Ryker and Cloud Atlas

Before I start I want to let you know that I’m writing from the Boston Public Library right on Copley Station. If you ever have a chance to visit Boston City, I highly recommend visiting this amazing public space. I posted some pictures!

The Boston Public Library

The Trinity Church across from BPL

John Hancock Building

Old South Church

SO! Reworking the opening scene with Ryker had not been as bad as I thought it would be. His personality burst through quite easily and I found myself very loosely basing his character on a friend of mine. Zackaria and Meliz responded well to him as well. In this scene, Ryker is the troublemaker that the girls have to give extra attention to or else he will kill himself unintentionally.

COT opens up with the Kato siblings engaged in a high risk activity because they all share a love for thrills now and then, not just Ryker. Ryker's problem is that he likes taking it several notches higher above the girls' comfort levels, which is exactly what happens in this scene. He performs a variety of stunts that flame the ire of his sisters, especially Zackaria. A mistake or rather freaky malfunction sends him plummeting to his death and Z desperately tries to save him.

Ryker's reaction to facing death was different than that of Chrisa's. While Chrisa screamed everything her life was worth, crying to Z to do everything she could to save her, Ryker told Z to stay away because she might be pulled into death with him. He accepts his imminent demise. The precarious situation presents the siblings with a horrifying truth: there is no way to save Ryker. Unless of course a supernatural event takes, which is what happens, except this supernatural event can be explained through COT's pseudo-science, but the siblings don't know that yet. COT doesn't have magic; anything super that happens is a result of science. I'll explain more of COT's universe in a later entry. :)                                                           *****

I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about the movie Cloud Atlas I saw yesterday with my best friend from high school. We missed a good twenty minutes of the movie's beginning because we were late. We didn't mind since the movie was 2 hours and 44 minutes long.

However, jumping in that point of the movie, we were confused by the multiple story lines taking place in six different eras, along with the same actors playing different people. Thankfully, I read a bit about the structure of the movie so I wasn't totally baffled but my friend was so I offered as much insight as I could without spoiling it. The most difficult part of the movie for me was the post-apocalyptic vernacular. I wish they had given us subtitles because although they spoke English, the accent and broken English made it almost a foreign language to me.

Overall, the movie had a grand, ambitious plot and delivered scenes, visually speaking, I would never forget (One scene made my stomach turn inside out; you'll know if you catch the movie). Other lines and scenes even got laughs out of my friend and me. I liked the whole Buddhist vibe of a character forever living from one life to another and so on; how all our lives are connected; and how our actions, however simple they may be, rippled through and across time and people. The movie collects itself rather nicely toward the end, making better sense. I found myself caring more for the characters and feeling satisfied once it finished. After some cautious pause, I decided it was a good, rather interesting movie that made me think. I’m not surprised the Wachowski siblings made it. This is just their kind of stuff. Haha

Well that’s all for today.

Thanks for reading,

CSS

A Resuscitation is in Order!

HI :)

Never thought I'd update this blog, did you? It took more than a year, but I am back. This time I've dropped the pseudo-name Sammy Suzuhara. Call me CS. Severe is my real last name and I haven't given it enough credit for its radness. I am still working on Children of Tokua, the new name of this blog. This book has haunted me for seventeen years and finally, finally---no, I really mean it this time-- FINALLY, I am going to produce a finished product. I've made some serious changes that has revitalized the book, along with my interest in writing it.

Before I give you any details of what those major changes are, I want to share with you one essential process that I had to undergo to finish COT. Desire and motivation are very important when writing a book, without them, the thing never gets done. And this is true about any major project in our lives. I've been focused these past few weeks on raising my self-consciousness and performing some deep introspection. I had many obstacles to writing COT but I never dived deep into figuring out what they were. I assumed I was a chronic procrastinator, lazy, not disciplined, etc. And then sometime last week, I haphazardly visited this website called Personal Excellence after listening to a list of inspirational music which I arrived at through listening to Susan Boyle's rendition "I Dreamed a Dream" (Can't get enough of that song! Yes, I know it's a depressing song but it nonetheless inspires me, haha). I highly recommend the Personal Excellence website because it pretty much helped change my attitude toward COT.

I decided to read one of the articles on procrastination and did a self-introspection exercise to understand more deeply why I wasn't actively writing COT. My initial free writing produced some common answers such as: "I'm bored with the book. Hate seeing the same thing repeatedly. I'm lazy. Other things in life are getting in the way. Not enough time to truly write. I don't have enough discipline." I then steadily wrote things like: "I'm afraid of rejection. I'm afraid people will hate my book. I don't think I'm a great writer. I won't get anyone to represent the book. My writing isn't as great as I would want it to be." These were the real reasons why I wasn't finishing COT! In other words, I finally admitted to myself that I DIDN'T think I was a great enough writer for the book. This self-defeating thought and belief strangled my writing. I decided at that moment that I would no longer succumb to it. Taking this action breathed new life in my desire and motivation to write. I want to be a published author. I can clearly imagine myself as published author. I love the story of COT. I love the characters. They are my babies! I can't reject them just because of my own limiting thoughts.

So, I liberated myself from such negative thinking and instead embraced my capacity to write a story my heart desired.

And on the note of discipline, I realized from Personal Excellence, I didn't need discipline to write COT. Discipline is getting something you don't like doing done. I love COT so it should not feel like I'm having an uphill struggle writing it. Attitude is so important. Well, folks, that's all for now. I'll let you know how changed COT in my next post!

thanks for reading,
CSS