Hello World.
Pao's been in Colombia for a week, now. She's having a blast with her friends and family there, as well as a much easier time keeping her food down. (The baby likes Colombian food, apparently.) Toward the end of the month I will go there and join her for a few days, and then we will fly back together. It's been good for both of us; she gets to be back in her natural habitat surrounded by the loved ones she grew up with, and I have some time left to my own devices.
Of course, after a week of this, I'm pretty much ready to have her back. I spent all last weekend sleeping on the bachelor couch at the bachelor pad of a couple bachelor friends, and I had a damn good time. Civ4, comic books, action movies, a hot tub, a rubberband war, very little sleep... Good times. I got a lot of stuff out of my system, to be sure.
I've got outlines of other adventures to plan for the next two weekends before I go to Colombia. I've also given myself a lot of homework to do in WWI history (my chosen scholarly specialization/ultimate nerd-hobby). And yet, it occurred to me today that given the choice between all the possible things I could do with this spare time and simply watching a movie or taking a walk in the park with Pao, being with Pao wins every time. And I KNOW that when my son or daughter comes along, my transformation to full-blown family man will be complete.
Work on The Book of the Wolves is pretty much on hold right now, given the international traveling in this month. I've got another radical writing project to do before the month is over however. I'm going to write two letters to my children: one for when they are 12, and one for when they are 24. The first letter will contain all the advice I want to give them about the teenage years, and the second letter will pretty much just be all about who I am as I turn 24 years old this month. I like the idea that when my children are the age I am now, they'll have a way of hearing from me almost as their peer rather than their father.
In conclusion, Pao has a sexy new haircut.
Cheers!
Monday, May 7, 2012
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Updated every week? Did I say that?
Hello World.
Life is good. I got a raise at work, and I'm currently getting paid to read a book about World War II history. Lately there have been many parties and dinners and celebrations to go to, much free food, friends, family, and fun. My wife's boobs have become dramatically bigger. Seriously. It's amazingness. And a few nights ago I had a dream that I was taking a bath with my two-year-old son. I've never ever had a dream like that before. Waking up from that dream was one of the few moments in my life when I knew beyond any doubt that I had changed as a person, suddenly and unexpectedly, for the better.
I could go on about the few complaints that we have or the crazy little antics I've been up to, but I think I'll just take this moment to express my deep gratitude for the incomprehensible amount of good fortune in my life. I hope that one day I can look back on my life and say that I have paid it all forward.
Another chapter translated :)
Life is good. I got a raise at work, and I'm currently getting paid to read a book about World War II history. Lately there have been many parties and dinners and celebrations to go to, much free food, friends, family, and fun. My wife's boobs have become dramatically bigger. Seriously. It's amazingness. And a few nights ago I had a dream that I was taking a bath with my two-year-old son. I've never ever had a dream like that before. Waking up from that dream was one of the few moments in my life when I knew beyond any doubt that I had changed as a person, suddenly and unexpectedly, for the better.
I could go on about the few complaints that we have or the crazy little antics I've been up to, but I think I'll just take this moment to express my deep gratitude for the incomprehensible amount of good fortune in my life. I hope that one day I can look back on my life and say that I have paid it all forward.
Another chapter translated :)
"Three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love." --1Co 13:13
"You can't win against fools." --Mononoke Hime
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Two Rings
Hello World.
Better late than never. Last weekend was a good weekend and this week has been a good week; I suppose I've just been enjoying myself too much to sit down and write.
I wear two rings. One is large, rounded, white gold, and rather scratched up. That's my wedding ring. As the scratches can attest to, I very seldom take it off. It's still shines quite nicely however, still a fitting symbol of my everlasting dedication to the love of my life. The other ring is small, squared, and stainless steel. It's hardy, industrial, and unpretentious. That's my writer's ring. I chose it to be the symbol of my life's challenge, the extra-mile I have designated for myself after my family and friends are cared for. It's sole purpose is to remind me never to give up on being creative. When I look at it, it says to me, "So what if you haven't done much of anything creative lately? You're still a writer."
My writer's ring fits completely inside my wedding ring, because my family will always be the larger priority. And I am happy with that priority. Given the choice between setting ink to paper (or finger to keyboard) and just chillin out with Pao, 9 times out of 10 I choose to chill out with Pao, or my friends, or my relatives, and I feel no regret about that decision. The people I love are more important than the arrogant artistic flame that burns inside me. That choice is easy. When it gets hard however is when I'm at work, watching a progress bar crawl across a computer screen and reflecting on the fact that though many people will pay you to waste time (*coughcustomerservicecough*), hardly anyone is willing to give you a dime for doing something extraordinary.
Unless you're like Notch. Notch is kind of a nerd legend. Most people will not have heard of him, but he is a figure of awe for those who have. He worked making online games for a while, and then started his own independent project called Minecraft. It can be accurately described as the "Best Lego Game Ever" in that in allows the average person an unprecedented ability to create things in three dimensional space. In my opinion however, the true genius lies in the fact that the game algorithmically generates a world for you in a matter of seconds whenever you ask it to. Mountains, oceans, caves, forests -- all generated by random numbers fed into an incredibly intricate formula. A world miles and miles wide, no less!
There is a much more practical reason to care about Notch, however. While Minecraft was in it alpha stage of development, it attracted a cult following that grew exponentially. Thus, when Notch released the beta version and started selling memberships which included all future game updates for eternity, hundreds of thousands of people bought the beta. (I was one of them.) Each beta was about $17.
Notch literally became a millionaire overnight.
So what did he do then? He kept working on Minecraft of course, refining it and expanding it until he finally declared that it had gone past beta into an actual 1.0 version. He continues to develop it to this day. And now the buzz is that he's working on a space game.
This is how you recognize a true creative genius: when you hand them a million dollars, they say, "Oh good, now I can continue doing what I've been doing." It isn't about the profit for them, it's just about doing what they love, being what they can be.
Pao's hero is Jim Henson. I always enjoyed his work, but since meeting Pao, I too have become a die-hard fan of the man and his genius. His ambition was no less than to change the world through puppets. And by God, most people would agree that he did it! There are people in the world who are both ridiculously talented and daring enough to devote themselves to something that sounds completely crazy.
Deep inside of this broad American chest, there is a long-haired little starving wild man beating against the inside of my ribcage, demanding that he too be allowed to create worlds. There's a thing that guys do: we look at someone doing something and we think, "Yeah, I could do that." Some guys watch a mechanic working on a car and think, "Yeah, I could do that if I felt like spending the time on it." Some guys watch a martial arts demonstration and think, "Yeah, I could do that if I really wanted to." It's a testosterony thing that I think all guys do, both out of egoism and an innate sense of our untapped potential as human beings.
Me, I watch a enthralling movie, I read an engrossing book, or I play a deeply immersive game, and I think -- quite seriously, even though I know it sounds delusional -- "Yeah, I could make something like this."
Oh, but where is the time?
Well, the time is in all the episodes of Fraggle Rock I watch with Pao, all the dinners I eat with aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents and cousins, all the inside joking I do with my bros, and so on and so forth. And I wouldn't give up any of that for anything.
Those forty hours a week I spend in the office on the other hand...
Therein lies the great problem of being creative. A man can have a rich social life. A man can have a steady job. And a man can have the stamina to be creative. But I'll be fo-shizzle-my-nizzled if a man can have all three of those things at the same time!
And so I wear this writer's ring, whose job it is to reassure me that maybe, just maybe, there will come a day when the steady job is not quite as necessary as it is now. Maybe, just maybe.
Another book translated. Pao's been nauseous a lot lately, but otherwise we're doing well.
Better late than never. Last weekend was a good weekend and this week has been a good week; I suppose I've just been enjoying myself too much to sit down and write.
I wear two rings. One is large, rounded, white gold, and rather scratched up. That's my wedding ring. As the scratches can attest to, I very seldom take it off. It's still shines quite nicely however, still a fitting symbol of my everlasting dedication to the love of my life. The other ring is small, squared, and stainless steel. It's hardy, industrial, and unpretentious. That's my writer's ring. I chose it to be the symbol of my life's challenge, the extra-mile I have designated for myself after my family and friends are cared for. It's sole purpose is to remind me never to give up on being creative. When I look at it, it says to me, "So what if you haven't done much of anything creative lately? You're still a writer."
My writer's ring fits completely inside my wedding ring, because my family will always be the larger priority. And I am happy with that priority. Given the choice between setting ink to paper (or finger to keyboard) and just chillin out with Pao, 9 times out of 10 I choose to chill out with Pao, or my friends, or my relatives, and I feel no regret about that decision. The people I love are more important than the arrogant artistic flame that burns inside me. That choice is easy. When it gets hard however is when I'm at work, watching a progress bar crawl across a computer screen and reflecting on the fact that though many people will pay you to waste time (*coughcustomerservicecough*), hardly anyone is willing to give you a dime for doing something extraordinary.
Unless you're like Notch. Notch is kind of a nerd legend. Most people will not have heard of him, but he is a figure of awe for those who have. He worked making online games for a while, and then started his own independent project called Minecraft. It can be accurately described as the "Best Lego Game Ever" in that in allows the average person an unprecedented ability to create things in three dimensional space. In my opinion however, the true genius lies in the fact that the game algorithmically generates a world for you in a matter of seconds whenever you ask it to. Mountains, oceans, caves, forests -- all generated by random numbers fed into an incredibly intricate formula. A world miles and miles wide, no less!
There is a much more practical reason to care about Notch, however. While Minecraft was in it alpha stage of development, it attracted a cult following that grew exponentially. Thus, when Notch released the beta version and started selling memberships which included all future game updates for eternity, hundreds of thousands of people bought the beta. (I was one of them.) Each beta was about $17.
Notch literally became a millionaire overnight.
So what did he do then? He kept working on Minecraft of course, refining it and expanding it until he finally declared that it had gone past beta into an actual 1.0 version. He continues to develop it to this day. And now the buzz is that he's working on a space game.
This is how you recognize a true creative genius: when you hand them a million dollars, they say, "Oh good, now I can continue doing what I've been doing." It isn't about the profit for them, it's just about doing what they love, being what they can be.
Pao's hero is Jim Henson. I always enjoyed his work, but since meeting Pao, I too have become a die-hard fan of the man and his genius. His ambition was no less than to change the world through puppets. And by God, most people would agree that he did it! There are people in the world who are both ridiculously talented and daring enough to devote themselves to something that sounds completely crazy.
Deep inside of this broad American chest, there is a long-haired little starving wild man beating against the inside of my ribcage, demanding that he too be allowed to create worlds. There's a thing that guys do: we look at someone doing something and we think, "Yeah, I could do that." Some guys watch a mechanic working on a car and think, "Yeah, I could do that if I felt like spending the time on it." Some guys watch a martial arts demonstration and think, "Yeah, I could do that if I really wanted to." It's a testosterony thing that I think all guys do, both out of egoism and an innate sense of our untapped potential as human beings.
Me, I watch a enthralling movie, I read an engrossing book, or I play a deeply immersive game, and I think -- quite seriously, even though I know it sounds delusional -- "Yeah, I could make something like this."
Oh, but where is the time?
Well, the time is in all the episodes of Fraggle Rock I watch with Pao, all the dinners I eat with aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents and cousins, all the inside joking I do with my bros, and so on and so forth. And I wouldn't give up any of that for anything.
Those forty hours a week I spend in the office on the other hand...
Therein lies the great problem of being creative. A man can have a rich social life. A man can have a steady job. And a man can have the stamina to be creative. But I'll be fo-shizzle-my-nizzled if a man can have all three of those things at the same time!
And so I wear this writer's ring, whose job it is to reassure me that maybe, just maybe, there will come a day when the steady job is not quite as necessary as it is now. Maybe, just maybe.
Another book translated. Pao's been nauseous a lot lately, but otherwise we're doing well.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Free Food and Long Distances
Hello World.
We went over the translation of chapter 3 today. Pao has also translated chapter 4, and I'll be looking at that soon.
Tomorrow we go to the doc to get an official pregnancy test done. Of course, we have already obtained a carseat and a crib frame secondhand for $100 total: a good deal, considering how nice the stuff is and what good condition it's in. It's all thanks to the Nova Mafia, who have also started talking to doctors about any possible healthcare hookups we might be able to get. (Several of my relatives work for Nova Southeastern University, which includes a medical school. I graduated from NSU and was myself an employee there until less than a year ago.) It's impossible to underestimate the value of supportive family members. The only way a wayward son like me gets this far is via a network of much more rational people who lovingly point him in the right direction when necessary (and give him copious amounts of food at regular intervals).
Lots on my mind, but I'm having trouble writing at the moment. There are so many emotions to work through, emotions that were always there in one way or another but are being forced out into the open more often now. It's late. I'm going to go to bed for now.
~~~
And I'm back, two days later.
My body is tired, but my mind is restless, so Pao suggested I continue this blog post, as I've been meaning to do. Gotta put my money where my mouth is.
Last week was very good, especially Saturday. People have been buying us meals left and right. Historically I have always been the mooch in my group of friends from high school, and try as I might to reclaim my honor, my destiny reasserts itself time and time again. Oh well, I'll pay them back eventually by having my kid babysit their kids. I'm quite the trailblazer. I'm the first of all my friends, save two, to get married, and as far as I know, I'll be the first into fatherhood.
Giving everyone the news was great fun. My friends were both more shocked and more positively happy for me than when I revealed my engagement to them a few short years ago.
It was less fun for Pao though, as all her friends are back in Colombia. Sunday was a hard day. It ended well, but as you've seen, I was too emotionally exhausted to write much on Sunday night. You see, Pao is only here on this continent because of me. She came here to learn English in order to supplement her Bachelor's degree, and fully intended to leave once her stated mission was completed. When I met her, however, I did what all American white boys do best when they discover an amazing foreign girl: I stole her for the U. S. of A.
She loves me, loves me enough to have given up her upper-middleclass metropolitan life in Bogota where she was surrounded by literally dozens of friends and cousins so she could live here in the scorched suburbs of South Florida where I constitute 90% of her companionship. I've been to Colombia three times since meeting her, and I love it there. That she chooses every day to stay here with me is a wonder. It makes me feel doubly responsible for her happiness, but at the same time so helpless. Even being the best husband I can be, I can't replace 40+ good friends.
So yeah, Sunday was a hard day. A lot of factors came into play, including me being too hard on myself and not realizing that Pao's new hormone cocktail is going to pack some more punch into her moods for the next eight months. We talked about it, which is the always necessary and beneficial resolution to such situations. And now, I just pray to not be such an idiot sometimes. It's going to take a miracle.
The appointment with the doc yesterday went fantastically. She's a friend of the family, and so has our best interests at heart both medically and financially. She answered a lot of questions for us, and we walked away immensely more at ease about everything.
I think I've brought this post up to a satisfactory word count now. Here's hoping that next Sunday finds me garrulous, and well-rested.
We went over the translation of chapter 3 today. Pao has also translated chapter 4, and I'll be looking at that soon.
Tomorrow we go to the doc to get an official pregnancy test done. Of course, we have already obtained a carseat and a crib frame secondhand for $100 total: a good deal, considering how nice the stuff is and what good condition it's in. It's all thanks to the Nova Mafia, who have also started talking to doctors about any possible healthcare hookups we might be able to get. (Several of my relatives work for Nova Southeastern University, which includes a medical school. I graduated from NSU and was myself an employee there until less than a year ago.) It's impossible to underestimate the value of supportive family members. The only way a wayward son like me gets this far is via a network of much more rational people who lovingly point him in the right direction when necessary (and give him copious amounts of food at regular intervals).
Lots on my mind, but I'm having trouble writing at the moment. There are so many emotions to work through, emotions that were always there in one way or another but are being forced out into the open more often now. It's late. I'm going to go to bed for now.
~~~
And I'm back, two days later.
My body is tired, but my mind is restless, so Pao suggested I continue this blog post, as I've been meaning to do. Gotta put my money where my mouth is.
Last week was very good, especially Saturday. People have been buying us meals left and right. Historically I have always been the mooch in my group of friends from high school, and try as I might to reclaim my honor, my destiny reasserts itself time and time again. Oh well, I'll pay them back eventually by having my kid babysit their kids. I'm quite the trailblazer. I'm the first of all my friends, save two, to get married, and as far as I know, I'll be the first into fatherhood.
Giving everyone the news was great fun. My friends were both more shocked and more positively happy for me than when I revealed my engagement to them a few short years ago.
It was less fun for Pao though, as all her friends are back in Colombia. Sunday was a hard day. It ended well, but as you've seen, I was too emotionally exhausted to write much on Sunday night. You see, Pao is only here on this continent because of me. She came here to learn English in order to supplement her Bachelor's degree, and fully intended to leave once her stated mission was completed. When I met her, however, I did what all American white boys do best when they discover an amazing foreign girl: I stole her for the U. S. of A.
She loves me, loves me enough to have given up her upper-middleclass metropolitan life in Bogota where she was surrounded by literally dozens of friends and cousins so she could live here in the scorched suburbs of South Florida where I constitute 90% of her companionship. I've been to Colombia three times since meeting her, and I love it there. That she chooses every day to stay here with me is a wonder. It makes me feel doubly responsible for her happiness, but at the same time so helpless. Even being the best husband I can be, I can't replace 40+ good friends.
So yeah, Sunday was a hard day. A lot of factors came into play, including me being too hard on myself and not realizing that Pao's new hormone cocktail is going to pack some more punch into her moods for the next eight months. We talked about it, which is the always necessary and beneficial resolution to such situations. And now, I just pray to not be such an idiot sometimes. It's going to take a miracle.
The appointment with the doc yesterday went fantastically. She's a friend of the family, and so has our best interests at heart both medically and financially. She answered a lot of questions for us, and we walked away immensely more at ease about everything.
I think I've brought this post up to a satisfactory word count now. Here's hoping that next Sunday finds me garrulous, and well-rested.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Positive Tests and Real Deadlines
Hello World.
My name is Daniel. My wife Paola and I are writing and illustrating twenty-four English/Spanish storybooks collectively known as The Book of the Wolves. I shall be giving updates on the progress of our endeavor every week in this blog. And, while I'm here, I'll seize the opportunity to ramble on to the entire digitized world about whatever is on my mind.
Just a week ago this blog was to have a very different purpose. I was up until 2 am one night, facing down my chronic anxiety about choosing whether or not to go to grad school. As I was brainstorming I lapsed unexpectedly into automatic writing, something I have done many times before but not at all recently. Automatic writing, in my experience, is when your own hands start typing a letter to you from your Higher Consciousness/God/the Universe. (Choose whatever term suits you; I make no distinction anymore.) It sounds weird, and it is weird, but it is also extremely nice to get some straight talk from someone who knows exactly what you are thinking, even if that someone might just be a repressed part of your own mind.
Am I crazy? Well, yeah. Everyone is. Some people are aware that they are crazy, and some aren't. I greatly prefer the former.
Functionally though, I'm quite sane. I am currently twenty-three years old, which means that the first few years of my adult life have been characterized by economic recession and an ever more pervasive sense of our culture's decline. Yet, I've managed to be employed full-time throughout the entire recession, and despite my society's increasing uncertainty about itself, I have moved out on my own, graduated from college, and gotten married to the girl of my dreams.
Man, I make myself sound good.
Well, the truth is that I have fought through several legions of my own insecurities to get to this point, and that battle is by no means finished. Hence, I found myself one week ago looking at grad schools online, trying to figure what to do to dispel this haunting sense of inadequacy that lives in the back of my mind. I got to thinking (and writing) that I ought to just take my own education by the horns and study whatever I want to, designing my own curriculum and putting in the same amount of effort as I would at a grad school at a fraction of the cost. I suppose I should clarify one important point: my Bachelor's degree was in Humanities, and my Master's, if I pursued one, would be in something like History or Creative Writing. It was something of a miracle that within a few months of attaining my Humanities degree I was hired by Scribe, a publishing services company and one of the few companies left in this economy which actually seeks out those intrepid few people who are stubborn and foolish enough to brand themselves as "Literary," and therefore "Useless" to most normal employers.
So, given my interests and my refusal to even consider being someone like a pharmacist or a middle manager, you can see how deciding to eschew grad school for a self-directed course of study might not be completely insane. Plus, my plan was not simply to read a lot. I was also going to start a blog, a grandiose chronicle of my exploration into history, futurism, and spirituality. I figured that if I kept at it long enough, my knowledge would expand and my writing skill would sharpen, and eventually I would have enough internet cred to make some kind of a difference in the world (or at least attract a publisher).
So that was the nebulous idea bouncing around my mind for the past week. And then, on Friday morning, my wife and I passed three pregnancy tests.
After having spent the last three months trying to conceive, we spent the weekend kind of stunned that we had actually done it. The enormity of it sank in bit by bit as we gave the news to more and more people. I won't lie; the financial implications, which we had admittedly not given much thought to, are frightening. But our reasons for wanting a child have not changed, and even as we have realized what realities we are facing, we have also seen just how much unconditional support both my family and Pao's family have pledged to us, and we feel unfathomably blessed.
Pao and I have been married for two and a half years. From the beginning, we knew we both wanted children, and we knew we both wanted to wait a few years. Indeed, we would have waited a little longer, but back in December we realized that the Year of the Dragon was upon us. It was either conceive now or wait until the stars came back around in 2024. I am a dragon myself, born in 1988, and Pao was instantly enchanted by the idea of our first-born possessing the same intensity that I have.
When I told my father the news, he said that "real life begins now." I am beginning to understand how true that is. For one thing, The Book of the Wolves has a much more concrete deadline for completion. We mean for it to be finished by the time our first child is starting to read. That gives us a few years, of course, but since we're working on it only a few hours a week, a few years is probably what we'll need.
Currently the English text is all done. We have translated two of the books into Spanish already. The bulk of the work will be the illustrations, of which there will be over four hundred when all is said and done. We both have some talent and skill in visual arts, but we have no experience in illustration, so we're going to have to teach ourselves quite a bit before we can really even begin.
This project is important to us, however, and we are certainly not in it for the money. That is why it will succeed.
A few years back I finished a gargantuan epic historical fantasy novel called Dead In All Wars. I tried to get it published for over a year. A few agents actually did ask for the first chapter, but none were interested after that. The failure crippled me for a long time. I started many other books, but I never had the motivation to finish them. I began to think that I might be broken as an artist, that I simply did not possess the requisite toughness.
In fact, six months ago I was 150 pages into a fantasy series when I abruptly decided to start writing children's books. I realized that writing for my own children would mean infinitely more to me than playing the lottery of mass market fiction. And Pao has become just as inspired by the project as I have. We will try to get The Book of the Wolves published when we are good and ready, but because we want to, not because we need to.
And so, I have refocused this blog on our gift to our children. Hopefully it will generate some publicity for us down the road. I will still chronicle my exploration into history, futurism, and spirituality, but I suspect that our adventure in becoming parents will prove much more interesting.
This post is very long. I guess I should save some for next week. And the hundreds of weeks after that.
Cheers,
Daniel
My name is Daniel. My wife Paola and I are writing and illustrating twenty-four English/Spanish storybooks collectively known as The Book of the Wolves. I shall be giving updates on the progress of our endeavor every week in this blog. And, while I'm here, I'll seize the opportunity to ramble on to the entire digitized world about whatever is on my mind.
Just a week ago this blog was to have a very different purpose. I was up until 2 am one night, facing down my chronic anxiety about choosing whether or not to go to grad school. As I was brainstorming I lapsed unexpectedly into automatic writing, something I have done many times before but not at all recently. Automatic writing, in my experience, is when your own hands start typing a letter to you from your Higher Consciousness/God/the Universe. (Choose whatever term suits you; I make no distinction anymore.) It sounds weird, and it is weird, but it is also extremely nice to get some straight talk from someone who knows exactly what you are thinking, even if that someone might just be a repressed part of your own mind.
Am I crazy? Well, yeah. Everyone is. Some people are aware that they are crazy, and some aren't. I greatly prefer the former.
Functionally though, I'm quite sane. I am currently twenty-three years old, which means that the first few years of my adult life have been characterized by economic recession and an ever more pervasive sense of our culture's decline. Yet, I've managed to be employed full-time throughout the entire recession, and despite my society's increasing uncertainty about itself, I have moved out on my own, graduated from college, and gotten married to the girl of my dreams.
Man, I make myself sound good.
Well, the truth is that I have fought through several legions of my own insecurities to get to this point, and that battle is by no means finished. Hence, I found myself one week ago looking at grad schools online, trying to figure what to do to dispel this haunting sense of inadequacy that lives in the back of my mind. I got to thinking (and writing) that I ought to just take my own education by the horns and study whatever I want to, designing my own curriculum and putting in the same amount of effort as I would at a grad school at a fraction of the cost. I suppose I should clarify one important point: my Bachelor's degree was in Humanities, and my Master's, if I pursued one, would be in something like History or Creative Writing. It was something of a miracle that within a few months of attaining my Humanities degree I was hired by Scribe, a publishing services company and one of the few companies left in this economy which actually seeks out those intrepid few people who are stubborn and foolish enough to brand themselves as "Literary," and therefore "Useless" to most normal employers.
So, given my interests and my refusal to even consider being someone like a pharmacist or a middle manager, you can see how deciding to eschew grad school for a self-directed course of study might not be completely insane. Plus, my plan was not simply to read a lot. I was also going to start a blog, a grandiose chronicle of my exploration into history, futurism, and spirituality. I figured that if I kept at it long enough, my knowledge would expand and my writing skill would sharpen, and eventually I would have enough internet cred to make some kind of a difference in the world (or at least attract a publisher).
So that was the nebulous idea bouncing around my mind for the past week. And then, on Friday morning, my wife and I passed three pregnancy tests.
After having spent the last three months trying to conceive, we spent the weekend kind of stunned that we had actually done it. The enormity of it sank in bit by bit as we gave the news to more and more people. I won't lie; the financial implications, which we had admittedly not given much thought to, are frightening. But our reasons for wanting a child have not changed, and even as we have realized what realities we are facing, we have also seen just how much unconditional support both my family and Pao's family have pledged to us, and we feel unfathomably blessed.
Pao and I have been married for two and a half years. From the beginning, we knew we both wanted children, and we knew we both wanted to wait a few years. Indeed, we would have waited a little longer, but back in December we realized that the Year of the Dragon was upon us. It was either conceive now or wait until the stars came back around in 2024. I am a dragon myself, born in 1988, and Pao was instantly enchanted by the idea of our first-born possessing the same intensity that I have.
When I told my father the news, he said that "real life begins now." I am beginning to understand how true that is. For one thing, The Book of the Wolves has a much more concrete deadline for completion. We mean for it to be finished by the time our first child is starting to read. That gives us a few years, of course, but since we're working on it only a few hours a week, a few years is probably what we'll need.
Currently the English text is all done. We have translated two of the books into Spanish already. The bulk of the work will be the illustrations, of which there will be over four hundred when all is said and done. We both have some talent and skill in visual arts, but we have no experience in illustration, so we're going to have to teach ourselves quite a bit before we can really even begin.
This project is important to us, however, and we are certainly not in it for the money. That is why it will succeed.
A few years back I finished a gargantuan epic historical fantasy novel called Dead In All Wars. I tried to get it published for over a year. A few agents actually did ask for the first chapter, but none were interested after that. The failure crippled me for a long time. I started many other books, but I never had the motivation to finish them. I began to think that I might be broken as an artist, that I simply did not possess the requisite toughness.
In fact, six months ago I was 150 pages into a fantasy series when I abruptly decided to start writing children's books. I realized that writing for my own children would mean infinitely more to me than playing the lottery of mass market fiction. And Pao has become just as inspired by the project as I have. We will try to get The Book of the Wolves published when we are good and ready, but because we want to, not because we need to.
And so, I have refocused this blog on our gift to our children. Hopefully it will generate some publicity for us down the road. I will still chronicle my exploration into history, futurism, and spirituality, but I suspect that our adventure in becoming parents will prove much more interesting.
This post is very long. I guess I should save some for next week. And the hundreds of weeks after that.
Cheers,
Daniel
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