Espresso Love
As of June 11th, I’ve finished the first draft manuscript document of Espresso Love at 168,000 words. At the time, I was absolutely elated. I flew off my seat and ran around and must have did a victory dance but since I was so hyper I might have knocked over a cup in the process and proceeded to drop my phone and slip on my T.V. remote and forgot to the count the number of times I spun around while I was dancing – I’m kidding but that’s what it felt like, in a way. I was hysterical and posted all over my social media accounts if you are following me – which you totally should by the way. But nevertheless, nothing feels better than finishing this.
As of date, Espresso Love is my longest, most ambitious project and probably the first one that has been seen through from beginning to end, without ever stopping and finishing it strong. The last section still needs a bit more editing but the last pages truly drive the heart of the story home. I implore you, I beg of you to read the entire novel from beginning to the end when it’s up because the ending was something that made me tear up while I was writing it, then when I was re-reading it and then when I simply just thought about it. I can GUARANTEE that it will be inspiring and touching. My passion is to touch lives and inspire people through my work and I really think Espresso Love has what it takes, and even more than what I had been expecting. The best feeling comes from CREATING SOMETHING from NOTHING, BREAKING your own RECORDS and ACCOMPLISHING your LANDMARK GOALS, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, INSPIRING and CHANGING LIVES.
The journey I’ve been through in the past few years through my creative work has been absolutely Amazing and I’m certain there’s more to come. Through taking a stab at a cell phone novel as a teen, it sparked a whole “movement” and brought together a community of young people all around the world, who grew to become really close with one another, supporting each other in the daily trials of life, sharing many memories and laughs and calling each other family, forming a creative outlet that they normally wouldn’t have. Then onwards from there, just hearing that my writing, my worldviews and philosophies, and my music has blessed people with new insights, courage, strength, and even saving people from depression or suicide…. it’s this journey of lives influencing lives, that really is what’s important here. We are in the business of inspiration. The communication between hearts and souls and lives and the fruits that come from it. It has been amazing.
Finishing off Espresso Love, drives that home, because this novel contains so much of my sometimes harsh criticisms of the world, but also more tender aspects and philosophies of life, death, and love. In fact through writing this, I’ve discovered myself even more than before. In the beginning, the novel started off as a solely system, society, externally focused piece but eventually it started “going down the rabbit hole” into the questions of self, identity, what it means to be human or what it means to love and feel emotion. It ends off in a powerful statement about our value and worth in this world, as tiny sometimes insignificant existences. I’m tremendously proud of where this project has ended up. There’s lots of editing and rewriting to be done, but this is something I really wish everyone can read and take something from it. I myself am still learning from the novel and what I’ve written.
For now, I need to rest and recuperate. I’ve poured my heart and soul and constantly grilled my mind for the past six months? (Since late December) into this novel, and it has exhausted me completely yet, it had become my life. It become this frame I was looking at life and living life through. I was the characters in the novel and I was those worldviews. This also marks the peak of my current writing ability because it combined the very utterly conscious determination of highly focused writing, planning, critical and deep thinking – even working with a quota of 1000 words per day, which picked up to 2000-5000 words per day in the last two weeks of the novel manuscript – with the instinctive, intuitive subconscious flow. I tried to balance and optimize these two things. I would think as much as I could outside of actual writing and when I wrote I let it bleed and often times what came out was enlightening to myself. (I’ll post my mindbleed exercise below)
Anyway I’m on a break from long term novel writing now. The novel will be continually posted every 3 days, until the whole novel is up. At that point, I may begin to do edits and rewriting. But I need at least a month or two off time. During this time however, I’m writing short stories to keep my writing muscles working and to also put together a collection as well as have pieces to submit to literary magazines and contests?
Below is a link to my short story collection, which contain literary fiction pieces (two atm, more coming) which will address a variety of things of the human condition, identity, life and death, and so on. I hope these will speak to you or inspire you as well:
Espresso Love also was featured by Wattpad on their site and tweeted about, and possibly future exposure. I thank Wattpad for this opportunity. It was a great choice to get involved in their huge community with my prose work and has been rewarding. I’m excited to see what holds for the future! Help share the novel and retweet this: https://twitter.com/wattpad/status/478599567542202368
After finishing Espresso Love, it was also just in time for World Cup season! I was SO excited and felt SO free after writing. Best feeling ever, and totally completely relaxed. That was the best day I had ever in a long time. And I’ve become a total football nerd, as if a switch had been flicked and I was all of a sudden an expert. Note I never watch sports, except for the World Cup. The kind of intensity and spirit each national team and its fans brings is entirely flooring, and the matches have so much speed and heat in them, it never gets boring. The size of the field, the speed of the ball 
and the determination of the players you can feel it all, the aura is immense. Anyway, the matches were a bit unpredictable and unexpected so far. Really interesting to watch. Spain suffered a humiliating game, but Netherland played really well so they deserved it. England and Italy was a thrill to watch, I had such high expectations for this match and it didn’t disappoint. However, I was cheering for England, and they had amazing performance, really aggressive in offense and solid in defense, but even with all the close shots, it was a matter of luck and it was just a one point difference. I liked their play. France and Honduras was amazing to watch too because despite the Honduras physical aggressiveness, French play was so strategic, calm and efficient with the right amount of burst when the window of opportunity was there. Benzema was brilliant. Argentina also weren’t as exciting to me personally but they had their chance to shine still. Messi is still attracting attention. Japan vs Ivory Coast was like a battle of size and height, which Japan eventually lost no doubt. However, their play was really good and you could see their effort. of course, I have tremendous Japanese spirit, so naturally I was disapointed and felt bad for them because of their effort. But it was quite clear about the differences between the African players and the Asian players… ! To wrap up today, Portugal was absolutely shaming. 4-0 loss to Germany. The Germans are strong no doubt, and their team play was spectacular, however, I wasn’t expecting Portugal to limp away with a nil. It was as if they had no defense, and the goalie had been bribed or something. Ronaldo was way too cocky in the beginning and he was just recovering from an injury, why does the entire team depend on him? One star player cannot defeat an eleven player star team, someone said. I sort of have a thing against bad team play and star player focuses, its a team sport. On the other hand I’m looking forward to Brazil vs Mexico and Japan vs Greece, because I’m rooting for Japan to win this one for sure. And Brazil I need to see how they do firsthand. Neymar is getting attention but I hope he’s not going to be cocky! I personally don’t want to see Brazil win the Cup because it’s their home turf, and I like irony 😛
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Here’s a “mindbleed” blurb from FB I wrote.
Sometimes it’s just necessary to not think – sit in front of this glaring screen in strange hours in the morning, no time to even make coffee or pour a tea, and just bleed. Hemingway once said that, “just bleed”. And probably a whole lot of other writers. A lot of writing for someone who’s naturally inclined – maybe “talented” is something people would say to describe those writers – comes subconsciously like instinct. This is no doubt necessary, but perhaps most people don’t ask why this happens. Why is it that artists are talented in one way, why are musicians talented in another, why do writers work that way?
Writing is like the art of recording the self onto paper. It’s the most direct way, for the most part, there’s no true need to re-interpret or reconstruct. It is just the conscious and the subconscious and the unconscious all converging like a flow of rivers into the ocean. This is the ocean of writing.
If you can write fast enough, the mind directly flows onto the page without even a single conscious thought about it, like I’m doing now. This is a remarkable and extraordinary feat if you think about it. In visual arts, you have to sit there, visualize what you’re going to do with your paintbrush or your pencil or your tablet for that matter, and come up with the concept. Music is perhaps the same way, there is improvisation but the mind has to translate the feeling, the instinct, your skills, style and rhythms and so on into physical movements and operations, whether you are playing a piano, a guitar or moving your diaphragm and mouth to sing.
However, this is not the case with writing. It’s possible to just bleed, at least for the first draft or a ramble like this one. But the question remains, how come it is possible for my mind, to bleed like that? It’s not possible for every person, at least as instinct, and people will relate this to “talent”. But fundamentally, the word for it shouldn’t be talent. Talent will put labels on people and channel things into strict rigid boxes like cheap plastic packaging for action figures or metal shipment containers on a freighter. Talent takes on the connotation that it is only available to exclusive people and select groups. This is not quite true.
When it comes to bleeding, it comes from the conscious, subconscious and so on. But essentially, it is an out of body experience. You disconnect your mind with your body. While the mind resides in the body, it takes on physical mechanical functions, like as my fingers here are typing incessantly, typing up a storm, these are all like the workings of a machine. The mind might work while you close your eyes and block out the influences of the surroundings, or perhaps works better hungry or might feel sluggish when full. Maybe it’s only when you have music that you can think. This is while the mind resides in the body.
Writing right now is different, my mind is not in my body no longer. I’ve placed it on a platter on my fingers that are doing the typing, and maybe am placing it onto the screen directly. Smearing my brains across the screen – pretty picture isn’t that? But what I’m saying is, what I’m doing here, my mind is outside of me. That’s how it can bleed, that’s how “natural talent” comes about. When you’re able to truly remove your mind and let your body simply become a conduit you do two things. First, the converging of the conscious, subconscious and unconscious happens because your mind isn’t looking at itself inside a room with four walls, in the black cave of your skull, it’s looking at everything from the outside with a certain aspect of objectivity. It can see all conscious, subconscious, unconscious levels of thought at the same time, while not truly thinking about it. It perceives, it sees, but doesn’t think.
Thinking is what you do outside of writing. It is like I said, a mechanical process almost. You can really read up, research, reference literary greats, history, science, mythology, psychology, philosophy, all kinds of influences and inspiration that evokes in you some kind of intense passion and sudden eureka-moments, but these all have concrete substance to it. It is a conscious and hardy attempt at connecting the bridge between the mind to the greater vast landscape of the Spiritus Mundi (the land of the free World Spirit: the collective of human wisdom, spiritual or mythical realm, creative imagination, intrinsic archetypal form, metaphor and symbolism and so on). These attempts won’t go very far. These provide the premise and foundations, firepower and cannon fodder, the potential energy needed for the move, but it doesn’t actually move. The flow and the bridge is only half constructed. The better constructed it is, the easier it will be, but the bridge doesn’t need to be fully constructed. It’s when you take your mind out of your body, when it can connect naturally to this realm and things pass from one end to the other.
Of course, this isn’t to say you don’t need actual literary skill. The skill comes hand in hand, and becomes part of the conduit, just like your body, your fingers that type, your hand that writes, and your thought-foundation you have built as mentioned before. These things become the pipe through which the current passes. The more well-developed these elements are, the stronger the result. Our development of our body, whether it is physical training and maintaining a healthy body, or actual knowledge, skill and practice is the only thing we can focus on intentionally. But the content and the flow, yes, those are from the conscious, subconscious, unconscious in objectivity, propelled by a force from the Spiritus Mundi.
Now bleeding from the out of body mind considered as “natural talent” is an important element, but when one and two come together, that is a masterpiece. The power of truly mastering the self by flowing through the pipe you’ve so carefully constructed and developed. And then by having knobs and switches on which you can control the throttle and the pressure of each nozzle, organizing subconscious things in an utterly conscious way. When the land of the Collective Spirit and the physical world, the mind-talent and the physical body meet, it’s not purely bleeding nor is it purely academic, not pure talent nor pure skill, not pure imagination nor pure arithmetic, but it becomes creative intellectual work, which is the highest form of human capability and intelligence. Through this collision, you will achieve the greatest exhilaration and triumph, the greatest sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
End bleed.
(8 minutes 39 seconds, I have no idea what I just wrote)
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And a quote from Mumford for some Espresso Love-esque insight:
“So strictly did Plato sort out the classes in his ideal city, the philosophers, the warriors, the craftsmen, and the husbandmen, that he returned to the order of an insect community, whose social adaptations are sealed in biological structures that have remained unchanged for tens of millions of years. What he did not suspect apparently was that this geometric heaven might, in terms of man’s suppressed potentialities, turn out to be a living hell.
Till now mankind has been saved from Plato’s dream by its technological innocence – and impotence. But we today, who have the means of achieving Plato’s ambition without yet having plumbed its horrible implications, would do well to pause and examine the prospect. IF WE CONTINUE IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ALONG THE LINES WE ARE NOW FOLLOW, without changing our direction, lowering our rate of speed, and re-orienting our mechanisms TOWARD MORE VALID HUMAN GOALS, the end is already in sight. Cybernetics, medical psychiatry, artificial insemination, surgery and chemotherapy (*I would insert: clandestine systematic conditioning*) have given the RULERS OF MEN THE POWER TO CREATE OBEDIENT AUTOMATONS, UNDER REMOTE CONTROL, with just enough mind left to replace the machine when its cost would be prohibitive.
…
Another century of such ‘progress’ may work irreparable damage upon the human race. Instead of deliberately creating an environment …to bring out the maximum number of human potentialities and the maximum amount of significant complexity, our present methods would smooth out differences and reduce potentialities, to CREATE A STATE OF MINDLESS UNCONSCIOUSNESS, in which most of man’s characteristic activities would be performed only by machines. Even if the infamous nuclear and bacteriological weapons that already threaten wholesale extermination remained unused, historic man, he who lives in cultural time and space, WHO REMEMBERS AND ANTICIPATES AND MAKES CHOICES, WOULD DISAPPEAR.”
– “The City in History” by Lewis Mumford