come on, it’s a book with a twist, you can talk about stuff around that,’ and like kinda no not really, it’s way more complex than that, and even just telling you that is enough to make the wrong kind of mind leap at shadows thinking every single thing you deal with in the book is The Twist. Good news, though, because in this situation, oh natively paranoid, must-not-be-surprised, solve-it-first readers, you’re right!

Everything in this book is The Twist.

Image Source

When I talk about the author of this work, understand I’m talking about this in the context of your Barthes-style critical engagement with the hypothetical author of a work, an individual expressed by the work that exists, not like I can sift through the word choice in this book to winnow away publication guidelines and editorial oversight and test reader input and anecdotes and tumblr jokes and Biblical references to try and pull out some narrow thread that reaches into Tamysn Muir’s head and interpolate something about her as a writer or a person. That’s not how this works, because if it did I could somehow supposedly divine the character of King David of Israel just because this quotes one of the Proverbs. No no no. Bear that in mind when you read the next bit, okay.

Holy shit this is an Australasian author.

And I don’t mean things like how Harrow’s story can be seen as the narrative we get, white as we are, about how being included in the system of Empire, get to benefit from this system of privilege as long as we are immediately useful but we all – all of us, both in group and out – we know that you’re not really part of it, and we are going to throw you aside the second you stop being immediately useful or highlight how you’re different to us.

I don’t even mean the way that Harrow’s entire perspective is broken into three pieces as she tries to construct a narrative of who she is, in the heart of a communal space that is also dying and cracking up because something terrible is happening.

Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think this story is about how vast systems that affect huge numbers of people are in the name of benefitting a tiny number of dysfunctional shitheads, and how understanding them does require understanding that they don’t understand you, but that’s not what I’m getting at.

What I’m getting at is this is a book where, without any explanation or belief that an explanation is necessary, a narrator refers to the emperor losing his nana. And you may think ‘I know what that means’ but if you’re not from the area, no you don’t, it’s not his nanna, that’s a different thing, and the lovely audiobook reader made that mistake too.

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This is a book that cares about words, though, and it cares in a way that’s awesomely clever. And as seems appropriate for this book, I want to pull over and talk about words for a moment.

First, clever. Often when I use the word ‘clever’ its a neutral term, an idea of how something can be done in an intricate way, a way that required a particular kind of good idea but that’s not the same thing as being the best way to do things. I know as a writer, I care a lot about being clever with wording and terminology because that’s something I can do, as someone who spends a year with the book that a reader who spends a few afternoons with it can’t necessarily. Clever can be a mousetrap but clever can be a clockwork.

Second, awesomely. It’s not a word I’m using here to indicate a generic positivity. It’s a word about being rendered, in a moment, bolted in spot in awe. A realisation that something that I have been party to a magic trick, been fooled by someone who never lied to me, all because they were relying on me to imagine and anticipate a different lie.

The wordplay and subtle references and cleverness around terminology in the start of The Locked Tomb danced across the whole narrative like constellations on a blue sheet of a sky. You could connect them all (hey, notice how all the characters are named after numbers?) and that definitely added depth to the work, but the story wasn’t about being clever, or inviting you to try and be clever. You were in a mind and body that approached everything with a headbutt. The close-in perspective of a mind that thinks about tits every third breath but nonetheless knows the word liquescent uses that deep vocabulary to tell you about the narrator. It also betrays a love of the words themselves, and a love of using them to control attention.

Harrow The Ninth feels like it took that same concept and instead asked, hey, what’s the most I can do with the least. How much weight can I use, how much power can I wield, with the least word possible? Harrow The Ninth is a book that completely transforms the very fundamental assumptions of what the story is doing at all based on the word ‘me.’ Not joking, not kidding. There’s a single point where the word ‘me’ appears on the page and at that point you have to stop and go back and reconsider everything before now and every single bit of comforting structure you assumed the book was doing that was also already pretty difficult to put together was wrong.

It’s like imagining you’re working on a completely white puzzle and you’ve got your four corners out of the box and you’re about halfway through these multiple different chunks that don’t connect to each other yet and then as you’re sifting through you find, taped to the inside of the box lid a fifth fucking corner piece.

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I used to like talking about character voice in fiction with people, because it was a great way to show people the way work they loved did something they didn’t notice but once they noticed it, it was something of a revelation, and then over time, mass media eroded the practice and it actually became more common to see large groups of people who had a character voice, based on the work of the whole fiction. In Harrow The Ninth, this discipline, of being aware what one character would say and how they would say it and how they would think it, and how they would think of other people thinking it, is slowly unfolded like a dead rose, and if it wasn’t also engaging it would just feel like the most titanic flex.

There’s more, of course, because it’s not just doing something clever, every part of the machinery that locks the cleverness together is also individually engaging. What the hell is going on with Ortus? What do these flashbacks mean? Where is Ortus?

Why is Ortus’ sword so important and why isn’t Harrow even trying to work with it? Why is all this stuff in Canaan House not like it was in Ortus The Ninth? What does dying mean? What doesn’t dying mean? Is everyone here a shithead? Oh wait, no, is nobody here a shithead? How much of a huge smile did the author had when they made a None Grief, Oof Ow My Bones, I’m Dad, or There Goes Gravity joke? How universal an experience is it to hold onto love letters from someone you haven’t spoken to in a year that this book made me personally feel very small? Where the hell is Ortus?! And why aren’t the other characters asking ‘where’s Ortus?’

I’m obviously signed on to read the rest of the series and probably whatever else Muir makes at this point because it turns out that in addition to making stories that are very good and very impressive, they’re also about things I like to read about and have a willingness to be violent and funny and horny and smart in ways that I normally feel alienate me from other books. I know I’m meaner than stories want me to be, I know I can find a lot of fantasy novels about how religion is only bad when it’s bad, and empires can be okay, sometimes, actually, and maybe I’m just a bit much for the whole landscape of storytelling.

But not here.

Y’know what, I think at this point I have to accept that I’m absolutely just going to be one of those people who are Very About this franchise and consign myself to that fate. Don’t worry, I don’t expect to cosplay anything in it.

Image Source

And now, here are some glib alternate titles I proposed to friends as I was reading it:

Isn’t Dumbledore An Arsehole

Gideon Navi

How Harrowhark Was Always Right, Actually

Old People Are Evil

Wives Out

Symbolism 301 As A Vomiting Goth

Big Evil Clown Energy

Girlboss Gaslight Girlboss

Wight By The River

Ripper of a book. Absolutely choice.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Media #Story Pile

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[kaistrex]

No Filter. 1213w

When Derek was hired to photograph some up-and-coming novelist for his book jacket, he was expecting someone stuffy, middle-aged and, well, bookish.

That’s not what he gets. At all.

Note: I apologise in advance for the disgustingly sappy ending. | AO3

When Derek was hired to photograph some up-and-coming novelist for his book jacket, he was expecting someone stuffy, middle-aged and, well, bookish.

That’s not what he gets. At all.

The boy on his studio doorstep, no older than a college student, is bright-eyed and wearing a clashing blue and purple plaid shirt over a bright red tee with a yellow lightning bolt in the middle, hair sticking up every which way.

As soon as he’s through the door, the guy’s mouth moves a mile a minute, and Derek clutches at his camera like it’s some sort of lifeline amongst the flood of words bombarding him. He’s barely taken two steps inside and Derek has somehow learnt the guy’s name is Stiles, he had an omelette for breakfast and his best friend decided to become a vet after rescuing an injured baby rabbit from the side of the road.

He can’t remember how morning meals turned to woodland animals and, if asked, he’d venture a guess Stiles wouldn’t either. Instead, he’d probably start in on the wonders of the mind and end up at orchestral overtures. As it is, he’s found his way to relating the benefits of glasses over contact lenses. Derek finds himself wondering how Stiles’ fingers can keep up with his thoughts when typing up his novel, how he’d manage to arrange it all into any semblance of order. It just conjures a vision of a very harried-looking editor.

Erica, Derek's assistant, looks just as bemused as Derek feels, but a smile is steadily growing on her face as Stiles prattles on while she arranges his hair into something more presentable. Derek understands it. Stiles’ chatter, despite being a shock to the senses, is lively and engaging, a buzzing energy he can't help letting draw him in.

The feeling only intensifies when he gets Stiles in front of his camera.

The man doesn’t stop fidgeting or talking, eyes darting around the room like he’s not sure where to look; a clear display of nerves. For Derek, it’s like a feast: Stiles’ roving amber eyes catching the overhead lights, the splay of his long fingers as he gestures animatedly, the lush pink of his mouth shining every time he wets his lips. It’s such a pity the typical style for this sort of work is black and white.

He's intrigued by Stiles’ animated descriptions of his book, of what sounds like a complicated web of parallel universes and the clash of seemingly unrelated plot lines, but with Stiles’ energy and passion, Derek has no doubt he can pull it off. It sounds like he's onto something that has the potential to be huge, and when Derek tells him so, it's the first time Stiles falters. He ducks his head, eyes shyly averted and lips pressed together in an attempt to hide a pleased smile.

Eventually, Derek realises he needs to produce some usable photos and Stiles’ sheepishly apologises for his motormouth and jittery nerves.

“If it helps, you can picture me naked,” Derek offers, raising his camera once again in an attempt to conceal the heat creeping up his ears.

Stiles’ eyes widen for a moment and then his smile becomes a lascivious grin. Derek’s finger shakes as he snaps a picture, trying to ignore the stray voice in his head pointing out it would be right at home gracing the cover of a very different sort of publication.

In the end, Derek ends up taking a lot more pictures than he normally would for this sort of job. He tries to tell himself – and Erica’s knowing glances – that he just lost track of time, but deep down he knows it was just a way to delay saying goodbye.

When Stiles takes his leave and Derek shuts the door behind him, the studio is eerily quiet, gone from his favoured setting of a focused, professional working space to feeling like something’s missing.

Erica is shrugging on her coat. She doesn’t say anything but her pursed lips tell him all he needs to know. He should have asked for his number, asked him on a date, at least said he’d like to see him again. But ‘direct’ never has been Derek’s style when it comes to relationships.

Hitting send on the email containing Stiles’ files feels like the end of something no matter how much Derek tries to tell himself there wasn’t even a beginning.

*

A month later, Erica drops a package in his lap addressed to him in an erratic scrawl. Inside, he finds a signed copy of Stiles’ book and a handwritten message on the inside cover. It rambles just as much as Stiles had in real life and Derek’s smile makes his cheeks ache as he reads.

Look, so, this is probably way out of bounds and I’m really sorry if it is but I’ve been thinking about you a lot ever since I hired you to take my picture and I know I probably should have come to see you in person to do this but you’re like, insanely hot and I couldn’t think of an excuse to come and see you in case of the highly likely certain possibility that I’d chicken out and pretend I needed more photos or something or, God forbid, I’d accidentally say the ones you took weren’t good enough because let’s face it the word vomit is strong with this one. And I just want to be clear, I’m not just saying I couldn’t stop thinking about you because of your face and biceps and your whole – everything, because there’s also the fact that even though I took up, like, an hour more of your time than I should have, you didn’t tell me to shut up even once which is probably a first in my entire life? And I kinda got the feeling that you maybe didn’t mind it?

So. Call me? Or don’t. Either way is fine. WAIT I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean it would be fine if I didn’t hear from you, though of course I totally respect your decision if you don’t want anything further to do with me. I mean, look at this message. Of course you’re already looking, you’re reading it right now. I just mean– Jesus, this is why I never hand write. There’s no filter. And now Scott’s advancing to take this away from me before I embarrass myself any further – you know, the vet? I’m sure I told you about him? – ANYWAY. What I mean is, I’d really love to hear from you so CAL L   M

Below the abrupt end of the message is a phone number printed neatly in someone else’s hand and Derek can picture Stiles’ faceless best friend sighing with exasperation.

Derek reads the message through twice more, able to hear Stiles’ voice so clearly.

No, he doesn’t mind. He wants to hear more. He wants to hear every errant thought that’s ever crossed his mind, every anecdote, every opinion. Derek dials his number and tells him so.

*

The sequel Stiles presses into Derek’s hands in person and it contains a similarly lengthy, rambling request to move in together.

*

The final entry in the trilogy comes with only four simple words and Stiles sinking down onto one knee.

#eternalsterek #mywriting #sterek #fic #photographer derek #writer stiles