Will You Visit Me At My New Blog?

Why do I need to move to a new blog? Let me count the ways:

1). Let's blame my childhood.

I moved a lot as a child. I went to 3 different elementary schools, 2 different junior high schools, 2 different high schools. My family moved from one city to another, then even moved countries twice, and I always blame this continuous packing and moving whenever I get the chance. I changed jobs almost yearly from 1998 to 2004, and I blamed the itch that forced me to leave one job for another on the semi-nomadic living I had as a child and teenager.

I started a blog in 2001, and can't remember how many times I've deleted an old blog to start a new one. Again, let's blame my childhood for this. I can't seem to stay too long somewhere. I need to always move, physically, or if that's not possible, then virtually.

2) Let's face it: creating a new blog doesn't cost anything. Which is always a great reason to do something, if you are cheap like me.

3) I started this blog in 2004 without any particular idea except to use is as some kind of a diary. Therefore, blogging is never on my priority list, resulting in only 200-odd posts after more than 8 years! In those 8 years, I have associated this blog with something I don't have to do except if I have plenty of time in my hands (which translates to almost never.)

Now in my ripe old age, I want to make writing a priority, and I think a move to a new blog will motivate me to write more. My plan is to write 3000 posts in my new blog, because roughly I spend more than 3 hours to write one post, and I like the idea that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become good at something. (Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000-Hour Rule").

I still hope I will one day write something worth reading, that some people will find my writing resonate with them, and I am willing to put in the effort to improve my writing.


So there.

Will you visit me at my new blog?  It is here on http://3000posts.blogspot.com

I hope to see you there.

Reading "A Farewell to Arms"

It was with slight nervousness that I decided to start reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I am almost always nervous doing whatever I do, and diving into this particular novel I was intimidated by the thoughts that my English was too limited I wouldn't understand the long phrases in the book. And then even if I got the words I might not get the meaning.

Ah. I see that I am not making any sense. So. Okay.

Reading the first few pages, I thought of those long days in elementary school when little was understood. I couldn't connect with the scene, the characters that Hemingway laid out. I tried harder to recognize details which made people attribute some kind of holy manliness to him - details that made him the epitome of everything manly.  As the novel was set in World War I, and the lead character was personally involved in it, of course there are scenes of bombings, wounded men, men dying in different sorts of circumstances.  The lead character witnessed deaths from up close, killed his subordinate for not obeying a command, was wounded himself, and was depicted as having no complaints about the whole ordeals.

What came into my mind was not that this lead character, Frederic Henry, was very manly, a strong man with a steel heart. Instead, I perceived him as distant, aloof.  He could manage to get over deaths, it seems, because he could distance himself from whatever happening around him. Or: is that being manly is all about?

Although there are certainly more than just one character in the novel, all of them sound almost identical.  Catherine Barkley, Frederic's girlfriend, sounds exactly like him that when the two converse I felt like reading a monologue.  But: this is Hemingway, who later went on as the winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction! And the Nobel prize for literature! I did find some of his sentences paint a deep emotion I can't really put a finger on.  For instance, Catherine mentions that she wants to have her hair cut short, and Frederic doesn't say a thing. Catherine then asks if he doesn't want her to have her hair cut and he chooses not to answer.  I recognized this as the strange characteristics that often accompany love: we sometime wish our lover would/would not do something, yet we refrain from expressing the wish because love gets in the way.

That particular scene might make Hemingway seem sexist, however an almost exactly same thing also happens with Frederic. He grows his beard because Catherine asks him to, and at times he thinks of getting rid of it. He keeps the beard however, because Catherine wants him to.

(Did I really just discuss about hair and beard, not insights about love and war and compassion and companionship depicted in the novel???)

All in all, I don't even know what genre this novel is in. Romance? Suspense? Thriller? Or gasp - Literary? It just doesn't fit in any category I can think of.

True, there are some worthy quotes from the novel which show Hemingway's brilliant observations of life. You can easily find them all over the internet. However, what I conclude from A Farewell to Arms are these:

(1) Intimidated as you may, no matter how limited your English is, just dive into that novel people make a big fuss about, and -
(2) You might find out that the Writer Other People Make A Big Fuss About didn't write brilliant dialogues with vivid characters - yet you can't deny the solid proof that he wrote something.

A writer writes. An age old mantra I long  to put to use for myself: a writer writes, no fuss, no excuses: A. Writer. Writes.

Writing Longhand

My excuse for not writing in this blog is that I have begun to start writing long-hand in a notebook..but even so, I am still not writing enough.

I am still yearning to craft a fiction, and so far have come up with two unfinished stories which are about nothing with nobody in them.

I did, however,  wrote two letters this past month, and I really love how it feels to write letters and now I wonder whether I can earn money by writing letters.