Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2013:

1. 3 poems posted here
2. 22 essays/rants posted here
3. 1 prose/story posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry that I have censored because it was dreadful in the choice of content

And thus the grand total here is 27 articles, down from the 127 articles in 2013.

That’s an average of 0.074 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.34 last year. I'll be frank, it's an atrocious number of writing, at least, if you compare only the publicly available stuff. I have reverted to writing diary entries these days instead of using my own blogs to publish my thoughts on issues around us, partly because it is just more handy (grab book, grab fountain pen, go!) compared to using Blogger (log in, click new post, realise I can't gauge how much I'm writing from the lousy back-end text entry area, load up Q10 to scribble, copy and then paste into text area before publishing). The other part to the reason is that my thoughts on many things have started to stray more and more into the not-so-good-for-public-consumption realm.

What this means is that I have decided that certain thoughts that I have are to be kept relatively private, and are not meant for world consumption. Is it because they are seditious? No, they are just private thoughts. It's tricky that way. Sort of like a religious conviction---you have them, but you can't exactly explain or even talk about it that makes sense to anyone but yourself.

Besides, now that I've turned more or less into one of the millions of corporate drones in the world, what kind of care-free frivolous whimsical writing am I supposed to do? I don't really have much good news to write about, and I've been on cold turkey from writing verse because I think my verse is just terrible, and not to mention that I am less inspired these days due to corporate drone-hood.

The last six to seven months of being back in Singapore have been very sobering. The environment that I was used to is no longer existent. Everywhere I look, I see new and strange sights that I would not have dreamed of just two years ago. Everyone seems to be rushing around in circles, and those who seem smart enough to escape the cycle of busy work have done so by just leaving it behind and disappearing elsewhere. It's a bleak outlook, my fellow reader, a very bleak one. And it's getting to the cynic in me.

This year though, I have rekindled my old hobby---reading, and I don't mean reading scientific papers from conference proceedings or journals, I mean fiction, or at the very least, classics. Already I have put up a reading list on my own web site to track the books that I am reading, will read, and have read. Perhaps this is my way of escaping the cycle of busy work, to embed myself in alternate worlds that were created by writers past and present, to see things from their perspective, to live more lives than I can physically do so vicariously.

I think I'll boost the writing output for this year. I can't let it slide away like that. Of all the things that I do that are not work-related, writing comes in as the first thing, followed by music, followed by my martial arts and running, of which I had not been doing much of late due to over-use injuries. So, as a part of the plan, I will write a short story fragment every day, using the venerable WriteThis 2, my steady companion throughout all these years to help me keep my ``blitz'' style of writing going. At the same time, I'm doing a rewrite/retelling of the fantasy story I wrote last year. Having read the Ender series, I think I have a gimmick that I can explore a little more fully than that horrible draft I had written earlier and make it into something a little more substantial, but infused with a little more local flavour. I refuse to sound like a typical American or British writer---I think that the interesting Singaporean style of talking and phrasing will be a more refreshing feel than what has already been said out there. It won't be a best seller (because I'm not going to get a publisher for it), but it should be quite fun. I'll probably work on it a little each weekend for the rest of this year as a means of getting something useful out. Can't do it more frequent than that because it will start to eat into my Aikido, running and reading time. I value my reading time of the Economist a lot---that periodical contains way more content and punch than the average person that I converse with these days. How sad can that be?

To the few loyal followers of my blog(s), I apologise deeply for the relative lack of updates. Let us make a deal. No matter what kind of crap I have, I will try to write something here at least once every fortnight. It's one of the few tenuous connections that we have left between you, the reader, and I, considering that I am almost on the verge of shunning that abominable social network known as Facebook. No matter how inane the post may be, no matter how short it may be, I will write something here every fortnight at the very least. Perhaps such a schedule will allow this blog to not fall into oblivion like all the other blogs in existence.

And with that, I conclude the oddball year that was 2013 and look forward to a better one in 2014, where it will be the official last year of being twenty-something.