Journal

Discovery writing, it's the 'winging it' of writing. No outline, no plotting, just a vague idea of a story and a lot of stream of consciousness. I started out as a discovery writer, racing to my computer when my daydreams lead me to something juicy. Lying down in bed in the middle of the night, imagining what the Witcher would be like if Harry Potter was introduced into the universe. Twenty minutes later: "Hey, that's a story." This line used to get me off the bed. There's something magical about it. You have a scene, walking down a post-apocalyptic abandoned KL to get food from what's left of Tesco. You see it in your head and as you write it out, your reality is there. You are a cameraman and/or a witness to what's unfolding. Every emotion and action stirs a reaction out of you. A good joke makes you laugh; a dark hallway makes you nervous. The journey is something so raw waiting to be tempered and refined. If this is relatab

This is going to be a personal post and a confession. I've come to realize that in the months I kept up with the blog, my writer's block stems from this one thing:  " I'm obsessed with completing and publishing my novel so I can get out of the shit-hole I'm in and start living my life." It's something so simple and reading it in front of me now I feel ridiculous but here it is. All for the world to see. This is what killed my writing. It's so weird because anyone who is a writer will tell you that this is what chasing perfection does; anyone who aspiring to be one can tell you they've heard this piece of advice tossed around before. And I know. I've watched and read them .  Writers have told me chasing perfection kills creativity but it was a psychiatrist which told me why I was doing it . For the longest time, one of the things I kept doing was putting my life on hold believing that, because I haven't written a book yet, I'

Source: Twitch.tv Twitch is not for me. Not now, at least. Two months may've been too soon to hang my account, place it on the back burner, what have you, but I saw what it took to keep streaming. I learnt what it takes to live off streaming; the latter of which is personally the crux of my abandonment. To preface all this, streaming is arguably a career that consequently popped up as technology gets better. I believe it is. However, what isn't said enough is what a new streamer has to do to get a modicum of success if that is his or her aim. I started with a sum of money and a month's worth of research on how to get started. When I had everything set up, I had a mid-range computer, a decent microphone, and a webcam I scrounged off my sister. That was enough to set me for the short-lived one man show. Going live four hours a night from seven to eleven o'clock, Monday to Friday, I showcased single-player games that were heavily story driven. My main idea

I am terribly behind updating my blog. To whoever is reading, I'm so sorry. A lot of things have been happening in my life, none of them related to writing. Thank you for putting up with me, to whoever is still reading this. If no one is reading, then I'm just going to write as how I've always done. I finally finished the draft of Chapter Seven a couple of weeks ago. I'm not happy with it, but I'm not going to go through a grueling process of writing it from scratch. All it takes are a little tweaks here and there. This means a big deal for me because now I am finally passing the one-third mark of my novel and moving into the second act. As I write Chapter Eight now, everything just seems to make sense. I'm happy with the direction that the story is developing and now I'm taking a day off to thoroughly imagine how the rest of the chapter will go. There's a balance between stuffing and trimming that I tread upon and its a delicate process to me. Howev

I've been on a roll. Five hundred words an hour, throwing caution to the wind and letting my instincts dictate what happens next. It's great because it's progress. Nevertheless, there's an internal conflict between my editing self and my writing self. Even then, I've come up with a good way to compromise between the two. To preface the above, this is the kind of reckless writing I used to do when I started writing stories. The only difference is that I was unwilling to be the ruthless editor younger Ma-El needed. This changed somewhere, some time, I don't know when. I became hellbent on perfection, managing a meager ten words a night; ten on a good night, that is. To be completely honest with you, I've only begun getting out of this just a few days ago. One evening, I decided to say "screw it." I wrote word after word based off what I felt was the natural flow of how the chapter developed instead of trying to engineer the best scene. After that

It's been a rough week so far. I've been away from my computer, lacking sleep, and just generally feeling like crap. No surprise that I haven't been able to write as much. Now, I'm not sure whether I've mentioned this in previous entries, but my stable routine requires discipline and that's something I've not been able to muster. I'll bounce back but man it sure sucks when you're stuck in the mud. One thing I need to get off my chest is that I watched 'Love, Simon' today. It's a good movie and for now I can only imagine how good the book is. However, I can't help shake the anxiety that follows after experiencing good stories, especially the ones that are successful. There's a twist in my gut that makes me want to be at that point already. Slumps like these make it hard not to be impatient, to be across that finish line, to be on top of the mountain. This is that point in time where watching something like Love, Simon invites dea