Nano's here, and although I'd love for everyone to think that I'm superhuman and that I've destroyed it and I'm moving on to one of the other projects in my life, I haven't. I've been stagnant, and I've been stagnant for years, not really done anything about it and wasted my time away. Time that I could've spent writing things like the epics that have spawned from ideas that came from late-night AIM conversations, for instance, my latest one about a guardian angel that needs the saving. Lo, I wallow in my existence and instead of making the mark upon the world that I so greatly desire to do, I squander my time away playing video games, or watching television, or even something as mundane as surfing the internet. I waste considerable amounts of time on things that I routinely only averagely enjoy, while I've put my creative outlets on the backburner.
Time used to be that I loved to draw, loved to write, loved to fantasize and act out my stupid fantasies under the sheets until I fell asleep at night. Not saying that I roleplayed alone before masturbating, because that's secretly odd and on an entirely different level than what I mean, but I used to lay in bed, sometimes for an hour, or two, and when I really couldn't sleep, three or more. You see, my mother used to have set bed times for me, but I never really followed them. In my later teens I'd have the telvision on and watch Adult Swim, primarily Cowboy Bebop, all the time listening for the distinctive sound of the footsteps meaning my mother was about to smash my head in for still being awake after twelve. At ten or ten-thirty or some other after primetime hour I used to write roleplay letters to a good friend of mine that always bolstered my imagination and thought it was a good idea to let my mind run rampant. They usually entailed a short sort of cover letter talking about our day in general, followed by us taking turns writing some adventure that our characters would be having, and then finished with a picture of something that had happened in our so called episode. As tedious and time-consuming as they became for me after my undergrad high school years, they were always fun and a ridiculously great exercise because they had me doing the two things that I loved doing most as a hobby, writing and drawing.
And then... Ramza?
When I played out fantasies in my head under the covers late at night in my latter adolescent and pre-teen years, I was some character whose name I can remember, something like Tiko or Teeko or some craptastic thing that you'd expect a young kid to come up with after watching hours upon hours of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Before they aired on Toonami and everyone else saw them, that is. I mean Dragon Ball Z on the WB at 6-7 Saturday mornings and Sailor Moon at 8 on FOX. Most of my friends didn't even know that Dragon Ball Z aired in America before it's Toonami run, and even less about Sailor Moon, although it's all the rage now and will forever remain in our memories as some of the best times we ever had. Moving on, for a short period of time I was Teiko. In my head he was somewhat similar to Gohan of Dragon Ball Z fame and had similar energy based powers. After about two months I dropped the character entirely for an entirely fanbased perception of Ramza from Final Fantasy Tactics. I was Ramza in usernames, in my Link's Awakening save files(on many of which I have never died, once; secret ending ahoy), I was Ramza in my everyday personality whereas my ten-year-old self had previously been Cloud(I even had a 10 year old friend in school that was Vincent, without the Yuffie crush though. I had a certain Lego guy that I called Ramza, and he had the only pieces that I owned from medieval sets: a sword and shield. Lego medieval seems to go in and out of production, but ninjas and dragons and Harry Potter and Star Wars are always on the shelves. Yeah, I own and Imperial Starfighter set, or I used to, until Pandora smashed it to bits like fifteen billion times, but who needs like four hundred blasters? Is it too much to ask to get some swords and shields action going on that isn't Harry Potter, Hermione, and Ron up to something underneath Hogwarts, i.e. the chess match?Back on topic, I became Ramza, and Ramza stuck with me for years. My character choices for any game I can customize since have become paladins, knights, nobility with a penchant for treating commoners the same as them, and any mashup of those with a helping of noble mercenary since. The bedtime fantasies were all stories about Ramza in an alternative universe with a family entirely of my own creation, the noble house of Beoulve, or sometimes Ruglia, if I wanted to play up Ramza's use of his mother's surname for a more righteous effect. If I'd written down half of those fantastic stories, I could've written a children's book of epic proportions and been rich several times over. But apparently I'm either stupid or was like thirteen because I'm still lower middle class and squabbling about how I should write myself out of this hole I feel like my life is in.
I Feel Like a Linkin Park Song
Let's be clear on this, I mean the old angsty Linkin Park, none of that new soft punk rock jive. I'm not into that, but on occasion, I'm completely into remembering how naive and ludicrously mad at the world I used to be. The odd thing is that I'm not at all angsty about the current state of America, just passing into liberal and downright pissed off. I guess age and enlarged worldview will do that for you.But seriously? What the fuck happened? I used to be able to stick to writing like it was no joke and pound out chapters that were 10,000 words. Five chapters would've killed my Nanowrimo count, and everyone would've celebrated how awesome I was. I was fifteen, but I could write "high-end fanfiction" as my friend described, like nobody's business. Okay, I might have lied, but I did just check the word count on a chapter I wrote back when I was in high school and it totalled 6.5k. I wrote things like that every night, and it was a natural stress reliever to me. I also think I wrote it during October in baseball season when I had to share the den with my stepdad since he put the second big screen he'd stolen from somebody's curb-trash-dump out there, so that high word count might've attributed to trying to annoy the ever living shit out of him. Last Nano I struggled to pump out 4k for a chapter, and when I read over it I wanted to throw my computer in the trash, hang the paper and dunk myself in the toilet. Why? How did four thousand measly words become a challenge for me to pull off? I used to be able to bullshit a 5k research paper on a Sunday afternoon with time left for me to go hang out with friends. Somehow, along the way, part of my brain must have died and left the rest of my creative outlets to lack without my knowing.
Well fuck.
