The spine’s chilling and the body is shaking

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change”
Mary Shelley
 
Horror brings tension to a story, creates a darker atmosphere (intentionally caused by the writer) and awakes the interests inside a reader’s mind, often by expressing questions – who, what, how, why. Questions to which the writer answers with his own style and capabilities. In many crime and drama series the story starts in a calm and peaceful manner before the actual plot starts. The flow of calmness in the story may change a bit over time, I guess. Depends how long the “prologue” part is in a normal, about 40 minute long story. Slowly but surely the story starts to develop and change to a more interesting one, up to a point where the writer wants to drop the first “bomb” of the story on to the reader.
The story named Frankenstein is sort of a benchmark for horror writers nowadays. I would guess that everyone has at least heard the name Frankenstein atleast once in their lifetime. I have here a picture of James Whales’ Frankenstein-story. The picture showcases a supernatural creature, a man-made monster that has been created from stuffing many human (and possibly other creatures’-been decade or two since I read the story) body parts together. The creation called Frankenstein’s monster is walking through an open, sturdy door. Walking after getting new life breathed into it. The picture expresses Frankenstein’s monster to be unnaturally strong and in size much larger in comparison to
a normal human being. A supernatural threat which may or may not be impossible for us to create in the future. Scary.

The use of horror genre in fiction is a great way to make the followers of that particular fictional story see and feel - sense - safely something, that would in real life somebody, like a victim on a crash incident,  traumatized. The human mind tends to want to experience different kinds of colors in their lives every now and then. Young people tend to want to drink alcohol and play slot machines because they're both not allowed for underage people in most countries around the World. The experience of doing something that's illegal makes the experience all the better and makes even something like drinking alcohol exciting.
Horror stories may be based on something that exists between the realms of fantasy and realism. Sometimes people believe seriously in the supernatural and unseen, such as reading stars or tarot cards in order to get a structure to your fate or reading them in order to see to the future, and some people believe in aliens - those things like us from other planets in the Universe. People believe in them despite never seeing them, because it apparently seems ridicilous to believe that we would live alone in the vast space, and Earth shouldn't be the only planet with life on it.
Last notes to this:
What would happen, if aliens were to come and started trying to take over the World?
"There's a wicked witch in the forest, that appears when the sun goes down and kidnaps little children," said an elderly man to his grandchildren in order to not let them go outside during the night.
When you think about it, there are many examples of how people that believe in supernatural all around the World have shown the different ways that this genre has affected their everyday lives, from praying to Greek's gods to learning and studying about Japan's numerous mysterious and mythical creatures.

A Drawn Out Journey

"The aftertaste you leave with a reader is more important than the first and immediate last impressions if you want to have the reader coming back for more."

- Me while thinking about By the time you read this.

By the time you read this, by Giles Blunt, is a mystery-crime fiction novel that managed to get "the Best Mystery of the Year"-name/award by the Globe&Mail. I've never read any other novels by Blunt, but apparently his "Forty words of sorrow" was some kind of award winner also.

The story opens up with a description of a town (or some kind of area, maybe it was a small city even) called Algonquin Bay. The readers are immediately assured that nothing bad could ever happen in Algonquin Bay, which ofcourse means the complete opposite: something terrible must be on its way. On a second thought, though, after finishing the book, since the antagonist/villain had been wreaking havoc from the shadows for two long years, that particular opening statement about the town makes little sense.

John Cardinal is our main protagonist. He's a very experiences and skilled policeman out of suit who on paper comes out to be sort of a Gary Stu (praised to high heavens by the author and story's characters), but the twist in the story is that Cardinal is the one who all terrible things happen to, and he's left mentally exhausted, left to question himself about "what good is it to keep on living" as very early on in the story John Cardinal's wife, the beautiful and perfect Catherine dies by what is considered to be a certain suicide. That's what I as a reader also believed - and hoped - to have been the case, atleast until the ending portion kicked in where everything sort of gets explained... And I can't say that things were explained in a "good" way, really.

Giles Blunt is an excellent writer when it comes to expressing how things would look like in order to create the imaginery for the reader, he's also great in atmospheric build-up, realistic writing and grammar. However the story felt too in-my-face realistic when it came to spending my time in telling how even the smallest things seemed and were like - truly alot of trivial things in the text - that I just couldn't keep myself invested. At times it felt as if I was doing homework, in other words it was exhausting to read. Also in this story Blunt seems to fall short in having any sort of imagination required to tell a compelling fictional story, as By the time you read this had a guidebook crime drama plot and story. The whole story was uninspired to no end, side plotlines (well, the only one there was) were handled in a boring manner while Blunt tried to present them as something huge and special, he failed in executing the promises. He failed reaching up to those standards he himself set for the story. There was nothing much going on in the story either as I spent hours trying to get through it.

After John Cardinal leaves a plotline with the Algonquin Bay's mayor's adultery investigation hanging (never to be continued again in the story. This is the first thing that happens after the opening segment, also),Cardinal gets a notice while on a stakeout with the mayor that a woman has jumped off a 10-story building to her death. When Cardinal arrives to the crime scene, he immediately goes to grab the woman with broken bones and holds her - a moment which may or may not make the reader feel some form of emotion. I didn't feel a thing, not because of its amazing plot weaving (which it didn't have) or just because of the fast pacing and skipped character fleshing out in order to get to that point but because of the unnatural amount of hard-to-understand words that Blunt filled the text with in order to build up atmosphere - words that someone who doesn't have english as their first or second mother language may find frustrating trying to decipher. The alien words used weren't what made the story fristrating for me however.

After Cardinal finds his dead wife - soon after the story begins - the story falls into a downward spiral

of simply boring storylines, bad handling, lame climax and laughable resolution, putting it simply.

Aside from the less than memorable characters, the only ones who I could remember while reading, I could probably count with one hand. The MC, John and his wife and their emotional support daughter Kelly who didn't really have any personality going for her, Lise Delorme - John's perfect colleague, the antagonist who brings another layer of weird writing into the story. The antagonist is hailed, by award giving groups, to be on par with Hannibal Lecter's tier of great villainous characters and... Not even close.  The story is filled with somewhat annoying coincidences in the plotlines that it'd be arguably better without the antagonist, but another problem in the story makes me regret saying that, that problem being pacing.

As I mentioned previously, the story takes a dive not soon after it begins, and most of it has to do with the lack of any interesting or entertaining characters with quirks or interesting and suspensful plotlines. Everything is so blank, depressing in a boring way. The story consists of John Cardinal and his daughter Kelly trying to deal with Catherine's death and depression.

 John Cardinal is on leave from work at the PD where the 2nd most important character of the story, Lise Delorme, is trying to crack an old case about a sexual predator. The side plotline is handled in a pretty lackluster way and it doesn't leave any type of taste with the reader, it's just Delorme going around talking with people to get hints at who the guy could be, and the guy just happens to be indirectly connected to the main antagonist, in other words it's unnecessarily mixed in with the main plot. Anyways, as Cardinal tries to find a good coffin for his late wife and also a strange guy who sends him threatening letters regarding Cardinal failing to protect Catherine, the reader will spend a good 200 pages reading rather empty text that, aside from atmosphere, doesn't build-up to anything in the long run. The writing oversaturated the story with trying to tell how things are like. The characters weren't that great either as I previously mentioned, so reading so much "meh" slice-of-life about them did not do the story any favours. The drama in the story also felt like it was some kind of crime-drama trope that was being used. 

Most of the enjoyment I remember getting while reading came from trying to guess what will happen next in the story (though that would mean that something actually happens which really isn't the case in this book), and then after dozens of pages of nothing happening, the thing that I had guessed would happen, happens, that's when I just laughed at how stupid the whole thing seemed like. 

Last notes.

The chapters were nicely short, easy to read to a "checkpoint."
The story was unnecessarily left open-ended, but not in a good way. It felt like the author got bored with the story, tried explaining things while forgetting to give closure to things, and just wrote that it's over here and everything is good.
The last dozen or two dozen pages of the book is a taste read of Giles Blunt's next book. The genre seemed to be completely different and the characters seemed to actually have some life to them, despite seemingly being archetypal characters with quirks. Atleast they were noticeably more lively compared to the characters in the main story of the book.

A Technically Perfect Ending

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had. J. K. Rowling
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/remembered.htm"

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jkrowlin454004.html?src=t_remembered

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jkrowlin454004.html?src=t_remembered

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jkrowlin454004.html?src=t_remembered

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jkrowlin454004.html?src=t_remembered

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/remembered.html

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had. J. K. Rowling
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/remembered.html

"I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had."
- J.K. Rowling 

Curtain. The final released Poirot novel by Agatha Christie. I already made a somewhat spoilery (the post has a picture with a spoiler) respect post about the book earlier here but now that I've completed the book last month and gathered my thoughts about it, I ofcourse want to write a bit about it. According to Wikipedia, Christie wrote the story ~30 years before the actual ending and had it stored in a bank during World War 2 to keep it safe. Curtain's purpose was to act as a "fitting" end to the series, which it in some ways is and in some ways isn't.

The setting and certain resurfacing ideas used in the book's story are, some more than others, symbolistic. The very first case and setting of the Hercule Poirot series is brought back in this final book as Hercule's old friend, captain Arthur Hastings, stars as the main character of the story. Hastings's purpose according to Poirot is to work as Poirot's five senses for trying to solve the case of the mysterious culprit "X," a person who Hercule Poirot says is his most formidable foe yet (X's presence was not presented as well as it could have been, though, for this to be all too true), who had "killed" multiple people in the past and is now hunting for more. Since the beginning Poirot knows everything of X, while Hastings knows practically nothing (well Poirot told him his few potential victims - as to hint at X's murder methods) and is looking for the culprit X and his murder methods in that way, while knowing nothing. In other words Poirot is missing clues for the culprit's methods as he can't prove X's part in the killings, and he is also looking for X's next victims, so he wants Hastings to look at the people of the newly remodeled Styles's Court building construct (from the first Poirot case) from inside-the-box point of view, and he wants Hastings to report everything he sees to Poirot himself.

Chavenage House (near Tetbury, Gloucestershire). Inspiration for Styles Court

Styles's Court is now a place for for people in need of extra help to continue their lives with help to live in, also with some extra guests that just come to relax there and spend some time. In other words the mansion has been turned into a nursing home.

The premise of the story is the usual; it has a place and a case. Arthur Hastings gets a letter from Hercule Poirot in which he wants Hastings to come to meet Poirot for old time's sake. One of Hastings's daughters, Judith, and a slew of other people are already waiting for him (well not really but they're there), and Hastings really wants to meet Poirot once more. Hastings's memories and nostalgia - the shared history with Poirot - is brought up multiple times. The cast of characters in the story is nothing spectacular but Christie does a well enough job in bringing the characters up multiple times for the reader to get used to who most of  them are. When I began to read the book at first, I felt very lost on who is who, but thinking back to the previous chapters made it easier to get into the flow of the story. The story itself is very basic, in fact so much so that it felt disappointing. It didn't take much (while reading I didn't mind it at all) from my enjoyment but I did think that the setting - a mansion in which a group of people are in, locked room murder and multiple other murders - and other such things were terribly uninspired and from that front not the best way for the curtain to fall. In this case I think Christie saw very far into the future (if the "writing 30 years before the actual ending" thing is true) when she wrote Curtain, as it was the perfect soft-boiled setting and the premise of the story with Poirot's age etc. being brought up for the case. However these things were too perfect for their own good as nowadays these are rather overused ideas to say the least.


Characters? They were okay. No one really outstanding, but Hastings's thoughts and personal motivations were well handled in this. Poirot's moments were pretty nice in a good and bad sense, I believe, while thinking back. There was a a particularly powerful line about dropping the curtain which Poirot himself made that sticks with me still. Dr John Franklin stood out in his slightly sudden character development ways also and Boyd Carrington was interesting. I guess Judith's attitude and the way the true culprit was handled in the backgrounds was impressive, very much so. I didn't think the story was as well thought out until the bomb was dropped in the end. Some may see it as a psychological babble but I believe that Christie simply didn't know how to put the methods the culprit used into better words (the murder method was put in very simplistic ways during the explanation), but, as far as mystery/detective fiction, instead of sci-fi, goes, it was handled better than in the story I'll be writing a review about after this - a story in which there's a therapist and suicide talk, alot.

The story repeats an old-to-new type of writing where Hastings and other characters compare past to

Past and present overlap with each other.

present, in more ways than one, probably on purpose to reflect on their journey. Despite Hercule Poirot's bad and near-death condition, he keeps telling Hastings that his brain works as fast as always. Hastings questions this couple of times: "maybe Poirot has gone senile and is only making up this story of X?" You could tell where the story was going. It was to be the final Poirot book, Poirot's condition, and ofcourse getting to know the culprit etc. by the end was also a given, but how the story unfolds is another thing. In the end Poirot had to send a letter after all to explain everything, which was disappointing despite the somewhat emotional open-ended ending which came before it. Had the book told more in the epilogue, it could have turned out to be better. It feels like the ending part was added on random to avoid backlash.

And finally, you'll probably not guess the culprit on your own. they're the one I least suspected. they weren't brought up that often. The hints were low in count but the hints that exist in the story were really subtle.

Theory on time and space

Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.
 - Albert Einstein 

During our english lesson we had to write an essay on a subject that might interest oneself, so after thinking about it I decided to pick one that someone wouldn't normally write about without reading about it. I decided to create my own theory on dimensional pockets in other words something explaining how there are more than one "Universe" out there (abstractly "out there"?).

Well the theory starts here. Let me point out that I haven't really studied space and nor have I rechecked whether or not certain things such as the talk about a red giant are as factual as I make it sound. Anyway, the entire Universe and "beyond." Gravity, mass, the flow of time and other abstract things, concepts, such as those, interest even random amateurs such as myself.

It's theorized that the Universe is a constrantly reviving "thing."  Something that dies again only to be born once again from its remains, from the never disappearing "energy." My example would be the Sun. When a Sun, a star, is in the last stretch of its life, it will turn into what is known as a "red giant" and envelop a massive space by expanding, the heat energy that is packed in the Sun and other forms of energy, such as light, run out and the red giant with an insurmountable amount of size and mass, both which create gravity that pulls even planets towards itself, turns into a "white dwarf" with little to no sign of its previous life left in it. It's dead to us. However, the life force it used to hold in known as energy has not disappeared out of "existence," only moved elsewhere in the Universe's pocket dimension of space, but that energy can never escape the Universe because concepts, laws of physics and everything else can only exist inside this particular Universe that we are aware of. Oh, and nor has the energy appeared out of nowhere either.

As we currently know, the Universe is created by a "Big Bang", an explosion that happens when all the energy in the space and time of the dimension is condensed into a single ridicilously small (gold ball or even less-sized) point, with space and time itself. My earlier example of the Sun goes with the life of the Universe also dying; expanding and afterwards turning into a "white dwarf" of its own, however, the "energy" contained inside the Universe is only limited to being able to exist inside our Universe's space, because of its laws of physics holding such rules, so it can't escape despite of the pocket dimension getting smaller and smaller. And when it's at its tiniest point... BOOM! An explosion happens once again, as it had happened much more than merely billions of years ago, and the Universe is technically "reborn" once again, almost like the legendary mythical creature "
Phoenix", as the energy in the explosion starts stretching the walls/borders of the space and it keeps expanding at many, many times faster than the speed of light, according to some scientists that study space.

I do not know what could possibly exist in the emptiness of the void that may be outside our Universe, our space and time, perhaps an emptiness that contains countless of Universes with their own laws of physics and concepts, but I'm interested in finding out. Wait, if laws of physics could exists in pockets of space only, then something like a "distance" between dimensions should not exist at all in what I'll call the "outside Void."
Mm.... Perhaps the connection between the Universes would be something akin to water droplets that create the sea. The pull in protons, neutrons->atoms->molecules.

Detective Conan story arcs: The Beginning ("Conan Arc" and introduction)

Detective Conan is an extremely popular detective and crime fiction comic book series created by Gosho Aoyama over at the Shonen Sunday magazine. The series has been going strong for over 20 years by now as it first started in 1994.

The premise of the story is about an intellectual boy named Shinichi Kudo, 17 years old after the first movie, getting beat up by men wearing black suits (well, one of them) whose codenames in their organisation Conan later learns of being Gin and Vodka, and he gets fed a drug that shrinks his body into that of a elementary school boy. After surviving the attack and the heart

Gin is potentially the main villain of the series.

pounding, body burning side effect of the drug, he decides to go back home and has to explain to a good friend of his, inventor Professor Agasa Hakase, that he's in fact Shinichi. Conan decides that he will get his hands on the drug once more and sets his mind on defeating the organization. In order to do this he requires the help of many, many different people and the story begins as he moves in with his childhood crush/friend Ran Mouri and her father Kogoro Mouri who is a private eye drunkard that never gets any calls for work because of Shinichi. Conan will live with the Mouris, awaiting for different cases to come by making Kogoro a popular detective with a cheat in order to every now and then stumble on a case that the "Black Organization" may be a part of.. Conan meets friends in the elementary school he goes to and other different people as the story goes on.

The "Conan arc" takes place between episodes 1 to 128. In this part of the story the core cast of characters are introduced. The "detective boys"; Ayumi, Genta and Mitsuhiko that Conan befriends and joins tend to solve normal clue puzzle cases over the course of the series. The "DB" aren't that important to the story but they allow the author to come up with different, more normal mysteries and they also allow Conan to develop as a character over the course of the first 100 episodes as he turns from a murky person who wants to leave them as quick as possible into someone who cares and thinks "it's not so bad after all."

 Conan gets to meet his biggest rival and best friend, Heiji Hattori. As Shinichi is known as the best detective in East Japan, Heiji is the best in the western parts. This kansai-ben speaking character is a personal favourite of mine. He's as smart as Shinichi is but his biggest flaw is that he's hot-blooded in personality so he can change the way the culprits thought their plans would go or he can also dig himself into a hole and lose his "match" just as well. Heiji tends to bring his childhood friend Kazuha Toyama around with him everywhere, she's kind of like Ran. Once every fall or so there tends to be
a Heiji case in the comic series. His cases are soft-boiled, Agatha Christie-like supernatural murders with the usual "inner circle" cast and case, and a "sealed-off" setting for serial killings to potentially take place in.

We also get introduced to Shinichi's parents, Kudo Yusaku, the what could be the smartest character ever, and a great female character Kudo Yukiko, who plays a bigger role in the later parts of the story.
Another technically rival appears called Kaito Kid. A mysterious phantom thief that steals jewels just to get a peek at the light inside of them once you look through the gems towards the moonlight. The first few Kaito cases are amazingly handled and he serves to bring actually supernatural type of cases to the series as he's kind of superhuman in a sense. Kaito Kid is a tie-in character from another ongoing series of Gosho Aoyama's called "Magic Kaito." Conan isn't interested in mere thieves with his detective pride but Kaito's style is to trick the police and send challenges before the act, so it's a whole other story.
Conan learns during the "Bullet Train" case that the two people who drugged him are from an organization and have the codenames "Gin" and "Vodka." Another codenamed member of the org gets introduced called Tequila and an important character called Miyano Akemi is introduced.

The cases in the first 10 volumes of the series are mostly averagely written in the logical sense but are very much fun to follow because of the characters. Afterwards the author perfects his style and manages to write more compelling short stories as Conan's main pull is in the variety of the types of cases it has. Overarching story during cases, long soft-boiled cases, normal tricks, puzzles, apartment cases with closed room tricks and so on.

Aside from the individual cases I may talk about in greater detail later that's most of the summary for the introduction arc. Next up is the arc that introduces a certain traitor.

Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- sucks

The constant hype surrounding this adaptation of the Re:Zero light novel series has truly made me think twice on listening to hype in the community.

Aside from couple of movie type adaptations I've truly never liked any light novel adaptations because of the cringeworthy dialogue, one-note designs, overuse of tropes and cliches, a terrible cast of characters and a nonsensical plot that is almost purely fanservice. Re:Zero is not as much different from other LN adaptations the fanbase wants to think it is and it will more than likely be forgotten in the upcoming weeks after the series ends as it's currently in its 20th episode. One can only hope that there is not going to be a second season.

When I was getting into the series I just thought that I could get used to the animation and like it that way, as the animation is great in the series half the time. But no. The presentation since episode one has been really awful. The series repeats a certain pattern that is annoyingly clear and it hooks newcomers in with this so called "foreshadowing" that people like to call good writing. It's not in this series I can assure you and let me explain why.

Why!? Tell me why!?

 The story begins with a boy, our main character Natsuki Subaru, who is sort of a fourth wall breaker at first getting thrown into a fantasy world. Throughout the series it's as if he's never even been in the "real world" however, as he never once has a thought of going back there or anything. He's your stereotypical light novel protagonist with a twist; he's an emotional loser. Big time. He gets constantly attached to people he doesn't even know, all one-note characters. The side character "knights" in the series look like they're fodders from "Tales of-" games. Really generic looking designs for everyone except the main character, sometimes, as his face turns into all sorts of things during his "character development" progress which doesn't feel natural at all in the series as the MC has a power to keep going in a world where death may anytime be around the corner. He has a cheatcode almost literally. In comparison you can look at someone like Light Yagami from "Death Note," Light is a character who develops more naturally along as the story progresses as well as make choices based on his emotions (I know people will bring up that Subaru's a normal boy who's an overly emotional freak etc.). Anyways, as the story progresses the main character gets very, very annoying and overcomes his emotional obstacles and turns into a hero. Generic LN protag with a twist as he's an asshole in one part of the story. Oh and I've heard people say that the plot and characters are like in Higurashi... Just no... That was actually well plotted out and had better twists (yes I know "Re:ZERO has "twists") but it was stretched out I will admit.

Wow, an actually decent side character.

As I've ranted enough of the MC, there's really nothing to talk about any of the side characters. All and I mean every single one of them are just badly written cheerleaders in the end. It's time to summarize my problems with the so called "well written story" that the series has.
 Slight spoilers ahead.




Subaru, the MC of the story, has a power, or you could call it a curse, which he calls "revival by death." It allows him to quite literally revive in a way in which it seems he himself had gone back in time after dying. What does this mean, then? It means an extremely shittily fleshed out and repetitive storylines. The "arcs" in Re: Zero go like this:

Story starts as the MC is shown dying and revives -> we see the story go back to that point of "zero" which is a "checkpoint" in time that Subaru will revive in -> mc is unknowingly getting brutally killed ->  revive, same story we already saw, nothing gets skipped -> MC faces hardships and dies yet again in the end -> MC revives. Same freaking story we already saw once again and the MC dies after getting almost to the root of the problem and revives -> After collecting himself up and showing his true plot armor, he stays victorious. And yes, there may have been atleast one more revival and repeated time that the story was told once again but I'd love nothing more than to not remember that.
The so called "foreshadowing" of the series is done poorly because the story never advances. It simply loops and repeats itself infinitely in each arc without any real progression. The main character is an invincible self-insert that will make the watcher feel disgusted with him and sympathize with him.

Rating of the series: F for Fail

What is your dream

"While many can pursue their dreams in solitude, other dreams are like great storms blowing hundreds, even thousands of dreams apart in their wake. Dreams breathe life into men and can cage them in suffering. Men live and die by their dreams. But long after they have been abandoned they still smolder deep in men's hearts. Some see nothing more than life and death. They are dead, for they have no dreams." 
- Griffith from 'Berserk'

Lack of motivation, anxiety, downwards spiral in morality, negative thoughts, effort, time, money, feel of accomplishment, senses, thoughts and excitement. These different concepts and many other may have taken place in different fprms and ways in your everyday life during small things you like doing, wasting your time on, so to say. Coming home from basketball practise, doing everything you can to get noticed at work in hopes of promotion one day. Sweat and tears from positivity and negativity. Tonight I was thinking of the time it would take to write many stories as I have some in mind, but one which is still a work in progress, though not far from end, is still annoying me as I haven't yet found the motivation to finish it. Simplest way would be just to finish it. Write. That's easy in all technicality, however as I thought about these works something somehow surprising came into my mind... Why do I want to put all of the effort into imagining something like a novel series? After thinking about it for a while I still couldn't come up with any real explanation other than "I just want to see if anyone can create popular series" which is just a roundabout way of saying "I want people to buy my creations" no matter what it is. It's not enough of an answer for me.

So I would imagine many other have vague ideas of wanting to do things without a clear long-time goal in mind. You'd want to spend time doing something you enjoy or once enjoyed doing and have become fairly good at doing it over the course of your life, right? For me, I believe that thinking about what first motivated me to become invested in the art of novel writing would be a great help in figuring, molding out the form for what I truly want. Well, gathering the motivation and energy to actually physically do it is another thing.

Thriving for your dream goal may be hard, very, very hard. It's a dream for a reason, right? Many people are going to say things that will hurt your pride. People that don't truly even matter. Teachers, people on net, co-workers you barely even know. Anyone can potentially say something to you that they won't realize will without doubt hurt you, burn you from inside out. It's important to realize that nothing should stand in your way if it's irrelevant and unmotivational. Go watch motivational videos. You will have earned the place to keep going, to never stop from people saying "don't do this right now" or "you can't do that" or "this is not good at all, you should really stop" if you, yourself, know that you've put your all into doing something and hate it when people who don't understand your passion say something that they won't even realize the meaning of. Everyone's a different type of individual from the inside, much like our fingerprints.Anyway... Don't let people control your thoughts, especially the important ones. Chances are that they're not any better than, in fact they are most likely less experienced at what you do and you're not  the one in the wrong.

How to avoid getting caught by writer's block

“Get your character in trouble in the first sentence and out of trouble in the last sentence.” 
Barthe DeClements 

"Holy crap! That's alot of headaches!"

Camp NaNoWriMo ended for this summer just recently. I wrote my first novel, or maybe you could call it a draft, which had 50 000 words as a goal. I passed the word count  at 23:57 in other words right before the month changed, so just in time. Gave me a great feeling for a minute there. However the novel isn't done. I will probably get to 65 000 words by the time it ends, with all the editing and so on afterwards also being something that I'll have to go through.
Anyways, I had started my project 7 days late and had things to do for a good week with moving where I couldn't write anything, so if you were wondering "is it possible to write a novel in half a month?" The answer is a big "YES" even from an amateur like me who took his time thinking about the plot, characters and story. I can't confirm it but on the NaNo forums, apparently there were some reaching over 50 000 words in one day. Sounds ridicilous.

Ahh, yes. The problem of "writer's block." Truly a problem I've heard some people have. The story just doesn't start on itself, or the motivation just isn't there. That's true. I myself rarely had any motivation to start writing... Until I did. You see... I never hit a writers block for one simple reason and that was that I had started creating a work that was challenging 'enough' for me. After introduction parts I focused on writing something that would make me 'feel' many different types of emotions and disappear into the story for hours after hours without even noticing. Sometimes I stopped to imagine the setting in what it would look like 'in real life', which was a great way of adding words to the story as I described everything. Another time I took my time to draw on the 'Paint' program how a floor of a building would look like, how the rooms are placed on the floor and where the characters were at that point in time. Imagining it, writing it, experiencing the story made me shed tears atleast dozen times from the feeling of suspense I constantly had. Always write what interests you the most is what I'd like to say about this. 'Plotting vs pantsing' is one of the most heated debates when it comes to writing in general, but all humans grow tired on anything as time goes by. This is why we need variety in our lives, we need exciting, new things to happen to us. People tend to grow tired of plotted out stories and those will never be finished. To be honest, that's one of my fears also. Leaving a story unfinished, that is.

So... When it comes to pantsing, readers sometimes tend to have this notion in their heads that plotting = good writing, pantsing = bad writing, but completely plotted out stories, even if logically completely sound, may be the most boring stories out there. If you want to become an author you should try to understand what readers prefer and what they don't. Becoming familiar with the genre of the type of fiction you want to tell will get you far. I know "reading is boring" and so on, but if there's a story you just have to tell and you know the genre, you really should try to read that type of literature to understand how a story forms, how the rising and falling action works in actuality etc.

This last part I wanted to write this post about the most as it was what I used. It's pantsering, just technically forcing myself to write (though during these parts I mean in this part of the post I did enjoy writing those parts of my story) through everything. I just let my mind come up with reasons as to why something is there, if I was wondering about something, my main character would wonder about it. Twists that I could not have seen coming started happening in the story...
In other words: When you start hitting that keyboard, don't be afraid of the things that you may find as 'asspulls' in your story. This isn't the same as deus ex machinas and forced tropes and cliched writing. It's about you writing a story as it progresses. Once you get better at writing itself, people won't even tell the difference of a plotted out story or a pantsed out story. Though I suggest plotting it along the way. It takes a while to write, after all. Remember to avoid writing plot holes that may make you rewrite your story from half point on or something like that, that's terrible.

Tmartn case and CSGOLotto

 Happiness is a positive cash flow.

- Fred Adler

CSGOLotto is (by now hopefully 'was') a website made to make illegal but somehow legal money by scamming underage children by making them bet their CSGO skins, which have been bought with actual money in more cases than not, on the website. The 'difference' between the CSGO skin 'betting sites', which CSGOLotto is/was also, is that the real life money gets turned into steam money, and the steam money can't ever leave steam, supposedly (too bad when there's money there're and will be ways to get it in reality). My friend bet on the site last winter in fact, and afterwards they sent dozens of bots to harrass him through his steam account and constantly the bots posted about the website. Constant adds etc. by CSGOLotto bots happened to me also. By using  these ways that go against all morality Tmartn has collected ALOT (potentially millions) of dollars. According to whiteboy7thst Tmrtn, and hopefully his co-assigned criminal friends (let's be real here, there's no way he could run such an imperium at such fast growth rate in such a short period of time. Countless bots everywhere in CS as I already mentioned), will be held in FELONY charges if the attorneys manage to get big pot customers. The case is underway and they've confirmed this to be one of the biggest and "juiciest" cases an attorney could hope for (scamming little children via gambling). If every single person, which ofcourse is not happening 100%, who bet on the site makes a claim, the so-called "CSGOLotto enterprises" will be losing minimum of TEN TIMES the amount they've made and facing who knows how many years in prison. If he's found guilty of fraudulent crime, felony, scamming etc. All the access into his way of getting illegal money, which could potentially include his YouTube account, will be permanently shut, which could mean millions of dollars gone. However, it seems Tmartn has a plan for semi-washing money into "legal" money which I will be talking about a bit. In Tmartn's response video, he mentions that he had fifteen people working on CSGOLotto's business team working on skin trading.

In Tmartn's response video when the shitstorm news hit him, he responses in a weird way:

"CSGOLotto is a company! Tmartn enterprises is a company! CSGOLotto pays Tmartn enterprises for promotions! Tmartn enterprises promotes CSGOLotto!"

He's trying to make it seem that he's doing everything legally right and he's basically saying that ALL the money will leave CSGOLotto's bank accounts for the Tmartn enterprises promotion fees. Yes. Dumb. As. Fuck.
He's also constantly trying to cling onto people's sympathy in the video by talking about always speaking the truth and "I would never do that guys!"



 And by the way, he deleted all the CSGO videos he had. Like a criminal who thinks, nay, knows that "they got me" would do. Also his video reeks of bullshit since he's talking about morality in a way that "why would people do this to me" when he's nothing more than a pig who steals money from children. And in his response video, which he deleted also, he mentions he had talked with an attorney who worked "countless hours" on investigating the CSGOLotto idea to make sure it was "100% legit."

Now I ask you: Where is this attorney at? He actually pointed towards the sea when he showed in the video where the attorney was at, lol. Anyways... Why are you panicking so much, Tmartn? Is that a sweat drop on your nose? What is there to get so scared about? You're talking too fast in your video. You shouldn't have to, you know, try so (in fact TOO) hard on proving your innocence if nothing is wrong. And yes, you faked your videos. Why are you even lying like that, terrible. They were made to create the illusion to people that are less developed, the illusion of thinking that 'this is easy money. I can make bank via this method.' And it's all money, mother's credit cards being used, on silly skins in a video game. 

Retarded idea at best in more ways than one, those sites are.

By the way, if you want the full story from the very beginning, watch the video series of "CSGO Scandal" created by HonorTheCall over here.