Tag: update

Update July 25th 2019: Bench writing

Posted on by Marc in Blog

As I’m writing this I sit on a bench near the river, admiring the last bit of yellow reddish sunlight coming over the horizon. I wonder how many people admired it today. It was the sunset that pulled me out of my appartment into the warmth outside. The beautiful spectacle of nature I rarely enjoy as much as tonight.

Walking to the river, I doubted that many people chose to watch the sunset over television or their mobile device. Especially after day with the outside temperature kissing 40 degrees.

But ending the day on a mobile device or television is something I find myself distancing from again. Because I feel that more can be learned and earned outside of this space. Sure, I watch animation and films. But I choose with deliberate intend. Looking to characters, structure and execution of a story. Goal driven entertainment, if you will.

Looking forward

My personal theme this year is Future Fit. I intend to create a situation that allows me to create stories full-time. Hence that I’m writing again for my website, about 141 days after my last update. I deliberately mention the number of days because my focus has not on writing. It was on making the event that I’m volunteering a succes. But it required me to be active and responsive to the situation, which left me tuned out to writing and my development in this field.

I realised after(wards) how detrimental it was to the focus I had towards writing and creating. Only now, 3 weeks after, I feel that this step backwards has allowed me to take two steps forward. Retaking focus (in a brutal way) and making steps towards defining my Ikigai.

I had to fill in the last blanks in my Ikigai overview, but I believe I’ve made progress. The question is how I will use it in my next step. Because in all stories there are 3 common things: There is the thing a character wants – which for me is creating stories; there is the thing the character needs – I believe for me this is focus and balance.

But there is also the thing the character will get through the course of the story. And since this current chapter of my life isn’t over yet, I cannot answer this yet, The only thing that I know for sure is what my mind does when I quiet everything else around me. It makes stories to fill me up. It uses me as a perspective to venture to fantastical places; futuristic and fantasy alike. That is my anchor for this chapter in life.

You will probably read it in the future on this website when I feel a new chapter begins. Untill then, I try to update while writing my book. Second part of the 2019 is going to be interesting. I’m quite positive.

Update and near future: August September 2018

Posted on by Marc in Blog

It has been a long time since I’ve posted something. But I am determined to pick things up where I left them. I sort off left them, at least.

My personal theme this year is about writing. In the first couple of months I created a couple of blogs and short stories. In the months following (March-July) I focused on helping organise a great local beachvolleybal tournament. Being responsable for PR and communication, you can probably guess the amount of time and energy it took. But the results where absolutely there. The downside was it took a severe chunk of my development as a writer and cancelled the plans I had for writing blogs for the months of May and June. I managed to squeeze out the blog about Poirot, but that was it.

When the tournament was finished, my focus shifted. I needed R&R before I eventually started to spend some time working on videoscripts related to the video series “What animation taught us”. I wanted to finish them and edit the videos, but my bad excuse is the consecutive heat of July and August in The Netherlands. There was simply no interest in finishing personal work after a long days work in front of a computer screen.

So my focus shifted again. Distraction is a killer if you want to produce original content. A bit of gaming in between also did not help production, but it helped to take the mind of things. Relaxing, but not really helping.

Positive developments

I did however make significant progress on some story concepts I have been playing around with in the last months. One of them is a story concept that I want to meld into a book. Writing a book was, and still is, the big challenge in front of me.

So I piled my notes, sat down and my energy eventually resulted in two story outlines for the same book and a not so happy writer. It feels like I don’t know enough about the genre. The thriller/detective story with sci-fi elements is not one I venture in regularly so I did the only thing that I could: shelve it untill a later date. This decision made room for the other story concept that I silently had been feeding attention over the last three months. When I made the decision a couple weeks back to spend time on this story rather then the first one it took me some time to prepare and find the direction I needed. This preparation involved immersing myself in the superhero genre films. And I must say they tend to get a little boring at times. Fortunately there are more films waiting. So I hope to find some good ones in the coming months.

At least I have a sense of things that I don’t want now, and feel creatively free enought to implement some good elements into my own story. This is a story that is ready to be written.

It especially feels this way because I have been doing some intense worldbuilding over the last 1,5 week. My conclusions are that I have done enough worldbuilding to carry my story, but I have not seen enough to fill up the universe that I am creating. Fortunately for me that does not matter since I currently have a strong base for 2 short stories, a film script and a tv series concept.

So my focus is good, I only need to do the hardest thing: write. But I am sure with some excellent planning it will go relatively smooth in the next weeks.

So, new updates coming soon. And I am excited for them. And if you know know any good sci-fi detectives, please let me know on the Twitterverse. I can put them on the watchlist.