A page from Nina's diary: September 13th

Disclaimer:
this is a work in progress and a result of a continuous stream of consciousness. Whatever version appears in the final draft will be a lot shorter than this. In the book, it takes place at the beginning of Chapter 3, the evening of Nina's first day of school where she bumps into Jonas at lunch and is unexpectedly rendered blind and unconscious for several hours after the fact

September 13th

As far as first days of school goes, today was anything but ordinary. I never expected to make friends on the first day. All of them were amazingly beautiful girls so when they invited me into their group, I couldn't believe it. It seemed too good to be true, but all of them were genuinely nice. Although Mai, the designated leader, seems a little conceited or at least seems to think she knows everything about everyone in the school. I really don't want to turn down easy friends in a brand new place, so I'll see how that goes.
From the looks of it, I could be a cheerleader. They invited me to try out with them and think I have the right build for it. Sure, I'm not the athletic type and I'm not into sports all that much, but anything's worth a try. Gymnastics was a lot of fun and I'm going to miss it among a lot of other things back home. But this is my home now and I'm more than willing to make the best of it.
I promised myself I'd get to see the forest in my backyard up close after school. Heck, I promised my new friends that I'd meet them after school so we could compare notes before the try-outs next month.
I never got around to doing any of that. I barely made it halfway through the day before the extraordinary happened. Well, extraordinarily annoying for a number of reasons. But it turned out for the best for the most part. One second I'm rushing over to Mai's lunch table and the next, I bump into somebody and everything went black. I couldn't see anything but shadows and I couldn't even stand on my feet. The boy I bumped into was extremely gracious about it and strangely enough, he was more upset than I was that I was in such bad shape. He immediately carried me off to the nurse's office, stayed with me for a minute or two and that was it. I woke up in my own bed some five hours later, my sight back and my balance restored. He was even kind enough to make sure I got whatever little homework I had. Luckily it was only a few geometry problems and a couple reading assignments. After the half a day I had, I'm not sure how much I can handle. I feel fine now, but there's no telling if something else won't happen.
I should be upset or embarassed to go through this on my first day, but I'm neither of those things. In fact when the boy was with me at the nurse, I wished I had my sight just long enough to see his face, to see if there was any way I could thank him for helping me or even apologize for him having to go through all this trouble to make up for my clumsiness. There was regret in his voice that told me he didn't want to leave me as much as I didn't want him to leave. He had a way of keeping me calm and relaxed. I'm looking back now and finding myself so grateful for all that. I wouldn't be able to live this down otherwise. In a touching and unexpected gesture, he massaged my forehead and kissed before he left. He refused to give me his name, but I overheard the nurse call him Jonas.
Jonas... now that's an extraordinary name.

Feeable Attempt at Summerizing

If I wanna be technicial for a second, writing became my hobby December 8, 1999 after having a dream that begged to be explained. Why was the subject in a hospital bed? How did he get there? Who is with him? What ultimately resulted was a series of fanfiction that, believe it or not, I'm still writing, although given the time I spent in the real world, college, etc, my attempts have slacked over the years. Yet he still loves me after all this time.
Per my own words, obviously.

A discussion about teenage suicide in my 10th grade health class and however little I knew of J.R. Chandler of "All my Children" fame resulted in my first quasi-original work. To this day, after changing the set-up of the storytelling and the point of view from 3rd to 1st, it remains in the editing bay. It's a difficult subject to write about without it sounding autobiographical. I have experienced my doubts of depression over the years, but no matter how realistic the climax may sound, I hope the day comes where the people I know best can look upon it and trace the thoughts of angst back to me.

I date my writing back to March of 2003 for a reason. It was when I found my voice in my own words. What people would call originality. That isn't to say that I may have tweaked and borrowed elements from my biggest influences, but every facet of the story itself is entirely my own.
This is also the reason I listed Hayao Miyazaki as one of my writing influences. To this day, I still consider his masterpiece "Spirited Away" as the last puzzle piece I needed to create my main character. For a while before that, I entertained the idea of my own epic battle between good and evil where elements of nature played a key role.

Not even an hour (or so my memory tells me) after seeing that movie, I wrote my prologue and the result was nothing short of magical. It takes place in an unspecified time long ago. My original draft flouted not only creationism but evolution as I explained that my villian wiped out the dinosaurs, he and his adversery having some sort of humanoid form. For the sake of simplicity, I left the time unspecified and non-descriptive.
It begins with one of the biggest clichés in the book: the world was at peace until someone disrupted the balance of nature. In recent revisions, it erupts into so much more than that. All forms of life died and the earth was breaking apart.
Then enters our hero, who I originally drafted with the description "great angel prince." But over time, he just became a pure-hearted angel whose soul was purest of souls to contrast with my sorcerer, who was the epitome of evil.
The epic duel goes down, good triumphs over evil. I go back to the elements in nature that I named in the first sentence and give them physical form. Pegasuses (winged unicorns, horned pegasuses, whatever) and dragons seemed to be a good fit, so I ran with it as well as the pure-hearted angel having a gem within him that was the main source of that element on earth. The rest was history, magic off my fingertips. And I didn't see my angel being around much longer, sarcifices himself to save the world and in case evil should return, the five creatures combine their powers to reincarnate him.

Which brings us to the present.

First off, I'm going to end (talk about a paradox) with a not-so fun fact about my posting. I tend to like to have one complete thought to post so when something is gathering dust on my clipboard for a while, it's hard to pick up where I left off.
Little by little, I'll use the next entries to introduce more of the storyline and the characters, but I think I can safely start with the original intention of this place: promoting my characters and the world they live in. Not too different from ours, except there are occurrences of magic, existences of mythical creatures and occasionally the angel's voice will linger in the wind in little more than a whisper.

Introductions

Please excuse our appearance. It'll take a while for me to get this blog together to where I want and need it to be. I hope it will help me launch my writing career or at least get my foot in the door.

You see, the thing is, I've been writing for a long time. My only successes have been finishing writing stories from start to finish. The trick is editing, which sometimes takes longer than the actual writing process. Wait, strike that, it always takes longer than the actual writing process.

I like to believe and still like to believe that writing YA (young adult) romance-fantasy is my speciality. In recent years after my college graduation, the fantasy started to secede from my work and despite my inexperience in it aside from your run-of-the-mill schoolgirl crush, romance remains in my work to this day. Considering where I am now in my writing, I can say that it was a short-term vacation in the territory of literary fiction in which I derived my inspiration from more realistic issues. Among my influences were a Season 8 American Idol contest, a 2010 film that ended in 9/11 and the 1987 film "Less than Zero." But more on those "spiritual" ventures later.

It's hard for me to believe sometimes that I'd been writing prolifically for the past 8 years, although less prolific lately where I'm lucky to take one idea from start to finish each year.

These days, though, I have more of a reason to celebrate. I returned to my roots in romantasy land and was rewarded more than I could possibly imagine.

My personal records show (although one of these days it would help to have an Excel sheet to explain all this) that I'd completed 12 stories (3 of which are of short, novella length) and of those 12, I could easily see 5 of them on a bookstore shelf (or perhaps a Kindle/Nook) in the distant future. I'm my harshest critic, so it's hard to discern sometimes what stories are good enough to see the light of day and which could gain enough of a following to wind up on a best seller's list someday.

The purpose of this blog is my attempt to establish a platform and gain a following to give myself more of a fighting chance in this competitive market.

Long story short, writing is one of the few things I'm really at and it's what I've always wanted to do, and have done.