Photo Friday: Adventures in New Orleans

As I mentioned earlier this week a trip to New Orleans was my reward for finishing The Bartending Book. My husband and I have friends who are living down there, but moving back to Chicago this year so we thought we better get a visit in and take advantage of having a free place to stay.

I haven't been to New Orleans since Halloween of 1999 when I went with an ex-boyfriend and stayed in a French Quarter hotel. I don't remember much except for some awesome Halloween decorations and stumbling into a Halloween parade. I was only 20, but that didn't stop me from drinking heavily. And my visit before that in March of 1998 when I was 18 was even more alcohol (and drug) fueled. That was spring break during my first (and only) year at Antioch College in Ohio. A very crazy time in my life. I drove down with one of my best friends. We were supposed to stay with people we knew from school who were on co-op (Antioch's version of an internship, but you got one every other semester). However those people had a crazy roommate (literally crazy. I'm guessing schizophrenic or severe bipolar), who kicked us out after the first day we spent there because she thought we were talking shit about her (I'm not sure when as we arrived at 6:30 am, did a couple shots of SoCo with our friend who was already wasted and passed out. Apparently we were sleep talking???) So suddenly we were two broke-as-shit college kids without a place to stay in New Orleans on our spring break. We tried calling a few hotels in the French Quarter, but they were either booked full or incredibly expensive. So we drove down St. Charles Avenue and right off the I-10 exit ramp in what was a very shady neighborhood at the time, we found a hotel above a 24-hour bar that cost 30$ a night. We went for it.

If that description sounds vaguely familiar, it's because I used that hotel (but renamed it) in I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE. Louisa lives there for a while (it rented rooms by the week as well as by the night) and Emily has a fucked-up drug experience there (which ummm *cough* is also cribbed from my personal experience there).

Thirteen years later (almost exactly), my husband and I passed that hotel every day when we took the street car between our friends' place in Uptown (and these friends were super cool with no crazy roommates just a funny cat) and the French Quarter. The neighborhood has been completely gentrified (at least the part along St. Charles has, I'm willing to bet that if you walk a couple of blocks in it wouldn't be) and our crappy hotel is being torn down. But I snapped a picture of it, so here what I called The St. Charles Hotel in IWBYJR, sleazy place where both Emily and I combined sleeping pills with other substances and had some bad hallucinations:

You can't tell from the photo, but the inside of the hotel has been completely gutted. If they are turning it into condos or something, I kind of want one...

Anyway, the point of that ramble is that my previous two trips to New Orleans were alcohol and drug addled which ummm I guess maybe is to be expected when you are 18 or 20 and visiting New Orleans (though I do not advocate these things, while I have some fond blurry memories from those times, I also do a lot of cringing and thanking my lucky stars that I'm actually alive). I wanted to have a better rounded experience this time, now that I have learned how to drink in moderation (mostly. I was hungover the last day, but it is New Orleans....), so instead of drinking everything I could get my hands on and marveling over the fact that no one was even asking for my ID (and I didn't have a fake when I was 18, but did when I was 20), I chose my drinks wisely (for the most part) and marveled over the fact that you can drink while walking down the street as long as it is not in glass and you can even have open containers and drink in the car!!! (The driver is not allowed to drink. If they purchase a drink from a drive-through daiquiri, they must keep the paper on their straw.... though I was told this just leads people to keep spare straws in their car.)

We started our trip right and instead of just grabbing any old Hurricane I could find on Bourbon Street like I did in the past, our friends took us straight from the airport on Sunday night to Pat O'Briens, where the Hurricane was invented.

Later that week I also had a Pimm's Cup at Napoleon House, one of the oldest bars in New Orleans where the recipe for the traditional Pimm's Cup was tweaked by adding lemonade (and oh my god, it was delicious and I usually don't drink gin because of an incident [or gin-cident as my friend Chuck has started me calling it] when I was 19). It was a beautiful bar that has long been a haunt for artists and writers and I can see why:

Okay now it is starting to sound like my trip was totally booze focused, but it really wasn't and this picture is just cleverly posed (perhaps I am acting out my previous 2 trips to NOLA):

This time around I was really interested in doing tours (yes, I acted like a tourist which I very rarely do but since we didn't have a car, it seemed the easiest and safest way to go) so that I could see the city, the cemeteries, and the swamps outside of the city. And of course, Scott and I also just did a lot of wandering. More wandering and discovering that I normally would have on a vacation because I must admit that I'm usually the itinerary nazi and I plan out everywhere that I want to go to see things, eat or drink before I got. I was too busy with the book to do this though, so Scott booked the tours for us and made note of cool things to check out that we'd heard about and of course we had our gracious hosts, Kasia and John to recommend things to us. They really were wonderful hosts and their cat Wickett kept us entertained. He really loves stuffed animals. Like really loves them. Even though he's neutered. Here he is with my stuffed cat:

Wickett wasn't the only wildlife we saw though or even the only feline. There were feral kitties in Jackson square:

On Kasia's recommendation we went to Audubon Park one day and saw all kinds of cool stuff like two sets of adorable turtles paired up on a log:

And then there was bird island:

And we fed the ducks and turtles:

Except I got a little bit frightened because the ducks started really coming for me:

There were cool trees too:

And they were filming a movie apparently (and not spell-checking their signs):

Scott really wanted to go on a swamp tour and see alligators right up close.... I did not so much want to be up close to them, but I wanted to see the bayou so I agreed. I was probably tugging on his shirt, trying to pull him away from the rails at the edge of the boat as he took these photos:

The bayou really was beautiful:

But the landscape changed during Hurricane Katrina. The swamp was all surrounded by trees like this:

But the pressure from the storm surge clear cut a certain section and created a lake (our very funny tour guide said, "We're not very creative around here so we just call it Lake Katrina):

It also swept one of the houses in the fishing village on the bayou away, you can see it way way back there if you click on the picture to enlarge it:

This was my first time back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and it's heartbreaking to see that there are still so many damaged homes that were abandoned. It brought me right back to the time that it happened seeing things like holes in rooftops that you imagine were either made by people trying to escape onto their rooftops or by rescuers and seeing the symbols left by the search teams on buildings like this:

I had family living New Orleans at the time Katrina hit, elderly relatives who went to Houston and were unable to return. And after I went to New Orleans at 18, it became one of those cities of my heart like Seattle also is. I talked about moving there for a long time and often wish that I had taken that leap the way my friends Kasia and John have. So I was glad to see signs of recovery as well like the Musicians' Village that has been built in the Upper Ninth Ward, which was where many of New Orleans' musicians lived. They lost everything in the hurricane and this project allowed them to come back and bring the music that has helped make New Orleans what it is home:

And I'll just close with some other images of what has always made New Orleans such a fascinating place to me. Like the architecture from the Garden District Homes:

To the French Quarter and Jackson Square (where of course I had my tarot read and I also bought some great pieces made by local artists on salvaged wood and roof tiles):

To the muddy Mississippi (a body of water I have always felt kinship with because I lived near it for the first 7 years of my life) and the skyline which we saw from the ferry between New Orleans and Algiers:

To the Mardi Gras beads that still hang in the trees and are piled on the ground along the parade routes:

And of course as someone who has always loved cemeteries (and lives in a town with more dead people than living), I'm glad I finally got to go in one:

Though this is St. Louis #3 and next time I go back I want to visit St. Louis #1 and visit Marie Laveau's tomb, this time we only went to the Voodoo Museum:

We also went on a haunted history tour though I didn't take photos during that, except of this bar which is purportedly haunted:

Lastly I took a lot of cool statue photos, which I have a thing about. Oddly, these first two statues I took photographs of on my first two trips too. I guess I'm really drawn to them:

If you haven't been to New Orleans, you really should go. There is no place else in the country or I'd venture the world like it. I'm definitely not waiting another thirteen years to go back because there is still a lot I want to do and of course it is wonderful to bask in 80 degree weather when it is 30 at home and just enjoy the richness of the culture, sounds, and sights of the city!

Stephanie's Current Obsessions

I thought it was time to take a break from the writing talk (though if you do want a bit more of that, check out my post on YA Outside the Lines today about what I've learned about my writing process from the Bartender Book) and give some love to other artists by sharing what I've been obsessed with lately.

TV:

Oh, The Wire. I had more than one friend tell me that it was the best TV show ever made. They were friends I trusted, so I can't really tell you why it took me so damn long to watch it, except that cop shows usually aren't my cup of tea. But the thing is The Wire is not a cop show, it's a modern day tragedy, a show about the state of our society, a part of society that doesn't often get a voice. And those are the kinds of stories I like to read, watch and tell, so like I said I have no idea what took me so long and if you haven't seen it yet, I don't know what is taking you so long because now I'm going to be one of those people who tells you that it is absolutely the best TV show ever made. The way it explores our criminal justice system, the "war on drugs," the political system, the media and especially the inner city education system.... I don't have words. I don't need words because The Wire speaks them for me. It's one of those very rare shows that just gets better season by season. I thought there was no way I'd love a season more than the first season, but then I got to season 4, which is probably the best. The fifth season isn't as strong probably because there were a lot of threads to tie up and they had a lesser number of episodes to do so in, but it's still damn good, better than any other show I've watched. I'm used to watching shows that I love either get cancelled and leave me on a cliffhanger *cough My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks cough* or stay on too long and burn out *cough X-Files and Grey's Anatomy cough*. This feels like pretty much the only exception to that rule. I must say I am bummed that HBO didn't renew it because I think they could have done more, but at least it had a satisfying conclusion, a very satisfying conclusion in fact.

My husband and I were so hooked on it that we were staying in on Friday nights and watching like 4, sometimes even 5 hour-long episodes. We finished it at the beginning of March, right before I had to start pulling those 14 hour writing days and then we went on vacation, so we are only now starting to watch TV again and we are going in slowly because it almost feels like nothing will be good enough for us after The Wire. We're currently watching a mini-series called The Corner that pre-dates The Wire, but is by the same producers and deals with some of the same subject matter. I'm enjoying it though my husband finds it very depressing. Next will be a little sci-fi break as my brother has been harping on me to see Firefly forever. And then I think we will finally check out Mad Men. We've also been watching The Big Bang Theory because we need something light. But yeah, I just don't know if there will ever be as good as The Wire. If you have suggestions, do let me know.

Books:

While I was pushing myself to get through the Bartender Book, I didn't have much reading time, but I decided to do a little re-reading of some contemporary YA that I really love. Both of these authors handle their troubled narrators so well (and as you know those are the characters I love to write) and the books are much shorter than I usually write with some of the backstory either omitted or carefully woven in. Since those are challenges for me, I was reading them sort of for that purpose, but ultimately just got sucked into stories again. Like staying up way past my bedtime to finish sucked in.

So, if you like my books and haven't read BEAUTIFUL by Amy Reed or CRACKED UP TO BE by Courtney Summers, you absolutely must.

I wish that I had had both of these books as a teen because I relate to both of the main characters in certain ways. Like Parker in CRACKED UP TO BE, I spent a lot of time trying to be perfect. I wasn't the head cheerleader and I didn't really let it be known what an overachiever I was, but even during my worst periods in high school, I still aimed to be a straight A student, but life spiraled out of control and while I didn't break down for the same reasons or in the same way as Parker did, I just relate. A lot. And the book is crazy well-written in a way that makes me jealous. Hence the re-reading so that I can hopefully improve upon my next contemporary YA (have an idea for it, not sure when I will write it.)

I also relate a ton to Cassie in BEAUTIFUL. No, I really never felt beautiful (but does Cassie really feel that way?), but I had a period where I acted a lot like Cassie and had friends a lot like her friends and yeah, I've just been there and I wish this book was there for me when I was and I hope it finds it's way to all the teens who need it now. If you liked BALLADS OF SUBURBIA, you will definitely love this book.

And then my most recent read, which has led to a little reading break because I'm having a similar thing that I did when I finished watching The Wire, wondering if I will ever find something quite this good again. I wanted to crack this book the day it came out, but I saved it as my reward to myself for when I finished writing The Bartender Book:

Yes, that would be DARKEST MERCY, the last book in the Wicked Lovely series which is up there in all time favorite series for me along with the Harry Potter books and Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books. When I first read WICKED LOVELY, I was floored. I hadn't loved a YA with magical realism/fantasy elements that I loved so much since Francesca Lia Block. I wrote a gushy fan mail to Melissa. And I wrote her another one at the end of the series because the end was so perfect. Melissa clearly knows her stuff when it comes to folklore and the way she seamlessly weaves into her stories, well, I bow down Wayne's World I'm not worthy style. These books are so lush and beautiful, so perfect for those who love myth and lore like I do, and best of all, the women in them are strong, they are real role models and the stories are all about choice, so even though they are other worldly stories, they translate to this world and give you a lot to think about. Again, wish I had them as a teenager and so relieved they exist now for me to point to when the teenage girls in my life ask for recommendations and I want to give them something fantastical that isn't all girl swooning over the boy who will save her. The characters all really grow in this series too. Even one guy that kind of irked me through out, grew up in the last book. Very pleasing. *Stands up and applauds Melissa* Now I absolutely cannot wait for her adult book, GRAVEMINDER.

Music:

All I listened to for the past two months was my bartender book soundtrack and bands related to that soundtrack, so the other gift to myself after I finished was this, which I've been listening to non-stop since:

That would be one of my favorite bands ever. In fact I think they are the only band formed after the early nineties to grace my personal all-time top five favorite bands list which goes 1. Nirvana 2. Hole 3. Social Distortion 4. Rancid and 5. Civet You have to be pretty fucking awesome to break into the personal top five. And these ladies are.

That would be Suzi on the left and Liza on the right. They are sisters and the core of Civet. Liza does lead vocals and guitar and Suzi does lead guitar and backing vocals. The rest of the band has been in flux over the years, though I hear the guys that have joined them now are awesome. I first discovered Civet right before the release of their first album with Hellcat when Melissa Marr (wow, such syncronicity that I blogging about them both today) ran a contest on her blog before my first book I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE came out challenging people to share their favorite songs by kick-ass women. The girl who introduced me to Civet via their song "Son of a Bitch" won first place in that contest. Liza and Suzi pretty much are the kind of women I had in mind when I dreamed up Emily and Regan from I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE and Civet is like my fictional band, She Laughs, a powerful fucking band fronted by a woman that I would love to see top the charts. If I was in charge of the universe, the Britney Spears' of the world would be replaced by the Liza and Suzi's.

Anyway if you want to read more about these two ladies, here is an interview with them I did while they were on tour supporting their last album Hell Hath No Fury. (It's a Women Who Rock Wednesday interview and I swear I will try to bring those back soon.) Love & War is the perfect follow-up to that record. It's hard-rockin punk at it's best and if you are a punk fan and haven't discovered this band yet, you are missing out big time. Also if you're a self-proclaimed bad girl like me, the songs are probably like a musical version of your diary with plenty of lessons learned and reminders of why you've got to stay strong and live life the way *you* want to not the way anyone tells you to. It's that perfect mixture of an outlet for your anger and a personal motivator that I think good music should be. My favorite tracks change constantly, but among the top for me are "Sunset Strip" (Including the shoutable line: "We're all bad girls, bad girls living in a bad world, bad world" and my personal favorite: "We all have big rock n roll dreams and nothing's ever as it seems"), "LA Nights," "Love & War," "Summer of Hate," "Cryin' Wolf," and "I'm Not the One."

Lastly, I just have to give additional props to Liza for her comments on the Ben Weasel incident at SXSW and what it's like to be a woman in rock in general in this AP article, which is really a must-read for any lover of punk rock or feminist.

Okay, off to listen to Love & War for the 50 thousandth time while I clean my house.

Let me know about the music, books and TV you've been loving lately!

My Triumphant Return! A Finished Draft!

I haven't blogged in two months and for the past month or so I've barely been online at all. In fact for the first couple weeks of March, aside from going to my bartending job and occasionally the grocery store, I was completely lost in the world of my characters-- even my husband and cats barely saw me. Sometimes this was enjoyable, sometimes it was pure torture.

In my last blog entry, I was feeling incredibly positive about the book. I was on schedule to have a solid draft done by the end of February and then a line-edited version of the book to my agent by March 18. A week after I wrote that, things came to a screeching halt. I reached the same exact point where I continually got stuck every time, the final act. (As you may have noticed I always divide my books in sections, IWBYJR has 3 acts, BALLADS has those Verse/Chorus/Verse sections, it's just kind of a thing. This book has 4 acts (though at one point it was 3, at another point 5) and for some reason when I got to the last one, right after the reveal of a major secret, I didn't know what to do. When I wrote what I'm calling my rough draft, which doesn't really count as a real finished draft because 3/4ths of the way through I decided to cut a subplot and never went back and fixed it, the dreaded last act was barely a sketch. This time I thought I knew where I was going. Then I realized that I was avoiding a bunch of scenes that actually needed to happen and had written a bunch in that rough draft that were totally irrelevant not to mention took the book into a whole new direction instead of wrapping things up like I was supposed to. This realization was preceded by the big freak-out.

I had the big freak-out on February 8th (according to the dismal series of updates on my facebook page). It started when I realized that idea for the end wasn't clicking, worsened when I looked at my still insanely high word count and then came the biggest and worst wave-- suddenly I thought that one of my main characters was completely unredeemable. I thought that I couldn't figure out how to resolve the conflict between two of my characters because I didn't see how one could be forgiven for her actions which THE WHOLE PREMISE OF THE BOOK was based one. I sent panicked emails to my critique partners asking why I hadn't noticed sooner that the whole premise of the book was flawed and I was going to write myself into a corner I could never get out of. I tweeted that this was it, I'd wasted almost an entire year on a book that did not work at the core. But then fellow writer friends that I really admire told me to calm down, that this happens to everyone at the end of a book or at least it happens to them, which made me feel sort of better and I realized that yes, it's true, I had a freak-out like this at the end of writing a draft of BALLADS too, however I was still convinced that this was way worse and this time I would not be able to get over the hurdle. The only way I did was with the help of my friends.

One by one my critique partners wrote back assuring me that the book wasn't fatally flawed and my character wasn't completely unforgivable. Even my mom (who knows a lot of this story because A. I spent much of last summer and fall writing at her house because one of my sick cats was living with her and B. the book involves a pregnancy and my mom is a NICU nurse) assured me that my character was forgivable which helped a lot because this character, who is a mom, is so unlike my own mom. So I started to think of ways to tweak my character's back story and the fucked-up thing that she does so that I could make it work. However, fixing the ending still took a while and it honestly never could have happened without my good friend and one of my favorite authors, Jeri Smith-Ready, who told me she'd be willing to give the first three acts of the book a quick read and talk through the ending with me.

So my schedule for writing the end of the book went out the window, I sent the beginning to Jeri and distracted myself by writing a different opening chapter (because I'd also convinced myself that the beginning was still screwed up too), which I sent to critique partners and also my friend Christie and my husband, but all of them told me to stick with the original beginning. In the meantime, I was starting to come up with ideas for the end. I was using twitter for cheerleading and guidance. Mari Mancusi, Melissa Walker and I started setting daily goals with each other as a way to hold ourselves accountable and it helped immensely, but also was a good place to vent. And when I got stuck on the scene I needed to start the last act, Leah Clifford started throwing out semi-ridiculous scenarios (one involved a pterodactyl), but one of them, someone loses a shoe, actually gave me a little jumpstart. Then Jeri finished reading in record time, assured me that the book wasn't total shit (in fact she actually said it was good which means a ton coming from a writer as amazing as her. Seriously have you seen the first chapter preview for SHIFT the sequel to one of my favorite books of last year, SHADE? Awesome!) and we had the first of several plot talks on Skype.

Finally, during the last week of February when I meant to be finishing the very end of the book, I started on the last act. I had to write a chapter a day for the first week of March. I finally hit a stride though and was barely sleeping because I couldn't stop thinking about the book. I was consuming a giant pot of tea every day to keep my energy up. I was writing until 1 am on the nights that I wasn't working at the bar. Of course I hit some snags and I got thrown off slightly at the very end when I realized that the epilogue I always planned to write seemed to resolve things too neatly, especially for the type of books I write. The ending of the last chapter of act 4 surprised and pleased me and I thought it might be the end of the book, but I wasn't sure. Once again Jeri and my critique partner Jenny (who had slogged her way through my 160K super rough awful ugly draft) came to my rescue and read the last couple chapters for me while I went back to the beginning again to start revising. I had some major changes to make, some chapters particularly at the beginning required a complete overhaul. Everything required tightening because the the book was still way too long and I had a week to do it in if I wanted it done before my vacation. Which I really fucking wanted. I did not want to have it hanging over my head.

I need to revise something like seventy pages a day if I wanted to get done on time with a day to read it aloud (which is my preferred line edit method). The first day or two went okay, but then I got stuck on one of the scenes I was adding. Still determined, I was revising 14 hours a day for 4 days straight. I asked my co-worker to cover my Wednesday night shift for me so I could have more time. Jeri and Jenny's verdict on my ending came in and thankfully with some slight tweaks/tightening they felt it worked. I would have had to finish on Wednesday night or Thursday afternoon at the latest to do my read-aloud, line-edit thing, but I didn't. I finished around 4:30 on Friday the 18th. I'd done a pretty good job tightening as I went along. I knew I could do a better line edit job, but I also knew my agent and critique partners would have comments and edits of their own, so I figured I might as well do the line-editing then. I went back over a couple places that I had concerns about, but by 8 pm that night, I decided I had done my best. I sent my draft, the polished version of the first real draft of the bartender book (so it was kind of a second draft) into my agent.

I did it. I finished the book at the eleventh hour before my vacation. The book that was supposed to be done in October and then in December and then in January, finally FINALLY I pulled it off. It does have a title other than the bartender book of course, but for some reason I don't want to share because I really like it (and I didn't even come up with it, my editor at MTV Books did way back when we decided this should be an adult book not a YA) but I know that books don't always keep their titles (BALLADS was always BALLADS, but IWBYJR had a few different titles), so I'm afraid of jinxing it.

In fact, now that the hard work is done, the really scary part starts. Because in the end, even though I thought it would never have a satisfying conclusion and always have plotholes and fuck, I honestly thought it would be the first big project that I completely abandoned, I fell in love with that book. Hard. During those first couple weeks of March when I was writing and/or revising 14 hours a day and things were finally clicking, I've never loved writing more. My characters came to life for me. Sometimes I laughed at them, sometimes they made me cry, their love interests definitely made me swoon (while still not anywhere near traditional, the relationships I wrote in this one are a lot more romantic than I've done in the past). This book is all things that I think it should be. It's funny. It's sad. It's frustrating. I think the characters and the place are pretty well-developed and did I mention that it actually has a freakin' end and I figured out the plot problems because it does and I did! So in other words, I worked harder on this book possibly than either of the others (though my perception may be skewed on that and I know revisions on BALLADS were very intense and that was a more emotionally intense book to write for sure), but I'm very happy with it. And as a result I'm fucking terrified that now my agent or my critique partners will tear it apart or that they'll like it but it won't sell and even if it does, it's still on the long side and somebody is probably going to make me cut some stuff I really like somewhere along the line. So yeah, those are the things I have to look forward to, but even though I am scared to death, I'm still happy that the book actually clicked. Those first two books that I wrote weren't just flukes, I did it again!

So I went to New Orleans and celebrated for a few days:

Don't worry, it wasn't really as bad as it looks! I'm just pretending there. I wasn't really fall-down drunk. In fact, I wasn't even that drunk throughout the trip especially compared to previous trips to New Orleans, though I definitely had my fair share of celebratory cocktails. (And this started the night I finished the book when I went to the bar I work at and had three shots of Patron.)

Those of you who have been following along with the saga of this book over the past year, starting with the YA version of it that my publisher turned down, know that it has been rough and while there is still a lot of potentially hard stuff ahead, it was time to celebrate. I know my struggles with writing over the past year have made the blog, my twitter feed, facebook, etc (and god help you if we're real-life friends) a bit gloomy to say the least, but when I got my tarot cards read in Jackson Square (after carefully selecting the most legit seeming reader), the reader pointed out that deep down I'm an eternal optimist and I am. I hope that the book will sell and that what I've recorded here is the creation of a book from it's rough writing days through publication and maybe my honesty will help other writers... or at least serve as guidance for me when I start the next book and inevitably face the same struggles.

I do have three other book ideas milling around in my brain and I am not sure which I will choose next. I'm taking this week off to catch up on house-cleaning and tax-doing and blog-writing and email-answering and then hopefully I will have agent notes and start revising or begin to tackle those other ideas, but I'm hoping to lead a slightly more balanced life. Part of me loves those total binge write days/weeks, but I can't do that all the time, so you should be seeing me back on the blog more often, starting with some posts later this week with more on New Orleans and the things I've been enjoying on my break in terms of books, music, TV, etc. So thanks for coming with me on this journey, dear readers!