Starting Before You're Ready

Hai mum and dad!

Lately I've been spending an exuberant amount of time on my work, and as I've mentioned in earlier posts, more or less ignoring everyone I know in the process.

Now what do I mean by exuberant amount of time? Obviously I mean the bare minimum amount of time I can put into something while taking an online Philosophy class and working part (full) time at a hotel as a front desk agent and bartender.

In other words, I've gotten soft and lazy over a good-ish paycheck while trying to write the end of my book. (Also, I'm pretty much done with that now, and I'll be editing it in August- which is a weird thought.)

But by now you're probably wondering, why is this titled "Starting Before You're Ready"? Isn't that a kind of ridiculous name for some kind of open letter?

Yes, yes it is.

So, here goes.

Yesterday I submitted my work to a writing competition for the first time. Not much is at stake here, and I don't think I'll win by a long shot considering what I'm up against.

But for me this is a huge milestone.

It's putting my work out there to be scrutinized not by well meaning individuals, but by those willing to pay for my work. In other words, it is stepping out and into the real world of writing before I am even ready to be out there.

via GIPHY

And you could say, "wait a tec, Alexander, You've been working on this book of yours for almost a year now (if you include the three months I had to shelve it to get through my last semester at school, when I didn't write at all), and you started writing almost two years ago, by now you should be ready to actually submit work for your livelihood, no?"

No, you are exactly incorrect. When I started writing, I had no clue what I was doing, and sure I wrote a very long story with hopes of connecting the very separate (but always lumped together) science fiction and fantasy worlds, I was chewing on a seven-book project from hell that was doomed to begin with.

 I had no idea what a story was, and no real ability to learn it.

So I started before I was ready and learned so much that I violently scrapped the project and never looked at it again.

And now I'm caught in my current work, a space odyssey that is well over five hundred pages long and not getting any shorter, at least until I tear it apart and make it read-worthy.

But does that make me ready to submit my work to the public for monetary feedback? Hell no. In fact, I am not at all skilled enough a writer to submit to competitions. So why would I even try? Because of a principle that got me almost everything I have in life:

Starting before you're ready.

Was I ready to speak Chinese at work with customers and coworkers to accomplish all the goals of hospitality and the service industry? Absolutely not, and my awful excuse for a standard working fluency in Chinese has never been better.

Was I ready for my advanced Japanese class, where I would have to formulate ideas in complex sentences and give opinions in near- fluency level detail after only a year and a half of studying Japanese? No, not in the slightest, but my B in the class is a tribute to the work I put into it with significant help from my tutors and professor, and my essays for that class are some of the best writings I've ever created.

And so I've decided to do the same thing with my work, and will regularly submit my writing until it is good enough to make money, until it does what I want it to do.

You see, I want to make people think, and feel. I want people to laugh from words on paper that I wrote, to tear up and vomit profusely at the situations I put their innocent fictional friends in. I want to write from the heart and be able to touch the hearts of those who see my work. And I want to write so much that my work pervades the air.

Hopefully, with the help of my readers who care so much about their own lives and work so hard to attain the betterment of our world, I can achieve such things, but to do that I have to do things before I'm ready.

Of course I will be uploading all of the submitted stories rejected and accepted to abkshorts for you all to enjoy or hate, whichever is preferable.

via GIPHY

On another note, I would like to bring up my translation portfolio blog. The few people who have seen it may be wondering- what the hell Zander, you promised weekly posts and even a whole novel translation! Are you seriously that lazy?

Firstly, yes I am extremely lazy.

via GIPHY

Secondly, as far as legality goes, I would rather either translate my own work, or better yet, submit original work there. After much thought I came to a decision. On that blog you will soon find my ramblings in Chinese and Japanese and eventually whatever other languages I decide to study. My translation of that novel will be removed and probably completed in private.

Everything I post will be my own work and translated into English so that it can be scrutinized by my readers. It's updates will be posted to websites that are accessible to speakers of the various languages I'm learning.

I beg an hope for violent merciless feedback so that I can edit my own work and make it perfect.

That means that everything I post there, so long as people point out my mistakes, will actually improve over time, and so a post I wrote five years ago might be a completely different post today! I think it's a great way to learn a language, especially in our modern world, and I love being wrong as often as possible so that I can be right later on down the road. So my Japanese and Chinese speaking friends, please tear my work apart so that I can talk with you more easily.

On that note, I love you all. Have a fantastic day!

Love,

-Alexander

Front Lines From the Back End

Hai mum and dad!

My little sister sent me a message recently saying that she hasn't seen or heard from me in months and asking if I was okay.

It was one of the most beautiful messages I have ever received. It is sad, but I'll admit to preferring the sound of "Where have you been?" to "Why are you still here?" In the days of constant internet access and instant feedback it has become abnormal for people to simply fall off the face of the Earth.

Falling off the face of the Earth, mind you, is my specialty.

So what have I been doing? Writing, writing nonstop except to work, eat, sleep, shower, and read. In fact I've taken on a third job as a front desk agent in the hotel which my bar is located, it is about this that I figure it's time I shared some thoughts.

So let me tell you a few things.

My first weekend as a front desk agent was a swift kick in the groin. To me, customer service is not some complicated ritual that only some people can do, but a learned skill that is basic human nature, until you actually get down and dirty with the problem clients, like the person who felt the need to spell out a four letter word while slamming their hand on the table because it was pronounced by another person in a different accent, or the client who gets exactly what they want but screams and yells because they didn't get it exactly the way they wanted.

Yes, that is customer service.

When a person goes on vacation, or to a McDonalds for that matter, they suddenly forget that other people exist. This is in effect the real reason people find they cannot provide excellent customer service, or even handle these kinds of jobs at all. Too many people simply want the product without taking an honest look at the work it takes to get that product, and in a hotel- the chances of an employee to receive such a customer go up by an alarming rate. The reason, I suppose, is due to fatigue. Most complaining customers later explain that they are tired, or came from a great distance. They suddenly become not customers of various enterprises but victims of companies that view them not as people but as consumers.

See what I did there? I just flipped the whole thing over on its head- the consumers are treated like bags of money and the employees are treated like bags of products. It's a nice cycle that everyone cries victim of. I've known this ever since that scar in my resume called two-ish years of Wal-Mart. And I try my best to think of that every time I get a new customer through my doors.

But why should working at a front desk be any different? Well, it's not- in fact it's pretty easy on the surface, you stand there, look happy try not to die inside (die inside anyway) and provide the service you are hired to provide. But when you go deep enough and actually attempt it, you'll find that a front desk agent not only has to memorize a ridiculous series of unrelated but completely intertwining rules, regulations, and procedures that ultimately are completely useless except in the most extreme circumstances where their absence or mishandling ends in a really bad law-suit. Never in my life have I frozen up and made mistakes that could have cost me the job more than my first few weeks at the front desk because of exactly these procedures.

What do you mean, you ask?

Say I put a customer that has booked through third party in to my system. Their account requires me to take down their credit card information because the card on file isn't real. But I put it through anyway because I'm lazy, now the hotel is out a couple hundred dollars (This is impossible with my system, but gives you an idea).

Or say a customer brings pets to the hotel, so we have them fill out a pet registration form, but the pets are service animals, so now we just violated policy by asking them to fill out a form, they sue the company for breaking the law.

All of this boils down to the quick five minute conversation between the desk agent trying desperately to be left alone and the customer trying desperately to not get ripped off while being left alone from the annoying fake small talk the representative is required to regurgitate. If that five minutes goes bad, money is lost by often hundreds of dollars.

So no pressure or anything.

When all that is down and there is no longer any way the front desk agent could get those interactions wrong, suddenly they can be thrown into a situation so absurd that they have to use a novel technology that most humans don't have access to- problem solving skills.

Instant and immediate problem solving is accomplished in several different ways:

There's the yes man:

Customer- Hey I'd like my room for half the regular rate, and I want to check out four hours late since you said you're sold out tomorrow, can you do that?

Yes man- Sure thing!

The Idunno:

Customer- how do I get to my room?

Idunno- Idunno.

The helpful but useless:

Customer- Can you explain to me exactly how it is that we can look at rocks and tell how old they are?

The helpful but useless- Oh jeese let me ask my manager, Bob, BOB, can you- oh he's at a meeting with the hotel owner right now can you just wait there, oh wait no I'm sorry he went home for the day, Hah! where's my head at. Sorry I can't help you, feel free to ask my boss when he gets in next time around the time he's scheduled.

All of these techniques provide excellent strategies for getting the customer as far away as possible as soon as possible with only a minimal amount of loud vituperation.

Of course I'm kidding, but you'd be surprised how not cut-and- dry this job really is. It is a job so easy that it's not, so hard that it's not and yet still has you going home exhausted and crying.

In all it has helped me improve my writing, especially dialogue, as I have personally found it easier to write the awkward conversational scenes in my as yet unfinished novel Adebayo's End.

HOLD ON ALEXANDER, you scream, YOU SAID IT WOULD BE DONE BY LIKE FOREVER AGO!

Yeah... yeah I did. But when I got to forever ago I found that I had at least twenty thousand more words to go, and that was twenty-four thousand words ago...

The book has become roughly five hundred some odd pages over the past month in its first draft, which I expect to cut down in half during editing- and with work and a summer course coming up I'm going to be slightly distracted, especially when it comes to responding to messages and phone calls.

If it is any consolation- I can see the ending and it's really a matter of just filling those spaces, and I must say that is a liberating place to be. I expect to publish before 2019, so I'm still on schedule, just behind by a few months.

Until next time, I hope you're all well.

Love,
-Alexander

Well I Guess I Had Better Get to Work- an Update and a Request

Hai Mom and Dad

When I started this blog I thought that I wanted to share little details of my life with my family- who I knew had their own lives to live and their own paths to follow, far from where I happened to be. I really wanted to connect in an unabashed and honest medium- to show everyone I love a side of me I normally reserve for the closest people.

My last post, was unarguably the hardest thing I have ever made public. So difficult in fact that I felt I needed yet another hiatus from blogging- from writing, to be frank.

So as I'm sure you can guess, in that time a lot has happened.

Since writing that post I have left a job or two behind and rethought my future, I have finished my bachelors (a story in itself I might add), met a Moose, and begun that long awaited trek into THE REAL WORLD.

I also decided it was time to FINALLY finish something, 

drum roll please!

I'm writing a novel.

...Everyone pretty much knows this by now... 

I'm Finishing my novel.

There, take that!

 It's not the first one, heavens no- more like the third... or was it the tenth? In any case, I've thrown away a lot of (LONG, like 200 pages long..) stories before I came to this one...

I started Adebayo's End around August 2017, and put it on hold during the semester (putting a book on hold means averaging a thousand words per month..) And have finally gotten back into full force averaging around 10,000 words a week.

I have to say, writing a book is literally one of the biggest adventures I've ever undertaken. I wish I could talk about the story, and its themes, but a serious book is something that cannot be known by anyone except the author until the first draft has been torn to shreds in the editing process and several gnomes are ritualistically slaughtered.

...

I expect to publish before I leave Binghamton for work (and forever) this Summer. And I really hope you'll enjoy it, whoever reads it that is.

That said, I'm looking for people I know, good ol' honest folk who are willing to say to me:

"This story is great, when compared to the flatulence of the arse of my Aunt Wiggly's pig GarfelSnout the Third."

Or

"Hey, How about you take a look at page 65. What you're character is doing here doesn't really seem like her, but more like something out of a damn Twilight book."

(If you're wondering I'd prefer that last one)


(Also, if you have an Aunt Wiggly I would like to meet her and her pig)

(Also Also if any sections of my work remind you of that abomination of a vampire series I will personally burn the page it was written on and start over from scratch)

I desperately need people who are willing to do this for me, people who would really enjoy being a part of my work, and if it's crap- I'd like to know now so I can take more writing lessons!

So if you are one of those people, and you are interested in being involved in my writing process before I get it professionally edited, I would appreciate your help. Please contact me via email.


But wait, there's more!

Truth is (The Updatening):

The reason for the rush is that I figured I'd rather finish my book first so that I can get up one day with passive income and be financially stable enough to you know, not say to myself:

"Well, I guess I can't go doodily-squacking until my paycheck comes, but then if I go doodily-squacking after my paycheck comes then I won't be able to eat squiggily snoops next Thursday.... and I really love squiggily snoops..."

Let's just say that I'm caught in that rest-of-your life situation where any thing I do actually will have lasting effects. And frankly I also just want to finish my damn book..

That does not change my financial situation, I am in need of a job. So as a result the next few months will be spent building a portfolio of translation projects and writing while I job search for a full time job (and write my book..)

(good time to say, if you're hiring, let me knowww!)

So that is my way of hinting that there will be a lot more content uploaded to my websites between now and May.

Once my first draft is completed and the second draft is edited I will be sending copies out to those who were interested in giving me suggestions on my work.

During that time (March or April) I will be uploading short stories to a new site, and throughout I will be uploading translations to the books I am reading here and for progress updates on my work you can follow my personal facebook page here.

For Haimumhaidad updates you can follow Haimumhaidad on Facebook and Instagram, for my photography portfolio you can look here and you can find me on Linkedin as well (I only connect with people I know). I am always available for emails too.

All links are in the side-bar. 

Until next time!

-ABK