I am writing every day for 41 days for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, the writing workshop of which I am Board Chair. And I’m posting my writing here to give anyone who wishes a chance to edit the editor.

These are not necessarily full stories: they may be scenes, conversations, bits and pieces. All the work is absolutely new, and will often be quite raw. I’ll comment on my own process and ideas, and I hope you’ll comment too: what do you see that’s working, or not working? How would you fix this piece? What can you apply to your own writing? Is there anything you’d like me to comment on? Let’s talk about whatever you like.

You can read all the pieces and comments here. I hope you’ll find them interesting and useful.

The Rock and the River

It was good they got off the boats for lunch, because by then Betsy was within a twitch of tossing the Larson kid over the side, preferably straight into the vacuum suck of the rapids, still clutching his stupid phone, whining all the way about why didn’t they have 3G down heeeeere? Bets didn’t think anyone on the boat would miss him, including his parents, who had raised Ignoring The Adolescent to a fine art. Then she would only have to get the Anderson family and Encyclopedia Guy eaten by snakes. The rest of them could stay as long as they left her alone. And then maybe Bets could enjoy the Grand Fucking Canyon.

When she signed up for the river trip, she imagined a small group of other adults, people of calm competence and intellectual mien and passionate adventurous spirit. She didn’t expect three motorized rafts of competitively-sunglassed executives who took a quick look around as they set off, noted that the Grand Canyon had a lot of rocks, and then got down to the serious business of checking each other’s status in the real world and telling the driver how to steer. All except Encyclopedia Guy, who went into full-bore full-volume download mode on the specific amount of damage that badly-conceived government management policies were doing to the river and canyon and wildlife and downriver ecosystems. Why, it’s all dying right this second!

He didn’t seem to notice that she flinched. Bets settled her baseball cap and bandanna more firmly onto her bald head and tried not to waste too much time hating him.

Once they disembarked onto the beach, she joined the line of folks unloading food coolers and cookgear. Then one of the bluff VP-on-vacation types shouldered in and tried to take the cooler from her, saying, “That looks heavy, you just let me get that for you, honey. You go on and find a seat.”

Fine. Fuck him. Bets released her grip, and enjoyed his nearly-drop-it-on-his-foot surprise at how much it weighed. She was still stronger than she looked. But the pleasure didn’t last, and the sourness still sat like lemon on the back of her tongue; because what did it prove, except that she still needed desperately to be strong?

#

So she sat on the sand and watched the river, while the not-dying-right-this second crowd fetched and carried and set up tables under the instructions of the boat drivers. Behind her, the cheerful human chaos. Before her, the Colorado: green and serene, opaque in spite of the hard hot sun that lit the canyon walls in such sharp detail it almost hurt to look at them. But look she did: the ancient rock, the river humming to itself, rolling on and on, and it was almost like music, on and on, almost like voices, on and on and–

She came back to awareness between one blink and the next, and found a child sitting silent next to her. A girl of perhaps eleven or so, a small, compact person in a white t-shirt and jeans and well-worn hiking boots who turned and grinned and said, “You hear that?”

“Almost,” Bets said.

“Come and get it!” a woman announced from the table. It took Bets a while to unkink herself and stand; by the time she was on her feet, the girl was gone, presumably somewhere in the crowd around the table. Bets got herself a grilled salmon filet and a spoonful of rice salad, ignored Encyclopedia Guy’s lost-lamb look, and found herself a rock for one as close to the river as she could.

#

After lunch, everyone piled back into the boats, and for a while the Andersons insisted on giving everyone a move-by-move account of the season finale of Dancing with the Stars, and Bets found herself so angry she wanted to scream. Don’t waste my time! But eventually the food and the sun did their work; the chattery people relaxed into silence, the Larson boy gave up on the internet and fell asleep, and even Encylopedia Guy was content to sit and only mutter to himself occasionally. The canyon narrowed around them as the river carried them deeper in and deeper down. There were no more beaches; the walls rose straight from the river, so high now that the sun and sky seemed impossibly far away, as if Bets were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope.

Deeper down. Deeper down. Moving faster now toward the rapids ahead, just a mile or two, soon now, where the river would dash itself against the rock and break and reform and break again, on and on.

But now they came around a bend, and the boatman slowed and steered them toward a place in the wall where the rock was black and dense. “Touch it,” the boatman said.

People hesitated: the boatman was holding the boat in place with a deft hand on the reverse throttle, but this close to the wall it was impossible to miss the muscle of the river underneath them, impossible not to know that it had carved these mile-high walls one molecule at a time with irresistable force and relentless will, and that it would go on doing so, on and on, on and on–

Bets felt a hand on her arm. The girl said, “Go on, touch it.”

“Where did you come from?” Bets said.

“I’ve been right here,” the girl said, and her eyes were the dense deep black of the rock, except there was light at their center like the light of the sun. She said, “Listen.”

The boatman was speaking again. “This layer of rock is two billion years old.”

Two billion years. Bets put her hand to her mouth.

Listen, the girl said again. And Bets listened with every fiber of her being as she reached out and touched two billion years of sunlight and shadow, of water and wind, two billion years of plants and small creatures and dinosaurs and people, all the things they were and said and did and felt, what they loved and feared and everything that gave them joy, two billion years of the river that she could hear so clearly now humming Life life life, life is the rock and the river and the sun, and we are going on and on and on.

The girl said, You hear that?

On and on and on. “Yes,” Bets said, and began to cry.

Kelley’s notes: This one gave me some trouble because it’s much closer to being “about me” than some of the other pieces. I’m not currently dying, as far as I know, but I have my ongoing wrestle with the notion of death, as I believe many of us do. I have been on a river rafting trip down the Colorado. I’ve touched that rock, and the experience lives deep in my memory. I have a lot of feeling that I wanted to explore/express in this piece.

However, as I think I’ve said before, emotion isn’t story. It’s only a part of story. There must also be events: without a plot, a piece of writing may be meditation or self-expression, but it’s not a story. Take that, New Yorker.

A story is an experience for the reader, a journey. Just because I bring a lot of deep personal feeling to this piece does not mean that the reader will therefore “feel it.” Emoting onto the page is not enough. As the river needs a guide, so does a story. It’s our job to guide the reader as best we can, and we do that by creating a series of events that lead characters through conflict and choice into the emotional highs and lows we have mapped out for them.

I re-discovered in writing this piece, as I have in many of these pieces, the sheer heavy lifting required to bring the character and reader to a Big Emotional Payoff. This story is all about the last 3 paragraphs — about 120 words. But it took me 900 words to get there, in a way that is sketchy but, I hope, sets down the bones of character and story. Still, if I wanted to work this into a story, I’d need… hmm, I’m guessing at least another 2,000 words to do proper setup — a few more scenes of Bets interacting with people, more specificity about the mysterious girl, and some conversation or memory moments to give us some backstory, so that we care about the loss of her life and we understand what a triumph it is for her to be able to weep not just in grief for death, but in joy for life, at the end.

The point is that big moments require setup. Here’s what I felt I had to establish, at a bare minimum, in order for the ending to be anything more than an emotional riff:
1. A modicum of setting. I could go on at length about the Grand Canyon, but because I was on a schedule, I needed to be efficient. I consolidated the experience into a single day so I wouldn’t have to go into the logistics of camping overnight, and so I could avoid further interaction with the other rafters. I established key qualities of the river and the canyon, including using the “reverse telescope” image to give a sense of height, and also symbolize Bets’ distance from herself and others as she goes “deeper into herself.”
2. Bets is dying. There’s no need for me to be coy about this. I find often that emerging writers want to keep things like this “secret” from the reader. Why? It’s not a secret to the character, in fact it’s the single biggest thing in her heart and mind right now. And it is the central fact that drives the story. Don’t hide that stuff. I think the fact that she flinches at Encyclopedia Guy’s “dying” remark is enough clue for the reader, but the other rafters also need a clue, hence the bald head and bandanna.
3. Bets is angry about death. It’s important to show this in her behavior with/response to others, not just through internal thoughts/conversations. Interaction and relationship behavior are events — they are part of what makes plot, and therefore story.
4. There is a Mysterious Girl. This is one of the weaker parts of the story; what does the girl really represent? Is she a manifestation of Life and Death? Is she the spirit of the canyon? Is she Bets? I don’t know, and because I didn’t have time to nail it, I kept her as generic as possible. The lesson here is that if you can’t be specific, it means you haven’t thought it through (smile). But the girl is important — she is also part of what passes for plot here, an external force to which Bets must respond. If all this conversation was simply internal to Bets, there would be less event to drive the story, and less tension for the reader.

If you’re setting up an emotional payoff, you need not just the feelings that lead up to that moment of emotion: you need events that drive the character to have that sequence of feelings.

I am writing every day for 41 days for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, the writing workshop of which I am Board Chair. And I’m posting my writing here to give anyone who wishes a chance to edit the editor.

These are not necessarily full stories: they may be scenes, conversations, bits and pieces. All the work is absolutely new, and will often be quite raw. I’ll comment on my own process and ideas, and I hope you’ll comment too: what do you see that’s working, or not working? How would you fix this piece? What can you apply to your own writing? Is there anything you’d like me to comment on? Let’s talk about whatever you like.

You can read all the pieces and comments here. I hope you’ll find them interesting and useful.

Sweet 16

Valerie was mad for fashion and lifestyle magazines. All the girls in the caravan park read them, even though no one could afford trendy clothes or $20 mascara. Most of Val’s friends loved the celebrity mags as well, but she wasn’t interested in what boy bands or TV stars were doing. She was too busy planning her own stylin’ life away from her parents house — well, it wasn’t a house at all, was it? It was a bloody stupid caravan made to look like a house with a little porch, and some flowers in the dirt patch out front that died and had to be replanted every year because it was too bloody hot in Adelaide. Once she got out of there, she was never coming back.

Tick tock, counting down the clock. Two days until her 16th birthday. She could leave school. She could leave the caravan. She could get a job in Melbourne and live in a bedsit with girls who would teach her how to find flash clothes at great bargains, and what clubs were the best, and they would all have boyfriends with good jobs, boyfriends who were older, maybe even 25, who had their own apartments you could move into and buy appliances and a lounge suite and then you were on your way.

She sat at the kitchen counter with her pile of magazines, her scissors, and her clip box, cutting out the best makeup tips and ideas for classy home decor and filing them under the tabs she had created. Office Clothes/Face. Evening Clothes/Face. Kitchen Cabinet Organization. Parties and Entertaining. Holiday Destinations. Bedroom. It was important that the bedroom be sensual and welcoming without being too feminine, because men wanted to be with women without being reminded of them all the time.

And the magazines had given her great tips for her Sweet 16 Party. Don’t have an entertainment-friendly home? Find an unusual and exciting location that shows your individualism! Val planned her party at the bowling centre where her dad worked as night manager, and her boyfriend Derek was the top scorer on the car wash team. They would have half the lanes for themselves, with a red rope blocking off the section, and a DJ, and a mirrorball, and free food from concessions, and they could bowl and dance all night, and at midnight her dad had promised her a bottle of fizzy wine.

And she knew. She knew that Derek’s bowling shirt would have a mustard stain, that her dad would make an embarrassing speech about My little girl, that lots of the kids from school were only coming for the free bowling. She knew. But she was going to make it the best bowling dance Sweet 16 Party they’d ever see in their entire stuck-in-Adelaide lives. And then she and her clip box were off to something better.

#

But it all went wrong right away. The red rope was just colored twine, so thin that it was hard to see, and people kept trying to walk through it and pulling the stanchions down. The sound system was wired so that bowling announcements from the public lanes interrupted the DJ music, even when she and Derek were dancing to Their Song and everyone else was watching. It was supposed to be beautiful: the darkened dance floor, the mirrorball sparkling light down on them like stars, wrapped in Peter Cetera’s voice and Derek’s arms. It was supposed to be the moment when all this was almost all over, and for the three minutes of the song it was safe to let herself love everything about the life she was leaving. But this was the life she was leaving, the life where some insurance adjuster’s strike was more important than a Sweet 16, where the ordinary always overcame the special.

And some of the boys brought flasks, and soon the punch was practically hallucinogenic, and all Val wanted was that three minutes: so when Derek said Let’s go sit in my car, she did, and when he said Let’s not use one this time, let’s make it special, she said okay. And while she in Derek’s back seat, midnight came and went and she missed her dad’s speech and the fizzy wine, and two weeks later she missed her period.

#

She didn’t sleep at all the first night she came home with the baby to the caravan. Will you be all right? her mum said, and Val said yes. After her parents went to bed, she got out her clip box and went through every article and every photo, one at a time; the smiling girls with their straight white teeth and glittery bracelets and tanned, fit men at their sides, the cunning cosmopolitan flats with exposed brickwork and track lighting, the Ten Best Places to Kiss in Melbourne.

Tick tock, said the clock. The baby would be awake soon. Val closed the clip box, and turned to the pile of parenting magazines, and began to read about diaper bags.

Kelley’s notes: Today is about voice and details.

The sponsor is Australian, and the prompt he gave me was particular enough that it was important to me that the character and setting be as Australian as I can make them in context, without depending on too much exposition. Voice is part of that: looking for Australian word choices and rhythms (caravan instead of trailer, bedsit (which I think is an AU usage as well as UK), bowling centre, etc.) Those choices send signals to the reader about setting and culture even without the larger cues of Adelaide and Melbourne.

You’ll notice that I’m not describing anything much about setting — just enough to create an essential impression of “A hot Australian trailer park where people don’t have a lot of money.” And the information I provide to create that framework is as much emotional as it is descriptive. Setting is sometimes as much a “character” in a story as any of the people; and, like everything else in a story, your protagonist has a relationship to her setting. It’s useful when you’re nailing down descriptive details to think about how your character feels about the setting, not just “what it looks/smells/sounds like.”

I have saved the details in this piece for the specific scenes of Val’s clippings, and her party, because these are the emotional touchstones of the piece: the life she dreams of, the three minutes she settles for, and the life she gets as a result. Those details are much more specific, but also chosen for maximum emotional impact. I set up the articles first to show the Big Shiny Dream, and then selected party details to resonate as much as possible: the red rope to cordon off the party section, the DJ, the fizzy wine… That’s the best Val can do right now, but she’s trying to live the dream. And then, of course, the reality isn’t the dream — and the slap of reality is all in the details.

It’s true that I like a good emotional riff, a lyrical or galloping paragraph about what’s happening inside people’s hearts and minds. But sometimes this contrast of details is much more emotionally rich and persuasive than any amount of “telling the reader” about feelings, no matter how well-written it might be. I think today’s approach of using details to drive the emotional arc is better for this piece. That’s why it’s good to have lots of different tools in the writing toolbox, lots of different strategies — so you can find what’s right for the story, not just what “the writer likes to do.”

I am writing every day for 41 days for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, the writing workshop of which I am Board Chair. And I’m posting my writing here to give anyone who wishes a chance to edit the editor.

These are not necessarily full stories: they may be scenes, conversations, bits and pieces. All the work is absolutely new, and will often be quite raw. I’ll comment on my own process and ideas, and I hope you’ll comment too: what do you see that’s working, or not working? How would you fix this piece? What can you apply to your own writing? Is there anything you’d like me to comment on? Let’s talk about whatever you like.

You can read all the pieces and comments here. I hope you’ll find them interesting and useful.

Bubble and Sass

Bubble the Box-Master was relieved when all but one of the Usurper’s boxes were quelled and their flattened carcasses carried away. One box was no trouble, but so many at once, all needing reconnoiter, domination of contents, and then regular re-intimidation… it was frankly exhausting, and took time from his responsibilities in the neighborhood. Pirate was becoming restive without proper supervision, and there was a tribe of rats in an oak tree on the next block whose spines needed snapping.

At least the Usurper was finding his proper role in the order of things. He had learned to recognize rudimentary commands — out, in, food, lap — and was proving unexpectedly good at helping Staff understand the autonomy a busy cat required.

“Oh, let him out, Susan, he’s got things to do.”

“What if he runs away again?”

“He didn’t run away. He came to find me and bring me back to you.”

“Danny, you don’t know anything about cats. They don’t fetch,” Staff said. “But I love that you’re such a romantic.”

#

Bubble made his rounds and found a message from Scooter: Oak tree. New development.

Scooter was waiting under a bush. Bubble settled beside him. Rat trouble?

Scooter twitched his tail in a laugh. Trouble for rats.

A soldier rat lay dead under the tree. A second made its way cautiously along a branch overhead. Step, step, pause. Step, step, pause, a black-eyed terrified look at the crushed warrior below. Step, step–

Whooosh. Death dropped from a crook in the tree, landed with four-footed surety, seized the rat in sharp teeth and broke its neck with casual elegance, then slung the body sideways and sent it spinning to land splayed near its fallen comrade.

The tabby cat on the branch stared at Bubble and Scooter with green-eyed battle joy. She gave them a hiss of triumph, then turned and leaped, twisted beautifully, landed lightly on her feet, grabbed one of the dead rats in her jaws, and disappeared into the bushes.

Bubble blinked in approval.

Toldja, Scooter said.

They rose and stretched, and investigated the remaining rat. A beautiful kill; and the intoxicating scent of the killer. I like her, Scooter said. Bubble turned a cold stare on him and bristled slightly. But not really my type, nope, not all all, good luck with that, Boss, Scooter said, and hunched a moment before he took himself off in the other direction.

Who was she, this mysterious malefactor of rats? Bubble the Besotted followed her trail into the brush.

#

And around. And around. And again around the neighborhood in a loop. She was everywhere but wherever he was. Bubble the Backtracker approved of her more and more. He like a challenge.

He found her, at last, in his own back yard. She sprawled in the grass, licking her leg unconcernedly. The second rat body lay a foot away.

Bubble assumed the crouch of non-hostility for a minute, and then proceed to give himself a thorough bath as well. Eventually, she rose and yawned and stretched, and came to touch noses with him.

Sassafras, she said. I brought lunch.

Bubble’s heart swelled. A huntress. It was so romantic.

They ate the rat except for the liver, which Bubble encouraged Sass to leave as a gift for Staff and the Usurper. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the Usurper came out barefoot, stepped on the liver, yelled, “Yooock!” and dropped the box on the patio while he hobbled back inside calling for Staff to bring him a paper towel.

He didn’t eat it, Sass said.

They never do, Bubble said. But they seem to appreciate it anyway. Come on and help me with this box.

By the time the Usurper returned with the packet of Friskies treats, Bubble and Sassafras were curled up together in the box. Sass was asleep: beside her, Bubble the Boyfriend raised a baleful eye.

“Awesome,” said the Usurper. “You go, dude.” He shook some liver-flavored nuggets from the packet and put them within reach. Enough for two.

Very good. Very good indeed. A reward was in order. Bubble butted the Usurper’s hand and rechristened him Majordomo. Tomorrow he would make sure to mark all Majordomo’s possessions properly, and then turn his attention to the delicate matter of introducing Sassafras and Staff. Always so much work to do. It was frankly exhausting, being head of a family.

He blinked, settled himself more comfortably against Sassafras, and went to sleep; and dreamed of rat corpses piled ten deep, of drowsy tumbles in the afternoon, of black and tabby kittens in the sun.

Kelley’s notes: This is the second piece about Bubble I’ve written for the Write-a-thon (the first is here). I hadn’t planned to write any “sequels,” but Nicola asked for another Bubble story, and I am always happy to give her a present.

Today’s challenge was to maintain continuity of plot/tone/voice between the two stories while introducing the new element of the cats speaking directly to one another. The moving boxes are the direct link to the “sequel” vibe (the Usurper is moving in) and then the visual signal of Bubble’s new domesticity. Once I had that framework, it was just a matter of introducing Sassafras in an appropriately “romantic” way.

Other than that, I’m not sure what to say about this piece, except that I’m finding the Bubble stories require a certain zest and lightness of touch — almost a “G movie” distance, without making the characters dumb.

I am writing every day for 41 days for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, the writing workshop of which I am Board Chair. And I’m posting my writing here to give anyone who wishes a chance to edit the editor.

These are not necessarily full stories: they may be scenes, conversations, bits and pieces. All the work is absolutely new, and will often be quite raw. I’ll comment on my own process and ideas, and I hope you’ll comment too: what do you see that’s working, or not working? How would you fix this piece? What can you apply to your own writing? Is there anything you’d like me to comment on? Let’s talk about whatever you like.

You can read all the pieces and comments here. I hope you’ll find them interesting and useful.

Allie Allie In Free

Alice Watts found the house on Larch Road when she was ten; already old enough to imagine herself in someone else’s life, already old enough to yearn; already sure she would never be more than she already was, the silent, watchful child of people that other people called trash. So much already in her life.

And so the industrial road that separated her Walton Springs neighborhood from Larch Road might as well have been a mountain that she could never climb: no native guide, and too many ways to slip and fall. People from the Springs never crossed Walton Road. But on this summer afternoon, Allie was on her bike on the Springs side of the road, pedalling furiously away away away, her face stained with tears, her mouth and chin smeared with blood where Teddy had slapped her aside when she’d tried to put herself between him and her momma. “Leave her, she’s just a child,” Momma said, and pulled Allie up and whispered, “Go on now, and don’t come back for a while.” And then Teddy grabbed Momma and she said Teddy, don’t make my little girl see this, and Teddy shoved Alice out the door, slam, Allie on the outside —

Then the noises began, and she grabbed her bike and did a running start out onto her street, and all she could do was ride away, away, until she found herself on Walton Road with its deadly blind curves and its dangerous traffic of semitrailers loaded with enormous steel pipes or doomed cows bound for slaughter, pickups with biting dogs in the back beds, souped-up beaters that looked like nothing but had it where it counted, like the hard-eyed boys who drove them. There were no sidewalks, just the huge parking lots of the warehouses and the big-box stores, the junkyard and the auto repair shop. Everything on the Road moved fast, and a small girl riding too close to the edge could get knocked down in the windslap of their passing.

She should have turned into the factory outlet mall and made her way back to town. But she was full of something horrible and huge, some feeling like teeth eating her from the inside, and all she could think was away, away, go go go! So she worked up as much speed as she could, and then she pointed her bike toward the other side of the Road and shut her eyes and went.

Air horns. Air brakes. The stink of diesel and rubber and when she opened her eyes, the looming toothy grin of the chrome grill ready to bite her in half, and the shocked O face of the man behind the windshield as he wrenched the steering wheel into the four-inch swerve that saved her life. The bumper and the great grinding tires squealed past her and her bike thumped over the grass verge and down toward the railroad tracks below. She flew up from her seat and for a moment she thought she would go right over the handlebars; then she came back down hard and her left pedal smacked her in the calf, and her feet found their purchase and she rode bump bump down the hill and across the tracks, thud racketaracketa THUD and it slowed the bike enough that she could put her foot down and scoot to a stop and finally stand, trembling. It all happened so fast that she could still hear the truck driver’s final shout of fucking crazy KIIIIIIIID! fading away.

Her bottom hurt where she’d come down on the hard rubber bicycle seat. Her calf was aching like sweet jesus billy-oh. Her jaw was tender. But the chewed-up feeling was tucked away somewhere inside her, like a balloon in a closet: it would pop out as soon as she opened that door, but right now… right now, where was she?

About a hundred feet away was a bright yellow barricade with a sign: Larch Road. No Trespassing. On the other side of it, a road began, winding away underneath tall trees whose branches interlaced to form a thing-opy, a canopy of leaves through which the sun sparkled and danced.

She pushed her bike across the weedy dirt and around the barricade. She knew what trespass meant. It meant her and her momma and the guy in the truck and the boys in the old cars. It meant what Teddy was doing right now. And Allie thought away, away, and set her bike upon the road, and went.

Kelley’s notes: Ah, the Narnia hommage. I do love a tale of secret worlds, of discovery and quest.

Those stories work in part because the adventure of the story is also a self-discovery/self-actualization for the protagonist. That means doing the setup work of establishing that the character has the grit for the journey, but also has some vulnerabilities or wounds that need healing — and it’s best when the discovery of the secret world is directly tied to those vulnerabilities. That’s why Harry Potter opens with Harry in his closet room, and why this opens with Allie trying to outrun her own life on her bike.

For Allie, the transition to “the new world” is very nearly lethal. I made that choice in order to show her impulsiveness and determination, and to contrast with the serenity and strangeness she will find on Larch Road. I also wanted to make that world hard to get back to: there’s always Walton Road to cross, and it will always be dangerous. I like the idea of the Road as the boundary because I do love a good metaphor (smile), and because the road can bring lots of different kinds of dangers, as well as allies, to Alice in her quest.

I think that in story, it’s always worth taking the time to show us the protagonist making important choices; especially, perhaps, choices that lead to unintended consequences. Without an understanding of the rage and horror and helplessness that are driving Allie, and without the chaos and near-violence of getting across the industrial road, the impact of Larch Road is lessened.