Towards Adventure

Jimmy had been in the library for a while, searching through the shelves for something to take home. His parents had told him no more than an hour of looking, knowing that left to his own devices he would comb the shelves for much longer, and he could feel that his time was running short. Nothing he had seen had caught his eye as of yet, however, and he began to march back to the front desk, anticipating another fruitless trip to the library, when a clearly aged, leather bound book caught his eye. He stopped in his tracks to examine it, unable to see a name on its spine, and so he gently pulled it from its spot, gently cushioned between two other, more modern looking books.

The leather in his fingers felt like it could crumble at any moment, yet the book called to him, as if it had been alone for some time and longed for a human to crack it open, to flip its pages and see the words contained within. Quickly, Jimmy found a small reading desk and sat down, gingerly opening the cover to the front page. There was no introduction, no copyright information, and no title. Immediately he was confronted with a page full of handwritten text, slightly faded with age, written in an ancient style that made it hard to read. Carefully he turned the pages to see that every page was filled similarly. It was hard to distinguish the words from one another, much less to read any of them, but he began to notice that each page ended with the same string of words.

Curiosity burned in Jimmy's chest as he tried to read the pages. Somewhere, deep in his subconscious, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had to take this book home with him. He had to know what the contents were, who had written it, and why. But as he came to the back of the book, quite abruptly he found that there large chunks of pages that had been ripped away and discarded long ago, lost to history. It was only then that he noticed the roman numerals written at the top of the pages. He could recognize some of them, but in the back pages where they skipped wildly, the numbers became simply too large for him to be able to read.

Carefully he closed the book, his mind made up. Moments later he arrived at the front desk, checked out his book, and left with his parents. The check out lady seemed tired and uninterested, not taking the time to make any note of what book Jimmy had selected. His parents had seen him take so many different kinds of books home that they thought nothing of the age of the book, only reminding their son to be careful with it, and that with a book so old, it may be best not to take it with him to school. Even if they had not mentioned anything about it, Jimmy never would have thought of taking the book to school. It was far too old to risk doing that.

He spent a week pouring over the book in nearly every free moment he had. It didn't take long to learn the roman numerals, as they were much easier to make out then the text itself. He was surprised to find that the numbers exceeded seven hundred, and he soon realized that what he was reading was not just a book, but a journal. The numbers were the numbers of the day, beginning at one on the first day it had been written in.

The next thing Jimmy had to do was to decipher the text, which was much more difficult. Towards the back of the book, the handwriting became more consistent, but it also became rougher, as though the writer had been upset while writing it, or had been rushed in his writing. Some pages early on even seemed to have different handwriting entirely, as though they had been written by a different person. Yet even at the end, he ended every page with the same string of words, which Jimmy was eventually able to make out as being five separate words. It was these words that allowed him to finally, after three days, be able to decipher the text.

"Towards adventure I set myself."

At the end of the week, Jimmy returned the book reluctantly. He didn't want to let go of the delicate bindings, or the unique writing.

But at least he knew where it would be. And he knew that no one else would notice it, as they had not for so long. And he had been able to start deciphering the life of the adventurer, Bermis, whose story would soon become a focal point of Jimmy's life.

Why I write what I write 2

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the future. Even as a child, when I first started writing, I was fully aware that it was not an easy way to live. It wasn't easy to write a book that would sell well. I could see that every time I went to the bookstore and walked past aisles upon aisles of books that I had no interest in, and that no one else seemed to be interested in either. Today as I look upon this world of writing, as I tentatively dip my toes in the water, anxiety fills my soul. I become so incredibly terrified of what I am attempting to do that I can't help but ask myself "Am I doing the right thing?"

I want to say yes. I desperately want to, I beg to the universe that I am making the right choice, and I am met with... silence. Crushingly deafening silence. And as I continue to listen to that silence, a chill slips its way into my bones, into my chest, and it rips away the enthusiasm I have tried so desperately to hold on to. I am filled with fear that, perhaps, this is the wrong choice.

Perhaps this is the reason that, as of late, I feel that I am regressing. My writing feels weak, like it will snap under the lightest of tensions, and perhaps it is because I am afraid. Afraid of moving forward, afraid of falling back, afraid of staying at a standstill and never getting anywhere. But above all, afraid that what I once believed in is fading from my mind.

Above all, I want my writings to have happiness, and inspire happiness. Writing these things, these bitter, chilling things, makes me want to vomit. I can feel my stomach shifting, fighting against my actions, trying to tell me to stop before it is too late.

In school, we often read the "classic" stories. Thinking on them, I am struck by how often they left a similar taste in my mouth. Stories of betrayal, confusion, blindness, and a lone sense of hope which is systematically and irreversibly crushed, burned, and obliterated. Pages of text which I wanted to shred and set aflame before they could infest my heart. What little hints of hope they contained within their pages existed only at the expense of others, for the most common lesson I was taught was that happiness could only be gained if wrenched from the hands of others.

Perhaps I was simply missing the point, but this was what I saw, and I hated it. I loathed it with every fiber of my being. I vowed to make that change. There were so many stories I read in my own time where this was not the case, yet no one I talked to had ever heard of them. I accepted that I was alone in these endeavors, though I could not understand why, but I wanted to make that change. I wanted to show people that a good story was not defined by sadness.

I genuinely question if this is something anyone wants to hear. Surely there must be someone out there who believes in happy endings. Surely I am not alone in this. And if I can find a way to write for that person, to give them strength in their beliefs, to show them that they are not alone...

That is why I write.

Pain

Johannes slammed his fist into the wall, immediately feeling the burst of pain sear through his hand as the skin of his knuckles tore. Uncaring for the pain, he swung again and again, each blow on the wall leaving another pair of bloody marks. When he had lost track of how many times he had hit the wall, he slammed his head against it and came to a stop, both hands curled into fists and resting against the uneven surface. He could feel the heat of his blood flowing down the back of his hand, as well as some that was starting to flow from under his hair.

"Johannes, please, you must relax..." came a concerned voice from behind him. His arm shot back, pointing in the voices direction, which responded with a small cry that Johannes assumed must have come from the blood leaping from his wounds.

"Don't tell me what I have to do!" he shouted, his voice rough from use. He had been screaming in frustration, unable to find the words to express just how angry he was, but trying to find them all the same. He ripped himself away from the wall and turned to the voice, which came from the nurse who had been trying to look him over. "Do you understand what it feels like to have your life ripped from your hands?" he demanded. "Do you know what it feels like to have everything you know and love taken away? I may as well give up! There is nothing left for me!"

The nurse looked back at him, her eyes are cross between concern and anger. "Johannes, I need you to sit down," she tried to say firmly, though her voice was warped by worry. "I need you to calm down so I can try to administer care."

"What's the point?" he cried out. He wiped his hair out of his eyes, and saw the blood trail left behind on his hand as he brought it back down. The pain had quickly become numb, but his body was not so quick to adjust as his nerves were. Blood was pouring out from his knuckles and forehead, but he was too angry to recognize that if he did not do something soon, he would likely become light headed. "I didn't ask you to help me, you know! For all you know, I don't want to be aided. Maybe I just want to let my wounds fester so I can die and be done with this shit."

The look of terrified pain on the nurse's face was evident. Were this any other day, it likely would have immediately drained the argument and energy from Johannes. But the pain in his heart was too much to bear. The only thing keeping him on his feet was his blind rage, and it would take much more than a sad face to knock him out of it.

"Johannes..." came the nurse's voice once more. He glared down at her, her body appearing to retreat back into itself. "Would this be what she wanted of you?"

Her words hit Johannes like a brick. His knees crumpled beneath him, the air rushed from his lungs, and he collapsed to the ground, a miserable pile of tired limbs. His eyes burned as tears began to form.

Slowly she walked towards him as he silently sobbed. She kneeled in front of him, her face now flat, not wanting to betray what she was feeling. "I'm sorry, Johannes," she whispered. "I know this is hard for you. But you can't be like this. She would have wanted better of you."

Johannes could do nothing but quietly nod in agreement as he fought to stifle back the tears.

Critiques and growth

I have been writing for practically my entire life. When I was in second grade, I wrote my first story, at least as far as I can remember. I still remember it, though I don't think I still have any records of its existence, and looking back on it I recognize what it was.

The title was "The power of the balls." You can probably guess at the quality.

But I was proud of it at the time. It was mine, and it was the first time I had ever really created something of any form, and it felt like I had actually accomplished something. A year later I was introduced to the concept of writing stories in school, and I thought "Oh my god, this is a real thing. I've done this. This is something I can do." We wrote about once a month, I believe, and those were the days that I thrived. I don't think there were any students who finished as many stories as I did, and I had some of the longest.

I was also in third grade. So what was long then was probably comparable to these short pieces I write on a daily basis for practice today. And I hardly knew what I was doing, so I was able to cram a lot of information in them, but without any tangible content.

Ever since then I have thought of myself as an author. Ever since then I have had people look at my writing and tell me either one of two things: "This is great" or "This sucks." Never anything more, at least as far as I can recall. I have never felt that anyone has ever said anything constructive to me. And as I think back on these five months of writing that I have done, I really wish someone would.

When I started this blog, I had hoped that people would say something about my writing. I try not to ask the few people who I know read it for feedback, because I don't want to come off as begging for attention or some such. Hell, even just a "I liked this one" or an "I didn't like this one." But it hasn't happened, and I understand why. You don't want to crush the person you're reading by saying something they don't want to hear. I get that. I really do. But I disagree.

These aren't things that have been confined to writing for me. My entire life has been full of "Wow, that's cool, you're so lucky" so on and so forth. I know it's a whiny thing to say, but I get tired of it. I get tired of hearing about how good I do on things, because that is all I ever hear. I never get people who are willing to say things that will help me, even if they hurt me in the process. Or at least, I don't feel like I do.

Looking back on the things that I have written on this blog, I don't feel like I have grown as a writer. In some ways, I feel that I have regressed. I try to write for myself, and that's a good thing. I don't necessarily want to be a smart writer. I want to be an entertaining author. I want people to read the things that I write and feel as though it has made them happy in some way. But that still requires being a good writer. I can't bring a smile to people's faces if they don't feel that there is any substance to my writings, and that is how I have felt about what I've written as of late. It's probably part of why I haven't been writing as many fictions lately.

The problem is that I don't know how to change that. When all you ever hear is "this is good," you start to feel like you don't have to push yourself to get any better. That's not to say you can't say something is good. But you should explain. "This is good because..." or "This is good, but..." These are constructive criticisms, something that I haven't felt like I've gotten in a long time.

I don't intend on stopping writing any time soon. Even if this pattern continues, I will not stop, because I know that even if it doesn't seem like, somewhere deep inside I am learning, even if it is abysmally slow. If you're reading this, don't feel like you should be pressured to leave a comment, here or anywhere on my blog.

But you also shouldn't feel that just because a piece of writing has come and gone doesn't mean that it's not worth commenting on. If you have something you want to say, please, say it. If you come back to a story a year or five after it is written, and there is something about it that you want to say, please, say it. Don't be afraid of hurting my feelings. In martial arts, one thing I learned was that to get stronger, you must first break down the muscles and bones so that they might heal back, thicker and stronger than ever before. I need to be a stronger writer. I can feel it in my bones. So first, somehow, I need to be broken. Even if it takes a dozen tries to break me, if that is what it takes, I will do it. And if you are willing to help me, than I encourage you from the depths of my soul to do so.

I've said before that these are rough drafts. And that is true, and will likely always be true. But I have also said that I am a terrible editor. So do not feel that you need to hold back because of that.

A book's life

"Do you ever wish your life were more like a book?" John asked. He had been sitting in his chair, looking out the window, not saying much for a while as his brother worked on cooking dinner. The question came very abruptly, catching James off guard.

James looked over from the food, but John wasn't looking at him, instead continuing to stare out the window. "What brings about a question like that?" he asked his brother. "I'm sure it's a thing that most people wish for, especially when they're in the middle of a good one. You got a suggestion for what I should read next?"

John shook his head. "No, I was just thinking about it," he explained. "You read stories, and the guy always gets the girl, and he never loses a fight, and he's capable of so many things. It makes you jealous, you know? I wish I could do stuff like that."

James chuckled and shook his head, turning back to the food. "You've been reading the wrong books if those are the only things that ever happen in them," he replied. "There are all kinds of books out there about the guy failing over and over. All kinds of stories in which things don't go the way you expect them to."

"I don't read those kinds of stories for a reason, dude. I want to read a story so I can escape my life. Why would I read something that's exactly the kind of life that I'm already reading?"

"So you're saying that if you were more successful in life, you would stop reading these kinds of stories? You would be more inclined to read the stories about people who weren't as successful?"

John stopped and thought about that for a while. As he thought, there was no sound but that of James' cooking, sizzling meat and vegetables, and the quick and methodic chopping that came with preparation. As those sounds died down, with James getting close to finishing cooking, John spoke up once again.

"No," he said hesitantly. "If I were successful, I would want to read about people even more successful than me."

"Oh?" James asked. "And why is that?"

"Because that way I would have something even higher to look towards as inspiration and to shoot for."

"You know, bro," James said as he started to set the table, "every once in a while you say an actual smart thing."

"Was that one of them?"

James chuckled. "Yes, John. Yes it was. Immediately followed by something stupid, as per usual."

John frowned at his brother. "That's not a very nice thing to say about someone, you know," he complained.

James smiled and set out the food. "Maybe next time you should try actually helping with the cooking, then."

"You know I don't know how to cook."

"Yes, but someone in this house does, and he can teach you. Now quit while you're ahead and come eat."

Writing advice

I'm not really here to give writing advice. That's not the point of these on writing posts. I don't want to dictate the way anyone but me thinks about the right way to write, or how things should be read, or anything like that. I just want to try and get down in words the way that I think about it, to try and accurately describe my thoughts and my feelings on the subject. If anything I were to write is able to help someone else understand or think about their own writing, I would be more than ecstatic, but it's not the point. I don't really believe in giving advice, at least not when it comes to writing.

I don't really like it when people try to give me advice about my writing. I'm fine with critiques, don't get me wrong, but it's advice that I have a problem with. Critiques come across as "this is a mistake, and this is how you should fix it." Advice is more of "this isn't what I think is right, so you should do this." At least, that's how it comes across most of the time.

No writer is the same. That's why no two stories are the same. They may follow a dozen of the same plot points, share character names, take place in the same location, whatever. But that doesn't by any circumstance actually make them the same story, as much as you may try to draw the similarities. But it goes deeper than that. No two writers write the same way. They plan differently, they think of their characters differently, so on and so forth to create the worlds and stories that they choose to share with the world. You can teach someone the basic techniques, but you can't teach someone the advanced lengths to which they will go to complete their story.

The only useful advice you can possibly give someone for writing is to keep writing. To write and write and write until you've written so long that you've forgotten to eat. And it doesn't matter how many times you're told to keep writing, it will always be true, no matter how tired you are of hearing it. Because the only way you can learn to write is by writing, and seeing what works and what doesn't, and constantly applying that knowledge and gathering more, compounding further and further on top of each other until you learn how to tell the story you want to tell. And even then you won't be done learning, and there will always be more to understand, and so you keep writing and learning through story after story.

Despite that, I still frequently hear pieces of advice about how you should write to better yourself. Things like eliminating certain words, diligently following sentence structures and patterns, things like this. I'm sorry to say, but doing these things won't make you a better writer. If anything, they'll limit you. They'll make you think that there is a correct way to write, and that simply isn't true. The only correct way to write is the way that works for you. And the only one who can decide something like that is you.

The history book

"This book," their grandfather said, pulling an old book off the shelf and carrying it to the table, "has been passed down through this generation for safekeeping for generations." Carefully, he placed the dusty, leather-bound book down on the table, and gently wiped some of the dust away from the leather. It was decorated with swirling, intertwining designs of styles which Greg and Malory couldn't recognize. In the very center of the designs, however, was the distinct depiction of man who, upon closer inspection, looked remarkably like their grandfather in old pictures which they had seen in photo albums.

"What is it?" Greg asked, reaching out to touch it before being stopped by his grandfather. He was deathly curious about what was inside of it, and he could practically feel that pages of it calling out to him to turn them and read them.

"It is a history of our family," his grandfather responded, "more detailed and accurate than you could ever imagine. One day, the story of your lives will be placed inside it as well, and those of your children, and your children's children." He was grinning at the two of them, clearly filled with pride, both in what was already inside of the book, and what would be in it in the future.

"So do we have to feel the pages out ourselves?" Malory asked, looking at the thick book. "Cause neither of our handwritings are very good, and I'd feel bad filling it up with something people couldn't even read."

Their grandfather chuckled and shook his head. "You'll be filling it up yourselves," he told them, "but you won't have to worry about your handwriting." The children looked up at him, confused by what he was saying, which caused him to chuckle more. "I know," he continued, "it's confusing. But it will all make sense in time. Well... For the most part."

"Nothing you are saying to us makes any sense," Greg complained. "How are we supposed to fill it up if we don't write in it? And what is 'for the most part' supposed to mean? Are you saying you don't fully understand the book?"

"I understand what is in the book," their grandfather explained, "as will you, but how it got there is not quite as clear."

"Are you going to let us see the inside of the book or not?" Malory asked, pouting.

The grandfather chuckled to himself and kneeled down in front of the table. "Very well," he said, "but you must be ready. Do you swear to me that you are ready?" The children leaned over the table and nodded fervently that they were. Slowly and carefully, the old man lifted the cover of the book and turned to the first page. The pages were clearly old and faded, but not a word was written on a single page.

Before the children could question this, however, suddenly words leaped into their minds. Their brains were filled with the history of the first ancestors who had used the book, hundreds of years prior, and they knew them intimately, as if they had grown up and lived with them.

After only a moment, their grandfather closed the book once again, a wide smile on his face. The two children sat back, eyes struggling to focus as they took in the things which they had just learned and experienced. "What was that?" Greg asked after a long time as he began to gain his focus again.

"That," his grandfather told him, "was your history."

Tears

Leon could feel the heat growing in his face, could see the very edges of his vision start to blur. He had no idea why, but he could tell that he was about to cry. With every fiber of his being he fought back against it, but he could not stop them from coming. He could feel the water begin to pool in his eyes, and slowly drip down his face. He wiped madly at them, trying to make them stop, but they continued to poor from his eyes.

"Leon?" his girlfriend, Rachel, asked. "Are you ok? What's wrong? Why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying," Leon responded bitterly. "I don't know what's going on. My eyes just started tearing up for no reason."

Rachel sat up and turned to look at Leon. "You don't have to pretend, you know," she said. "Just because you're a guy doesn't mean that you have to be all strong and tough. You're allowed to cry."

Leon glared at Rachel through the tears that continued to fall from his face. "I'm telling you, there's nothing wrong. I don't know why I'm crying. I feel perfectly fine, other than the fact that my face is getting wet. There is nothing wrong."

"I don't believe that for a second. I can see the tears in your eyes plain as day, and you look upset."

"Yeah, I'm upset now," Leon retorted, "because someone keeps accusing me of things that I am not. I'm fine. The tears came from nowhere."

"Leon, you stop lying to me this instant."

"I am not lying!"

Rachel glared and frowned at him. He hated it when she did that. It was like she took all of the things that made her face pretty and discarded them for the moment whenever she did. "Don't look at me like that," he said. "I hate it when you look at me like that."

"Then tell me the truth!" she exclaimed. "I can see that you're upset, so just tell me what it's about!"

"If I was upset, I would tell you!" he practically shouted. "In fact, if I was upset, I probably wouldn't be crying, but instead would be throwing fits! I have no idea why I'm crying. Maybe I'm tired, and my eyes are drying out, so my body is trying to rehydrate them or something."

Rachel continued to pout, clearly not believing him. "Do you feel tired?" she asked flatly.

"Well... No, not particularly," he conceded.

"Then it must be because you're sad."

"I am not sad! If anything, now I'm just getting angry."

"You're mad at me for trying to help you?" she asked in shock.

"Yeah, kinda!" he replied. "When you're trying to help me with a problem that doesn't exist and refusing to believe the things that I am telling you! In fact, if you're going to be acting this way about this, why would I tell you anything? Clearly you just wouldn't believe me."

"I'm not doing this anymore, Leon," Rachel replied, standing up and turning her back to him. "I'm leaving."

"Fine," Leon spit back, continuing to wipe at his eyes as she walked away.

Leon awoke with a start, his eyes stained with salt that had been left behind by his tears, and the pillow in front of him uncomfortably damp. He wiped at his face, but it had long since dried up. He looked beside him to see Rachel sleeping peacefully beside him. He let out a breath of air and slowly laid back down, adjusting himself so as not to be on the damp part of the pillow any longer.

"Stupid dreams," he mumbled to himself.

The guitar

Jason ran his fingers over the softly curving edges of the guitar which had been handed to him. He had often watched his father playing it, seemingly lost in the music he pulled from its strings, his fingers dancing along them more gracefully than any person could dance with their feet. As he held it, not knowing what to do with it or how to play it, he could feel a warmth coming from within it that called to him, as if begging to be let free. Jason wondered if his father could hear that warmth when he played, and if it was that voice that he listened to within the music. That thought filled him with a burning desire which he had never felt before.

His father looked down at him and smiled. "I see that spark in your eye, son," he said, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder. "I had a feeling that someday you would want to learn to play. But seeing that look on your face... You want to play even more than I expected you to." Jason looked up at him, confused, but determined to learn.

"Teach me," he asked. His father simply smiled and nodded.

Over the next year, Jason spent nearly all of his free time of every day sitting with that guitar, plucking at its strings, trying to learn how to pull the music out of it like his father did. Day by day he learned, and day by day he felt the warmth from within the guitar growing. It began to fill his body, starting at his fingers and crawling up through his arms to reach into his heart, from which it spread to the rest of him. He learned to play quickly, much more quickly than anyone expected him to. That guitar called to him, and he could not ignore its calls.

As he learned to play, he found that though he loved the music his father could teach him, Jason needed more. He began to branch out, looking for more ways to play, and how he could incorporate them into what he wanted to play. He learned bits and pieces of the styles of every genre he could find, and soon he surpassed his father in skill. By that time, the warmth inside him had grown into a raging inferno, and he found that only the guitar could let him control the fire.

He pulled back from the people around him. Though he continued to love his family, and they knew he did, he sunk down into his music more and more, and the few friends he had had faded away from him. His fingers grew faster and faster, and in school, though he could not bring his guitar with him, he became known to spend more time playing an air guitar than pay any attention to what was happening in class. The few times he was allowed to bring his instrument, it was quickly sent away, as he couldn't pull himself away from it.

Eventually, even his parents knew that something had to be done. So they found a school, one where he would not be alone, and though it pained them to do so, they sent him off. And there, Jason would grow into the man he would become.

Muscle Memory

Jat looked on helplessly, unable to do anything as he watched his friend be pummeled into a wall. Blow after blow this strange man threw, each one making a distinct thud, though whether it was from the skin on skin or skin on wall, Jat couldn't tell. He had been strapped to another wall by metal pipes the man had jammed into the concrete behind him. Jat wasn't nearly strong enough to do anything about the pipes, and had no choice but to watch on, waiting for his turn to be pummeled.

Sarah, on the other hand, kept her mind clear, feeling the sharp pains of each blow pounding into her, and the wall behind her reverberating back into her spine. All the while, however, she focused her eyes on the face of the man before her. His features were plain, with gray eyes, his lips formed into a sinister snarl, the only defining feature the pure rage in his eyes. His fists came at her fast, each one faster than her eyes could fully follow, the pain burning throughout her body.

Very abruptly the man stopped, one hand on her chest pinning her to the wall, and the other raised and ready to stop. "Have you already given up?" he asked, his voice low and full of malice. "You show no sign of fighting back. Yet your face..."

Sarah grinned, spitting out her knocked out and bloody teeth into his face and revealing her now gaping smile. "You've noticed?" she asked sweetly. "You want be doing any more damage to me, I'm afraid. My muscles know you now." Her voice was sweet and teasing, though the pain was clear in her voice.

"Your muscles?" the man scoffed. "You're out of your mind. Must be the pain." He burst forward, aiming for her face, and his fist made solid contact with the wall. He stopped in surprise, feeling the pain in his own knuckles unexpectedly. He looked at Sarah, whose head had moved just far enough to the side for the blow to miss. Infuriated, he released an onslaught of blows, every one of which hit the wall as Sarah moved every so slightly away from each blow as if on instinct.

After only a few seconds of the onslaught, though to Jat watching from a distance in wonder it felt like minutes, Sarah counter attacked, slamming her own fist into the man's chest as he hit the wall, pushing him back and giving her space to get away from the wall. As the man stepped back in surprise, she continued to push forward, dodging through his blows and landing her own hits on him, pushing him back and back until he tripped over a piece of broken wall he himself had knocked to the ground.

"You get him!" Jat yelled from the sideline, amazed at what his friend was apparently capable of. Sarah hardly gave him a glance, however, keeping her eye on the man laying in front of her.

"How?" he asked. He wanted so badly to destroy her, to crush her with his fists, but he was distinctly under the impression now that he stood no chance in doing so.

"I told you," she replied, smiling once more. "My muscles know you. A high resistance to pain and incredible muscle memory make it very easy for me to stage a comeback. Wouldn't you say?"

The man growled in response, ready to lunge forward, but her foot slammed hard down onto his face. Again and again it fell, each time pushing further and harder, until she heard the loud crack of bone as his skull shattered. She pulled back, making sure he was dead, then made her way over to where Jat was pinned to the wall.

"That was amazing!" Jat exclaimed. Sarah smiled back at him before remembering the teeth she had lost and quickly covered them. She looked at the pipes that pinned him, then sighed and looked around.

"I'm not strong enough to get those out," she said. "We'll have to find something around here that we can use to loosen them."

"That's alright," Jat said. "You always get me out. I trust you."

Sarah looked at him, surprised. She knew that they had been friends for a long time, but for some reason, hearing those words... She smiled again, undeterred by her broken teeth. "Yeah," she said. "I always do."

Sleep

Mark felt his eyes growing heavy. His head felt numb, and his mind felt like it was racing, though there wasn't a thought in his mind he could clearly make out. His hands hovered over his keyboard, knowing that he must press forward with his work, though he could hardly believe that his fingers were still moving. He had a strange feeling that when he read over what he typed in the morning, he would have to do a lot of reworking. He briefly considered just putting it off until then, but in the meantime his fingers continued to plow ahead as though with a mind of their own.

Abruptly he found himself standing up at his desk. He didn't particularly remember standing up, but nonetheless he was standing. He let his legs carry him away from the brightly lit screen and into the kitchen, his arms pushing the door out of his way with more force than was necessary. If he thought about it, he might have realized he had made a fighting gesture to open the door that he really only ever saw in over the top kung fu movies, but he was too tired to register the thought now. His fingers curled around a glass, and he had to take all the focus he had to make sure that it didn't overflow as he filled it with water.

He quickly chugged the liquid, feeling the cool sensation rush through his body as though he were being possessed by a ghost. It didn't wake him up at all, but it felt like the most vital thing he could have been doing in that moment.

In the blink of an eye, he was in the bathroom, peeing it all back out.

Then he was back in front of his computer all over again. As his eyes slowly focused, he realized that the work he had thought he had done previously was non existent. He must have imagined all of the movements that his fingers had been making. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. What felt like an eternity later, he forced his hands away from his face and blinked his eyes back open.

Not even a minute had passed since he sat down.

"What the hell am I doing?" he muttered to himself. "I need to sleep." He stood up roughly and stumbled the few steps it took to get to his bed and collapsed onto his pillow. He flopped around on the bed, trying to get comfortable, then remembered that taking off his glasses would probably help with that. He rested them on the table beside and laid back, staring up at the ceiling.

Very suddenly, he wasn't tired anymore.

"Every time..."

Writing sites

I've been around the web a lot, and I've seen a lot of writing websites. As with most things, there are some good, and there are some bad. When it comes to writing, you'd think all you'd really have to do is provide a space in which text can be placed, but you'd be surprised at just how wrong that assumption is. Even here, on blogger, there's more to what makes it an enjoyable experience for me than the fact that I have a document which I can type in to, hit submit, and it's out there for people to see. There's a reason that you don't see books out there that are the size of your standard printer paper.

There are several things that make writing interesting, and I find that nearly every website out there, good or bad, has some of the right aspects and some of the wrong aspects. Let's start with the most basic part - the document itself. You need to have a smooth, easy to comprehend and use document that gives you all the parts you need to write - and admittedly, there aren't that many things you need. Ease of scrolling, plenty of space, the ability to bold or italicize, and a word counter. You'd be surprised how few websites actually have all of these, though. Blogger lacks a word count, for instance, which is something that is highly frustrating for me with a word count goal on a daily basis.

The next is a goal. This doesn't apply to all sites, obviously, with things like blogger depending on you making your own goals. Which is fine. But there are sites that give you a daily minimum that you should be writing, or where each piece of writing has a maximum word count that you can't go over. These kinds of things test your ability to adapt, and say what you need with the space that you have. That's an awesome thing, and lord knows that I have days where I simply don't know how I'm going to hit 500 words with the topic that I'm writing. At the same time, a site that I used to use a lot called typetrigger limits you to 300 words, and trying to fit a meaningful piece of writing into that space is quite a fun challenge. But, to me, something like twitter which limits you to barely a couple dozen words is just asking you to confine your thoughts.

The last thing, the thing that seems to pop up when I least expect it, and the thing that I think should never be, is judgement. Now, there's a difference between criticism and judgement, and criticism is incredibly important. Being told automatically that I have made spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes is fine, and important. But there are sites that go beyond this, and though I'm sure they don't mean to, it goes into the area of judgement. For instance, I use a site called wordcounter to, get this, count the words, specifically for these blog posts. It's easy. Copy paste it in, it tells you how many words it is, a couple other interesting statistics about what words you use most often or whatever. But recently it started analyzing the reading level of what you post in to it.

There are a lot of problems with this. This is based solely on the words that are put in, as far as I can tell. I'm not big on fancy language. I want my story to be focused, to have a point, to make it so a reader can understand what they're reading. That goes far beyond the "quality" of my writing, and it certainly can't be analyzed by some computer logarithm. Yet, with nearly every post I make, I am told that my writing is on a 7th-8th grade level. Somehow, I find it unlikely a 7th or 8th grader could write the things that I am writing. I admit that I am writing quickly, with lesser depth than a full story, but still. Come on.

Personally, I think that to find the best site, you can't just stop at one. You have to find a bunch, and pull from them all, use them all continuously, challenging yourself to work within the good and bad of them all. Nothing is going to be perfect, so you can't just stop in one place and say that it's the be all end all. You keep going, and you keep learning. And eventually you'll get what you need.

Thinking

The people who annoy me most when it comes to reading and writing are the people who think too much about it. It's one thing to be reading an article or an argumentative piece, and be fully analyzing it and discerning how much details and accuracies are involved, what the author was thinking or trying to say, and so on and so forth. I understand that, and I accept it. But all too often, when it comes to fiction, I believe that there are people who just dig too deep, are thinking too hard about what there is and what there isn't, and I feel like they're losing something. When I'm reading, I'm not thinking about how the story is set up, and how each sentence relates to that.

To me, that's a thing that you feel. If something is good, than you can feel it inside you, like it's tugging on your heart strings, begging you to come closer and to experience it. There is no thought about it. You don't think to yourself, "Man, I want to read more of this." Instead, you feel in your brain, and in your bones, and in your heart, "I have to keep reading."

I admit that as an author, I don't fully understand how to make this happen. If I did, I'd probably be a published multi-millionaire. I don't think any author fully understands how to make that happen. And the reason for that is that different things pull in different people.

The only way I know to make that happen is to let the story make that happen. I'm not a creator when I write. I don't try to force things to be beautiful and to pull in readers. I am a catalyst for the story, a way for it to tell itself, and if that story wants to pull people in, then it will. At least, that's how I think of it.

And you still need a decent amount of skill in order to make that happen. When picking a catalyst, you would always want to choose the best one. Think of a science fiction movie where the bad guy has the ability to inhabit a person's body and make it their own. They don't choose the weak and useless people for the final battle. They may choose that person on their way in, but not when it's important. When it's important, the pick the biggest, strongest, most capable people.

A story doesn't have to sneak in. It's the final boss from the get go. It wants to punch your face in and throw you against the wall, pick you up and carry you face first to the other side of the arena, and fling you in to the air, kneeing you in the gut and breaking your spine on the way down. It makes it so you can't look away. It makes you focus on it and only it, and it wants you to never forget it. It can't have you be thinking about your next move. The only thing it wants you to think about is "What the hell is going to come next?"

But for that to happen, its catalyst has to be in tip top shape. They have to have the skills, the determination, the shear strength of body and mind to pound that story out in the most incredible way. So if you want to write, it's not about knowing all the techniques. It's about using them. Making them second nature. Understanding them so intuitively that you don't have to think about them. You just feel them in every fiber of your being.

That way, your reader won't have to think either. They'll feel the blood, sweat, and tears that you put in your story. And it will move them.

Well. Hopefully.

Broken

"Your emotions make you weak," Trinan spat. "They will be your downfall."

Brenan stood up shakingly, his knees weak, but his demeanor calm. "Don't give me that shit," he muttered back, wiping the blood from his mouth. That last blow had been a powerful one, and were he a lesser man, he would easily be dead. But he was not. "Do you expect me to tell you you're wrong? That love is my strength, and that it is your hate that makes you weak? How cliche do you think I am?"

Trinan glared at him, standing tall. He discarded the hammer he had been previously wielding, and it clattered to the ground with a loud crack as it broke the pavement. Trinan stretched his shoulders, only slightly tired from carrying and swinging the weapon. It had been forged from ancient metals, ones long since abandoned by the planet. There were very few who could wield it. Even fewer who could withstand a blow from it. "Do you think you can defeat me as you stand now?" he demanded.

Brenan grinned at him. "No, not particularly," he replied calmly. "But does it really matter?" Carefully, he removed his shirt, and used it to wipe at the blood gathering on his face. The skin beneath his clothing was deeply bruised, and showed signs of broken bones and internal bleeding. "The better question is whether you can defeat me."

"Do not be cocky, fool. You are the one on the edge of death, not I."

Brenan chuckled and discarded the bloodied shirt. Despite the wounds, far more than he should be able to withstand, he began to stretch his muscles. "These?" he asked. "These are nothing. I have withstood pains far more than you have given me. Why don't you see if you can truly hurt me? But it will take far more than that hammer of yours."

"I don't need any weapons other than my fists to finish this battle now," Trinan spit vehemently. "Let's see you withstand my power when it is backed by speed and accuracy the likes of which can only be reached with my fists." Slowly he lowered himself into a fighting stance. Brenan only laughed.

"Fine," he said. "Fight me however you wish. But I won't fall to your blows. You will find me much more resistant than I appear."

Trinan launched forward in an instant, fists swinging at full speed and power. Brenan took the blows without resistance, blood spurting from his mouth and open wounds, the loud crack of bones breaking filling the air. Trinan didn't stop the onslaught until Brenan dropped to the ground, every bone in his body broken.

Trinan breathed hard, every ounce of energy he had having gone into the attack. And then, without difficulty, Brenan once more lifted himself back onto his feet, limbs shaky and improperly connected. Trinan stepped back and shock and disgust. "What the hell are you?" he breathed.

"More than you can handle," Brenan answered, swinging his broken arm up to brush the hair out of his face. "If that's all you've got, I'll be on my way now."

Trinan could do nothing but watch as the broken, bleeding man walked away as if it were nothing.

Hate

There are days when I honestly, truly hate writing. I sit and look at a blank document for hours at a time, trying to put something down on it, wanting so badly to take the words and mold them into something beautiful, and they simply will not let me. I'll write a sentence or two, and I won't like them, so I'll rewrite them, or I'll try something different, and over and over the result is the same, and I just end up with something I don't like and that I don't feel like I can continue. That blank page stares up at me, mocking me, taunting me with its potential, telling me about all the wonders that I could put down on it but refusing to allow me.

These days happen to me far more often than I would like to admit. It's like... It's like if I was writing with a pen, and even though I just bought it, and I know that it works, no matter what I do to it it won't let out any ink. It just absolutely refuses to write. So you start looking around, trying to find other things to do that might help you get the ink going, and all around you you see people whose pens work just fine, and you might even ask them for help, and all they have to say to you is "Just keep using it, it'll work. Look, mine does." "Great," you say back to them. "I'm so glad yours works. Mine just doesn't though. Can you help me?" "I'm telling you man, just use it. It works for me, I don't see why it wouldn't for you."

It's so frustrating to not be able to write. It taxes me more than you could imagine. It's like my brain, my creativity, my being is sucked out through my pores and pulled away from the page. I try to reach out towards it, but it's like I'm being pulled away by chains that come from nowhere and exist solely to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do.

These are the days that I question what I'm doing. Why am I making myself when I can't stand it? Why am I writing when it is painful, tiring, and so incredibly difficult? It keeps me from doing other things that I want to do, knowing that I still have to write, and I continue to put it off because I don't know what to write, and the longer I think about it, the less I have to write about until it comes down to a point when there is just so little left in me that I make myself write just anything that I possibly can.

These are the days when I write what feels like the same thing over and over. Even my sentences become repetitive.

But for some reason I write. I write, and I write, and I write, until there's nothing left to write, and then I write some more.

And when I look back on what I wrote, knowing all of the hate that I felt as I did it, knowing how much hate there was leading up to it...

All of that hate is gone. And I am happy.

Writers

I'm not a big fan of writers. That sounds strange, but there are reasons for it. I love people who write, and I love authors, but I hate hate hate writers. As a word, there is nothing wrong with a writer. To describe myself quickly to someone, I would tell them in a heartbeat that I am a writer, because writing is what I do, it's who I am. But telling someone that you are a writer leaves a lot of uncertainty about what it is that you do. I have had to explain far too many times that, no, I do not have any interest in writing non-fiction, in going into journalism, so on and so forth. This confuses people, because they don't understand the difference when you say that you are a writer. And that's fine. It's understandable.

I have no interest in being a writer. I want to be an author, a hundred and ten percent. But if you tell someone you are an author, they ask what you've written, and then you have to explain that no, I am not published, no, I do not currently have something going through the system, no, I do not have anything ready to publish. "But why did you say you're an author then?" they ask. "You say author, I think someone who's published." And that right there is the problem. What I have done should not define me as a writer versus an author. What I write should.

So why is it that I hate writers? From the sounds of it, it's a very general term that covers many factors, and it is, but it is also a word that all too clearly defines one set group of people, and a set of people that I want absolutely nothing to do with.

I think that every group of people has a small subsection of themselves that this applies to. The most obvious to me is a guitarist versus a guitar player. A guitar player is someone who plays guitar, obviously, and they may or may not be any good at it. A guitarist is someone who lives and breathes guitar, who understands its intricacies, who sees it as an extension of themselves. "Well great," I hear you say, "so a guitarist is just someone who takes it one step beyond." No. A guitarist is someone who understands. A guitarist is someone who's been there. A guitar player is someone who sees the guitar as a tool, and therefore there are set ways to use it, right and wrong ways, and if you aren't doing it the right way, then you're out of your mind. A guitar player can not appreciate what you do with your own guitar if it does not follow their expectations. A guitarist is someone who looks at what you're doing and says either "Hey man, that's really cool, can you tell me about that?" or "Hey man, that's really cool, have you tried doing this?"

It's a distinction that is far more subtle than it sounds. You look at it like that, and it seems so obvious that it could never be mistaken, and yet it happens every day, in everything. And the weirdest part is that the guitarist knows, but the guitar player doesn't. The guitar player flocks to groups, surrounds themselves in like minded people, further cementing that his way is right. The guitarist moves from person to person, interacting with them on a personal level, learning them, and constantly grows.

The difference between a writer and an author is the same. I have tried so many times to find writing groups which I can be a part of, and every time I have found those groups to be close minded and inward facing. They do not accept that there can be other ways of writing. There are rules, they say, and regulations, and they must be followed. You can not have this in your story, and you can not do this, so on and so forth until their rules are so specific that every story is the same, and then they do not understand why there is so little originality in the world of story telling. Yet they can not see that they themselves are the ones putting those same stories over and over into the world.

It is for this reason that I am not a writer. And I have come across writers who had no idea what I meant when I said this, pushed me away, continued on their writing ways, and I do not hold this against them for being this way. I can learn from these people all the same. I have also come across people who called themselves writers, not knowing what it meant, but as I talked to them, I realized that they were more than that. And when I explained to them the difference in what I said, they knew what I was saying, and like me, were relieved to find someone who understood.

A writer looks at their favorite author and emulates them.

An author looks at their favorite author, and their favorite author, and all the authors around them, and all the authors who inspired them, and then takes all of their favorite bits and pieces and takes them in so that they might write as they will.

I choose to be an author.

A dying sun

David watched the model of the sun as it burned, an accelerated depiction of its predicted history, which showed the flaming ball shrinking and changing colors as the heat grew hotter, until eventually it burned itself out. "These holograms are getting better and better," he said to himself. "I could swear that I could actually feel the heat coming off of that one."

He switched the projector off, the machine making no sound as it did so, and turned in his chair to face out the window. The end of the sun that he had witnessed in the hologram was a millennia away, but the changing of colors had long since begun. It hung in the blackness of space, an incredibly bright blue orb, tinting everything they saw with that color. David was lucky to be able to say that was his favorite color. Others were not as much.

"Even though I know I won't live to see the day," he muttered, "I still fear for the day the sun burns out. There will surely still be people alive, and there will further surely still be those who live under this sun's rays, choosing to ignore the warnings we have provided them. Those days will be dark, and painted in purple, and still they will continue on. How many people will perish in those days, clinging to their beliefs that we were wrong?" He sighed and rubbed his face, then pulled the skin colored glove off, revealing the metallic workings underneath.

He had had to get the prosthetic nearly a decade prior, after getting into a fight over the ownership of the ship he now resided upon. He had underestimated his opponent's ruthlessness at first, but not after his hand had been severed by the man's makeshift beam knife. David won, though, but it had taken quite a while to get the new hand installed.

The prosthetic itself was made of titanium, and despite the large number of moving parts and working engine, it was cold to the touch. That was the main reason he wore the glove. It was specially designed to feel like human skin, and was heated, to mask the bitter coldness of the metal underneath.  It also disturbed people less, which was surprising considering the number of people who had to get such replacements, but such prejudices still existed, and though David did not often run into people these days, it was still nice not to scare them at first glance.

He turned back towards his desk and pulled up the screen through which he observed his ship's course and maintenance. All was as it should be, to no surprise, but he generally liked to keep an eye on things, just to be safe. He would rather consistently see the same okay screens over and over, then see an error too late for it to be corrected.

"Someday we'll find a new home," he told himself. "One that is safe from the dangers of our old sun, and where humanity can begin to rebuild. Until then, I'll just have to keep searching, lone wolf. I swore not to take a family until I knew they would have a future after all." He kicked back in his chair and pushed the screen aside. He had a sweetheart back home waiting for him.

He wouldn't disappoint her.

Weapons

Hans stared down his opponent, standing a defensive battle stance, waiting to see what he would do. They found themselves facing off in the arena, each knowing that the only way to survive was to kill the other. They had been found guilty of heinous crimes, and regardless of whether their guilt was real, to get a second chance at life they would have to fight their way through the arena. They had both faced down a dozen opponents already, and they had lived this far to tell the tale. Only one, however, could make it out of finals.

"It's quite a weapon you've got there," Hans' opponent, Frig, called out. "You haven't been using it much throughout the arena, I noticed. Probably trying to make sure that I don't know the full extent of its utility."

On Hans back rested a wide shield, a sword hilt sticking out the top of it, the center bearing the distinct resemblance of a longsword, though it seemed infused with the shield and the edge between its appearance and that of the rest of the shield was solidly shut. He lifted it off of his back and slipped his arm into the straps, which cinched tight around his forearm, making sure it wouldn't come loose in combat. "I'm not the only one," he called back. "I'm sure those gauntlets are more than you've lead the crowd to believe."

Frig grinned back at him and lifted his hands up to block his head. On each hand was a long gauntlet, which Hans had witnessed sliding along its self in tandem with Frig's strikes, as though it were somehow trying to unload an unseen power, or perhaps simply enhancing the force of Frig's punches. Not only that, but the metal they were fashioned of he had witnessed to be quite powerful, capable of blocking several sword strikes throughout the tournament. "These are the finals," Frig responded. "Shall we let the crowd have a show?"

"Yes, I suppose we shall." Hans gripped the sword hilt extending from the top of his shield and pulled the sword smoothly out from the center of his shield. As it came free, the shield moved together behind it, sealing itself back up, and the pressure of the metals pushing against each other caused extensive friction, heating the edges of the blade so that they glowed red hot.

Frig responded in kind, flicking his wrists to snap the backs of his gauntlet up over his hand and back behind, revealing that the motion loaded in a vial of gunpowder, ready to detonate on impact. Each gauntlet was loaded, and Hans suspected that there was more than one vial in each gauntlet, ready and waiting to be loaded. The two smiled at one another.

"This should be interesting," Frig said.

"Indeed."

Food

The scent of cooking filled the air, the sound of meticulous chopping and stirring fittingly accompanied. Sarah could feel the drool forming in her mouth, and actively made sure to keep her lips shut tight, so as not to let it flow out. She had been purposefully kept in the dark as to what was being cooked, or what was being used as ingredients, so she didn't know what she was in store for but good lord did it smell good. She could only help that the taste would match the heavenly scent.

"How much longer are you two going to keep me waiting?" she shouted out to the cooks in the kitchen. "I'm starving out here, and the smells from the kitchen are driving me crazy!"

"You can't rush perfection!" one of the voices came back to her.

Sarah sighed. Michael always was one for exaggeration. "Perfection," she scoffed to herself. "Like those two idiots could ever manage perfection." She rested her face in her hands and waited for them to finish. They had been bragging for ages that they were learning to cook so the could rub it in her face. She always used to be the one who had to cook when they were together, because she was the only one who knew how. Supposedly they had started taking lessons, with the intent of being able to cook better than she could. "They can use all the fancy ingredients they want," she told herself. "But it still won't taste good if they don't actually know how to make it." Still, she couldn't deny just how good it did smell.

Another ten minutes passed before the kitchen doors slammed open, and out came Michael with a covered dish in his hands, followed by Ian, carrying the drinks. "Bon appetit," they declared proudly in unison, laying their deliveries on the table before her. Sarah looked up at them, one eyebrow raised, before she moved back to the plates and slowly pulled the cover off to see what they had made.

She was shocked to find a finely cooked steak and ricotta gnocchi sitting in front of her, decorated with bay leaves, with a side of bruschetta. She looked up at the boys, who said nothing but smiled and urged her to eat. Slowly, reluctantly, she picked up her fork and began to eat. She tried her best to keep her face flat, but the food was incredible. It tasted as though it had come from some gourmet restaurant. She could already see the grins of self satisfaction on the boys' faces.

After a few bites, she put the fork down and sat back in her chair, looking at them. They grinned widely, but said nothing, waiting for her response. "I don't believe you cooked this," she finally said. "Where did you order this from to try and trick me?"

"Don't you pull that on us!" Ian cried out. "We worked hard to learn to make this! This is all our work!"

"We slaved over it!" Michael added. "It was cooked with our own blood, sweat and tears!"

Sarah watched the two's faces, but she could tell they weren't lying. "...Fine," she conceded after a while. "It's truly fantastic." The grins once more donned the boys' faces. "What else have you learned to cook?"

"About that..." Michael said, rubbing the back of his head.

"We worked hard to learn to make this one dish," Ian explained.

Sarah sighed. "Idiots."

Truth

"Come, child, and show me the truth which I am denied."

Allisa backed into the corner, staring at the bare husk of a man before her which had once been a man she greatly admired. Over night he had seemingly changed into a monster in human's skin, hunched over, his skin pulled tight over the mutated and disgusting muscles that had grown from nowhere. She wished she knew what had happened to him, what he had done to himself, and if there were anything she could do to reverse the process.

"Child!" he shouted at her, his voice deep and husky where once it had been soft and soothing. "There are things in this world that we do not understand, and we have agreed to search for them together! But in my haste, I have cursed myself with knowledge. Do you not feel pity on your old friend? Do you not wish to help me?"

Allisa trembled, unsure of what to say, or even what he meant. "I... I don't know how to help you," she whispered, barely able to gather the breath she needed to form the words.

"Do not lie to me!" he screamed. With each passing phrase his voice seemed to get louder and rougher, his anger beginning to boil over, though what it was directed at, Allisa could not say. "Give me your wisdom, child! There is something that you know, something you are hiding from me, and I am desiring of it! We agreed to work together. How can we do that if you will not share with me?"

"I don't know what you're talking about!" she replied in a terrified scream. "I don't know what's happening to you! How am I supposed to help you when I don't even know what's going on?"

"Lies!" he barked in return. "I have long seen the shimmer in your eyes! The way that you take things in and understand them in an instant, far better and faster than I did! Tell me, child! Tell me what you are hiding from me!"

"I swear to you, I don't know what you're talking about!"

The hulking beast of a man lurched forward at her, a terrible roar erupting from his throat, and Allisa screamed and tried to shrink away from him, sinking down into the floor, tears spilling from her eyes.  She shook her head, breathlessly muttering how she didn't understand, unable to think straight as she was filled with dread and terror.

"Give it to me!" the man bellowed. "Give me your truth!"

"I don't have any truth!" she screamed back at him.

The words hit him like a rock, and he stumbled backwards, dazed. Allisa squeaked in surprise, but did not move from her spot, tears flowing down her cheeks from her wide open eyes. The man tried to keep his balance as he gripped his head, appearing to be trying to pull his skull apart.

"There must be truth," he cried out to no one in particular. "There must be. This can not be for nothing!"

He lurched forward again, ripping another scream from Allisa's throat, and as she did so he stumbled back again, unable to physically bear the noises that came from her. He fell backwards, his back hitting the ground hard, his head making a loud crack as it slammed into the floor. Again Allisa screamed, and the man's body was overtaken with violent tremors.

"Give it to me!" he cried out, his voice now weak, as though it were fading away. "I must have truth! I must... I need..."

The man's body fell limp to the floor. Allisa could do nothing but watch in terror as slowly his body ceased its movements. After a long moment, she found the strength to slowly stand and approach him. He did not move. He did not breath. He was dead.

From the doorway came another voice, tearing Allisa's attention from the body to the door. There stood another man, or rather a silhouette of a man which she could not make out.

"The truth is only for those deserving," the man said. "You have long been deserving, whether you know it or not, and thus the truth has long sat with you. Do not be afraid, child. When you are ready, so will be the truth."

Blinking the tears out of her eyes so she might better see the man, Allisa found herself once more alone. The man had simply disappeared. She looked down at the body before her for a long time, before leaving the room, locking the door behind her with no intentions of ever returning.

A break

Sometimes, when I'm staring at the blank document before me, trying to think about what it is I want to write for that day, and coming up with little to say, I wonder if I should take a break. Not like a ten or twenty minute food break, where I get up and walk around and try not to tax my brain with the efforts of coming up with a new story to tell. But a full break. A day off from telling stories or trying to understand writing and what I love about it and what I hate about it and what may or may not be the right or wrong way to go about it. I've missed a day before and continued, so I know it's possible for me not to lose my way entirely, though I also know from previous experience just how easy it is to let that break continue on and on ad infinitum.

I mean, people do it all the time, right? It's supposed to be healthy for you to take a vacation from your work. And as much as I may love it and try and tell myself otherwise, writing is work for me, and as long as I continue to pursue it, it always will be. That's just how it goes. So surely at some point a vacation is in order, right? I mean, I've done over a hundred of these things, and I ran out of things to write a long time ago, yet I'm still pushing on somehow.

But, setting my own rules, how do I know how long a break is supposed to be? Is it a single day? A weekend? A week? And wouldn't doing so inherently make me fail in my goal of writing everyday for a year? I mean, granted, I already have, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to say that one lost day is better than two, or three, or so on.

When I started this challenge, I knew it was going to be exactly that - a challenge. I wasn't expecting it to be easy. I knew it would be hard, and good god, that hardness has exceeded my expectations. I have pushed hard, harder than I ever had, to write. Somedays it's easier than others, sure, but that's how everything goes. That's how things are supposed to be. At what point can I say I have earned a break?

Everyone has a different answer to that question. And for all I know, it may differ from thing to thing, place to place. Some things may inherently need more breaks than other things. For me, there is no point at which a break has been earned. Not for writing. Even if I were to publish a book, the next day the best thing for me to do would be to sit down and get to work on the next one. I just wouldn't be able to get back to it if I took a day off in between. And, sad as it may seem, I have a feeling that this is true for a lot of people in whatever endeavors they may choose to follow.

Breaks are important, though. We can't burn ourselves out. We need time between the big pushes to cooldown, gather ourselves, and get ready for the next big step. In a way, you could almost say that my real talk posts are my breaks. They don't require a lot of creativity. They're just me getting my thoughts down. Not to say that they aren't useful to me, although they may be useless and uninteresting to any reader I may or may not have. But that's why I wouldn't make a book out of them.

In many ways, you can't take a break from writing. Or at least, I can't. Even if I weren't doing the physical act of writing every day, I would constantly be thinking about it. Thinking about things I want to write, or that I have written, or things that I've read and what I liked or didn't like about them. Writing is, in some ways, one of the most mentally intensive activities I can think of. It always requires your attention, whether you even realize it or not.

So call this kind of writing my break, as an artist may consider a quick sketch a break from their bigger projects. Because breaks are important, even if they do not come in the shapes that we expect of them.

First kiss

It had been a long night at the end of a long day, following a long week that had come at the end of a long month. I didn't know how long we had been standing there out in the cold under the moonlight, arms wrapped around each other, and I highly doubt she did either. It seemed like an eternity, yet at the same time, it felt as though no time had passed at all. We had talked about so many things, but looking back, I don't remember any of them. I don't think we could have even recalled them at the time. In some ways the things we had talked about were important, I'm sure. But at the same time, I'm sure they hardly mattered. A lot of things that night carried that feeling of inherent contradiction.

As the night had progressed and he air grew colder, we both moved closer together. It was hard to say if it was truly because of the cold, or just a desire to be closer to one another. Even at that time, it was no secret the feelings that we held for each other. But many things had happened, and neither of us wanted to rush in to anything. We had both experienced pain only recently, and though we felt that we could help each other, we didn't want to risk making decisions that hadn't been thought through. Less than a month prior if you had told us that we would be there that night as we were, neither of us would have believed it. But there we were.

As the night dragged on, it became more and more apparent that we would need to pull apart. But neither of us wanted to. By that time, we had already become so close, both emotionally and physically. I remember resting my forehead against hers, our noses touching, as we stood in silence, just looking into one another's eyes. I remember wanting so badly to close that small gap between us, to press my lips against hers, to kiss her. But I also remember being afraid. I didn't want to mess that up. I had never kissed anyone before, and she had, so she must have some kind of expectations, some idea of how it was supposed to go, and how it was supposed to feel, and I had nothing.

But I couldn't get the thought out of my mind. I wanted to do it. I wanted to kiss her so badly. And that's when I heard her say it.

"Are you going to kiss me?" she asked me quietly.

I looked up into her eyes. I didn't even realize that my eyes had drifted down to her lips. She smiled gently at me, and I could see in her eyes that she was ok with the thought. I don't know why I had doubted that she would be. But I couldn't shake the fear that I would somehow do it wrong. "I want to," I whispered back to her. I could feel my voice shaking slightly as I spoke, and I tried not to let it out. "But I'm worried I'll do it wrong."

She smiled again, and then she slowly pushed forward and kissed me. The feeling was inexplicable. Her lips were smooth and soft, and as they touched mine it was like a wave of warmth washed through me. My fingers clenched around her back, pulling her ever so slightly closer to me, and I kissed her back. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before, and I do not know if I will ever have the words with which to explain it.

It lasted only for a moment. She pulled back away from me, ever so slight a blush on her face, and I realized that my eyes had instinctually closed as I opened them to look at her. So lost in what had happened, the words we may have exchanged in that brief moment did not fully register. All I remember is pulling her back in to kiss her again.

Monster

Marcus hit the ground hard, rolling back into the wall where he heard a loud crack and felt an abrupt and explosively sharp pain in his shoulder. He knew in an instant that it had shattered. The being before him that he faced, its incredible power, its twisted and terrifying features, could be described only as monstrous. Slowly, Marcus rose to his feet, his arm swinging limp and useless by his side. He glared at the monster before him, knowing he was helpless to defeat him, but unwilling to step aside and let him have free reign over this town full of people he loved.

"What is it you want of us?" he demanded. The monster looked at him, large and wide eyes unblinking and without emotion. A low, deep growl came from deep within its chest, though it lips did not part to allow the air to escape. Marcus wasn't sure that it's lips could open. He had yet to see them do so. "Why do you hate us so?" Another growl came from the beast. Marcus couldn't tell if it couldn't answer, or if it didn't understand. But either way, the monster continued to advance on him, and he had nowhere left to run. He backed up against the wall, pinned in his place, death approaching him.

His sword lay useless a dozen feet away, behind the monster and inaccessible to Marcus. His armor had been ripped to shreds, hunks of metal strewn about the floor. Nowhere to go, nothing to protect him, no one to call out to for help, Marcus faced certain death. He watched his reaper approach him, finding himself unable to move. His breath hardly came to him, and his mind was blank.

The monster stopped less than a foot in front of him. Its arm raised slowly toward him, long and lanky fingers reaching for his face, weak in appearance, but able to crush him effortlessly. "Please," Marcus whispered. "Don't kill me. I'm sorry I hurt you. I just wanted to protect my family." The monster seemed to take little heed of his words. As its fingers reached for him, he felt a chill rush through his bones. He watched his life flash before his eyes. He thought of his wife and of their children. He thought of how he would never see them again.

And just then, through the dark cloud of fear, it became clear to him. To defeat the monster, he thought, he must become a monster himself. A final, desperate scream of anger erupted from his lungs, unbidden but welcome, and the monster before him reeled back in surprise. Marcus clawed at his face with his good hand, suddenly and inexplicably wracked by an inner pain that threatened to rip him to pieces. Deep within his mind, the chill from the beast continued, infecting him. He felt his skin pulsing, muscles expanding, his own features becoming something other than himself.

The monster stepped backwards, its eyes widening further to impossible lengths, and then a shiver ran through its body. The two looked down as one to see Marcus' arm already through the monster's stomach. In a rough and shaky motion, he pulled his arm back out, and the monster fell back, already dead.

Marcus shook with the power and cold that he had been infused with, unknowing of how it had happened, or what it would mean. He couldn't dream of seeing his family again. Not like this.

Without a second thought, he crouched down on all fours, and fled to the forest.

Treasure

Elizabeth looked fleetingly around before slipping into the cave in the mountainside. She wanted to make sure that no one was following her. The treasures contained within the cave were very precious to her, and the thought of anyone else taking them from her was not only terrifying, but emotionally painful. She didn't want to think of the dangers that could result from someone else finding and taking her treasures. It could spell disaster for her, her treasure, and any town within the vicinity if it fell into the wrong hands. She was determined to prevent that from happening. But she also couldn't leave her treasure alone.

Moving through the rough formation of the cave, she could hear deep within the familiar sounds of sleeping animals. She was not the only one who frequented the caves, though she was the only human. Often times she saw a deer or two lost amongst the rocks, and once she even saw a bear. She was not afraid of these animals, however. She was much more nimble and familiar with the maze like structures than they were. Even if the animals were able to find her treasure, they could hardly do anything to it. They had just as much reason to fear it as any person did.

In these caves, Elizabeth had little reason to fear anything, really. She so frequently traversed it that she could draw a map of the caves from memory, and she could move among the rocks with her eyes closed. She had even done so once or twice, just to prove to herself that she could.

As she drew close to her treasures, she could feel the cold air of the cave begin to grow warm. She smiled to herself as she felt the change in temperature. That meant that no one had come and taken her treasure while she was away. Elizabeth slowed as she drew closer, listening to the sounds of the cave. Deeper within, she could hear the soft snoring of animals. She had gotten there before they awoke. She loved to watch them sleep.

She dropped softly to the floor of an open cavern, the forms of two sleeping dragons curled around each other in front of her. They had hatched from their eggs a little more than a month prior, which was nearly a year after Elizabeth had found them. She had often worried that they would not hatch, but the day they had had been joyous for her. They had stumbled around in the dark for a short while before they found her, and with nothing else nearby, they had adopted her as their mother. She had done her best to provide, bringing them meat until they were strong enough to hunt.

They had long to go before they would reach their full size, but they were already nearly as long as Elizabeth was tall. Their scales emanated warmth, which she loved to cuddle up next to. Ever since they had hatched, Elizabeth had begun to feel for the first time in her life that she had a purpose. She would raise these creatures to be kind and benevolent, and they would be able to help the villages nearby. She would not let them grow to be the cruel creatures of legends old.

She would love them, and they would love her, and someday, she would share their love with the world.

Country

This is a pretty different topic than what I normally write about, and having said that, I would not blame anyone for choosing not to read what I am about to write. But believe me when I say that what I have to say is more relevant to writing than you might think it is.

I'm a fan of country music. That's a thing that goes in and out of fashion depending on when and where you are, but I don't care. There are a lot of things that I thoroughly enjoy about country music, but it's not just any country music. The classic joke about country is "Do you know what you get when you play country music backwards? You get your house back, your truck back, your dog back, your wife back..." There is a subsection of country that this absolutely applies to, and that is not the kind of music I am talking about. Some of those songs are ok, I won't deny, but they're not why I love country.

There's the huge subsection, especially in more recent years, of drinking songs. All kinds of songs about going out and getting drunk, or why you're getting drunk, or why you aren't getting drunk, and all kinds of bullshit. If you haven't been able to guess by some of my stories, I'm not a drinker. I don't particularly understand the appeal of getting drunk, but that's another story entirely. Again, some of these songs are good, especially ones that make me laugh, but these aren't the songs I'm talking about. These don't define country for me.

No, the country music that I love, that I am a fan of, is the music that tells of life. The songs about love, and life, and work, and childhood. Songs that you can listen to and relate to, that you can visualize in your head, and that make you feel something. Funnily enough, a lot of these songs don't sound that country. They're not big hoedowns with lots of guitar twang and thick, southern accents. If you just heard them without knowing beforehand that they were country, you might not even realize it.

If you're willing to take a chance and take a peek at what I'm talking about, I suggest Lady Antebellum's "I Run to You", Darius Rucker's "This" and "Alright", and Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying".

These aren't the songs people think of when they think country, much in the same way that when I say medieval fantasy I don't mean Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. I run on a different system, but there aren't words that distinguish what I'm talking about from what other people are talking about. I can't just pick a single word to describe them. If I could, I wouldn't be writing about it now.

If you've made it all the way here, I hope you realize just how different what I wanted to say came out from how you might have judged me right off the bat. Ideally, that's the kind of character I want to write in a story. But that can be pretty hard to do. Playing with a person's expectations isn't the easiest thing to do in the world, especially when you're making something entirely from scratch. Things have to come from somewhere, after all. But as a writer, this is something that I strive to do. To take your expectations and twist them on their head, but not make you feel lost in the process. It's not easy, and it's not something you can just do. It takes time. It takes explaining and building.

You can't just tell someone you like country that isn't really country, even if it is true.

How do

We all have questions about how to do things. If we didn't, frankly, no one would ever do anything, because no one would ever be curious enough to figure out how to do it in the first place. Think about all the cool things you have ever done in your life, or ever wanted to do, and realize that somewhere, someone at some point had to figure out how to do that in the first place. Most of us probably have asked ourselves while doing something, "Who came up with this in the first place?" And the things that we may not realize is that that applies to absolutely everything that has ever been. Hell, we wouldn't even be here if way back at the beginning of history, two people didn't figure out how to make a baby.

One thing I've never asked myself though, and you'd think I would, is how to write a book. I've often wondered how to publish one, how to advertise one, how to get people to buy one, how to format it and make a cover for it, but never how to write it. It's never been something that I've been curious about, because I just kind of started doing it. I never thought about it. I just started telling stories when I was a little kid, coming up with new and weird ways things could play out, and as I grew up I wanted to remember them, so I started writing them down. And eventually I found that I enjoyed doing it, so I wrote more and more, and my writing began to become more refined and focused, and then... Well, then I started a blog.

Despite knowing the answer already, I once asked an author how he came up with the ideas for his books. He told me he didn't. There was no process of coming up with an idea for a story he wanted to tell. It just came to him, and as it did, he wrote it down. And the more he wrote it down, the more it evolved and expanded, and so he kept writing, until eventually he had a long and detailed book sitting in front of him.

When I was a kid, I would play pretend all the time. I would lead my friends around the playground, telling them about what abilities we had, and what we were fighting, and where we were. It was like we were really there, and we could see the monsters, feel our own bodies being surrounded in the elements as we called upon our magic to fight them. I wish I could explain what about it was so magical that it came upon us so powerfully. But it did, and I remember it so specifically, and it's something that I try to tap into when I write. We didn't have to think about it back then.

It's kinda weird to think about how there are somethings that you don't have to think about. They just come to you. We all have them, though we might not always realize it. No one had to explain to me how to take words and sentences and put them together to make a coherent story. No one had to explain to me how to create characters and worlds. I don't know how I got these abilities. I just know that I want to keep working at them and refining them, until I can tell stories I can be proud of and that hopefully someone else will want to read.

Take your time

"Excuse me. Can I buy you a drink?"

Angela glared up at the strange man who had come up to her. He didn't look like the usual bar goer looking to pick up chicks, dressed in simple jeans and a dark grey t-shirt. All the same, his intentions were very clear to her. "I don't drink," she spat venomously.

Undeterred, the man sat down next to her. "A bar seems like a bad place to go if you're not someone who drinks," he replied calmly. "Unless of course you're the designated driver, in which case I would think you would be out having fun with your friends, rather than sitting alone at a table off in the corner."

The man's calm demeanor and refusal to take a hint only served to irritate Angela more. She scooted as far away from the man as her seat would let her, backing herself into the wall. Abruptly she realized that if she wanted to run, she had no way of doing so. She was cornered. "What do you want from me?" she demanded, unable to keep the nervousness entirely out of her voice.

The man made no movement to get closer to her after he sat down, but he also didn't take his eyes off of her. "I just want to take some of your time," he said.

Angela blinked and looked at him, confused. "What does that even mean?" she asked.

"This isn't the first time I've seen you in this bar," he began to explain.

"Have you been stalking me, you creep?" Angela accused angrily.

The man shook his head and held his hands up to appease her. "I have not, honestly," he replied. "I don't drink either. My friends know that, so they know they can rely on me to be a designated driver, and frequently ask of me to do so. While they're drinking, I have a habit of letting my eyes wander, and I've seen you several times, sometimes with friends, sometimes over here alone." Angela averted her eyes from the man as he explained himself, not wanting to acknowledge that this was not, in fact, the first time she had been here alone.

"It got me curious," the man continued, "as to why a pretty lady like yourself, who I have not, now that I think about it, seen drinking here, would be doing in a place like this by herself. I've seen you shoot away the drunk assholes who want to get in your pants, so you're not here to get hit on. You don't drink, so you're not here to forget. It's not particularly quiet or peaceful in here. I don't get it."

Angela looked down at her hands and twirled her fingers, unsure of how she wanted to respond. This wasn't the kind of fare she was used to receiving when she was in the bar. Hesitating, she slowly answered him. "I... I don't really know. My friends drag me here sometimes, but I don't drink, and I don't really enjoy it here. But I keep coming back, cause I feel like there must be something that I'm missing. People come here to relax, right? I want to relax, too, but I just don't get it."

The man smiled gently, but just then the bell over the door rang, and he looked up to see a group of ladies entering the bar. He pulled a small piece of paper and a pen out of his pocket, and began writing on it. "Listen. I don't want to impose. I'm not trying to hit on you. I don't want to make you feel like I'm trying to take something from you, or that I'm taking you away from something else. Those are your friends walking in, I recognize them, and they're probably gonna think I'm some creep and chase me away, so I'll go on my way. But take this." The man stood and held out the piece of paper, which Angela slowly took from him. She glanced down at it to see a name and a phone number. She looked back up at him, confused, and he smiled back at her. "I'm not trying to change your mind. I don't have to make you love me. I just want to take your time."

With that, the man left, and was soon replaced by Angela's friends, who gathered around and questioned her about the man who had just been there. Their questions buzzed around her, but she didn't truly hear any of them. She looked down at the paper again, and noticed an address was written on it as well.

"If you want my time," she whispered to herself, standing up from her seat, despite the protests of her friends, "then I'll give it to you." And with that, she followed after him.

Transformation

"Hey mom?" the small boy asked in the middle of the day. His mother tried to hide a sigh. It was never a good sign when her son started asking questions. He consistently lead her down uncomfortable paths of questions she did not want to answer, or could not answer, or should not answer. He had a knack for finding the things he shouldn't find, and frequently left her in awkward positions.

"Yes, Brett?" she replied gently, taking care not to let the fatigue show in her voice. She knew that this was a time in his life when he should be learning, but the amount of 'learning' that he did was beginning to wear her thin. "What is it?"

"Is this supposed to happen?" Brett entered the kitchen where his mom had been cooking, his arm held out in front of him, several small blue marks on his arm. His mother at first assumed that they were splotches of paint he had stained himself with while playing with his toys, but upon closer inspection they had more depth and texture to them than paint. "They won't come off," Brett continued, "and I'm not really sure where they came from. They were just there when I looked down at the end of my cartoon."

His mother's brow furrowed and she knelt down beside him, examining the splotches more closely. They were smooth, rounded features, and as she ran her finger over them, they were cold and hard. "Were you doing anything while you were watching tv?" she asked, gently rubbing her fingers against the strange dots, feeling no give as she might something he had accidentally glued to himself. Brett shook his head. "No reading or playing games?"

Brett shook his head again. "I was just thinking about what it would be like to live inside the tv," he explained. "Dragon Tales was on, and I was thinking about how cool it would be to be a dragon, and when the show was over, these were on my arm."

His mother frowned and grabbed a towel, dampening it and rubbing at his arm, to no avail. Whatever the dots were, they simply did not want to be removed. She had only been half paying attention to what her son had been saying, but as she pondered what the things might be, his words slowly dawned on her. "You were thinking about being a dragon?" she asked, unsure that she wanted to hear his answer.

"Yeah."

"Well, honey..." She couldn't believe the words were about to escape from her mouth. She wanted to stop herself, she searched for any answer that made more sense, and as stupid as it seemed, she couldn't think of anything else it might be. She didn't want to imagine it was possible. But it was hard to ignore the smooth, hard scales in front of her. "I think you might be on your way."

Swearing fealty

Caval approached the princess after the funeral and bowed deeply before her. "My deepest condolences about your father," he said. "As the head of the guard, I regret that I was not better able to protect him. I offer you my deepest apologies."

The princess looked down at the knight, her face drawn and composed, long since trained to hide her emotions in public. Gently, she laid her hand upon the knight's shoulder. "It was not your fault that my father fell in battle," she assured him. "It is the way that he wanted to go, in a blaze of glory. He brought his own end upon himself."

Caval stood up straight and nodded in solemn agreement. "You are wise beyond your years, your highness. Moving forward, I pray that that wiseness carries on in your decisions. In the current conditions of the kingdom, you will have to take on great responsibilities. I wish to offer you my services as you may need them going forward."

Instantly, the princess' composure fell, and the gentle smile that had graced her face was replaced with a bitter glare. "Is that so?" she asked venomously. "And what, pray tell, are you to gain by offering me your services?"

Caval blinked, surprised by the sudden bitterness. "Excuse me?" he asked, confusion clear in his voice. "I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean."

The princess rolled her eyes. "I have already been approached three times today by men offering me their 'services' in hopes of gaining the wealth and power of the royal family. I am not interested in marriage, Sir Caval. As the head guard, your services should already be mine. So why are you now offering them to me?"

Caval stood upright, looking down at the princess. "I am not your guard, your highness," he stated flatly. "I was your father's, and I vowed to him that I would protect him and his family. Seeing as he is no longer with us, I merely wish to renew that vow with you. If, however, my services are no longer desired among the royal family, I am sure that I can find others who would be appreciative of them."

The princess looked up into the knight's eyes, challenging his statement, but found him unwilling. Slowly her face softened. "You will swear yourself to me?"

Caval kneeled down before the princess, in plain view of the other members of royalty and the guard who had remained in the vicinity. "I will swear myself to you, Princess Fleur, your family, and your wellbeing. I will do all that is within my power to protect you, and aid you as is fit of my position. If you are desiring of my advice, my company, or my strength, I will swear to always be available to you."

Fleur smiled gently and placed her hand once more on Caval's shoulder. "Thank you, Sir Caval," she said. "It is good to know that there are still some honest men in this kingdom."