#oibu

[joslushie]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Here is Chapter 5 of The Coming Tides, sequel to Waves Carry Us Away, part two of the Oceans In Between Us series. I am truly, deeply sorry for the delay. The story will continue to be updated. Thank you.

[briansolomonauthor]

Happy Birthday Conrail!

Conrail began operations on April 1, 1976.

The class 1 carrier It would have been 43 years in operation today.

The name lives on as Conrail Shared Assets, the terminal operation jointly owned by Conrail’s buyers, Norfolk Southern and CSX.

Exposed on Kodachrome 25 slide film with a Leica.

I made this photo in September 1988 of Conrail OIBU (Oak Island to Buffalo) working the old Erie…

View On WordPress

[joslushie]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Here is chapter of 2 of The Coming Tides!

Enjoy!!

[joslushie]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapter 1 of The Coming Tides is here!

I am so very excited about writing for this universe again. Please enjoy!

[joslushie]

OIBU/WCUA/TCT

So, question. I have finals this coming week, BUT I've been trying to work on how I want to start the second part of WCUA and I almost have enough to be satisfied with a first chapter that I hope sets the tone and pace that it will go. That said, my question to EVERYONE, is this: Would you like for me to post the first chapter NEXT SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12TH... Or WAIT until I have a few chapters down instead of just one. In this case, the first chapter would be posted FRIDAY, JANUARY 1ST... I'll take everything into consideration if any of you would like to tell me of your preferences. I'm fine with either way. Thank you!

[joslushie]

The Coming Tides Preview/Spoiler

Here’s the preview of what I have been working on for part two of the Oceans In Between Us universe; let the confusion commence.

A single square was one-foot-long on each side. There were different colored horizontal lines running horizontal throughout it, sixty of them in total. Fifteen red lines, fifteen orange lines, fifteen green lines, and fifteen brown lines. Fifteen feet of red lines, fifteen feet of orange lines, fifteen feet of green lines, fifteen feet of brown lines. There were one hundred squares covering the floor. One thousand five hundred red lines, one thousand five hundred orange lines, one thousand five hundred green lines, one thousand five hundred brown lines. One thousand five hundred feet of red lines, one thousand five hundred feet of orange lines, one thousand five hundred feet of green lines, one thousand five hundred feet of brown lines. One hundred square feet.

A single square was six inches long on each side. There was only white filling in the square, a single blot of alabaster or ivory or off white cream or shattered egg shells under porcelain feet. There were a thousand squares covering the walls. Thirty-six thousand square inches of bastard white covering the walls, clashing with the rolling blood and slow sunrises and fresh foliage and pungent dirt of the floor. One hundred square feet.

There were four walls, a thousand horribly bland squares on each wall, four thousand cancerous chalk stamps surrounding him, leaking into the setting sun and powdered pomegranates and dirty money and decaying slush of the floor. Blended dairy squares that mush into a lactic mirror of limp darkness and beaten down light. One hundred square feet. One hundred square feet. One hundred square feet. One hundred square feet. Four hundred square feet. There were twenty-five squares on the ceiling, two feet long on each side. One hundred square feet teetering on the edge of solid clouds, reaching and longing for ripe roses and sour citrus and turtle soup and rusted pipes.They had no color, or perhaps they were blackened with too many colors to see clearly through the muck of virtue. One hundred square feet.

A hundred squares. A thousand one hundred squares. Four thousand one hundred squares. Four thousand one hundred and twenty-five squares. A hated, welcomed cage made of four thousand one hundred and twenty-five squares, four colors or five or six or innumerable hues of geometric, shapeless forms.

Four exits. One door, shapeless, colorless, locked and open and inaccessible. One window, closed blinds, bright fingers creeping in, barred, glass-less and lined with jagged ice, inaccessible. One smile, swallowed pills, dishonesty, and fake alibis, accessible and inaccessible, play it out. One last sigh, pills in a pillow case, honesty and genuine smiles that look like frowns, stained sheets and dripping onto putrid kaleidoscope carpet, thick and congealed and opened tunnels encased in prickled skin. Accessible.

Exit number one opened, smoothly and swaying, and a sweet voice called out, “Mr. Di Angelo?”

[joslushie]

Oceans In Between Us PSA

You all will be happy and devastated to hear that I have officially begun the writing process for the next segment of OIBU, sequel to Waves Carry Us Away, and that it will be titled The Coming Tides.

I do not know how long it will be until I have enough to be satisfied to start posting, but I felt everyone deserves to know that I am not simply fiddling my thumbs and procrastinating. Not to say that a great deal of time spent after I posted the last chapter of WCUA didn’t consist of fiddling and procrastinating, because by the gods it did, but I’ve also been planning and dreading and being creatively blocked.

Hopefully there will be a snippet of what I’ve been working on coming soon.

[joslushie]

WCUA and OIBU Universe Disclaimer - College

This is going to be a long post, I am sorry, but there are some things I need to clarify. There has been some concerns voiced to me about the accuracy of college life that I depicted in Waves Carry Us Away through SOCU-Second Olympus Celestial University. Most of the time they were brought into discussion in a civil manner, but I believe I am being generous with that approximation. So, I thought I would attempt to provide some clarification here and summarize under the cut.

Firstly, I have made it a point to state that the way that I write SOCU and the college experience is not accurate. I have it tagged, in the official Work Tags of the Archive that it is Not An Accurate Depiction of College, in those exact words. Besides tagging it as such, I have taken great pains to ensure that it is clearly not meant to be an accurate overview of what college is like. I have a note at the end of the work that states that it is not an accurate depiction of American college, and I have now included the same disclaimer in the notes at the beginning of the work, with the rest of my disclaimers. I have also taken the time to discuss some of the inaccuracies with several readers throughout the work. That brings it to a total of three places where I have attempted to provide clarification outside of the work about how it is not meant to accurately showcase a typical American college experience. Besides that, it is also briefly discussed within the work. I believe it is chapter 8 in which Percy and Nico discuss how SOCU is run and why, but you’ll have to pardon me if I am slightly off in the location since it has been a little while since I read it as a whole, chronologically. So that brings the total up to 4 places that I have discussed how my work is not meant to be taken as a sincere picture of American colleges, not including the individual discussions I have had with readers in the comment section and through email communication. Please, if after this post or in general if you have any questions about this topic or something else, feel free to contact me either through Tumblr or through email, which is available on my Archive of Our Own profile or by directly contacting me so that I may provide it to you, so that we can reach the ultimate level of clarification and understanding. 

I will list a concern and then attempt to answer it. If you do not feel like I satisfactorily answered anything, or if you have another concern or question, please get in contact with me and we will work it out if it grieves you so. Some of my explanation is copied and pasted from the comments section of WCUA because I made my argument there and I am simply transferring it onto here.

I know nothing about college/the education system.

Incorrect. I have attended college in America for two years now. I am doing exceptionally well, and I am proud of what I have accomplished. I am also a Secondary Education, with a focus on English, major, so I not only know how college works, I also know quite a bit about how American schooling works. That’s my job.

Do your research before you write about something.

I do, to varying degrees admittedly, but I put a lot of thought into what I include in my writing. And even if I didn’t do sufficient research before hand, there is a difference between politely suggesting looking into things more and outright demanding what I do with my time and writing. This is not the correct way to go about it, and it is also rude and accusatory.

There are no study halls or detention in college/you pay for your courses.

Why, yes, you are correct! American college does not have these aspects, but as I have previously stated, SOCU is not meant to model the typical American college. SOCU, at least many aspects of it, are based off of boarding school practices. This was mentioned in chapter 8, about how it is meant as an easy transition college experience strongly structured. That goes along with another concern about paying for courses in a typical fashion and paying for study hall, an essentially unnecessary course. I imagine that tuition for SOCU works much like a boarding school and goes per year, perhaps per semester, and that the study hall would then be included as a requirement that goes along with the courses, not a class that is paid for separately.

No periods in college, i.e. having classes back to back.

This is semi correct.Courses are selected by section number and times that fit into whatever schedule you’d like to create and is totally subjective to how you mold it. So, yes, there are not typical periods, but they can be created. That said, SOCU, once again, is meant to model boarding schools, so this is not applicable. 

This should have been set as high school AU/boarding school

No. My writing isn’t “should have” unless I give it that status, no one else can determine that. It could have been, but that is not the direction I wanted it to go in. This will become more relevant in the second part.

Educators are called professors in college, not teachers.

Also correct, to a point. It depends wholly on who the educator is. Other titles, from personal experience as a college student, are Doctor, Mr./Mrs., TA, or simply by their first or last names. Professor is the most common and respectful if you are unsure. Also something to consider is this; Nico is new to the college experience, and SOCU isn’t anything like what other typical colleges are, so he is largely unsure of how everything works. His calling the professors ‘teachers’ is a character quirk I gave him. He would also be widely in the dark about the legality of not having detention in college, especially SOCU. The things he knows was either in derived in passing from Hazel or Percy, or perhaps from movies or books.

Classes are sorted by major, not year/Percy and Nico wouldn’t have any classes together.

Also true to a point. Courses are taken by levels, and those levels are structured, mostly, according to previous requirements which will often be according to the year you are in school. The courses that Percy and Nico have together, if I remember correctly, are the study hall course and Greek. Since Percy and Nico are different levels in school, as well as different majors, they would not have close to any classes together. But Greek is a course that isn’t just available to one major or level, and it isn’t that rare for people of different majors or levels to be in the same courses. In all of my courses there are a diverse mix of majors and levels, and I would be shocked if there wasn’t. As for the study hall, that was pure indulgence on my part so that I could have all the characters together. 

American college is completely different than what I have shown here in my writing. The classes are different, the campus is going to be different, things are run on different schedules, and a whole lot of other things are different as well. Depending on where you're going to go and what you're going for, some things might be pretty relative, but on a whole, on a day-to-day kind of thing, it doesn't represent college life. My wild nights are staying up and watching Anime all night even though I know I have an exam at 8am, getting ice cream at 2am because why the fuck not, and doing my laundry at the ass crack of dawn or 1am on Thursday because it's the only time I can find to do it. Although it is a lot less drama than depicted here, also depending on what type of person you are. Honestly, college is great and you're going to most likely love it, but it isn't how I wrote it here.

I hope that I have made it painfully clear about why SOCU is the way it is and what it is NOT supposed to be like. The actual schooling takes such a minor role in the scope of the story that I am surprised that it has become such a problem. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to provide further clarification.

I would like to address tone, though. While I appreciate everyone’s critical responses and working with me to make your experience enjoyable, telling me what I 'should do' is not the correct way to address an independent writer with their work that they are creating free and completely of their own good will for your enjoyment and entertainment. I deplore how writers mention that at every turn because I feel like it is meant to imply that the readers owe them something, which is NOT the case, but I feel like it should be said. Perhaps asking me if I could do something or making a similar suggestion with flexible language would come off as less combative and more as a conversation. There are ways to politely discuss these matters without being offensive.

I hope this hasn’t struck a negative cord with anyone because I love and appreciate you all so much, but it needed to be said. Thanks for bearing with me through this long and difficult post. I didn’t like making it, it makes me sick to my stomach, and I am sorry if these deviations are not to your liking.