karma

i am still reeling in shock.

my friends and i were in the metro, on our way home and we were just chatting as malaysians always do. during a lull in the conversation, a nice looking aunty came over, smiling, and tapped my friend, sherylee.

i nudged her to get her attention, and this blond haired russian aunty pressed something firmly into sherylee's hand. she smiled, and walked away.

we both thought she just passed on some random piece of paper, or gave sherylee drugs or candy or something. when she opened her hand, we were shocked to see a 500ruble note. that's like equivalent to rm50.

we were so shocked, and when we tried looking around for the lady to question or thank her, she had disappeared amongst the crowd in our wagon. and then she must have slipped out with the rest of the crowd when we pulled up to the next station.

Sherylee and i were in such a shock, and theorizing as to reasoning behind the nice lady's actions.

we told elise, another of my friend who was catching some shut eye next to me. she immediately thanked sherylee in advance for belanja-ing us lunch haha...

but we decided to give the money off to someone else who were more needy. it would've just been wrong to keep that money!

when we got off at our station, another russian aunty who had been in front of us the whole time asked if the nice lady said anything to us etc. then she told us the lady must've heard our conversation about our winter trip and the payments we had to make or something.


on our walk back to the hostel, the four of us including zi were still reeling in shock.


it'll be awesome when we pass on that money to a needy looking babushka or something, passing on the good deed in a chain :)


god bless the nice lady. karma comes back around and i'm sure something good is bound to go back to her.


ps. i'm still kinda on a high, reeling from the shock. faith in humanity restored! haha..

You've got mail!

or at least, i've got nano mail... and the timing couldnt be better.. :) 

i'm feeling rather exhausted after typing out almost four thousand words today... my contact lenses should have been taken out hours ago, i still need to take a shower, update my microbiology sketchbook, and prepare for two different classes that start way too early tomorrow morning. And my characters are still calling to me. 

anyway, the mail i got was like a little pick-me-up. i liked it so much that i'm gonna post it here. 

Subject: A Pep Talk from Chris Baty

You're watching a movie. And halfway through it, the hero crumbles.

He or she is lost. Surrounded by zombies or forsaken by love or separated from their favorite wookiee. They stare forlornly at the mess their life has become, hope fading that things will ever be put right again.

Screenwriters call this moment "the long, dark night of the soul." Every Hollywood movie has one because we love seeing our protagonists pummeled for a while before they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and head out to kick some ass.

NaNoWriMo participants go through their own long, dark nights of the soul halfway through November. If you haven't experienced one already, you will very soon.

I say this with certainty because we've spent a lot of time and money making the middle stretch of this year's adventure especially difficult.

We don't have the costumes or the makeup budget to send a convincing-looking group of zombies to your door. Instead, we've relied on smaller, cheaper things to demoralize you mid-month. We've convinced your bosses and teachers to heap projects on you at the last minute. We've gotten your family to pitch fits when you need to get caught up on your word count. Most insidiously, we've paid your novel's cast to stumble through their scenes with all the eloquence and charm of a baked potato.

Why? Because we have to do something to make your novel-in-a-month endeavor a fair fight. Which it isn't. Look at you! You're a fantastically gifted individual, with fierce courage and an imagination powerful enough to knock out a dozen books in November.

If you don't believe me, just scroll back through all you've written so far. That's more than most people achieve in a year, and you did it in two weeks. It may be less than you'd hoped, and the quality may be crappier than you'd envisioned. But first drafts are supposed to be rough, and I guarantee you're too deep in the process right to recognize all the great stuff you've put on those pages. Despite our meddling, you've achieved a truck-load of literary goodness. And it's just a taste of what's ahead.

Because the second half of this noveling marathon is when things really begin to move. For starters, the NaNoWriMo-funded interference will end. This is partly because we've realized the whole "fair fight" thing was a dumb idea, and partly because we blew all of our harassment budget on yesterday's spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to crash every word processor in Manitoba.

Shenanigans aside, the back half of NaNoWriMo has always been a place where writers get their second winds. As long as you keep working, your potatoes will turn back into charismatic protagonists, and your imagination will build a path right out of these mid-month doldrums.

You can help build that path faster by hitting your writing goals for the next three days. This may sound like a small thing, but little, consistent writing achievements open the door to huge writing breakthroughs.

If you've fallen behind on your word count or lost the thread of your story, you may think no breakthrough will be big enough to save your book. Take heart: There are 300,000 of us out there right now living that exact same movie. We're all struggling to balance our books with the crazy stuff life has chucked at us these past two weeks. We're all wondering if we have what it takes to see this thing through. And we're all about to stand up, dust ourselves off, and go kick some major ass.

The long, dark night is ending, my friend. The homestretch lies ahead.

I'll see you at the finish line.

Chris

random much?

wrote more than 3000 words today for nanowrimo :) and i'm still not done for the day. the juices are flowing, baby!

anyway, i was taking a break from writing, and something funny happened.

naturally i texted one of my besties (shoutout to jialickme) and we had a very brief but fun texting session. they were also a few of the hardest text messages i had to compose. i had to squeeze my brain so hard trying to type out those few messages. took the both of us freaking long to send texts to each other.... constructing the erm, sentences, proved to be a harder challenge than expected. ;p

and she saw one of the new acronyms i made up as a typo -.- dummy. i just hadnt gotten to explaining the acronym!

anyway, i'm back to writing :) oh how i wish i could skip class tomorrow just so i could type through the night and continue typing all day.... but i wont. cos i cant. :(

anabasis.

as kids you have play dates. (or at least, the americans in my storybooks are all about arranging play dates for children)

when you hit ten, its all about hanging out with your friends.

at fifteen you can go out at night and it morphs into lepak.

reaching twenty you begin to chill.


but what comes after that? getting drinks after work?

and what about people in their mid-thirties or early forties? have a get-together?

after that you're in the tai-tai meeting up for brunch phase.

then what? visiting your friends at their homes because you all go to the same morning exercise thing in your neighborhood?
slowly each person shows up with a maid that your daughter in law stuck onto you?


i dont wanna get old.

11k

So. against my better judgement, i for some reason, decided to take on nnwm this year. never mind that i have a lot of things to settle academically or that i've barely had much free time this semester. 

Such a pretty badge this year ;)

i started pretty late but the words came spewing out, and there's no turning back now. i've just passed the 11k mark although my supposed target by this time should be 15k. 

feeling pretty nervous though... my characters have decided to make out and leave me standing at one side, trying to figure out what they'd wanna do next. D: 

they did tell me what they'd be doing in a few days' time, so i'm not so worried if i can get to that point. getting to that point from where i am is what's giving me the headache. 

so i've taken to going through the nnwm website etc, got myself a pretty word counter badge thingy. hopefully that'll motivate me to continue pumping words out. 

and they've got a word count scoreboard by your country... germany's right at the top, followed by london. america's split by states and region though, so kudos to them for snagging so many other top spots... moscow is ranked no. 486 haha... russia is only slightly better, coming in at 466. malaysia's doing pretty darn well at 117 :)

ignorance is bliss.

Ionkina (my physiology teacher) has permanently spoiled chewing gum for me. there was this class where we were learning bout the hunger-satiety mechanism etc and she once said that if you ever see a person, especially a medical student or a doctor, chewing gum, it goes to show that said individual has completely zero knowledge about physiology, and how said person might not have even completed high school. you know, because the chewing action activates your glands and stomach motility etc but there's no real food going down, so it ends up being bad for you etc. 

one of the reason that stuck with me was because of how epic it was when she said that. the way she just looked you in the eye and go "zero knowledge. Zero." is something that kinda sticks. besides, who makes such a big fuss over chewing gum anyway?

so. why the random rambling? 

i was watching an interview, and this actor that i absolutely love happens to be someone who would always chew gum on set and it was brought up during the interview. 

unfortunately, my brain went straight from the actor chewing gum to "zero knowledge" and that sucks because for the rest of the interview (which spanned an hour long) i kept thinking of how this actor i love, has "zero knowledge" and how much i'd like to tell them that chewing gum is really bad for you.

gargh. it was a wonderful interview though.

Nanowrimo

November's here! and that means Nanowrimo '12 is here... 

for those of you who dont know, it stands for national novel writing month. a friend of mine introduced it to me years ago... the objective is to write a novel in a month. 

50 000 words in a month. just type it all out, no editing, no nothing. just squeeze those creative juices and bring your characters to live. there's a word count program thingy on their website, and you can see your bar slowly increasing as you progress throughout the month. 

So once you surpass the 50k word count within november, you're considered a winner :) and you get really cool badges and a cert or something. you can even publish your book. here's one of the badges i got way back in '09.

i think most people who get to the 50k mark would agree with me that getting there isnt the hard part. oh sure, there'd be days when the plot bunnies all hop away, and there's no inspiration, the muse is off playing hookie, and you hit writer's block. but, if you're lucky, things work out in the end and the words just come spewing out. 

the hard part is the editing. here's the thing. you put in so much effort, and you think you've got a solid piece going on. but when you edit, you end up throwing chunks out and wondering if you were sane when you typed those chapters out. and you end up jumping back and forth throughout your story, making sure you get your details to match.

my original piece was about 85k, and after all the editing i think it got cut down to 60-70k words. 

i enjoyed writing. i still do. but i think i'm still recovering from the phobia i got from editing. nowadays when i try to write, i cant help but read when i'm done for the day, as opposed to reading through and editing only when i was done with the whole piece, like i did back in '09. 

and i hate reading back what i've written. i dont like reading what i wrote. and i am absolutely terrified of someone else reading my piece.

i keep running different scenarios in my head, and in the end the story just dies there because i cant bring myself to just leave things be and continue on with the story. i keep thinking how frustrated i'd get when i do my final editing after finishing the story. hence the WIPs (work-in-progress for those  of you who dont know) accumulating on my laptop and phone. then when i stumble upon them on a random day, i'd be so pissed at myself for not continuing because i think those storylines have a pretty good backbone and plot line going on. 

maybe one day i'd be able to finish another piece. type in my last full stop and put the end  and save the doc. feel the elation without the dread that follows in the wake of editing.