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Tabula Rasa

This entry I wrote while in San Diego last week. There's also a bonus round for this entry, which I will write as the next entry.

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So, I haven’t done anything with this site for a while. To be honest with you, I really haven’t been motivated to do any writing at all since I finally got my new desktop built, which I guess can be attributed to the fact that I had a large number of PC games that I either purchased and was unable to fulfill the requirements for, or were gifted to me without my computer specs being known by the purchaser. Regardless, I haven’t done lately some of the things i usually enjoy, such as writing for this site.

Tabula rasa, in Latin, means 'clean slate'. In my mind, my thought process works in two different ways when I’m developing ideas: I either directly focus on letting the story in question develop, or I run a story that basically just happens as it comes to me, and I take whatever works and apply it elsewhere and toss the rest. Skewed used to be my storyline for this method until I started planning it out in cards and finished the storyline to the end, at which point it had no further development use to me, and so I wiped it from the slate. Hehehee The Story was also such a platform, and it’s premature end led to me starting the Red Ice series to continue some of the ideas I was playing with there.

Perhaps its no coincidence that these platforms are all essentially fanfics: I particularly do it that way because I don’t have to spend a lot of time coming up with new characters (which, as I have mentioned before, are all in the names). Coincidentally enough, my current platform started in the exact place I’m writing this entry now: 2 years ago, here in San Diego. It shouldn’t be of any surprise to certain people that know me well that the platform is the Touhou indie game series, which, back then in the last San Diego visit, I had just been getting into, and couldn’t tear myself away from reading practically the entire Touhou wiki (wikis do that of course). 

Now while I don’t particularly intend to share any of the storylines of what’s grown on that platform over the last 2 years, but I will share a point I have found interesting for it: tabula rasa is easy to apply. There have been multiple times where I’ve run up to a brick wall in where the story has gone, some within days and some much longer, but due to some unique properties in the way Zun has presented the series, I have multiple entry points to work with, so can just wipe the slate and go again whenever I have no more room. Over the last years, its ended up wi1h be having an overall story made of about 7 or 8 different major arcs that could be tied together into the main overall story of the platform, and a bunch of smaller independent pieces. Oddly enough, the story isn’t even anywhere close to Touhou canon anymore, having become in the most recent major arc a strange amalgam of Touhou, Fallout, Stargate, my Spiral Island series, and FFXI, with Gensokyo itself destroyed and the main characters of the arc living above the earth in a ship which I named, appropriately, the Tabula Rasa.

Although now even that’s running into a wall. So I’m hoping this trip back to its source will once again inspire me with a new seed, and I can wipe clean and start fresh once more.


Date posted: 21 August, 2011
Tags: names personal writing
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