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Tag: loner

  • Is Halloween a big source of inspiration for good horror storytelling?

    Is Halloween a big source of inspiration for good horror storytelling?

    So this new Halloween paraphernalia has arrived to my country in the last recent years. It should be due to Globalization since I never grew up with this. However, it gets me in the mood for writing, and maybe it´s also because we’re close to NaNoWriMo and I´m getting excited about it as well.

    But I’m also a sucker for good horror/suspense stories.  Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first writers I was introduced to when I was a kid and loved all his stories. Then, Mr. Stephen King arrived and blew me away.

    This doesn’t mean I´m only dedicated to this genre, I love reading good thrillers and even had read a couple of romance novels long time ago. My first novel is a Thriller now (no horror elements for this one) but trying to fill it with much of suspense as possible.

    hopsa co za

    Image source: hopsa.co.za

    What I love most about the horror/suspense genre is the possibility of describing anti-heroes as main characters. I also love good suspense, page-turning books that can make me lose my sleep at night.

    I know many people who just stare me plain blankly when I mention my favoritism for this genre. I hear comments “Oh, I don´t like that” “I try to get away from that”. I guess most of my friends would fall into this category.

    However, literature, writing is universal, the ability to create powerful characters, create overwhelming settings, develop emotions, and the turn all of these elements into wonderful storytelling is art for me.

    And you what do you feel about horror/suspense stories? Why do you think many people turn away from this genre? I want to hear your thoughts!

  • Being the real ‘you’ and not the invented one…

    I´ve never been more devoted to being myself. Unfortunately, this has brought me lot of disadvantages and one of them is to be a loner.

    Few years ago, I was a complete different image from what I am now. Surrounded by friends, always with social activities, going to clubs, etc. Now I´m not a fifth of what I used to be in those years. I had my years of fun, getting drunk, and the regular things people do when they are young. But now, I don´t do that anymore, and I´m still young! But I don´t do it for one simple reason: it wasn´t me, it´s not me, and will never be me.

    www glavo net

    Image source: www.glavo.net

    But how do I know that I am better now than I was before?

    Because…

    Because if you had asked me before in those years, if I was totally happy with the way I was living my life, if I was doing what I always wanted to do, If I could feel that I could already die without regrets, mmm… the answer would had been a mess, it would had depended on the day I was, If it was a good day I would say, geez…I don´t know, if it was a bad day I would have started crying for sure.

    If you ask me that now, good or bad day, I would say yes: I´m happy and I´m living the life I always wanted to live. Period.

    The reason – I have accepted who I am: the bookworm, the girl who loves classical music and dislikes most trendy music, the nerd, the geek, the writer.

    www lightsburning com

     

    Image source: www.lightsburning.com

    I´ve been wondering why so many friends have grown so distant from me. My best friends are still there but it is not the same anymore, and it won´t ever be, because I´m not what I used to be. I´ve become too boring for them.

    However, there is always this “however” in my posts.  I don´t regret anything because for the first time I’m being myself and nothing else, not what others want me to be, not what family wants me to be, not what I think I should be in order to mingle with others. That´s the challenge, and I´m on my way to achieving it, how many people can say that?

    No matter, how people around us think, what our society waits from us, how do we think we should be, the only ever existent challenge is to be ourselves and nothing more. And if the so called friends don’t like the truly me, then maybe it is time for letting them go and let other people come in, but without ever thinking in changing again.

    And you, how truly are you? Have you invented and ´ideal you´ or are you just being the way you are meant to be, the REAL you?

    www imagesbuddy com

     

    Image source: www.imagesbuddy.com

  • BUSY LIVES ARE THE BEST!!!

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    Image source: www.stevewiens.com

    So this last month has been chaotic for me… Yep, I know, I haven’t written anything here in this period of time… What was I doing? Well just creating an online virtual store, working full time as tech writer, preparing a bachelorette party, translating some documents and the list could go for ages…

    But actually, this has been a very, VERY good month; it was all chaos but very fulfilling. I may not have achieved something big and I may be in diapers with the online virtual store, but still, things are getting accomplished little by little.

    And I even found that I want to start other projects as well, I can´t help it, I´m a constant project machine… I never get bored; there is no easy weekend or peaceful resting time… Yesterday, for example, I decided to give me a break, I switched off the computer at around 7:00 pm and decided to turn on the TV to catch a movie and just do nothing. I caught a very nice one: “Valentine´s Day” (I´m not that romantic but anyway…), but whenever there were commercial breaks I would find myself without knowing what to do…. How funny is that?… I usually watch TV while the laptop is on, or I have my tablet or cell phone near me to check stuff at the same time… I felt like I was not being productive enough with my time…. Is that lame? I really don´t know, and it wasn´t like I was disconnecting myself from the electronic world, I was in front of a good piece of electronic device: the TV!!!

    Anyway, I finally got it, I LOVE multi-tasking, I LOVE being busy; I feel that I have the chance to do so many things in one day. And this is not about dependence on technology, I really enjoy doing other physical activities such as sports, dance and shopping (come on I´m a girl, who cannot love shopping?). So I guess that just watching TV was too “easy and so simple” for me…

    So get the chance to BUSY YOURSELF, enjoy every day at the very BEST, do as MANY THINGS as you can, go to bed feeling exhausted but feeling that you made THE MOST OF YOUR DAY… life is so short… do you want to let it go WITHOUT DOING MUCH? 

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    Image source: antdagamertv.blogspot.com 

  • From Nomadic Matt blog: How to Deal with Unsupportive Friends and Family

    From Nomadic Matt blog: How to Deal with Unsupportive Friends and Family

    This time I would like to post this “post” from Nomadic Matt blog, one of the coolest guys I´ve ever read on the online travel community. This post “got me” so bad because I know that most of the people who want to have a nomadic life style, like myself,  won´t always have the support from their friends or family. So please enjoy, click on the title above and read it!

  • The reasons of being lonely….

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    Image source: micuadernitoverde.blogspot.com

    The last posts I´ve been writing about inspirational and self-improvement topics, or at least that´s what I was trying to do, and I actually have managed to evade the “happy loner” topic for a time…

    I´ve always told myself what a happy loner I am , and I am, really, but sometimes I can´t help but to question myself “why I am a loner”. I actually get this question many times from people that surround me.  I´m 32 and most people that I know are either married, getting married or in a happy relationship. Don´t take me wrong, I´m not against of relationships, but in some way I feel that I´m not ready yet….as silly as it sounds.

    I´m so focused in achieving the life of my dreams, of doing the things that I´ve always wanted to do, that I actually feel that I couldn´t do good in a relationship. I would have to achieve at least a part of the goals that I´m trying to achieve right now. It´s like needing to find myself before sharing my life with another being….

    For instance, I´m not ready yet to settle down and form a family. I want to do so many things for myself before I get to this part. I know, you may be saying, but you actually can do many of this stuff while you are in a relationship and you don´t have to sacrifice one thing for the other… well the thing is that I would actually need to find somebody who could fit in my life style…. and that´s a little hard…

    And what is my life style? Well,  I´m working to get a working -nomad-traveling life style, I haven´t got there yet but I´m on my way to do so, that would mean that, at least, this person would have to have that same kind of free spirit… am I wrong? I haven´t met anybody like that in my social environment yet…

    Su just patience, I tell myself, just enjoy the moment that I have, and take advantage of the many things that I can do while I´m in this “loner state”, after all, one has to get the most of every moment in life, right?

    What do you think? Maybe some advice would be nice 🙂

  • How late is it to change paths?

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    Image source: jenifferbarnett.edublogs.org

    Well I studied Industrial Engineering, did a Master degree on Environmental Studies, worked on a couple of companies in the production, planning and logistics area, did some consulting on Quality Management Systems, Good Manufacturing Practices, Industrial Safety. Before that, I worked in the Purchases department of another company, did some work on external trade and even took some courses on Customs regulations in my country. I also worked on project management in a software development company and even occupied a position as “E-commerce sales analyst” ah… and I also sold cars in a car dealer shop.  And I could be going on for a couple more paragraphs on the many things I did and studied in approximately 8 years. I´ve changed jobs so many times that I actually hate to fill in Resumes just because I can´t remember already many things… On the other side, I´ve seen many people who graduated with me from the University getting stable jobs and promotions and now earning good money.

    I also went on the entrepreneur side and I´m still going on it as I like it (and I see it as my main income source). But now I have settled down a little bit, I have managed to find a job that gives me some sort of “peace of conscience”, one job that doesn´t make me want to run away as fast possible from it.  I´m not looking anymore for other job opportunities in the newspaper. I´m ok where I´m, like I mentioned in a previous post, I work in Software Development Company as a Technical Writer. This is completely different from my previous job experience and educational background, but I like it, I actually like the “writer” part more than anything, and I think that I´m on the way to something good and bigger yet, but most important, I´m on the correct path…. I always knew since I was very young that this was the path… but I guess I wasn´t brave enough to look for it… I was too worried thinking on what the family and friends would think… since all the people I knew where studying these complex careers like engineerings and that stuff and getting jobs and working their ass off it…

    So is it too late for this change? Of course not! I´m actually grateful that I´m still young to do this change, I knew deeply that I wanted to this change but I always thought that I was going to do it later, in the future, you know after I got married and raised kids and that regular things that we think is what we must only strive for…

    Of course, I would have liked to have this change before the 8 years or maybe I would have liked to have chosen a different career after school… but I wouldn´t have had the experiences that have allowed me to mature and see things the way I see them now. I can´t go in the past, but I´m lucky to have reached this point in life where I definitely know where I want to head… many people live their lives without knowing it and some of them know it but won´t do anything (for me the saddest thing that could happen).

    So I´m reinventing myself, I don´t care anymore what are my degrees and post-degrees and my previous job experiences were, because none of those things make me happy. What I care is that I have a new chance now I´m willing to go with all for it!

    So how about you? Do you think that it´s too late to change careers or paths? 

  • How brave are you?

    This post is going to be a little bit different from others…

    Some time ago there was an incident in a city near mine; some guy was killed on the streets through gunshot in the middle of the day in a not so dangerous neighborhood due to some “business settlement vendetta”.  The incident was on all the local news and a security video from the street showed exactly what happened. The guy could have been saved, because you can see how the assailant starts shooting from the other side of the street first, the victim goes down to the floor without being hit first and then runs to the car of a woman and begs for her to let him in. The woman got scared and pressed on the accelerator of her car as fast as she could and disappeared. A couple of seconds later, the shooter arrived to where the guy was laying and shot him to death.

    Would you have done the same thing as the woman? Would you have let the guy inside the car to save him? I’ve always said that I would have tried to help him, opened the door and then accelerated as fast as I could. Maybe I would have gotten myself into trouble. I imagine myself already in a persecution, with the guy in the car, and the bad guys’ cars trying to intercept me.  Then, I hear some close friends saying that the woman did the best, and I can’t help but to imagine that If I were the woman I would feel so guilty that I could have saved one life, and that  I was so “chicken” that I left the poor guy to die.

    I don’t know, I would have had to be there, in the “moment”, in the “situation”, maybe given the time I would have reacted equally to the woman, maybe I would have paralyzed or maybe I would have gotten the “guts” to save him. I’ve always considered myself more courageous than the average, but I’ve never been in situations where I could actually prove myself how brave am I.

    But apart from this type of “hero braveness”, how courageous or brave am I in my ordinary life?  Because there is another type of “courageousness”, the one that make us go through our believes, no matter the difficulties we may found on the road, the one that makes us continue and gather our strengths to defeat our most simple fears.

    Was I ever fearful of leaving my routine, leaving jobs, leaving cities, leaving countries, changing my paths, or changing everything around me?  Luckily I can answer that with a No. And I know maybe I may not be the most courageous person in the world but I know that I’m brave enough to face my fears, risks, changes and the unknown…

    And you, how brave are you? I think we must always make this analysis….

    Until next post…

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    Image source: taraburner.com

  • HOW HARD IS IT TO BE PERSISTENT?

    So, PERSISTENCE, what is the definition of PERSISTENCE?

    The Oxford dictionary says

    “the fact of continuing in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition”

    Well, we can understand this meaning, it is simple, and everybody knows it, but can we understand it well enough to apply it in our lives?

    Since I remember, I use to make plans for improving my life; I would make things like these ones:

    1. Make a written, signed contract where I compromise myself with improving in all aspects: losing weight, going to the gym, learning mandarin or Italian (whatever was I felt I needed to learn at that time), read 3 books per month, learn this or that, etc.I would get to do this for a couple of days, maybe a week and then I would get weaker and I would just forget it.
    2. I would also do more detailed plans, I would write my resolutions in a paper, make detailed plans to achieve them and even set daily goals. I would buy a diary or notebook, just specifically for this purpose. I would start with all my enthusiasm and then the same would happen, I would forget it or just get consumed with the daily routine.

    So this is the summary of the dozens of times that I have tried different approaches. Some methods would work better than others, but always at the end I was swallowed with the everyday routine.

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    Image source: www.empowernetwork.com

    At this very moment, I´m with one method, I have a little notebook at work where I write the hours of the day and try to assess every hour I let pass, so I just put a happy or sad face next to it when I feel an hour has been productive or not. Until now, it´s been lasting more than any method. But, I must admit it, there are hours, even days, where I forget about this thing and I find myself filling hours with sad faces trying to remember what I had done before. I hope this method lasts….

    But, besides this, I have actually realized the following: I´ve been persisting in improving my life, trying different methods but with the same idea: improving. So I have accused myself many times of not being persistent enough and it´s is true, in some ways… after all, the most difficult thing to achieve in life for me has being persistence.

    But the idea is to persist right? And I have persisted in figuring it out these methods, even when they didn´t work, I would look for another one… little step by little step, mistake by mistake, and at the end NEVER SURRENDER…

    And more than anything never stop persisting in trying to achieve our dreams, no matter how our methods are, but never give up on our dreams, never forget them….

    I would like to finish with this quote:

    “If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of Persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked seventy times and get up off the floor saying, Here comes Seventy One!”

    DeVos, Richard

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    Image source: www.empowernetwork.com

  • HOW VIRTUAL CAN OUR EXISTANCE BE?

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    Image source: www.mondolithic.com

    So I came to this topic when I was writing my last blog. I mentioned that it´s good to have at least good Internet contacts that are “more like us” or “believers like us” so that we can feel encouraged to follow our dreams and make them come true. Then I came with a sudden question while I was writing those lines: How virtual can our existence be? I mean for a person like me, a sort of loner on the way, sometimes we tend to look for social “contact” on online communities but even from my loner perspective this has pros and cons.

    So take into account the following:

    1. Online contacts may present themselves differently. Who can assure you that everything that you know from this contact is real? How much can you trust?
    2. We are not always sincere with our online contacts, yes, as they may be disguising themselves, it is also easier for us to disguise just a little bit (even if it´s not intentional), and who is going to know if we lie about something? If we pretend to know or do something that is not real, it is plausible that our contacts in Kazakhstan, Latvia or Mozambique will find the true?…. (Please take into account that the countries just mentioned were just a random example and any coincidence…well it´s just coincidence…  :))
    3. Communication can be totally misinterpreted, when we chat, email or write messages with some virtual friend, no matter the quantity of emoticons we use or how well we think before writing something, there´s always the chance that we could be misinterpreted, or the other way around, maybe we´re reading something in between lines that was never the intention of the sender…
    4. These online contacts or virtual friends may not be able to help us when we have a situation in the physical or real world, they may motivate us or write good encouraging things, but the extent of their help is limited, you know that…Image

    5. So if making friends is not your best attribute (like me 🙂 hence the loner tag..) Then remember, your virtual being with many virtual friends has to have a limit, prudence is the word, because you will never know what the real intentions of others might be…so prudence my dear friends, besides from that, enjoy all you online friends and community, be virtual but not that virtual… 🙂

  • FIND THE “RIGHT PEOPLE” TO BE WITH YOU

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    So this post may be a continuation or probably a contradiction of the one called “You are the result of the 5 people that hang out with you the most: WRONG”, but don’t be disappointed, this won’t be more ramblings about the same topic but rather a different and more interesting point of view.

    So in that previous blog, in summary, we said:

    –          One has to fight to find their uniqueness and not engage in the same behaviour as the people surrounding them.

    –          One should define its own character so well, that we’re not influenced by those traits we don’t believe in, especially from our friends or family.

    Don’t worry, I still agree with this and I’m not going to argue it, BUT – always the big BUT – there is some true in the fact that you must look forward to be surrounded by people like you; and I don’t mean people that think, act or behave exactly like you, but people that intrinsically have the same BELIEFS as you. Yep, that’s the word I was struggling to find when I was thinking, this afternoon, about writing this blog.

    If you are a true believer that with perseverance you can make your dreams come true, no matter what dreams are; then it’s actually discouraging to be with people who think that you are such a dreamer, or don’t get your point in focusing in something that you probably won’t achieve according to them.

    Well, I know sometimes our closer friends and relatives will be this crashing- dreamer types and that we won’t able to get far away from them. But we must look for and try to find those people (or at least internet contacts) that have our same BELIEFS, so that we feel energized, and motivated. Because sometimes it’s not enough to be our own drivers and motivators, sometimes we need a hand or a little push.

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    So if you just spotted somebody that is a BELIEVER like you, get the chance to know that person, you may find a good friend in him or her, and who knows, maybe the path to achieving everything you always wanted to will be easier with some support by your side.

    You noticed that I mentioned “Internet contacts” before, well actually as a loner,     I´m not the “expert”  in giving advice of how to make friends, but I found that the least I could do was engage on online communities, or blogs with people that help me feel encouraged to follow my dreams (I may explore this topic deeper in a future post) but If I spot some positive thinker and believer like me in my neighborhood, I may introduce myself…

    So what do you think? Do you think it is good to find BELIEVERS like you?