Journal

I stumbled upon a video series called 'Movies with Mikey'  from a YouTube channel called FilmJoy. It's a well-produced series of Mikey's thoughts on the movies of his choice. Good laughs, deep insights, definitely worth checking out while we're all most of us are stuck at home. On his thoughts about the film "Serenity ", Mikey closes his video essay with the line that's the title of this post. I'm going to pause here to take a deep breath before changing gears. I actually don't know translate what I wanted to say about the title. What I'm going to do instead is write three anecdotes that encapsulates why that line resonated with me. 1. In great suffering, I wish I could tell you I was coiling in the abyss, acting on dolour-driven fantasies like the next guy. It had been a hell of a week. I was caught between a rock and a hard place, especially when the best foot out was a half-measure. Instead, what actually happe

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'