This is MJ Muñoz. You are listening to Story Over Everything, the chronicles of an author, artist, and analyzer.
The date is October 7th, 2022.
Later, I will be brainstorming a creation story for my universe, which is like a combination of the chronicles of Narnia and Marvel Comics.
My prompt is, What was before Dark?
But first, let's track my progress.
Starting off with the work in progress, what is the status of my current projects, progress made, length of time on the back burner, etc.
So, active projects. I've got my five books of the Grow Bug series planned out.
Manuscripts completed. Books one and books two.
Or, books one and two. So that means I have three more to complete.
Drafts completed for three through five. I have zero completed drafts.
Drafts to start, I need to do books three, four, and five.
Outlines started. I sort of have an outline for book three.
It's more of like an outline paragraph written for the book, and I really like it.
And I don't know how it's going to affect four and five, so I think I'm going to finish.
I wanted to do like a macro or like an overall outline for the whole series, but that's just...
I'm going to switch things up and not do it that way.
So, next thing to do is I need to outline or outlines to start our books four and five, because three is basically started.
So I just need to do it all the way through, push it all the way through.
But my next action from September 27th, 2022, was to make text descriptions and thumbnail sketches for all 32 pages.
I did not do that. I did not do that.
Actions taken by 1007282, that was me.
Or, well, I progressed towards the end. I made a copy of the text document and formatted it for the descriptions and sketches.
So that's something. At least the format ends out of the way.
So that's my final excuse when I open up the document again to not just start in on writing those descriptions.
And then eventually after the descriptions are all written, I'll start making the sketches.
That's what I plan to do.
And my next action would be to make descriptions and sketches for Grow Book One, which I...
This is the second week that will be my task.
And then I need to follow up on research crowdfunding, make crowdfunding proposal,
create it for myself and then send that to my artist as well.
Send the sketches and descriptions to the artist and then negotiate rates and terms.
And as far as things that are on the back burner, basically more than milk is on the back burner. It's been for two weeks.
The next action would be to publish...
Well, the next action to publish the book would be to get the text descriptions and thumbnails to the artist for that.
And just keep pushing it along step by step.
And then the fantasy dragon book, it's basically on hold.
So I'm not going to keep a ticker going on that for how long that's been on the back burner because it's not really in the back burner.
It's, I don't know, in the pantry. It's in the shelf. I don't know where it is.
But as far as completed works, I did not get to any writing or drawing this week, creative writing that is, or creative drawing.
I did other drawings, but not creative stuff.
And then lessons learned from the stuff that I wrote, or sorry, from the stuff that I analyzed this week,
because I did analyze Dawn Brothers 31, Futopi 10, and Geats 5, which those are shorthand terms.
If you really want to know, you can look in the show notes and you can see it's Avatar Sentai Dawn Brothers.
Futopi is the whole title, but then the common writer, Geats. These are Japanese shows. Two are tokusatsu, one is anime.
I'm not going to go over what those are again. You can click on them and find out.
In my watching and analyzing of these shows, I went ahead and made segments of what I've learned
to include here in this episode. So I'm learning to leverage content I made in one place that can be reused for another place.
So I'm going to go ahead and be quiet for a little bit and drop in my audio recordings,
and then I will come back on the other side and we'll get into the next segment.
For Dawn Brothers Episode 31, this is my lessons learned section.
I need to learn to be a funny writer. It seems like Inoue treats writing like a game in some ways.
He plays with the structure of the show, the characters, and the situations in such a way that it is entertaining,
even when it isn't serious or important. The fact is, this is fiction, and while stories matter,
the only ones that count are the ones that stick with you.
I think all the fun I have had with Dawn Brothers will cause it to stick in my mind for a long time.
From Futopi Episode 10, what lessons did I learn?
It doesn't matter that not everyone will like everything in your story.
There are some things that people will just roll with. This is me rolling with the ridiculous Brachiosaurus.
I do not like it one bit, but I am rolling with it. A much larger audience is too.
The manga is still ongoing and I am actively enjoying the anime adaptation of Futopi.
Be wary of making a cast so big and a scope so small that people get shoved aside.
Still, I will not argue with the success. And I wonder, is it artistic integrity to do something you want to do as the author
I know that I am not the only one who is concerned about that.
even if the audience will think it is dumb? Maybe. It is definitely gutsy, and I do admire that.
I am concerned about the fact that people will think that I am a dumb person.
In other words, be bold and make choices you like even if some of your audience will balk at them.
I am concerned about the fact that I am a dumb person.
Be wary of making a cast so big and a scope so small that people get shoved aside.
I suppose the real lesson is making sure your cast and setting match each other well.
My main problem is that I feel like a lot was left out of this episode.
What could have been done differently to make it work better?
The format of the show is to move briskly, endear the heroes to the audience, and introduce cool toys.
The game that was the setting of this story and single episode could have been made into an arc of a few episodes.
We could have spent time with each team figuring out the game.
In a book, that would be no issue.
You take the time, you have more chapters, the final page or word count matters less than the restrictions of a 22 minute show of around 50 episodes.
Still, I could have...
Whoa.
Still, it could have been done. I was not saying I could have done it better, but still, it could have been done better.
To put it simply, the author is in control and can right-size the elements so they all flow well.
We have to make choices and stick to them, even if it is hard.
Alright, so like I said, that's what I learned.
And now moving on into the Fabula Ex Machina section.
My prompt is to make a creation story for my superhero universe and to approach it with the question, what was before Dark?
And I'm going to give myself about five more minutes on this to kind of spitball.
And then I'll give myself five minutes of trying to make this happen and we'll see what happens.
I'll probably write it down later after and I'll just release the audio.
And then during the week, I'll listen back to it and write down some incoherent and coherent from the brainstorm.
I think doing it like that makes a lot more sense.
So here we go.
First of all, why am I asking what came before the dark?
Because in my understanding of the biblical narrative, there was darkness first and then light was withdrawn from darkness.
And I don't know if there's like a linguistic link to that, but or would be light and Hosek is darkness.
And it's interesting because like Hodesh is new.
So I don't know if there's a link between Hodesh and Hosek at all.
But anyway, it is interesting that the narrative, the biblical narrative starts off with darkness is the first thing and then God brings light into that.
And yeah, I'm very much playing with the idea of my the God in my universe instead of being a heavenly father, being a heavenly mother.
I think that could be a lot of fun. I think it'd be a neat little twist on things.
I'm keeping things fairly traditional and like I don't really plan on quoting biblical texts in in any of the stories that I do.
But like with this creation story, I would end up doing something like paraphrasing.
I guess you could say I'm kind of writing, rewriting Genesis in, you know, for this story universe.
But yeah, I think that's what I'm doing. So we'll see.
I think it could be kind of fun to make God a woman or heavenly mother instead of heavenly father, because, you know, if you understand theology properly, at least.
Yeah, I think if you understand theology properly, there's no issue with the spirit being manifest in either way.
And there are masculine and feminine traits to God, even from the Hebrew, the like the shekinah, as some people call it, the shekinah.
It has it has a feminine, it has feminine attributes and the words used to describe it are feminine because Hebrew is a gendered language.
And there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing weird about that. It's just it is what it is.
So anyway, yeah. What came before the darkness? What was before dark?
I kind of want to say that.
Before light.
Was pulled out of darkness.
Now, this is making me get all not metaphysical, but like into thinking about physics.
The fact that light is a wave and a particle and it's a form of energy and matter doesn't need to have light to operate.
Technically, you have matter and energy and light is like an energy and matter is, you know, physical force or not a physical force, but a physical entity.
And I believe the theory on this is correct. And it's the theory behind like, you know, cold vision, I think is what they call it, where you can convert matter into energy.
So there's like a if you had the proper machine, you could turn a small amount of matter, a very small amount of lead or clay or dirt or rock or whatever, into a ton of energy if you had the proper mechanism to do it.
And that's because matter and energy are different classes of substances or whatever.
And you can't destroy them or create them within our closed universe. And you can only rearrange them and the energy can be transmitted into matter and have an effect on it.
And matter can be acted upon by energy and have an effect.
I don't know. I don't know quite how to say that.
But like if you have a piece of wood and you burn it with fire, which first of all, what is fire and where is fire come from? I don't know. It blows my mind.
But then the all that's left is ash because as the heat as the fire works through it, it breaks down the physical matter.
But that matter is not destroyed. It's broken down into the ash that's remaining there.
And it also turns into the smoke and the vapor and the soot or not the soot, but the what do you call those things like the embers and things like that. That all burns off.
So you're transforming the matter by application of energy, which is, you know, it's the wood and the heat or the fire.
And that's really curious to me. So I wonder if maybe going back to the, you know, what it says in Genesis, if the idea is that light or energy was converted out of matter.
And that's God created matter. And I'm talking about like, you know, the God of the Bible.
But to go into the God of my universe, I think why I have the question and the prompt being related to why was there darkness first or what came before the dark is because I want to emphasize the fact that
the darkness and emptiness of whatever the world, the planet or the universe or whatever it was, was God was created. God or not God was created. God was in existence. God.
Gosh, this is so hard.
Especially because I'm trying to sort out like my theology and thoughts that I have about God from how I want to write this.
Maybe I need to define my terms first. God exists outside of time and space and time and space, time, space.
What's the third element? Space, time and matter. Space is matter. Space is matter spread out.
Well, I promise I'm not high right now. This is just me thinking about things, think about the way the universe works.
So there's a really cool insight to from the Torah scroll. It starts.
It's the Torah. The first word is Bereshit. And Bereshit means well, it means a lot of things.
But the important part is the first letter is a bait and the bait is closed on three sides and open on one side.
And an idea shared about that is that nobody can know or nobody in this world knows what came before the beginning.
And that's because the way the Hebrew reads that open space, it's closed and boxed in on the other sides.
And you have to read facing away from that. So it's like that open space is an opening that dumps you into this world basically and puts you into the respective of this world.
And that's all you get to see. You don't get to see what's before because it's closed off to you, which I think is pretty cool.
Anyway, I'm thinking there's this concept that, you know, God cannot be contained by the universe because the universe, all matter in space and time, matter, space time.
Does that make sense? Anyway, exists within God. But God is a spirit.
So how can this spirit have physicality or, you know, matter within it? But there must be some way, right?
Before the dark, there was a queen with no people, a mother with no child.
A one without another. She was alone.
And in her solitude, she opened a void. And the void was filled with darkness and the darkness with potential.
To the darkness, she turned her mind and filled it with every dream, every possibility, every joy, every sorrow, every nightmare.
Joy and sorrow.
Victory and defeat.
Comfort and pain.
All in unity.
Tears filled the darkness.
And the queen removed her crown and started to speak.
Okay, so I went back and I made the notes already, so I'm just going to include it right away.
Before the Dark was written on October 9, 2022. It's 89 words long. It took me about five minutes, sort of, once I started actively just writing it.
And here it goes.
Comfort and pain. All in unity.
Tears filled the darkness and the queen removed her crown and started to speak.
It's time for me to get out of here. This is MJ. I leave you with peace and blessings.
I'm signing off and I ask you to go over to MJMunoz.com and check out all my work, my analysis, art and fiction.
And yeah, I would appreciate it if you would check that out and see all the stuff I'm working on and keep up with the progress I make.
I will continue to release story over everything and share my progress with you.
I'm really hoping and praying that doing this is going to spur me on to be a more committed, more powerful, I guess, more profound, no, no, no, profound, prolific creator.
And yeah, I'm really hoping that.
Actually, a friend recommended me a book about alter egos.
And I'm kind of thinking my alter ego is Star Ishina Mori because, and I'll talk more about him later,
but I heard about a certain moniker he was given or title he was given and I thought, I like that title.
I kind of want to be that for books. And I've mentioned that before in passing over the years.
But maybe Ishinomori is my alter ego that I want to assume for when I'm delving into these creative works like this.
So anyway, maybe I'll share about that because that's something not specifically from the world of storytelling,
but it is something related to creative work that could be useful or beneficial. So anyway, again, this is MJ signing off.
I leave you with peace and blessings.