[Malia's Scrapbook] The Final Curtain

[Growl]

You know, sometimes you just need to ditch one of your pcs for awhile and concentrate on another one. Take Blythe for instance. I wrote for her a lot back in like... December and November. The nice little Konti, whose butt seems fused to the Island of Mura... who tells fortunes and is my one and only nice, reasonable, sane pc. I know you know her... anyway. I wrote and wrote, and wrote, and now, I am starting to realize that there isn't much else to say for her... it's like... you burn yourself out after a bit, need a good, long break, and then can go back to things. Or... you write and write and write, get stuck at this point where you honestly wonder what else there is to say... and then sit in your room for hours and hours brainstorming what to do next. (I do that way too often... since some of my pcs really need a change... or a purpose. A lot of them don't have a purpose). Anyway, the point is, sometimes you just need to step back and well.... let yourself think and figure out where to go next. Yes, ok, maybe you're taking a little longer than you'd like with your older pcs... but that's fine, isn't it? It's not like you have to post all the time, or be involved in more threads than you can count. You just... should write when you find the drive to, otherwise things are kind of just as dead as Malia... which no offense, is pretty dead >.< But then again, she's a nuit, so what do you expect? I think, what I am trying to say is... stuff like that happens. And... you'll overcome it eventually, and find the drive to post with some of your older pcs when you've considered where you want their lives to go. I think, maybe, looking at your pc's religious views may help. I know both Aselia and Malia are marked, perhaps they should lead a life that encompasses the nature or will of the ones who marked them. Or perhaps, it's time for a change, time to go against them? Just a thought... sometimes, it's nice to go in the opposite direction you originally intended with a pc. Just look at me and Aello. I mean, she was supposed to be self-conscious and logical, and relatively nice. And now she's... um... insane... like certifiably so. (Yeah... I still can't figure out what happened there... and am waiting for someone to shout out "tis magic!" Yeah...) Sorry for digressing again... Anyway...I hope you get the point, my mind is all scrambled today. As I said, I'm sure you'll figure it out. Blythe/Aello/Ariel/Cara/Ianthe

[Jilitse]

I ocassionally read your scraps, but this is probably the first one I need to comment on. We barely keep in touch through IM, I'll tell you all about what I went through to give you a perspective soon!

But this is what I can say, and I know you know my words hold water... after all we're both in the same boat. Character development at a broken bridge, loss of appetite for writing, found other hobbies to share leisure time with. We can list many things, many excuses, many apologies...

The most important thing that I reflected upon was the reason why I stayed here in the first place. I've had really nice friends leave the site for various reasons, some people are people I've attached myself with in-game and OOCly... but their disappearance or moving on should not - ideally - affect me. Losing the familiar faces disgruntled me, but stay a long while in chat and you'll love the new people. Thing is you will have to eventually make new friends again, introduce yourself - all over again... but it's good once you've gotten past those things. Chat is still as entertaining as ever (at least the few times I went in). But chat and chat people is just one of those things, the main reason why I stayed is because I found really great people, and I love how I improve within Mizahar (at my own turtle pace!), I am in love with my own PC - no matter how absolutely horrible it is to develop "incorrectly". And I am in love with Tarot as my go-to Gamemaster/Founder and writer and friend. I admire what the Founders gave birth to. And everyone.

When it comes to that, I just come back to what inspired Jil. I'm here to help Mashaen out of his Grand Oath! Yey adventure.

Malia has Kanikiki whathisname, and you have Uldr. You have Tanroa! You can expound on these things. Go to a moderator and ask for help? Maybe they could point you to the right way.

Also, you're in the Tarot quest. If you stick around long enough you might get a new recruit! Also you might find new players to play with. I envy you because you get to threat with Satu, Kamalia, Cass, Ariel...

EDIT: I meant THREAD not THREAT.

[Malia]

The Epiphany, Delayed To be honest, I don’t even feel like posting here. But every friend I’ve made here, everyone I know through Mizahar deserves to know what’s going on with me, so I’m going to give a brief overview. This is not the end. It certainly isn’t. There are times when one has to move on. I don’t know if I’ve really grown since I registered with Malia two years ago. It’s strange to see that it has been exactly two years. However, as I said this is not the end. I want to write. But I want to write my own stories and invent my own characters without any restrictions or rules. My vision of enjoyable writing has drifted away from Mizahar. It seems like I don’t want to write fantasy characters in a fantasy world anymore. And no matter how original and how beautiful Mizahar is, because it most certainly is, I don’t want fantasy anymore. What I want is realistic fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, whatever you want to call it. I want to write my own stuff. I want to get at least one novel into shape so I can send it to a literary agent or publisher without embarrassing myself (haha). At the moment I don’t feel any drive whatsoever to post. This might change in the future and I might be able to muster the energy and creativity to finish my threads (especially Tarot’s epic quest and Secret’s pretty adventure... and Malia’s meeting with Varian), but I think I haven’t posted much for nearly two months and it doesn’t seem to change. With university only a single month away, I’ll soon have other things on my mind anyway. That is to say, the people I really want to continue talking to are in my buddy lists on AIM or MSN. If you want to talk to me, if you don’t want to lose me, shoot me a PM (I’ll see the email notification). And then we can talk. This is it, for the time being.

[Malia]

The world is a place of constant change and we, its inhabitants, change in it. I’ve never come to realize how much truth these words contain. Eight years in the same school, five years in the same house, an entire life in the same rural area. Even though houses have been built and headmasters and teachers have been replaced, things pretty much stayed the same. Now everything is changing, and so suddenly! My mother is away from home for almost two months. My friends aren’t in the same classes anymore. Some of them are moving away, some of them have stayed behind, some of them are moving on with me, but studying different subjects and living in different places. I’m going to move to a city two and a half hours away (by train, mind you) and living at a dorm. I’m going to learn how to buy food and drink and household goods and still have money by the end of the month. How to cook. I’m going to get a part-time job in order to be independent. I’m going to study at university, be in charge of my schedule and my appointments and a million of other little things. I could say more. There’s a whole lot more to moving out and living in the big city. Not only the material and organizational aspects, but also the mental and emotional ones. The leap from countryside surrounded by fields, farms and forest to the middle of a city with more than just three tram and subway lines, to the middle of a city with an opera house of international fame, lots of coffee houses, expensive shops, a 200-year-old castle, a university with 88,000 students. This could seriously blow my mind, I sometimes think. And this is how growing up is supposed to feel? I’m not sure if I even want to grow up and something about being forced to do it in order to achieve what you want doesn’t appeal to me. I want to have a choice! Instead I simply decide to learn Japanese and the world starts hurling consequences at me I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t even know I was supposed to take my own cutlery and dishes with me! Wait, I now own a pot and a pan? And these towels, are they really mine? What for? Why? I guess the problem is that I’ve never been a material person. I dislike having to deal with material and everyday matters, I’d rather read books or discuss philosophic concepts and cultural differences or write my stories all day long. Just not interested in taxes, no thanks! But now I have to deal with all of it, watch out for deadlines, watch out for the amount of money I need to have ready at a certain point of time, watch out for lectures and exams I have to register for before it’s too late. Hope that I get in because the university is really crowded (not so much for Japanese, luckily). Am I intimidated? That might be it. I just wanted to get my wonder and confusion out. “Our world is of water, the only constant is change.” I hope I can change with it, but at the same time I don’t know if I want to. And even if I don’t want to, I don’t have much of a choice, right...? (At the same time I feel weird because most of you deal with it on an everyday basis. You can do it easily, can’t you? Because you have the experience!)

[Malia]

Fact of the Matter 1. I’ll work on finishing Malia’s current threads and figure out how to continue her plot. That includes a) moving forward with the Kahnikivas plot and b) fulfilling the promise she gave Uldr. 2. My participation in The night the towers cried will be discontinued. I simply don’t have the motivation or the will to dig through all those pages and think of a way to write Malia back into the happenings. I should’ve never signed up for it. What I learned: Huge adventures aren’t for me. I prefer one-on-one interaction between moderator and player, or two or three players, but not a dozen. 3. I’ll alter the NaNoWriMo challenge a bit to fit my goal of getting into RPing again. Haven’t figured out what it’ll be yet, but probably 1 post or 500 words per day. (I don’t need the medal. I admit that I’ve participated in the regular NaNoWriMo since 2009 and still love every minute of it.) 4. When I try to channel Malia, music by t.A.T.u. is actually very helpful. Some of their songs and especially lyrics really fit Malia as a person, for example “I only want what I can’t have / I only need what I don’t want” from Craving (I Only Want What I Can’t Have) or “I’m not pretending to make it simple / try to be something experimental” from Perfect Enemy. 5. I want to be more present in chat and get to know all the new faces and names that are floating around. With most of the “first generation” players gone, I feel like I really need to reconnect with the community. And it should be fun!

[Malia]

Voice When I first decided to write Malia again, it was very hard. I had forgotten how to get into her head and, even worse, how to write in English. I’d most obviously gotten rusty. You don’t really want to see my first try at writing a post. I think I deleted it after one or two paragraphs and started anew. The worst was a training thread I tried to start over the course of the past few days. First I wrote it as I usually would, but quickly found out that I didn’t know where I wanted it to go and deleted everything. Then I started reading a lot of threads (by Caelum, Kendall, Seven, only to name a few) and liked what I read. I asked myself how I could achieve a level of writing skill that was close to what they were producing. Of course, it’s wrong to say “I want to write like XY”. But sometimes it can be helpful. I also read the writing advice in Caelum’s scrapbook and found it rang true in my mind. So I started another try with the training thread, this time putting the things Katie wrote to good use. I liked it. And then I showed a single sentence to a good friend who is also a writer and she told me why she disliked it. I saw her point and, what’s even more important, it made me realize that it’s not my usual writing style at all. I mean, I like reading stories written in that style, and I definitely enjoyed playing around with it – but it’s not me. It took me way too long to make it sound like I wanted it to, to think of metaphors and pretty words to describe the environment. Then I turned back to the short and precise writing style that really is my ideal. I don’t like many words and I don’t like complex phrasing and exotic vocabulary. I like to write something people can understand and relate to immediately. I guess that’s how I found my voice (again). And now here’s what I want to say after having learned as much: Don’t force your voice to become something that doesn’t suit you. If it takes too long, if it’s tedious and exhausting, it’s not the right thing for you. If the words are flowing out of your fingers, then it’s the right thing to keep writing. And by all means keep writing if you’re in the mood! This isn’t only for NaNoWriMo, but also for writing RPG posts. If you have to force it, it’s not yours. It might take some experimenting to realize which style really suits you best, but you’ll find it sooner or later.

[Caelum]

I am so glad you posted this. I agree with everything you just said regarding voice and personal styles. The things I have discussed regarding descriptive techniques are just that, techniques. It was one of many and not just every writer, but every story requires their own combination.

[Malia]

Thanks for commenting, Katie! I'm glad to see that you agree with what I said. Characters Yep, another rant about characters. I didn’t have one in a long while, did I? Clearly Malia is the oldest and the one I put the most words and effort into. That’s the reason why she’s the only one I pulled out of the pool of inactivity when I came back after the long long summer break. However, I get the feeling that she’s gotten sort of bland and grey in my head. She isn’t alive anymore. Of course she never was, at least not since I started playing her... but you know what I mean. She has her storyline and it’s interesting and all, but I’m starting to ask myself if I did something wrong with her. Was accepting help from Uldr the wrong idea? Does she spread herself too thin between two Gods? She basically has two tasks of which she finds one completely tedious and disgusting and hunts the other one with passion that borders on insanity. I’m just... not sure if she’s going well. If there’s a way to fix the mess she has created, or rather, the mess I created by letting her take up everything that looked like it could give her just a little more power. She has Kahnikivas, she has Animation (where’s the connection, anyway?) and she has Uldr and the Chained Ones. How can she possibly work towards all of her goals at the same time? I thought I had gotten the most important things right with her – she has a plot, after all! But I’ve found holes and doubt in her concept lately. She’s drifted around too much. I don’t know if she’s even able to make sense. On the other hand, I’m kind of afraid of starting yet another alt. I’ve done it before, tried a lot of concepts and races, but nobody really stuck around. I couldn’t keep up with them, or so it seems. So I’m a little afraid of trying yet another new character. What if their concept isn’t interesting or personal enough? Because most PCs are based off of some of my personality traits. It’s what makes writing them and sticking to them easier. If you can’t sympathize with them, you at least have to empathize with them – I read that somewhere and it has stuck with me. Anyway, I’m not sure what to do, so I’m currently doing nothing. I have ideas, in fact I have a cute little character concept sitting in a Word document and just waiting to be developed more. He’s PC material, I think. But I’m also afraid... He doesn’t deserve to be abandoned after ten or twenty posts. I don’t want to make mistakes anymore. I want to be a player with steady activity, one who doesn’t disappear halfway through a thread. Just not sure how to work towards that goal at the moment.

[Jilitse]

*spanks Malia*

Come on now creating many alts has been a... um... habit (I wouldn't say addiction ha-ha) of yours. You just need to focus! Focus on one plot. Focus on your favorite plot about Malia! If you want to pull her back to Tanroa, do so!

You have your Nuit-killer dagger, why don't you use that?

[Malia]

Thanks for the comment, Jili! Turns out it's what I really needed. Malia will stick around. I'll simply work on her to do list so that she can return to the Kahnikivas plot! Write Write Write As you all know, NaNoWriMo has started and MizNoWriMo with it. While I’m not attempting the latter, I started writing the former right after midnight today. I will continue. The plot is interesting and features some aspects that I haven’t tried out yet. For example, I’m writing in present tense. I’ve also realized that my writing style has changed. So, even though I’m not doing quite the same as most of you, I still feel the excitement and the anxiousness and all the other stuff that comes with the biggest WriMo of the year. And once again, I’m excited to be a part of it! I’ve already been to a write-in this afternoon and we shared plots, problems, cake and some writing time. I’m mainly writing this to let people know that I won’t be as active here, although I do plan to write a significant amount of posts during November. My current goal is five per week which means one per day with a cushion for busy days or bad moods. However, I also wanted to share the synopsis of my novel with you. It’s titled “Crow City”. What happens when a lonely Philosophy student whose disillusioned world view sends him into regular fits of cynicism meets a man who wants to be the prettiest face in town? They make a deal to reintroduce said philosophy student into society. What follows is a whirlwind of coffee shop pranks, night clubs, sparkle, glitter and discussions about the very nature of mankind. But Alexis doesn't take it well at all. Memories from the one girl he wanted to forget come to the surface. He sees her in the wooden figurine of a Japanese cat, sees himself in the crows on the rooftops, wishing for black wings to carry him away... Will he survive in the big city? Or will he succumb to the desire of letting himself fall -- and testing if he can really grow wings? Now that you know what I’m working on, I can go back to the manuscript document without a bad conscience because I disappeared from here without a trace (again, oh my!). No, I’ll stick around and I’ll most definitely hang around in chat to watch the progress of MizNoWriMo – while churning out words for NaNoWriMo. Good luck, folks! You’re doing great, and it’s only the first day!