mood: proud
music: Listztomania – Phoenix

I love words. I love writing them, I love reading them, I love speaking them, I love studying them. I’ve been called a flake, a hypocrite, and a liar, all because of my love for words and the way I use them too loosely. When I am happy, I love to express it through words. When I am upset, I need to express it through words. When I am confused, I always turn to words to help me sort out my feelings. When I am earnest, I use words to make promises. When I am trying to help, I use words to comfort and advise.

(I know I’m in love because he’s the one person in the world who can really make me speechless — it means that he has the power to extinguish the words swirling around in my head and render them useless to describe how he makes me feel, whether that feeling be good or bad. That’s how I know that my feelings are legitimately strong. That’s how I know that he’s something special.)

I love reading. In the past month, I have read so many books and so many stories. I am still uncertain as to whether I am doing this more out of a desire to read books or more out of a desire to escape to another world where things are different and if not better, at least not directly affecting me. I’m pretty sure it’s a mix of both, but that’s no matter. I love the power that these formations on a page, these sounds that we make — I love the power that words exude. I love the way that a good book can change your life. I love the way that a single line on a single page in a single book can suddenly make you understand something that your friends have been trying to teach you for ages. I love the way that a string of words, phrased a specific way, can remain etched so clearly in your memory even when the last names of half the people you knew in high school start to fade.

I love writing. Since the breakup, I’d mostly only been writing original stuff. Fanfiction was too difficult to engage in with other, suddenly more pressing things on my mind, and anything based on real life hurt too much (well, other than two stories I wrote immediately after everything happened and before I got any answers to my questions). Today, I spent most of my time cooking, working on late Christmas presents for my friends, and watching television shows, namely The Daily Show and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Watching YGO! was fun because I’ve never seen Duelist Kingdom in Japanese and so it’s new while not really being new at the same time. It actually made me really want to read Duelist’s Point, my epic NaNoWriMo story, and so I pulled out and edited a lot of chapters to be posted later (maybe tomorrow). Then, I was reminded of the other recent Darkshippping stories I’ve written. I’d totally forgotten about both Defeat and The Pharaoh’s Ring (which hasn’t been finished yet! I had no idea). I worked on TPR for a while, which was really enjoyable. (It was really interesting to me that after the past four months, I have a totally new perspective on a lot of the character interactions and conflicts. It’s pretty amazing and useful. Maybe the next time I’m upset I can channel it this way, haha. New character understandings!)

It’s one of the best feelings in the world, when the words just flow so naturally from your fingers. It’s something I was always really sad to not be able to achieve with music (upon hearing this, Mark would tell me to practice, haha), but I imagine a lot of musicians know what I mean by that sort of blissful feeling.

Anyway…I’m just really thankful to be blessed with this talent. Or this interest. Or this hobby. Whatever it is, I’m grateful for it. Writing soothes my soul. I may never be a big shot author — or even a small, published one — but I’m proud to be a writer. I’m proud of everything I’ve produced, even the really embarrassing stuff, and I’m proud to continue to produce stories all the time, whether or not anybody reads them.

mood: at peace
music: Dear Vienna – Owl City

I love good action/adventure stories. Watching Avatar for the second time today (with my parents this time), I realized how to better explain my taste. I really love action; fighting sequences are really awesome to me — but unfortunately I’m also extremely squeamish. So I really enjoy action that’s not gorey or gruesome; action that gets the point across without explicitly emphasizing the violent aspect of it. Adventure stories are great for this. Most stories that have “battles” are usually winners for me. I also really like putting action scenes in my stories, but I kind of suck at writing awesome action. I think it’s definitely one of the hardest things to write convincingly (Rick Riordan actually does it really well in the Percy Jackson series; it was always very easy for me to visualize what was going on but it wasn’t like simple or anything; it was clever action that made sense and was exciting), along with romance.

I really love movies that fashion a new world. You know, ones where the writers had to sit down for a long time creating a world. I’m hardly degrading movies that aren’t like that, but those are definitely the ones that really catch my eye and get me really excited and…into them, really. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a total sucker for new worlds, superheroes, magical universes, mythology, all of that good stuff. My friends at Berkeley are always making fun of me for my random plot bunnies/wild imagination tidbits that I like announcing to the world, haha. Once, we were hanging out in C.J.’s room when we suddenly heard a loud train horn outside and were really confused, seeing as there are no trains that close to the dorms. Really excited, I suggested that maybe a superhero had just teleported a runaway train into the soccer field on top of the parking garages and that now our lives would be changed forever. I just love thinking about that kind of stuff. Maybe it’s childish. Maybe it’s unrealistic. Maybe it’s escapist. But more importantly, it’s fun.

Right now, I’m working on an original story about superheroes. The idea was born two summers ago during a family trip to Las Vegas; we had to take my dad to the hospital that time, and afterward, we dropped my mom off at Walgreens to pick up some meds. While we were waiting for her, I chatted with the cabbie. His story, in combination with the David Copperfield show that I’d seen the previous night, sparked my imagination and grew into a full-fledged plot bunny. I really hope that I’ll get somewhere with this.

In fact, I’m going to go work on it right now, before I sleep. Thank god for break and all this freedom!

I have spent the past two months writing, writing, writing. I’ve been having the time of my life. Before high school, it was easy to write chapters for five different stories at the same time, but once high school began, it was near impossible to get any writing done during the school year. Thank god for the summers, during which I went crazy writing CATCF and Cars–both of which were a delight to be completely immersed in. Ever since school started and especially after everyone left for college, though, the part of me that craves reading/writing has been deliciously sated. I write in class, I write at work, I read at home; it’s a fantastic life, really.

This year, I decided that I would give NaNoWriMo a try. Ever since 2002, two different epic plots have been spinning around in my head–one original and the other fanfiction (Yu-Gi-Oh!), affectionately dubbed “Epic Novel Thingy” and “3D”, respectively. I’ve written many parts of both, but as some of them came into being when I was twelve, a lot of them aren’t exactly the best, most well-thought-out things. So this year, I read the NaNoWriMo website and found out that their purpose is to get authors to get off their asses and write those damn ideas that have been floating around in their heads. And I thought–”Well, why the hell not?” So I decided that this year, I’m going to give my epic YGO! fic a try. It’s not super plausible. It doesn’t make total sense. It doesn’t really fit into the timeline anywhere. It features way too many pairings and original characters. It’s a little too…”I-came-up-with-this-when-I-was-12″… But… Well, why the hell not?! So I’m going to do it. I’m going to attempt to write 50k+ words of action, adventure, romance, and drama. AND I’M GOING TO LIKE IT.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of pre-writing and planning for this epic story, and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m really excited to get started. Even if I don’t win (read: finish all 50k words), I’ll at least have gotten off my butt and started on the damn thing, right? And, well, the story is so shitty (to an outsider, anyway; to me, it’s fucking brilliant, LOL) that it won’t matter if I have to write it under a time constraint! Yay!

So yeah. Don’t bother me when the next month rolls around. But do cheer me on!

I’m just glad that I’m finally getting a chance to do this, after years and years of being too stressed out by school to get involved.