Twitter, Death n Friends, and School

Hey everybody! I thought I'd squeeze in one more blog post this month in hopes that the "three posts a month" thing will catch on as a regular thing.

This post will have more to do with some technical updates rather than it being a rambling of my struggles and views on the craft of writing. Yes, I know I keep saying in my posts that there are little things that I'll "get to later" or something (last time I said my 'lifelong tragic love epic' was now a 'love story' and that I would get to that later), but don't worry as I really will be getting to it later. Later just isn't now quite yet.

Firstly as you probably already noticed, I have a little Twitter thingy on the right side of the page now that lets you see my latest "tweets". I admit that when I first heard of Twitter a few years ago (or was it one year ago? This internet thing moves too fast) I thought it was useless to me as I could simply say whatever short thing I wanted to say in a Facebook status instead of a "tweet". And honestly it was pretty useless to me, and the only reason I created an account was so I could get the quick little updates about my favorite band, Nine Inch Nails.
But now it seems it could actually be of more use. I am going to try using it in conjunction with this blog. Meaning that I will update it with little things that wouldn't fit a whole blog post or that I just don't have time to write about in a whole post yet, as well as announce via Twitter when I post something new on my blog, so feel free to follow me, "RyanMatejka", to get all those little updates.

An example of the quality you can
expect out of my comics.

Secondly if you like my sense of humor (who doesn't?) then you'll be happy to know that there are three new comics posted on the Humor page of this blog. They're honestly nothing to get too excited about, as I simply doodled them at various times in school (you may notice the first one is dated a few years ago, while the second two were written this past uear and are not dated) and there's not much depth or maturity to their humor. Nonetheless they're called "Death n Friends", (which makes as much sense as the strips themselves) there's three of them, and they're located in the Humor tab above. Enjoy!

Lastly it should be known that the second semester of my Junior year of college has begun, so for all I know you won't be hearing from me as often simply as a result of having too little time to write stories or blog about anything, though I vow to update the blog at least once a month. Also it helps that I am in a fiction writing class and plan to write a whole short story just for that class which I will inevitably post about on here.

So yeah, that pretty much sums everything up. "Twitter, Death n Friends, and School", as the title indicates. I hope to update you all on the progress of my love story in the coming weeks, as progress has been better and bigger than expected.

Stay classy interwebs.
-Ryan

Learning Lessons Otherwise Dismissed

DISCLAIMER: The entire following post was typed solely on my Nook Color's touch-screen keyboard. It was a slow and buggy process but it beats sitting around doing nothing while I am without my laptop at my parent's house.
----------

Well it seems I've been made the fool.

It wasn't very long ago that I went on a slight rant on Facebook about Gustav Freytag's famous plot pyramid which we are all taught in the youngest years of school. You know, the one that looks like this:

As good and true as that certainly seemed, to me in a time of creative infancy I decided that Freytag's model for story progression and structure was too limited. Of course technically any model for anything is meant to be more correctly analytical than it is meant to be limited in scope, and of course Freytag wasn't trying to create any one definite rule for composing a story; he was simply trying to analyze the trends of literature of the time. I did not realize this at the time. I instead interpreted it as the former rather than the latter. I concluded that we as a culture of storytellers should forsake the rules for the sake of genuine creativity and thinking outside the box, and thus I created this new model for storytelling:

Yes, how naive I was. You see at the time I was fascinated with the idea of telling a story documentary-style, meaning there may be no rising action, climax, or falling action, but instead a documentation of a series of fictional events.
That sounds all well and good in theory, but I now realize that even when I'm not trying to create a story with a climax and rising or falling action, there may in fact be no other interesting way to do it, and perhaps no other way at all.
What I mean is that without these elements, there is no plot at all. Sure in theory I could write a whole story detailing a single day in the life of Mr. Somebody, but not only would it be incredibly boring to read and write, but it would be incredibly hard to think of events to move the story along without including some sort of plot or conflict; even the average day has these things in it (that and it would be hard to find inspiration for what happens next in a story where nothing happens).

So how did I finally learn this seemingly simple lesson? Well I realized it as I was typing out the climax to my lifelong tragic love epic, which shall now be simply referred to as a love story due to reasons too lengthy to appropriately describe in a post written on a touch-screen keyboard (as if that's keeping me from rambling anyway).

So, to finally conclude; I learned a very simple lesson first-hand even though I was supposedly taught it over a decade ago.

Sometimes that's what happens.
-Ryan

Not Just a New Year

I have no idea where that year went. It was certainly shorter than 2010 right?

Actually it was an incredibly stressful year as far as my personal and school life goes.

Good thing I have you all to talk to.

This is indeed an exciting time of my life. I'm becoming an adult (and will be turning 21-years-old in February) and am quickly being faced with how I am to live my adult life. To be honest I'm excited and nervous, but that's not what I want to talk about today.

I don't want to reflect on the last year right now, and I don't want to talk about the upcoming year either. That's what everyone else is doing on their blogs. You don't want to read more of that.

Firstly I should explain my Christmas gift to you guys. I should but I really don't want to because that would ruin the fun. Let's just say it has something to do with something I've mentioned before that I've been working on. Oh, and it was written in pencil on receipt paper.

Secondly I am totally excited to say that with the money I got for Christmas, I was able to buy myself a brand new Nook Color! This means that I can finally start to see exactly what the world of independent authors publishing on e-readers is like, which is good since I'll potentially be a part of that world someday on the horizon. I was honestly worried I wouldn't want to use it for books since it can browse the web and play apps, but it turns out that having the ability to shop for millions of books at my fingertips is somewhat like the cliche metaphor of throwing a kid into a candy store, granted you throw him through the door and don't accidentally direct his body into the window or pavement.

Lastly I couldn't be happier to announce that coming up this month will mark a whole year since I got engaged, and a whole four years since I started dating my fiancée. If men who venture to get the affection of women call themselves "players" then I daresay I'm "winning the game".

I'll get to talking about all that aforementioned stuff later this month, mmkay?

Here's hoping things to according to plan this year.

-Ryan