Memory Lane

I was going to blog about guns, and how they’re bad and how the recent events in Orlando were a tragedy, but I think we’ve already heard all of that before. I extend my deepest sympathies to anyone affected and truly do think it was a terrible thing, but my condolences aren’t going to help or add anything to this discussion. My monetary donation isn’t going to bring those people back to life, or stop killers thinking the way they think, and if I lived in the area then my blood wouldn’t be needed either due to the immense generosity of the human race having already met that quota. So that’s why I’m blogging about something completely different today. I just felt that I should acknowledge that.

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I’m not sure what prompted me to do it. I was talking to a friend about a particularly awful old story I wrote on a website called Quizilla back in the day, and pure curiosity compelled me to try and dig it out of the Wayback Machine‘s archives. I didn’t hold much promise that my work would have been archived, and most of it wasn’t. But I found two things: 13 year old Kristian’s Quizilla profile, and Chapter 22 of New Recruit, my teenage vampire story.

That’s right. I wrote a teenage vampire story. And I’ll never live it down.

Rather than immortalise this monstrosity on the blog where I’m supposed to show off my writing talent, I will instead post two extracts here and point and laugh at them. The first will be a segment of my profile description, and the second will be a small extract from chapter 22 of the epic teenage masterpiece itself. But I’m not quite self-loathing enough to post the entire thing right here. So without further ado, here is a glimpse into the mind of a creatively rabid teenager from 2008:

I’m becoming a bit more popularz so it’s time to update my description. Yeah, I’m a guy. Plain and Simple. Believe it or Beat it. Age? 13. And I’m not a stalker or anything. Description: Ohh, I dunno. My profile pic is what I want to look like, I’m close to it. Green eyes, short brown hair. Nothing much else to know. Oh! I’m a MIDGET people! Webcam Show Schedule: HEY! Wrong guy, wrong website. OKAY?! Confession: I don’t update my journal much. I have a blog though: [REDACTED]. What else ya wanna know?

So at this point you may be wondering why I’m posting this here, and if I get a kick out of ridiculing myself. The truth is that I find this type of thing fascinating. It’s like that moment when you see a photo of yourself maybe four or five years ago, and realise that actually, yes, you do look like you’ve aged into the adult that society is convinced you’re supposed to be. Now, I always knew that I was a little… overzealous as a young teenager. But I don’t remember being this… sassy. Maybe this is only interesting to me – I hope not – but the passage of time and growth of the human mind has always been a keen point of fascination for me.

I’m not stalling, I promise.

Okay, maybe I’m stalling just a little.

Without further ado, I present to you an extract from chapter 22 of New Recruit. Jack Chimcholi (our sensibly named teenage vampire protagonist) is currently being introduced to the secret underground vampire city that lies below the town he lives in. His friend, Felix, is showing him to one of his favourite shops.

Felix then leads us to a shop which sells all sorts of anomolies which the human world couldn’t dream of. Sweets that make you tell the truth, Y-ray goggles that let you see all the things inside a body, V-goggles which shows you who’s a vampire.

“Woah. This shop have a name?” I ask Felix. I want to come back here later.

“Umm, ya stupid. Its called Berties Bizzare.”

“Berties Bizzare what?”

“Just Berties Bizzare. You don’t get it do you?”

“Whuh?”

“Bertie is an awful bizzare name for a vampire.”

“Oh. What the hell? Flying potion for 100 gold? That CAN’T be real!”

“Oh it is. It just has some nasty after-effects. Only for suicidals really. Here.” He says, taking a packet of the shelf and scanning it on a nearby computer. It comes up on hte screen, and he clicks an option saying “Show Dangerous After-Effects”. A video comes up.

It shows someone drinking the potion and smiling. He then flies up for 10 seconds and goes back down to the ground, holding the product and winking. He then blows up.

Felix tuts. “Death in 2 seconds.”

We walk on.

So it’s clear that I had a pretty nonsensical, overactive imagination. And let me assure you that whatever doubts I have about my writing, I can objectively say that I have come a long ways from writing this kind of trash. But the crazy part – and the reason I’m sharing this today – is that when I wrote this, I was fairly confident that I was ready to write a novel. In my mind, I knew that this wasn’t the best writing in the world and that a real novel would require more focus and attention to detail, but I was pretty sure that I was just about there. And to look back on this now, after 8 years more writing and having finished a Creative Writing degree, I can safely say that no, I was not ready to write a novel. I’m not even sure if I am now. The writing of a novel requires continued creativity, originality, editing, rewriting and an objective evaluation of one’s own work, along with much, much more. And when I do write a book, you can be sure that Jack Chimcholi, Reluctant Teenage Vampire will not be making an appearance.

New Year’s Resolve

It’s that time of the year where we all talk of how awful this year was and how everything will change in the next- wait, hang on a minute, we’ve done that one already. But viewpoints change over time, so we’ll truly start as we mean to continue:

Happy New Year! To some people, the turn of the year means nothing, but for the majority it’s a time of self-reflection and prospective planning. Last year I ragged on this a little bit, saying that people shouldn’t make themselves wait for the New Year before doing this, but in retrospect, anything that causes masses of people to find it within themselves to improve their lifestyle gets a thumbs up from me.

Last year, my New Year’s Resolution was to update my blog more frequently. In all honesty, I kind of forgot about this after a few months and it seemed that this place would forever be yet another writer’s abandoned project, doomed to the depths of WordPress save for the occasional, half-hearted polish. Resolutions are resolutions, however, because they’re a necessary improvement which nags at the back of our minds, and though I didn’t remember it to be a resolution as such, I came back on the 1st September announcing weekly blog posts across both my sites. So for once, I can actually say I achieved my goals! I don’t plan on halting the updates any time soon and I thank you all for reading my ramblings. To be honest, I’ve still only just started.

Personally, 2015 was a bit of a stagnant year for me. I didn’t really do anything new besides put effort into this blog, and I’m really not that much different of a person than I was the year before. It’s not exactly been a bad year (though it’s definitely had its lows), and it’s not been something I’ve disliked living in (apart from the aforementioned lows). If you wanted to call it a calm before the storm, then it’d be an overcast, chilly kind of calm.

2016… is going to be a decisive year for me. I finish my Creative Writing degree and finally have to face the world whether I like it or not. That may sound terribly cowardly, and it probably is, but it’s something that I’m going to have to deal with. I often remark that I still feel like a child at 20; well, if that’s the case, then it’s time to grow up and face responsibility. And when it comes to me, that is so, so much easier said than done. But facts are facts. If I’m the same person at the end of the year as I am at the start of it, then I’ll be in a very tough spot.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Whenever we wonder what we’ll be like exactly one year from now, we picture somebody who has grown in bounds, conquered fear and forged success; somebody who has become confident, found someone to live their life with, stepped outside their comfort zone and made the area outside it just as cozy. I envision this every year, and if you go back and read last year’s New Year’s blog posts, you may find them laced with that anticipation. And the troubling thought that crossed my mind is that, if you showed January, 2015 Kristian what January, 2016 Kristian was like, he’d lose all motivation and hope and consider the year a write-off.

On a less… morbid… note, I have here my new New Year’s Resolution, considering how splendidly the last one turned out! (Can’t believe I’m writing that without sarcasm.) After pondering a few ideas that ranged from fortifying self-confidence to accepting responsibility to gaining independence, I decided to fence them all into one word. My New Year’s Resolution is simply this:

Actualization.

I will write my dissertation. I will finish my degree. I will find a job and I will live with it and in it. I will write fiction, and I will work on a story, and I will learn to live outside of my comfort zone even if that currently scares me in irrational volumes. I have spent twenty years of my life hanging back, for multitudes of reasons, and it’s time to stop. And just saying it won’t make it any easier, or make me any less likely to fail. But it’s time to start trying to try.

And if I make this public, then maybe it’ll just be too humiliating to allow myself to fail.

Self-Reflection

For as long as I can remember, I’ve believed that the key to becoming a better person lies in one’s ability to see the world and themselves from many different perspectives. This way, they can avoid ignorance, unnecessary offense, and generally be kinder to others.

Sometimes, we don’t follow our own rules. I had to remind myself this morning that no matter your philosophies or beliefs, self-reflection and re-adjustment are always necessary, or you’ll find yourself slipping into another person who you might not entirely like. On Twitter this morning, I came close to creating a game, which, should it have taken off (which I’m sure it wouldn’t have), could have potentially offended many authors.

The premise of the game was to tweet the hashtag, conjure up the name of a pretentious-sounding novel, and then search for it in Google. If it was a real novel, you gained a point. If it was also a movie, you gained two. I rather quickly deleted these tweets after realising that creating a game that is literally about judging a book based on its cover is one of the dumbest and most ignorant things I could do.

The concept of being pretentious is, from my understanding, the act of claiming to have a high standard of morals and acting like you support charities and movements, but only so that you can gain some sort of moral upper-hand over your friends and be revered and admired by the people around you; so that they can call themselves a better person than you.

Basing an author’s ideals on the name of their book, therefore, is a rather dense thing to do. It could be a lovely book; it could be good, and simply not my cup of tea. It could even be autobiographical and highly self-critical. And that is why continual self-reflection is important, else I would not have realised this.

Sorry this blog post has been rather self-centric today. Coming up I hope to be making some blog posts about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and writing comedically, and the rise of storytelling in videogames such as those found in Telltale Games’ creations. Also, maybe a thing or two about cats, and why they shall become transcendent beings.