Another journal

New story incoming!

2026-04-22T05:53:34Z

If you follow me on Comradery (or Patreon), or elsewhere, you may have heard me mention a tedious-to-work-on current project that I’d be sharing soon. Well! I’m serialising another book!! The tedious parts were doing an edit and breaking the book up into nice chunks (and queueing it). Starting June 21, 2026, I’m serialising The Consoling Divide! You may remember (or have been signed up to get the emails for) The Audacity Gambit, this is both a sequel to TAG and also a story that can stand on its own.

If you’d like to know more about this upcoming story, check out the info page here! Also please, enjoy the cover and a blurb:

Here’s the blurb:

Five years ago, Emily Anderson of Royal Oak Court Trailer Park was declared the Chosen One and sent on a quest to the Sidhe realm to end the exile of the adults who raised her. She succeeded, because that’s what Chosen Ones do, but the aftermath left her alone and in charge of the rest of the children in the trailer court.

Since her return, they’ve all found a kind of peace and stability, but nothing can stay the same forever. When Emily learns she has to plunge back into the fairy world she gladly left and reopen emotions she’d even more gladly bottled up, her reluctance is met by the one thing she knows is true: she can only rely on herself. One of the children Emily raised needs her, but first she needs to find them. The world she’s returning to is a different one than what she experienced as a hopeful teen, and even when it is familiar her place in it is no longer as clearly defined, the path not so easily followed.

I had fun going back and getting this ready to serialise, I hope all y’all have a nice time reading it. In case this is a blog post and not just an email (I am writing this ~ in the past ~ oooOOOhh ~ here’s a signup for getting The Consoling Divide delivered to your inbox. Of course, as always, you can as easily add it to your RSS, which is very sexy too.

If you were signed up for updates for TAG, I’ve (I believe) set up things so that you either start getting emails for the new story as before and can also easily unsubscribe from TCD updates if you prefer. Please let me know if you have trouble with it! Goodness knows its been a bear from my side.

The intent is to be annoying (ie: somewhat regular, rather than easily distracted) about promo’ing this one, I have promo images and everything. So expect to keep hearing about this for a bit! It may not start until mid-June, but hey, I’ve got plenty of other stuff for you to read until then.

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February 2026 Bookpost

2026-03-05T19:59:44Z

I ended up reading a bit less this month (well, in book numbers, not page numbers) thanks to Flash Fiction February. That said I also am trying to be better about having more than one book checked out on Libby at a time. I get nervous is all, what if I don’t finish the first book while I have the second book checked out, ugh, it’s there hovering, waiting. But Libby has changed it’s delay options, so rather than pushing things back to a date a week, two weeks, some months from now you can only suspend a hold and then unsuspend it when you’re ready. I have, ah, several books suspended right now (most of which are non-fiction because I’m slow at reading them and like to pace them between fiction).

Anyway, here’s the roundup and stats for February.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

What a grody, gorgeous, viciously verdant book. The story drips thick and rich through a rotting, sprouting world of opera and overthrown regimes, as the characters twine relentlessly to their fates.

Boy-o, what a delight this was. It’s thick and visceral and lived-in. It just makes me want to use squishy descriptive words about it. It also does some things with structure that I didn’t catch right off, so I don’t want to say too much, but I’d loved Leech and now I guess Ennes is just on my list of To Watch For. This felt like a good companion to Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide, so if you like one or the other, there’s a rec for you.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Whew what a book! So many shadowed layers, thickly and deliciously spread with an inhabited world and the mess of people in it. The plot doesn’t twist so much as turn like a winding snake, a winding ribbon to an ending.

This had been on my to-read and I’d then forgotten but then a pal’s review (and a better review than this) reminded me about it and I dropped it in the hold queue. Weirdly?? Reminds me a little of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler but maybe just parts of it, maybe just the journey of it, the papers and the periods of being lost, the structural play. It’s certainly a better book than IOAWNAT, to me at least.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

The layers of this book fold together like beautiful cloth wrapping, from novel-in-a-novel to interviews to the main tale. It kept me turning and unwrapping the story drawn in by lush descriptions of family and food and life. You want to call the ending the bow on it but it was instead the thing hidden by all those layers and I don’t! feel it was quite what I wanted or expected to find.

Notable about this book, I paired it with Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward in the latest newsletter reading recommendations and I’ll just copy what I said there:

I recently read two books in a row that had the same thing going on. Not the story or the style or anything, but both were awesome rides the full way through, doing some neat things with how a story is shaped, but then the ending didn’t hit for me as solidly as I needed it to. Which does not! Mean they’re not worth reading. It was actually really interesting to interrogate myself on why the endings didn’t work for me the way I wanted. Maybe (probably) they’ll do better for you.

I can’t hate a book for not sticking the landing, not if they do it the best they can. I don’t know how either of these books should have ended but the endings here work! And I enjoyed the ride, so I can’t complain (well, I can, but you know).

Here’s the pretty gradient of the month’s covers:

There’s Legendary Children again, this time it was as audio, a joy. The other book in this lot was Kate Elliot’s The Nameless Land, the concluding book of the Witch Roads duology. As sometimes happens, the second book didn’t do it for me as the first did. Still glad for it, well-written, good conclusion etc., etc., but I can’t pick out which ingredient (longing? world building? quests?) I found so tasty in the first book that was missing here.

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Yuletide 2025 Reveal/Commentary

2026-01-03T23:56:57Z

I'm still picking through Yuletide fics and making some bookmarks for recommendations. I had been hoping my Yuletide Reading Bingo attempt this year would help me some there but after I generated it and started filling it out I realised I had two matching squares and two squares that were antithetical to any tag you'd find in the Yuletide collection, so!

I had a fun time deciding my fandoms this year—my own fandoms are those that are verrrry small and specific, so my depth of knowledge or confidence to approach others isn't always that high. That said, this year I lucked into matching for Earthsea!

First, the fic and tags etc:

To be useful, if not free (2343 words) by bzedan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Serret (Earthsea), Yarrow (Earthsea)
Additional Tags: No Dialogue
Summary:

The child knew that if a queen were to have yet produced but a single daughter, then the creature should be at least pleasant to look at, easy to care for, and useful. Of the three, the most important was that she was to be useful.

Writing commentary

I honestly didn't mean to write another story from the POV of a seagull, I swear. But the prompt had so many delicious ingredients in it—the simple joyfulness of Yarrow, the mystery of Serret's background, the possibility of her escaping.

A secret: I had seen this prompt last year and felt like I just didn't have Earthsea fresh enough in my mind to offer the fandom. Which was a shame as the Earthsea books are a dear favourite. So, I reread the series in 2025 (among other LeGuin works, as my best friend read Lathe of Heaven for the first time and my partner read The Disposessed), and added the fandom with confidence. I was excited about all the fandoms I offered, but over the moon to get matched with one I'd already prepped for.

I love to approach things with form, so the idea of not naming our narrator (Serret) and using ages as periods/delineating times for each vignette set me going. Then I started giggling at the idea of taking "maiden/mother/crone" and making it "maiden/mother/bird" and, well.

Also, in the books, it is sort of intimated that only Ogion could have returned poor Ged to his human form, so I thought Serret might well be stuck as a bird. And that, on further reflection, for a woman who was only ever the tool of others, the simple and straightforward life of a seagull—the selfish joyfulness of it—might be preferable.

Additional Earthsea notes

Now, the fun thing about Earthsea is it had a hand in my partner and I meeting and getting together. Chase's mom is a librarian and they had the Earthsea trilogy (and Tehanu) on the shelf of their dorm. Those specific first edition paperbacks, if you remember, with the bold colours. Distinctive as hell to spot on a shelf.

It was why, when I first saw them on an endcap at my high school library, I picked them up. I don't know if they were part of a display or if they'd just been purchased, or what. But I picked up the first one, read it, returned it, then picked the next from the same display. The problem was, the display was gone by time I was ready for the third book (or the fourth—it has been decades, so the details are fuzzy).

As I had not taken in the author's name, so I had no idea who this series I was in the middle of were by. I did find them eventually because I knew what genre they were and they had those bright colours, so it was just a matter of searching the shelves with a sharp eye.

All that to say, the covers were well-impressed on my mind and spotting them on some guy's dorm room shelf made me go "Oh, I bet you're interesting." Turns out they were and now some 20-odd years later the books are on our shelf.

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A confluence of cameras

2025-12-26T19:41:57Z

I have accidentally become someone who collects little novelty digital cameras. They’ve all been gifts so it wasn’t intentional, but I’m not complaining. A few years ago Chase got me a Canon PowerShot S200, which was what reminded me that I just like to take a snap. It immediately became my go-to for park trips, replacing my nicer DSLR. I mean, I’ve been shooting for nearly 30 years, I love messing with settings, but there is just something about a point-and-shoot.

It’s so aesthetic, I love it.

Chase and I take pictures. It’s what we do. And I have a very distinct approach to things, I like shitty pixel quality, I like the flaws of a camera. So then they got me another. This one, the Camp Snap, is styled after a those disposable cameras. No screen, simple as can be, the colour profile of the images it takes is exactly the vibe. It’s my pocket camera often, because it doesn’t need the ageing batteries the PowerShot does.

Only the PowerShot has a pretty portrait, all the rest are snaps I took to show friends via text, lol.

It is easily overwhelmed by the sun, which is a funny thing to happen here. I love the yellow, watery way it handles light.

Then, a friend let me know about the Charmera, a cutie from Kodak that has a design inspired by the old 110s (a camera I ALWAYS wanted as a teen). It’s keychain sized and has goofy filters. It’s a hard one to get but Chase pre-ordered two (one for the person who told us about them) and when they arrived we’d forgotten that they existed, so it was extra delightful.

It’s so TINYYYYY.

The photo corners are to hold “filters” (interesting pieces of plastic to shoot through. The designs are blind box and pretty cute. It also gets a little overwhelmed by unadulterated sunshine (which I think is just what this size and kind of inexpensive sensor does). The silly filters and size make it a delight.

With a bit of holo plastic over.

Filter!!!

Okay so, these were all gifts from one person (Chase, thank youuuu), but it’s not like I have picked up a gimmicky little camera myself yet or anything. Only, apparently this is now something I am known for and my amazing and wonderful manager got me this as a holiday present:

I can’t explain what a delight of a size this is to hold.

Yes! The screen is on top. YES you can crank the side to take video. There’s two filters: regular and black and white. It has two focus options and, like all little gimmick cameras, is overwhelmed by direct sunlight. The trigger button is where it is supposed to be, and the proportions hit that sweet spot of just small enough to squee over but not too small to easily handle.

I really enjoy the way it handles colour.

This is such a 2010s Flickr image, lol.

The way you shoot with it should make it easy to hold a filter in front of the lens, so I’ll dig through my bins and find one of my heavier neutral filters and see if that helps it handle the sunshine. I do love that the silver of it absolutely reflects into the lens, causing some interesting artefacts.

Chase wonders if maybe we can manufacture a tiny little hood for the lens.

Anyway, now I guess this is my Thing ™. Which I am delighted by. Taking pictures is fun and it is joyful to have fun things to do it with.

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Any Small Town

2025-10-25T19:12:07Z

Last year I participated in an “Ominous October” writing challenge, to write a ~5k story around a theme a week of October. I only got the first two weeks done (because I had other creative projects going on), but I enjoyed it. Here’s my story for the theme “Undead / Strange Town.”

Everything was better once the mill burned down, of course. For whatever one’s idea of better was, anyway. But the point was, when that final abandoned shell was alight, the flames reflecting on the surprisingly calm faces of the residents gathered around the unexpected autumnal bonfire, it felt like the last page of a book turned, cover snapped close with finality. Without a mill, they weren’t a mill town any more, were they? The path was wide open for a New Town Identity, something they’d been attempting for a decade with the grim determination of an ex-quarterback who’d switched college majors three times over six years and found himself at forty with two marriages behind him. Because really, what was a town without a gimmick?

Up the highway, quite a bit up, was a Dairy Town. Now there’s a great thing for a town to be. You’ve got cheese, ice cream, every shop on the three-block main street dressed up quaint effigies of holsteins for Halloween in thematic outfits, while scattered through the town itself were bronze bulls of a different sort, the kind painted by local artisans to add photo-op colour to historic points of interest. They had a great online presence and a nice bit of tourism from the folks travelling through who realised that they might as well stop to water and walk around in a place that also gave out free cheese samples.

Down the highway, that was a College Town. The place that used to be a mill town was bracketed by College Towns, actually, but it did just go to prove that whatever your Town Identity was, it didn’t have to be unique. As it was, each of those college towns was its own sort of college town. You had the hippies and farmers and people who were determined to talk to dolphins at one, and the kids who liked to play with their chemistry sets a bit too much, or who somehow found running fulfilling at the other. So the place that used to be the mill town really had their pick of possibilities. And with the mill gone, so conveniently, they could now freely choose what to become.

The problem was, of course, that even with the mill gone the place was still full of ghosts. Most anywhere is, to be honest, but in a town that had been focused on an industry quite well known for its rather intense selection of tools, not to mention the way the land to grow all those trees had been got in the first place, the ghosts were pretty thick on the ground. Or air. Ether. One couldn’t walk the charming main street (four blocks long, due to how the highway split the town, thank you very much) without slogging through the miasma of lives long past. It added a rather negative vibe to the annual harvest festival—which was in summer, and full of summer fruits and vegetables, none of that dark winter-welcoming nonsense, thank you. It’s hard enough to stuff oneself on strawberry shortcake and zucchini noodles in the blare of wet June sun as it is, but doing it under the soul-weighing stare of several unnamed spectres can turn the stomach.

Which, of course, is not particularly great for the tourism.

After the mill burned down and the town felt it could steadily start down the path of claiming a new identity, the first tack they attempted was “recreation.” There were trees! And paths! And something like a pond and river that hadn’t flooded its banks in decades at this point—only the old-timers really remembered the smug satisfaction of the torn-away floating docks and pleasure boats, the only reminder of frivolously spent money a waterline smudged evenly well above head-height on every half-million-dollar manse that had been built too close to the riverbank. So, there was plenty of nature to recreate in. Especially after the town itself re-created a goodly bit of it, which included a makeover of one of the more rural parks that had all the subtlety of a desperate trophy wife remortgaging her youth under the knife.

The benefit of recreation, the former mill town figured, was that one didn’t need to have the town explicitly as the goal, the end-point of whatever RV-charioted quest a person was going on. Straddling the highway as it was, something that had been to its benefit in the old log-hauling days but now served only to make it a righteous pain to get from one side of the town to the other, it made for a nice little stop on the way. Why not stop for an extra night under the now thinned-out shade of trees that had outlived the logging? While you’re here sample the local cuisine, which was not much to speak of yet but a stack of small business grants sat tidy on the desk of the Chamber of Commerce, ready to serve.

If you’re just pausing on the way, not making the town your destination, then the ghosts aren’t quite as noticeable. They haven’t time to sink in, catch in your hair like the bitter liquor smell of campfire smoke. Right as one is about to get the jeebies, if not the heebies, about the undeniable presence of the unsettled dead, it’s time to roll the awning up, dump the black tank, secure the loose items on bungee-corded shelves, and hop back onto the highway that so conveniently rolls right past your temporary turn-off. You won’t remember the ghosts, some miles down the road. You won’t remember much of the town itself either, which is fine. The money you left behind doesn’t need anybody remembering, as long as the checks clear.

If you live in the town, there is no denying the ghosts, is the thing. They remain quite undeniable.

The place that used to be a mill town did try its best to deny them, focused as they were on re-sculpting their selves into a semblance of a Nice Town To Stop In For A Night. There were towns that were Ghost Towns, the kind that have a nicely sized, rosy-cheeked population happy to strut around in cowboy couture for the tourist, play-acting an era that more or less existed before a boom went bust. And, of course, there were the actual ghost towns, the ones that really are quite empty, buildings shuttered, windows soaped, the mail delivered begrudgingly to the single municipal building housing an employee only because the retirement age keeps rising. Having come a bit too close to the actuality of a ghost town between the mill closing down and its convenient collapse into ash thirty years later, the whole concept was just too close for comfort for the Chamber of Commerce.

The populace of the town wasn’t quite as strident in their denial, being as they were rather more preoccupied with the day-to-day and less so with Five Year Plans and Tourism Initiatives. You couldn’t harvest a grass field without the combine cutting down a score of wafting, wandering spirits, though the process seemed to affect them as much as if one took a pair of scissors to a blob of mercury. They’d coalesce, seemingly no worse for the wear, whatever sticky gobbets of soul-stuff that had been caught up in blades lazing its way back to reform with the rest that had scattered among the seeds. The filberts weren’t free of ghosts either, they’d fall from the trees right along with the nuts as the shakers throttled the sturdy trunks. Others would get swept up and sifted out with the leaf litter. Very few ever made it as far as the nutcrackers, thanks to the local orchards modifying their sorting machines to strain out spirits.

It was disconcerting for the harvesters, but as a town that relied less on seasonal workers and more on a centuries-stratified system of social caste, it was a discomfort easily overridden through practise. Nobody in the far-flung states that planted grass seed to staunch erosion (often caused by logging, in a lovely sort of karmic loop) found foreign phantoms popping up with the shoots, nor did any ghosts gum up distant candy machines, or get enrobed in chocolate on their way to joining a discount Valentine assortment. As none of it seemed to affect any of the harvests themselves, the whole thing was easy enough to shrug off. It was like sparrows in seed barns, you did what you could to keep them out and dealt with what ones got in.

The ghosts were so undeniable that people causally built their life around them like a squeaky stair, but like the self-same stair, they were so ingrained into the daily life that what a stranger would do when confronted with this invisible issue never occurred to them. The Chamber could deny the ghosts, the recreators in their rented RVs could forget, but any outsider spending a sizeable chunk of time in the town would step right on the stair, sending it squealing. Maybe it’s apocryphal but the concept of the stranger stepping into the saloon, their dusty boots sounding a creak on the dry and tired floorboards that causes everyone to turn in worry—that’s because squeaky stairs and creaking boards were purposefully built-in. How better to know an outsider than having the house itself tattle on the trespasser?

It makes one wonder about the kinds of house rennos that silence all squeaks, shore up and square up all sloping walls that were set in place by a handful of folks piecing together a home from a Sears catalogue in an outsized premonition of the future’s flat pack furniture. It gives all the energy of a thriller heroine trying to alert the daring protagonist that “it’s a trap!” her words muffled by duct tape that one hopes is from a special theatre company that doesn’t hurt when ripped free.

When the town decided to branch out beyond recreation and began courting the addition of a new employer in the hospital industry, things started to get strange. Living in the town, staying within it for a couple of seasons, exposed outsiders not only to the breadth of the ghosts but the spaces the local population made around the ghosts as a matter of habit. Which wasn’t quite the fit one would hope for when trying to incite a college board to build a lovely brick satellite campus on the outskirts, next to the town hospital.

Why such a small town would even have a hospital is a surprise, actually. Other towns of comparative size relied on the helicopter closeness of nearby cities. It wasn’t as if the closest town was that far by highway (which, remember, split the town neatly in two and was quite easy to access). Once one is rural enough, thirty minutes is nothing, that’s about the standard just to get overpriced milk from a shop that doesn’t specialise in smokes and lotto. But thirty minutes, when you’ve got people working with saws and threshers and all the sharp implements that chew up nature and spit out building blocks, that’s enough time for things to go rather wrong. So, of course the town had a hospital. And a rather decent one as well! Decent enough it made sense for a medical college to break ground on a new campus, what a lovely thing, a win for all. The college could claim the prestige of expanding, the town could add a rotating drip of residents with a bit more money to spend, and the students and staff itself could practise medicine then spend their precious off-hours in the second growth forest so carefully tailored for recreation. A particularly nice option for those who weren’t quite cut out for the city. Except, again, for the ghosts.

Doctors aren’t baseball players, they haven’t room in their lives for casual superstition. Particularly superstition that seemed to have little predictable pattern, as one did need to breathe the full year of the seasons to start to see the shape of it. Only dipping into the freshly painted bars rebranded as pubs and added overly complicated burgers on weekends, they’d be confused by things like like open pockets in an otherwise thick weekend crowd, jukeboxes loaded with playlists nobody breathing had selected, or bar rags kept in briny buckets that rimmed the tables with like a margarita glass thanks to regular wipe-downs between customers (a favourite trick of all eateries in town for ensuring the only souls occupying a four-top had butts to warm the seat). If they bothered to ask, if a local bothered to answer, if the blossoming medical professional bothered to listen to the consonant-dropping drawl, the answer still wouldn’t have offered them a satisfactory explanation.

It wasn’t as if the town had taken the traditional path of creating a divide of tourists and townies. The presence of tourist season is a heady mix of end of the school year exam rush, harvest season but the harvest is other people’s dollars, an injection of new blood that stays long enough to observe like a migration of exotic butterflies, something that would be annoying to deal with on the daily but are fun enough for the short time they stay. These baby doctors, they were staying for months and months at a go. The caste stratification of the town, as previously mentioned, was as worn in as an old mattress that caved in at the centre—not comfortable, but familiar and difficult to get out of. What happened with this sparkling satellite campus was that it stacked a new class smack on top of the old.

It turned out that not only did this new class of people, with money to spend and little time for the near-monthly holiday parades of the (four block long!) main street, did not mesh well with the already extant populace, but they also did not mesh well with the ghosts. You’d think, working at the hospital as they did, that the whole lot would be familiar enough with ghosts, that they’d be used to running their rounds while wading through a spiritual swamp, thick and steamy with (un)life. They were, it turned out, rather not. And, as students who had invested quite a bit of money in being students and who had the horrifically packed schedules that higher learning deems the correct way to run people through the laundry press of education (because what better way to create a class of caring medical professionals than churning them through the kind of days that could be considered a type of psychological retrofitting designed to strip compassion and empathy for others until a body was honed to only survive and prescribe?), it really came down to one simple thing. They hadn’t any time for ghosts. They didn’t have the time, nor want to make the room in their schedules or lives, for the ghosts that haunted the streets and shops, parks and populace.

It had been so long since anyone had acted as though the ghosts weren’t even there that the town’s residents, both ethereal and physical, were quite taken by surprise. It took the first full semester after the ribbon cutting at the shiny new satellite school, with its fresh baby trees and under-grown local flower bushes barely visible against the clean white concrete and classic red brick, before anyone quite realised what was happening. The ghosts were agitated. Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce was satiated. The dual-pronged approach of Recreation and College Town put their piggy bank to a place where they could order new banners (at cost from the local sign shop) for the summer harvest festival. Actual twenty-footers, that could stretch nearly across the two lanes of main street, printed nice and bright. There were other nice things they threw into their shopping basket, most of which were signage-related, though they did also buy a new copier-printer. Fat and happy as a pig before slaughter, the Chamber waved away the inquiries that had begun trickling in from local businesspeople regarding the ghosts.

What ghosts, they said, despite their lives being as shaped around the spirits as anyone else in town. What problems with the new residents, they asked, concerned that the little thing about the quality of some of the outlying area’s well water had reached the delicate shell ears of the medically-inclined new members of town. Everyone had known the Chamber wouldn’t be a helpful place to turn but they’d all felt it was best to try the official channels first. Due diligence, after all, is sometimes worth the effort. Like a person calling to see what is wrong with their router box and being told to turn the device off and back on again, it was worth trying even though one knew the result would be the same as if they’d been asked to spin in a circle three times widdershins.

With their due diligence done, the town was now free to find their own solution. Not the whole town, of course, even at the cosy population of a cool dozen times one thousand they were too big to truly do a thing en masse. As it was, quite a lot of that census included the people who didn’t live in the town proper and had quite enough of their own problems going on. So, the folks who had the time and the gumption got themselves together, at one of those places that is sort of a meeting club, sort of a bar, the type of place with the tinsel backdrop on a stage that’s a bare eight inches higher than the rest of the floor. You see a lot of old man bands on that kind of stage, folks who don’t have it in them to be bar bands but do like to get together and sing rock standards. That kind of place. Always named after some sort of animal, or with an animal for a mascot, their signs a mishmash of letters making an unmemorizable acronym. They’re good places to meet, especially if you want to be sure no outsiders will wander in. Because who goes to places like that except for the club members and folks who’ve rented the space for an event?

And they schemed. Well, they got close to scheming. The first time the invested members of the town got together they didn’t even plan, they sort of just hashed out what was going on, comparing notes like students a week before exams. Well, you’ve got that answer but my notes say this, they can’t both be right? Comparing observations and just getting the lay of the land. The land lay as thus: they did quite like the infusion of money so expertly inserted into the town from the baby doctors, that was a fact. It wasn’t just the Chamber that had made a good time of it. They couldn’t treat this new, ghost-ignorant class like the unwanted beaux of a single mother in a children’s cable romantic comedy and scare them off. All that said, it didn’t feel right for the ghosts to be so ignored. Or more, it didn’t feel right for how the town felt about the ghosts to be ignored. A person not in it could say that the town itself ignored the ghosts and they’d be right but also quite wrong, as one doesn’t make that level of effort to work within the bounds of a thing that one is ignoring. It’s the squeaky floorboard situation again, a purposeful shape made around a thing that acknowledges its existence while also choosing not to interact with it.

The second time the group got together—something that was easier than expected, because it was a large enough crowd of folks that one would expect schedules to misalign like a bad bite—the second time they started to sketch a plan. It wasn’t a very good plan, because no first plan holds up in the light of day, withering to dust like a movie vampire staked through the heart by logic. But they kept getting together and planning and finally scheming and eventually, the shape of a Good Plan started to form. Much like the ghosts themselves, who seemed to have changed their schedules to include these get-togethers and were showing up in larger and larger numbers each time but seemed satisfied enough with being gently herded onto the stage and out of the way of everyone else, the shape wasn’t incredibly solid but it was there and undeniable.

The primary problem that every previous plan had was: even if they got this batch of burgeoning medical professionals to acknowledge that the town had ghosts and there were accepted ways to deal with them, the school year would end, or residencies would change and then there’d be a whole new crop of well-educated idiots who’d need to be trained all over again. Any solution had to have a perpetuality to it, something that could keep puffing along on its own momentum eventually. As the town had well-proved, once a system had enough momentum, it slotted into life like a good pair of glasses, something you could forget existed but couldn’t live without.

The town historian had died the previous year. Nobody had spotted his ghost among the floating masses, but also nobody was particularly sure what the process was, as some townsfolk you saw again and some you didn’t. But of all people to join the haunting host, the man who’d run the tiny town museum would be highly likely to find his way back. And, if folklore (not the town’s folklore, just the general sort of thing one picks up out of the air like a radio signal), was correct, unfinished business had a large part in tying a spirit to a place. The town historian had left behind an estimated thirty linear feet of unsorted archives, which was a very rough estimation because the file boxes were scattered around his modest one bedroom, with more piled on various empty flat surfaces across dining room, living room, bedroom and, unfortunately, bathroom.

Some celebratory town birthday was coming up, one of those round numbers that end in a zero or a five. The tiny historical museum had spent the last year putting the more upsetting old taxidermies into heavily mothballed storage, replacing them with photographable dioramas and those informative mini-games that are the keystone of any all-ages educational facility. Due to the historian’s death, they’d also found themselves having to process all those linear feet, a task that had been particularly onerous due to them having only just finished processing what they thought were all the backlogs of previous historians and donors. They’d asked him, the dead historian (when he wasn’t yet dead) if there was anything at his house maybe, it seemed like there were gaps maybe, in the boxes they were going through. The dead historian had waved a hand at them, neither confirming nor denying and mostly implying that he’d get to it. Which, of course, he did not because Death got to him first.

A long-planned part of the birthday extravaganza was that all the old buildings, the ones that had been around notable amounts of time, would be getting tidy little plaques about their historical value. The more interesting ones would also have informative displays installed, in some sort of hope that the town populace would absorb the museum’s enthusiasm about history through proximity to educational signage. A nicely-designed pamphlet was due to be sent to the printers with a list of all these buildings of note, the kind of thing made with medium-grade paper and astringent smelling ink that could be purchased for a little bit more than you’d like to spend from the counter at the museum. During the week-long celebration, photocopies of the relevant individual pages would be available at each of these historic locations, the kind of thing somebody picks up and folds to put in their pocket or purse before they forget about it entirely.

It had been, until the problem with the medical students, a bit of a battle as to whether the hospital was old enough to be counted among the historic buildings. Maybe, some had argued, in five years it and other buildings of borderline eminence could be inducted. After gatherings in the dimly lit meeting club—where the slowly growing crowd of ghosts on stage were generating enough glow that they lit up the tinsel backdrop as though it were sparkling seaweed in the ocean’s depths, sending disco droplets of light over the concerned faces of townsfolk—it was decided that the hospital was old enough. It was quite special, after all, for a town so relatively small to have such a large hospital. Especially a large enough hospital to attract something as important as a satellite medical campus.

With everything decided, the nicely-designed pamphlets had small adjustments made and were sent off to the printer. The sign shop owner, who would have been having a banner (ha, ha) year if it hadn’t been for the Chamber and Rotary Club’s constant discounts, pulled out substrates that nobody in town had ever ordered, due to their expense and possible lack of taste or dignity. They were, actually, a very good sign maker, despite the clip art logos from clients they found themselves working with. Parade plans were solidified and announcements about street closures were published in the weekly paper nobody ever read. The secretary of the hospital director had practised his signature over the years due to really being more of an administrative assistant (despite that title rarely being in use in the modern age as it encouraged higher pay and prevented coffee from being made), so securing last-minute permission for new instalments in the lobby and other key places around the campus was as quick as the click of a pen.

In the week leading up to the town’s big birthday bash, even the most aloof baby doctors couldn’t ignore the preparations. Signs warning of roads being closed and parking abbreviated for the parade popped up around all their favourite spots to lunch, flyers were stuck under the windscreen wipers of the kind of cars that didn’t have a dealer around for a hundred miles. All the hip little pubs had placards about the upcoming specials to tempt the palate, with enigmatic titles like “Miller’s Mighty Meal,” “Strawberry Summer Surprise” and “Log Cabin Lumpia.” Every old building around town bloomed with badges, hidden until the day of the event beneath little squares of white, as though the streets had suddenly filled with fourth-grade teachers who’d found a good deal on novelty ghost brooches and decided the uneasy undead were the safest celebratory accessories.

The hospital itself seemed to be the central source of imminent revelations, the lobby now the proud owner of a large something that sat under a heavy painter’s drop, bracketed by empty easels that would presumably display information about whatever it was that sat beneath the sheet. The building itself not only had a yet-to-be-revealed badge at the front, but another at the back, right at eye height to the door most of the medical students used when passing between the fresh new campus and the place they practised their learning. There was even a plinth on the path between the buildings, newly installed with mud squeezing up through the grass around it, though it sat uncovered and empty.

The townsfolk were nervous, both the good kind one always is before a big event finally exhales and releases all the plans one has made into the air to come together as fate and planning have made it and the more uneasy kind when one has made a bet but is not certain of the odds. The ghosts, for their part, seemed mostly unaffected by all the preparations, though they did appear in such a volume they could barely be contained to the club stage during the last meeting of the conspirators.

When the day came, it came rather drizzly, which was standard for the season (or any season, really), but the kind that promised a solid 70% chance of sunshine once the morning got over itself. This was no bother to the residents, who were used to that sort of thing, and who appreciated the time to themselves to go about finishing their preparations. The building badges were revealed, the little museum unloaded a box of freshly printed pamphlets into the wooden rack at their information counter, every participating business pulled out the stack of Interesting History Flyers for their building, the restaurant openers swapped out the menu cards for happy hour specials for those themed to the event, and anyone involved in the parade hissed around on their walkies, getting floats in line.

The sun came out as the clock ticked over for the parade to begin, which also happened to be lunch hour for baby doctors, enjoying their pint on sidewalk patios while deciding whether or not the new specials were worth a go. They found themselves far more integrated into the populace than they tended to allow, as anyone who hadn’t claimed a space at the edges of the main road were crowded onto the sidewalk, though they did so in a way that left easy gaps for anyone in outdoor seating to see through. The soon-to-be medical professionals appreciated this. Although much of the town’s displays could be considered provincial, they were notably good at parades. First, announced in the semaphore of the colour guard, came the high school band, their brass honking in that way that makes one almost appreciate Sousa. They were followed by the nervous clopping of the equestrian team, who were doing an admirable job reassuring their steeds when the flutes hit a note flat.

Then, after the swift machinations of people with brooms and dustpans clearing the road, some charming old cars with banners stuck on to celebrate various clubs, tossing candy to the packed crowds. The booming sirens of emergency vehicles on their day off could be heard echoing off the two-story facades of the side streets as they lined up to trundle down the four-block main street, surrounded by the swarms of worker bees in their ambulance blues and firehouse reds. Then, the high pony tails and sparkling suits of the high school dance team as a choreographed sea buoying a small float blasting something indecipherable while a separate drama played out on its tiny mobile stage—something that had the girls covered in winding sheets that contrasted strangely with on-the-beat hip pops. This was the harbinger of the business floats, which didn’t pass out anything more than penny candy and slightly off-cut coupons. They rolled along like a mobile Bayeux tapestry, telling a heroic version of the town’s birth and growth. The theme first spotted on the dance team’s float continued through the business floats, floating white spectres slipping around the smiling, waving, bastions of Business. Several of the baby doctors checked their phones that the date was, in fact, some time in late spring, and not anywhere close to a more appropriate autumn.

Everyone expected the children’s floats next, themed costumes and decorated bikes, determined parents pushing prams done up to look like combines, but in their place rolled an indefinable mass of somethings. There were heads and hollow eyes and a certain basement dampness, the lot of them weaving patterns like a jacquard loom as they made their way down the four-block main street. They were, in such a mass, heralded as they had been by the previous floats, undeniably ghosts. As with the horses, a group of people followed, spreading salt as they went in the same easy patterns they spread seed. Crunching the crystals behind them came the children, none of whom seemed to care a whit that close ahead lay the unmistakable and familiar spectres of death.

Of course, not all the baby doctors were lunching during parade time, as some had drawn the short straws when it came to rotation. For them, and for all the doctors who would come after, there was the new diorama in the hospital lobby, a tidy little miniature of the hospital itself, like a homunculus awaiting its own birth. As one walked around the display, different eras of the hospital revealed themselves, a time lapse controlled by one’s feet. It was a fascinating and charming jewel of a sculpture, created thanks to the singular talent of the bartender at the meeting club, who had turned skills gained through his passion for miniature trains to the cause. What was most notable, beside the realness of each brick and bush, were the semi-transparent figures floating millimetres above the tiny turf. A scrolling brass plate at the front of the diorama read “In celebration of our residents, living and dead” which was the kind of sentiment one was used to enough in hospital memorial sculpture, though it most notably came minus actual imagery of ghosts.

It was a classy and subtle bit of work, but the plinth along the path out back, where nobody but the medical students went, was not. Empty until the day, it was now the stage for a ghost, who seemed quite satisfied to simply stand there, staring at all who passed.

After the celebration week ended and the Birthday Bash specials had been mercifully retired, tinsel and banners removed from lamp poles, the ghost still stood on the plinth between the sparkling new Satellite Campus and the hospital. It perhaps wasn’t the same ghost, as none of the baby doctors quite had the eye to tell them apart yet. But there was always a ghost, no matter the time of day. And one couldn’t cut across the grass to take the long way, as the lawn that had been put in after the new construction hadn’t much of a root mat and a step off the path meant mud up to the ankle, if the weather had been wet enough.

In the end, the ghosts were undeniable. For everyone.

comments

Dear Yuletide Writer! (2025)

2025-10-19T06:50:05Z

This is my second year doing Yuletide and I am revisiting most of my tags from last year because I am the kind of person who orders the same thing every time at restaurants as well. I am fine with all POVs, tenses, unusual formats and ratings (in fact, I quite like when people play with form!). I tend to like short fic, but also I just like to read stories <3

My AO3 name is also bzedan, and I am always open to treats.

I love (and I don't even know how relevant these are to my requested fandoms, I'm just sharing vibes): found family, hurt-comfort, guard dog relationships, loyalty, praise-kink, epistolatory fiction or anything related (transcripts! snippets of archived materials!), queer characters, purple prose and excessive scene and food description, worldbuilding, goofy metaphors and similies, domestic cosiness, animals and nature, "one last job" or "we gotta save the barn!" situations, second chances, time loops, fingers in the mouth.

I'm totally fine with: canon-typical violence, gore, 'depressing' existential concepts, horror/creepiness, emotional loss, change-the-setting/time AUs.

General DNWs: pregnancy of any type or stage (one exception, which is noted in the relevant fandom), death of requested characters who don't die in canon, real-life current political figures, explicit non-con, beastiality, child/adult sex, fecal play.

Chronicles of Amicae - Mirah Bolender

My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice): Laura Kramer (Chronicles of Amicae), Clae Sinclair (Chronicles of Amicae), Okane Sinclair (Chronicles of Amicae), Worldbuilding (Chronicles of Amicae)

Canon-specific DNW: Current enslavement, but passing mention of past enslavement okay

Listen, I know this is a hard series to get hold of. I'll take any domestic moment or fight scene or worldbuilding about any of the characters. I'm a big ol' sucker for how the main three (Laura Kramer, Clae Sinclair, Okane Sinclair) interact and the family they've created, but I also love basically everyone else in the series. Heck, if you feel wild enough to delve into the Hive-Mind, I'd love to see it.

Additional notes: This series is getting more difficult to find on Libby/the library, here are links to the three books on Storygraph (which also has content warnings, and links to find):

City of Broken Magic
The Monstrous Citadel
Fortress of Magi

The Mechanic (2011)

My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice): Arthur Bishop, Steve McKenna

No canon-specific DNW

Love these boys, both alone and together. I'd be happy with anything from a grumpy morning over coffee to them pulling a wetworks job to an explicit scene of them fulfilling a different kind of (wet) job. The things that particularly endear me to them is the reluctance to aknowledge their mentor-protégé relationship that is almost knight/squire in depth.

I'm okay with Steve's death in canon (even though I'm also a fan of the alternate universe - canon divergence where he lives) and Arthur dealing with how he feels after that could be interesting!

Additional notes: Apparently it's on Kanopy currently! You can access Kanopy for free with a US library card or univeristy login, "rentals" are a ticket system, it's a great thing to have anyway, haha, support your library resources!
https://www.kanopy.com/en/lapl/video/14189845

Twisted Metal (TV 2023)

My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice): Mayhem (Twisted Metal TV 2023), Needles "Sweet Tooth" Kane (Twisted Metal TV 2023), Worldbuilding (Twisted Metal TV 2023)

Canon-specific DNW: Mayhem and Sweet Tooth are only ever an "and," never a "slash" for me.

I love, love, love Mayhem, what a type of gal, nothing but trouble, but also exactly what rounds out her family with John and Quiet. What else has she been up to? What scrapes has she been in or gotten in? Sweet Tooth is a murderous goofball, what a jumble his brain is , and he's all heart, somehow. Though maybe not just his own heart. I'd love to get inside either of their heads. But also: worldbuilding. The show really built a world, and a wild one, and one that begs to be played around in. There's a lot of possible theres, there.

Additional notes: Available on Peacock (subscription streaming service). Peacock does not have a playlist I think (rude) but has a decent number of clips on their YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@peacock/search?query=twisted%20metal), which, combined with the fandom wiki (https://twistedmetal.fandom.com/wiki/Twisted_Metal_Wiki) you can probably get what you need.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (TV)

My gift must feature all of my chosen character tags; or it may use exceptions I explain in the form: Keiko Miura, Leland "Lee" Shaw, William "Bill" J. Randa - my exception is if the story has only one or two of them actively/physically in the story, but the three of them are still romantically together.

Exception/Explanation for character tags: I would like everyone in the monster-hunting throuple to be at least acknowledged - I know that different ones are only "alive" or "present" at different times in this skein of a continuum.

No canon-specific DNW

DNW Exception: If any of the kaiju/monsters/titans is gravid and it is approached in a not overly-biologically descriptive way, like how a farm handles livestock being pregnant or how people are when their cat is going to have kittens. I know that the very first entry in the Monsterverse showed some pretty gratuitous egg-laying, but in context really no weirder than Attenborough nature docs.

Listen, I am here for the monster-hunting throuple. I love them, I love their dynamic, both in the field and at home. I think about how possibly maybe they could still all be together even after the events of season one (even if one of them got eaten by a Skullcrawler). I think about how they have each had to mourn the loss of the other two pieces of their heart at different times. I love them!

Additional notes: Available on Apple TV+ (subscription streaming service)

Thank you so much, and I hope you have fun, I know I will! <3

comments

The Fourth Step

2025-10-18T07:02:26Z

The scene was one that Mol was intimately familiar with thanks to numerous films and shows. A basement of a church or a rec centre, or whatever kind of public-enough place that had a side entrance to a big, rentable room. Sometimes the room had a bare concrete floor, sometimes the room had that sad speckled industrial carpet with pile of all of a quarter-inch, the barest layer of softness that did little to dampen sound or blunt a fall. There was always a table off to the side with a big ancient coffee urn, or a couple of those brown-paperboard containers like caffeinated box wine. There would be some sort of carb, doughnuts freshly picked up from the nearest 24-hour place hopefully and not sitting in a sad little kitchenette since noon. Or there could be those packets of black and white sandwich cookies slid out from their neat rows onto a platter, like what one saw at small town banks. There would be a circle of chairs, the folding kind. The walls would hold informational and motivational posters for whatever the space did during the day, their cherry candy colours washed green in the hum of the fluorescent banks.

Despite the entire space looking exactly as she’d pictured it, with any variances from her memory only heightening the familiarity, Mol stopped dead as she crossed the door, uncertain that she’d come to the right place. A body bumped her from behind, which was expected if one was going to freeze up in the centre of a doorway. Murmuring apologetic noises, Mol shuffled aside, crossing the threshold. An older lady—at least, older than Mol—patted her arm as she passed, in two gentle pats conveying a full sentence about how “we’ve all been there, dearie, no worries.”

Mol watched the woman beeline to the coffee (which was in a press pot decorated in delicate florals, another one in plaid waiting behind as backup), pour a cup and add an unsettling amount of powdered whitener. When she moved to the tray of pastries, Mol gathered herself and strode as confidentially to the table as she could muster, summoning all of her masks to remind her how a person should act in a situation like this. Pumping the top of the pot for her coffee, she watched the other woman pluck something filled with jam from the cut-glass platter. Like the airpots, the tray was a heavy looking thing that had probably been in service as long as Mol had been alive, objects pulled out for hundreds and hundreds of potlucks and meetings over the years. Leaving her coffee plain, Mol edged along the table to choose her own pastry and realised the woman was still there.

Analysing the situation, she realised that the other woman had been taking her time at the table so that she could speak to Mol in a casual way. Well played, Mol thought, mentally shuffling through possibilities before going for the simplest. She smiled at the woman and asked what pastry she should pick.

The woman cocked her head like a bird, eyes flicking between Mol and the platter thoughtfully. “If you don’t like sweet, the cheese danish is actually quite good.” She nodded at Mol’s steaming cup of coffee. “But, if you drink it black so you can have a sweet, then the chocolate chip muffin is a classic that pairs well.” She hefted her cup, the liquid inside as light as an adobe wall, then jiggled the napkin-wrapped pastry with her other hand. “My choice is always cream and jam.”

Mol picked up the suggested muffin and smiled, though she didn’t bother engaging her eyes in the movement. To her surprise, the woman seemed to notice and laughed, her eyes crinkling.

“Well, I know it’s not cream, love. It’s a bit of a joke just for me I guess.” She sipped the coffee, her eyes twinkling. “I did look up what was in it once, and sometimes it is a milk-derived thing but,” she glanced at the tidy jar of packets, “not this brand.”

Realising she hadn’t moved her body since picking up the pastry, Mol made a small turn towards the expected circle of chairs. It was still a full ten minutes before the meeting was set to start and people that looked like regulars were gathered at various points along the basement walls, though two had already claimed chairs and were chatting with their heads close together. Shuffling through her mental cards again, Mol selected an action and tilted her head back to the other woman, using her chin to point at the waiting circle.

“This is the C.C.A. meeting?” A beat before adding an improvisation. “Or am I stealing snacks from the wrong group?” Mol decided not to smile, but kept her tone light.

“It is! And good of you to ask, because we have had folks wander in—though that was after they switched from Wednesdays to Thursdays and some poor souls from a monthly group spent a full half hour with us before realising how rather wrong they’d gotten it.” The woman looked at Mol, fully and openly but in a nice way, like how one looks at a cat or an interesting building. She felt assessed but not judged. With a decisive nod, the woman gave another smile. “You’ll do fine, love.” And with that she turned and strode off to a group gathered by a bookshelf, biting into her flaky pastry and shedding bits of it in her wake.

Mol found an empty spot along the wall and sipped her too-hot coffee between nibbling on the edges of the muffin. She felt herself go into neutral, where her body could continue eating in a normal-person way while her brain idled along on its own. Over the rim of her paper cup she looked at the others in the room and wondered if she’d seen any before. It was a small enough city, and people coming to a C.C.A. meeting would probably have similar daily paths, it would be logical to have encountered some of them in the natural rhythms of life. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to find any faces familiar in that seen-you-at-the-grocery-at-9pm way, or if it would be better if everyone was a stranger.

Someone with a clipboard made their way to the circle of chairs with purposefulness, and Mol watched the various clusters of people begin moving toward them like drops of ferrous fluid pulled to a magnet. She topped up her coffee before following, knowing she’d want the cup to give her hands and mouth something to do while listening. The muffin, half-finished, shedding crumbs, she wrapped up in a napkin and slipped into her bag. The woman who had talked to her was sat between two of the people she’d gone to talk to, which was a relief, Mol wouldn’t need to wonder if she was expected to sit beside her. Finding an empty seat, Mol eased her way between the gap of two chairs and sat down, tucking her feet onto the crossbar, both hands on the coffee cup perched on her bag that she’d slung around to sit in her lap.

Once everyone was settled, the person with the clipboard stood. They looked exactly like someone who held a clipboard while standing in a circle of chairs in a basement should, at least based on most media. A causal but collared shirt above pants that weren’t slacks or jeans, lightly tinted glasses, a few leather bracelets. Clearing their throat with a smile, they nodded in a way that encompassed the entire group.

“Welcome to Cursed and Changed Anonymous. These weekly meetings are casual support and discussion sessions where we can freely talk about daily difficulties, share milestones, and generally have a place to chat with others familiar with similar situations.” Their eyes flickered around the circle, “I see we do have some new faces tonight, know that you don’t have to introduce yourself tonight, but that it can help—both because it can feel good to say a thing out loud and because you might find others here who have found themselves in your shoes.”

Mol had spent most of the bus ride to the meeting trying to decide if she’d introduce herself and hadn’t landed on a decision. She carefully uncrossed her feet from where she’d hooked them onto the chair, feeling the soles align flat with the ground. Even if she wasn’t expected to stand, if she took the plunge she wanted to feel grounded. Before she could pull a trigger on making a choice, someone a few people down the circle waved a hand and stood.

“Hi, um, I’m Benny.” Benny ran a hand through his short, messy hair in a practised motion that Mol envied. It carried exactly the right nervous weight. “I’m a late bloomer in the cursed department, I guess. I had a girlfriend who was into some weird stuff with books—” at this, one or two people along the circle let out knowing sighs. Benny half-stretched his hand out to them, in a gesture of recognition. “Yeah well, you can guess then, um, the short of it is that we are no longer dating but I am definitely carrying a curse for two, ha.” He looked as if he were going to say something more, but the shadow of a hand appeared at his throat and his mouth closed with a reflexive snap, teeth clicking together before he sat abruptly.

The person with the clipboard’s eyes flicked to Mol, slipping off quickly and exerting no pressure. It was fully up to her if she wanted to share with the group. She mentally gave herself a little shove, enough to tip the balance. Because she’d prepared her body it was easy to stand, hands still clutching—not gripping—the paper coffee cup.

Mol realised the woman who had talked to her at the refreshments table was just inside her peripheral vision along the curve of the chairs. Putting on a familiar posture of “telling a story” Mol looked around the circle with a smile balanced somewhere between shy and welcoming. She let the words she’d practised on the bus ride slide easily from her lips.

“Hello, I’m Mol and I think I probably fall right between cursed and changed. I’m getting a little tired of straddling the line and thought this might be a good place to find support.” She was careful to aim her words and gaze at nobody in particular, so it felt like an even distribution of attention. Even so, she remained aware of both the person with the clipboard and the woman from the refreshments table.

She let her gaze drop to the floor. “In the evening I get whisked away to, I guess, fairy land. Only the time discrepancy is inverted from standard so I live there for anywhere from days to months, mostly. Then I wake up back here, and its the next day.” Mol felt, more than saw, a movement among the circle. She looked up, used a small smile. “Yes, like that Star Trek episode,”

Mol dropped the smile. “But actually. Not every night, but most nights. Since it truly is happening, I have brought things back with me.” Another movement along the circle, in her peripheral. “I’m about 35, days counted here. When I count all of them, I’m about 120.” It was off-script, but she added “I’m tired.”

She sat back down, perching her feet onto the crossbar, both hands on the coffee cup resting on her bag. Mol couldn’t decide if she felt better. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t said it out loud before, but she’d hoped that telling other people who’d also been touched by curses might feel different.

Nobody else had newcomer introductions—or if they did then Mol had brought the vibe down with hers—so the person with the clipboard moved them along the agenda.

“Does anyone have any wins, losses, or observations from this week?” They nodded to a willowy man who raised his hand with a grin. “Yosh?”

Remaining seated, the man spread his hands wide and simply said, “I’m learning to control it.” Cheers broke out from several points in the circle. Nodding, he continued “It’s not—” at this he spit a pearl into his palm. “It’s not cured, obviously, but—” a ruby this time “—its better by far.” More cheers and someone clapped, while Yosh tucked the two gems away into the zip pocket of his pullover.

The rest of the meeting went like that, people sharing things that had went well or things that had gone badly, then hearing encouragement and support from the rest. Mol joined in where she felt it was appropriate, cheering along or hissing in frustration, though she kept her lips pressed tightly when advice was asked. There were more than enough folks chiming in with help and she felt a depth of ignorance about how to manage video conferencing when one always appeared as the viewer’s true desire.

A chime sounded from the pocket of the person with the clipboard and they raised both hands, the paper on the clipboard flapping as it was brought aloft. The group, which had been offering words of encouragement to a woman who was debating when to disclose her curse to a new partner, wound down their chatter.

“That’s it for the evening, folks.” They stood and nodded to the group. “We’ve got the room for another half hour, socialising and discussion can continue while we put things away.”

Mol slid out of her chair and made her way back to the refreshments table. After she threw her empty cup into the trash she gazed at the airpots of coffee and arranged possibilities. She picked one up, and began to gaze around the room in a purposeful way, sending out the signal that she was looking for the next step in helping put things away. She was unsurprised to find the woman she’d talked to before standing beside her.

“Is there a kitchenette?” Mol hefted the airpot, which felt empty.

“Sure is, love, follow me.” The woman picked up the other airpot, and wove her way through the milling group to what Mol had assumed was some sort of reading nook, separated from the main room by a cheery floral curtain on a tension rod. The woman twitched the curtain open, revealing a narrow counter with a shallow sink, and the oldest fridge Mol had seen, all cowering under sets of mismatched cupboards.

Mol hefted the airpot onto one of the few empty patches of counter. Most of the cracked yellow formica was taken up by a catering-sized coffee maker, flanked by bins of tea and coffee on each side as though it were some sort of beverage dignitary.

The woman popped open the lid of the airpot and dumped the last tablespoons of coffee down the drain. As she angled the pot nearly horizontal to get its mouth under the spigot, she said “Angie.”

“Mm?” Mol had been mentally inventorying the contents of a wooden bookshelf stocked with cans and bags rather than books.

“My name is Angie, I realised I didn’t introduce myself at all when we were chatting earlier. Mol, isn’t it?” She swirled the open airpot around before dumping the contents into the sink, stepping back to avoid the splash. “If you don’t mind my asking, when did it all start, your plane-hopping?”

She held out her hands and it took Mol a moment to realise Angie wanted the airpot she’d set down. Mol handed it over, buying time with a tilt of her head, as though she were considering.

“I don’t mean, how did you get cursed, you know, that’s personal, I just mean, how much of your life has been spent getting tossed around like a hot potato?”

Mol shrugged, “about fifteen years.” She had done the math, some years back. She’d spent 95 years of life on a different plane, which averaged out to something like six and a half years for every year her curse had been active. Feeling impulsive, she added “it’s not every night, there was one year where I was only taken one night, but I was there for about eight years in a go that time.”

“Well that sounds quite worse, honestly.” Angie gave the airpot one last shake and bustled past Mol, back to the refreshments table. Mol followed, assuming that was what she was supposed to do.

At the table, Angie spread out a napkin and placed the remaining pastries on it. “I hate when people cut things in half, look at this, two half doughnuts, who is going to want those things?” She nodded at Mol, “grab the tray, love?”

Mol did and Angie scooped up the coffee caddy and baskets of napkins and spoons, then the two of them navigated the thinning group back to the kitchenette.

“It’s not fair, actually,” Angie began as she set the caddy and baskets on top of the bookcase-pantry. “I’ve been asking you questions but not told you my situation.” She took the heavy cut-glass tray from Mol and put it into the sink, where it sat angled, only the bottom third fitting into the shallow basin. She turned the water on. “I have a similar situation, and I’d like to think I sensed it on you but it’s just how luck shakes out, doesn’t it, love?”

She swiped the tray with a sponge and moved the spigot back and forth to rinse it before simply pulling it out to rest across the sink, faintly dripping. “I’m a changeling, more or less, emphasis on the less. I’m the one that ended up in fairyland.”

“Oh.” Mol had no script for this, and thanked a too-long lifetime of experience that for keeping her face neutral with a trend toward sympathetic. She could feel the open door of the kitchenette nook behind her, heard the slowing chatter of people getting ready to lock up.

“Well, you know how time is there.” Angie looked away from the tray to stare at Mol. “I grew up, came of age, went travelling and thought I’d see what happened to my mirror-half.” Her voice was still cheery, but hollow.

Mol melted her face toward sympathy, softening the brow, the area under her eyes tightening with concern. “More time, or less?”

Angie broke eye contact, waving her hand dismissively. “Less.”

“Ah.”

“Well!” Angie made shooing motions at Mol, “better to come back a week after my fourth birthday than four hundred years in the future, I suppose.”

Mol let herself be herded out of the kitchenette. In the main room, the chairs had been folded and slotted into a rolling rack along one of the walls. Only crumbs remained of the leftover pastries Angie had set out.

Using the napkin to sweep straggler crumbs into the trash, Mol gave the other woman a small smile. “Looks like someone did want those half-doughnuts.”

“Hm,” Angie squinted. “My working theory is it was the picky bastard that cut them in half in the first place, coming to finish off what they’d mangled.”

Fishing her headphones out of her bag, Mol shook her head to both agree with both Angie’s theory and in memoriam of the halved pastries. She slipped them around her neck, their bright retro style underlined by a thick wire that plugged into her phone.

“Here then,” a slip of paper with a phone number scrawled on it waved in Mol’s peripheral. “No commitment,” Angie added with a smile as Mol took it. “Just know you can ring me up if you need.” Her eyes narrowed for a moment as she thought. “Or text!”

“Wonderful, thank you so much.” Mol smiled, let it engage her eyes. “And maybe see you next week?”

“Oh absolutely! A pleasure to meet you, doll!” Angie swanned out ahead of Mol, who folded the paper carefully and put it into the front zip pocket of her bag.

Taking one last glance around the room, Mol pulled the headphones on and brought up the transit app, queued to her return journey, before she stepped out the door.

The bus ride home, Mol played through the evening again, deciding what was worth remembering. Once comfortably home, inside the two-bedroom she could only afford because her patrons gave her gifts with great market rates, Mol put her things away. Everything had a place, less because Mol was a tidy person, but more because she was not by nature good at remembering small things and that was compounded by her curse. Knowing you’d put something in a logical place yesterday was no use if, by your memory, that yesterday was four months ago.

She set out what clothes she wanted for the next day, along with a printed to-do list she modified with a green pen. Mol had a folder of pre-printed daily lists, which she liked to think of as her “landing itineraries.” Even without a guide she could get through a weekday without too much disorientation, but it helped to know what she’d wanted to get at the grocery store the next day or that it was compost pickup that week.

Flipping through the folder, Mol found the page for two days from now and stuck the slip of paper with Angie’s number to it with a piece of sparkly washi tape before adding a contextual note. She flipped ahead to the next week and added the C.C.A. meeting to evening activities, writing “(maybe?)” below.

Mol finished a few more notes while the kettle boiled, then enjoyed a cup of lavender tea with a well-battered paperback before running through her evening routine and slipping into bed. As she did every night for the past fifteen years, Mol wondered if she’d be taken while she slept. For the first time in a long time, she hoped she was.

A week later, in the mundane world, Mol was back in the basement, waiting for the meeting to begin. She decided to forgo a pastry this time, having neglected to note the partial muffin in her bag and only unearthing it, quite squished, either three days or six months later, depending on one’s perspective. Mol felt an ease in her bones as she poured a cup of coffee from one of the old airpots. Doing anything a second time was always smoother, and she always processed situations better with a purpose in mind.

When Angie arrived, Mol put on a pleasant smile and raised her hand in a small wave. She had texted Angie the day after they’d met, as her itinerary reminded her to do. Mol preferred texting because she could always scroll up to see where a conversation had left off, no matter how many subjective days or weeks had passed. Luckily they hadn’t said much to each other beyond initial pleasantries, which was a relief.

Mol waited by the refreshment table while Angie mixed her concoction of coffee and whitener and stared thoughtfully at the plate of pastries before picking the same kind of jam-filled she’d taken the previous week.

“I’m glad to see you again,” Mol said, sipping her still-too-hot cup.

“So am I,” Angie smiled. Her eyes crinkled in concern as she added “how has your week been, love?”

Mol had anticipated the question and gave a half-shrug as a reply, receiving the expected pat on the arm in return.

Angie caught the eyes of somebody behind Mol and brightened. “I’ve got to go make the rounds. Excuse me, doll.”

“Oh, of course, I should probably grab a chair soon anyway.” Mol got one more pat on the arm before Angie slipped off to a group of people who could have been the same as the previous week. She hadn’t taken notes about who Angie was talking to before the meeting, though she had found that those kinds of details weren’t easily recalled and were rarely worth the effort.

Although people were still circulating, Mol made her way to the ring of chairs and sat down, once more tucking her feet onto the crossbar, both hands on the coffee cup perched on her bag. A couple more group sessions and she would have worn a groove in her memory for the C.C.A.. Mol wasn’t sure yet if that was what she wanted, but relaxed into the confidence of having been there before and knowing that she wouldn’t need to introduce herself this time around.

The person with the clipboard was possibly wearing the same clothes they had the previous week. Mol wondered if they had outfits they wore on specific days, or for specific occasions, or if their closet was simply like a cartoon character’s, filled with identical causal collared shirts in an inoffensive colour palette. Good for them, if so. While Mol pondered this, the chairs around her filled in.

There was only one new person this time around, with a story about a ring they couldn’t remove. Mol let her face show support and interest, eyes open and brow lightly creased.

After, as everyone shared moments from their week, Mol let their words filter through her, reacting at appropriate moments but forgetting the content once the next person began their anecdote. So far, the same as the last time.

Near the end of the meeting, during a pause, Angie cleared her throat. Mol leaned forward, pillowing her elbows on the bag in her lap. Angie’s eyes were bright but in a different way than they normally were, now shimmering with the impression of wetness.

She took a breath. “This will mean more if you know my situation, which some of you do,” there were murmurs of agreement in response. “But I have a meeting set up with my parent-sponsors next week and I plan to ask them about returning.”

Mol observed the group’s reactions in her peripheral vision, keeping her focus on Angie and her face supportive-neutral. The rest of the circle’s feelings seemed to run the spectrum, from enthusiasm to a wariness that bordered on anger, which Mol found interesting. She had been piecing together Angie’s situation from their single conversation and other observations, and this development could mean a lot of different things.

A few members voiced their support for whatever she decided to choose, and strength in meeting with the people who’d snatched her from this plane. Angie almost glowed under their attention, drawing their words in like ballast.

“If I’m not here next meeting you’ll know what their answer was.”

Mol wondered at a life that could be dropped so easily, even as she acknowledged that everyone had different brains and approached the world from a myriad of perspectives. She let the rest of the meeting wash past her and timed her steps to catch up to Angie at the refreshment table, where they each grabbed an airpot at the same time.

Angie offered Mol a smile. Once they were in the confessional booth of a kitchenette, Mol let the words come out quickly, and they sounded nervous, spontaneous.

“Can I get you coffee or something after? I know it’s kind of late, but I thought you might want a friendly ear?” She crooked the corner of her mouth up in a partial smile, hopeful.

From her body language, shoulders relaxing from an almost invisible tensing, it was what Angie wanted to hear. “You sweetheart. Yes, I’d love that actually.”

They finished the routine of cleaning up the table and Angie led Mol out the door and down the street to the kind of cafe that attracted late-night student study groups. Mol asked Angie to order for her from the giant, cramped menu, payment card in hand, ready to tap the moment Angie finished. While they waited for their orders Mol wondered how many days a person would need to try every drink listed in quirky font on the board behind the register. A month and a half, she thought, counting the columns and multiplying them by the number of items in one of the columns. Roughly, anyway.

Once they had their drinks, Angie led Mol out a back door that led to a charming garden patio strung with fairy lights. Mol perched on the wrought-iron chair and glanced around. The closest person was at the opposite corner of the garden, headphones on, their face lit by the glow of a laptop screen. She turned back to Angie.

“Want to talk about it?”

Angie sipped her coffee—something with carmel syrup from what Mol could smell—before answering. “You know, I wanted to go back almost as soon as I got here.” She waved her hand. “Not just because of the time thing, seeing a replica of yourself at four and realising that if you stuck around you’d get the horrible privilege of watching a changeling raised in your place in real-time.

“I was just homesick. I’d built up the idea of normality in my mind and worshiped it, almost. It didn’t matter how comparatively kind my parent-sponsors were, or that I had a lover who liked me for more than just the novelty of my humanity. I wanted a ‘human life’ and I wanted it so badly I burned every bridge to get back to what I thought was home.”

“Oh no.” Mol hadn’t meant to say that out loud but decided it was a fine and normal reaction, so she focused her energy on toning down the amount of shock that showed on her face. She tried a drink of what Angie had ordered for her and immediately had to re-divert some of her energy to pretending to sip the chocolate-mango latte while not letting it pass her lips.

Angie patted her hand. “Oh no pretty much covers it, love.” She brightened momentarily. “How do you like the drink? Fun, isn’t it? It’s like a little flavour vacation.”

Mol nodded. “That is a great description.” Angie’s hand was still on her hand and Mol briefly calculated the next social steps of disengaging before she caught a particular tilt of Angie’s head.

“Burned bridges can be rebuilt though, if you have the right materials.” Her grip tightened on Mol, fingers beginning to bracelet her wrist. Mol kept her body very still, her other hand still firmly gripping the to-go cup of chocolate-mango latte.

Angie smiled, and Mol wondered if Angie was the kind of person who would eventually get pointed teeth after living in a different plane for long enough. Angie seemed to like aesthetics.

“You, my dear,” the grip tightened more, “are the perfect building materials. You know I learned about you from one of my tutors? Not because of your curse, but because you’d married into some royal family and your coming and going was of particular legal interest when it came to inheritance.”

“So, your plan is—ransom?” Mol held Angie’s eyes. “Some sort of influence-based leverage?” She leaned forward, which Angie didn’t seem to like paired with the unbroken eye contact. “Do you honestly think, after I’ve spent 95 years over there, even if it has been spread out over goodness knows how many centuries, that I’m little more than a token?”

Mol clenched the hand holding her still very-full drink, aiming it at Angie. Chocolate-mango latte erupted, sticky and fragrant, from chin to lap. Reflexively, Angie let go of Mol’s wrist as she fruitlessly swiped at the sixteen ounces of liquid soaking enthusiastically into her clothing.

Dropping the cup, Mol reached one hand into her coat pocket and set the other gently, but firmly, around Angie’s throat as she stood. From the corner of her eye, Mol checked that the person at the other end of the garden hadn’t moved more than desultorily tapping at the keys of their laptop.

“Let’s go home then, shall we, love?” Mol gripped the talisman in her coat pocket and they tipped, from nighttime cafe garden to a sunny verdant bower.

There were no convenient cafe chairs where they arrived, so when Mol let go of Angie’s throat the woman toppled backward, landing heavy on the soft moss-covered ground. The fall seemed to knock words out of her.

“But, you can’t control when you go!”

“Correction: I couldn’t.” Mol brought her hand out of her pocket and shrugged showily. “I don’t make a useful token of exchange, but as a daughter gone astray you rather did.” She considered putting on a mean smile, but decided the other woman wasn’t worth the effort of playacting.

Angie was sputtering, trying to speak, but Mol ignored her and looked up to the two figures waiting under a silvery willow. “There she is, as asked. A pleasure doing business with you.”

With everything checked off her to-do list, Mol stepped lightly from the bower, tapping the pocket that held her new talisman. With the freedom to come and go as she pleased, she felt no rush.

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This is just a post to look at format

2025-05-25T01:27:20Z

It's very funny, I was looking at my bff's LJ and mine through Wayback Machine but neither of us much used the various mood/music/etc. Though I was a more thorough tagger than her.

I did remember I'd imported my blog entire over to my *actual* blog, which has been WP for about one million years (I actually just dug into my email and it's been bzedan.com since 2007, before that it was bzedan.us). I'm glad I did. With Twitter I just did the mega-erase, didn't import a thing to Bluesky. What's done is done. But my blog posts? My wretched little written memories from as far back as 2007? Can't tear them away. I'm not sure what happened to posts from 2005-2007, but that's fine, we can't remember it all.

Anyway, point of this is to see what the bells and/or whistles look like.

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Last Year’s Flash Fiction: Any Hero

2025-04-17T18:35:37Z

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

Then who slayed the dragon, exactly?

Well, Neihm landed the killing arrow in the beast’s throat, but it was the work of the group to give her that opportunity.

Okay, and this is the group you were the leader of for the past five years?

Yes, a really great team, I loved ensuring that they felt supported on missions.

And how did you do that?

Well, any real team leader doesn’t lead so much as they support the growth of the team, right? I listened to their needs, helped them identify growth opportunities, managed payroll so that they didn’t have to balance money worries while also fighting monsters, that sort of thing.

Ah.

I think really there’s nothing quite like seeing that the role somebody is in doesn’t fit their needs and working with them to figure out what will. Like our rogue, right? He actually started out as a wizard, but as we worked together, I realized that he had a great memory for spells but showed active curiosity in how locks and traps worked. So, I set up an apprenticeship for him, and that great memory served him very well when it came to traps and locks, plus his wizard background gave him a real edge in perception. Probably one of my most satisfying experiences with that team.

More so than, it looks like, overthrowing a demon lord?

Well, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if he hadn’t become a rogue. And same for the rest of the team, really. As a leader it was really just beautiful to see how much they’d all grown not only in their own skills but in how they worked together.

So, you feel that, as a leader, it’s not that your adventuring party supports you—

But that you support your adventuring party, exactly! And it’s not as though I think they don’t have my back. It can be tough to be ‘the face’ of a party, the hero, whatever. It’s you who has to interface with kings and merchants and whoever is footing the bill. And that can be stressful! But being the buffer between my team and the sometimes not quite reasonable demands of our employers is satisfying. And if things ever got rocky, I know they would be there to back me up.

When running your background check we did find that you had posted some inflammatory broadsides about a local prince?

Yes, I did. On researching his quest query, we discovered some pretty nefarious stuff and after discussion with the team we decided that supporting his opponent would be the best move. They ended up becoming a regular client of ours, actually.

I see. And what are you looking for in your position with us?

Oh, just fresh opportunity. Like I said, I really like supporting a team, and I enjoy the folks I work with but it’s only a small independent adventuring party. Working with a bigger team would be a really fun challenge that I think I’d excel at.

That’s great. And do you have any questions for us?

Yes! Did you know that the average retention rate for an adventure staffing company this size is something like 65%? Which isn’t bad, really, when you think about how volatile the industry is, but what’s really interesting is that if you remove all management above “hero” it drops to 50%? And then, if you also leave out the heroes it drops to 30%? That’s like, spectacularly bad. That indicates a real problem within the very structure of your company.

I don’t—

No, you don’t. But that’s okay! Because your current employees do. And they hired us, well actually we’re working pro-bono, but they hired us to shake up the management structure some and begin union negotiations. And what is really lovely about that is you have this big group of people who maybe 30%, 40% tops were going to finish out their year here, that’s how little they cared for your company, all joining together towards one common goal. So, the possibility of real cohesive and modular teams is there, you’re just not utilizing it. But that’s okay, we’re going to help you out. That’s what I love to do, help folks who need it. That’s what being a hero is.

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Oh hello, I'm pinned, I think

2025-04-12T18:50:07Z

I think one can do pinned here? Or "sticky"?? Anyway, I just went and cleaned up some weird code that the linkback from my WP plugin was doing and figured that I should note: more often than not, what you see here is just mirroring my blog-blog! But I do reply to comments here, obvi, the posts just *originate* mostly from another place.

In the spirit of putting some useful things right up top, here's a the intro from my Tumblr, where I am the most active:

I go by B most often and if you are wondering how to pronounce my handle/name, this post right here has visual and aural examples, thanks to a wonderful podficcer ask.

I’m all over the internet because I’ve been here a long time, see my link page for the regular places. Tarot card stickers can be found here!

I’m also on AO3 as bzedan as well because the fact that I’m very googlable has yet to be a problem with work.

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Last Year’s Flash Fiction: Darkness Will Endure

2025-04-10T18:41:12Z

It is eclipse season once more, my heart. You remember—each year, as the season spins up, one of the planet’s satellites occludes the sun a little longer, a little more frequently. Like all children I’ve done my share of annual observatory visits, memorised the tour and peered at the orrery that explained the phenomenon.

But you know I’ve no head for these things. The orrery is beautiful, and I know each capital city has its own, made by local artisans to reflect the attributes of each place. Our orrery was composed of granite marbles and chrome, visually one with the building itself, the mosaic floor a portfolio of stone patterns and textures, walls and columns dense concrete.

Once, when travelling, I visited the observatory of a small farming town and their orrery was a series of lacquered seeds and fruit pits, combining field and orchard. It was charming and inventive and it saddened me to hear other out of town visitors imply it lacked an appropriate seriousness.

Why should an orrery be serious? Eclipse season peaks as the largest satellite matches the sun for half a day, but the slow blinking of light in the weeks leading up to it is a manic thing, a wild thing. There are dances about it, and traditional cookies. I think you’ve tried those cookies, when you were last here. I made them, even though it was simple-summer and finding the ingredients out of season felt like a quest. How can something that is accompanied by a traditional cookie be so serious it should only be represented in the least fanciful materials?

Anyway, as I was saying, I love an orrery but they speak in a language I cannot learn. I remember when you showed me the little tide table you kept in your wallet, and explained how an ocean worked. That made sense to me, more than a device I could draw from memory. Every year we can pick up something similar from the town centre, a time table of occlusion. It’s a handy thing to have on hand when running errands, or before starting chores. I’ve been caught out in the dark walking home, my arms full of groceries (this is before you got me that little rolling basket) unable to get to the jacket I’d tied around my waist. It gets so cold during an eclipse. I don’t know if it is only in comparison to the moments before, or if there is something else about it. I had to walk home, shivering in the dark. Luckily the streetlights turn on automatically, but you know that the last stretch before my house is shaded by trees, with only one small globe at the crossing from the main road. It was quite an adventure. The tables aren’t perfectly accurate, but they’re good estimates and guides, and it pleases me to keep it in my wallet as you do your tide tables.

I’m writing this now, bundled up, as eclipse season reaches its zenith. Or is it the nadir? According to the time table, it should have ended over an hour ago, but still here I am under my warmest blanket, a lamp on and it not yet noon. Like I said, their accuracy isn’t fully guaranteed and I’m sure there is an expected range of inaccuracy. There is a word for that, isn’t there? If you were here I could just ask you, as I know you’ve said the word before, talking about your work and all those experiments you would check and recheck. Part of me wishes you were here now, so you could tell me what word I was thinking of and so we could sit under my heaviest blanket together. It’s a better warmth, the kind shared with another.

I know it’s for the best you’ve returned to your oceans and tides. You would find eclipse season fascinating. We could go on a tour of small towns and compare everyone’s orreries. Maybe there is one made with flowers, or even one that uses projected light. I think it would be fun to see what is out there, how different places interpret the same thing.

If you were here though, I think you’d worry that the time tables had been so inaccurate this year. You’d say “surely this is greater than any margin of error”. That’s it! That’s the word, or words. I imagined you well enough you answered me. Oh, my heart, maybe someday I will be able to go to you. I would like to see an ocean. Does your world have orreries? If so, what do they make them from?

Your beloved.

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Last Year’s Flash Fiction: Circles of the World

2025-04-03T18:40:53Z

It was Tuesday. It had been Tuesday for, as well as Mel could reckon it, something like five years. This would have been fine, they thought, if it was a solo or limited affect time loop. If it was only Mel, or only Mel and like a dozen people around the world, experiencing Tuesday, that would have felt surmountable.

But the whole world had been experiencing Tuesday for something like five years and had decided, after about a year of panic and then a year of recovery from that panic, that Tuesday was fine, actually.

That first year there had been spates of bank robberies, vengeance killings, strange pranks, horrible suicides by people sacrificing themselves in an attempt to reset the day. A lot of weddings, also. Money stopped meaning anything, what one spent on Tuesday was back in the bank on Tuesday morning. Even Mel had participated in an outrageous indulgence, purchasing a ticket for a first-class international flight. They’d had to buy it a couple of Tuesdays in a row, waiting for everyone else’s choices to line up for there to be pilots who chose to spend their day at work, for the airport to be intact, for the ground crews to also decide to spend their day at work. Mel was fine waiting. The airport was like a mall and it was as good a place to spend Tuesday as any.

All the social sites and forums reset each day as well, but Mel had gleaned enough over the months to know that they wanted to cross the international date line eastbound. Going west would just pop them right back into Tuesday. Going east let them enjoy the view, the food, the very nice accommodations. When they grew tired, they let themselves fall asleep, knowing they’d wake up in their bed, Tuesday morning.

They’d played, cautiously, with what defined “Tuesday.” It was some point of sunrise, the light gaining momentum as it spilled across the hills and they’d blink and they’d be opening their eyes on a fresh morning and another Tuesday.

Despite what was happening in much of the outside world, Mel spent those first two years more or less enjoying Tuesday. It was, in the old parlance, their “Sunday,” and what was a day that once held its own special dread of the work week to come now felt like a kind of haven. They did find it frustrating that any work they did on various craft projects was undone each day, calm hours cross stitching emptied from the aida. Eventually the frustration was filled with a sort of existential peace. It was the action more than the finished work that Mel liked anyway.

One of their mutuals on a fibre artist forum wrote a poem about Penelope and somebody with a better memory than Mel memorized it, adding it to the boards early Tuesday morning. Memorising the poem and sharing it became a ritual for Mel’s friends.

It was somewhere in the third or fourth year of Tuesdays that Mel’s manager called them and asked them to come into work. Mel hesitated, they’d always been very protective of their two days off in a row and the instinct wasn’t broken by years of Tuesdays. Mel’s manager then told them that “even if Tuesday forgets, I won’t,” the threat clear in her voice. Someday Tuesday would end and if Mel wanted to be employed that eventual Wednesday, then they needed to come in. And so, they did.

Mel’s manager wasn’t the only one who tried to claw back a semblance of order, playacting a normal week of days across a string of seven identical Tuesdays. Mel felt bad for her for a while, realizing how empty her Tuesday must be without the self-definition of her job. Mel’s pity lasted for a couple of months and then the habit of going into work carried them another year. They’d always been easily swayed into routine, and the pattern of going into work was a more practiced one than having a day off.

Then, one Tuesday lunch break, Mel read their mutual’s Penelope poem again. Someone had filmed themselves speaking it, over slowed video of a sweater being frogged. They’d done a great job with the sound, the popping rip of the yarn coming undone not overpowered by the words of the poem, but supporting them like a drumbeat. Mel watched the video three times in a row, then walked out of the store, leaving their apron on the hook in the break room. Tuesday morning the apron was back, folded on top of Mel’s dryer. There was also a very long text from their manager that Mel did not read before replying “Sry, day off.”

When Wednesday came, Mel wanted it to be a day shaped by their choices alone.

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Last Year’s Flash Fiction: On We Go

2025-03-27T18:38:17Z

Seb held up his hand and felt Aurok gently run into it. The small bird nibbled softly at the back of his hand before turning around and patting away. Turning his attention back to the parchment, Seb dipped his pen and continued outlining the flowers framing the verse. Although he liked adding the colours as well, Seb enjoyed this step the most, feeling the sweep of his pen follow twining stems. He was not so entranced by the process to miss the tapping sound of Aurok returning.

With the deftness of practice, Seb caught the bird before it closed in on the parchment. Aurok peeped cheerfully, nodding its head to duck within the warm cage of Seb’s curled fingers. Knowing what came next, the scribe hastily cleaned his pen and set it aside before placing the bird back onto the desk, an arm’s length from his workspace.

Merrily, Aurok strode toward the parchment. Seb caught it up again, the bird giving a high flute of excitement. Back to the scarred wood of the table, the bird’s steps jauntier, eager for the next part of the game. Once more Seb scooped up the bird, adding a small swoop to the path of his hand as he returned Aurok to its starting point. They repeated this cycle several times, until Aurok nipped Seb’s finger in a clear declaration of the end of the game.

Seb returned to his work and Aurok returned to its current project of tearing apart an old rag. Without interruptions, the outlining was done quickly. Seb tidied his workspace to make room for the paints. Seeing Aurok well occupied with its rag, he turned around to fill a dish with water.

The pleasant sound of splashing covered the noise of any crimes, and Seb turned back to the desk to see Aurok halfway across the parchment, the dainty claws of its feet leaving a trail through the not fully dried ink.

There was mercy in heaven, Seb thought, for Aurok’s path had not crossed the careful script of the verse. Quietly, he set the dish of water down and closed the distance to the desk. Aurok, focused on its quest, ignored him as it rummaged between the assorted jars and containers that accumulated on any working surface. Smoothly and swiftly, Seb’s hand darted out and captured the bird. Aurok showed no distress at this, nor in Seb wiping its feet, as it was far too engrossed in prising out the meat of a walnut half. Seb could not remember when he had last eaten walnuts and resolved that in the future he would pick up and wipe under the things on his desk rather than sweeping around them.

Its prize obtained, Aurok expressed no further interest in crossing Seb’s desk. The scribe spent the rest of the daylight incorporating Aurok’s inky steps into the design. The end result, he had to admit, was quite harmonious.

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A specific whim

2025-01-25T19:30:15Z

I got into my head that Tamsyn Muir’s The Unwanted Guest needed to be bound to look like a Samuel French script. You know them, if you’ve done theatre. And although they’ve redesigned their covers, they looked the same for a very long time. I’d hoped to unearth one of mine as a reference (No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre), but I have no idea where it disappeared to in the two decades and half-dozen moves since I first marked it up.

Luckily, “vintage” acting editions abound in the second-hand world and I was able to find reference images to suit. I think I did a good job getting the vibe right. I made three copies, two gifts and one for me (which worked out great since I fully forgot orientation for my printer and the inside cover of my copy is upside down).

For this bind I added a lot of fluff, like inside covers advertising posters, other scripts available from the Mithraeum Play Service Inc. library and a new play available – The Noniad.

I also wrote little character descriptions, which I’m proud of. Luckily the script book I had to hand to physically ref was also a two-person play so it helped with the vibe. The inside text block is… fine. I realised way too late that I had mucked up the scene headers, so we won’t look at those.

Also fun: text on the spine. You know, to become completely rubbed off as your sweaty hands keep fussing with the script as you completely destroy it while memorising your lines. Probably nowhere near accurately bound but it gives the vibes.

This was a delight to do, and (other than messing up the scene headers) they turned out exactly as I’d hoped and imagined. The covers were off-cuts from a photo backdrop! The perfect colour I think.

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More Book Gifts

2025-01-18T23:44:36Z

As I posted earlier, I did some pamphlet binds of short stories for family gifts this year. Pamphlet sewing is my comfort craft, tbh. It’s always satisfying, easy to play with form, just a delight up and down. If you missed the earlier post check it out here.

Which is good because I had to make a grip of them in a week (I put things off a touch). I had done a very niche bind in a set of three as more specific presents, then realised I should just indulge myself and do something similar for everyone. You can get a peek of what the initial bind was here, but it will get its own post.

All this talk of pamphlet binding and this first one isn’t that. It’s three signatures, with a soft cover. I selected three favourite trope-based stories and wrapped them in the brightest dang red I have tried to photograph. The illustrations for each section I drew myself based off of images found in Wikimedia Commons.

The stories are:

Getaway by Nicole Kornher-Stace, time loop
If We Survive the Night by Carlie St. George, final girl
Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim – what it says on the tin

One of the fun things with this project was thinking about what story would make someone the happiest – what they’d read and loved or had never read and might love. For this friend, I couldn’t think of a better match than Pockets by Amal El–Mohtar. The images were sourced from Wikimedia Commons, coloured with watercolour pencil and gold pen.

This one I haven’t mailed yet because first: I always mess up this person’s address somehow and USPS will say they don’t know where that is. And second: because we are very close to one of the big LA County fires and our power has been out and schedules disarrayed. Elves in Illinois by Sarah J. Wu is a true delight and the length pushes the appropriateness of pamphlet sewing.

This searingly bright bind is a fanfic for a very specific ship, if you have AO3, def kudos All The Things You Are by bossbeth, this is just chapter one.

Okay, I’ll get to the bind that started it all next. These were such a joy to make, there’s something very magical about being able to hold something in your hands you otherwise can only access on your phone.

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Dear Yuletide Writer!

2024-10-13T22:44:05Z

I am very excited about this! This is my first year doing Yultide and I am going to be over the moon about anything you write for me. I am fine with all POVs, tenses, unusual formats and ratings. I tend to like short fic, but also I just like to read stories <3

My AO3 name is also bzedan, and I am always open to treats.

I'm totally fine with: canon-typical violence, gore, 'depressing' existential concepts, horror/creepiness, emotional loss, change-the-setting/time AUs.

Chronicles of Amicae - Mirah Bolender

Canon-specific DNW: Current enslavement, but passing mention of past enslavement okay

The Mechanic (2011)

My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice): Arthur Bishop, Steve McKenna

No canon-specific DNW

Love these boys, both alone and together. I'd be happy with anything from a grumpy morning over coffee to them pulling a wetworks job to an explicit scene of them fulfilling a different kind of (wet) job. The things that particularly endear me to them is the reluctance to acknowledge their mentor-protégé relationship that is almost knight/squire in depth.

I'm okay with Steve's death in canon (even though I'm also a fan of the alternate universe - canon divergence where he lives) and Arthur dealing with how he feels after that could be interesting!

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (TV)

Exception/Explanation for character tags: I would like everyone in the monster-hunting throuple

No canon-specific DNW

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Some comics from moving.

2018-09-04T00:04:10Z

We finished moving in June but finishing these comics got put off a couple months, thanks to the whole process of moving itself. I finished them though, and that’s what counts.

Originally published on Patreon in an early-release to patrons.

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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Drying papaya seeds

2018-08-03T20:01:23Z

One of the most wonderful things about living in Los Angeles is the sheer variety of produce available at local supermarkets. Oregon was rich in berries and always had a good general selection, but seeing jackfruit, mangos and papaya just sitting next to bananas at Vons (the local version of a Safeway) is a special kind of experience.

The most exciting fruit so far—because I haven’t got the courage to try a jackfruit yet—has been the papaya. I’ve enjoyed papaya juice for a long time, thanks to an everlasting love of P.O.G., but hadn’t encountered the fruit in person. First, they’re huge, with a lot of the Mexican papayas weighing up to ten pounds. For an example, the much smaller papaya I recently picked up was enough for a snack, a smoothie the next day and well, a lot more than that. The big papayas offer about double the amount of fruit.

There’s a meatiness to papaya fruit that is reminiscent of a more sturdy melon and they’re juicier than you can imagine, which can lead to quite a delicious mess. Slicing off their rind feels a lot like fileting a chicken breast or taking the skin off a fish, with the same slippery worry that you’ll nick your hand.

Their flavour that ranges from peppery to musky, depending on the breed, which makes papayas amazing in everything from salads to smoothies—or just straight out of a bowl with a little Tajin. They’re better than any P.O.G. or Kerns Nectar could have prepared me for.

Papaya seeds are also a lot more intimidating and interesting than the little black specks on a juice bottle convey. The first papaya I picked up was packed with seeds, just cups of slightly squishy, alien-looking little things. I’d read they were edible, with a taste like mustard, black pepper and horseradish, which sparked my curiosity.

I ended up being a little overwhelmed by the idea of processing so many seeds and composted them, swearing the next papaya seeds would get dried and used. Imagine my surprise when I picked up the next papaya, a Hortus Gold, and found barely any seeds inside.

Even though I was disappointed after the previous seed bounty, for a first-time experience, it ended up being the perfect amount of seeds. As I learned a helpful post on Spruce Eats, the fleshy covering of the seeds should be removed before drying them. This is a sticky operation, but rubbing them between layers of paper towel first cuts down on the number of little seed skins that end up stuck to your hand as you pop them out of their skins.

The seeds themselves have tiny bristles and hooks and look less like alien things and more like the briars that stick to your socks in late summer.

Although there are a lot of blog posts out there saying papaya seeds can be dried in the oven “at low heat,” nobody really seems to be giving an exact time it takes. I’m sure it varies, but for a handful of seeds, I was able to get them dry enough to grind in about an hour at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

The dried papaya seeds ground incredibly easily with a mortar and pestle, leaving me with about a teaspoon of softly peppery powder that will be a perfect topping with some crema on corn.

The drying and roasting process takes a lot of the mustard and horseradish flavour away from the seeds, which is a pity. I suppose I’ll need to hope the next papaya I pick up is more generous with its seeds because I can’t wait to try them raw.

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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E-Comm Fiddly Bits: Managing copywriting problems

2018-07-31T00:01:09Z

I feel like I’m saying this a lot, but writing copy for e-commerce is a lot of refining things to hone in on what works best for you and your customers. In my time writing product copy and producing e-commerce content, I have noticed the two biggest hurdles to clean and clear copy (other than problematic legacy copy) are tone and overly similar products. But these copywriting problems aren’t insurmountable.

Treat your customers like people

I think of this line from Cat’s Cradle often “It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work,” and honestly it’s the same with product copy. If you tend towards pedantry or if you think your customers are stupid, it’s pretty clear.

I’ve encountered product descriptions that were legitimately awful, like cringe-inducing terrible, or used some pretty questionable language regarding bodies and gender. The only reason the products were being purchased was that not everyone reads descriptions, the photos were good, or the product was unique enough customers couldn’t get it elsewhere.

Why are you even doing this

If you’re an employee writing descriptions for someone else’s product, I feel you and you can just skip to the next section.

The rest of you, though. For real, if you find yourself despising your customers, there’s a larger problem there that is your own journey to fix.

If it’s just that the bloom is gone and you are despairing and in a bad place, try to stick to the facts and limit your romance copy to a tweet length. Come back to it when you aren’t looking at the folks browsing your site as cretins you want to capture the dollars of.

It’s true, sometimes folks are going to ask a question that seems dumb to you. And it can be frustrating! Try to use that as a chance to not condescend, but educate. Can you use this to make your product description more clear? If yes, then try. If no, then deal with the issue individually if needed and move on.

If you hate the product

Friend, I have been there. There are some products that are the emotional equivalent of when you rub a cat’s fur the wrong way. But when it’s your job to write about products, even if you do not like them, it can be hard to summon the muse of “getting it done.” Here’s what’s worked for me:

Think of something very mean or funny

Absolutely do not type it into your CMS or company programs. It’s not worth forgetting you wrote beautifully salty copy and didn’t erase it before uploading. But, the process of using your fabulous skill to weave a dunce hat for a stupid product can cheer you up and sometimes even have a kernel of nice copy to start from.

Take it as a challenge

You’re a badass. A dumb product that shouldn’t have wasted resources is no match for your superior descriptive skills. It’s a battle and you will win

Who is this product for?

If you are utterly baffled by a product it can be hard to think of how to make it sound good. Remember, not everything is for you. So, who is this product for? Sometimes taking a step back and trying to realign how you see something is all you need.

Similar, but different products: the struggle

This can be less of a problem if you’re the one deciding what products your making or carrying. But that doesn’t mean you’re immune to the weirdest sort of writer’s block: how to describe two products that are only nominally different.

Good copywriting means you don’t have the same copy for different products. It also messes up your SEO to have the same copy on different product pages. Even if all the product details are the same, you need to figure out how to tweak the romance copy to make it clear for folks browsing how things differ.

Spot the differences

For an example, let’s say that there are two sizes of our imaginary Four Thieves bath bomb. Our short description of the original one was this:

Our dramatically oversized Four Thieves bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered to steal away your stress with a cleansing blend of essential oils!

Let’s pretend that Aesoap’s Bath now has a smaller version of this bath bomb. Same ingredients, but half the size. Okay, so we know we need to drop the “dramatically oversized” bit. How about this?

Our Four Thieves bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered to steal away your stress with a cleansing blend of essential oils!

Oh, that’s not that great. Sort of loses the momentum from the start. So, what are some notable things about this new product?

Better for small tubs
Half size of original
Cheaper
New version of a popular item

Things like price and newness should be indicated on the page already and it’s best to not add “this is new” copy unless you know you’ll go back and updated it when it’s no longer new. So that leaves us with “half size” and “better for small tubs.”

Tiny tub, big stress? Our Mini Four Thieves bath bomb has all impact of the original, sneaking its cleansing blend of essential oils into half the size!

Not bad! This is just the short copy, but now we’ve got the angle to take for the long description.

Check the packaging

If you’re handling things you don’t make yourself, then plop your similar products in front of you in a row and eyeball the packaging. Pulling the wrong item for an order is what distribution centres try to avoid, so there should be some indication in the text on the package of the individual differences. If it’s just that one wrapper is blue and one is green, I’m sorry, they are monsters.

Hopefully, there will be something you can use. Here are some things that are my go-tos to check:

Fibre/ingredients
Fit/size
New version of old thing?
New process of production?
Maybe something about the product name can help you generate something?

Even nominal differences can be spun into a sentence that helps folks see why Item A is totally not the same as Item B. Remind yourself, you just need that one sentence.

See what the supplier does

If the products are from another supplier, look at their site or catalogues and see how they try to justify the similarities. Basically, this is the same process as looking at the packaging, but going deeper into their promotional materials.

I’ve encountered overly-samey products mostly in technical or specialised things and, luckily, suppliers LOVE touting technical achievements. Use this to your advantage and see if you can scrape a couple good facts to clarify the differences between the products.

Remind yourself, they had to have some reason to have made two things that are basically the same.

There are sometimes unexpected hurdles in copywriting. The obvious stuff you can look up, a lot of the time, all the technical terms and current trends. The rest of it though, it just gets easier with practice and being honest to your customer and yourself.

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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E-Comm Fiddly Bits: Product Categorization

2018-07-28T00:01:28Z

Now, with product categorization, we’re going to start getting into some real nerdery and therefore stuff I’m very stoked on. It’s also the kind of thing where you really need to figure out what works best for your products and your CMS. I’m going to try to be briefer and give you some good resources to check out and use as works best for your brain and what you’re doing.

Just what is product categorization?

It’s the rare online shop or shopper’s mood that browses endless unfiltered pages looking for the thing they want. Mostly, folks navigate to the top-level category that describes the thing they’re looking for and go from there.

Let’s look at our pretend shop again. Aesoap Bath doesn’t have a whole lot of products but what they do have can be categorized into:

Bath
Body
Accessories

Once somebody navigates to a category (let’s say “Bath”) they then have the choice of going to a sub-category or filtering all the products in the Bath category right there. For a more text-adventure-y example, the person browsing either:

Chooses sub-category “Bath Bombs” and is presented with all the bath bombs available, in different scents.

-or-

Filters all products in “Bath” by clicking “Lavender” under the “Scents” filter on the sidebar and is presented with all bath products (bubble bath, bath oil, bath bombs) that have lavender in them.

That’s the ideal basic experience. You have categories and filters that help a potential customer find what they’re looking for. Why not have “Bath Bombs” as its own top-level category, if you know they’re a top seller? Honestly, you totally can! You know your customer behaviour best. Here are some reasons not to:

You limit the shopping experience early on, meaning a person has to navigate out of a category, losing any filters, to see other products they want.
If you follow that train of thought too often, you begin offering too many categories, which creates a paralysation of choice right at the start, not ideal when you’re trying to make sales.
The Big Corporate Company who has site organisation you admire has “Bath Bombs” as a sub-category under “Bath” and they have way more resources to research this stuff.

This is all very skimming the topic, so we’ll check out some more in-depth resources.

Three good resources for figuring out e-commerce product categorizing

Like everything we’ve been going over, categorization really depends on your own personal variables. I think these three articles have some good things to keep in mind as you figure out or refine categories and filters.

The basics of categorization

This three-point post on WebsiteMuscle gives a really clear and quick definition of categories and filters. It also gives a basic outline of the process of categorizing, with this tip that I think is super valuable:

Speaking of which, be sure to categorize products for your e-commerce site based on the terms your customers use. This may not be the correct or technical term used in your industry, but who cares? If it’s not the term your target market uses, you’ll lose customers.

A more in-depth look at categorization

I really like the explanation and examples used in this post from Baymard warning about over-categorization. It also goes over “product types” and has some reports backing up their observations.

Even if you’re a very small business with very few products, the advice they give is a good thing to keep in mind. Having these terms and thoughts in mind will also help you find why certain sites work for you and why some don’t. Remember, knowing what you don’t like is just as valuable as knowing what you do!

It’s possible that the content management system you’re using doesn’t even have an option for filtering a category because some CMS are obstinate and weird. If you do have the option for filters, though, this is a paragraph I want to frame:

Because filters are combinable they afford the user much greater customization power over the product list, yet it is the user’s category scope that determines which filters are available to begin with. This interdependency between categories and filters can make them look all the more alike, yet actually just makes it even more important to correctly distinguish the two, as misimplementing one hurts automatically hurts the other.

The design of categorization

Beyond just what gets slotted into a category, how that category looks to the person browsing makes a big difference. This brief post at Shopify has some good visual examples and tips of what tends to work best.

They look at both the category page and the product page and offer advice on text and image balance, which is (like everything) so variable on the product. What’s nice is that they understand this, adding at the end:

It’s important to note that there are no magic numbers here. What works for one business may not work for another.

Haha, sorry, there are no shortcuts beyond paying someone else to do it for you (and then there are no shortcuts for them).

Real talk, I’m partially limiting what I’m saying about categorization because I have opinions and love talking about categories, but it’s something that is difficult to talk about theoretically. It can also be difficult if you’re trying to re-organise legacy categorization that was in place for a long time, or that you didn’t build yourself.

There are so many variables in categorizing products! But, if you’re doing your research and thinking about what experience you want to give a shopper and how best to talk about your products, then you’ve got the tools to categorize correctly.

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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Product Descriptions: How it looks in search engine results

2018-07-26T00:01:32Z

I keep harping on making your copy something that answers a customer’s question or provides them with what they’re looking for. The first chance you get to do that is when they look at the search engine results for whatever it is they’re looking for.

This is where all that “being clear and truthful” stuff really comes into play with those SEO keywords and phrases. We’ll go over some vocab then look at a couple of my favourite resources for wrapping your brain around search engine behaviour.

Some Search Engine terms and things about them

Like with all this e-commerce stuff, it’s nice to learn the “right” terms for things so you can look up (read: Google) answers to your problems more easily. A lot of this stuff is the sort of thing you already know, whether you know it or not because if you use the internet, you’ll have encountered it!

Page Titles

A page title is basically what it says on the tin. The quick definition is that it’s the title of the web page (obvs), which means it’s the big blue letters you see on a search page or the little letters in your browser tab. If you’re looking for more information, Moz has a really good description of page titles and tags with examples. We’ll use the imaginary Four Thieves Bath Bomb as our example here.

A lot of product and content management systems for e-commerce will automatically set your product name as the page title, which is helpful but not always ideal. Generally, page titles are best between 50 and 60 characters long (you can always check using a character counter) and, when it comes to products, the format that seems to be the favourite is:

Product Name – Some Keywords | Brand Name

Think of it from a potential customer’s perspective: if you’re looking for bath bombs and one mentions right there in the title some scents you’re interested in? You’ll be more likely to click it.

Those secondary keywords can include things like:

Supplier (if they’re a brand folks look for specifically)
Textures or fibres (soft, 100% wool, silky, etc.)
Scents or flavours (vanilla, flower garden, etc)

Think about those keywords that you did research on earlier. Look at them being used again! If you’re in control of your page titles you can also adjust product names to make more sense outside of the context of your shopping site.

Remember that nobody is really into word soup, so try to keep things coherent. So this isn’t ideal:

Allerleirauh Textured Scrubby – 100% Cotton, Soft | Aesop Bath

It’s also too long by a little bit, so let’s just tidy this pal up:

Allerleirauh Exfoliating Face Cloth – 100% Cotton | Aesoap Bath

There, that’ll look way better when it shows up on a search results page. And, this is also one of those opportunities to see if maybe your product name could be optimised. So much of managing an online store is thoughtfully refining how you do things to make it easier for folks to find what they want.

Meta Description

The meta description is the grey text that shows up under the page title on a search results page. Let’s look at our Four Thieves Bath Bomb result again:

Does that text look familiar? It’s the short copy we figured out earlier! There’s a bunch of tips about meta descriptions over at Yoast, with links to more articles about their changing ideal length. Since things seem to be in flux a bit, the current recommended meta description length is 155 characters.

Like with page titles, some content management systems will automatically grab text for a meta description. And just like with page titles, it’s not always ideal. But, if you’ve done all the prep work and figured out your short descriptions, then you can just pop them in the meta description and be set.

Don’t worry about meta tags

Back in the old, bad days of SEO, meta tags must have meant something. Nowadays though, they’re sort of just a thing search engines have grown out of caring about. So don’t stress adding keywords, if your CMS has a field for them.

Actually, there’s one place meta tags can be really useful. In some content management systems, like certain builds of Magento, the internal search looks at meta tags along with product descriptions. That means you can put keywords and phrases into your meta tags that you can’t otherwise shoehorn into product descriptions, for more control over what users see when searching your site.

This can be useful especially for esoteric categorisation, like temporary product categories inspired by popular media. It’s also good for sneaking in words and spellings you personally hate, but that customers use all the time.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

I felt incredibly dumb when I realised “SERP” just means “Search Engine Results Page.” It’s the thing your preferred search engine gives you after you type something into the search box.

A lot of the results are just the same blue page title and little grey meta description we’ve been talking about, but you’ve probably also encountered the more exciting “features” on a search engine results page, like pictures and graphs and business hours. Moz explains different SERP features here, with a lot of helpful images.

Here’s a sentence that might not have made sense a while ago: “Learning how to optimise the short description on your PIP, and what you can customise through your CMS, allows you more control over how your product appears on the SERP.” Jargon is so dumb, but also helps us more quickly convey the things we’re trying to convey. Just like keywords.

Some tools to ease the suck of SERP

Let me be honest here: search engine algorithms are weird and wild and unknown. They’re also always changing! It’s a constant arms race between a search engine trying to serve relevant results and people trying to game the system to get their not-quite-relevant results to the top.

It’s frustrating when you just want potential customers to find your products so you can make money to live, but the way to get there seems labyrinthine or inaccessible. From what I’ve experienced, the best course of action is the same as in most of life: be clear and be honest. And try to enjoy yourself where you can.

These tools and sites are useful for understanding basics and keeping on top of all those changes that keep happening with search algorithms.

Moz

Like most sources out there, Moz is selling something. They’ve got SEO tools and lessons you have to pay for, but they also have a pretty comprehensive free series of resources for learning about SEO. They’re a go-to for up to date character limitations on the SERP and keeping track of current practice.

That’s the nice thing about companies that offer both paid and free resources, especially if they’re trying to place themselves as the primary knowledge source of an industry: they keep things up to date on the free stuff because they have to update the paid stuff.

Yoast

Like Moz, Yoast has both free and paid courses and tools. I’m personally super fond of their WordPress plugin. It’s got lots of options and good walk-throughs to gently teach and guide you in optimising your content for SEO value. The free version is honestly robust enough for most folks as well.

The last team I worked with I got set up with Yoast so they could start learning keyword density and finessing things like the metadata at their own pace. Their simple red/yellow/green light system for content SEO is intuitive. Another bonus is that their documentation is good and lots of folks use Yoast, so you can look up answers for things that might be confusing to you.

Their most utterly valuable tool is their Real Time Content Analysis tool. It’s basically like a tiny version of how their plugin works, and it’s how I made the fake search engine snippet for the fake product in this post. You can plug your content in and see what’s working and what’s not, check the length of your page title and meta description, with fast and clear feedback on what you can improve.

I super recommend at least playing with the Real Time Content Analysis with any of the copy you’ve been working with while reading these posts. I think doing is a huge part of learning and I’ve found the system they use is pretty intuitive for most folks I’ve shown it to.

Check your work

Okay, you’re all loaded up with facts and resources, and you’re making changes and progress in updating and optimising the SERP of your products. But you’ve got one last thing to do: check your work.

It’s recommended to do your checks quarterly. That gives pages time to be crawled by Google, and for user behaviour to interact with the changes you’ve made. And anyway! You’re working for the lasting and holistic betterment of your site, that takes time. Give it at least a week, preferably two, after you’ve made changes, if you’re feeling antsy about something.

Get out your list of keywords and phrases you want to start getting better at, then switch to private (Firefox) or incognito (Chrome) and start searching. You want to be in private or incognito so that your own browsing history doesn’t influence your search results.

And if you’re not seeing your products, just append your company name at the end of your search, or look for specific product names. It’s okay if you’re not coming up on the first page! What you’re really looking for is a general feel of how things are naturally ranking and what your products and pages look like to a random user.

Just like when you were researching keywords, see what folks who rank higher than you are doing and see if it’s something you can apply to your own content. It’s a never-ending cycle of learning about how people browse and how you want your content and products to be received.

Next, we’ll be diving into some more granular product management and site optimisation, stepping away from copywriting and SEO (well, nothing is ever fully away from SEO).

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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Product Descriptions: Optimizing your Product Page

2018-07-24T00:01:38Z

It was way too late in my working life that I learned what a PIP is. I’d been optimising PIPs for years without realising it because I didn’t know that “PIP” just means “product page.” You know, the thing with the pictures and the info that has the buy button.

One of the problems with being or working in a small business is you don’t learn all the acronyms and words for the tools or things you’re working with. That doesn’t mean you don’t know how to use them, but it can hinder your ability to learn how to use them better because you can’t search for information more precisely.

Even if you do feel like you’ve done ALL the research and your brain is bursting with all the stuff you know, take a gander at the linked resources. I’ve found that there’s value in not only learning a new thing, but learning a new thing and thinking “that’s stupid, I hate that.” Knowing what doesn’t, or won’t, work for you is as important as learning what will.

Some e-Commerce terms and things about them

I’m not going to give you an exhaustive list of words to know. There’s a nice e-commerce glossary at Demac Media that should give you some jumping off points for further research, but we’re going to just look at a couple terms that will help you out with the basics.

CMS (Content Management System)

Dang, that sounds very intimidating but it just means “how you put things onto the web.” So if you are using WordPress, Etsy, Shopify, Magento, whatever, you’re using a CMS.

There are a whole bunch of content management systems out there and you’ve already probably put lots of thought already into the one you’re using and why you picked it. All the advice I have here is take a couple hours each month to just search around and see if there are any good articles, tips and tutorials on getting more out of the CMS you’re using.

Some CMS are very straightforward, some are labyrinthine, but there are always updates and cool things you can learn to make using it easier or less stressful. One of the wonderful things about the internet is that the answer to what you’re looking for just might not have been posted yet. Wait a couple months and it may appear.

PIP (Product Information Page)

I personally call this the product page but it’s also known as the product detail page, product selling page or about a half dozen other things that convey the same meaning. If you are linking someone to a product, you’re linking them to the product’s page.

There is a very thorough breakdown of product page elements over at Econsultancy, with lots of visual examples and clear explanations of what goes on a page and why.

Here’s my main advice about the product page: If possible, set up your content management system to keep romance copy and product details like content and care in two separate fields, because nothing is worse than updating what something is made of and introducing a Big Ol’ Typo to the main stuff. Or deleting the main stuff.

It may feel frustrating as heck sometimes to keep things modular, but it can make a huge difference when you get to a point where you have lots and lots of products (and it makes using a CSV to import or change product copy a dream). If you’ve ever had over a dozen product tabs open, making granular changes in each one because sometimes suppliers are so dang stupid, then you know what I mean.

Short Description

Wait, we already did this, right? And we needed a super long description, so what is with this short description junk?! Well, some content management systems and product pages have an area “above the fold” for a bite-size bit of product description. That’s the short description.

Let me back up, “above the fold” is the stuff you see before you scroll, a term holdover from newspaper days. If a product page has a lot of images, or if you’re on mobile, then there’s not a lot of room for all that romance copy and the product details. A good product page has the “BUY ME” button above the fold, so a solid short description is your first chance to get someone to buy your product.

It’s also a very useful thing once we start looking at how your product appears on a search engine page. Some examples and a longer description of the short description (haha) are here at Modern Retail.

On the product page, sometimes a short description stands alone, just sort of hanging out next to the image. More commonly there’s a little “read more” link that either unscrolls the copy or jumps you down the page to a longer product description.

Using that e-commerce vocab

Remember what I said a little earlier about keeping your romance copy and your product details separate if your CMS allows it? Partially that’s so any selling points in your product details don’t get lost if the product page is buttoned up and only showing the short description. That’s all three vocab words in a paragraph!

But really, let’s look at what I mean. We’ll use the product description we put together when learning about romance copy, here’s the whole thing for reference:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses.

Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial, and general cleansing properties. Gorgeously gloomy grey, with warm top notes of clove and lavender that float dreamily above purifying white sage and rosemary and the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor.

Okay, now let’s look at that same copy with two different types of CMS managing the product page.

The Etsy (the fadeout)

Etsy seems to show about eight lines before fading into the “+More”. So what does our copy look like with that?

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses.

Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial, and general cleansing properties. Gorgeously gloomy grey,
+More

Not bad! The Etsy product page has ingredients listed in the right sidebar, so that’s more info above the fold. I got rid of that extra carriage return after the first paragraph to tighten things up and bring some of the more directly descriptive copy above the fade.

The Farmer in the Dell (short description stands alone)

For this, think of any product page that has the product image, the buy button and social media links above the fold, with only a tweet-length bit of text for the copy.

If you let the CMS automatically select the short copy (which some do), they tend to limit it to 160 characters. That would make our short copy this:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend…

Not great. So bring up your favourite way to count characters and let’s refine this. I just use Excel, because of course I do, but Word Counter has a nice little online tool. It counts as you go, so you can fiddle. Remember, you want to get the key info up there right off the bat.

Our dramatically oversized Four Thieves bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered to steal away your stress with a cleansing blend of essential oils!

And we got it in 149 characters! All we’d need to change in the longer romance copy further down the page is chopping out the first sentence so there aren’t too many jarring phrase repeats.

Even if your content management system doesn’t have a field for your short description, it’s worth thinking about what it would be and setting that aside for later.

Figuring out how to crop out chunks of existing copy is useful not just for short descriptions, but for posting on social media. A nice thing to have is a spreadsheet with all your copy in it, both long and short product descriptions, so you can pull as needed and so you have a backup in case something terrible happens.

It’s especially useful when you start trying to improve what your product pages look like when they show up on in web searches. We’ll be going over that next!

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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Product Descriptions: Using SEO Keywords Thoughtfully

2018-07-21T00:01:34Z

When I was fishing around on Twitter for subjects to cover for these guides, my best friend, who is also an e-Commerce management nerd asked me, “What do you use to guide your SEO rich content? Like how do you source keywords to optimize?” And it’s a good question and one I think we need to go over a little earlier in the overall game.

If “SEO” is still kind of a foreign concept to you, that’s okay. It just means “search engine optimisation” and basically is the fancy word stand-in for “improve the odds your pages and products show up when people look for them.”

In the same vein, “keywords” is just “words or phrases folks use a lot when looking for things like your product.” Like, you sell bath bombs, but “fizzies” is going to be a keyword, because different people use different words and use search engines in different ways.

There are lots and lots of places talking about SEO and what tools to use and what their fancy methods are. I super suggest Moz as a good jumping off point for learning the basics.

This is going to be a long one, so strap in.

What SEO used to be

When I was first really introduced to SEO as a concept was when the site developer of the company I was at said we needed more “SEO keyword rich articles” on the site. We were given a list of keywords that someone who did SEO analysis for a living had decided were good choices for us and I wrote dozens of posts just jam-packed with the keywords and variations of the keywords.

Later, we learned the keyword density was too high and so I had to go back and strip out a lot of those words I’d been told to just pack in there. It felt very illogical at the time (the list of words to use wasn’t even that relevant) and like a long-form version of those Etsy product titles that are all like “ORGANIC BATH BOMB PINK BATH FIZZY RELAXING BATH SOAK”.

Basically, when all the search algorithms were little digital babies, you could trick them by stuffing keywords into every bit of copy and code. Sort of like how folks will lie about what’s in a food to get a picky kid to eat it. But, like those tricked kids, search algorithms have grown up and gotten smarter.

What SEO should be

What I eventually learned, as I started teaching myself some SEO basics, is that there’s a happy medium between making copy look tasty to a search algorithm without deception or excess, and making that copy also appealing to your human customers.

If you’re doing it right, you can drop in keywords that will bring your content up when customers are looking for something like it, while also truthfully and clearly conveying information and emotion about your product. And even if you don’t care a whit about SEO, or how high your pages rank, knowing what keywords are right for your product helps you better sell your product. It can also help you see what other variations of things similar to your product folks are looking for that you might not have thought of or considered as desired!

Knowing your keywords helps you write clearer copy, honestly. Eventually, this creates a really positive and fulfilling feedback loop; your customers are finding what they’re looking for, you’re getting the customers you’re looking for and you can make sure your customers are finding what they’re looking for, and so on, recursively.

First: what are your customers looking for?

As always, this is going to vary by what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. There’s honestly no one “right” answer and that’s awful, I’m sorry, I know it can be overwhelming. So let’s use this imaginary, folktale and myth-themed bath and beauty company that I’ve apparently named Aesoap Bath to work out paths of approach.

What are you selling?

Oh, that’s easy. Aesoap Bath sells the following:

Bath bombs
Shimmer oil
Soap
Chapstick
Balm

Okay, good start. But! That’s just the categories of products. What else are we selling? I’m talking about common ingredients, themes, and yes—feelings. If we’re trying to be more comprehensive, then we need to add the following:

Folktales, fairytales
Myth, mythological creatures
Handmade bath products, handmade beauty products
Essential oils
Relaxing soak
Invigorating fragrance
Moisturising, soothing, hydrating

And so on. For real, just make an embarrassing list of words. Sometimes what feels like the dumbest thing is actually a really powerful search term. Why? Human brains are eternal mysteries.

Who are you selling to?

This is sort of a Mary Poppins bag of a question, like, there’s a lot that can be inside it. There’s a term, “customer segments,” that can get pretty brutal and gross feeling because it splits your customer base up into things like age, income, and gender.

Personally, I think it’s a load of garbage on both emotional and business-logical levels. Business-logically: if you’re crunching numbers, previous customer behaviour better predicts future customer behaviour more than mutable divisions that don’t properly account for the actual spectrum of humanity. Also, hard segments mean you could be hiding products from potential customers who might be interested in those products personally, no matter where they’re segmented.

So, let’s go into this thinking like people who like and respect the people they want to sell things to. Here are some things to consider:

Do your customers use the internet a lot? (Are memes, trends and slang familiar to them?)
Are your customers part of a group that has specific cultural or linguistic habits? (Are you going to need to code switch to reach a different base?)
Is your customer base folks that aren’t often catered to? (Are there ways your customers can feel seen?)
What price range do your customers mostly shop in? (What is going to be a splurge for them that you need to sell differently?)

All of this thinking can also feed into how you write your product descriptions and site content. Be honest about who you’re selling to and what you’re selling, not just to your customers, but to yourself.

Next: Hook up with a dream team of SEO resources

Thinking about what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to by making lists is a way to objectively look at your products. Like with writing product descriptions, you’ve got to be able to step back and try to see your products from the point of view of your customers (and potential customers). It’s a hard thing to do when you’re probably sick of looking at something, so that’s why we’re looking at these little tricks.

But now we’ve got our raw info to work with. Now, to use that info to do my favourite thing: RESEARCH!!! I’m excited.

Who else is selling it?

Listen, if you’re a small business, you do not have the resources, time or energy to pour into intense and dedicated SEO research. But you know who does? Bigger businesses. I’m not saying copy them. Why would you do that? Nobody is selling exactly what you’re selling to exactly who you’re selling it to. Trying to copy someone else is pointless and looks thirsty in a bad way.

What you want to do is look at bigger companies, or more successful companies, who are selling similar things to you and learn from them. Here are some things to make note of and ask yourself:

What words are they emphasising? Look at their copy (including ads and banners!), what terms and phrases are used frequently?
Are they using different terminology than you for similar products? If so, are they alternating it with more familiar wording?
If they have reviews on their site, see what words their customers use to describe the products.

It may seem like a time suck, but treat this like skimming a boring canon book for a class. Don’t overthink it, just make note of what words are popping out. You’ll notice trends within brands or across brand types that you might not have thought of for your own products, or that you think are stupid and want to make note of avoiding. Honestly, learning what information you don’t want to convey is just as important.

Google Trends

Okay, with a list of keywords and phrases in hand, let’s go to Google Trends. We’re going to refine that list some and get a better idea of what is worth pursuing. With Google Trends we’re just going to dial in a couple phrases from the list for our imaginary bath and beauty company:

Bath bombs, bath fizzies
Handmade bath products, handmade beauty products

What I’ve found Google Trends is good at is letting me know what variables of keywords aren’t worth worrying about and how most folks spell or format a word or phrase. Two good examples are:

I learned an acronym we were using was actually more common in trading card games, so we made the switch to writing the phrase out and using other variables.
There was a compound descriptive word we used that most folks searched for as two separate words (though there were regional differences), so we integrated the version folks used more into things like page titles.

There’s a lot of functionality in Google Trends, as a tool, but we’re just looking at the straightforward plugging-in-of-words. For the first search, let’s drop in “bath bomb,” “bath bombs,” “bath fizzies,” and “bath fizzy.”

It’s nice because you can limit your search by area, time etc. For how I personally use Google Trends, I cast my net wide. And we can see here that variations of “fizzy” don’t really get searched for much. So, even though I scraped that term from a popular bath and body place, it’s not a term folks use a whole lot so I don’t need to integrate a (new and weird to me) phrase into my copy.

It also looks like the plural version of “bath bombs” gets searched more. From my experience, folks search for the pluralised version of things more than the singular. Except when they absolutely don’t. It’s weird! Language is amazing.

Searches also surge around the winter holidays but that’s an obvious thing. However nice to keep an eye on, because sometimes sales don’t accurately reflect when people want something.

Now to the next terms! We’re looking at “handmade bath,” “hand made bath,” and “hand-made bath.” I didn’t add “products” to the end of these terms because it doesn’t matter and leaves things open for “bath and” or “bath bombs.”

Wow, hyphens can just hang up their hat, huh? Well, now that we know the consensus on how to present “handmade,” let’s look at one more term: “handmade beauty.”

This is really cool! See, even “English” varies a whole heck of a lot across regions. There is one phrase for a product where I used to work that is what’s standard in UK English but is absolutely a different thing in US English. Language! You can click on those dots and lines on the right and see what the breakdown is by region if you want, too.

We’ve got what we needed from Google Trends though, clarification of best terms to use. Now, on to what I consider one of the pillars of serving good SEO.

Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Full disclosure, the awesome web and design manager at my last employer just sent me raw spreadsheets of our external search term results every month and then I plugged them into a workbook I’d built that would compare keywords and terms between previous months and pull out low performing terms. That is, well, probably a lot more involved than what you’re probably wanting to deal with.

Even so, you should be using Google Analytics and Google Search Console, they’re super useful tools. This walkthrough on Backlinko takes you through setting up GSC and hooking it to your Analytics.

Once you’re set up, what you’ll want to do is go to the Performance Report of that walkthrough and check out the section on finding terms with low CTR (click through ratio). You can do this to see what’s working well too!

Some webmaster tools also show you your incoming search terms, they’re not as flexible or robust as Google’s tools, but if all the Search Console and Analytics stuff is overwhelming, it’s okay to not dive in right away.

However you’re getting the info, what you’re doing is looking for terms that:

You know you should be getting more traffic from.
You didn’t realise were bringing folks to your site.
Could be improved using what you’ve learned from your earlier research.

Please also enjoy the weird stuff that people have typed to find you. There will be some mind bogglers, I assure you.

Now, since this is an imaginary company we’re doing all these comparisons with, I can’t show you screenshots or give real examples pulled from the dash of external search terms that brought people to Aesoap Bath’s site. So let’s pretend one of the terms not getting good click-through is “shimmer oil.”

With some of my earlier research, I’ve learned that “shimmer body oil” is a term used more widely and also allows me to use the keyword “body oil” which outperforms every “shimmer” variant by an embarrassing amount. Sweet! That’s a smart and simple fix that could make a big difference.

Other good resources

The other key pillar of serving good SEO is, in my opinion, internal search terms. If you have any access to how people search within your site, look at that info. Even if your site tools shows how many results come up for a term, type that in yourself and look at what comes up. If someone searches “hydra” and gets the twenty products that say “hydrating” in them, with your Hydra-themed face mask all the way on page two, then you want to put a pin in that to deal with later. It’s good to step back once in a while and see what your customers are seeing.

If possible, what you want to do is sort terms from most to least frequently searched, then limit that by what has the least search results. You know your products so ignore the things that you know only have one or two relevant products anyway and notice what should be brought up far more results than it is. Or is bringing up none at all!

For our imaginary example, let’s say that folks are searching within the site for “crow” a lot and only getting one of three possible products in their results. After a look, turns out I was using “corvid” instead, like a pretentious dummy. Easy to correct.

On the face of it, internal search terms may seem more like a general site optimisation task, rather than a general SEO thing. But, if you’re trying to create a holistic copy and content experience—one that serves what people are looking for when they’re looking for products like yours—then you need to be aware of what both potential customers and folks already actively browsing are searching for.

Implementing all this

Remember, all this is was just research gathering. You were using tools to refine your list of keywords and to expand it to include things you wouldn’t have thought of. Now you have a better idea of what folks are looking for and how to help them find it.

Now, don’t go wild with power! Unless you’ve learned you’ve obviously been going down the wrong road (like with that acronym issue I personally encountered), implement your new keywords and phrases on the pages or products that need it first and give it two weeks to see how it shakes out.

It’s a weird and organic process because you’re trying to improve the odds that folks will find you while also making your product and site copy more enjoyable. I think it’s worth the effort to create an enjoyable experience for the customer even if (especially if!) they’re just looking to get in, buy something and leave. Make it easy, make it clear, make it fun.

Next, we’re going to look at how product information is laid out on a page and learn some more cool terminology for things you may not need to be worrying about.

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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Product Descriptions: What needs to be in your Product Details

2018-07-19T00:01:36Z

Last time, we looked at the romance copy, how long it needed to be and how to get the pieces to build it. For that, we used a pre-made list of product details that was ready to be dropped into the product description. Now we’re going to look at what should be going in your product description, the meat-and-potatoes of your copy.

The short of it is: be honest and be clear, which is frankly what you should be aiming for in general, especially as someone owning a business.

What should be in the product details?

I’ll be honest, some folks just don’t read the romance copy. They skim like little search engine bots, grabbing only the keywords. Your product details and associated bullet points or small sentences may be the written text someone sees. That’s a super legit way to browse! Lists are just easier for some brains. Also, there’s subjectively boring stuff that is just straight descriptive and doesn’t need to be part of whatever microfiction you’ve written about your product for the romance copy.

The kinds of things that need product specifications vary beyond imagination. I picked two types of products that cover some basics, but you should always scope folks selling similar things to learn what you like and don’t like in product details. Other than the stuff that you basically legally have to have, most information in product details is up to you.

For our examples, we’re going to stick more imaginary items from our fictional folktale and myth-based bath and beauty shop. One is an oil based body shimmer and one is a textured face scrubber.

Look at your product objectively

When you’ve been working with products from conception to production, you’re intimately aware of all the tiny details and it’s tough to remember that your customers aren’t.

It may seem obvious to you that the textured face scrubber has finished edges because picking the right thread for the overstitching was a pain when the dye lot changed halfway through production, but nobody else knows that. There are some ways to trick yourself into thinking of your products objectively.

Head customer questions off at the pass

Customers are going to ask weird and obvious questions and they are often going to ask a lot of the same ones. Use your product specifications to reduce the number of folks asking how many face scrubbies come in the pair. They are absolutely going to ask you about it anyway but it’s nice when you know you’ve totally said it already on the product page.

The other side of that coin, however, is listening to your customers when they ask questions because they’re often asking because you were wrong in assuming something was clear. Here are some subjects I’ve seen folks asking about that are good to consider including in product specifications:

How many are in the package, or how much is there?
How do you wash it or care for it?
How big is it?
Does it work with [logical other item]?

What customers ask is going to vary depending on your customers and what you’re selling. Try to cover your bases and be open to adding or clarifying your product details as your curious customers ask obvious questions.

For our imaginary products, here are answers to what customers might ask:

Oil-based body shimmer: comes in a 20ml glass roll-on bottle
Textured face scrubber: comes two to a pack, machine wash & air dry, six inches square, can be used with your favourite face wash or just water.

What can’t we see clearly from your product image?

Product images and proper image descriptions for accessibility are their own thing. They’re a huge part of the product page but still exist outside of the product description. When it comes to product detail copy, consider what isn’t clear in the main product image or any additional images and what might be visible but is a key feature to mention.

Like with customer questions, it can be exasperating if you think something is obvious in the product photos but the reaction is that you never showed it. Keep in mind that sometimes folks don’t notice additional images, or see the images at all. Some examples of what folks could miss noticing in your photos:

The inside or back of a product (think shirts with the tag printed inside or pre-installed picture hanging hardware)
Fit (apparel specific, really but is it clear that a style hugs the body, or that it’s not lined and the images edited for modesty?)
Colour variance in different lighting situations (the nightmare of still images of anything shimmery or holographic)

With our imaginary products, there isn’t too much to worry about, but we should note the following:

Oil-based body shimmer: green, purple and pink micro-shimmer (which is info that might just do better in the romance copy anyway)
Textured face scrubber: stitching on finished edges varies.

What needs to be in the product details?

Here’s the disclaimer! I’m not a lawyer. If you’re a business person, you should have a lawyer and you should also do your due diligence and be up to date on FTC laws (and FDA, if applicable). They have great plain-language guides for everything, including online advertising and marketing.

The information I’m sharing is just what I’ve learned and observed while trying to be the person who made sure a company properly disclosed information in their copy.

Like I said before, be clear and be honest. Nothing makes me hotter under the collar than looking for something’s country of origin and only learning that a product is “designed in [U.S. City].” Pal, that is great, thank you for sharing, but you also need to say where the product is manufactured. It’s a law and also your customers are going to ask you anyway so be up front.

FTC and FDA Regulation

Now, I’m gonna make the assumption that all product labels follow the Fair Packaging and Labelling Act as is appropriate for whatever item they are. Here’s a simplification of the basic requirements:

What is it? (“a statement identifying the commodity, e.g., detergent, sponges, etc.”)
Who made it? (“the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor”)
How much of it? (“and the net quantity of contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count (measurement must be in both metric and inch/pound units).”)

For cosmetics, you need to look at FDA labelling laws as well. Here are the ultra basics:

Name of product
Identity
§ 740.10 warning (cosmetics with unsubstantiated safety)
Net quantity of contents
Directions for safe use
Warnings
Name and place of business
Ingredient declaration
Any other required information

Well dang, that is awesome, that’s basically some stuff we already went over, just clarified. So, updated, the info we need is:

Northern Lights:

Oil-based body shimmer
comes in a 20ml/0.676 fl. oz. glass roll-on bottle
This product contains no preservatives. Store in a cool, dry, place and use with clean hands.
This product contains essential oils. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using products with essential oil.
Helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed oil, vitis vinifera (grape) seed oil, fragrance, tin oxide, mica, iron oxide

Allerleirauh Textured Scrubby:

Textured facial cleansing cloth
Two pack
Machine wash warm, lay flat to dry
Six inches (15.24 cm) square
Can be used with your favourite face wash or just water.
Stitching on finished edges varies.

For this imaginary business, which I guess I have to name now, all items are made by hand in California. That means we can just append the following to all products:

Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA.

Country of Origin

FTC has some pretty strict, but clearly laid out laws regarding claiming or implying “Made in the USA” on things that are not, in fact, made in the USA. That’s what that “designed in” nonsense I was complaining about earlier tries to circumvent.

If your product is an automobile, textile, wool or fur item, then any U.S. made content needs to be disclosed on the label. If it’s made in the States but from fabric from Mexico, then you need to say that on the label too. You don’t have to say it on the product description, from what I understand, but dang, why not?! For that face scrubby, let’s amend the “made in” text to this:

Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA from fabric woven in Mexico.

There’s a lot of weirdness with some brands around the country of manufacture disclosure. Just, be honest and straightforward.

Ingredients and fibre content

It’s good to say what things are made of so your customers can make informed decisions. And if you’re dealing with cosmetics or textiles then it’s the law.

Cosmetics labelling, I linked to earlier, but here’s the ingredient section specifically. It’s not as easy-read as FTC, but I think they do a really good job explaining a whole lot of info.

Textiles have specific content labelling requirements, there’s a good plain language guide here. It gets INTENSE. There’s so much fibre content law and so many people lie all the time. I’m not even dipping into it.

Okay. Let’s put it all together then and see what our final product specification copy looks like for these imaginary products:

Northern Lights:

Oil-based body shimmer
comes in a 20ml/0.676 fl. oz. glass roll-on bottle
This product contains no preservatives. Store in a cool, dry, place and use with clean hands.
This product contains essential oils. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using products with essential oil.
Helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed oil, vitis vinifera (grape) seed oil, fragrance, tin oxide, mica, iron oxide
Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA.

Allerleirauh Textured Scrubby:

Textured facial cleansing cloth
Two pack
Six inches (15.24 cm) square
100% cotton
Machine wash warm, lay flat to dry
Can be used with your favourite face wash or just water.
Stitching on finished edges varies.
Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA from fabric woven in Mexico.

Writing product details really just comes down to being truthful with your customers and anticipating their questions. Oh, and complying with any specific laws.

Next time we’re going to look at how to take all this delicious copy we’ve created and seen how we can optimize it to include those useful SEO keywords while maintaining a basic respect for the customer.

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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Let’s talk about writing product descriptions

2018-07-17T00:00:28Z

Writing product copy is weird. You’re trying to sell a stranger on something in a very short amount of words while also upholding like, a brand voice. Sometimes you’re writing about products you hate or have no opinion about (which is worse!). Too often you’re writing for a company or person that hasn’t solidified their brand voice but thinks they have a brand voice.

And a lot of times? A lot of times you’re just a person who has to write product copy and site content for something you’re doing and you don’t know where to start. I’ve spent the better chunk of my adult working life writing this stuff and it honestly doesn’t stop being a strange game that gets stranger every day.

All that said, I’ve been doing this for so long I forget that not everybody knows the basics. So, let’s start going over some basics. We’ll start at the top.

Product Descriptions: Length and Structure of Romance Copy

The framework of this particular post is from a twitter thread I wrote a while ago after seeing some pretty junky copy. I don’t want to be mean, so all products and the copy I’m going to mention here is totally made up stuff.

Before anything though, let’s go over some vocab. Different places call all these things different names, it’s frustrating.

Product Description: The sum total of all the text next to or under the product image when you’re looking at a product page. We’re talking the stats, measurements, fancy descriptive words, all of it. This is not to be confused with the plain ol “description” which is really just part of the whole.
Romance Copy or Description: This is the fun stuff that sells the personality and possibility of a product. Think dreamy scent descriptions on a bath bomb, or what’s basically a short story in a lifestyle clothing catalogue.
Product Specifications or Details: Here’s where the hard facts go about a product. What oils are in that soap, what that sweater is knit out of and how to wash it.

These are the two main components of a product description. Depending on where your product is posted online and how you’re putting it up there, there will be different terminology and sometimes sub-categories. But them’s the basics.

Outside of forgetting to follow rules like disclosing country of origin or use and content disclaimers, product specifications are straightforward. The romance copy is where product descriptions fall down the easiest.

How long is good romance copy?

The general suggestion is that product copy should be somewhere longer than 300 words and shorter than 600 words. That’s a lot! That’s like, microfiction a lot. No worries, you don’t have to write 300+ words of product description if that doesn’t work for you. But, it does need to be longer than a tweet (and yes, I mean the current 280-character length) though, for REASONS I’ll get to a little later.

How long should your romance copy be? It’s going to vary by product so ask yourself the following:

Do I have detailed or robust product specifications to convey as well?
Are there statements about the product or brand (like use instructions, health disclaimers or community give-back programs) that need to be included?
Is the product conveyed with clear pictures, like lifestyle and detail images to provide visual information beyond “item on plain background”?

If you’ve got a “yes” on any of the above you can shave off a sentence or two. Too much text is too much. This article on Content26 has some examples of copy that is too long and copy that comes up short. It really does vary by product, customer and what the product page looks like.

For our example item, let’s say it’s a novelty shaped bath bomb with two product images that just show it from slightly different angles. Here’s what text has to be included for the product details:

Top notes: Clove and lavender.
Middle notes: White sage and rosemary.
Bottom notes: Camphor.
How to use: Drop the whole thing (or use just half!) into a bathtub of warm water and relax into the soothing oils and fragrance.
Ingredients: Sodium bicarbonate, citric acid, potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar), magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt) coconut oil, Vitis vinifera (grape) seed oil, fragrance, iron oxide.
Disclaimer: This product contains essential oils. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using products with essential oil.

BAM, right there is 85 words. With some generous rounding, you only need to write 200 words of romance copy to round out that product description. And honestly, for most folks? You don’t need that much. A lot depends on how your product page looks and at what point the copy visually just appears too long.

What information goes in romance copy?

Relevant facts, brand and product themes and engaging descriptions are all good fodder for romance copy. Even if your pictures are good (and your image descriptions are good), someone should be able to picture the product from the description.

Dressing up details

Keep hard numbers (like material content) and use facts/tips (washing, care, etc.) out of the romance copy unless it’s a key selling point (85% unicorn hair). Looking at our example bath bomb, some good selling point info from the product details are the scent notes, so we’ll pull that into the romance copy as well. It’s okay that it’s mentioned twice!

How can we turn a basic list of facts into fun copy? With descriptor words! So, this:

Top notes: Clove and lavender.

Middle notes: White sage and rosemary.

Bottom notes: Camphor.

Can be turned into this:

Warm top notes of clove and lavender float dreamily above clean and purifying white sage and rosemary with the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor underneath.

And that’s another 25 words!

One thing to remember is a good percentage of folks aren’t going to read all of your romance copy or all of the product description. So important stuff should go in both places, both to repeat important information and display it in two different ways (both within sentences and in a bulleted list).

Stay on brand

What your romance copy is for is to give the customer a feeling for the product. What it’s good for, how it can make them feel, fun facts. Think about product descriptions you’ve read that made you laugh or put something in your shopping cart. Why did it work for you?

If you have an overall company, brand or product theme, you’ve got an easy way in. For our bath bomb example, we’ll say the company specializes in folktale and myth-themed bath and beauty products. That means the product has a couple of anecdotes and history snippets we can include:

Inspired by the Four Thieves Vinegar tale about robbers protecting themselves during the Bubonic Plague with a magical blend of oils.
The essential oils used in this bath bomb are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial and general cleansing properties.

And we can spin that into this:

One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses. Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial and general cleansing properties.

And that’s 65 more! What are we at now, close to somewhere around 100 words? NICE. Oh dang, and there’s still another thing we can add? NICER.

Describe me like one of your French girls

What we’ve got left is just straight describing the product. Here are some things to know about our pretend bath bomb:

This bath bomb is shaped like one of those bird plague doctor masks
This bath bomb is dark grey and large.

Not a lot of info! But enough to work with. Let’s see what we can do, using some of those descriptor words like we did with the scent description:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is a gorgeously gloomy grey and moulded to look like a plague doctor mask.

Sweet, 19 more words. Okay, let’s start putting this together.

What’s a good romance copy structure?

If you do it right, almost any sentence pulled from a piece of copy can stand on its own and sell a product. Treat it like an essay or article and get your primary deets up top—which you should be doing anyway, because who knows how things get cut up on a search engine result page.

Here’s a good basic structure:

Fun, short intro sentence! A slightly longer statement that utilises useful wordplay that intrigues and informs. Finish up with drier details or useful product facts.

Okay, let’s see what components we’ve built earlier.

Warm top notes of clove and lavender float dreamily above clean and purifying white sage and rosemary with the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor underneath.
One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses. Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial and general cleansing properties.
This dramatically oversized bath bomb is a gorgeously gloomy grey and moulded to look like a plague doctor mask.

Now, let’s string them together with a couple more phrases to liven it up and some cleaner grammar:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses. Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial, and general cleansing properties. Gorgeously gloomy grey, with warm top notes of clove and lavender that float dreamily above purifying white sage and rosemary and the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor.

And there’s your romance copy! Next time, we’ll look at what needs to be in the product specifications half of a description, how that varies by product and audience, and what you need to make sure you disclose.

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

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