Reboot

Its been a long time since I wrote on this blog. A long time. A pretty long time. A dang long time.

Stuff has been happening. Life's pretty hectic. Last month has been full of the trial med school tests I signed up for - in order to prepare for the eventual showdown next year. I've practically been traveling 250 miles each weekend to sit the tests. It doesn't help that most tests are scheduled pretty early in the morning - meaning I had to wake up practically during the night to make the trip, then sit the exam, then return - to do it all over again every (and sometimes twice) week. The time between these trips is spent studying  . . . and playing Starcraft 2.

 Physics and bio are rough task masters. By the end of the day I'm tired as hell (not necessarily by just studies  . . . shhh) but pleased by the fact that I've learnt something new. Until the next day that is, when the delusion is lifted when I'm unable to solve any problems. And don't even get me started about chemistry. Because . . .I don't know WHERE to start. I haven't even made up my mind whether I love or hate the damn thing. Maybe a bit of both? Who knows?

The other thing occupying my time is, of course, Starcraft 2. And I didn't post about it because there isn't anything that I can say about that game that hasn't been said already. With the huge community of starcraft nerds and it’s astoundingly awesome and exciting pro-scene, anything I say is only going to be redundant. That being said, much of my free time has went into watching pro repays and the highly entertaining and educational blip.tv videos of Day[9] and MrBitter. Any starcraft gamer must check them out.  

The exams end next week so I will start posting stuff again. There will be a few changes though. No book reviews for one. I thought of writing book reviews because I wanted to talk about the books I read. But I realized fairly soon that writing a book review actually doesn't give you enough leeway to 'talk' about it - discuss what you liked and hated. It restricts you to vague expressions. And there are bucket loads of book reviewers out there. They are a better source of opinion if you want a review. I'm no authority on books. And I don't want to be.

So, from now on, if I read a book and want to discuss it, that's what I will do. No stupid review that restricts me to articulate anything remotely coherent, no sir. I will write a post about the book in its full 'spoilery' glory and anyone who already hasn't read it may be damned. Oh ok, don't glare at me, I will specify the beginning of spoilers. One good thing about this approach is that I am free to gush about a book  and all that sort of good jazz, without a care about the 'professional, factual, emotionless' way of a book reviewer. These guys show less emotion than a biology professor dissecting a frog. I'm looking at you, WeirdMage!

Some other changes may be in the air, but I haven't given much thought to that. I 'MAY' stop writing for ryeting.com since I don't get much time for that sort of a thing and Shaun has gathered a good slew of dedicated writers for his website. I don't want to give it up, but seriously, I haven't produced any good content in a long while and future prospects aren't looking good.

Anyway, that's all for this post. Hopefully, there will be one soon. Probably. Hopefully.

Trials And Tribulations

Currently, I'm staring into the maw of the worst monster ever. Actually, there may be worse things in the world, but for a student, its the worst nightmare.

Yes, you got it right, EXAMS!!!!!! Could anything be worse. Hmm . . .difficult question, but I'm sure getting struck with food poisoning a couple of days before said exams will definitely qualify

Yeah, so I'm in a really f--, err, bad position. So keeping it short, since I'm really tempted to spew words I'd rather not on my blog, the fact remains that there will be no new posts for about three weeks. But be ready for a literal barrage afterwards.

In the meantime, pray that I get through this and survive to tell the tale.

This is 'Yours Truly', signing out.

Some Promotional Stuff

Some days ago, Shaun Hammond, the administrator of ryeting.com saw my blog and offered me to write gaming articles for his website. He also, very kindly, told me that he had no problems with me posting those articles on my blog too and cross-linking them. Of course, I accepted the generous offer.

So, from now on, any gaming articles I write will also be posted at ryeting.com. I request anybody reading these articles to post any comments they have there. 

Trying My Hands At Writing Ficiton

 Almost every single person who reads books has tried their hands at writing some time or the other. Though some do get lucky, go on to be published and become successful, it’s exceedingly rare, and for most of us, the attempts end disastrously . . . and hilariously, messed up. 

Mostly, and I’m talking of the younger readers out there, the inspiration to write comes when you have downed a couple of good fantasy or sci-fi series, but haven’t got high enough experience of the genre. You are happily reading and one day, have that light-bulb moment and your train of thoughts go something like,” Hell yeah! I’ll write a fiction series of my own, and then bang, I’m as famous as Rowling.”

I used the J. K. Rowling reference above not only because her Harry Potter series has become something like a holy grail for young readers new to fantasy, but also because she is the most well-known and apt example of this ‘rags-to-riches’ story, going from living on benefits to multi-millionaire status. Hence her name comes to mind immediately when teenagers first get the idea of writing a novel (at least, it happened with me).

But that’s the point folks. Rowling, and all other immensely successful authors for that matter, have the genius to think of an original and engaging storyline and world, and their writing style is their own. They got the ingenuity to think of the ‘idea that clicked’ and got lucky, since mainstream fiction is an exceedingly competitive arena as sure as the sun rises in the east & even good authors go years before finding any major success.

An easy way to see whether a person has the potential to be successful is to see what they're writing, and how persistent they are. Clichéd storylines and borrowed writing style doesn't get you anywhere, and funnily enough that’s what we kids do! We think of  a plot that seems impressive (to us) by mixing and matching those of our favorite books and try to imitate the style of our favorite authors, going as far as to ‘borrow' whole phrases and passages out of their repertoire. Eventually, the realization sets in, we mourn the time wasted (that could've been employed to study, in my case) and move on. Those ambitious manuscripts either become a matter to laugh about later on, for boring Saturday evenings when you got nothing else to do except gossip. Or else, they are hidden from prying eyes, buried so deep that the pirates of old, who hid their treasures in much the same manner, would be envious.

After that lengthy treatise on ‘writing-philosophy', its time to begin the (comparatively short) narrative. A couple of years ago, it got into my head that I needed to write a sci-fi book to make the world aware of my (non-existent) talents in the field. I didn't create a plot of my own though (I lacked the creativity for that sort of a thing). Rather I decided to write a series of novels using the storyline of the famous Halo series of FPS games, which I found had a lot of potential to be used in a book, because of its complex world and plot (I can visualize the gamers among those reading this post nodding sagely in-front of their PC screens). 

I spent three months thinking about the plot, filling in the gaps and adding more twists to it than a dozen spy movies or ‘Call Of Duty’ games can hope to achieve (I cringe to think of that wasted time, now). I even finished about a third of what was supposed to be the first book, and you can imagine how “good” a job I must’ve done.

I said above that Halo had a lot of potential to be implemented into a sci-fi series. Apparently it wasn't only me who had this realization. Because, one day while idly browsing the net, I (SHOCK! OUTRAGE!) found that there were already six books on it. Bungie and Microsoft had contacted Eric Nylund and some other authors for the work, the bastards.

I resolved to read the works that had brought about the “demise” of my writing career (so I thought). And I found the surprises didn't end there. Not only the first book written by Nylund had the same title that I had though for ‘my' first book, but the prologues to both were almost the same! What he wrote was obviously superior (duh), but THAT'S beside the point.

Anyway, so I decided to abandon writing, and decided to choose a more viable career path (sigh). As consolation, Nylund’s book was pretty damn good!

Starting Out...

I never had any thoughts about blogging until last week when I read a friend's blog. Suddenly I realized that I wanted to have a blog of my own. Without any second thoughts I went ahead and signed up for blogger. It was time to write my first post. And here I was stuck.

Now, i'm usually a guy who used to scoff at social networking sites. I joined twitter a month ago to follow Brandon Sanderson and realized I was hooked to twitter proving i'm a hypocrite if nothing else. Now don't get me wrong, I still hate Facebook, but I've come to realize that Facebook isn't the end of the world. Which brings us to this blog.

After waiting a couple of days for inspiration to strike, which surprisingly ( or rather, unsurprisingly ) did not happen, I decided to go ahead and start writing anyway.

The first thing that came to my mind while writing was - ''Man, this sure as hell ain't twitter!'' ''Well, duh!'' you'd be thinking, and I'll agree but really I wasn't thinking of the superficial differences between twitter and a blog but rather the difference in the way you express yourself. I actually had to think before writing, I couldn't just go ahead and blurt the first thing that came to my mind. And that ain't exactly easy either.

So now comes the big question - What will this blog be about?

On my blog, I will mostly post about Gaming and Books, Reviews and stuff, with the occasional random junk thrown into the mix.

So, Lets Get Started...!!

- Dante
' Dovie'andi se tovya sagain! '
( Its time to roll the dice! )


P.S. - If you found this Post to be cheesy ( I sure did ;D ), you are welcome to roll your eyes all you want, but don't expect me to apologize or anything, mmkay? And didn't you just read the post till the end to be reading this part? So what'cha excuse for whining?? Heh.