The fire within

Ryoul stood in the midst of the barren room, wearing the uniform which he had been instructed, which was little more than a loose fitting pair of cloth pants. Though the stone walls and floor were cold, feeling like ice to the touch, the air was blistering hot, and Ryoul was sweating heavily. Though he wasn't wearing anything on his upper body, he felt as though he were wrapped in heavy chains, weighing him down, keeping him from moving. His breath was heavy, and the air felt as though it sat in his lungs, unable to escape. 

"Put your back into it, scum!"

From the entryway, Ryoul's master, Spyre, watched as Ryoul stood still in the center of the room. Spyre stood fully clothed, arms crossed, seemingly unaffected by the strange properties of the room. He leaned down and lifted a large rock from the ground, turning it effortlessly in his hands, examining it. Without warning, he launched the rock through the air, directly towards his pupil. Ryoul took the blow, the rock impacting his gut, forcing the air out of him. But he did not fall. 

"You think you can get by just standing there, scum?" Spyre called out. "You think just because you can withstand, because you can endure, that younwill succeed?" Ryoul did not answer. He could not. "You are wrong! You must fight, boy! You must give more than you are capable if you wish to be worthy of my lessons! If you are anything less, do not expect to escape with your life."

Ryoul stared at his master, but said nothing in return. He knew what the consequences of his actions were. He could feel the heat of the room. It seeped into his blood, and into his lungs. His heart beat fast and hard, pounding against his chest, ready to burst through his skin at any moment. But he would not let himself die. He would not fail.

Spyre once again lifted a rock from the ground, his eyes without emotion. "I won't mind," he said flatly. "Frankly I don't expect you to succeed. I never did. You will die soon, scum. And I will go back to my life without regrets."

Again the rock flew through the air. Ryoul watched it soar, clearly aimed at his head. If he didn't move, he knew he would not be able to withstand the blow. But he couldn't. His skin was too heavy, his lungs too hot, his muscles too sore. He could barely stand.

But he couldn't die. He couldn't let himself. A roar bubbled up in his throat, burning it from the inside out. His hands felt as though they were melting, his skin felt as though it would simply fall away. The scream tore his lips apart, and fire leaped from deep within him, engulfing the rock in an instant. 

For a while, the student and madter stood in silence, watching each other. 

"Well then," Spyre mused. "Perhaps you have a little fire in your belly after all."

The blade

Ryan pounded at the heated blade he had placed on his anvil. He had been working on the piece for a few weeks now, honing the steel into the long shape of a sword, folding the metal repeatedly and re-melting it to increase the strength. It would be complete soon, and ready to be handed over to the man who had ordered it to be custom made. Normally Ryan wasn't one to take custom orders, but the man had offered a large payment, which Ryan really couldn't refuse.

His hammer fell in rhythm, the loud clang of steel on steel ringing out with each strike. Every blow was carefully aimed, placed so as to give the blade it's distinct shape, and to have the strength to withstand a thousand blows. It was no secret that this blade was made not only to fight, but to kill. However, Ryan would not be deterred from his work over such a tiny detail. He did not live in an age in which killing was something to be afraid of. Perhaps when he had been a child, but no longer. If anything were to come from the future, some men would have to forfeit their lives, first.

As the heat of the metal began to fade, and the steel would no longer be shaped by his hammer, Ryan lifted the sword from his forge and examined it closely. It would not do to have imperfections that would weaken this blade. The center had been designed to draw blood, and anything that prevented such an act would be highly detrimental. But his work was true, and the blade was finally prepared for the sharpening stone.

He made his way to the wheel and sat down to his work. He knew he had only a few hours before his client would arrive, awaiting his weapon, and sharpening was not a process to be rushed. He began to pump the pedal on the ground, which started the gears which set the wheel to motion. His foot pulsed slowly and steadily as the wheel gained speed until it reached the pace it needed to be. Only then did Ryan put on his leather gloves and put the steel to the stone.

Sparks flew as the very edge of the sword began to sharpen and hone. Ryan was careful to methodically sharpen the blade all the way around, first one face, and then the other. It needed to be sharp, but too thin as to create weakness. It was a delicate process, but one that he had practiced many times, and that he felt he had mastered.

As the hours dragged on, the blade slowly came to its desired sharpness. Just as he was lifting the blade from the stone to give it one last run down, he heard the door to his shop opening. He looked up to see the man from before walking inside, dressed in dark clothing, a sheath already attached to his belt and awaiting the blade.

"Is it ready?" the man called out.

"One moment, "Ryan replied, "I'm just finishing up with the sharpening."

He heard nothing in reply, and looked back at the weapon he had created. There was no question in his mind that this would be lethal. Men would fall to it, and it would stain red with blood. The sharpness was just where he wanted it, and the design was without flaw.

He was proud of what he had made.

He came out to the front, where the man was waiting, a bag of gold already placed on the counter. Without a word, Ryan handed over the sword. The man took it, looked it over and, satisfied, slipped it effortlessly into his sheath, leaving in silence. Ryan watched the man leave and then picked up the bag, feeling its weight, and pulling a couple coins to examine them.

He would live well for quite some time off of this.

Papers

Jason sighed and stretched, leaning back in his chair after a hard day's work. He had spent the last several hours finishing an assignment for class, and had turned it on online with an hour to spare, much better than he usually did. He had stressed himself out while writing the paper, and while the time left over was small, it was oddly relaxing to have finished easily on time for once. He supposed this was how one was supposed to feel after turning in an assignment. He would need to remember that for next time. Perhaps if he could remember this feeling, he could make himself work harder.

He looked around his room, unsure of what to do. He often distracted himself from working by playing games, or reading, watching videos online, anything really that wasn't what he was actually supposed to be doing. But as he sat at his desk, now with an hour free, he found that he didn't much want to do any of them. It was a strange feeling. He so often was willing to do anything other than work, but now that he actually had time to, they didn't seem nearly as appealing.

Jason briefly wondered to himself why that was, but decided to set it aside. There was really no point in wasting the hour thinking about what he would do with it. He would much rather just pick one of his options and sit down to it. His hand passed over the keyboard of his computer, a stack of games, and some books he had been working on as he pondered which to set himself into.

But none of them reached out to him. He simply wasn't interested enough in them at the moment to get to work on them. He wanted to do something different, he realized. Something he didn't do very often. Something he often thought about when he couldn't do it, but rarely did when he actually had what he needed in front of him to do it.

Jason grabbed his laptop and pulled it towards him, immediately going around to the various windows he had open and closing them all. He didn't need to watch any videos, or play any games, or mindlessly surf. For once, he knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he was going to do it.

A word document opened up on his computer. It had only been a few minutes since the last one had closed, the one that had held the assignment he had been working on. He hadn't anticipated using the program again anytime soon, but now it was calling to him. This document was blank, however. He didn't have anything previously set to work on. This one would have to be from scratch.

He thought for a minute about what to write. Something creative. Something different. Something that wouldn't be graded or judged on its content. Soon, something came to him, slowly at first, but quickly growing. He smiled to himself and let his fingers gently fall on the keyboard as it came to him. All he needed to start was a name. Letters ran through his mind until he latched on to one, and then the letter stretched out to become a suitable name. When it arrived, his fingers flowed easily.

"Aaron sighed and stretched, leaning back in his chair after a hard day's work."

The promised day

Jared passed back and forth nervously as he waited for his girlfriend, Sarah, to come home. They had been living together for two years, and dating for six years before that. Friends and family had pestered them for ages about when they were going to get married, and they had always agreed that they wouldn't until they were financially better off. But Jared had recently gotten a pay raise at work, and had gotten his first big paycheck that afternoon. With the extra money, he had gone out and bought a ring. For the past month, he had said nothing to Sarah about the raise, and had spent his time planning out how he wanted to finally propose.

Jared repeatedly went to the window, checking to see if Sarah had arrived yet. He knew her schedule, and knew that she would have left work nearly half an hour prior, but traffic was unpredictable. He knew it was getting to be within the range of times that she could be arriving, and the longer it took her to arrive, the more frequently he checked if she was there yet.

He had prepared dinner for her already. He wasn't normally home before she was, but he had requested the day off, and having explained his reasons to his boss, the higher ups had gladly accommodated him. So Jared had used the day preparing. Dinner was a nice beef lasagna that he knew Sarah loved. Accompanying it was home made strawberry lemonade. The entire house had been cleaned, the laundry was done, the dishes had been put through the wash. He wanted her to come home and feel relaxed and welcomed.

As he paced, he suddenly heard the sound of a car pulling in to the driveway, and he looked out quickly, seeing Sarah's car pulling in. He rushed to the door and watched through the peep hole. As Sarah came to the door, fumbling for her keys, Jared pulled the door open for him, a smile on his face.

"Oh!" Sarah exclaimed involuntarily. "Jared! What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be at work?"

"Sarah," Jared replied, "I have some good news for you."

Sarah grinned, wonder clearly in her eyes, and walked past her boyfriend into the house. "Mmm," she hummed as Jared closed the door behind her. "It smells good in here. What have you been up to?"

"I've been up to a lot of things. Go and put your things away and join me for dinner, would you?"

"God, you have dinner ready? You're the best. I'm starving."

Jared smiled and watched as Sarah went to their room and set down her bags, taking her coat off and letting her hair loose. She came back and saw him watching her, and grinned coyly at him. "Enjoying yourself?" she asked, giving him a quick kiss on the lips.

"Not nearly as much as I'm going to."

"Is that a promise?"

Jared just smiled at that. Sarah walked past him into the dining room and gave an exaggerated, but happy sigh. Then she turned quickly, ready to accuse Jared playfully of doing something wrong and trying to cover up for it.

But Jared was already on his knee, one hand in his pocket. Sarah gasped, tears forming at the edges of her eyes. "No..." she whispered into her hand.

Jared smiled up at her, knowing what she meant. "Yes," he replied. He lifted the small box out of his pocket and opened it, revealing to Sarah the ring. "Sarah, will you marry me?"

Sarah squealed as she threw herself down into his arms. "Of course I will!" she cried into his shoulder. Jared wrapped his arms tight around her and held her to his body. "Oh my god, of course I will. But you..."

"I got a promotion," he explained. "And this was the first thing I did with it."

Sarah half cried and half laughed. "But you..." She pulled back and playfully hit her fiance in the shoulder. "You jerk! You have so much explaining to do!"

Jared laughed. "I know. Over dinner. I promise."

Disconnect

I have a friend whose mom was utterly shocked when I told her that I have a great interest in writing romance stories. To her, this made absolutely no sense. In real life, I'm a guy who spends a large amount of time playing rpg/adventure video games, doing martial arts, backpacking, stuff like that. I have a dark sense of humor, and I'm generally not a nice person. The fact that I wrote romance stories, or at least stories with a heavy romance overtone, was simply unbelievable. It didn't fit my person at all.

I think most people can agree that there is a kind of disconnect between the person they are in public, and the person they are in private. Even with close friends, the person you are when you're alone doesn't always fully come out. Best friends and significant others probably know about that person, just because they spend so much time around you, but very few others do.

For writers, it can be hard to remove that private person from your writing. After all, it's not very often that writing is public event. The end product may be shared publicly, but the process is so incredibly personal because it comes from deep within you. So putting a story out there is effectively the same as putting your private person out there. People may not realize that when they're reading it, but the author is often acutely aware of this fact, and that's part of the reason so many people are afraid to make their writing public. They don't want to be judged for the person they are when they're alone. There's a reason they have a public persona, after all.

This isn't to say, of course, that what a writer writes and who they actually are can't be disconnected. I've talked before about how we shouldn't judge a person too heavily on what it is they write, because they may be pulling from other inspirations, like friends, family, or other characters they have seen. But it is certainly difficult to fully remove one's self from a story. In some way, in everything you write, you are putting a piece of yourself down in ink.

That kind of thinking can be scary. To think that you are putting yourself on the line. That someone might read what you write and make a decision about what kind of person you are because of it. We've all seen that happen to our idols. Fans think they're something they're not because of what they have or haven't done. Whether we want to admit it or not, we've probably done it ourselves. I certainly know I have.

But at the same time, we have a potential in our work. That piece of ourselves that we put down can do so many things. It can reach out and touch a person. Make them see, or feel, or remember. Whatever you do, in whatever field, you have that ability. To affect a person. And maybe, just maybe, you'll affect two. Or three. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Maybe you will touch the entire world.

So it can be tempting to disconnect yourself from what you do. Say, "it was just a spur of the moment" or "I don't know where that came from." But you know it's not true. Deep down, you know it came from you, that it is you, in some small way, and that it can never not be you. And while it is scary, you shouldn't be afraid of it. Because it has a power within it, that exists because you put it there.

One day, the things you create may light up a person's world.

And do you really want to disconnect yourself from that light?

Choosing what to write

One of the hardest things for me, and I would imagine many other authors, is choosing what it is I want to write. It's part of the reason I have a tendency to write these blog posts at night before I go to bed. It's not that I don't want to write, or that I don't have time. It's just that when I sit down to write, I find myself staring at a blank document, unsure of where to start. You'd think it would be simple, but unless you sit down to do it yourself, you'll never truly understand the frustration of trying to decide what to write.

For my entire life, I have always told people that I want to write medieval fantasy. And that's true. Medieval fantasy stories are the ones that most easily draw me in, they're what I'm most familiar with, and they're what I think about the most. They're the reason I became interested in both reading and writing, and in fact, the middle ages were the first thing in my life that I showed true interest in, and even to today, they are my favorite thing to learn about. But truth be told, I still don't know all that much about the medieval period, and I find enjoyment in writing all genres. Well, at least all fictional genres.

I sometimes find that medieval fantasy is the hardest genre for me to write, and I can't fully explain why. I know a lot of the material that I need to know to write a fictional story in the genre. I know lots about different medieval weapons, how they are used, and I have general ideas of different occupations, building styles, and the like. Not a lot of specifics, but you can get away without specifics a lot of the time. And yet, when I write them, the story gets out of hand for me. It spirals out of my control. I'm not one to try and control my stories, as I want them to be as organic as possible, but I do have my limitations.

I think my biggest problem is the list of characters. It's not that I don't have an interest in them. I love archers, knights, blacksmiths, kings and queens, all of them. But that's kind of the problem. I'm the kind of person who can't keep track of a lot of people in my mind at once. I get things muddled and confused. And for some reason, by nature, medieval fantasy stories have an extensive list of characters. Even knowing that this is a problem for me, it becomes difficult to try and slim down the list. Somehow, it's just unavoidable.

So, despite my love for the genre, I find myself oft writing pieces in different areas. Admittedly, however, it's difficult for me to shake the fantasy aspect. Fantasy works for me. You don't need extensive explanations for things. Why does something happen? Because magic. It just works. And you can still place limits on things. Logical limits, depending on the source and power of the magic. Magic is fascinating because it can be anything you want it to be. Without getting too into it, I don't feel like science fiction gives that same kind of freedom. You can still have freedom, but it requires more explanation, more intricate knowledge of what you're trying to do. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just not my thing.

One of my favorite pieces, and one of my few completed stories, is a fairly generic western. I'm not going to pretend that it was some breakthrough in story telling, or that I somehow made it particularly unique. It wasn't. But I was able to focus on the characters, try and develop them, make them have an interesting backstory and growth, at least in my eyes. I've tried to do that in medieval fantasy, and my story just drags on and never gets finished.

I suppose the answer to this is to try more things. Keep coming around and back, do things over and over until I can make them work. I need to practice more. And that's what I'm here to do. That's why I'm writing this blog everyday.

But damn. If it ain't hard finding what to practice each day.

The missed day

I missed my first day yesterday. Honestly, I have some reasonable excuses. Sickness, scheduling stuff, yada yada. But it's all kind of irrelevant. I missed a day. I messed up. And I feel bad about it.

The important thing from here is to not let myself do it again. I can't let myself get discouraged by missing one day, and let myself miss another day, and then another, and then another. I've done it before. I've done it so many times. And I just can't let myself do it. I've fallen behind on things, and become discouraged, and never picked them back up again. Things that I throughly enjoyed, and to this day wish that I still did.

It's not that everything I've stopped doing I regret stopping. There are things that I know I just shouldn't be doing. And getting discouraged and stopping something isn't necessarily a bad thing, given that it prompts you to go out and do something new and different and better. But that's not what I'm talking about here.

I love writing. That should probably be fairly obvious at this point. Making this blog and trying to upkeep it is frankly one of the best decisions I have ever made. God damn is it hard, and some days I hate trying to think of new things to write. But that's the challenge. It's the challenge that I need to face, have needed to face, and will continue to face for the rest of my life, because I will never be able to stop writing. It is too far engrained into my person. And forcing myself to finally face this challenge, getting myself to write like I've wanted to for so long. It feels so good.

Missing that day hurt. It hurt really bad. But I can't let it stop me. I have to keep going. I don't know how I'm going to keep it going. I don't know how to make myself do it everyday. They say if you do something every day for thirty days, you make a habit. Clearly that hasn't happened for me yet, and I had hit over 60 days. So I guess I have to go further and longer. But god dammit, I'm going to try. I have to try.

If there's anyone out there reading this, and especially if you find yourself in a similar situation, work with me. I know I've said a lot of this stuff before, but it's important. We all need to find that thing that we're passionate about, that we love, that we can do for the rest of our lives without stopping or regretting. You may not know what that thing is right now, but don't think that you'll never find it. It's never too late for you to find your passion.

I've been lucky a lot in my life. I've known where my passions lay for nearly my entire life. I've survived a lot of shit that I probably shouldn't have. But I can't run on luck forever, and frankly, I'm tired of being lucky. It's made me complacent. It's made me weak. And all of this writing is helping me see that. See more clearly my weaknesses, and making me want to fix them.

I don't know how, but if you are anything like me, then join me. Challenge yourself. Find what you love, and make yourself do it, every single day. If you want to, put it out there for people to see. It's scary. You may not get noticed. God knows I almost never get any views on this blog. But it doesn't matter. If you love what you are doing, and if there is even just one person out there who enjoys your work, and keeps coming back to see it, then what you are doing is worth it.

I have to keep going. We all do. And so while I won't simply forget the day that I missed, I won't let it stop me. Someday, somewhere down the line, I will hit a full year of writing every single day. And then two years. And I'll keep going until the day that I die. Because that's what I need to do.