Inspiration is weird, I told you before.

Okay, so I've wanted to write a story about a pair of characters that go on a LONG road trip for a while now. When I say long, I mean Saigon to Berlin long, living in a van for weeks long. I've tried it a couple of times, some of which could be construed as fanfiction, but I just wanted to write the story. Still, I've failed everytime, but last night, I heard a beautiful Mongol song that made me think of two characters, drunk in Ulaanbaatar, singing away in a café like their existence hasn't just been completely up-ended. The characters are Udirdagch (Uri) and Naagl'zhiin (Zhiin), the witch. They're probably just gonna be one-off characters, but they make the trip from their world through Viet Nam, China, North Korea, China (again), Mongolia, Tuva, Buryatia, Russia, Poland East & West Germany, some time in Western Europe, and a part of America, all in what is essentially a 1984 Plymouth Voyager (Not the GRAND Voyager!). I'm not going to spoil anything, but I'll put here what I wrote after hearing it after the post.

When I think about Mongolia, I don't think about the city or the "Socialist Era" or any of that, no. What comes to mind when I close my eyes and think about Mongolia is seemingly-endless steppes, herds of horses, and a land full of nomadic people. I hear neighing, the breeze, and the Moriin Khuur, khoomei, kargyraa, and sygyt. Endless blue skies are overhead, and I feel a connection that modern society has forced us to lose over the years, it's a connection with me. A better way to put it would probably be that I go, I do, I see, and I feel, almost as if I'm seeing an exact clone of myself in front of me, but only grown in his own elements without the influence of what humanity and society have become. It's as if he's guiding me. He is my teacher, he is my horse, he is my path, he is the real me… the me that would've come naturally in a perfect world.

I have to wonder about the ideas, thoughts, and inspirations that we routinely describe as "weird" or "absurd" and wonder if there's a small part in each of us that's a natural me, one that just can't give a damn about the world in the truest sense, the inner person that lets their true colors shine so brightly, true, and pure. Have we snuffed that part of ourselves out? I like to hope not, the human spirit is something that we can't afford to lose. Its beauty is utterly unmatched.

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Ulaanbaatar, State of Mongolia

Udirdagch and Naagl'zhiin were sitting at a table at Café Mongol, filling themselves with Airag and the intoxicating treats from the country, much like the tribal lands from their world. Both were intoxicated and laughing, in spite of their situation. As the table filled with dishes and glasses, they laughed and made general nuisances of themselves, ignoring the danger that was likely only a few hundred miles away.

Still, after a small burp and giggling, Naagl'zhiin took a deep breath and sung like the tribemen of their world.

“Erkhem zayaa ni öödlökh… Delger tümnii mini mongol Naadam minu zee!” she sang, letting it resonate as a tribal cry, both too drunk to care about the forming audience from the streets of Ulaanbaatar before singing the next part with a regal beat, “Naran galaa badraan asaaj Mönkh tengeree süslen mörgöye öö!”

“Khari talyn tüükhee tsalamlaj!” Udirdagch sang the next part, “Morin khuuraa khöglön naadiya!”

“Mandan adislakh altan naryg, Magnai deeree deedlen jargaya aa!” they both sang in unison.

By this point, even if they were slurring and pronouncing the Mongolian choppy-as-hell, it didn’t matter to them. The tribal lands of their world had always represented freedom, moving, and being bound to nowhere, nobody, and nothing. The horse had been a majestic animal to both of them, and they’d even wanted to make part of their travels in their world on horseback. Seeing the whole world was, to them, the ultimate success. The world was a big place, you’d have to see it to know where you wanted to settle down… if you want to settle down.

In a sense, they were traveling the world right now… just not in the way they’d imagined it, but they were living their dream.

Neither could be happier.

Music, instead of Writing, this week.

This week, I'm going to do something a little different, partially because I've developed an allergy to something our cats have gotten into, and it pertains to music. Don’t worry, “Aleks meets Inga” is still being proofread… it’s just going at the speed of basically-zero. It’s still being worked on!

Anyway, this week, I’m gonna share something with you that found its way to my Fur Affinity page and (two weeks after, nearly!) I figured out how to post it to Facebook. I’m not big on social media, if you were wondering. Long story short, about two weeks ago, I was laying in the bed that morning, scrolling through YouTube on my phone, and I heard this song. I'd tried to work on “The Golden Record” (my latest project, somewhat of a throwback to what my writing originally was in middle school), but couldn’t make any progress on it… it was an unproductive day for writing. Anyway, fast-forward to about 7p-8p, I still have that song stuck in my head, so I decide to sit down to my piano and start trying to pick it out. Here is where I think I should mention that, because of the nature of the story (the two main characters are a human named Seth Davis and an alien named Azathoth), I had another scene in my head. It was of the alien’s home planet. Now, I’ll admit that I'm crazy enough (at least in some regard) to be somewhat of an anthem-enthusiast (the ones that come to mind on my MP3 player’s playlist are East Germany, Mongolia, Tuva, North Korea, Buryatia, England (if we’re counting Jerusalem), Tibet, and the USSR). There’s some more on there, but I don’t want to list them all. That’s also not what this is about.

Anyway, back on topic.

When I sat down to my piano and started trying to pick through “Horn of Plenty”, it quickly turned more into the other song in my head, so “Horn of Plenty” fell by the wayside and the other melody slowly took over, I ended up calling it “Tanh Khlokh - Moahen” (literally “Song of Tanh Khlokh” in Azathoth’s language) and it also had some inspiration drawn from the melody pattern of Nối Vòng Tay Lớn when the melody hits the third stanza- it’s the same melody as the first stanza, but you can tell it’s different. It probably doesn’t make any sense, but I’m hoping it does. Anyway, so when I realized I was playing the melody of what would be “Tanh Khlokh - Moahen”, that’s when my brain shifted gears and I decided “Alright, I’m gonna make an anthem for that fake planet and see if that helps my process any. It probably won’t, but I’m gonna try it anyway.”

I ended up with a recording of a little over one minute and it seems to sound good, so here’s a link to the original. It’s worth noting that Fur Affinity doesn’t have a way to change your username on the site (as of the time of writing), so it’s stuck on an old handle I don’t use anymore and would, quite honestly, like to leave that chapter of my life, and the trauma associated with it, buried where it should be.

Tanh Khlokh - Moahen

Waterfox! Or how I'm running out of ideas for things to write while adding in my fixation with the color blue. Sounds about right… just click and read the rambling! It might be entertaining!

We’ve established that I pull ideas from the strangest of places (like going to take my uncle some lunch during his shift at Factory Connection, for instance). And yes, the 2015 WaterFox logo does play into something I’m gonna say… maybe, I don’t know; think of this like No Effort November or Unscripted & Casual, I don’t know. Anyway, one of my ideas for how Aleks (a previous iteration of him) relates to this logo. It wasn’t a major thing, but it also kinda was… then again, I have a pair of underwear with Japanese writing because I mistook the Kanji as Traditional Chinese Hanzi, so take that at whatever you will.

First, I’ll start with a previous iteration of Aleks. He had blue hair, especially when I tried to write him as a vampire god, the blue theme rolled on (blue hair dye to cover up the (un)natural inky-black/extremely-dark brown, blue glasses to cover up hungry, red eyes, the list can go on). Everything was blue, sosumi. Anyway, I’ve got another character that I don’t use anymore, her name is Melanie. She’s half-human/half-alien or humanoid alien (depending on my mood). Everything Aleks was, she wasn’t. He is a bored megagenius driving (at the time) a Zastava Koral (Yugo for all of you not living in Eastern Europe) because “It works.”, she’s a peppy idiot who can be called a social butterfly driving a 2015 Volkswagen Beetle. Aleks does what he believes is sensible and is a night owl, Melanie grows roses from placenta and is up with the sun. When Aleks was a vampire, she was a lycan. The list goes on if you can imagine it.

I’m not gonna lie here, but I will say a few different things I’ve tried to write Aleks in or as, and they include as as high school student, predictably. Somewhere, I have a snippet of a story I tried to write in college, but it never went anywhere. I think it was about the main character getting attacked by (and soon after meeting) an alternate version of himself as an animal. The details are fuzzy, but I’ll try to find it and maybe post it to my scraps on Fur Affinity… I think I used my English teacher as a character in it (I’m not sure, but it feels like I might’ve), so I’ll see about that detail and get in touch with him because when it comes to privacy, I’m kinda crazy about it… why did I use my name as the name for the website?

Anyway, some of the crazier things I’ve written kinda left me wondering if I’d be committed to a sanitarium if I let them see the light of day… probably a good thing that some of them were corrupted or overwritten, thanks to some shoddy flash storage I used at the time. Sadly, though, I do miss some of the things that I lost, but it’s probably for the best. Drafts I wrote as a freshman in high school (one of which was inspired by the fact that my uncle has a ‘84 Wasserboxer VW Vanagon (if memory serves)… my friend hates the vanagon in the story, probably with good reason) had some really crazy premises, though the original companion for what would become Aleksey was, personality-wise, based off of Raven from the original Teen Titans. She was a girl, she had fangs for teeth, and she had some powers. That was the extent of the similarities if you take away the personality aspect.

It was at this point I named the character Seth and gave up on the idea of Rachel being up-front (or even existent at all) with the next story. I think I may have written her a couple or three times after that, but I don’t think so, aside from the occasional name-drop. I saw The Parent Trap and </SCORPION> a year or two after I pretty-much forgot about Rachel and got the idea to give Aleks a gambling problem and bring back the companion character (this time, she’d actually be his girlfriend) and make her closer to how he acts. Early on, I didn’t do much with her (hell, I didn’t even name her, she had like five names in one story), then I saw the character Moondancer from My Little Pony, so I used that as a placeholder name after realizing how unintentionally-similar the characters were. She and Sasha (I think that was Aleksey's name at the time) were running from something in his Yugo, it starts going way-too-fast for its own good, they end up in the My Little Pony world, and after the scare and shock ends, they move into the town library, where Sasha soon after kicks Chloe out and they get back together when the main characters get Sasha and Chloe to a casino the town built (I don’t remember the specifics, but I also know the story was mostly general ideas… maybe one day I’ll find it and write it for Fur Affinity) to save their friendship. Anyway, they’re both wearing sunglasses, it’s dark, they’re pissing off everyone because they’re master gamblers or something and end up at the last table (with an audience of quite literally everyone) sitting across from each other in dark sunglasses, all of the money in the pot staying in the middle, and they finish off every dice, deck of cards, every roulette wheel, everything, before finally having a much-needed conversation (they got physically violent with each other when he kicked her out… early sign) and walking away with the money. Don’t ask me how.

For a while, every computer that I used in my stories was some form of older Macintosh model (blame SheepShaver and later Basilisk II) and either Mac OS 7 or Mac OS 9. The laptop was always either a PowerBook 5300c, PowerBook 170, PowerBook G3 Kanga, or Indigo iBook G3 Clamshell. Sometimes, if a desktop was involved, it would just be a 90s PowerMac, then I swapped to Linux and started picturing my own stuff. As for the Macs, I never name-dropped a model, but those are what I pictured in my head. I think at one time, I pictured a Mac LC of some sort, but I could be mistaken. The way Aleks dresses can actually be traced back to when I’d sneak downstairs to the basement and watch Daria as a kid in our old house. It was just kind of fitting and I even found myself mimicking the dress of the character later on (in my case, it was a jacket, t-shirt, jeans, and slip-on shoes). It was just standard-grade ‘90s stuff, nothing special. It was functional and you could probably build a whole outfit for under $25. Since the character ended up not giving a damn about what he wore, this was perfect. Before I pictured what the character would actually wear, I just pictured him wearing whatever I was wearing at the moment. The reasons he keeps to himself originally was because he was an outsider, which kind of taught him to be a loner and “do him” (as Seth), he was too vested in knowledge and technology, as well as brash (as Alex), just a pain in the ass (as Alex, Sasha, and Aleksey), and now it’s because he doesn’t see very many people as worth dealing with (as Aleksey, also voiding out the other reasons that are still very-much prevalent).

I’d originally wanted to talk about some of my other characters, but this post is on its way to becoming an essay, so I’ll save them for the next time I don’t have anything come to mind. That being said, check back next week for more ramblings… or actual stuff, whichever I manage to pull out of my brain. See ya!

Why You Shouldn't Trash Old Ideas

My proofreading for «Aleks meets Inga» is going much slower than I'd originally planned on, but it's the holidays… among other things. Anyway, This week, I'd like to talk about why you shouldn't throw away your old ideas. I know some people do, and that's your prerogative, I guess, but I think keeping them around is better in the long run, even if you don't use them.

Firstly, I think that, whether or not you're aware of it, you use your old ideas all of the time, maybe not in their original capacity, but you're pulling from them, nonetheless. Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned the trail of how Aleks came to be the pain that we all know and barely (if any) tolerate? Yeah… kinda going back a few steps with him, back when he was still Seth, and the Gemsona? You'll get to meet him in time… at least chunks of the personality. I don't know exactly when the story's set, but it's set in the same time period that most of my long-lost work was set in (think dial-up, grunge, converses, floppy disks, and when you had to actually walk up to someone before you could confess your undying love to them.) Unfortunately, I don't really have a good way of writing it on period-correct hardware… some things in my collection are proving harder to… deal with, at the moment.

Secondly, or more an extension of my first point, you can always build off of ideas, whether it be your own or someone else's, though I'd recommend some caution in that. Still, I don't think that getting rid of something, just because it's not the picture child you're wanting it to be, is a good way to go. If it's something that you want to do, even if you trash it, believe me, it will come back. Even if you don't think the two are related in any way, you can still look and see "Oh, this is what started xyz." and, when you look back down the road, you might even realize that what you didn't like was what you wanted. It's a little backwards, I know, but in the show Bojack Horseman, if you watch the episodes where Dianne Nguyen is trying to write a book of her memoirs, you'll see that, while she doesn't want to write Ivy Tran, that's how (I believe) she ended up successful. If I'm wrong on that one, you'll have to forgive me, it's been a while since I've watched the show in any capacity, not to mention I've slept since then. Still, though, you can see how, in the end, her ideas manifested themselves in a way that everyone (and eventually herself) came to like and enjoy by way of her Ivy Tran series.

Thirdly, and I think this may be my last point today, is to simply give your ideas life and control of themselves. It sounds a bit on the crazy side when I say it out loud, but hear me out on it: this actually does work. Whatever the idea is, a character, story, anything, it can grow into something entirely new. I'm not saying to find something good and latch onto it so much as I'm saying to explore the different paths it could possibly take and the different shapes it could take on. Penelope Turner, a yet-unseen character of mine, is somewhat of an example of this: her character is basically Aleks (when he was called Sasha the first time around), but if he were a girl that was able to convince herself that she had a strong connection to East Asia, somehow. To each their own, I say, but the premise of the two characters is the exact same: "Assholes to the world, brilliant to a close few." It's not the most elegant, and I can't say for certain if Penelope will go anywhere or if Seth will be more than a one-and-done story, but by giving them life and a path that they can grow on as themselves, it's kind of like a way to explore and encourage more open ways of thinking, if you will.

Anyway, that about sums it up for this one. Have fun and never throw an idea out!

A Talk About Boredom

Boredom… it's something we all dread. It can also make us do some pretty crazy things. I don't mean commit crimes, no. What I mean is that boredom, sheer boredom, can lead us to doing things that we wouldn't have found ourselves doing otherwise. In my case, it was downloading a series of Mac emulators (SheepShaver, BasiliskII, and the source to Mini vMac) to build the computers that exist in another story I'm working on, entitled «The Golden Record». The particular shot in question is a screenshot of Seth Davis's computer (a Mac IIci with a few upgrades) showing the Wikipedia article for the computer via Gopherpedia in Netscape 2, easily loaded over his 28.8k dial-up connection.

It takes place in the 1990s. No specific year, but I'm trying to go for mid-90s. It's one of those stories that I've always wanted to try and write, but no matter how I did it, I couldn't get the premise to go right- I will admit, some of the world building was inspired by Steven Universe, so there's a few hints in there (and the rest of my writing) for eagle-eyed readers, but mostly, I just liked a Mid-Atlantic location more than a New England location… I used to write a lot of my stories in the New England area or try to make them «Anytown, USA» kind of generic. Anyway, crap happened, Steven Universe came out, I went down a bunch of rabbit holes, and found out that Mid-Atlantic locations are easier for me to write than Jonesburg, Maine.

Boredom also can make you fill up a device with recordings of yourself screwing around on a piano, something I find very relaxing.

Anyway, this week has kind of proven that I'm at that point where my days just kinda blur together, and being on the «Stalin Sleep Schedule» (yes, the man's waking hours were from 12:00 to 03:00 Moscow Time) certainly doesn't help matters any. Granted, that being said, I am coming to enjoy the peace and quiet of working with nobody else awake to disturb me, even if I have to worry about waking up some people when I go to have a midnight coffee. As long as I step lightly (or manage to not break my neck in a pair of socks), I usually get things done without causing too much of a disturbance.

I tended to have similar sleep issues in high school, but managed because the teachers learned that me having a Good Ol' Cuppa Joe wasn't the end of the world.

Anyway, I've been doing some thinking over the past several days, and I've come to the conclusion that I should've taken up writing a lot sooner. I know I probably would've been brought to the front of the classroom and expected to "show the class" what I was working on (Except for Mr Spoon in seventh and eight grade English… he put that spark there for me, so if you're reading this, Thank you so much!). I probably would've gotten in trouble, but I've also seen enough reaction to my writing over the years to be able to make a fairly-sure assumption that it would've been the right thing to do- if nothing else, other than to help me "come out of my shell".

There's a lot of things I could've done different or sooner, but there's no use in regretting them- that only eats up time, and reality, unlike fiction, doesn't allow you to change the clock or go back and and add details or change things later on.