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Personal rants and other things

I recently published a little review of the movie, but I tried to keep out my personal biased thoughts from affecting my review. As I mentioned on it, Death Note is one of those series that I call “foundational” during my teenage years. I read the manga so many times growing up, that I know the story almost perfectly, even now 10 years after having been the most obsessive of fans. And, for the context of this rant, let me say that I never finished watching the anime. Within 5 episodes, I dropped it because I thought it did not do the manga justice. That’s just how obsessed I was. And, as you can imagine based on my opinion on the anime, I absolutely hated this new Death Note interpretation, and it’s because of the same reason as the anime. This movie failed to capture the essence of what Death […]

On Death Note (2017)

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The other day I wrote all about Writing Discipline, which seriously has me thinking more and more about the future of this site. I really want to create that. That’s why I changed that tagline to join me in my journey. And, it’s also why this site is called Raven’s Apotheosis. I want to show my personal journey forward as I make it out there as a writer. In a way, this place is all about me becoming an author. That’s why this is a little unorthodox. This is not about me. Instead, I want to talk about this kid I met in high school that inspires me. Back in 11th grade, my friends initially met as the group we would end up being for the next decade. Originally, we were the weird rejects that played Yu-Gi-Oh in front of the band room. And no, it wasn’t as sad as […]

Norembridge

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I had a revelation earlier today as I watched a video on facebook (yeah, I’m that type of person). To be honest, most of the video was unrelated to my realization since it was a politically and racially charged video; you know, the type of videos people share on facebook when you have a liberal group of friends, but I digress. The video spoke about the stereotype of being smart and clarified the line of thinking Japanese people have. I can’t say that the video is 100% accurate, but–according to the speaker who is Japanese–Japanese people believe that discipline eventually overtakes intelligence. That got me thinking about writing as per usual, and I returned to the one advice people, especially big named writers like Mr. Stephen King, give: sit down and write. It’s the same advice I’ve been given countless of time. I mean, the no. 1 advice my writing […]

Writing Discipline

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It’s November 7th, which means this is one complete week into NaNoWriMo, and I’ve been writing a lot every day. So far, I’ve managed to write every single day without miss, hitting the number of words just as expected. But, this is not a post to brag about this. No, this is the Not Writing Advice part of the week, where I talk about something shitty about writing. And in this case, it’s word counts. For the longest time, I’ve been one of the biggest pushers for NaNoWriMo (and I still am), but I’ve always been very conflicted about writing goals, especially when dealing with word count. See, the thing is that when I write a lot–and I mean a lot–I start losing sight of the work. At some points, it seems that scenes go on forever and take longer than they should, all because I’m trying to hit a word count […]

NaNoWriMo Day 07 – Not Writing Advice

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The funny thing is, yesterday I posted talking about how I had all these plans for my novel. I wrote two outlines over October and got ready to write. But, it seems that after writing two complete novels, I’m still the worst when it comes to planning. Today I wrote about 2,000 words, but none of those words went exactly as planned. The more I kept writing the characters, the more I realized that the two main characters were, well, a little different than I originally planned. I know it sounds weird to say that the character hijacked the story, but I swear I’m not crazy. Online, writers often talk about how characters do what they want to do. Sometimes, some even mention how characters take a life of their own and change things. All of that makes it seems like the writers are crazy, but I think it’s actually […]

NaNoWriMo Day 04 – The Characters Stole the Novel

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[Day: 03/30 & Words: 5,000/50,000] Over the last two days, most of my NaNoWriMo updates haven’t really been connected to my actual progress, so I wanted to take today and actually give a proper update. For this November, I decided to continue working on an old project of mine called “The Black Symphony.” Technically, I had already started this novel back in July and written about 30,000 words (a little more, but I can’t remember) for camp NaNoWriMo, but I decided that this November would be a good chance to actually finish the novel. I know that NaNoWriMo technically asks for 2 things I’m going against. I’m supposed to write a new novel, and I’m supposed to write 50,000 words for it. But, to be honest, novels are not really that length. That’s just a little over a novella, barely enough to classify as a novel. So, I decided to […]

NaNoWriMo Day 3 – A Real Update

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Today in the morning, I spent about an hour writing 400 words. They were probably the slowest 400 words I’ve had in months. It was just as if the writing wasn’t coming out at all. And, to be honest, I’m not sure what blocked me, or why I was unable to write quickly. Regardless, I was growing frustrated, and that, well, is never good when you’re trying to have fun writing a novel. But then, the very best person in the world offered to help me out with a little something people online call a “word sprint.” That’s where you set a timer and write for that amount of time without stopping. In a way, it’s meant to use that little competitive spirit inside of us to push us forward. And god, it works. It works so well. Long story short, thanks to this amazing and beautiful person with the […]

NaNoWriMo Day 2 – Word Sprints

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It has begun! November has come, and we, the NaNoWriMo writers, have crawled out of the caves we dwell in, and we have taken over cafes across the world. Do you guys know what this means!? It’s the beginning of the coffee conspiracy 2016! If you guys don’t know me, I’ve been claiming this since the inception of NaNoWriMo. You see, I’ve come to notice a trend…During November, Starbucks, Coffee Bean, and all the other big coffee companies have a ridiculous revenue increase. Do you guys know why!? It’s all because of NaNoWriMo! See, a long time ago, these companies were having very low sales during November, so they came up with a huge plot to raise their sales…and they targeted writers…thus creating NaNoWriMo. The idea was simple. Force writers to go berserk during a month. Force them to need a lot of energy, and force them to have little […]

NaNoWriMo Day 01 – Coffee Conspiracy 2016

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Yup, look at it. The clock. It’s right on the cusp. We are here…The NaNoWriMo is coming… Throughout the month, I’ve been talking about my project, and how I worked on the outline for the chapters I’ll be writing, but I never talked about something else (though to be fair, I was given the idea to do this fairly recently). For this month, I decided to start this thing called a “bullet journal” because the best person in the world started one, and she totally inspired me to make one…but, when I say make one, I really do. So, this entry will be a little of a dual topic. Yes, I started the current blogger fad known as the bullet journal. I started it today, prepping the whole journal so it goes forward. However, it’s too early for me to really talk about it and say whether or not it’s […]

NaNoWriMo – One Minute to Midnight

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