The summer is already drawing to an end! Here are some things I’ve been up to lately.
I published My ████████ Angel, a mini interactive fiction story. This project was made for Neo-Twiny Jam, a charity event to fundraise for the Trevor Project and SAGE. Neo-Twiny Jam matches the number of games created by dollars donated to a LGBT organization. I almost dropped this project several times because I found it hard to work with the 500 word limit in an interactive format. But I’m glad I finished it in the end. It’s really hard for me to create things when I feel like they aren’t meaningfully improving my skills in some way, but maintenance is also part of cultivating skill. Improvement is not a line with a steady upwards slope. It’s a slow hike that takes endurance and sometimes stopping to see the view of how far you have come. By making this little story, I’m practicing being okay with producing rougher work, exploring ideas that are interesting to me with less commitment, and recognizing that the quality of my work doesn’t equate to my worth as a person. I also really appreciate jams like this because they force me to meet a deadline and motivate me to finish something. Also check out the other entries to this jam! It’s super inspiring to see what others did with the same prompt.
This summer, as I’m home from school, I’ve been trying to participate more in the local writing community. As part of this effort, I participated in the OC Poetry Slam at Den Cafe. It was really interesting, and I got to listen to the work of so many amazing people! Den Cafe hosts open mics and lots of other great events, and I would love to go to more of them. I’ve also been attending a local writing group in Orange that I found on Meetup. Unfortunately, I show up late 90 percent of the time I go because I am horrible at time management. I feel like the writing scene in OC is so much more vibrant and alive than I ever realized when I was in high school. I think it will be hard to find a creative scene again when I go back to Houston for school, because I don’t have the bandwidth to attend any writing or art classes, but I hope that I can meet like-minded people somehow.
Besides that, my current obsessions are sci-fi and mecha. I’m flailing around for the motivation to write Star Wars fanfiction and a “pilot” chapter for a mecha story. Something is so satisfying about people fighting each other in big robots. Especially if there are copilots. Every relationship is made better by a big robot.
Recently, a team project pushed me to finally learn how to use GitHub, which has been long overdue. I also stumbled onto Nekoweb, a static web hosting platform similar to Neocities. This is pushing me to be more involved with the small web again. If the motivation lasts, I will update this site and add some more interesting features! In particular, I plan to add an RSS feed that will update when I publish a piece of writing or a blog post. So keep an eye out for new things!
I've decided to start a blog on this website!! Updates will be infrequent, but I hope to upload short pieces on writing events that I'm attending, what I've been working on, and what books and other media have been interesting to me lately.