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GODDESSES SERIES

from Lisa Tillman PRitchard

Title: The Goddessses Series
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>     

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Title: The First
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>     

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Title: Samurai
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>       Prior post
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Title: Keep Your Faith
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>       Prior post
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Title: i'm a warrior baby and i will never quit
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>       Prior post
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ELEPHANT SERIES

Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard

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Title: Elephant Series
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>       
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ZODIAC SERIES

Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard

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Can you figure out who? the names  of each are in the stored file, just place your mouse above the image

Title: Zodiac SEries
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>      
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Title: she samurai
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>      
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Title: need a vacation
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>      
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Title: just breath
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>      
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Title: be bold 
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>      
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Title: Peace of Mind
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>     
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Title: honey
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ , https://www.tiktok.com/@ltpartllc>     
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Title: black gold collection 
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ >    
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Title: the flowers that bloom
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ >   
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Title: never fold
Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ >  
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Title: Stretch

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Title: Next Wave

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Title: Honolulu Blue

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Title: Had to represent

Artist: Lisa Tillman Pritchard  < https://www.etsy.com/shop/ltpartllc1/ > 

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Thistle and Verse hosting a panel featuring 
@Lisa_teabag , @atullerwrites , and @jellybeanrae  to discuss subgenres in sff and sff-ish genres that predate the label. Read through the thread for more info on the panelists! 

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). She is the co-founder of the 
@voodoonauts
 Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells is currently available for purchase.
https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813196978/drinking-from-graveyard-wells/

A Jersey native, Celestine Martin writes whimsical and flirty paranormal romance that celebrates the beauty of everyday magic. She’s inspired to write happily ever afters and happy for now endings starring the people and places close to her heart. 
https://linktr.ee/celestinemartin

Abriana Tuller (she/her) is a Vegas native who has just acquired her dream job of becoming a Micro Fiction editor and Fiction co-editor for Solarpunk magazine. Along with having an education background, Abriana is a former journalist.
 

The number of self-identified Black farmers in the United States has dwindled over the last century, in part because of overt discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency is the economic backbone for most American farmers through its financing, insurance, research and education programs. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on a push to help Black and other underserved farmers survive.

Video is below Read the Full Transcript after the video if needed

Amna Nawaz:

The number of self-identified Black farmers in the United States has dwindled over the last century, in part because of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The agency is the economic backbone for most American farmers through its financing, insurance and research and education programs.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Oklahoma, where, despite roadblocks to federal aid, there's a concerted push to help Black and other underserved farmers survive.

Leroy Brinkley, Rancher:

I knew I was going to do this since I was 7 years old. First time I pretty much got on a tractor with my uncle, and I knew I love agriculture. Wouldn't give it for nothing in the world.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Did you know how tough it was going to be?

Leroy Brinkley:

No. I do now.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

For 50 year old Leroy Brinkley, self-described hermit, this 80-acre farm with nearly three dozen beef cows is his comfort zone, a labor-intensive full-time job, but it is one he has to finance by working at least as long off the farm as a heavy equipment mechanic and truck driver.

Why isn't farming by itself a full-time occupation? Because the work certainly is full-time, right?

Leroy Brinkley:

Yes, the work is there, but the money is not. Economically, I don't see this working just by itself.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

When he began farming three decades ago, Leroy Brinkley tried to get a loan from the USDA. But at the local office, he says he was turned down and turned off by the experience.

Leroy Brinkley:

I brought the papers, and it was just no support. I could tell from the get-go I wasn't going to get help. I tried it anyway, trying to be nice, polite. I still didn't get the support that I needed from it. So, I couldn't bother with it anymore.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

An experience all too familiar to Black and minority farmers.

John Boyd Jr., President, National Black Farmers Association:

We have clearly been dumped on worse than any other race in this country by our own federal government.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

John Boyd Jr. is president of the National Black Farmers Association and a fourth-generation Virginia farmer. He says African Americans have been systematically excluded from programs that enable farmers to acquire land and build wealth, and unfairly targeted for foreclosure.

John Boyd Jr.:

The government has to start living up to its commitment, and they have to start treating Black farmers with dignity and respect.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The government has settled two class action lawsuits in the past 25 years.

Tom Vilsack, U.S. Agriculture Secretary:

Socially disadvantaged producers were discriminated against by the United States Department of Agriculture. We know this.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

And, in 2021, the Biden administration included billions in debt relief for minority farmers in its American Rescue Plan. But lawsuits from white farmers, claiming reverse discrimination, held up the program.

In response, Congress repealed it last August, instead setting aside money in the administration's Inflation Reduction Act now for so-called distressed borrowers.

Willard Tillman, Executive Director, Oklahoma Black Historical Research Project:

There a lot of opportunities there under this administration that a lot of people are not taking advantage of.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Willard Tillman;s organization is a resource that connects minority farmers to complex government farm programs. He says there's a rare opportunity to bring these farmers into the system from which they felt alienated.

Willard Tillman:

If they don't understand it, they're ain't going to mess with it. So that is where we come in.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

They don't trust the government.

Willard Tillman:

They trust me. I don't take dirty water to them. If it is good for them, I tell them yes. If it's not good for them, I tell them no.

Leroy Brinkley:

Survive with these cows.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

With the help of Tillman's group, Leroy Brinkley enrolled in a program last year called CARE, Conservation and Agriculture Reach Everyone.

Leroy Brinkley:

Those blackbirds, you see how they started?

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

It paid him $70 an acre for 40 acres, which he used to partner with a local elementary student to bring goats to graze on the invasive species.

Leroy Brinkley:

Want to try to get this covered with a cover crop.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

This year he has participating again, getting support to plant more grass for his herd to graze on.

Leroy Brinkley:

Fifteen hundred dollars in seed ought to get it.

Sarah Blaney, Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts: Yes, well, time, yes, for your time.

Leroy Brinkley:

Yes.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Sarah Blaney runs the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts, which administers the admittedly modest CARE program.

Sarah Blaney:

Our specific program is smaller, but our hope is that this is maybe the first introduction to that process and makes them a little bit more comfortable with the idea of working with government, so that, when they're ready to go apply for those bigger contracts, they know the right questions to ask. They know what their rights are.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

A more immediate challenge for Brinkley is the months-long drought across Oklahoma, which has almost tripled hay prices this year.

So it costs you about 700 bucks per week to feed this group?

Leroy Brinkley:

Yes. This is very expensive this year.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Some of his expenses have been offset by a $50,000 loan he received through the Native Creek Nation, where he is an enrolled member, money that was guaranteed by the USDA.

Leroy Brinkley:

It did not grow me any. It just kind of took the curves off some things. Maybe the next time, the next go-around, when this operation is up fully and running, it may make a difference.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The Black Farmers Association's Boyd applauds efforts like those in Oklahoma, but he says the money now available is a fraction of what would have come to minority farmers under the debt relief program that was repealed.

John Boyd Jr.:

We were promised 120 percent debt relief, and we didn't get it. It looks like to me, every time Black farmers are promised something in this country, we don't get it.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The USDA declined an interview request, but, in a statement to "PBS NewsHour," said, given court injunctions that tied its hands, the goal was to get relief to farmers quickly, adding that: "The Inflation Reduction Act provided $3.1 billion that will allow USDA to work with distressed borrowers, and for those farmers that have suffered discrimination by the USDA farm loan programs, Congress allocated to $2.2 billion."

But Boyd says the government broke a promise and a contract with minority farmers, and he is suing the USDA.

John Boyd Jr.:

When they changed the language to distressed, it opened it up, and white farmers were able to get their loans and stuff current. There are far more white farmers than there are Black farmers in this country. We are less than 1 percent. We are facing extinction.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Back in the early 1900s, Black Americans owned some 16 million acres of farmland, a number that was down by 90 percent by the turn of the 21st century.

Here in Oklahoma, there once were more than 50 all-Black towns built around agriculture. Clearview is one of just 13 that survive today.

Shirley Nero, Resident of Clearview, Oklahoma: My family moved here in 1902, when the town was established. My dad had a 40-acre farm. This is where I will stay until I pass away.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

Shirley Nero and her husband, Donnie, both had careers as educators, Donnie eventually becoming president of Connors State College. But they were both pulled to return to this tiny town 80 miles east of Oklahoma City, population about 50.

Shirley Nero:

Most of those people that settled here were freed men. When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the first bill they passed was the Jim Crow law. And this was a place of freedom. They could express themselves. They could actually support themselves.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

As the years went on, the population and Black-owned land eventually began to dwindle.

Shirley Nero:

Our school got down to 32 in the high school, and then that is when they closed it, in '64.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

The Neros built their house and now breed cattle here, a rare reverse migration, they admit.

Donnie Nero, Rancher:

We see so many of the young people today, their parents or grandparents have had land for so many years, but that almighty dollar speaks. And, when it does, they are going to move, and the farms are going to be lost.

And when you lose the land that you have, and you now find yourself in a condominium somewhere, the value does not — doesn't equate.

Fred de Sam Lazaro:

For his part, Leroy Brinkley is open to participating in more farm programs, but, based on experience, says he is not counting on anyone but himself.

Leroy Brinkley:

I have got a little piece of a home. I'm satisfied. Had to move some hurdles out of the way, but I am making a go of it.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Fred de Sam Lazaro in Haskell, Oklahoma.

Amna Nawaz:

And Fred's reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

And there is more online, including a look at the lives of Black farmers through a photographer's lens. You can see those images at PBS.org/NewsHour.

U.R.L.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/black-farmers-struggle-in-face-of-structural-racism-and-economic-headwinds
 

Most of the stop-motion puppets in “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” are operated through mechanical gears in their heads. But the title character was fabricated via metal 3-D printing.Credit...Netflix

For ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,’ a Star Built From Tiny Gears and 3-D Printing
The studio behind stop-motion hits like ‘Corpse Bride’ and ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ started work on the new film in 2008 but had to wait for the technology to catch up.

By Charles Solomon
Published Jan. 3, 2023
Updated Jan. 5, 2023
From its earliest stages of development more than 15 years ago, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” was envisioned as a stop-motion production. The director explained, “It was clear to me that the film needed to be done in stop-motion to serve the story about a puppet that lives in a world populated by other puppets who think they are not puppets.”

He also knew that key members of the cast had to be built by the British studio Mackinnon and Saunders. “They are the best in the world,” he said in a recent video interview. “The starring roles of the movie needed to be fabricated by them.” As the producer Lisa Henson put it, “They do things that other puppet builders do not have the patience or the expertise to do.”

“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is the latest example of the efflorescence of stop-motion animation. For decades, the technique was overshadowed by the more expressive drawn animation and, later, by computer-generated imagery. But new technologies have allowed artists to create vivid performances that rival other media.

Artists and technicians at Mackinnon and Saunders pushed stop-motion technology in an entirely new direction for “Corpse Bride” (2005) by inventing systems of tiny gears that fit inside puppets’ heads. The animators adjusted the gears between frames to create subtle expressions: Victor, the title character’s groom, could raise an eyebrow or lift the edge of his lip in the start of smile. This technique also enlivened “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009) and “Frankenweenie” (2012).

“Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro will bring us the story, then give us the space to say, ‘What can we do with these puppet characters? Let’s find something new to do,’” said Ian Mackinnon, a founder of the firm.

He likened the mechanics inside puppet heads to components of a Swiss watch. “Those heads are not much bigger than a ping-pong ball or a walnut,” he said, explaining that the animator moves the gears by putting a tiny tool into the character’s ear or the top of its head. “The gears are linked to the puppet’s silicone skin, enabling the animator to create the nuances you see on a big cinema screen,” he said.

The introduction of geared heads was part of a series of overlapping waves of innovation in stop-motion that brought visuals to the screen that had never been possible. Nick Park and the artists at the British Aardman Animations sculpted new subtleties into clay animation in “Creature Comforts” (1989) and “The Wrong Trousers” (1993). Meanwhile, Disney’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) showcased the new technology of facial replacement. A library of three-dimensional expressions was sculpted and molded for each character; an animator snapped out one section of the face and replaced it with a slightly different one between exposures. Then the Portland, Ore.-based Laika Studios pushed this technique further, using 3-D printing to create faces, beginning with “Coraline” (2009).

For “Pinocchio,” which debuted on Netflix a few months after Disney released Robert Zemeckis’s partly animated version of the story, most of the puppets were built at ShadowMachine in Portland, where most of the film was shot. Candlewick, the human boy Pinocchio befriends in the film, “has threads set into the corners of his mouth which are attached to a double-barreled gear system,” explained Georgina Hayns, an alumna of Mackinnon and Saunders who was director of character fabrication at ShadowMachine. “If you turn the gear inside the ear clockwise, it pulls the upper thread and creates a smile. If you turn it anticlockwise, it pulls a lower thread which produces a frown. It really is amazing.”

That was the result of a process that began in 2008, when the Mackinnon and Saunders team made some early prototypes. “By the time Netflix greenlit the film in 2018, we were ready and waiting,” Mackinnon said. “If we’d tried to do ‘Pinocchio’ 10 or 15 years ago, the technology wouldn’t have been there.”

Although mechanical heads are used for most of the key characters in the film, Pinocchio himself was animated with replacement faces. Because he has to look like he’s made of wood, he needed to have a hard surface, the animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen said, explaining that 3,000 of the faces were printed. “His expressions are snappy; the mechanical faces look softer and more fluid compared to Pinocchio. He’s built differently and animated in a different way to set him apart.”

The character is the first metal 3-D-printed puppet, Hansen said. Because he’s skinny, “the only way they could make him strong enough was to print the puppet in metal. He’s a strong little guy, quite difficult to break. The animators loved animating him.”

Thanks to a team of engineers and the puppet designer Richard Pickersgill, “we’ve moved the replacement technology forward a little bit,” Mackinnon said. The designer “gave Pinocchio spindly limbs and joints that look like Geppetto carved them by hand.”

The studio spent a year and a half prototyping Pinocchio before making the first production model. Eventually more than 20 puppets were built to ensure the animators had enough.

The studio has made figures as big as the “life-sized” Martians in “Mars Attacks” (1996), but most stop-motion puppets are about the size of Barbie dolls — Pinocchio is 9.5 inches tall. The sophisticated creations meant del Toro and his co-director, Mark Gustafson, could get the performances they needed. They looked for inspiration to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, whose characters think, pause and change their minds as they move.

“I had a road-to-Damascus moment watching ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ where the father tries to put his shoe on: He misses it twice, then gets it on the third try,” del Toro explained. “Miyazaki says if you animate the ordinary, it will be extraordinary. So we went for failed acts because we wanted to breathe life into these characters.”

He estimated that 35 shots had to be redone because “we said, ‘The character is moving, but I don’t see the character thinking or feeling.’ The little failed gestures or hesitations before a movement tell you, ‘This is a living character.’”

Gustafson said that failed gestures were especially difficult “because the intention has to be visible — it’s not actually a mistake. I think our brains are really wired to recognize when a gesture is false somehow, so we worked really hard at getting those things to feel as natural as we could.”

Artists can change or rework computer-generated and 2-D animation during production, but once stop-motion animators begin moving a puppet, they have to continue to the end of the scene — or start over. They can’t alter what they’ve already filmed, any more than an actor can stop midstride, walk backward a few steps and cross the set differently.

“Stop-motion is the art form in animation that is most analogous to live-action, because you are doing real movement, from point A to point B,” del Toro said. “You cannot edit. You’re dealing with real sets and real props, lit by real light. Stop-motion is to live-action what Ginger Rogers is to Fred Astaire: We do the same steps, backwards in high heels.”

MY THOUGHTS 

I love stop motion animation, I am a fan of guillermo del toro's work, good stuff folks

Article URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/movies/guillermo-del-toro-pinocchio-puppets-stop-motion.html
 

Why Plots Fail

September 26, 2022 by Tiffany Yates Martin

Many authors embark on a new manuscript with one of two common inspirations: a great idea for a plot, or a fascinating character and situation.

Both can be good springboards for story, yet without more development, each may result in stories that peter out, dead end, or get lost in rabbit holes (especially during the breakneck pace of NaNo).

Plots most commonly fail when:

• they’re approached as an isolated element of story, a series of interesting events for authors to plug their characters into, or
• when interesting characters are randomly loosed into an intriguing situation with no specific destination or purpose.

Characters must take action, but action is not plot, and plot is not story.

The role of plot in story

The basic definition of story is a character pursues something he desperately wants, and he is changed by that pursuit and his success or failure in achieving his goal. Plot is simply the road the character travels on that journey.

I often reduce it to a simple formula:

Point A + Plot = Point B

In other words, story equals character arc plus plot.

Creating an elaborately structured plot and calling it story is like mapping a trip and calling it a vacation. What makes it complete is the character’s experience of it. Character drives plot, not the other way around.

Don’t panic, plotters. That doesn’t mean you can’t map out your plot ahead of time. And fear not, pantsers—it doesn’t mean you have to painstakingly develop or outline the whole story before you begin.

But creating compelling, cohesive stories does mean considering how these two crucial story elements work together.

Know what your character wants

Before you can put a character in motion, you have to know where she is headed and why. What drives your characters is the engine and the fuel for the actions they take and fail to take in the course of the story, the reason they—and we—take this journey.

Your character’s goal(s) and motivations determine those actions, as well as her reactions, inaction, and interaction; they dictate every choice she makes that pushes her along the plot. It’s essential to understand at least these basics about your characters before trying to put them in motion.

In director Baz Luhrmann’s recent movie Elvis, the titular character’s main motivation is evident from almost the first scene: Elvis loves music, especially blues and gospel. It literally moves him—in an early scene he wanders into a tent revival and his body starts shaking and swaying seemingly without his volition.

That dictates his main goal—to make his own music—which is the propulsive force for every subsequent action he takes (or doesn’t take) in the course of the story, starting with recording his own version of the one of the songs by a local blues musician that fascinated him, accepting Colonel Tom Parker’s offer to tour him on the carnival circuit, and every subsequent choice he makes.

But characters may have other goals and motivations as well, and will also continue to evolve as the story develops and as the author’s understanding of them deepens and grows—which will also affect the choices they make and the paths they take.

Elvis’s desire to pursue his music begins to morph early in the story as he is seduced into a new goal—fame and fortune—which evolves from his deeper motivation: a desperate need for love.

These are powerful and universal desires, the kind many readers can relate to. But they’re vague—another reason plots can falter or lose focus.

Create tangible as well as intangible goals

Pinning your character’s intangible longings to a concrete goal gives readers something to root for—or against—and tells us when the character has “won” (or lost).

Without that, momentum may stall, like a footrace with no definitive finish line for runners to orient themselves toward or to tell them when they’ve reached it.

Or the story may lose cohesion and feel episodic: “This happens…and then this happens…and then this happens…” but because the plot has become disconnected from the character arc, the actions lack meaning or impact.

Tie your character’s more generalized motivations to some specific, tangible “brass ring” that represents them.

For Luhrmann’s movie version of Elvis, each element of what drives him is pinned to a definitive representation of that longing:

• His love of music—his kind of music—is tangibly represented by a Christmas special where Colonel Parker demands he sing sanitized traditional carols and not swivel those hips, as well as the broader concrete representation of Parker’s pushing him to shift his career to inoffensive, bland music, against a new manager who wants to encourage Elvis to play his own kind of music and swivel at will. This sets up a clear story conflict that serves as a powerful propulsive force.
• His desire for fame and fortune is represented by specific, tangible goals that Elvis associates with money—wanting to buy his mother a pink Cadillac, Graceland, his own plane, etc.—and popularity and acclaim, like bigger venues, Hollywood movies, and eventually a European tour.
• His longing for love is represented by his profound devotion to his mother, Gladys (and to a smaller degree his father); the Colonel; Priscilla and Lisa Marie; and, as the Colonel himself reminds viewers throughout, the fans. Elvis thrives on attention and confuses it with love—and that motivates every decision he makes in the story.

Defining what your character wants and why allows you to grow a cohesive, integrated plot as you throw obstacles in the path between your characters and what they want, and let their “why”—what drives them toward that goal—dictate the choices they make. Each choice sends them on the next step of the path as your plot develops organically, always driven by the characters.

Know how your character changes

One final reason plots may fail is that the character’s point B—how they change by the end of the story, externally, internally, or both—is not directly related to or a result of what happened to them in the course of it.

But if you let their goal and motivation dictate their actions and behavior at every decision point, then readers will see on the page, step by step, how your character moves along her arc: how each challenge she faces, every choice she makes, affects her, shifts her perspective, and causes her growth or change.

This direct, intrinsic relationship between plot and character—the character’s struggles, choices, longings, and goals that drive the actions they take in the course of the plot—is what makes for dynamic stories that feel organic, cohesive, and satisfying to readers.

Article
https://www.janefriedman.com/why-plots-fail/

My Thoughts

the following is a little aside. but, what do you think about short stories that contain key tenets or rules in a world that can prepare an author in making a longer story in the same world ?  I use as an example. ursula leguin's earthsea. she wrote three short stories that like any good short story stand on their own but also displayed key principles of the world in the later books. I have a larger work I am working on, the plot is not finished, but that is based on what I want a few major characters to do at or near the end and it is an important choice.  But a smaller story, in the same world , is near complete, The characters , The plot, the story is done. The ending resolution even relates to where I want the larger story to go.  And some key rules are displayed. Maybe some plots fail because authors are unwilling to give glimpses, ala short stories, into the world first?  I will be blunt, I never wrote a short story at the same time working on a larger one in the same world.  Maybe if plotters:) or pantsters step back from the big book and make an intentional short story in the same world, it can help them with the cohesiveness between the plot side characters lives in the longer story. 

Writers of the future talk

I wonder how many Black women have reached orgasm before 30 while interacting with a black man. The only way is to ask all black women and no one has done that for any question. all polls are merely averages. But I bet most black women have never reached an orgasm in their entire life time side any man and that includes sadly, my fellow Black men. 
The article below deals with a film that is a fiction about a woman on a quest to have an orgasm who never did before and is a mother of adult children and the wife of a deceased man.
But I think the topic is true. Many of my fellow males, including me, can be insensitive to women in intimate scenarios and that leads to women not being pleased. I know for sure, through offline talks that many men, not all but many, believe all every woman needs is a thick penis in them to be aroused and that simply is a lie. 
But it is a lie that many men have been taught to be truth by other men, especially their elders in their homes. 
But I wonder, I think if every black woman can say by her third intimate experience with a black man she had an orgams, regardless of when that will be a nice communal achievement of change.

Emma Thompson and the Challenge of Baring All Onscreen at 63
The actress made the choice to disrobe. Still, she says, it was the most difficult thing she’s ever done in her four-decade career.

By Nicole Sperling
June 15, 2022
It’s the shock of white hair you notice first on Emma Thompson, a hue far more chic than anything your average 63-year-old would dare choose but one that doesn’t ignore her age either. It’s accompanied by that big, wide smile and that knowing look, suggesting both a wry wit and a willingness to banter.

And yet, Thompson begins our video call by MacGyvering her computer monitor with a piece of paper and some tape so she can’t see herself. “The one thing I can’t bear about Zoom is having to look at my face,” she said. “I’m just going to cover myself up.”

We are here across two computer screens to discuss what is arguably her most revealing role yet. In the new movie “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” directed by Sophie Hyde, Thompson is emotionally wrought and physically naked, and not in a lowlight, sexy kind of way.

Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed, former religious schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm. At once a devoted wife and a dutiful mother harboring volumes of regret for the life she didn’t live and the dull, needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker — a much younger man played by relative newcomer Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders”) — to bring her the pleasure she’s long craved. The audience gets to follow along as this very relatable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who in Thompson’s words “has crossed every boundary she’s ever recognized in her life,” grapples with this monumental act of rebellion.

“Yes, she’s made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from her office in North London. “Then she makes at least two or three decisions not to do it. But she’s lucky because she has chosen someone who happens to be rather wise and instinctive, with an unusual level of insight into the human condition, and he understands her, what she’s going through, and is able gently to suggest that there might be a reason behind this.”

Thompson met the challenge with what she calls “a healthy terror.” She knew this character at a cellular level — same age, same background, same drive to do the right thing. “Just a little sliver of paper and chance separates me from her,” she quipped.

Yet the role required her to reveal an emotional and physical level of vulnerability she wasn’t accustomed to. (To ready themselves for this intimate, sex-positive two-hander that primarily takes place in a hotel room, Thompson, McCormack and Hyde have said they spent one of their rehearsal days working in the nude.) Despite a four-decade career that has been lauded for both its quality and its irreverence and has earned her two Academy Awards, one for acting (“Howards End”) and one for writing (“Sense and Sensibility”), Thompson has appeared naked on camera only once: in the 1990 comedy “The Tall Guy,” opposite Jeff Goldblum.

She said she wasn’t thin enough to command those types of skin-baring roles, and though for a while she tried conquering the dieting industrial complex, starving herself like all the other young women clamoring for parts on the big screen, soon enough she realized it was “absurd.”

“It’s not fair to say, ‘No, I’m just this shape naturally.’ It’s dishonest and it makes other women feel like [expletive],” she said. “So if you want the world to change, and you want the iconography of the female body to change, then you better be part of the change. You better be different.”

For “Leo Grande,” the choice to disrobe was hers, and though she made it with trepidation, Thompson said she believes “the film would not be the same without it.” Still, the moment she had to stand stark naked in front of a mirror with a serene, accepting look on her face, as the scene called for, was the most difficult thing she’s ever done.

“To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen,” she said. “I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.”

She can, however, talk about sex. Both the absurdities of it and the intricacies of female pleasure. “I can’t just have an orgasm. I need time. I need affection. You can’t just rush to the clitoris and flap at it and hope for the best. That’s not going to work, guys. They think if I touch this little button, she’s going to go off like a Catherine wheel, and it will be marvelous.”

There is a moment in the movie when Nancy and Leo start dancing in the hotel room to “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes. The two are meeting for a second time — an encounter that comes with a checklist of sexual acts Nancy is determined to plow through (pun intended). The dance is supposed to relieve all her type-A, organized-teacher stress that’s threatening to derail the session. Leo has his arms around her neck, and he’s swaying with his eyes closed when a look crosses Nancy’s face, one of gratitude and wistfulness coupled with a dash of concern.

To the screenwriter, Katy Brand, who acted opposite Thompson in the second “Nanny McPhee” movie and who imagined Thompson as Nancy while writing the first draft, that look is the point of the whole movie.

“It’s just everything,” Brand said. “She feels her lost youth and the sort of organic, natural sexual development she might have had, if she hadn’t met her husband. There is a tingling sense, too, not only of what might have been but what could be from now on.”

Brand is not the first young woman to pen a script specifically for Thompson. Mindy Kaling did it for her on “Late Night,” attesting that she had loved Thompson since she was 11. The writer Jemima Khan told Thompson that she had always wanted the actress to be her mother, so she wrote her a role in the upcoming film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

“I think the thing that Emma gives everybody and what she does in person to people, and also via the screen, is that she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said. “And I think people really respond to that. She will meet you at a very human level.”

The producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Sense and Sensibility” after watching her short-lived BBC television show “Thompson” that she wrote and starred in. The two collaborated on the “Nanny McPhee” movies, and are working on the musical version, with Thompson handling the book and co-writing the songs with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).

To the producer, the film is the encapsulation of a writer really understanding her actress.

“It felt to me like Katy knew the instrument, and she knew what the instrument was capable of within a few seconds,” Doran said. “It isn’t just, over here I’m going to be dramatic. And over here, I’m going to be funny, and over here I’m going to be emotional. It can all go over her face so quickly, and you can literally say there’s this feeling, there’s this emotion.”

Reviewing “Leo Grande,” for The New York Times, Lisa Kennedy called Thompson “terrifically agile with the script’s zingers and revelations,” while Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “an ageless treasure urgently overdue for her next Oscar nomination.”

The obvious trajectory for a film like this should be an awards circuit jaunt that would probably result in Thompson nabbing her fifth Oscar nomination. But the film, set to debut on Hulu on Friday, will not have a theatrical release in the United States.

Thompson doesn’t mind. “It is a small film with no guns in it, so I don’t know how many people in America would actually want to come see it,” she said with a wink.

That may be true. But more consequently, because of a rule change by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that reverts to prepandemic requirement of a seven-day theatrical release, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is not eligible for Oscar consideration, a reality that the director Sophie Hyde is not pleased with.

“It’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to sort of protect cinema, but I also think the world has changed so much. Last year, a streaming film won best picture.” She argued that her film and others on streaming services aren’t made for TV. They are cinematic, she said, adding, “That’s what the academy should be protecting, not what screen it’s on.”

Thompson, for one, seems rather sanguine about the whole matter. “I think that, given the fact that you might have a slightly more puritanical undercurrent to life where you are, that it might be easier for people to share something as intimate as this at home and then be able to turn it off and make themselves a nice cup of really bad tea,” said Thompson, laughing. “None of you Americans can make good tea.”

Nicole Sperling is a media and entertainment reporter, covering Hollywood and the burgeoning streaming business. She joined The New York Times in 2019. She previously worked for Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angeles Times. @nicsperling

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/movies/emma-thompson-good-luck-to-you-leo-grande.html

IN AMENDMENT

Again, the problem with Black people is we talk about finance in such a legal way, White people make money based on whatever it takes, not within a system. and the reality is, black people's leaders in the usa have chosen to lead the legal way for their own agenda , which doesn't help black people en large.

Lavish Money Laundering Schemes Exposed in Canada
Government officials in the province of British Columbia were aware that suspicious money was entering their revenue stream, but took insufficient steps to stop it.

By Catherine Porter, Vjosa Isai and Tracy Sherlock
Published June 15, 2022
Updated June 17, 2022
VANCOUVER — Self-professed students were buying multimillion-dollar homes in the Vancouver area, with dubious sources of income, or none at all.

A family of modest means transferred at least 114 million Canadian dollars to British Columbia.

Loan sharks cleaned their dirty money by giving garbage bags and hockey bags full of illicit Canadian 20 dollar bills to gamblers who took it onto casino floors.

Those were just some of the findings from a long-awaited report into money laundering in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, which after two years of testimony was finally released by a special commission on Wednesday.

Canada is a “major money laundering country,” with weak law enforcement and gaps in its laws, that put it on a list of countries that included Afghanistan, China and Colombia, according to a 2019 report by the State Department.

Few places in Canada launder as much money as the province of British Columbia, specifically the region around Vancouver, which has one of the country’s biggest underground economies. The province has earned an international reputation as a haven for “snow washing” — a term for money laundering in Canada, according to government officials.

Billions of dollars a year have been laundered there by criminals, using tactics such as gambling in casinos, buying and selling luxury goods and taking out residential mortgages that are paid off in cash installments small enough not to trigger any alarm bells.

British Columbia’s gambling industry is a cash cow for the provincial government. At its height in 2015-2016, gambling generated a record 3.1 billion Canadian dollars in revenue, about one-third of which went to the government and was used to finance hospitals and health care, community organizations and other projects.

The commission was tasked to delve deeply into how bad money laundering in the province had gotten, and whether regulatory organizations, as well as the government itself, had failed to stem it, or even worse, turned a blind eye to it. While the report found no evidence of corruption, some elected officials were aware that suspicious funds from the gambling industry were entering the provincial revenue stream, but took insufficient action to stop it. One official, the minister then responsible for gaming, took no action.

The report, more than 1,800 pages long, lays out the staggering scope of money laundering in the province and sets out more than 100 recommendations for addressing it.

The province should create an anti-money laundering commissioner and a dedicated money laundering investigation and intelligence police unit to address this “corrosive form of criminality,” the report says.

“Money laundering is fundamentally destabilizing to the society and the economy that we all want for the province,” Austin Cullen, the head of the commission and a former British Columbia Supreme Court Justice, told reporters on Wednesday. “Sophisticated money launderers have used British Columbia as a clearing house or a terminus for laundering an astounding amount of dirty money.”

The provincial government announced the inquiry in May 2019 after a series of government-sponsored reports found what the commission called “extraordinary” levels of money laundering in the real estate, casino, horse racing and luxury car sectors, fueled in part by the illegal drug trade.

Books, podcasts and news reports had raised the alarm across the country, accusing gangs in China of importing fentanyl to the Western province, and then laundering the proceeds through casinos and high end real estate, helping to further inflate housing prices in a city already deemed the most expensive for housing in the country.

A 2019 report to the province estimated that in the prior year, up to 5.3 billion Canadian dollars in laundered money flowed through real estate investments in British Columbia, inflating housing prices by as high as 7.5 percent because they were purchased with the proceeds of crime as a way to clean — or legitimize — that money.

The commission, headed by Mr. Cullen, a well-respected judge, has been a constant drum beat across the country throughout the pandemic, hearing from almost 200 witnesses, including a former premier, a government minister accused of ignoring warnings about money laundering in casinos because they offered huge revenue for the government, and police officers alleging their investigations into illicit gambling were shut down for similar political reasons.

Witnesses told the commission how one scheme worked. Rich gamblers from China flew in, wheeling hockey bags stuffed with tens of thousands of Canadian 20 dollar bills to play baccarat at private salons inside Vancouver-area casinos. The money was suspected to come from loan sharks connected to Chinese criminal gangs and drug traffickers. The loan sharks laundered their drug money by lending it to the gamblers, who would in turn repay them with clean money deposited to bank accounts in China or Hong Kong. This became known as the “Vancouver Model.”

Specialized gambling police and lottery investigators raised an alarm but found their investigations shut down or blocked, or even worse, they were fired, the commission heard. The betting limits in casinos were hiked to 100,000 Canadian dollars per hand, allowing even more money to be laundered.

British Columbia’s Attorney General David Eby, who has been campaigning against money laundering for many years, told reporters earlier this month he hoped the report would offer his government a road map for turning the province and Vancouver, “into a model for fighting money laundering instead of a center where it takes place.”

Already, the British Columbia government has taken some steps to combat the problem. It has tightened the rules at casinos, requiring gamblers to declare their source of funds and in 2019, launched a public land ownership registry, requiring certain real estate holders in the province to disclose their owners, particularly those hidden behind shell companies, trusts, partnerships and other “beneficial owners.”

Correction: June 16, 2022
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the actions that the Cullen commission report said provincial government officials in British Columbia took to address money laundering in the gaming industry. The report said that some officials took actions that were insufficient and that one official took no action, not that all officials took no action.

Catherine Porter, a foreign correspondent based in Toronto, has reported from Haiti more than two dozen times. She is the author of a book about the country, “A Girl Named Lovely.” @porterthereport

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/world/canada/canada-money-laundering.html