by on

So yesterday, my awesome German teacher showed this video to us. 

Of course, it was all in German, and I am in the beginning stages of learning the language. I always has this stereotypical concept of German songs being a mix of guttural syllables and angsty hard rock. I had NO idea why. But  that has been totally wrong, and German music has its own kind of strange beauty too.
Watch it. Watch the video and you’ll see why I teared up.
It’s not about youth painting the town or doing drugs or whatever American songs are about these days. It’s a friendship/love of an elderly man and woman, spray-painting the town walls, skateboarding, pulling pranks, doing what the children and the young do, like what Liesel and Rudy did in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
And again–I had NO idea what the song was about, but I think it’s something about having a childlike spirit. And I see the two in the video–free of burden, laughing and smiling.
And this made me sort of smile and tear up at the same time, because I think that as we get older, our souls kind of get heavier and heaver. I once heard Jennifer Lawrence say that as a teenager, she was a sort of a hotheaded, rebellious girl, an all-goes, almost naive kind of spirit. She said that as she got older, she got more more self-conscious, more aware of her mortality. 
And I think–when you get that old, is it possible to still have a light spirit? Are you forever a well of memories and burdens and regrets? Is it not possible, if your body is willing, to be old and still raise hell and smile easy? 
This was totally not a writing post, but in a way, it may have been. I don’t know. But this was a song that made my week, and I hope it would make yours too 🙂
Any songs that you would like to recommend?

by on

Sometimes I don’t know how to title these posts.

But as of now, I’m sitting in the family library, and from the view out the windows, it is a perfect brooding gray outside. Of course, a rain day.

Rain days create this certain aura of nostalgia, and they create this sort of closed-in atmosphere that is…cozy, I guess. I don’t like cloudy days, but I love days that storm and rain, where I’m safe inside, reading classics on the sofa while the skies above throw a loud fit. 

Writing is slow. Everything is slow. Of course, when I am trying to chug through revising/rewriting in a month because this rewriting business has gone a bit far too long, writing a thousand words a day is considered terribly dragging. Today’s the last leg of my rewrite for Part 1.

I’m thinking about making myself a cup of tea right now.

I suppose I should focus on a bit more objective thing, such as writing a post on the craft of writing or something. But I shy away from the idea, because in reality, I am still very much a beginner. I am still learning a lot.

And I’m not really trying to gain a big readership, not right now. I don’t really care about subscribers or comments or regular readers. For now, I just want something so I can look back in the future, and read what my thoughts were back then. I like tangible records, and I’m not a good journal-keeper.

Well. That’s all for now.

by on

Basically, the story of March was this: I went MIA for a bit, then looked over at my 2nd draft and decided that I needed a third rewrite. And then I went to China for two weeks for spring break. It was fantastic.
The story of April is this: After China, I came back, went MIA for some more, and had a week freaking out about my novel and decided that I should go plunge into it after a week of meticulous plotting.
And then the meticulous plotting basically translated into watching all sorts of NaNoWriMo pep talk videos on Youtube. Even though, you know, it was April, and Camp NaNoWriMo was already half over.
This rewrite was going from April 20th to  May 29th. Which gave me exactly 40 days to pound out a suitable 3rd draft before BookExpo America. (Cue excited dance; this is my first time!)
And this time, I estimated that my final word count was to hover somewhere around 85,000 words. 85K.
This is absolutely crazy, and I know it. But the love for my story is still there. It ‘s not quite like the passion-filled, this-story-is-consuming-every-fiber-of-my-soul kind of obsessive love. But it has sweetened and mellowed.
Either way, I still don’t know what I am doing. But I am plugging away at the novel, and I recently ran across a quote by the author Dave Eggers, from his pep talk from last Nano.
“You better do it now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page. 
So you have to do it, goddamnit. You have to do it, and you can step back and be happy. You can step back and relax. You can step back and feel something like pride.”
Bravo, Dave. You will keep me going.