Oh, this is a bit of a tale, and it is a bit sad. so a warning in advance, Nonnie.
When I was in Year 3 (I was 7), my class read ‘The Hobbit’. I’d read it before, but something about having it read aloud to us set my imagnation ON FIRE. I went BONKERS. I made a Gollum puppet in Art, even (mum still has it). I drew dragons on EVERYTHING, and generally raved on about it to my whole family, and they indugently smiled and nodded and left me (the nerdy, bookish one) to my nascent literary fangirling.
Not so my uncle Puss.
My Uncle Puss was my mum’s brother, and a very intelligent, shy, gentle man. He barely knew what to do with my sister and I, because we were loud and dramatic and theatrical as kids, and he would retreat a lot. But me ranting about The Hobbit drew his immediate and undivided attention, and it was like opening a door into a whole new person. It was Uncle Puss who told me that there was a sequel, and that it was MASSIVE. And that after that, there were whole languages, and a mythology, and so much more!
Tiny me: THERE’S A WHAT???? OH MY GOD, GIMME.
My Uncle Puss was, in other words, a fellow nerd. And I didn’t know until that moment. It became a thing we shared, this world we loved, and the rest of our family teased us about our nerdery. This awkward shy man and this awkward dramatic little girl, enthusiastically shouting together about Elves and Hobbits and Dwarves.
(He ALSO introduced me to Star Trek TOS.)
He gave me my first copy of LOTR. It was his own, actually, and I treasure it still. I have other copies now, some very pretty and fancy, but his was the first and most special. He gave me all of HOME for my birthday, a volume each year. I am holding his copy of the Silmarillion in my hand. It has his name on the inner cover.
Uncle Puss was not a well man. He was bipolar and schizophrenic, and disappeared about fifteen years ago – just before the films came out, actually. He’s presumed dead now. I miss him still.
So yeah, it is the books first, for me. Always the books first.
It’s easier for me to name authors, rather than books. Because I tend to fall in love with the way a person writes, as well as the story they tell, and the two become conflated in my weird head somehow 🙂
On AO3, I adore icarus-chained, enigmaticblue (THIS AUTHOR IS MY FAVE SCIENCE BROS/DR PEPPERONY AUTHOR), thehoyden, keelywolfe, astolat, winterhill, rageprufrock, waldorph, versaphile, and ohhelpme so many more.
Published authors include Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Ursula Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones, Guy Gavriel Kay, John Birmingham (read Leviathan if you want to see how history and people shape a place, and vice versa), Jasper Fforde, Robin Hobb, China Mieville, TE White, CS Lewis (OF COURSE), Ben Elton, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Christopher Koch (Highways to a War was a formative read for me), GRRM, Vikram Seth, Alexandre Dumas, Joseph Heller, Spike Milligan, Agatha Christie, HG Wells, Gregory David Roberts…
… I have a LOT of books. A LOT of books. My house doesn’t need insulation: every room is covered in bookshelves, basically! I’ve chosen mostly fantasty/sci fi authors here, assuming that that is what you are into, Nonnie.
Poets I love: Edna St Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney.
eep Nonnie, I am occasionally asked for advice, but tbh I don’t feel like I am up to the challenge. I try to rise to the occasion, but I feel that advice is an odd sort of beast: sometimes a tip from a reputed writerly-type source will work for you, and sometimes it doesn’t. I suspect it is because we are all different people, with different minds and ways of succeeding. So idk, maybe try them all out: read all the advice out there, there are so many blogs, so many forums. I read the advice sometimes too, and sometimes it is the opposite of helpful for me – but sometimes it is great.
So, there we go, a list of awesome authors for you! But this is a tiny, tiny drop in the ocean of all the work out there. I began hiding in the school library during lunchtimes when I was 8 years old, and I think I left a part of me there – or found it, pressed amongst all those pages.
If you sometimes feel like it was pure, ridiculous hubris that you ever started a story that would take so much work and persistence to finish, I promise you, you’re not alone.
If you feel like you’ve already been writing forever and the “good bits” are still ages away, you’re not alone.
If you’ve been stuck for days or weeks or longer because you know what happens later but you don’t know what happens next, you’re not alone.
If you’re desperate to squeal about your beloved OTP but you feel like you can’t, because spoilers, and it’s driving you nuts, you’re not alone.
If you feel like you’ll never finish and you’re bound to fuck it up somehow, you’re not alone.
If you wonder if you’ve sabotaged yourself because who’s going to click through to a 28 chapter WIP, you’re not alone.
If you feel like you’ve been pouring your life into a single story for ages and will be for ages still and you don’t know why anymore because hardly anyone seems to care, you’re not alone.
If you can hardly even plan the further-away parts of the story or even think about them because thinking about them reminds you how absurdly far you still have to go and you get massive anxiety, please believe me. You are not alone.
I fucking live for your work. Like I love me a little one-shot or a medium-length fic but srsly give me that 100k+ (200k? 300k? yes pls) goodness.
I am constantly in awe of your ability to stick with your story, to keep your plot moving and your characters’ relationships developing like just damn.
I don’t judge if your updates are erratic. If you’re worried about too much time passing between updates, just know that I and so many others squeal with joy when we get that subscriber notification in our inboxes.
There is literally nothing more glorious than watching characters develop through a long-ass fic. Relationships, friendships, character growth? Sometimes after I’ve finished a longfic or I’ve gotten to the last update I’ll go back and reread the first couple chapters just to see how far my babies have come.
If you stop updating your fic for whatever reason, that’s okay. We as readers are just lucky to have been graced with your story as long as you chose to write it. You’ve been gifting us with time and effort for this long and we appreciate it.
As someone who has had multiple longfic ideas and either (1) got through two chapters and gave up or (2) was too overwhelmed by how much work it would take to actually write, you are my literal superheroes.
You are brave and persistent and creative and a gift to fandom, and if you ever need a pep talk I am here to love on you.
They’d have to pass through not one, but TWO metaphysical barriers. There’s the wall between the living and the dead, of course. But there’s also the mists between Aman and Middle-Earth that separate the Blessed Realm from the ‘real world’ and keep it apart and inaccessible.
Hell, it’s hard enough for the spirits of the dead dwarves to make it there!
This is just an silly/odd idea, but I like to think that if a dwarf deliberately dropped something into Gimlin-zaram (say, a hammer, or a pen?), it would immediately sink without trace beneath the glowing water. No other change or sign to show its passing.
The next time that dwarf saw Mahal, that hammer or pen would be in His great hand, and he would give off a slight air of mild annoyance. He would give it back with pointedly deliberate movements.
“Please refrain from littering, my child. Please use the bins provided.”
The idea of Mahal somehow gathering litter is hilarious, but this is now making me question far too many things. Like what happens if you tie a string to the pen and lower it into the waters? Does the string snap when the pen disappears from sight or would it just keep feeding into the waters until you have no string left? Is there a bottom to the pool?
Could one pull the pen back up from the pool by the string if it did stay intact?
Could one theoretically swim in the pool? Like if instead of sitting on a bench and staring into the pool, you just jumped into it? Has anyone done that? Would your clothes get wet if you did somehow manage? What would happen if you dropped the pen while you were someplace on Middle Earth? Could someone else from the Hall find the pen later if they went to the exact same spot or does the pen disappear once it’s no longer touching a dead dwarf and Mahal has a dead dwarf litter radar and is going to have to go find this pen because you can’t just leave afterlife pens lying around on Middle Earth. That’s how you break the barrier between the living and dead, children. Could Gandalf pick up the pen and use it or can he only look but not touch? Does he send Mahal a message via god wifi to pick up this pen that Thorin dropped in Bilbo’s room because someone’s going to trip over it and cause a zombie uprising?
I’m going to go to the store before I start wondering about cross dimensional travel and death in the Tolkien universe and whether there’s like invisible litter all over Middle Earth from a bunch of dead dwarves.
But you guys…think of the angst….Thorin figuring out it is possible and leaving Bilbo little gifts with notes on them on his bedside table. Bilbo holding the gifts, smiling and sobbing all at once because his Dwarf is a tremendous sap.
I’m roughly the shade of beetroot here. You are WAY WAY TOO GENEROUS. Thank you, beautiful kind person.
Ohboy, okay, here we go, answers one after the other:
At what point did you realize that Sansukh would be not just long, but OMG Freakin’ Epic?
I always knew it was gonna be enormous – I think there’s a note right at the first chapter that is a little bit jokey, a little bit ‘it’s ME so ofc it’s gonna be long and over-complicated hahaha aren’t I a dumb’ – but I NEVER THOUGHT IT’D BE THIS ENORMOUS holy shit. I think it was about chapter 19-20 or so, when I began to think ‘okay, that’s one book down… ohgod but The Two Towers is SO MUCH MORE COMPLICATED and ROTK IS EVEN MORE SO … ok, breathe, shit we’re gonna be here A WHILE.’
And that was when I started to think, all right. So it’s going to be a behemoth. That’s ok. That’s fine. You can do it. No rush. Don’t burn out and abandon it because you pushed yourself for more than you have to give at a time. You WANT to finish it. It means too much to you to have a forever-WIP on your slate bc of something as stupid as burnout.
So, I’ve taken my time. When I can’t, I don’t. When I can, I do. Slow and steady, as the tortoise said 🙂
Did you ever think you’d be writing well in excess of HALF A MILLION words just on AO3, to say nothing of tumblr headcanons, ficlets, meta, songs, and and and?
NOPE. NOT IN A MILLION ZILLION YEARS. NOT TO ANY OF IT. NOT TO THE WORDCOUNT, AND NOT TO THE COMPOSITIONS AND HEADCANON SPLURGES AND META AND FICLETS AND APPENDICES. I’d wouldn’t have dared to dream that I could make all that. I wouldn’t have thought I could even do HALF of that.
I think I trust myself a bit more, nowadays 🙂
Ohgod you’ve reminded me too – I really really have to update the masterposts, they’re SO behind!
Do you anticipate writing at that length ever again (after a suitable recovery period)?
Oooooh. Um. Possibly. I would have to find the kind of premise that really grabs me. Also, it would have to be a story I need to tell. there are elements of Sansukh (the Dwarf-centric and Dwarf-sympathetic viewpoint, for example, as well as many of the themes – such as hope having virtue in itself rather than as a means to an end, fucking up and moving past it, found family, learning who you are, working through institutionalised racism, mental illness and management, racial and sexual and gender diversity, etc etc) that mean so damn much to me, that came pouring out of me in a torrent.
Plus, if I were ever to write anything as massive as this ever again, I would have to ensure not to have a baby in the middle of writing the dang thing. Puts a massive crimp on your writing time!!! 😛
Did you think your creativity would inspire so many others?
Never. I didn’t even think it would get noticed. When I began writing it, the trend in fandom was for very fluffy Beorn’s-house or Laketown fics, some cute pining, mostly requited, lots of very enthusiastic porn.
And there I was, with HELLO ANGSTY CHILDREN, EVERYONE’S DEAD AND EVERYTHING SUCKS. HERE ARE A MILLION FOOTNOTES AND HALF A RESEARCH PAPER. AND JUST IN CASE YOU’RE FEELING TOO CHIPPER… HEEEEEEEERE’S MORIA!! *jazz hands*
I’ve never really stopped being overawed and amazed at the creativity of everyone. The animators, artists, singers, musicians, writers, the cosplayers and voice actors, the sound editors and podfic folks and composers and recipe-makers and those who had a giggle on the sansukh page at TVtropes and GOD, so many folks. I’ve made so many dear friends, ones I will hold in my heart my whole life long. I’m so so grateful. I’m constantly, never-endingly staggered.
And @fishfingersandscarves, who is behind the Sansukh Graphic Novel, and has created over 100 individual pieces of art for Sansukh. 100. Just. Wow. Fishy is a powerhouse, a fountain of creation and creativity. She has an incredible future ahead of her.
And finally, did you ever know that you’re my hero?
18 years ago when I was coming out, y’all made the word “bisexual” so dirty that for years the only word I felt was accessible to me was “queer”, if I had any chance at having a community.
Queer was widely used at that point among LGBT+ people to refer to ourselves and our community, and while you’d look askance at a straight person using that word, it was most definitely acceptable to call another LGBT+ person queer.
And now y’all are telling me “Queer” isn’t an acceptable umbrella term to use and it just feels like another way you’re using subtle language policing to tell me that really the only people you want in your community are gold-star LG folks.
Those of us who like the word queer because it accurately reflects our misfit status are basically being told that this self-identifier is dirty and wrong, this is no longer the “queer community”, and the message yet again is that we don’t really belong.
I get it if someone doesn’t want to be called queer, and I would never call another person queer against their will but holy hell please stop acting like it’s common knowledge that queer can’t be used as an umbrella term for our community when it was for DECADES
“q-slur” is a very new concept, kids.
This is something
that’s completely overlooked, by the same people who fling the word
“ahistorical” at every viewpoint they disagree with.
When I first started
participating in any kind of LGBTQ+ stuff online (so, 10 years ago),
“queer” was by far the most common descriptor. It was pretty much
agreed it had been reclaimed enough to be safe (I mean, show me an
active slur that has academic disciplines named after it?) and people
seemed much more keen to explore the ambiguity the term offers,
rather than sticking with predefined categories. By “q-slur”
logic, we should’ve been much less accepting of it back then if we
simultaneously believe that LGBTQ+ rights are advancing over time,
but the opposite is true.
So I would say that the current
stigmatization of queer is based on two things: 1) reactionary
essentialism (seeing “queer” as too dangerous for the more
clear-cut categories), and 2) respectability politics.
Now by taking away
“queer”, we don’t have any other term that’s both catchy (no
version of the abbreviation is) and broad enough to actually be
inclusive. Gay is not an umbrella term. It always has a default
connotation that’s very specific. It only reminds me of all the time
I wasted on bad gay-only discourse when I was first questioning my
own identity, and for this reason it took ages to arrive at the
conclusion that I’m just attracted to multiple genders and also trans without dysphoria (because the other bullshit I had to
contend with was the truscum narrative of transness). So, gay is not a safe
term for me. It doesn’t describe me and if I used it, it would
actually misgender my own relationship. I’m not doing that for any of
you, sorry.
Do you know who the
majority of the people who still use “queer” are? Trans and MGA.
Yet again, we have a political line that privileges cis LG people who are fine with binary categories
over the most routinely erased parts of the community. Of course.
This, I imagine, is also
why so many bi/pan and trans/nonbinary people aren’t against aces
being included. Chances are most of us, at least those who are 25+ or so,
have experiences like this, with either being actively policed out
or just unable to find the right identifiers for ages because of the
stigma and general ignorance surrounding them.
And now you’re
telling us we HAVE TO use gay, which isn’t a functional umbrella
term, because queer suddenly isn’t acceptable based on this new logic?
Do you even hear yourselves?
–
“But!” I can already hear the gatekeepers protest, “This all
relies on a bunch of personal anecdotes!”
In which case,
buddy, I have bad news for you about the vast majority of all modern
LGBTQ+ history.
I first came upon Queer as both an umbrella term and a field of academic study. This was in the early 90s. There were queer studies, queer histories, “queering” of the text, queer theory…
And Queer, more so than other words, felt inclusive of people who, at the time, referred to themselves as “genderqueer” as well as people outside the binary, as well as bisexuals, who couldn’t claim gay or lesbian.
It was, at the time, being reclaimed at a time when all the words were being used as slurs, so there was a real reason to reclaim them.
I’ve problem with using words that people are comfortable using, but not at the cost of erasing parts of our history.
I guess now is the
time we’re hitting New Essentialism and Respectability Politics 2.0
from people who aren’t old enough to remember any of this.
Yeah, that’s something a lot of folks in the younger generation don’t get.
When you campaign against words like “queer”, to those of us in the older generations, what it looks like you’re doing is trying to roll the nomenclature back to the bad old days when cisgender gay men were treated as the only “real” members of the community, and everybody else was lumped together as this peripheral pack of weirdos who were expected to be slobberingly grateful to their betters just to be acknowledged at all.
Hell, I clearly recall a time when the leaders of mainstream gay rights activism would routinely castigate even lesbians as parasites and invaders – and be applauded for doing so. It’s difficult to overstate just how deep it went.
And, like, that wasn’t all that long ago – I’m only 33 and I’m old enough to remember that horseshit.
Finally! Here’s my contribution to the Valor Anthology, “Bride of the Rose Beast”. Valor is a book I’m still so happy and honored to be a part of, and you can still get the 300+ page ebook HERE for $5! Enjoy!
Firstly, I cannot argue with your Spock analysis! (Also, I adore Spock! I have a Spock tattoo! I promise that I love him truly.)
Now that I have said this piece, I’m gonna go on a long clarifying tangent, because it is a running theme in the tags on the post/the asks I’ve been getting. But know that the tangent is not directed at you, defender of Spock! I’m just reblogging this version because it collected the fragmented pieces of the discussion into one post, for context’s sake. 🙂
ANYWAY. The point I want to get to is that character archetypes totally exist, and that is not a) a problem, or b) what I am talking about.
Spock and Sherlock and Jeeves all more or less share a type, which is just a thing that happens when people tell stories, both consciously and subconsciously. That doesn’t mean the characters are identical or interchangeable, but you can see how they bear a kind of family resemblance to each other. For example– “it would have cost me my soul” and “it was worth a wound" and “there is a tie that binds” are rhyming moments of Great Import to all three characters, although they refer to moments that are specific to their canons. The characters ARE different, but when you put them together in a iineup, it’s easier to see how they’re similar. That resemblance, imo, is neutral.
What interests me about the fandom ghost isn’t that he is an archetype, or that many characters are very similar to each other. What interests me is that this is a character type that fandom periodically yanks out of the drawer and dresses up in the clothes of a minor character.
That’s a very specific thing to do. It’s not something we are inheriting from any canon. It’s something we are doing, collectively, as the great migratory fandom thing we are.
We (collective fandom we) have imbued minor characters with these traits so often that I can trace it as a type the same way that I can trace Sherlock Holmes as a type. That is a) VERY interesting to me, from a nerdy Henry Jenkins-style crowdsourced-story “the people talk back to the culture” way, and b) EVEN MORE INTERESTING GIVEN THAT THIS GUY IS HERE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY TO GIVE US A WHITE GUY SHIP WHEN THE CANON DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH WHITE GUY SHIPS READY MADE FOR US. When we talk back to the culture, sometimes we speak bullshit.
Again, I don’t think any individual person is Wrong or Bad for liking or writing the ghost (I have liked the ghost! he can be very likeable!) but I think the fact that we keep resurrecting him and resurrecting him and resurrecting him IN FANDOMS THAT DO NOT HAVE HIM AS A PRE-EXISTING CHARACTER tells us something about what we as Fandom want. It’s a symptom that tells us something about the state of Fandom, the way a bechdel test fail does not tell us whether a movie is good or even feminist, but DOES tell us something about the state of hollywood.
TFA isn’t an incredibly diverse movie, but unless you pump up the empty balloon of Hux’s character with the ghost the only other white guys to pair Kylo Ren with are his blood relatives and Supreme Commander Gollum.
This is in a movie where he and Poe snark at each other with Poe on his knees; where he ties Poe up to a table and digs into Poe’s brain, where he looks at Finn from across a crowded massacre and Feels A Literal Magical Tug, where he and Rey basically mindfuck each other for agonizingly long minutes. There are Other Opportunities here, is what I’m saying.
Kylux is the most popular pairing in TFA fandom. Expanding Hux’s character is a choice that fandom made. Kylux is a choice that fandom made. The fact that Fanon Hux came canned and prepackaged for us–our ready made mayo sandwich–is SOMETHING TO PAY ATTENTION TO.
It’s not the character of the ghost, or his origins, or the canon characters that bear a family resemblance to him that really matter, imo. It’s the fact that WE, FANDOM, keep resurrecting him when we aren’t seeing a familiar enough white guy ship in the canon cast. That’s a canary collapsing in a mine, is what I’m saying.
I think what’s being said here is amazingly on point. It’s fascinating, the way that over time we remodel certain characters in fandoms – deciding they have certain traits and committing to this idea despite no real canon evidence, to the point that reading a fic where they don’t fall act in that way feels genuinely OOC.
In my view – and I’m sure it’s not an original one – Mr Fastidious-Kinky White Guy has a sister, a female character who is recreated again and again across fandoms. She’s the flawless pal of the main white boy couple, you know, the one who mostly exists to roll her eyes at their stupidity and probably save the world off screen while they’re getting their shit together.
Now, I’m being unfair. This character, as you’re saying with Hux, can be brilliantly written and wonderfully entertaining. I first came across her when deep into an obsession with Merlin, filling the role of Morgana – and perhaps significantly she mostly appeared in modern AUs. This Morgana was heart-stoppingly beautiful, wicked smart, eternally snarky, and in turns mean to and indulgent of ‘her boys’, who meanwhile spent the majority of each fic dithering about getting together. And I loved it every time. Actually, Morgana was generally my favourite part of these stories. She got all the best lines, and often felt like a refreshing and well-drawn character. If she didn’t much resemble the canon character, well, it’s hard to reconcile an increasingly murderous witch with a nice coffee-shop AU, especially when you genuinely like the character and want her to have nice things.
It was only a couple of fandoms down the line that she started to bother me. In particular, I found her in Teen Wolf. Mainly it was Lydia who took on the role, although most of the other Teen Wolf ladies could be co-opted into it. Again, I don’t mean to condemn the fandom. There are plenty of fics where lydia is a gloriously complex character. And as in Morgana’s case, there are plenty more where this archetype-Lydia is wonderfully written and puts a smile on my face. But ultimately, she is an archetype, created by the fandom to facilitate the getting-together of the white boy love interests.
And what I find particularly difficult about Morgana-Lydia-etc is that all too often, she’s not actually a minor canon character. Unlike Hux, she’ll often have be drawn in some detail by the writers. Maybe not in ways we always like or approve of, but she’s not an empty shell, and there’s really no need to superimpose a prepackaged character onto her.
We’re not gifted with a huge number of complex female character arcs on screen, and I think it’s interesting that we’re collectively so willing to put aside women in fanfiction and elevate minor male characters like Hux, especially while we’re simultaneously praising a movie like SW:TFA for being more diverse than typical blockbusters. I don’t really have an answer for why – I suspect that if I tried I’d descend into amateur hour psychology that anyone with a brain could tear apart in an instant. But I think it’s something we need to recognise in ourselves.
ABSOLUTELY. It’s a different but related thing, I think? The way canonically well-developed female characters (especially female love interests) get possessed by this “eyerolling at the boys and telling them what their feelings are while being badass conveniently elsewhere” ghost in fic.
Which, I should note, is a thing I have 100% written. Because I was being lazy, and rested the story on a sexist trope instead of doing justice to the characters. It can be done well, as you’ve mentioned, but I think mostly it’s lazy writing.
This one hits me harder than the ghost dude actually. As I read the initial description of Morgana above I was thinking, “that sounds just like how teen wolf fic treats Lydia.” And following the rest of the description, it also seemed a lot like Elizabeth and Teyla both in SGA, and like Natasha in Avengers fic, and even Karen, Marci, and Claire in Daredevil fic.
And yeah, the most frustrating thing there is that all these female characters are actually well-developed characters! They have agency and great stories! Why are they always turned into the sassy, snarky bff who tells her boys to get their shit together and date?
I would just like to say thank you so much to @m-a-t-91 for tagging me it means a lot someone who defo love is @marvelximagines (Go check her blog she post brilliant imagines and she is an amazing girl) I also love all my beautiful followers for example @arfrona@orangepenguin5@ideclaremarvel ( whose blog you should check out) there are many more but even if I did not tag you are loved dearly by me and never forget it xxxx
HOW VERY DARE YOU CAST ASPERSIONS UPON MY STRAYAN-NESS
JUST FOR THAT, MY MOST WONDROUS OF REBELS, I HAVE FUCKING PHOTOBLOGGED THE MAKING AND EATING OF VEGEMITE TOAST
FIRST. GET YOUR TOAST.
this is the multigrain variation of this fine dish, purchased from my local bakery (who DO A FAB CHEESYMITE SCROLL TYVFM AND NO THEY’RE NOT BAKERS DELIGHT EITHER)
then get your essentials:
THE STUFF.
Toast is done. Get butter happening.
LOTS OF BUTTER.
Then get into that salty umami happiness pot:
fuck, I’m almost out. Time to sacrifice a wombat, I guess
(just joking of course, ahahahaha*)
NEXT. SPREAD THAT VEGEMITE ONTO THE TOAST. NOT THICKLY. This is not fucking nutella, your tongue will be scorched land and you will taste nothing but salt for decades if you spread it on like nutella. THINLY. You wanna see butter in places.
(hopefully your bread isn’t as fresh and liable to fucking tear as mine…)
Now. Eat that wonderful goddamned black gold, savoury and buttery and warm and fucking delicious, all the while secure in the knowledge that there is now a rose in your every cheek (yes, we know, we know, the mental image is hilarious).
It is at this point that you will be forced to fight any opportunistic bastard walking into the kitchen who says, “oh, is that vegemite on toast?” They want your second slice. DO NOT GIVE IN. They make their own, dammit. This one’s yours.
Aw Yiss 