Black and White

Black and White


    My fingers slip along the keys
of the piano in front of me. Smooth;
they are smooth, and yet
the perspiration on my hands
creates a trail of sticky, sweet sweat
on each and every key my fingers trace.
People are looking at me -
people I know and people I don’t.
         Anxiety;
the black pupils
and whites of their eyes
distract me with their contrast -
the same as that of the keys in front of me.
    No.
         Focus;
I have to focus.
As my fingers slide
from black to white,
I can feel the strings under the ebony surface
get plucked, one by one.
I have to ignore the eyes,
their colors like a white angel
against a black one on my shoulders,
painting the entire world around me
         in black and white,
         right and wrong,
         up and down.
Every breath I take
is like a shudder from my core, and
I feel my body reverberate
with the same ‘pluck’
that causes each string of the piano to create music.
But a single pluck alone isn’t enough
to make the song. No,
the song comes from the mix
of black and white.
The gleaming eyes around me blur
as I am finally pulled
into the melody my fingers are conducting,
and the keys do the same -
I can no longer feel
the heat of the bright, yellow light on my back.
Black and white becomes grey -
         grey like the sky after it rains,
         grey like my mother’s kind eyes,
         grey like those old movies
before technology could handle the world in full color.
And the more grey the keys become,
the more clearly my music resonates
    within me.

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Look! I posted something! Somehow, I actually like this poem. Probably because I wrote it as a paragraph and then split it up. So, while I was writing it, it was technically prose. But really. It is kind of cool. What is this? Me liking poetry I wrote? Nonsense. The world must be coming to an end. But anyway, I've been very enveloped in Yu Yu Hakusho fan fiction. You should go to my fan fiction profile and read it. I update it every Saturday.

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Fan Fiction

I do not know what has possessed me to do so, but I have updated, and am currently writing more of, my Kingdom Hearts fan fiction. I realize it has something to do with all of the Spirited Away fan fiction I have been reading, but normally that just makes me want to write stories for whatever fandom I am absorbed in. Somehow I got the inspiration to write for Kingdom Hearts.

And, dear lord, I am having fun.

I have thrown all caution to the wind and nixed most of my planning, generally because I don't remember what it was from so long ago. I'm just writing. I know my general plot, though I don't know exactly where it ends up, but I don't really care. I'm just writing. And it's so freeing. Like flying. 

I'm hoping I can keep up with it once I go back to Tech. I mean, I would always have free time where I would be bored, so now I can convince myself that I should be writing my fan fiction so as to not leave my readers (if I even have any) hanging. It's exciting to write fan fiction again, even though I really should be working on my original fiction, since I could make money off of that one day. But no matter, my brain picks what it wants to write, and I cannot convince it otherwise.

I just wanted to share this with the world (or whoever reads my blog) because it makes me happy. So yeah. Have a nice day.

Spirited Away

Miyazaki. His movies are all simply amazing. They are all so creative, and each and every one of them really makes you think. He so successfully pulls you into the world he has created, and I know in my case it can be hard to detach myself from it afterwards.

After some soul-searching, my favorite of his movies is Spirited Away. I have always identified with Chihiro, and I would like nothing more than to slip into the spirit world to have an adventure, as traumatizing as it may be. From all of the books I have read, the video games I have played, and the tv shows and movies I have watched, I would like nothing more than to go on a massive adventure for some reason or another, meet the love of my life, and have something interesting happen to me.

This is going to be less like my Final Fantasy IX post about me convincing you that my idea of what my favorite is is a legitimate opinion, and more of a post with me gushing about how much I love it. 

First I would like to give a recommendation to any who care for it, in the form of beautiful (though there are a few very, very small grammatical errors) fan fiction. It is a series by the fanfiction.net author Velf, and it has three parts.

Courage of the Spirit

Enchantment of the Heart

Resilience of the Soul

I have spent the past few days being completely immersed in these stories, and even though the ending did not give me quite as much closure as I wanted, I am very satisfied by the plot and the world she created. It is beautiful, and I recommend it to any Spirited Away fan who wants to know more than just the movie, even if this story is not canonical. 

I think that is all I have to say. Not totally sure, but I feel like I have gushed enough. Really though. I wish I could be that creative. Sometimes I feel like my attempts are just pathetic and can never live up to the expectations I have for them, but I still have hope.

Because they are too adorable.

The Triangle

The Triangle

In all of my years of reading, both original works and fan fiction, there has been no single plot device that irritates me more than the dreaded love triangle. For most of my life so far, I thought it was stupid because it doesn't happen like that in real life. I have been proven wrong on that count, though it was more of a one-sided line than a triangle, what with someone liking me, but me not liking him at all in favor of someone else, who in turn didn't like me like that. So I understand that it can happen. But why on earth do so many authors feel the need to use it as a plot device?

I used to not have a problem with love triangles. If a book or fan fiction looked good, I would read it regardless of how many people were involved in the romance portion. I, however, eventually reached a point where it frustrated me. With the amount such a situation is seen in books, one would think it is a common occurrence in human life. While I can now admit that it isn't a real life impossibility, I also know that it is not nearly as common as an alien would think if he was learning our culture simply through reading fictional stories. I feel like we should be depicting human life as true as we can, unless, of course, the life we are writing about is not human.

Another problem I have with the triangle is the creativity aspect. Love triangles are a cliche. There are those who would disagree with me, and I do not particularly care. I have gotten to the point, when reading, where I see other potential prospects for the heroine and I assume there will be a damn triangle, even if it is just fabricated. Everyone is doing it. Should we just jump onto the bandwagon? I don't think so. There are so many ways to make a romance interesting without throwing in some other guy. Is this lack of originality a testament to the ever-shrinking creativity in writer's? I certainly hope not.

The next problem is characterization. I read these stories about some girl who is so very in love with this one guy. She would give anything for him. Then something unfortunate happens and she is forced into a situation, in some way or another, with another guy who is smitten with her. First of all, why are all fictional females ridiculously pretty and irresistible?  I understand that reader's don't want to read about an ugly person, as shallow as it may be, but it is really unnecessary to have everyone fall in love with your character. In reverse, it is not natural for the female to always be so fickle. Yes, there are people like that, but why is that the only side of human females represented in  literature these days?

I understand why the triangle is effective. It splits the reader, if done correctly. Either the reader has a favorite in mind and wants to see them win, or they love both and wait for the author to decide. This does keep the reader turning the pages, but at what cost? Yes, there have been times when a love triangle has kept me reading a book I would otherwise hate. But is that really the purpose of the book? I hope not. If so, it should just be sold under pointless romance with no plot. Yes, that was harsh, but as much as I feel that characters make a story what it is, plot is also necessary.

This rant really came about while I was reading a story where a woman was so in love and so happy, and the author decided to throw in a love triangle. It made me angry. So now I am letting it out. Because the plot is so good that I am willing to look past this stupid triangle because I need to know what happens in the story. And my stomach is growling. And the slightly formal tone of this post has now all-but-dissipated.

First Post and Introduction

Hello, you interesting soul who managed to stumble upon my brand new blog. I am certain I have made blogs before, but I never have the motivation to actually continue their upkeep. This is me deciding that I am going to put in a valiant effort this time.

Perhaps that can be a New Year's resolution, eh?

I am going to begin now by telling you a bit about myself. My name is Christina, and I have been writing since I was eleven years old. Form a very young age, I enjoyed playing video games (in the form of The Sims and all of the Final Fantasy games) and became attracted to the stories and characters. I would have this yearning to be able to see more of what happened, beyond the ending of the game, and that was what led me to fan fiction.

I started reading fan fiction, for various books and video games, sometime in the middle of elementary school. When it came to subjects like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, there were plenty of stories to choose from that I could read. However, when I started looking for stories about some pretty obscure pairings in Final Fantasy VII, it was more difficult to find anything, much less anything well written. When faced with this problem, I decided that, maybe, I should write something.

I have a quote, over there, on the right side of the screen, that says something along the lines of "if there is a story you want to read that hasn't been written yet, you have to write it." That is exactly how I first began writing: due to the scarcity of Final Fantasy VII fan fiction. I went through an extensive period of time, from fifth grade to seventh grade, where almost all of my free time was spent writing fan fiction for Final Fantasy games, Kingdom Hearts games, and a little Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Most of the time, it was underdeveloped, and I cringe when I look back on it.

There was one story, however, that I was consistently attached to. I began writing it in seventh grade due to the intervention of my best friend at the time, and it was the farthest I ever got with anything I had written. A few months later, however, I got my first real boyfriend. Apparently when I am romantically interested in real people, I lose any and all ability to write. Perhaps it is because I write fantasy, and having feelings for a real person grounds my emotions in reality.

I had a very long lull in which I wrote next to nothing. However, a few broken hearts and four relationships later, I began to get back into the swing of things. I had a problem, though. My writing style had vastly matured since seventh grade, and the new scenes I found myself writing just didn't fit with what I already had written. This was when I began to notice my need to create the entire plot on my own, and my need to follow a character of my own creation. Essentially, I was writing original fiction except with the additions of some characters that weren't mine and without the trouble of making the world on my own.

But then I had a dream. It was during my vampire-loving phase. The entire dream was extremely elaborate, but the main point consisted of me meeting my soulmate, apparently a vampire, inside a small bookstore. I barely remember the rest of it, but it was so epic that, when I woke up, I decided I needed to write about it.

I spent weeks creating all of the characters, and the world, and the plot. I had quite a bit planned out but, before I ever began writing, something happened that pulled me away from the story. Perhaps it was that I was over my love of vampires, or maybe I got distracted by some book. Probably both. But I completely scrapped the whole idea and tossed it out a window. Not literally.

I attempted, again, to return to my fan fiction. I came to the conclusion that I was not an adequate enough writer to be able to create a world on my own, so I decided to stick with borrowing other people's worlds instead.  I was making a valiant attempt to re-write my favorite story, the one I had gotten the farthest with, because I have a very strong attachment to the characters that I created there.

Interestingly enough, I will probably have to delete that story if I do get this novel published, because two of my characters are very strongly based on two of the characters I created in that story. I eventually got to the point where I decided that, if I took all of the original characters I had ever made and put them all together, I would have an adequate cast for my own, original work. I made a valiant effort to do so, but it was simply too much.

It was not a waste of my time, though. I threw the plot out the window to fester in the dirt with my vampire story, but I kept some of my characters and concepts. I filed them away in a dark corner of my mind in case they should ever fit into something I wanted to write in the future. And then I entered another writing lull, though much shorter than the first.

In my senior year of high school, I do believe, though it could have been my junior year, I was sitting in my kitchen, talking to my mother and sister about how all I wanted to do was write, but I couldn't think of a single good thing to write about. My sister just started looking around the room, spewing ideas at me left and right. None of them stuck out to me until her eyes fell on my mom's coffee cup.

"Write a story about a bunch of people that have to live in really tall houses because there is something on the ground that makes it so they can't go there," she suggested. This came from her spotting a lighthouse on the mug. I was pretty confused at first, but I brainstormed with her for the rest of the night about what could be on the ground. I got a general idea of what I wanted to do, and from there the novel I am working on at present evolved and turned into what it is today.

For example, most people don't live in tall houses, though that was the initial idea. The stuff on the ground has a huge backstory. I dug into that dark corner of my mind for some of the characters and concepts I didn't throw out from my previous story, and I managed to meld it together into something I like and can see myself working on for a very, very long time.

And that, dear people of the internet, is how I became a writer.