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It’s Humpday!

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Good day! Happy Wednesday!

We made it to the middle of the week!

I’m almost done writing the ending of Max and the Captain! Will get that done tomorrow! I wrote some real surreal stuff (and, boy, is real surreal not terrible writing)?

How is your day going? Great? Awesome? Blegh?

The other week, I was reading a Japanese Light Novel called Mapping: The Trash-Tier Skill That Got Me Into a Top-Tier Party! That is a mouthful of a name,  I know. It’s a weird trend in Japanese fiction. Anyways, most light novels are fluff. Power fantasy, strange ideas, comedies. If you watched Anime, a lot of them are based off light novels.

Anyways, this one wasn’t fluff. On the surface, sure. It has many of the hallmarks of those. The comedy. The fan service. But it also has a really great message.

In this world, people are born with 3 skill slots. This is what is called gamelit. The world works like it’s a video game though to the people in it, this is just how the world works. Everyone gets this skill slots and around 16. Some skills are rare than others and some take up more than 1 slot. They can make you an amazing swordsmen, an awesome mage, or the best carpenter around. They determine what you’ll be good at. Where you should focus your abilities.

But some are not seen as useful.

Our main character gets Mapping. It’s an Ultra-rare ability that takes up all three of his slots. All it does is let him have a map in his head in a 1 kilometer ring. He remembers the maps of every place he’s been. It’s not even the only skill like this. There are two others that are similar, one is even more useful, and they don’t take up all three skill slots.

Our main character dream of going on an adventure with the his childhood friend are dashed. How can he keep up with her when she got three god-tier abilities that have made her into the one of the best adventurers around.

He believes he has been dealt a flaw. That it’s worthless. And that is his mindsight. Six months later, his best friend can’t handle his negativity, his unwillingness to try. She tried to make it work, but he didn’t.

He fulfilled his own prophecy.

He falls into depression. Drink. He’s worthless. So he acts it. Then one day, a member of one of the best adventuring parties in the world shows up and says they need him.

That he has seen his ability the wrong way. His Mapping skill is what they need to conquer a dungeon. A feat no other group has managed.

With a change of his mindset, our main character takes what he saw as a negative into a positive. He changed how he viewed it. No longer a victim of circumstance, he is making his own fate. It transforms him. He won’t be a powerful fighter, a grand mage, or an inspiring priest, but that doesn’t mean he has no value.

It’s a beautiful idea, isn’t it? We make our own luck. Our own fate. We fulfill our own prophecies. Believe you’ll fail. You will.

  • Quote of the day: “If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.” –Julian Barnes
  • Here’s a great article on building an audience as a writer!
  • Never too late to enter in the weekly $5 Amazon Gift Card! Click here to enter! No purchase necessary!
  • Let’s caption an awesome pic!

Personal

Sleep Paralysis

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I am one of the thousands of people afflicted with sleep paralysis. Most nights my sleep is undisturbed. I lay down, dream, and wake up. Night after night. But sometimes when I wake up I can’t move. I dread those times.

It always happens the same way. My bedroom door opens in my dreams and a dark figure watches me from the doorway. The fear is so intense, and I can’t move. My limbs feel like they’re made of lead. I struggle, I fight, I try to cry out for help. My heart beats, rushing through me as I struggle to move. And that figure keeps staring at me, hating me.

imagesAnd then, like I had broken the cobwebs that bound me, I could move and spring up. My bedroom door will be closed, the dark figure will be gone, and the fear will bleed off me. But I can always feel it lurking. I can’t go right back to sleep or I’ll slip back into the paralysis.

I can never predict when it will strike, but I can often recognize the signs in my dreams when an attack, for lack of the proper word, comes upon me. My bedroom door opening. If that happens in my dreams, I wake up before my body paralyzes.

So if you’ve never heard of sleep paralysis, it is a little understood condition. While either falling or sleep or waking up, a person can get locked into complete muscle atonia and often have terrifying nightmares of intruders in their rooms accompanying their complete helplessness. Some attribute this to demonic activity, and after experiencing it, I can understand why. When I’m in the grip of the paralysis, and the dark figure is watching me, nothing has ever frightened me more.

The ‘intruder’ as the figure is called in medical literature, is thought to be caused by a hyper-vigilant reaction in the brain caused by finding yourself unable to move while you’re still not fully awake and causing your dreams to react accordingly. It is thought that sleep paralysis is responsible for tales of succubus, incubus, demons, UFO abduction, out-of-body experiences, and host of other, similar tales.

Science still doesn’t fully understand the causes of sleep paralysis and there are numerous theories explaining it. Luckily, it doesn’t threaten your physical health, just your sanity. Something I try and focus on when I’m in the grips of it as I lie they’re helpless. But it’s hard to remember that the figure isn’t really there.

Last year, after a particularly bad incident, I wrote a poem about it. All day the figure had haunted me and writing down my fears went a long way in shaking off the experience.