“A reclusive, gifted, and ambitious young gamer tries to become the first North American player to secure a world championship and realize what success means to them”—this is the logline for a novel that I’ve wanted to write about since 2018. It was an idea birthed not only from a personal love of video games and a fervent admiration for professional esports (fun fact: quite a number of esports players do not like it when you spell out the term with a hyphen or capitalize the first S—I reckon that it’s a “Gif”-”Jif” sort of peeve) but also to introduce the general public to that niche community by portraying the world in a digestible manner. Basically, I wanted to write the Rocky sports drama equivalent for esports (and I still want to).

I’m confident that writing this sort of thing is achievable since the best ideas tend to be stubborn ideas. Now, I’m pretty sure that, at the moment, I’m a pretty mild-mannered individual as I was back then in 2018. Sure, I’m still an unpublished writer but I’m confident in my writing abilities and I’m certain that what I come up with can’t be too bad (Ready Player Two currently exists so I’m very secure about my writing at the moment). But, despite all of that, a simple question still persists—one that you might be asking at the moment: why didn’t you start writing it back then? And the answer to that is not so simple.

I was very ambitious as a writer without discipline back in undergrad when I first came up with the idea for this novel. So, naturally, that meant that I wanted to write the damned thing in many different ways—comic book scripts, a connected short stories collection, one-hour show scripts for a limited series—all of which led to nowhere. I guess looking back at it now, I wasn’t as confident as I was back then since I did everything except attempt to write it as a novel. Among my more writerly peers, I was not as well read as them and heavily relied on my abnormal—I use this word because it seems that a lot of people that I’ve met and the majority of people close to me—ability to analyze and apply writing techniques from other creative mediums such as TV shows, film, and video games to formal prose. Now, I choose to blame it on not going against my parents’ wishes and work on tending to my mental health as well as inherent laziness on my part. But, I do think that there was a greater issue underneath all of that: I didn’t have anything to say with the story I wanted to tell.

And, I mean, that makes sense for a most college students, I reckon. The majority of people that I know in that age range have only learned how to playfully do wrong in between times of study and being poor. Sure, you might have a tale about nothing where you hooked up with a co-worker at what your friends called “The Speakeasy”, but there probably wasn’t much time for deep reflection. That sort of thing isn’t as simple as a lot of movies would make it seem, finding oneself doesn’t just happen on one fateful day and then you’ve tapped into some voice of introspection. It happens without you knowing, over time, like a malignant tumor. And even then, when you think that you’ve reached a point in your life where you think you can decipher all of life’s mysteries—the key to happiness, the path to success, the necessity of pain and chaos, etc.—you may still find yourself tongue-tied.

But now that I’ve had some time to address a lot of my own personal issues and made the right choices which have led me to this point in my development as a creative writer, it makes me feel warm inside to have some semblance of confidence to say that I’m ready to hit a reset button and face what was once a fear for me.

6.24 Danger Reset Button by Tyrone B.

A bit of a short post this week—sorry to those who want an apology. But, yeah, according to my calendar, I’ll be drafting actual prose and not scrawling down pre-writing notes this coming Monday and I will mostly be silent about it until the first draft is completed. There’s no hard date for when the first manuscript will be done but I’m aiming for sometime in early July before my birthday.

Other than that, weekly posts will still be happening. With the Academy Awards coming around the corner, you can probably expect a few posts regarding that within the near future. As always, thanks for reading and have a lovely weekend.

Oh, and leave a comment underneath this post, I’d love to hear about what questions you all might have about the novel project (it might be cool to collect them and compile them for an eventual celebration post for the first draft) or maybe leave a request for a future post. And, with all of that said, I wish you all the best and thanks again for reading.

Thank you for reading this edition of The Morning Owl. If you liked what you saw here, please leave a like, subscribe, leave a comment, and share this newsletter. Until we meet again, do take care.

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