Provided that you are, in fact, reading this post, only one thing can be certain: I have made a glorious return to Substack, my favorite publishing platform where, should I ever have the desire to scroll past fourteen consecutive Notes hailing the unplugged lifestyle as some sort of cancer-curing discovery, I am suitably fed. Perhaps it is because I never have that inkling that I have been absent for so long! I know my two-month hiatus must have been distressing for my—*checks notes*—eleven subscribers (a number which Substack is overjoyed to tell me is lower than before). To be truthful, I lack an appreciable excuse for my prolonged absence—I am simply non-committal, lazy, and stupid, blemishes of which I have recently been greatly reminded.
Allow me to go on a personal tangent—although nobody asked, I have frankly, in this estival environment of ephemeral escape, been unburdened of, well, giving a shit. My two latest posts were written and published towards the end of my high school days. This one—the third and last in its series—was intended to be published before I graduated. Obviously, this did not eventuate! I wrote one and a half total paragraphs before promptly abandoning this blog—and this site—altogether. At first, I reasoned that graduation and its surrounding festivities were so hectic that a minuscule break was justified—needed, even. As May turned to June, I was caught up in the long, seemingly never-ending whirlwind of graduation parties and celebratory activities… you know, typical senior summer fun. As my days were busy, my remaining bits of brain were on autopilot, which did not make for a particularly sharp tool with which to write. Then, July came around; whereas June was a leisurely sipping of glitz and spectacle, July has felt like a high-speed chug—only in the sense that it has resembled a hangover from which one has just drunkenly awoken, not speedy in the way that a few respectable shots might be. Through this month, I have lived with an uncomfortable sobriety; each day, I wake in the wake of another rude awakening. The fever dream that was high school is something that I have only been able to decode with two months of remove; particularly now that the social scene has come to a lull, high school has truly cemented itself as a bygone artifact. What felt like an unbearable prison from which I desperately needed to escape has already taken on the sheen produced by a pair of hazy, rose-tinted glasses. For as lonely, debilitating, and inert the whole four years were—and for as much as I seriously downplayed any sense of profound meaning within it the entire time—freshman year, though still bright in my elephant-caliber memory, feels truly like an obsolete era, one from which my classmates and I have grown so much. Almost paradoxically, though, as that time of my life acquires a certain luster, I have been saddened by the fact that many of its once-ubiquitous presences have fallen already to the wayside—before college has even begun! Friendships, romantic relationships, ways of living, my daily preoccupations… they have all crumbled! Though this is the price of growing up—and, indeed, something I once swore I would love for nothing more than to occur—there is a bittersweetness to it. College, which I began sensationalizing in high school as a freeing utopia, now seems frightening in its responsibility and overwhelming in its metamorphosis.
I say all of this primarily because I wanted to let off some steam (and perhaps to send to sea some sort of message in a bottle, now that Instagram Notes—by my own doing, I’ll concede—are no longer a serviceable channel). Secondarily, I am perhaps trying to excuse my crime for which no one is seeking to punish me; specifically, I chalk up my absence to… overwhelm and dread? However, since this post is about writing and my qualifications in, well, writing it would be called into immense question were I not to justify this off-script and -topic pre(r)amble, I will say this much, too: Writing serves many purposes. Although I originally intended for this post to focus more so on the technical aspects of writing, it would be insincere if I suggested that the emotional elements involved are not often important. They are! Indeed, it is an outpouring of emotion and contemplation that has brought me out of my blog-slumber; because the last month has been so queasy-feeling, I really had no choice but to turn to pen and paper. It began with fictional stories; then, it became satire and poetry; now, we are led here, a public domain in which I can write about writing itself, because I am apparently unable to resist cheap attempts at metanarration. Really, as pretentious and cheesy as this sounds (in equal parts), writing brings me out of the dumps! For that (and much more, into which I will delve momentarily), I must thank it.
Below lies the main portion of this post—for context, it is based primarily on a script that I made a few months ago, prior to the revelations of the above Bildungsroman.
An emotional catharsis. A record immortalized. A story brought to life. A unifying message. An empowering manifesto. An act of survival. Letters, words, and glyphs assembled against a contrasting background.
Writing is all of this and more. Here, in this last installment in my blog series on writing and language, I am attempting to dive headlong and submerge myself within the daunting yet mystifying ocean that is writing: the act itself, the purposes behind it, the ramifications it can have, etc. It’s all a bit… big-picture-y and vague, and my discursions are rooted less in research like the previous posts, but rather in personal experience and half-realized abstraction. This is less an academic distillation of the topic than it is a philosophical-ish exploration—though I don’t deny the roots writing has in anthropology and sociology, it’s also a very broad thing that any layperson (such as myself) can muse on. Again, in no way am I positing that I am especially qualified. I also will touch, briefly (hopefully), on my “personal” journey with writing—perhaps it will inspire a stray reader or two to start up a blog or write a poem or, I don’t know, begin an email newsletter.
For once, my self-centeredness might serve me well—I’ll speak, first, to my own experiences with writing. Writing is so universal a concept that we all have our own story with it; starting with mine will allow me to justify and rationalize my own views on it, as well as expose my limitations.
To be perfectly blunt about it (which I scarcely like to do), writing has always sort of been my “specialty”—not in the sense that I’m the next Poe or Shakespeare, but in the sense that it is the thing I am best at (in no small part due to the fact that I am not good at a whole lot). I don’t mean to be grossly unlikable, but I am going to try justifying my positioning here—I am, after all, on a publishing site. I’d like to say this blog speaks for itself inasmuch as quality is concerned, but I have, on this site, erred… be it typos or whole posts whose theses aren’t quite clear or well-developed. I digress. Like many a wannabe writer, I began with wee stories: fairytales with the type of unsubtle Lovecraftian horror only an overconfident ten-year-old can muster. Mostly, I wrote blatant rip-offs of popular franchises—A Series of Misfortunate Events was one such grammatically iffy plagiarism, as well as a whole host of Hunger Games spin-offs wherein I detailed the gory deaths of my classmates with an unsettling lack of moral perturbation1. Any original efforts at whole sagas were abandoned; sillier, shorter stories relied much more on gimmicks. They were devoid of theme, plot, and grammatical coherence, but those were my baby steps, nonetheless. An infant’s foray into authorship.
Throughout middle school, I cultivated a strange reputation for being the writing guy. Back then, I definitely let it get to my head. I was positively aflutter whenever I received perfect marks on an essay (be they about White Fang or Barney) or creative-writing piece (I recall an odd exercise in which a Filipino boy witnesses his baby sister die in a riot, despite the story’s basis on an event that was entirely peaceful in nature). I absorbed teachers’ praise as though it were nutrients (this was before I ended up becoming an academic flop—a bright mind goes only so far, it turns out, when one’s effort levels are sub-zero). I enjoyed classmates’ adulation, too, though I think theirs only came as a result of my too-frequent spewing of five-dollar words (often misapplied, but they didn’t photosynthesis that!).
As I transitioned into high school, my breadth in writing widened as my academic prowess narrowed. I dabbled with the school newspaper, though, in seriousness, by “dabble,” I mean “drafted an article and abandoned the whole enterprise as a result of non-existent leadership.” More seriously, I explored satire, poetry, essaying, speech-writing, “journalism” (I use that term loosely), and, inexplicably, emailing—mundane though it sounds (and lame though it was…), I fashioned a daily “newsletter” of sorts (it was really just a convenient vessel by which I could excuse my rants) via email in senior year. Moreover, I daily journaled—the writing therein was far less sophisticated (or even coherent), but in terms of practice, it was beneficial in that it helped me as a “thinker”. Identifying feelings, patterns, thoughts, etc. (boring life stuff, really) and explicitly writing those things down vastly improved the efficacy with which I could properly voice my thoughts (or at least I hope it did). After all, that is what writing, primarily, is. (That this led to a two-year compulsive spiral is beside the point.)
To varying degrees of success, I have tried using my experiences in writing as a selling point. With a testimony only slightly less overweening than the one above, I was able to shuffle my way into the school’s Writing Center (where my impact was minimal). In discussing my “philosophy” on writing, I was able to get into a few colleges (all of which I turned down in favor of U-Mich, whom I instead charmed with Pinoy Pride). I even landed myself as the secretary of my school’s NHS chapter, a tenure marked by an almost-laughable nothingness.
So, though that… mini-memoir inevitably reeked of bumptious vanity, what I am beginning to establish is that writing is as much thinking as it is doing. One must think not only of the point that they are trying to make, but also of the way they do so. As an elementary-grade writer, I had a humiliating dearth of critical thinking skills (and even less self-awareness) and this came through in my writing. For the sake of guffaws, here is an example of something I wrote when I was, say, ten years old:
“That’s correct, I remember that! You’re a-” I exclaimed.
Angelo’s mom smiled. “I knew you would. Now, remember Secret- NOOO!”
I gasped. Angelo wailed, “Give her back, you miscreant!”
I couldn’t make out the creature carrying Angelo’s mom away. Well, not carrying, but-
“Don’t you dare drop her!”
The creature dropped her.
“You imbecile!” I shouted.
A blast of lava shot up in the air, and a ghastly scream came to a silence.
“I can’t stand this!” Angelo screamed. “Three deaths in one day, and-”
He couldn’t stay angry. He was miserable. He started to weep. And soon, a hypnotic command came to my mind. It was ghastly, and lacking moral stamina. It was something I shouldn’t have known how to do. It was something I could never possibly attempt. But I did anyway. Kill Angelo.
It is not impossible that someone could glean more meaning from a shaken-up can of Alphabet Soup. Not minding the fact that this was written in an indecipherable font, there are more oddities in that passage than there are things that warrant appreciation. Any sense of adherence to grammatical conventions has been entirely thrown out the window—em-dashes and hyphens are confused with one another; commas are littered throughout the passage with reckless abandon. Phrases are assembled awkwardly and made even more stilted by out-of-place words whose uses aren’t even accurate. Plot-wise, the epiphany that the main character has to kill Angelo is rooted in neither logic nor any plot.
Clearly, ten-year-old Max had a “grand” imagination, but the haphazard assembly of words and letters on a page does not good writing make. (Duh.) The point is, though, that in a world in which sentences are spoken and written mindlessly too often, it is key to remind oneself of their message and their audience.
More often than not, one knows their message and their audience before they go into crafting a piece of writing—actually knowing how to act in agreement with that is easier said (or written) than done, funnily enough.
Perhaps a helpful touchstone to consider while doing this would be the medium through which one is communicating. No, I don’t mean language itself—that’s quite blatant—but instead the format in which it is used. The way one writes—be it as it relates to structure, vernacular, tone, rhetoric, diction, rhythm, syntax, etc.—shifts alongside the medium. A text is made distinct from an email in its lack of formal conventions; an opinion piece is differentiated from a journalistic article, oftentimes, because of its less-stringent tone; a poem and a piece of flash fiction are separated by their structure; an essay and a speech make use of different syntaxes. These vehicles of writing do not necessarily dictate the content of what one says, but they do inform the author of their audience and forum, which in turn influence how they write.
This is why linguistic prescriptivism, as I largely explored in my last post, while helpful as it is applied to formal, “conventional” writing, is largely unhelpful as soon as one widens their scope. To fine-tune and nitpick certain conventions, depending on the context, can be not only pompous but downright detrimental. To tell a poet, for instance, that their work does not comply with, say, punctuation rules or sentence structure is silly on the face of it—these poets are trained individuals, artisans of the written word whose divorces from convention are more likely than not intentional and well-reasoned.
Few would argue that a poet shouldn’t exercise their creative liberty as they see fit, but more might express disdain towards writing in a casual context. Though I’m 2 pretentious 2 do so, if someone sent me a text saying “ILY 2” (something which, as of last week, feels unlikely), I would not hound them for not spelling out the abbreviation (I would hound them for being a lying bitch). In text-speak, what that message is trying to communicate is rather unambiguous (syntactically, that is… emotionally, on the other hand, there is—apparently!—quite a lot of wiggle room in that statement). The same goes with slang; lest I suffer the irritation of my entire social squad circa 2021, I was in no way going to criticize someone saying “slay” without meaning to kill.
That isn’t to say all writing conventions should go out the window when in a casual context—clarity is what’s important here. If I were sent a message laden with so many typos and grammatical errors that its meaning was impossible to parse, I would perhaps react to that message with a question mark, gently nudging my friend to rewrite their text. Even “sillier” rules—such as with punctuation—can be important. Were I to ask my mom, for example, if I could splurge ten thousand dollars on a piece of jewelry, she might respond with “no price too high.” The lawyer within me might finagle that message, without the comma, to mean that no price is too high, and buy the jewelry. That example is perhaps a little contrived—in all likelihood, I would muster a few brain cells and understand the message’s intent—but this can happen and has happened in real life, sometimes with amusingly large implications.
Surface-level examples aside, the nuances of certain words or assemblies of words (and the contexts in which they are used) are something to which we should all pay great attention! Though writing and words cannot intrinsically mobilize scores of people (the Great Pyramids were not constructed via some sort of incantation), their consequences, in practice, are far-reaching. Consider a great speech that won a candidate an election (or got them accused of plagiarism)—behind that victory (or flub) was a scriptwriter who put into it a great deal of consideration (or perhaps one attempting a coup d’état). Think of a lawyer who saved their client from a great injustice (or maybe just justice) via a legal technicality. This could be, in part, through the particularities of a policymaker—or, in the case of trial by jury, perhaps a crafty emotional appeal on the part of the lawyer. Take the most devastating song lyrics or passage of fiction you know; perhaps those words inspired you to spread that work or even make your own art. That’s because the author not only had a brilliant and creative idea, but because they knew just the right way to communicate it. The overwhelming majority of successful movements, relationships, and humanitarian endeavors were spurred because of effective wordsmithery (though, of course, other methods exist, too).
Writing can be so appealing because it is often both incredibly emotional and highly technical. It is dependent on context and community; slip-ups can lead to fallout. It is a skill that is impossible to perfect—a practice that takes a lifetime to hone. One can express their innermost, most complicated ideas or wreak emotional devastation on others. An academic who’s also adept at writing can construct a downright deliciously elaborate, well-thought-out piece that expresses granular topics with unbelievable slickness. A multilingual writer can bridge together different communities by translating complex ideas whose nuances and turns of phrase are often, for lack of a better term, lost in translation. The world’s greatest artists have conveyed the most elaborate philosophies through mere letters or glyphs on a page.
Dim, annoyingly lofty aspirations aside, the best, most effective, and powerful pieces of writing necessitate not only emotional maturity and intellectual polish; they require technical proficiency, as well. Anyone who has ever learned a language has mastered it through grasping certain rules and conventions—when it comes to our first language, this is mostly subconscious and doesn’t take particular strain insofar as speaking goes. Writing, however, is not something we just learn via osmosis. It takes practice and education—especially so in a second language. We all had to learn, sometimes painstakingly, how to write each letter of the alphabet (in cursive, too!). We were then taught how to spell—for English-speakers, this can be never-endingly tricky as the exceptions and their exceptions unfurl themselves just as we think we’ve mastered this inconsistent language. A single word, though, does not make a fully-written piece (unless you’re one of these snoots, I guess); from there, we must learn how to assemble them, when to capitalize them, when to hyphenate them, when to separate them. We learn how to punctuate within and around sentences. We learn, for some reason, what helping verbs and dependent clauses are, despite the terminology seeming largely useless. The beasts we build and the magic we make grow more advanced as we learn how to structure paragraphs and the ideas within them—the art of the essay is not easy-peasy! Some people are still hung up over it in college, I am told. Eventually, a writer has grasped all the basic “rules” which they need in their toolbox in order to navigate their language effectively; still, at some point, writing advances beyond these basic rules and becomes more “cerebral” and less objective—fuzzy, some might say. Though I, in my mathematical and scientific incompetence, am not going to espouse some high-brow take like “actually, the arts are the hardest discipline of all!” (when we snobs would all die at the sight of a Lewis Dot Structure), I will say that it can be, on occasion, harder to teach writing and literature. The supposed “less objective” nature of writing sometimes turns could-be writers off the discipline altogether. I (predictably) think that this is sad! Although I could cop out and say that there is simply an ineffable je ne sais quoi good writing necessitates that comes only with immersion and practice—and this is, to an extent, true—writing is actually much more logical (mathematical, even!) than some might think. Even in as amorphous and emotionally driven a medium as poetry, there are still logical decisions being made behind the scenes.
I like to use the SAT as an example—though its use as an arbiter for college decisions is rife with problems (specifically, biases against low-income communities and students of color), I want to examine and tentatively explain the test’s content itself. The math questions are obviously cut and dry; the “grammar” section, too, is relatively straightforward. It is within the reading comprehension section that the external discussion is laden with lament.
Now, I am all for the freedom of interpretation—’tis one of the beautiful things about art! However, SAT Reading Comprehension questions are not asking students, as far as I’m aware, about the kumbaya of wishy-washy concepts. Not that I am particularly interested at all in defending the SAT, but the questions measure, according to CollegeBoard, “comprehension, vocabulary, analysis, synthesis, and reasoning skills and knowledge needed to understand and use high-utility words and phrases in context, evaluate texts rhetorically, and make connections between topically related texts.” The jargon basically boils down to “the test measures logic and reasoning.” In today’s day and age, this is arguably an important skill! I think it can be very helpful to think of phrases, sentences, and a passage’s syntax as puzzle pieces. Logic is a puzzle, and that is what these questions purportedly measure. It’s like proving a theorem in geometry! Consider, if you are of a more advanced age, the LSAT: Those questions are not actually related to the law, but they pose logical puzzles—in the form of writing—as one would see in law. There is a real science to it. That is why law is considered a social science; that term doesn’t solely exist to make lawyers feel less inferior to doctors!
This post is titled “Why Write?” Though in all of my periphrastic rambling, I did not exactly answer that question succinctly, my answer—personally—is hopefully distilled at least somewhat discernibly throughout the above portion.
That discursion, however, is simply one man’s take! A man who, mind you, is a few weeks short of being legally a man; moreover, one who has no accredited qualifications. I thought it would be useful, then, to turn to the semi-hoity-toity-but-still-respectable world of writers! All sorts of them—essayists and novelists and poets, oh, my!
In choosing a subtitle for this post, I went upon a laborious deep dive of Googling “quotes about writing.” I settled on the Ray Bradbury quote because it’s to the point2. However, there are a few other quotes I found somewhat inspirational or, at the very least, thought-provoking. There are also some articles and essays over the years that I have found illuminating. I actually don’t like reading about writers’ philosophies all too much—I am slightly miffed by the intellectualization and complication of something that, to me, feels instinctual—but perhaps this will be a fun exercise for the both of us.
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. —Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a professor with unholy sideburns, best known for penning science-fiction novels like I, Robot. I haven’t read his work, but he’s respected for a reason, surely. Asimov’s view on writing is perhaps the one most adjacent to mine—it is not particularly profound, but it is resonant in its simple truth. As I said earlier, writing is half-thinking. If anything, Asimov’s quote simply goes a step further.
There are a few quotes about writing to Sylvia Plath’s name that I find somewhat profound.
I wrote only because
there is a voice within me
that will not sit still. —Sylvia Plath
The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time. —Sylvia Plath
I include these mostly because I want to defend Sylvia Plath’s honor… not that she needs me to do it; her poetry speaks for itself. Too often, though, she is derided as some sort of one-note poetaster whose emo writing has unduly launched vaguely mentally-ill aesthetics among the teens. Plath was not writing for the Tumblr girls, okay!? Anyway… these quotes are rather straightforward, too (unlike, to my senior-year-self’s chagrin, her poetry). The first details the metaphysical urge that provokes one to write; the second is a gentle pre-Nike “Just do it!” that writers who are perhaps caught up in notions of artistic success (or are just procrastinating) need to hear.
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart. —Maya Angelou
I imagine Maya Angelou needs no introduction, but I like this quote because (unlike the indistinguishable slosh of other quotes I found plastered on blurry stock images) it’s kind of… contrarian. Not really, but what I interpret this quote as saying is that understanding and absorbing a piece of writing need not take intellectual work. Perhaps that is a gross oversimplification of what she is saying (or I am missing some crucial context), but ’twas an interesting take.
Lastly:
There is no such thing as good writing, only rewriting. —Robert Graves
The only kind of writing is rewriting. —Ernest Hemingway
The best writing is rewriting. —E.B. White
Good writing is essentially rewriting. —Roald Dahl
Weirdly, it seems as though they all simply rewrote each other’s quotes! Still, the point is no one’s first draft is perfect—a fact which egotists like me might do well to remember. Because of Robernest B. Dahl’s quote, I will make sure to actually rewrite this post.
There was another quote that was hung on a poster by my eleventh-grade teacher that I wanted to discuss; unfortunately for me, I cannot identify it verbatim. Anyway, there exist quite a lot of quotes about writing out there—who would’ve thought? I shan’t bore you with more; they’re mostly a kaleidoscopic mush about the inner recesses of humanity, the power of expression, the work ethic involved, the occasional slapstick one. All fine stuff—I have spent a lot of time discussing those very things—but nothing to write (haha) home about. I’d also like to throw in “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” from Hamilton. My eighth-grade, OCD-led self breathed that line!
If you’ll bear with me (no one is reading this), there is some longer-form content on writing out there that I would be remiss not to discuss. Simply search “Why write?” and a motley crew of blog posts appears! (When will mine join the ranks, I am forced to wonder.) Instead of tending to those parched posts, though, I’d rather water the gardens (i.e., examine the essays) of two already-renowned authors: George Orwell and Joan Didion.
George Orwell’s “Why I Write” essay explores its titular question better than can any made-for-Pinterest one-liner or self-congratulatory blog post. As is often the recurring, disappointing truth, to one, witty catchphrase cannot the motivations behind writing or the creative process be boiled down!
Joan Didion, author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (which inspired the Olivia Rodrigo song “all-american bitch”), wrote a piece of the same name as Orwell’s. I may have done hypothetical readers a disservice by burying this link so far down the page, but she essentially says everything I could ever want to say, but better.
Pivoting (and I promise I’m wrapping this up soon) towards the newspaper, I would like to highlight Frank Bruni’s weekly column on the New York Times (even though I have only been able to bypass its paywall through the Wayback Machine). He has a lovely little section called ‘For The Love of Sentences’ which features some bite-size pieces of delectable writing—it’s truly something of an art form. Also, this post in particular, inspired me to jumpstart this whole series, as ChatGPT’s encroaching loom over writing has been rather disconcerting to witness.
As much as I would love to end this post with a super-deep, epic retrospective on the history of writing or provide some emotional testimony… I’ve been at this for hours, and I am tired! Yes, yes, theoretically, I should plow away for the sake of a strong ending; unfortunately, I lack the discipline Sylvia Plath is urging me to exercise. It should be more than abundantly clear from my self-important droning how much I care about this stuff—it just so happens I care ever-so-slightly more about seeing what sort of brain-rot Instagram Reels has to offer tonight.
Instead, I shall leave you with a more “fun” idea. If nothing else, I implore you to write because it is fun! Yes, school-assigned writing is often tedious if not downright laborious, but the scope of writing is so vast that there are ways anybody can enjoy it. Start a blog about literally anything that interests you. Write a song. Write a story. Write a letter to a friend. We should all write more (and we should all use ChatGPT less!). Along the way, you can develop your own unique idiolect—i.e., your way of writing that is uniquely yours. As cheesily and cloyingly “BE YOURSELF!” as that comes across, I think that it is quite an enjoyable, even fascinating exercise to identify the various influences that have cultivated one’s lingo. I, for one, identify Kamala Harris, Moira Rose, Rachel Berry, Lemony Snicket, Twitter parlance, Reddit humor, Oscar Wilde, Sylvia Plath, The Onion, and scathing Pitchfork writers as some of my forebearers. Their idiosyncrasies admix to create what I call… “tragicomic, autofictional dramaturgy meets meta-narrated Bildungsroman meets pseudointellectual YouTube essayist meets zany surrealist meets Gen-Z camp meets confessionalism-as-satire meets faux-gravitas meets self-aware irony meets slapstick pathos meets chronically online nerd meets absurdist antijoker meets controlled chaos meets nuanced drama meets anticausal satire.” I’ve actually never called it that, ever, but you get my drift (probably not, actually). Your voice is uniquely yours, to parrot your chosen self-help book.
Thank you for reading this post (if you did, in fact, read this post and not just scroll numbly to the bottom, though I don’t blame you). Truly, I hope you all join me in my scripturient splendor.
As much as I would like to say this post portends a triumphant return, I, like George Washington, cannot tell a lie. To speak in pop-artist terms, this post is more of a droplet than it is a tease for a new era. Less than a month of summer remains! I am going to try my best to enjoy it while also preparing for the scary, shiny new world that is university. I’ll be bleeding maize and sporting blue! The In-BeTeens shtick, however, is seemingly going to age much quicker than I had anticipated.
I have a few other writing-related projects going on anyway—I practice what I preach! A high school retrospective masquerading as a novella is in the works, as are a few songs. At last, because I have a MacBook, I can make use of a notation program more advanced than Noteflight and an audio workstation more advanced than BandLab! Whether anything fruitful will come of those endeavors is an open question, but thankfully outside of the scope of this blog.
Freshman year of college is sure to be chaotic and busy; somehow, it’s shaping up to be hectic before it has even begun. Such is the nature of life: nothing is stable. Still, I want to eventually publish a sort-of WIHI-in-review post—wait too long to post, though, and I’ll end up becoming a super-senior! I’ll surely detail my college escapades at some point or another. Perhaps I shall look to “heavier” topics like mental health, religion, and existentialism, but, realistically, I hardly have the deft or the will to tackle those subjects. Maybe I’ll just post an ill-advised tell-all of my two-year on/off fling that seems to have finally gone down in ruins! Then again, though, one ought to be more tactful.
For now, though, I shall try to live my “best life.” There is only one month left of this liminal time period—in but thirty days’ time, I will have blossomed (or stumbled) into legal adulthood, splashed down at the college scene, and hopefully healed some wounds. Pray that I’ll get a life and job (and license…), guys!
I just read this back (thankfully)… this is perhaps a perfect example of why is it important to be careful with what one writes. Though I am not going to “defend” my unoriginal, somewhat troubled childhood stories, I now realize that I am sort of giving off the impression of a psycho… to clarify, I wasn’t some mentally ill child on the precipice of becoming a serial killer. These so-called “gory” deaths were more so cartoonish and comedic in nature… think Looney Tunes. This is not how I go down.
Thankfully, I caught this immediately after publishing, but I originally said Bradbury authored Flowers For Algernon… from where I got that fact, I am unsure, but he most certainly did not pen that novel.
i love you king
hello will be reading this at the airport tmr