I have been feeling rather...uninspired lately. Well. Kind of.
The last time I did any real work on my book was a good two weeks ago, and the thought of that kind of stagnation is really driving a rather massive spike into my conscience's most vulnerable orifice.
To be absolutely fair, however, my almost inhuman obsession with attention to detail has been far from idle.
Simply put, I've been devoting most of my free time toward writing a much less serious, significantly more "fun" project. I'm currently very backlogged, so it looks like MoB will have to sit on the proverbial shelf for a little longer still. Mostly...I'm just trying to justify that my writing muscle hasn't been just sitting around all lame and unused.
It would be such a pity to see that muscle go to waste, yeah?
Funny thing is that most of my meetings at work (now absolutely meaningless to me, for various reasons) are spent with me scribbling into my notebook rather vigorously. To the casual eye, I am simply taking a hefty amount of notes. What I am in fact doing, however, is jotting down plot points, character backgrounds, organization structures, even sketching weapons...basically all the auxiliary information that I need to drive the story.
These notes have now consumed just over half of my notebook at work, with actual work notes taking up less than a quarter of what remains. (For those mathematically challenged, allow the Chink to light the way: that means that less than an eighth of my notebook actually contains work-related information.) Flipping through them does make me want to get back to the book, but actually sitting down and writing it has become slightly arduous.
I do know exactly how to bring myself out of this kind of rut, and I plan to do this once my "other" project has come to a close. You know me, guys...project-bouncing as always. :)
I was asked the following question a few days ago by an acquaintance: why do I write this book, even when I myself don't expect to see it published?
This took me back to the spring of 1999, just after my family had moved to Beijing, smack in the middle of my junior year of high school...when I had sat down to write the very first incarnation of the book.
The question really should be: why do I write at all?
As with any activity, people do the things they do for their own reasons. For my part, I was never a big writer until I decided to sit down and become the youngest author of an epic fantasy ever. (This, of course, I thought without doing any real research into just how young some published authors really were when they first got "discovered." Gimme a break I was a kid.)
Writing was therapeutic for me. Some of you who know me well or long enough may remember me mentioning a disaster of an incident back in 8th grade, back in the Philippines, one of the roughest years of my life thus far. Simply put, my parents never knew all the details. Hell, my parents never knew shit because I wouldn't let them find out. My sister never knew all the details. Only a handful of my friends know that anything happened at all. No details will be given be here, but suffice that I came out of that incident more than a little overwhelmed.
To recover, I poured myself into volleyball for the physical exertion. I got very good at that game and won the respect of many former "enemies" because of it. But what really helped pull me out of that dark place was my journal.
I'd kept diaries and the like even years prior to 8th grade, but they were all giggly, girly things that I am simply embarrassed to acknowledge exist. After what happened, however, my diaries morphed into what they are today: journals.
They went from "Dear Diary teeheehee giggle giggle this boy was in class teeheehee" to a compilation of disjointed thoughts and ideas. Everything, from sketches to broken song lyrics to word games to travel logs to book reviews, went into these journals. There were nights wherein I'd stay up for hours past my bedtime just to keep writing. The callous on my right middle finger is pretty impressive in size thanks to this.
I took particular pleasure in buying a new journal every time an old one got full. There was never anything quite like flipping through a pristine, untouched stack of bound paper, ready to assault it with my too-hard handwriting and chaotic psyche. I loved (still love) receiving new journals and notebooks for primarily this reason. The desire to fill it is...invigorating. Pressing down on a fresh pad of plain, unmarred, flat paper for the first time was and still is one of the best feelings.
Sometimes I flip through old journals just to hear the pages crinkle and smile a little when I catch a phrase or two that I recognize and remember writing.
But yes, my connection to my writing was forged from a necessity to know myself. To see who I am, on paper, in the purest form I could manage. There were times when I would embellish the truth even in these journals...sometimes I'd picture someone reading it, and I'd want them to think better of me for it, so I'd write something that I felt would impress this nonexistent reader.
Yes. I'm insane. This shouldn't be news to a single one of you.
From this hailstorm of scattered ideas, my current writing project emerged. At first it was just an action-packed fantasy story with weapons and moves described as though they were from Xena's own diaries, but soon it went through a very severe metamorphasis.
Upon entering college, my faithful Cheer Bear in tow, I rewrote the story for the first time. At that point I had actually managed to finish the first book and was well into the second. I scrapped it all and started over, recreating characters and places. It became completely unrecognizable from its original form.
Why? Was it because I thought it was bad and needed an improvement? Nah. It's simply because I knew how to make this "book" mine.
If you read Signet of the Moon, you'll know that there are three principle characters. (Don't worry, that's the only spoiler you'll see here.) These three characters are what I have identified as being the three cornerstones of my personality. The story is admittedly woven out of my own imagination, but these three characters and their conflicts are basically a well-worded (if I do say so myself) representation of what goes on in my own head.
You've got the insufferable, preachy, often hypocritical know-it-all who is overly concerned with pleasing the higher-ups. You've got the likable, humorous, highly skilled smartass. You've got the passionate, feel-everything-to-the-extremes, naive bitch who craves only infamy, recognition, and her own satisfaction.
If that doesn't sum me up pretty well I don't know what does.
You could say that the books will chronicle their struggle through the plot as a trio...not unlike I, as an individual, must face what lies ahead with three very distinct facets of my personality warring against one another. It's funny because so much of the dialogue, while stylized to suit the story, are very accurate portrayals of what sometimes goes on in my head.
Naturally, this is practically invisible to anyone but myself, as I've taken plenty of creative license with it since my original idea. As far as most of my readers can tell, they are three individual characters, each with their OWN personality and style. This is a good thing, of course, as it means I have written them exactly how I should have to make the story interesting and engaging.
So, the story itself was born of a very close study of who I am. Everything else that I do for the book (i.e, the 800MB's worth of Appendix and Supplemental Material) is just me being my nitpicky, attention-to-detail-obsessed self. I swear I've done so much work on the world surrounding the story that someone interested enough could potentially pick it up and create a game based on it. (That's just my inner nerd being hopeful, of course.)
In between bouts of Writer's Block or even just me getting distracted by a side project (*cough*), I do take some respite in the fact that I am still writing. My favorite short story, now truer than it has ever been, is the lovechild of one such adulteration, and it, too, is a look into the kind of person I am.
I used to crave readers very badly, asking anyone to just check it out and let me know what they think, but that's not so true anymore. Now, I just want to finish my books, to get everything down and on paper, not to impress anyone, but because I owe it to myself. I owe it to my 8th grade self, who only ever wanted to show the world who she was and what she could do. I owe it to me, now. If you don't read the story, that's just fine. I enjoy reading it over and over as I go through it time and time again to fish out elusive typos or factual inconsistencies, and that is good enough for me.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Holy shit...
...I talk. A LOT. How do you put up with me? I mean, ffs shut me up every now and again.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
A Real Update For Once
[NSFlazyasspiecesofshitwhohaveshortattentionspans]
I don't need to state that it's been a long fucking time since my last, genuine LJ entry that didn't involve plenty of self-gratuitous picture sharing or site-whoring, but I will anyway. It's been a long fucking time since my last, genuine LJ entry that didn't involve plenty of self-gratuitous picture sharing or site-whoring.
In such a massive span of time, plenty has happened. My circle of friends has since expanded to an incredible size, consisting of people that I would have been dearly sorry to miss out on meeting. I have fallen out of love. I have spent less time gaming and more time outside, hanging out in all manner of locales, from bars to clubs to volleyball courts to parks to my friends' apartments. I have finally made certain career moves that I have been planning to make for some now, only lacked the courage and conviction to carry out before. I have lost weight. I have fully embraced who I am, flaws and all, and accepted that at the end of the day, I am not a terrible person.
The friends I have now, I would never trade in. We grew so close so quickly that it's hard to believe I've only known them for 5 short months at most. I imagine it's all part of the "expat package," part of the life you experience when you go somewhere new, where you do not fit in with the majority culture, where you don't necessarily speak the local language. You naturally migrate toward and get close to the people who are like you, and, because they are so few in number, you latch on quickly to the people who don't immediately piss you off and have a hard time letting go.
Last week I had a bit of a crisis when I realized that, by this November, most of my closest friends will be gone. Yes, I know some will still be here (see Chuck? I totally just referenced you), but many won't be. Or, rather, there's a good chance they may no longer be here. While I am content to stay in Shanghai just so I can stop moving around for once, I know that not everyone is going to stay just because of the friendships they've made. Many of them have goals and aspirations of their own, and often times breaking (or at least weakening) certain bonds is necessary.
For my part, I've been dealing with all this "bond-breaking" all my life. Between my moving around and my friends also leaving because they lived similar lifestyles, I never really had a friend to call my closest or my best. No one really knew or understood me right down to the core, even my past boyfriends. In this particular group of friends, however, I have found a few individuals who know exactly what I have gone through, having experienced it themselves, and I am not willing to let them go so easily, even though I know that we will eventually part ways. Either I will move on, or they will. It is inevitable. It is part of the "expat package."
I have gone from the hardcore gamer I was in college to the casual gamer when I first came out here to start working to the occasional gamer. I no longer spend every day logged into Guild Wars, I no longer spend hours on end in Civ 4, I no longer slice and dice warlords, queens, and titans in my manta to gain my world UT2004 rank of #3 (damn you Midget and Nighteye!). Instead I find myself playing the old games, the games I really enjoyed when I was younger. Granted, I have suffered through this phase before and it will likely pass, but it's nice to play the games I grew up with, rather than trying to keep to the up-to-date, newer franchises that will rape both my wallet and my video card.
I go home after work and, while eating, I will either catch up on the latest episode of something that I have recently missed or log onto an instant messenger or fire up Planescape: Torment/Full Throttle/Grim Fandango (dammit Romain hurry up and let me borrow Fallout 2 already). I play/watch for about an hour, read if there's still time, then usually I'm out the door once more. This is if I don't workout or meet friends for dinner, mind you. My social calendar is full 6 days out of the week and, admittedly, I do occasionally miss the days where I just sit at home and dick around doing nothing particularly productive, but the sweet thing is that I can always just stay in if that's the case, and my friends will understand.
Volleyball is yet again a part of my life, though this time less about the importance of teamwork and more about just meeting new people and playing a game that I have always loved. After a month's worth of Saturday-afternoon-three-hour sessions, I have my old serve back. I'd forgotten how much I had really missed people saying, "Shit, it's Viv, back the fuck up she serves like a cannon." I mean, this comes from dudes who are well past the 6'4" mark. Feels good. Too bad I still can't jump for shit, hahaha.
I recently bought my very first two-piece swimsuit. I never owned one until now because when I think "beach" or "swimming pool," I don't think "sand" or "sun." My 13 years of competitive swimming has me thinking: "WATER." Water, Helen. WA-TERRRRR. Ergo, if I want to swim in that water, the best way to go about that is to wear a goddamn one-piece swimsuit. Plus, my insecurities about my body do not help. Anyway… I haven't worn this bikini out to a pool yet, but I have a feeling that if I do, I will spend a maximum of ten seconds out of the pool and the rest of the time in the water, either hiding my body or showing off my awesome speed underwater.
I belong in the goddamn water, dammit. Why do you fucks think I'm pyrophobic, eh? Because the water keeps me safe, yes it does. I like the rain, I like the ocean, I like everything about water. Damn all you pyromaniacs. Damn you all.
We'll see how that first trip to the pool goes. I will admit: I am quite nervous. My scars are better but they still haven't healed, and I'm more concerned about them than any other flaw I see on my body.
The good thing about that is that I've lost a lot of weight. I gained some back from January to March but now that I have a regular workout regiment and regular volleyball, I am not only losing weight, I'm getting quite fit. I like it and I look good. Too bad the scars won't go away…I think I will be insecure about those until something else crops up that I choose to fixate myself on.
As for my career, well, I have been to only one interview, but it went so well that there's a good chance I'll get the job…and if I don't, fuck it, my resume looks awesome and the interview gave me the confidence to keep right on looking. Basically though this will come down to how much they choose to pay me, heehee. Many, many thanks go out to Michelle for just handing over my contact info, as it basically forced me to put myself out there, and it paid off. I needed that push. Thank you.
That boost in confidence, coupled with a hot(ter) body and a full-on acceptance of the fact that even if I'm not gaming 24/7 I am still a huge nerd (*cough*UNIFIED*cough*) have basically had me sitting very comfortably with myself. A couple of bouts with boy drama, while saddening at the time, have pretty much left me unscathed and confident enough to move on and just be myself and do my thing. I like this feeling. It's new to me. I am no longer afraid of walking through a door that will close itself behind me, because I know that no matter what's in the room I just entered, I will be fine.
I no longer hear my parents' voices in my head, I no longer care about impressing anyone but my damned self, and that, my friends, is a wonderful feeling. For those of you who knew me more than 6 months ago, you know how big this is for me.
Thank you to every single person who's helped me get to this point. All of you know who you are.
On a sadder note, though, much love goes out to Matt. I love you kid, I really do. You are a big part of my life and I will never, ever forget you. I have so much respect for you, for the kind of person you are. There are so many people twice, thrice your age who couldn't hope to be half the man you already are. Stay strong, and I know you will, no matter what.
I kinda have to cut this short right here. There is still a lot to say, but I imagine there's plenty of time for me to get to it.
~ Viv
I don't need to state that it's been a long fucking time since my last, genuine LJ entry that didn't involve plenty of self-gratuitous picture sharing or site-whoring, but I will anyway. It's been a long fucking time since my last, genuine LJ entry that didn't involve plenty of self-gratuitous picture sharing or site-whoring.
In such a massive span of time, plenty has happened. My circle of friends has since expanded to an incredible size, consisting of people that I would have been dearly sorry to miss out on meeting. I have fallen out of love. I have spent less time gaming and more time outside, hanging out in all manner of locales, from bars to clubs to volleyball courts to parks to my friends' apartments. I have finally made certain career moves that I have been planning to make for some now, only lacked the courage and conviction to carry out before. I have lost weight. I have fully embraced who I am, flaws and all, and accepted that at the end of the day, I am not a terrible person.
The friends I have now, I would never trade in. We grew so close so quickly that it's hard to believe I've only known them for 5 short months at most. I imagine it's all part of the "expat package," part of the life you experience when you go somewhere new, where you do not fit in with the majority culture, where you don't necessarily speak the local language. You naturally migrate toward and get close to the people who are like you, and, because they are so few in number, you latch on quickly to the people who don't immediately piss you off and have a hard time letting go.
Last week I had a bit of a crisis when I realized that, by this November, most of my closest friends will be gone. Yes, I know some will still be here (see Chuck? I totally just referenced you), but many won't be. Or, rather, there's a good chance they may no longer be here. While I am content to stay in Shanghai just so I can stop moving around for once, I know that not everyone is going to stay just because of the friendships they've made. Many of them have goals and aspirations of their own, and often times breaking (or at least weakening) certain bonds is necessary.
For my part, I've been dealing with all this "bond-breaking" all my life. Between my moving around and my friends also leaving because they lived similar lifestyles, I never really had a friend to call my closest or my best. No one really knew or understood me right down to the core, even my past boyfriends. In this particular group of friends, however, I have found a few individuals who know exactly what I have gone through, having experienced it themselves, and I am not willing to let them go so easily, even though I know that we will eventually part ways. Either I will move on, or they will. It is inevitable. It is part of the "expat package."
I have gone from the hardcore gamer I was in college to the casual gamer when I first came out here to start working to the occasional gamer. I no longer spend every day logged into Guild Wars, I no longer spend hours on end in Civ 4, I no longer slice and dice warlords, queens, and titans in my manta to gain my world UT2004 rank of #3 (damn you Midget and Nighteye!). Instead I find myself playing the old games, the games I really enjoyed when I was younger. Granted, I have suffered through this phase before and it will likely pass, but it's nice to play the games I grew up with, rather than trying to keep to the up-to-date, newer franchises that will rape both my wallet and my video card.
I go home after work and, while eating, I will either catch up on the latest episode of something that I have recently missed or log onto an instant messenger or fire up Planescape: Torment/Full Throttle/Grim Fandango (dammit Romain hurry up and let me borrow Fallout 2 already). I play/watch for about an hour, read if there's still time, then usually I'm out the door once more. This is if I don't workout or meet friends for dinner, mind you. My social calendar is full 6 days out of the week and, admittedly, I do occasionally miss the days where I just sit at home and dick around doing nothing particularly productive, but the sweet thing is that I can always just stay in if that's the case, and my friends will understand.
Volleyball is yet again a part of my life, though this time less about the importance of teamwork and more about just meeting new people and playing a game that I have always loved. After a month's worth of Saturday-afternoon-three-hour sessions, I have my old serve back. I'd forgotten how much I had really missed people saying, "Shit, it's Viv, back the fuck up she serves like a cannon." I mean, this comes from dudes who are well past the 6'4" mark. Feels good. Too bad I still can't jump for shit, hahaha.
I recently bought my very first two-piece swimsuit. I never owned one until now because when I think "beach" or "swimming pool," I don't think "sand" or "sun." My 13 years of competitive swimming has me thinking: "WATER." Water, Helen. WA-TERRRRR. Ergo, if I want to swim in that water, the best way to go about that is to wear a goddamn one-piece swimsuit. Plus, my insecurities about my body do not help. Anyway… I haven't worn this bikini out to a pool yet, but I have a feeling that if I do, I will spend a maximum of ten seconds out of the pool and the rest of the time in the water, either hiding my body or showing off my awesome speed underwater.
I belong in the goddamn water, dammit. Why do you fucks think I'm pyrophobic, eh? Because the water keeps me safe, yes it does. I like the rain, I like the ocean, I like everything about water. Damn all you pyromaniacs. Damn you all.
We'll see how that first trip to the pool goes. I will admit: I am quite nervous. My scars are better but they still haven't healed, and I'm more concerned about them than any other flaw I see on my body.
The good thing about that is that I've lost a lot of weight. I gained some back from January to March but now that I have a regular workout regiment and regular volleyball, I am not only losing weight, I'm getting quite fit. I like it and I look good. Too bad the scars won't go away…I think I will be insecure about those until something else crops up that I choose to fixate myself on.
As for my career, well, I have been to only one interview, but it went so well that there's a good chance I'll get the job…and if I don't, fuck it, my resume looks awesome and the interview gave me the confidence to keep right on looking. Basically though this will come down to how much they choose to pay me, heehee. Many, many thanks go out to Michelle for just handing over my contact info, as it basically forced me to put myself out there, and it paid off. I needed that push. Thank you.
That boost in confidence, coupled with a hot(ter) body and a full-on acceptance of the fact that even if I'm not gaming 24/7 I am still a huge nerd (*cough*UNIFIED*cough*) have basically had me sitting very comfortably with myself. A couple of bouts with boy drama, while saddening at the time, have pretty much left me unscathed and confident enough to move on and just be myself and do my thing. I like this feeling. It's new to me. I am no longer afraid of walking through a door that will close itself behind me, because I know that no matter what's in the room I just entered, I will be fine.
I no longer hear my parents' voices in my head, I no longer care about impressing anyone but my damned self, and that, my friends, is a wonderful feeling. For those of you who knew me more than 6 months ago, you know how big this is for me.
Thank you to every single person who's helped me get to this point. All of you know who you are.
On a sadder note, though, much love goes out to Matt. I love you kid, I really do. You are a big part of my life and I will never, ever forget you. I have so much respect for you, for the kind of person you are. There are so many people twice, thrice your age who couldn't hope to be half the man you already are. Stay strong, and I know you will, no matter what.
I kinda have to cut this short right here. There is still a lot to say, but I imagine there's plenty of time for me to get to it.
~ Viv
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