Top Secret Files of a Mental Fugitive, Exposed

I am a casual.

What type of casual, you ask? Almost everything in my interests. I am a casual KOF fan. A casual spriter. A casual Touhou fan or secondary. A casual gun enthusiast. A casual reader. Used to be a casual Troper before the 5P fiasco. A casual Type Moon fan. A casual music fan. A casual gamer. A casual movie fan. A casual art critic. A casual historian. And most of all, a casual writer.

When you define the word "casual", it only means something not serious, not too frequent, not risk-taking and not definite. And that exactly describes how I handle my interests. I can't play fighting games to save my life. I can't make good sprites all by myself. I play the Touhou games and I suck at them. I don't have a real gun. I seldom read fiction. I am not contributing to the TVTropes articles. I know jackshit about the mechanics of Nasuverse. If I don't like how a song sounds, I ditch it. I only occasionally go hard mode on games. I don't watch movies too often. I can only spot the very obvious flaws of a drawing. I am not researching about history too often unless it makes me curious. So many things I am interested with, so little actual interest.

However, if you ask me if what I want to be, I'll tell you that I want to be a writer, if not a gunsmith. But the problem is, in this country, people don't read books and don't want guns. That's my problem, and I have to face this fucking reality, even if it's ugly and you want to punch its face but you can't. It's like telling me "Your interests don't fit in this society, bear with it. " So here I am, just stuck with writing fanfiction and things that would outright be rejected if submitted to a legitimate publisher.

Speaking of fanfiction, I recently wrote a mildly romantic and mostly saddening Shirou and Sakura fanfic and posted it here in BL, named "Leukocyte". Only a couple of people commented on the fic and gave me some advice, so it seems that I still suck at it. And to me, if very few people comment of your work, the rest are not impressed. I don't actually know what's wrong with it. It might be the subject matter. It might be my actual writing skills. It might be because few people know me. It might be because it is too short and it is oneshot. It might be because it is plainly uninteresting. Or simply because I am an uninteresting person myself. I just don't know what's wrong with it, except for editing which Hymn of Ragnarok said, and it seriously makes me sad, makes me wonder why I am still doing this.

Then I remember my first literary clinic, when I was still a student in the old University. There, I submitted my two poems and the one which passed was titled "Instant", which talks about modern conveniences, inspired by a conversation with my brother. When it was reviewed by the panel, they said that as much as the poem talks about something contemporary, it is also too short and somewhat preachy. They said poems are a "show, don't tell" affairs and it also applies to fiction. But I liked their criticisms, they were all constructive and I was feeling something good in my chest during that time. It was a feeling of nervousness without the stomach butterflies, a feeling of strength, a feeling of happiness I've never felt before. And it was the first time I felt that.

And then, I said to myself during that time, that I want to be a writer. That I want people to listen to me. I want to entertain them. I want to make them focus on something after a hard and cold day's work. I want to write for the people. I want their laughs. I want their sadness. I want their frustrations. I want their anger. I want their sorrows. I want their cheering. I want their sympathies. I want them to feel, not for me, but for themselves, to remind them that they are human, and no matter how much bullshit happens in this country or world, there is nothing really bad about becoming human, despite our tendencies to kill or hurt each other in many ways possible, and we can do something about a problem that is bothering us for years in a realistic way, that things could become better, even if it cannot be perfect.

But then, it also reminded me of when my brother bought a collection of Edgar Allan Poe short stories in a book. At the very first story that was printed on the collection, he didn't understand it, so I was consulted by him, for me to read it on what it means. Imagine that. My brother, a linguistics student and more avid reader, stumped by a story written by Edgar Allan Poe, that he had to consult his older brother to translate it for him.

And when I read the first few pages of the story, it was a monologue of hopelessness from a character who was about to be executed for unknown reasons. I didn't mind that, except that the words used by Poe were archaic, if not outright obsolete in conversational English. Two questions were in my mind during that time. One was "What the hell is this?!" Two was "Is this really something that the average person can understand without constantly having a thick dictionary beside him or a tab of Wiktionary open?" Granted, it wasn't the first Poe I've read. The first one was "Cask of Amontillado", that was a prescribed reading in high school and that more infinitely understandable.

No wonder Poe was a Gothic novelist.

And then, I was reading more and more articles from the Internet, some of them using vocabulary that were so high-brow, it was like the brows of someone who got Botox injections on the forehead, taking sight of something that was really shocking, like a man being literally butchered on daylight in the middle of a street where many people were watching or the sight of two dogs copulating. It makes me sick, especially in that article that berates idiots simply because they are idiots in the Filipino language, while most of the article was written in words an average student will never encounter in his or her English lessons. It a pretentious display of circle jerking and ego stroking. I hated it. They told us that writing isn't a contest of how large your vocabulary is, it isn't done for awards, that being a writer requires patience and a lot imagination, that it isn't glamorous as many people would think. Sure, anyone can write, but to write something good means you have to connect with the readers and it isn't just having a large vocabulary.

However, there is another thing I saw that I didn't like. It was in the soap operas that were being shown on the television. I never wanted to watch these shows, but you can't avoid it, there's always one in every time of the day. And most of the time, they don't have good writing in them. The ending might change, the setting might change, the circumstances might change but the theme is always the same: A rich family against a poor heroine, usually with a obligatory love story to rope in some viewers. They are doing this to make people feel a little hope, but in reality, it is some sort of empty hope. No real motivation for the future. The economic rewards are just handed out to the heroines and the love triangle is always some sort of warfare, even without actual violence. People are just watching this to relieve boredom, and the TV stations resorted to importing Korean dramas to bolster more rating. And don't get me started on the Filipino action films. They were so cliche, no wonder they died out.

So that set my goal in what I want to write. I want to give hope to the masses without making them too indulged in something too unreal disguised as realistic or making them feel alienated with the vocabulary. That's all.

But here I am, still making fanfictions and fishing out ideas, still frustrated in my procrastination, still another casual writer in the Internet. I don't why I'm doing this, but hey, I guess this is a bit of a good start. Just a bit.