Base Nine

–Hey man, help me with this tip.  What’s like 15% of $24?

–I dunno.  My phones’ dead.

–I wouldn’t have asked you if I could have just done it on my phone myself.  You think three dollar is enough?  The waitress was pretty cool with us.

–Sure, I guess.  I’m not really good with math, though.

–It’s not that hard actually.  Just move the decimal point over by one and add an extra half of that.

–I can’t keep up with you when you say that.  Like I said, I’m really not good at math.  I don’t really even like it either.

–That just means you had a bad teacher or something.

–No, it all just started out bad actually.  You know how they encourage you to count on your fingers until you eventually can do simple stuff in your head?  That never worked for me to begin with.  I only have 9 fingers.

–Really?  Wow, I never noticed.

–Yeah.  Neither did I.  Nor my parents, or any doctors.  Not even the teachers, despite all my struggles.  Everyone was told to count to ten on their fingers, but I always just assumed that there was an extra number in there that I was adding or something.  I can’t remember which number I cut out of my own personal existence, but once that one was gone, I could count to ten just fine, except the number four or something didn’t exist.  I became overwhelmed trying to find out which numbers were wrong or right.

–No way.

–Eventually when I got into more complex math, I was already way behind, and nothing made sense.  It wasn’t until much later after failing many Math classes later that I discovered the problem, but only after getting my first girlfriend.

–What did that do?

–You know when you hold hands with someone and your fingers kind of lace together nicely?  My left hand would never do that, and the girl eventually examined my fingers to try and find out the problem.  I was born without a ring finger on that hand.  Never occurred to me that it wasn’t normal.

–So you’ve been in base nine all your life, then?

–What?  I told you, don’t talk that math stuff with me.

New Projects

Well, it’s April now, and I haven’t had the chance to actually write much in the way of stories to put up here.  I spent the other day, or at least a good four hours of it, learning Adobe Illustrator and putting together that comic for April Fools (if you haven’t seen it, you should check it out.)

Real life has been slightly busy, messing around with insurance and eye doctor’s appointments and stuff.  Also job interviews- very interesting, but the lead up to them is nerve wracking.  However, the worst thing is that the warmth is starting to creep up here, while I’m still hesitant to pull the wool blanket off my bed.  I prefer winter.

HOWEVER…  none of that matters to you all.  I’m participating once again in Camp NaNoWriMo- you know; the event in which last year I wrote Wall of Trump.  I’m trying my hand at a biographical fiction novel this time, called “The Tallboy.” I’ll try to explain the premise probably some time later when I have a better understanding personally of what I want the story to be about.

I had one last thought on my mind, something that popped in there today.  I’ve been watching people play Breath of the Wild- The newest Legend of Zelda game- on Twitch.tv. Personally, I’m vicariously in love with this game through the streamers I get to watch, including the game’s story.  I have an idea for a fan fiction based on it, as much as I hate to say so.  Personally, even though I’ve barely read any fan fiction, I’ve always strayed away from it because I’ve always tended to think of it as a corruption of the source work. I’m sure there’s good stuff out there, but there’s probably just as many works that are poorly written, derogatory, and distasteful.   But I love the world and characters of BotW so much, I feel as if I can’t help myself.

The biggest problem with this is that if I ever was to try and publish/monetize it under the Legend of Zelda name, Nintendo would be all over me with cease and desists.  They love that stuff apparently.  I guess I’ll see what it turns into.

I hate to bore with walls of text that aren’t story time, so here’s a cool album I discovered today to make up for it.  Hope you like post rock!

The Debut

If you happened to see my vlog way back when I was still in Paris, I took a short detour to an anime type shop as well as a manga/video game cafe.  I revealed that I am very much a big fan of Japanese culture and anime and stuff.

I decided that I would take a bigger step.  You see, while I like writing regular books, just putting walls of text on lifeless white pages is just so boring.  Have you ever read a manga?  That shit’s crazy!  I’ve always told myself; that’s what I wanna do!  So, I decided to give up traditional writing to become a mangaka (for you baka gaijin that means manga author.)

For my first work, I’ve decided to convert my story “Wall of Trump” into an action filled coming of age manga telling the tale of our main man Sergio fighting against the reign of Trump himself.  See the first chapter after the jump:Continue reading “The Debut”

Get’chur Ebooks

If anyone was still in doubt, I am still a vlogger, despite my paltry view on Youtube.  Possibly I may be making the move to a different career soon too, one that doesn’t involve putting ingredients between slices of bread.

For now, getting those fat (read: purely fringe) royalty numbers from Amazon is nice to see. Getting my own physical copy of the book that I wrote myself, however,  had a bigger impact than anything else.  From tomorrow, the 30th, to Monday, the third, and eBook copy of Mother of Mars will be free on Amazon.  Additionally, if you buy the physical copy for 6.99, you can get an ebook copy for free as well.

I still need to decide what to do, or otherwise give away this copy I do have, but I don’t know how I plan to do it just yet.  It will give me time to work on my signature, though…

Getting High on Rising Action

You start off on the straight edge, taking prescription reports assigned by your high school English teacher.  It’s some rhetorical analysis, non habit forming.  But the feeling of injecting lines of text into your word processor begins taking a hold of you.  Visions of fiction start to appear in your dreams.

You start of by just imagining the feeling.  You’ve got characters, scenarios, but you would never roll them up in a plot, blow them up into the smoke of a story.

Your friend shows you some of his poetry.  Crazy stuff, way out there.  You try some yourself, but it’s a trip you’re not ready for.  Seeing syllables line up like in some sort of pattern isn’t your thing, but you’ve already entered the gateway.

Prose isn’t that bad in comparison, right?  You lay down some short stories here and there, but it never feels like enough.  You could have so much more if you just expand on those characters, letting their rising actions taking them to climaxes in the plot-line.

You start feeling the need to shut yourself off, stashing your notebooks, lined paper, hiding the evidence.  The composition book sitting on the shelf at the mini-mart stares back at you, even though you only have enough money for the gas you need to get home.  You feel like taking it, but you know your parents raised you better.  But you need that fix.

Friends start to come to you.  Yo man, give me some of that historical fiction.  You’re passing out novellas so they can get their fix.  They come back for more, but you’re dry with writer’s block.  Just get me like a page, they say, even double-spaced is fine.

There comes a point when you have to come out.  There’s no longer a way you can hide it, bear to hide it.  Mom, Dad.  I’m a writer.

“It’s because you read him all those stories before bed.”  You mom would say, accusing your dad.

“You ordered that collection of encyclopedias too.  I saw him sitting with the second half of the E section, you know.”

It’s too late though.  You’ve got publishers breathing down your neck.  They want their stuff, but your parents took your keyboard away to try and ‘help’ you.  You’re scribbling with pencil nubs on the tags on your clothes, trying just to pull out one more chapter.

Writing.  Not even once.