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Preface | |
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Intermediate and Advanced Approaches to Fiction-Writing | |
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Developing and Complicating Characters | |
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Generating Characters | |
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Inhabiting Characters | |
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Representing Characters | |
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Character History/Background/Connections | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" | |
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Connecting Character to Story | |
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Motivation and Action | |
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Active and Passive Main Characters | |
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Relating Characters to Each Other | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "The Forest" | |
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Complicating Characters | |
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Sympathetic and Unsympathetic Characters | |
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Rethinking "Heroes," "Victims," and "Villains" | |
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Restraint in Writing Emotion | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Powder" | |
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Revision: Bringing Characters into Focus | |
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Character Exercises | |
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Reintroducing Third-Person POVs | |
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The Centrality of POV | |
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Real-World POV Decisions | |
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Complicating POV: Beyond First, Second, and Third | |
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Aspects of Third-Person POV | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "The Niece" | |
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Variations of Common POV Choices | |
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Objective Narrators | |
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Close Third-Person POV (Third Person Limited) | |
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Discerning Third-Person POV (Third Person Flexible) | |
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Degrees of Omniscience | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Inferno I, 32" | |
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Effectively Breaking POV Rules | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Gooseberries" | |
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Revision: Making Subtle POV Shifts | |
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POV Exercises | |
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The Uses of First and Second Person | |
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Stories that Require First-Person Narrators | |
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Aspects of First-Person POV | |
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Motives for Telling the Story | |
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Understanding the Past | |
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Applying Perspective | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "The Turkey Season" | |
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The Versatility of Second Person | |
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Disguised First Person | |
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Direct Address and Second-Person Narrators | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Trauma Plate" | |
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Revision: Making Major POV Changes | |
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POV Exercises | |
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Plot, Narrative Drive, and Alternative Story Structures | |
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Reclaiming the Pleasures of Plot | |
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Classical Plot Structures | |
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Plots and Subplots | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Father" | |
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Narrative Drive and Meaning | |
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Forward and Backward Movement | |
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Actual and Emotional Plots | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Photograph of Luisa" | |
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Advancing Plot Through Dialogue and Exposition | |
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Plot in Literary and Genre Writing | |
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Alternate and Experimental Structures | |
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Nonlinear Story Structures | |
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Image as Structure | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Graffiti" | |
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Revision: How Structure Emerges through Multiple Revisions | |
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Plot and Structure Exercises | |
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Time in Fiction: Scene, Summary, Flashbacks, Backstory, and Transitions | |
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Setting the Story's Time Span | |
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Scene and Summary in Draft and Revision | |
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Action, Description, and Dialogue | |
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Compelling Summaries | |
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Summary Within Scenes | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "The Eve of the Spirit Festival" | |
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Moving Through Time | |
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White Space and Transitional Phrases | |
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Flashbacks and Backstory | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "The Rooster and the Dancing Girl" | |
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Revision: Experimenting with Time | |
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Time Exercises | |
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Discovering the Story's Subject: Material and Subject Matter | |
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Ways for Writers to Identify Their Own Material | |
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Repetition and Variation in a Writer's Material | |
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The Difference Between a Subject and a "Theme" | |
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Psychological and Situational Subject Matters | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "A Wagner Matinee" | |
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Taking Risks with Subject Matter | |
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Ordinary Subject Matter: Beyond the Trivial | |
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Dramatic Subject Matter: Power vs. Sentiment | |
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Transgressive Subject Matter: Crossing Boundaries | |
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Nonrealistic Subject Matter: The Literary Fantastic | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" | |
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Revision: Discovering the Story's True Subject | |
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Subject Matter Exercises | |
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Macrosetting, Microsetting, and Detail | |
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Reseeing Familiar Settings | |
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Macrosetting, Microsetting, and Detail | |
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Essential and Arbitrary Settings | |
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Maximalist Settings | |
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Minimalist Settings | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "The Fence Party" | |
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The Possibilities of Detail | |
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Point of View and Detail | |
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Symbolic Detail | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Pilgrims" | |
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Revision: Inhabiting Places | |
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Setting Exercises | |
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Society, Culture, and Context: Research and the Imagination | |
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Creating Context | |
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Using Research to Enlarge Subject Matter | |
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Work and Leisure | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Orientation" | |
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Art, Science, and Other Fields of Inquiry | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Di Grasso: A Tale of Odessa" | |
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History, Biography, and Other Cultures | |
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Religion and Politics | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "Civil Peace" | |
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Revision: Contextualizing the Story | |
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Society, Culture, and Context Exercises | |
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Style and Dialogue | |
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The Writer's Style | |
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Word Choice | |
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Tone and Vision | |
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Figurative Language | |
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Sentence and Paragraph Work | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "The Cures for Love" | |
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Dialogue and Subtext | |
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Dialogue Rhythms and Styles | |
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Dialogue Tags and Accompanying Actions | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: "A Conversation with My Father" | |
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Revision: Line Editing | |
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Style and Dialogue Exercises | |
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Revision: Beginnings, Middles, and Endings | |
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The Writing Room | |
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Giving and Receiving Criticism: The Workshop | |
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Ways of Reentering a Story | |
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Structural Revision | |
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Beginnings | |
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The Creative Beginning and the Literal Beginning | |
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Setting Up the Story | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: Three Beginnings | |
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Middles | |
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Endings | |
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Inevitable Surprises | |
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Story Analysis and Questions: Three Endings | |
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Common Pitfalls in Beginnings and Endings | |
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Revision Exercises | |
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Anthology of Stories | |
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"Civil Peace" | |
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"Di Grasso: A Tale of Odessa" | |
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"The Forest" | |
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"The Cures for Love" | |
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"Inferno I, 32" | |
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"A Wagner Matinee" | |
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"The Eve of the Spirit Festival" | |
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"Gooseberries" | |
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"Graffiti" | |
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"Trauma Plate" | |
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"Car Crash While Hitchhiking" | |
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"The Rooster and the Dancing Girl" | |
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"Father" | |
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"The Niece" | |
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"The Turkey Season" | |
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"Orientation" | |
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"Pilgrims" | |
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"Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" | |
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"A Conversation with My Father" | |
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"Photograph of Luisa" | |
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"The Fence Party" | |
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"Powder" | |
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The Writing Process and the Writing Life | |
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Talent and Habit | |
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Advice and Experience from the Community | |
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Strategies for Developing and Maintaining Work Habits | |
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Writer's Block | |
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Advice and Experience from the Community | |
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Strategies for Overcoming Writer's Block | |
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Rejection, Publication, and Endurance | |
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Advice and Experience from the Community | |
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Strategies for Flourishing in the Writer's Life | |
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Appendices | |
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A Writer's Glossary | |
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Suggestions for Further Reading | |
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Author Biographies | |
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Credits | |
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Index | |