Writing

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.