I have now switched over to my female protagonist and I’m somewhere in Act 2 for her (her act 1 is pretty much done, unlike my male protagonist).
Now, how am I measuring up against set goals? The honest truth is I don’t know. I am now fully in the tunnel and have absolutely no idea how long before I am about to exit it. So the broad goal of getting up to decimal draft 0.84? No idea, wait and see is my approach.
I also had the mini goal of getting clarity up to the mid-point for both my protagonists which again I have no idea whether I am going to reach or not by the end of this year. I left my male protagonist in a state of “Nope, I don’t know enough about this chapter, come back to it next time” etc. but obviously that is all the way in Act 3 because I always go through the whole story linearly and never stop in middles or jump around much when I write scenes (well, I do jump in a sense because with my iteration approach I often wrote on a piece of scrap paper which chapters I feel I am capable of working on for the current round of drafting for each of my protagonists. That has been the approach for the latest two or three rounds. But I don’t hopscotch all over the story in terms of scenes right off the bat). So to be honest, my male protagonist currently doesn’t even exist for me, that’s the type of myopia I am operating under when I am drafting. I am not quite up to the middle point yet for my female protagonist.
I feel like a structural analysis of the whole novel is coming up for the mini goal. I have said that I try to avoid it because it led to procrastination. But the honest truth is that I have no other method to delve into the story to see clarity otherwise.
This is the state I am at with the WIP. Tune in for the September update.
As the title tells it all, I’m going to crown The Lost Choice: a Legend of Personal Discovery by Andy Andrews with this. At the time of writing I still have not finished this novel yet. But the meaning of Lost Choice does resonate with me.
I don’t think this will be spoiler alert because I am just talking about the theme but what is meant by lost choice is basically the idea that not choosing to act is a choice but it is a lost choice because by choosing to act you can potentially make a difference in the world by impacting others. That’s it, a simple concept.
How this touches me is in two ways. Firstly, I am somewhat of a passive person and there are lots of times when I do not act on my thoughts and intentions. I do not consider them lost choices normally because technically lots are just random thoughts and sure I might be able to make a difference in the world if I act on them but the counterargument is why me in particular to make that difference, why not someone with better skills, better time, better passion etc.? Secondly, co-existing with what I said above, I also personally believe in making differences in a small way. In fact, I tend to stay away from large scope stuff and just focus on small steps. That is how I operate. So technically I do make differences but I tend to focus on the small.
And this is all I have to say for now. You are welcome to add your thoughts in comments.
We landed in Rome without mishap albeit with minor delay and straight off I made a mistake: instead of waiting around at the airport for my booked hotel transfer I went to the taxi stand to see whether my driver would be there and got flagged by a black cab. Result: charged 180 Euro instead of the 65 Euro fixed rate. On top of that, the hotel closed down making us stranded ‘homeless’ in Rome! Tried to ask around for another hotel nearby but apparently there was a tennis match resulting in a short supply of hotel rooms so at the end we took up on the offer of the lady who had a design studio next to the closed down hotel who had a room to rent with a private bathroom. That took most of the morning (we landed at around 8:15am but the hassle of finding alternative accommodation lasted until lunch time).
We ended up not having lunch or rather making do with gelato as lunch. Straight away we could tell a difference between Oceania and Italy: they do not press down on the ice cream cones so that at the end you are left with all cone and no gelato. The cone was average but I did like the mango flavour of gelato that I ordered (we ordered 2 flavours each and I think I had pistachio and mango the first time, the pistachio flavour was only average. Mum had hazelnut and coffee, Mum always chose coffee).
The original plan was to take it easy the first day and do mostly Vatican City (since I picked a hotel in the Prati neighbourhood). So we did St Peter’s square and then we already lost the way trying to find Castello Sant’Angelo and gave up and returned to the accommodation. I also had the intention of returning in the afternoon for St Peter’s Cathedral in the afternoon to avoid the queue (that was in fact written down in my detailed travel itinerary G doc but being too tired Mum and I gave it a miss).
For dinner, we had it at a fastfood place called HFC that was combination KFC and pizzeria. Out of curiosity, I ordered the wurstel and french fries pizza. Well, you couldn’t really taste the french fries but other than that, it was an okay pizza, different from the ones we have in Australia. It was extra cheesy and seemed to taste good in small amount. But the cheesiness got to us after a while.
Day 2 in Rome, we started with catching the metro from Ottaviano to Barberini. And because we slept in, we were already in with the crowd at Trevi Fountain at 10amish. Unlike the Vatican City/Prati region, we managed to hit all the main tourist attractions in Rome despite losing our way often and having to ask for directions. We had a bland tasting seafood aka calamari salad for lunch at Piazza Navona. Later, we had a time mix up and thought we were late for our dinner appointment near the Colosseum at 6:30pm when it was only 3:13pm in Rome. That meant we sat around for a long stretch of time near the eating strip nearby- we had gelato, soft drink etc. The dinner we had was at Trattoria Luzzi. Mum had the carbonara while I had a baked sea bass/bream. Mum didn’t particularly like the carbonara- it was tasteless without the bacon inside and too salty with. My fish was okay but not spectacular. After dinner, we went to the Colosseum to take pictures and only Mum had a picture of the full Colosseum, I only had a pic of me with a corner of the Colosseum which was not identifiable as the Colosseum. But ah well, not that I’m an enthusiast of having pics of myself with all the landmarks.
I just came back from an almost month-long vacation from Europe hoping to have a long sleep session to catch up with jet lag and recovering from the cold, only to find… that our house has been broken into.
As a result, I am calling for rest from blogging for the month of June so that I can recuperate. But worry not. There is plenty to share on the trip after that. Stay tuned!
There are many other resources on these topics and feel free to browse around for a wider range of opinions but what I did was to use S Money to do my currency conversion (I used Travelex for the New Zealand but S Money is offering me a much better conversion rate, S Money is not able to offer me a single trip conversion like Travelex and hence takes a higher service charge compared to Travelex for the same amount of foreign currency needed but the better exchange rate covers it and for a rough idea we are talking about 0.6 compared 0.58x on any given day between S Money and Travelex. The other consideration is that Travelex has way more branches and so you can easily get to a place close by whereas at the end of last year when I started with S Money they only had the single branch on Spencer Street in the city in Melbourne but now it has about 4 locations in Melbourne now and I think they have similar expansions interstate too).
For a travel card, I elected to go with the Suncorp Everyday account because that’s the only non credit card that offers Internet banking for me. I could have elected to go with a credit card and I tried applying for the Latitude Platinum Mastercard because it offered free wifi as a perk but I gave up because once I saved my application and tried to resume I just couldn’t get back in. When I rang customer service, I was told that basically there was only one number for all applicants to connect to and that you just had to try logging onto the system every 15-20 minutes. I tried that about 5 or 6 times and being impatient in nature, I just gave up on it. That and Mum continuously worrying me about applying for a credit card and the interest rate charges involved. In practice, I’ve found out that while the Suncorp does not charge the visa 3% fee for transacting with overseas companies, if the other side charges it (eg. Swiss railway company), then you still incur the 3% but ah well, it still beats the bank card of our Big 4 bank that automatically slaps on the 3% charge on.
Those who followed my blog for a while should probably know that I’m a whimsical person when it comes to reading and writing. So that’s my approach to writing exercises if I have to sum it up with one word.
I bounce around with writing exercises in that if I grow tired of one, I switch to another. I tend to not follow other people’s ideas that much, with the vague notion that I’m using them to strengthen my weak spots.
My current writing exercises include the following:
The omniscient exercise that I blogged about before where I’m translating an omniscient online novel from Chinese to English
What I call “no obligation” where I made up or sourced random prompts to start off on a story that I give myself absolutely no obligation to finish (and I don’t think I had finished any single story I started for this exercise) which has now evolved into a long lists of remembered moments/recent happenings under the headings “Moments in Time”
Juxtaposition, an exercise I revived where I used an Excel sheet of 10 columns of words I handpicked, so that I’m generating one random idea per day that might or might not be useable for anything
5 For today, an idea from an article that I read as one of the free online writing/self-care courses I did, where I recorded 5 thoughts I had for the day. Currently, it often overlaps with the no obligation “Moments in Time” exercise as they both use the same base for inspiration. I did have a new prompt sitting there for the no obligation exercise but somehow I just kept writing down moments in time instead of starting a new story with that prompt. Not sure if it is lethargy or what.
In the past, I had actually done the following writing exercises:
The action scenes exercise which leverages on my movie spell. Basically, I was fictionising particular action scenes in movies that I had seen recently. When I stopped with this exercise, I compiled a table of contents grouping scenes by content (running scenes, fighting scenes etc.) so that if I ever became stuck with action scenes, I now have a kind of reference guide where I can copy and paste passages to use as starting points
The alternate scene exercise where I was using moments out of Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay and rewrite it alternately in first person and third person perspective. Why I used this particular work was simply because I was analysing it at the moment, mistakenly believing that it was written in omniscient form but it turned out to be written in third person limited with an omniscient narrator voice
The empathy exercise that I took off some source that I had forgotten about now, where I pegged that I was writing from a Chinese point of view in ancient times. Then on each day I would create a character that has three components: gender, occupation, descriptor. Some examples were: A decadent Emperor; A sensitive female prostitute; A scholar with a fixated way of thinking etc. I would write 100 words or so showcasing a given character
The sensory details exercise, aiming to increase my capability to make concrete sensory details. I would come up with three adjectives under each of the six senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and perception at a time. On each day, I pick up two senses and come up with two short paragraphs on each adjective
The sun, moon and star exercise: I’ve just noticed that I’m drawn to the three heavenly bodies and so I basically cycle through them and write a short paragraph about each every day. I think it shortly dies out because after a while, it is very hard to be original
And that’s it in terms of writing exercises. Until next time.
A renowned female spy of Manchurian descent, who spied for the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese war that is part of World War 2
Notable Life Events:
Born in 1907, 4 years before the Qing dynasty was overthrew, as Aisin Gioro Xianyu, a Manchurian princess born to a concubine mother
In 1915, she was given up for adoption at the age of 8 to her father’s friend, a Japanese espionage agent and mercenary adventurer, who took her to Japan and gave her the name she was better known as, Yoshiko Kawashima
When she was 15, her father died and her mother followed the Manchurian tradition of committing suicide as a concubine. At the age of 17, her adoptive father raped and later continued to abuse her
On 22 November 1925 (aged 18), she proclaimed of her decision to cease to exist as a woman forever and started dressing in men’s clothes as well as changing her hairstyle to a crew cut
When she was 20, she was arranged by her brother and adoptive father to marry a Mongolian prince (the Manchurian dynasty was really founded on a Manchurian-Mongolian alliance) but she divorced three years later. Afterwards, she seemed to have led a decadent life where she had lovers of both genders
Her espionage career seemed to start with meeting the intelligence officer Ryukichi Tanaka in Shanghai and subsequently moving in with him
Due to a cordial relationship with Puyi, the last Emperor of the Qing dynasty, who saw her as a member of the Imperial family (she was his distant cousin), she was able to persuade him to re-ascend the throne as the figurehead ruler of Manchukuo, a puppet state created by the Japanese for Manchuria based in the city of Harbin bordering Russia
She was arrested in Beijing in 1945, charged with treason in 1947 and executed in 1948
Moonlake’s thoughts on her:
I think this is a woman that is worthy of being cast as a female lead for sure (there was definitely a HK movie about her where she was played by Anita Mui): she has outward charm and she knows what she is doing.
This is not a travel blog per se but because I always obsessively plan my trips down to literally minutiae, I might as well collate the various bits of knowledge I’ve gathered for newbies like me.
Firstly, for itineraries, I’ve found the following sites very useful as templates and I can adapt them for my own personal needs:
Among them, earthtrekkers is usually where I start off since it has a broad coverage for 10 day trips around the world. Then I would do separate Google searches for “x days in [City name]” and the other two often come up.
If you are traveling or plan to travel around European cities via the train, https://www.seat61.com/ is the go-to comprehensive guide on train travel around the world. For my upcoming trip across three European countries- Italy, Switzerland and France, I ended up buying my train tickets three different ways for each country despite there being two aggregate ticket resellers and here’s why:
I was originally planning to buy Italian and French tickets all together through one resellers-RailEurope which only charges a flat fee of $8 Euro for a single cart of purchase which trumps Trainline which charges 3% of each single ticket bought through them. However, the Italian train companies only allow you to hold tickets for 10-15 minutes and when you also have to pick seats and choose between alternative times, I just found it an entirely hopeless endeavour to be able to buy 20 tickets all in one go through RailEurope.
So change of plans: through research I found out that there are only two train operators in Italy: the state-owned Trenitalia which operates every single train line in Italy and the private company Italo that only runs lines between major cities. What I did was basically just open up the two train websites on different tabs and run a search on the day I want to travel. Personally, I think the Italo website is easier to use for English speakers (no surprise, apparently it’s operated by a US conglomerate) but the Trenitalia can be switched to English on the top right-side as well. The only caveat is that you have to know the station names in Italian but that’s easy because a part of my trip planning always leads to search for “from location x to location y” which takes me to Rome2Rio.com which will show you different methods of traveling between the two locations, the time it takes, how long and schedules etc. And there I can easily find out about station names in Italian or whatever local languages. This way, I was able to book my Italian tickets one by one without the short time limit hanging over my head. Also, instead of the black-box interaction on RailEurope where I always feel inclined to book the cheapest tickets available I can easily compare across different ticket categories in terms of conditions (whether you can change the time and day of the train you take, whether tickets are refundable etc.)
I tried to replicate the same on the French side where there is only a single operator but then the SNCF site keeps freezing whenever I try to buy with my visa debit card. I tried to get in touch with them and the only means seemed to be through Facebook Messenger without any response. Then the GM of my gaming group told me of his experience in another European country which made me remember that I read somewhere that the French rail company’s website acted funny with foreign credit card purchases so back to RailEurope I went with all my French train tickets. This time around it works fine because the French side does allow you to hold a ticket for much longer. The shortest was 15 minutes for a trip between Paris and Versailles according to my recollections but most of the other tickets can be held for about 1 hour and above and there’s no need to select seats.
On the Swiss side, all I did was buy a half fare card for a month (we are only staying in Switzerland for 9 days but it’s still a cheaper option compared to the 10 day Swiss pass, especially since we are not visiting any museums) and the Daily Saver Pass for one day where I knew I would be traveling intensively along the Interlaken-Lauterbrunnen-Murren-Stechelberg route. I’m not purchasing any other tickets online because it always takes a 3% foreign transaction fee on their website even though I’ve got a visa debit card that doesn’t charge the fee on my end. Plus, there is absolutely no need to reserve seats and there is no cost advantage to buying individual point to point tickets in advance.
As per usual, I use booking.com for hotels because their website is easy to use for a search. But remember to set currency to property currency so that they don’t take a cut out of you for currency conversion. I’m not taking so many day tours this time around as for my New Zealand trip (only one in Venice) and I’m sticking to Viator.com. And just one advice of caution on European day trips: always search out whether you can DIY the same itinerary as a Viator day trip on your own. Back when I first started my European trip planning, I was going to sign up to 5 or 6 day tours but in the end only the Venice one was left because the other ones were either too expensive or could be completely or partially replicated with train travel between cities. I kept with the Venice one just for the gondola ride because research says that otherwise you have to negotiate rates with the gondolier yourself and I find that a major hassle.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 