Yes indeed I am. Ironic, since I’m the one who came up with the idea of this threeway blogging extravaganza, yet… very much like me. I tend to be late, frequently. Religiously.
Some say the first post in a blog is the hardest, as the writer feels the need to both introduce himself and to create a syntetic manifesto of what their blog will be in the coming years (weeks) of activity. I humbly disagree – the first post is incredibly easy, because it’s both an introduction and a manifesto, and there’s nothing that is easier and more natural than pretending to be more interesting than you actually are.
In no particular order, my name is L. and english is not my first language; in complete honesty, I’ve never actually studied it in school. Now, how I got to learn english is actually a funny story and, in a curious way, pertinent to the part where we get to my blogging manifesto. I was a 10 years old kid, and me and my older brother were both fans of miniatures and tabletop games. One day, my mother took us both to our local gaming store to get us a small reward for some school achievement I don’t remember, and the shopowner (who, at that point, was basically a family friend), trying to answer one of those terribly scary and complex questions only a kid with a fixation can ask, picked up a magazine from a box. And we saw it:
Now, I actually still own that issue. Actually, I own about 20 of those 199x issues. Because after we started flipping those 50 or so pages of impossible to comprehend text, me and my brother were utterly fascinated. This was about the hobby we loved, yet it looked much more in-dept than what we, as kids, had interacted with no differently as you would with a toy. It was a secret chest of mysteries. It made me feel ignorant, and it tickled that hitch that has always been a part of my life, if not the actual engine of my existance: I needed to know more. Suddenly, the actual toys weren’t really that important. I had already discovered the power of imagination. I could make up my own toys, I could look at pictures and make them do much more than their stiff plastic and metal bodies could – in my mind.
So, we wanted the magazine. Actually, the magazines. The storeowner, a very generous guy, told us we could have it, and a couple more – it’s not like they were selling. So we sat down for like 20 minutes, in the basement of his store, picking magazines, and then we came up with a couple dozens of them. The guy was sort of embarassed as he told us he couldn’t let us have them all for free. And my mother, in one of her greatest moments of clarity, asked him how much the magazines would cost. I don’t know what possessed her that day. She knew we didn’t speak english. So after the guy told her, she leaned toward us and asked us if we were sure we wanted the magazines, and she informed us we wouldn’t have any toy if we took the books.
The books won. It was just so much better. A toy was a dead thing. This was alive. There were hours and hours of reading and daydreaming there. So we went home, and we still couldn’t read english. And well, with a dictionary and those magazines… we learned. I can’t exactly describe the process. It was sort of magical. It was a lot of fun, and endless hours spent on something as insane as the kind of stories Games Workshop was surrounding their games with in the 90s. But it eventually led to me and my brother knowing a rudimentary form of english (but good enough to scare my first english teacher, who told me she’d never met an 11 years old kid who knew words like “forthcoming”, “middle ages”, and “carnage”), aside from a full set of less useful (and socially accepted) notions like how the Machinarium was keeping the Emperor God’s husk from decomposing and the names of half a dozen different types of demons who could kill you with sex.
So what’s the moral of the story? First, that if my english is far from perfect, or the structure of my prose is archaic, or sometimes I sound like a chinese warning sign, there’s a logical explanation. The second is the manifesto. I’m a guy. I’m not very good at talking about myself. I’m particularly bad about talking about how I feel, as I don’t feel the necessity to (and I know this frustrates my significant half to a point), so it’s pointless to me to write a blog about who I am. I wouldn’t be sincere, or interesting, or I would simply run out of stuff to do.
It’s easier to talk about what I like, and what I do. I’m a storyteller – not professionally, but in nature. I’m fascinated by stories because everything I look, touch or hear seems made to have one. I’m the guy who drives home on the backdrop of smokey mountains and thinks – feel would be more correct – that that scenery, that moment is meant to be part of a story. I think telling stories that talk about things you see, feel or know can capture the beauty of the “real” world and create something new but equally beautiful with it. Like when I was a kid, and I was reading on those magazines of the majestic imperial Capital Ships, so large that they could host a town over their hull… a second later, I was on that hull, telling myself a story about anything that could fill my imagination and make me feel the warm sense of peace that only daydreaming can give.
So while this blog will definitely have room for the events of my actual life (I’m in the process of moving in with the most significant significant other I’ve never imagined I would one day share my life with), this will be mostly about imagination. I may post something I wrote, or some ideas on storytelling itself, or more frequently my comments and experiences with the medias that more significantly represent storytelling for me – books, above all else, but also movies, comics, videogames. I promise you I’ll try to make my ramblings over the things I love as interesting as I can, and every now and then I’ll touch what I don’t like or loath, and I assure that then I won’t even have to try.
Dream on.
sirquincyfancypants 