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...

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...

If I traveled back in time and told my younger self I'd be fully committed to writing a novel, I'd end up kicking my younger self in the shins before he could get too excited. I'm two-thirds done with my manuscript. It's horrible, but I keep telling myself most things are when I'm relying on streams of consciousness to churn the words out.  It's an emotional roller coaster. There's a lot of frustration and anxiety. Reading through paragraphs on paragraphs that don't reflect the visions I had; only then to discover maybe I didn't have them in the first place. Poorly built roads leading to these moments that I so wanted to write. This is the immediate worry among a long list of worries. However,  I don't see myself doing anything else.  I don't want to do anything else. I  delude myself into thinking this is what 'having a calling' means and I fall into it with my arms wide open.  On a side note, the fact that Samuel Beckett felt ...

I've been falling behind on Twitch streaming. My sleep schedule has been all over the place and I've been demotivated over not having the appropriate gear for it. Persona 5 comes out in three days and I hope they don't have blocked content. I hoped they don't block the whole game. I'm wondering whether I should stream my writing. Would anyone watch that? A writer going through his second draft not knowing anything at all on what to do. It goes alongside the Kickstarter account I'm thinking of doing for the novel. Streaming for the backers is one way of holding myself accountable to my schedule.

I've spent five days so far writing the first chapter. It's a slow process but I'm trying something new. I read out aloud as I write. This effort will hopefully allow me to write in a more natural way. The sentences in the brain is different than the sentences we speak out loud. While doing so, the process is rather slow. What makes it slower is when you have introduce a new concept that you're bringing to the story. That's the brick wall I've run into at Chapter One. Since Nora Katahari is a lecturer in moral philosophy, it's a challenge to try and fit existing philosophical terms into a modern fantasy setting in a parallel universe. It is the struggle to pick a concept like Occam's Razor and revise it to fit the world. I won't delve too much into it. Rather, I won't delve into it at all. This exchange may not even appear in the final book. That in mind, I will spend the next few days writing about the important characters the novel r...

I've been streaming Arkham Knight on Twitch. It's the final installment, supposedly, in Rocksteady's Batman. It's the current thing I'm going for in streaming single player video games, I take a look at the writing behind it and the way the developers set up the plot from start to end. Being a video game and not a book, trying to analyse the plot is an interesting thing to do. The main quest is primary conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist. At the same time, just like there are side characters to help Batman, there are also side characters who serve as mini-antagonists. Dabbling into the side quest is the same reading a redundancy chapter in a light novel or watching a filler episode on a TV series. In most cases, it is to add depth in the design of the characters. The people that they are, what drives them, and how they might think of the big picture of the world around them. Batman is Gotham's sentinel. A highly competent character who ...