Peace And Love

I think the newsies guilt trip Jack over his betrayal endlessly.

Race: hey can you buy me lunch?

Jack: no you can afford it I saw how many papes you sold today

Race: *dramatic sigh* but *looks down* you know, with that fancy new job o yours n... *kicks his foot forward with his hands in his pockets* n the way you... *looks up at him with big eyes* well, you know...

feeling the most babygirl (lipsyncing that's rich)

Jack can't contain his emotions in just his body. he externalises his love, his anguish, his hate, his frustration into any medium that will bend to his will just enough to become his own. His paintings not only depict beautiful landscapes, but also the freedom he wants; the freedom he needs. The music he listens to is filled to overflowing with annotations and marks only jack can hear; the way certain songs get him crying.

Jack only sees himself as a husk- a skeleton of what could have been, if only Jack was given a little more. If only jack had been given a family, he might not have more than half of his personality and traumas displayed on his walls. If jack had been given a family, maybe he would just be better. Maybe it would all be fixed.

Maybe he wouldn't need to move to Santa Fe.

Trans Albert who starts looking like a stereotypical straight guy who might call you a slur and he doesn’t know how to feel about it because oh yay he passes but oh no I’m not like that I promise. Look here’s my boyfriend I’m not mean I promise

It's 3:30 on the 18th and I haven't heard anything ........ im going to explode WHERE NEWSIES EMAIL......

MY NEWSIES AUDITION IS DONE! i went for jack and I really hope I get it but either way ill be absolutely stoked to be in the production ........ cast list comes out on Dec 18th .... pray for my nerves

most writing advice is good as long as you know why it is good, at which point it is also bad. the hardest thing (and most precious thing) about being an artist is that you gotta learn how to take critique. i don't mean "just shut up and accept that people hate your work," i mean you need to learn what the critique is saying and then figure out if it actually helps.

i usually tell people reading my work: "i'm collecting data, so everything is useful." i ask them where they put the book down, even though it's too long for most people to read in 1 sitting. i ask them what they thought of certain characters. i let them tell me it was really good but i like it more when they look a little stunned and say i forgot i was reading your book, which means they forgot i exist, which is very good news.

sometimes people i didn't ask will read my work and tell me i don't like it. and that is okay, you don't have to like it. but i look at the thing that they don't like and try to figure out if i care. i don't like that you don't capitalize. this one is common, and i have already thought about it. i do not care, it's because of chronic pain and frankly i like the little shape of small letters. you use teeth and ribs in all your work. actually that is very true. i don't know what's up with that. next time i will work to figure out a different word, thank you. you're whiny, go outside. someone said that to me recently and it made me laugh. i am on the whine-about-it website as an internet poet. you are in my native habitat, watching me perform a natural enrichment behavior. but i like the dip of whiny, how the word itself does "whine" (up/down, the sound out your nose on the y), but i don't know if i want to feel whiny. maybe next time i will work on it being melancholy, like what you would call a male writer's poetry.

repeated "good" advice clangs in a bell and doesn't hold a real shape, dilutes in the water. like sometimes you will hear "don't use said." you turn that around in your head and it bounces off the edges of your brain like it is a dvd screensaver. it isn't bad advice, but it feels wrong somehow, like saying easy choices are illegal! sometimes i will only use "said." sometimes i will just kick dialogue tags out to the trash. sometimes i make little love poems where the fact that i do not say "said" is very bad, and makes you feel bad in your body, because someone didn't say something. i am a contrary little shitbird, i guess.

but it is also good advice, actually. it is trying to say that "said" sometimes is clutter. it makes new writers think about the very-small words and very-small choices, because actually your work matters and wordchoice matters. "i know," you said. "i know," you sighed. "i know." we both know but neither of us use a dialogue tag, because we are in a contemporary lit piece.

it is too-small to say don't use said. but it is a big command, so it gets your attention. what are you relying on? what easy choices do you make? when you edit, do you choose the same thing? can you make a different choice? sometimes we need the blankness of said, how it slides into the background. sometimes we don't.

i usually say best advice is to read, but i also mean read books you don't like, because that will make you angry enough to write your own book. i also mean read good books, which will break your heart and remind you that you are a very small person and your voice is a seashell. i also mean you need to eat books because reading a book is a writer's version of studying.

my creative writing teacher in the 7th grade had a big red list of no! words and on it was SUNSET. RAZORS. LOVE. GALAXY. DEATH. BLOOD. PAIN. I liked that razor and love were tucked next to each other like birds, and found it funny that he believed we were too young to know the weight of razor in the context of pain. i hated him and his Grateful Dead belt, where the colored teddy bears held up his appraisal of us. i hated his no list. it is very good/bad advice. i wasn't old enough yet to know that when you are writing about death you are also writing about sunsets and when you write about love you are tucking yourself into a napkin that never stops folding.

back then my poetry was all bloody, dripped with agony when you picked it up. i didn't know there is nothing beautiful about a razor, nothing exciting about pain. i just understood sharpness, which he took to mean i understood nothing. i wrote the razor down and it wasn't easy, but it was necessary. that's what i'm saying - sometimes it's good advice, because it's not always necessary. and sometimes it is very bad advice, because writing about it is lifesaving.

hang on my dog was just having a nightmare. i heard that it is a rule not to write about dogs - in my creative writing mfa, my teacher rolled her eyes and said everyone writes a dead dog. the literature streets are littered in canine bodies. i watched the rise and fall of his ribs (there is that word again) and had to reach out and stop the bad dream. when he woke up he didn't recognize me, and he was afraid.

it is good/bad advice to say that poems and writing have to mean something. it is bad/good advice to say they're big feelings in small packages. it is better advice to say that when my dog saw where he was, he relaxed immediately, rubbed his face against me. someone on instagram would make fun of that moment by writing their "internet poetry" as a sentence that tumbles across a white page: outside it is sunset and my dog is still in a gutter, bleeding a galaxy out of his left paw. or maybe it would be: i woke the dog up/the dog forgot i loved him/and i saw the shape of a senseless/and impossible pain.

the dog is alive in this one, and he is happy. when i tell you i love you, i know what i said. write what you need to write, be gentle to yourself about it. the advice is only as good as far as it helps. the rest is just fencing. take stock of the boundaries, and then break them. there's always somewhere else you could be growing.

i love you, keep going.

@coircus-aceman WELL IF YOU PUT IT THAT WAY .................

picture this: davey when jack betrays the newsies ...... davey had just realised he had fallen with jack, this boy who he thought was sent from heaven .. he was going to tell him after the rally .. but jacks betrayal left him feeling heartbroken . davey sitting on a roof, watching New York, too numb to cry . the boy he thought he had loved ... only for his own personal gain ... davey feels used . unloved . completely useless ........ cue that mitski song ...

maybe im just being autistic and applying my blorbos to everything but i just saw asteroid city and man. davey as a playwright. jack as a set designer. them meeting on the set of whats supposed to be daveys magnum opus, except davey doesn't entirely understand what the magnum opus is yet. it's there, it's coming, but it's not done. jack and davey clashing on ideas, getting into fights and not being able to explain themselves properly, hashing those fights out and kissing many, many times. davey creating plays within plays within plays because theres so much he wants to say in so many different ways if he could just figure out how he's supposed to say them, and jack's trying his hardest to keep up despite how confused he is because theres something there with davey, something life-changing, and jack desperately wants to see it through.

davey getting into a car accident a few months into production. the scenes and dialogue and set pieces and tiny tiny details that davey was so passionate about despite not entirely understanding them yet, all being cut for run time. until what was meant to be his greatest creation ends up... unfinished. incomplete.

(jack tries to get it. he doesn't get it. it's davey's life's work and he's not getting it)

jack mourning a relationship that barely even happened. jack trying to paint. jack's paintings never coming out right, not what they used to be, not what they could've been. jack living with the loss of something that hadn't even really been there yet. jack knowing that something could've happened here that changed him entirely, if it hadn't been cut off halfway through.

“Davey – Day, c'mon, y’ain’t makin’ any sense…” Jack says gently, rubbing his hand across Davey’s shoulders. “I mean, d’ya just not like her? ‘Cause there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that, sometimes a girl just ain’t the one-”

“But she was.” Davey insists, and he feels all the more like a child for it. “She – she was smart, a-and funny, and beautiful, and if there was ever a girl I could’ve liked, could’ve – could’ve been with, it’d be her, b-but I… I just…”

He takes a painful breath, his voice crushed - like shards of glass - into his throat.

“Jackie, I don’t…” He whispers as hot tears scald his cheeks. “I think there’s something wrong with me?”

His voice pitches up at the end like a question – but he knows the moment the words are said, the moment the thought is finally pitched into existence, that it’s not. There’s something wrong with him. He knows it. He knows it. And now Jack does, too.

ur first and last recent emojis are ur gender now. mine is 🅱👨‍❤‍💋‍👨