# What inspired your current novel?



## Xitra_Blud (Oct 22, 2013)

I was just curious of what the inspiration was for everyone's pieces. What gave you the idea to write it? For me, I happened to be looking at a picture of My Chemical Romance and it all too off from there.


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## Ireth (Oct 22, 2013)

My current WIP, involving Celtic and Norse mythology, is an adaptation of one arc of an ongoing text-based RP between myself and a friend. The MC was a villain in the roleplay, but over the course of the plot he started on the path toward hero-hood, and I realized I loved his development so much I wanted to turn it into a novel and share it with the world.


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## Feo Takahari (Oct 22, 2013)

In high school health class, I had to watch a video where a smarmy jerk said not to use drugs because you should act like you're the hero of your own movie, and John Wayne wouldn't take heroin before taking an enemy hill, would he?* That got me thinking, what would it actually mean to act like the hero of your own movie? What might you miss if you live your life as a movie instead of as a life?

At the time, I didn't think too much about it. I didn't know anyone who used Twitter or Foursquare, and I wasn't really interacting with Facebook and Myspace. It was when I got older that I began to recognize how many people in my age group did in fact see themselves as the heroes of their own movies, and saw everyone else as the supporting cast that would cheer on their effortless rise to success. The dominant narrative of my generation seems to be "me, me, me"--so I thought, why not write a story about you, you, you? It's a story about werewolves and superheroes and magical girls, but if you dig down to the very core of it, it's about the stories people build around themselves, and what happens when the stories don't come true.

* I'd love to track this video down again, since it was so deliciously bad. I know the guy WASN'T Joe Rogen, and I know he did a lot of voices that were supposed to be funny but just sounded irritating.


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## AstralCat (Oct 22, 2013)

Nine years ago, when I was a weird little kid with a sketch pad and a lot of dumb ideas, I made up a story for fun. It was about a pair of sisters and their talking cat sidekick who fight an evil queen and her batlike minions.

Well... To say the least, this story's changed a lot over the years. But I still have the original doodles and badly written drabbles that it all started with.


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## psychotick (Oct 22, 2013)

Hi,

I've just sent Guinea Pig off for editing, and its basically the story of a man who unwittingly gets injected with angelic DNA in a mad science experiment and of course starts to transform. 

Naturally it draws on themes I've thought about a lot, such as angels and genetic engineering. But where the story became an actual novel instead of just a few interesting scenes, was when I considered Frankenstein. It always struck me that Victor's goal in creating Adam, was madness. He wasn't really building a new race - a superior race, and it should have been obvious to him from the moment he started sewing body parts together. But genetic engineering allows for Victor's claimed goal to be believable - and to actually create a new superior race. And lets face it, shouldn't a new super race have wings?!

Cheers, Greg.


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## Helen (Oct 22, 2013)

Xitra_Blud said:


> What gave you the idea to write it?



Edward Snowden.


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## GeekDavid (Oct 22, 2013)

Believe it or not, I actually don't know where this inspiration came from... the idea just came to me one evening.


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## teacup (Oct 22, 2013)

For me, I thought up one scene from the story (the ending) and began writing book 1 to work towards it. So I have no idea what, if anything, inspired the actual story.

However, I do know that I have a few aspects of the story inspired by Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and some places inspired by Final Fantasy IX.


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## ndmellen (Oct 22, 2013)

Honestly? An episode of "Supernatural" titled "Something Wicked This Way Comes." The idea hit me like a lightning bolt and with in minutes I'd pulled out a notebook to start jotting down ideas and sketches.

Boom. Two years and 250,000 words later, "The Black Directive" is on its fourth and final draft.


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## Scribble (Oct 22, 2013)

This is a weird mix:

The 1979 movie The Warriors

A social psychology course 

The Hobbit movie (I was disappointed, I felt I could do better than Jackson in characterizing orcs, goblins, and trolls )

The Sorcerer's Apprentice 

Re-reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, it's painting with words.


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## Chessie (Oct 22, 2013)

What inspired my current story? Balto.


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## yachtcaptcolby (Oct 22, 2013)

Eight years ago, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to stay in the city after graduating college. I started writing a story about moving back to a small town. Two chapters in, I gave up - probably because I made arrangements to stay in the city and wasn't stressed out about it anymore.

I revisited it a few years later and fell in love with those first two chapters. It needed more of a hook, though, some kind of supernatural story. So I worked in the idea that no one in town could die and it was the main character's fault. I had been reading Iain M. Banks's Culture novels and was struck by how strangely many of his characters acted - advanced technology had rendered real death essentially obsolete, and the removal of the fear of such took away everyone's inhibitions. I wanted to play with that myself.

Then I realized I could tie it all into my previous self-published novel and it spiraled out of control from there.


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## buyjupiter (Oct 22, 2013)

For the story set in Egypt, the events of the last decade. It should be an interesting blend of an outsider to Egyptian culture writing about an outsider in Egypt (the main character is Sudanese). It'll probably be horrible, but the concept intrigues me. I'm playing around with ideas about what makes a single person "insane" vs a society that is insane, and how this society comes back from the kind of chaos political instability brings.


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## Guy (Oct 22, 2013)

My two flagship characters started out as Dungeons and Dragons characters I made back when I was in high school (1980s). They both advanced to such a high level that there wasn't any point in playing them anymore. One is a warrior (or fighter in D&D parlance). As an experiment, I once put her up against three war deities. She defeated two of them. I thought that was pretty good for a mortal. I stopped playing them but they stayed in my head. Then one day a commercial for laundry detergent set off a reaction in my head that became a scene for my first book, and I gradually built up an entire novel around that scene. I once saw a writer - I can't remember who - describe the process as like an oyster creating a pearl - a grain of sand gets in there, and irritant it can't get rid of, so it builds up a pearl around the grain to get some relief. I can't think of a better way of putting it.


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## psychotick (Oct 22, 2013)

Hi,

Glad I'm in good company for weird inspirations. The weirdest one I've got was my first book Thief which started out as two completely different books. The first one started with a scene in my head from some movie or another. A jewel thief dangling on a wire as he travels between two buildings with his loot, and for some reason when I was thinking about it and especially about everything that could go wrong, the idea of hanging there thirty stories up and an angel comes flapping by sort of captured my thinking. The second book was inspired by a scene from a movie, Date with an Angel, in which the angel is bathing in a pool and being spied upon by our smitten hero. And then somewhere along the way those two different half written books unexpectedly became one.

Cheers, Greg.


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## A. E. Lowan (Oct 23, 2013)

Our world is so large, so developed, and has been worked on for so many years that there have been many, many inspirations that have contributed to it - books, movies, even a K-pop video.  But the very, very beginning was a sketch of a pretty young woman with white hair, and before I was done I knew she was a wizard, and her name was Winter, and she was the last of her line.


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## shangrila (Oct 23, 2013)

What inspired my story was a what if question; what if a Spartan lost his shield but still returned from battle? The old saying goes something like return with your shield or on it, so what if one of them did neither. It's evolved since then, now having this particular question more a part of the backstory than the actual narrative, but that's still how it all started.


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## TrustMeImRudy (Oct 23, 2013)

Always loved mythology, read it since I was a kid with an insatiable appetite. Then I started playing Elder Scrolls, whatever, nice games, story's always kind of weak, but interesting background. I wanted to see where the gods came from so i looked it up. 

WOW, the background lore makes real mythology look like childs play [helps that this one was consistently made, but still was purposely made with the kind of is this true or is this that real world mythology would have]. Decided I wanted my own world with myths of different people that intersect and change one another.

Hence my Mythic Cycles.


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## Ireth (Oct 23, 2013)

_Low Road_ came about after a statement from my mom ("You should write a story about a Scottish vampire... named Olan!") merged with a question of mine ("What would vampires in a non-Christian setting be like?") Thus I made my vampires, the _sumairach fala_, "children" of the Celtic goddess Morrighan.

_Winter's Queen_ has a long and convoluted history. At its earliest beginnings it was the story of a young schoolteacher who is turned into a werewolf, and goes out seeking a cure. She is then kidnapped by pirates, and rescued by a mysterious masked man who is searching for his kidnapped daughter (the daughter is NOT the werewolf lady, jsyk). I started wondering about the daughter, who was apparently trapped in Faerie, and gradually the werewolves and pirates vanished from the story altogether. The story became one of a human girl kidnapped by an evil Fae prince, and her father and uncle's quest to get her back before midwinter, when she'd be married to the prince and trapped there for eternity.

_Summer's Pawn_, the sequel to WQ, has a much simpler idea: "What'll happen to the heroes once the events of _Winter's Queen_ come back to bite them in the arse?"


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## Sheilawisz (Oct 23, 2013)

Seven years ago, one day I was watching History Channel when they announced a new documentary about the Black Death that devastated Europe and other parts of the world between 1347 and 1350.

The Black Death has always been one of my darkest obsessions, so I decided that I could not miss the new documentary about it. I watched it that night, and even though at first they were not talking about anything that I did not know already, soon they touched the story of King Edward III of England...

The English King wanted to create an alliance with Castile, and so his fifteen-year old daughter Princess Joan was to depart in order to marry the Castilian heir and one day become Queen of Castile.

I was totally fascinated by the story of the Princess that sailed away in her travel to a far off land, soon falling victim to the Plague and then disappearing mysteriously from the world... I had to know everything about Joan, and from that moment I started to research like crazy and to imagine a story about her in my mind.

I started to write _Joan of England_ in 2007 and today it's a finished Fantasy trilogy that I absolutely love =)


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## Scales (Oct 23, 2013)

The Zipangu Trilogy is inspired by Ginga Nagareboshi Gin, Inheritance Cycle, Harry Potter and real life.

Dragon riding samurai wolves during 1940s Japan gather up to stop ragnarÃ¶k occupation, and the protagonist trains to join them.


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## Mythopoet (Oct 23, 2013)

The Book of Lost Tales, J.R.R. Tolkien's oldest version of what would later become The Silmarillion.
Plato's Timaeus
Various world mythologies
Tim Power's The Anubis Gates


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## Xitra_Blud (Oct 23, 2013)

Isn't it amazing how something can start with something so small and then grow into a whole world and adventure? I like to watch it grow. It's interesting to see it go from one thing to the next. Anytime I look at or think of the source that inspired me, I'm in awe, but everything comes from a seed. I sometimes get teary I'd when I think about it :')


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## Eagle (Oct 23, 2013)

My story began as a Final Fantasy VIII rip-off. Now, it is truly it's own entity and I am proud that it no longer borrows so heavily. Themes are also slightly inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire.


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## teacup (Oct 23, 2013)

Eagle, good thing it's it's own entity now. FF8 was a mess 

(let the game wars begin)


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## skip.knox (Oct 24, 2013)

Mine is deliberately imitative. The earliest full novel I can remember reading was an adventure story about some kids at some place on the British coast. It involved smugglers and an island and caves. Mostly what I remember is the sense of excitement I had in reading it. 

I already have a well-developed fantasy world, so I thought I would try my hand at telling that story, set it my world. It's no longer on the coast of Britain, it's in the Harz Mountains in Germany, but accomplishment sometimes wanders far from inspiration.


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## The Dark One (Oct 24, 2013)

Some great ideas here...

My recently published book was inspired by jogging around a park which features heavily in the story (the main character jogs around the same park and cooks up his evil schemes while doing so).

It was also inspired by my own brand of anonymous pranks which I call life sculpture. Our hero is a life sculptor par excellence, and through his pranks gets caught up in something way out of his control.


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## GeekDavid (Oct 24, 2013)

> Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.



Orson Scott Card


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## Malik (Oct 24, 2013)

25 years ago, I had an idea about a David Blaine-type magician (okay, David Copperfield, back then; but David Blaine would have been a better model) who had a whole shtick about being in touch with dark forces. He had facial tattoos, rocked the goth look, etc. He even had accumulated an occult following; ironic because it was all an act. The magic, though, was real. In my original version of the book, he ended up in the fantasy world where his family had originated, and used what he knew of Earth -- finance, road-building, basic governance, etc. -- to build an empire while becoming a powerful sorcerer. A neighboring country then decided to recruit someone else from Earth as his foil, and a war ensued to unseat him.

After a couple of rewrites I realized that I had my protagonist and antagonist reversed; the magician was turning out to be a selfish, conniving prick and the guy brought in to counter him -- a down-on-his-luck stuntman with a drinking problem and a vigilante complex -- was clearly the hero. They're both fairly gray as good guy / bad guy, now; where it really gets black hat / white hat is when they're each against a wall. That's when the magician turns very dark and nasty to get things done and the hero just gets funny.


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## Ayaka Di'rutia (Oct 24, 2013)

The overall story of Warhammer 40K provided a lot of inspiration for my WIP, mainly in the area of epic war/army ideas, although I've never read any of the W40K books (or played the game) and it isn't as violent or bleak.


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## Eagle (Oct 24, 2013)

teacup said:


> Eagle, good thing it's it's own entity now. FF8 was a mess
> 
> (let the game wars begin)



Oh you did not, good sir! But I do agree, FF8 had it's fair share of shabby plots. My story was more based on the whole concept of students being trained to be mercenaries and then fighting a sorceress. It's very different now, thankfully, but the initial influence will always be the same.


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## RS McCoy (Oct 24, 2013)

This is such a great thread! How often do we writers want to share the origins of our stories?

My book Sparks follows a mind reading teen who attends a school to train students to use their special abilities, or 'sparks'. Some students are talented with fire, others with animals, some with languages, etc. The idea started with the idea that there are people who are just ridiculously good at something, whether it be writing, or painting, or what have you. Those people don't have any physical trait that distinguishes their ease in their area, but they nonetheless have something special.


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## Xitra_Blud (Oct 24, 2013)

My idea honestly started as a video game idea, which then turned into a movie saga idea (six films, to be exact), which then I got an idea for a prequel. The prequel came from a smaller part of the episode (which, alone, was inspired by a dream). I already had another prequel idea for the movies that evolved around one character and I didn't want to have two movie prequels, so I decided to write the main prequel as a novel, and that's what I'm working on now. From a picture of MCR, to a video game idea, to six movie ideas (seven if you'll count Lance's prequel), to a novel that I'm working on now. It doesn't seem like it's been over a year since I got this idea. I love watching my work grow. Is like seeing your baby go from the crib to learning how to walk. Just hope I get to see it graduate


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## Sam Evren (Oct 24, 2013)

I was walking down the street, I saw a scene in my head, and I built the book around that scene. But not right away.

What really inspired me to write it was a letter from a girlfriend I found one night. I was at my desk. I was lost. I didn't know what to do, not just that night, but at all. 

My desk is a large, old roll-top from the late 1800s. It's filled with the last 26 years of my life. Sometimes, when I'm lost, I just open the drawers and look through my past.

That night, the night I started writing my book, I opened a drawer and found a letter. It was from my first "serious" girlfirend. The post mark placed it 13 years in the past. It was unopened.

I opened that letter. We were, at the time she wrote it, still in college. It was another time when I'd been rudderless in my life, and she'd written to encourage me to take Creative Writing classes. 

She wrote one line, a line about looking at a blank page and realizing that you have 200+ pages to write not being easy, but you have to start somewhere.

I realized she was right.

I started writing my first book that night. I wrote the bulk of it over the next few months. I didn't finish it until last week. I did finish it, though.

And she was my inspiration for starting it.


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## Mindfire (Oct 25, 2013)

I actually keep a list of all my influences and what parts of my work they inspired, from the Codex Alera to Thundercats.  

My current idea was originally conceived as being "Justice League Unlimited + Sky High, but in a fantasy world where superpowers = magic." ...It's evolved a LOT since then. The superhero aspect is 100% gone. There is no more international order of peacekeeping knights or a secret training academy based in a sinkhole city originally built by dragons (it made sense in context... I think). I ditched the generic elves, dwarves, and giants. And I no longer have gimmicky phoenix demigods (who in retrospect were strangely similar to the Golden goddesses from Zelda).

My current story I guess you could say is inspired mainly by the Codex Alera and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not necessarily plot-wise, but style-wise.


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## Addison (Oct 25, 2013)

I honestly don't know where a lot my story ideas come from. Sometimes I'll just be googling images for random things and one will provoke an idea or a question that I seriously consider. My current work is a combo of question and life inspiration. The question was "What would life be like if magic and all its creations didn't disappear?" a question I thought of while in a very dull class of high school history which I completely blanked on as I imagined myself in a history class where I was learning about the peace treaties between dryads and lumberjacks.


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## Tanihatu (Oct 25, 2013)

I have had a lot of ideas floating around in my head. I picked one and am now running with it.

The inspiration? Firstly my own cats. At home we love giving them voices and figuring out their characters. Secondly, Neil Gaimans 'The Price'. I love this and set me off on writing loads of ideas down.

I have drawn lots of inspiration from fantasy films, Tolkein, Lewis etc and then just said 'what if i did this with cats? Could i combine the two elements?!'

I have been recommended a series called 'The Warriors' to draw inspiration from but i think i am going to have a go first so i dont get too heavily influenced!


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## ascanius (Oct 25, 2013)

what inspired me to write were my nerdy friends at university.  what inspired my current wip, the world around me.  mostly books though for some reason I rarely get ideas from fantasy books.


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## Jabrosky (Oct 25, 2013)

I've finally got around to writing a novel outline all the way to the end. I will confess though that the plot owes more than a bit of inspiration to Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, most of all his short novel _Hour of the Dragon_. It is about a queen who must go on a quest and fight her way to reclaim her throne after all.


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## Mythopoet (Oct 26, 2013)

Jabrosky said:


> I will confess though that the plot owes more than a bit of inspiration to Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, most of all his short novel _Hour of the Dragon_.



As a lover of Howard's Conan stories, that sounds like excellent inspiration!


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## Jackarandajam (Oct 28, 2013)

Mr. Tolkien was the first fantasy I ever read as a child, so he will always get some credit. My current work was inspired by Treasure Island, Fight Club, and the movie Smokin' Aces.
It's called King Dogugorra the Mighty, but I toyed with the idea of calling King Dogugorra Must Die… I don't think I have quite the amount of action necessary to live up to a title like that though.


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## NellaFantasia (Oct 29, 2013)

I was roleplaying with some friends and really liked the character I created, so I wanted to tell her side of the story. And it kind of just took off from there.


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## Bruce McKnight (Nov 1, 2013)

The idea for my current work just sort of popped into my head one morning when I was between sleep and waking. I had an idea for a character that I had been kicking around for months. One night I was thinking about a rough structure for a different idea and when I woke up, all the pieces to integrate this character and backstory into this structure just fell together. I grabbed my notepad and jotted down all the thoughts otherwise I would have surely forgotten.


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## Daeldalus (Nov 3, 2013)

I actually had a dream where a guy with a huge bag over his shoulder jumped from an upper balcony of a house and then vanished mid-air, only to pop back up running on the other side of a wall. the guy standing next to me said that only a (I don't remember) could have pulled that off. 

When I woke up I thought how cool it would be to have a world where all "magic" had to be contained within an object, a huge bag for instance, in order for it not to affect the world without the user's input. From there everything else kind of just fell into their places.


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## oyler44 (Nov 6, 2013)

To be honest, my inspiration for my book came from my son. I read him the Dragonlance books as a kid and he loved them, now he pretends to be a Knight of Solamnia with all his friends. Ahh teenagers...


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## Abbas-Al-Morim (Nov 6, 2013)

I've built my fantasy world, destroyed and rebuilt my fantasy world several times over, learning from each stage, keeping the good and throwing out the bad. It's still not perfect, and the genre has changed from High Fantasy to Low Fantasy (taste changes with time, I guess) and has become a lot more cynical and critical of our world. But the world has become more realistic, more unique and more intriguing with every consecutive stage in the build-destroy cycle. I've attempted to write a novel several times but I usually lose interest after the first chapter(s) because I'm not entirely happy with my world. I'm a world-building perfectionist and quite frankly, world-building is half the fun for me. Sometimes, I wish I'd write more prose instead of lore but I'll keep re-imagining my world a bit longer. 

Although my setting is in effect a fantasy mirage of Earth 1400 AD (with a smidgeon of Earth 1000 AD and Earth 1200 AD thrown in as developments in my world aren't parallel to ours). That being said, there are a lot of bigger and smaller differences and they really make the setting unique.

(So my inspiration comes from history and all the Fantasy books and games I've read or played. It's an ongoing effort feeding off the inspiration provided by dozens of works).


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