The hero of the 7th Province has a choice.  He either rebels against his close friend and former mentor, or join him in taking over the world.  Each choice ends in war.  That’s a tough place to be.  Is there a correct choice?  For the hero I’m not sure.  As a writer, the choices that each character makes, ultimately mine, is a crap shoot.

I love that.

Even though I’ve plotted my whole novel, each day I wrote brought new discoveries and challenges that made me giddy.  I’m never sure how things were to happen.  I just know they had to happen.  As a result, writing my fantasy was a huge adventure.

Is rebelling bad?

I have a secret.  It’s one of my favorite things about myself.  I don’t get along well with authority figures.  That doesn’t bode well since my day job is encrusted in a corporate empire.  The funny thing is they have a lot of propaganda that emphasizes their business values.  I won’t get into the hypocrisy of it.

Is rebelling not a good thing?

A parent tells a child to kiss Uncle Louie.  Child scrunches her little face and shakes her head.  Parents eggs the child on, saying Uncle Louie loves the child.  Child pouts her lips, turns, runs toward her parent’s leg, and grasps with all her might.  Parent gets upset, unhinges the child, pushes her to Uncle Louie, and forces her to kiss him on the cheek.  (I credit this example to my best friend.)

Is this wrong?

Hell yeah.

The parent just took the child’s power away, forced her to kiss a strange man, despite her not wanting to.  If Uncle Louie were a child molester, the parent just punched a large hole in the child’s ability to resist the attack.  In the child’s mind love is associated with force.  And we wonder why some women stay with men who batter them.

What if the child was just being a brat?

Firm discipline should take place.  You decide what firm is.  That’s different in each culture, society, family and individual.  But in the example above, the child is not being a brat.

Teaching a lot of adolescent kids made me realize one thing.  Almost every single one exerts their own independence.  Every parent exerts their control in an attempt to guide them.  It’s the nature of the ocean, the ebb and flow.  Parents think their kids are being a pain in the ass.  Offsprings think their parents are being assholes.  What more could you ask for in a relationship?

Think of a pendulum searching for their own center.

Parents often ask me to infect a behavioral change.  But that’s an impossible task.  All I can do is mentor them without limitation.  Tom Cruise taught me that.

He was on Inside the Actor’s Studio.  A great show by the way.  He said that his mother never limited him in what he did.  She was watchful, but allowed him to explore the world.  Now he’s some actor making at least twenty million dollars per movie, chump change.

As you sit in your day job, and if it’s not the place you want to be, then what are you doing about it?

See part 1 to this article.

To rebel or not rebel.  That is the question.

The hero in my book is confronted with a choice.  His close friend and former mentor wants to brutally take over the world.  The hero is given the safe and easy position of being the right hand man.  Doing so would kill tens of thousands of lives through war.  Rebelling against his mentor would kill tens of thousands of lives through war.  Probably more.  Nice choice, huh?

I was watching a documentary called Slanted Screen. It chronicled the stereotypical and racial barriers Asian actors have to go through and endure in order to be successful in Hollywood.  I enjoyed the documentary, but I have a serious problem with it.  More on that later.

The main message was rebel.

One of the main reasons Asians are not seen as much in Hollywood is that acting, singing, dancing, the arts, are not considered practical choices of occupation.  I know.  My family detested my decision to study acting, and at times isn’t the most positive when it comes to my success in writing.

Actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa has been in tons of movies such as Mortal Kombat, Rising Sun with Sean Connery and  Wesley Snipes, and in upcoming movie Tekken.  The list is just huge.  He said something that I connect to.  If your heart is in the arts, and your family doesn’t support it, then don’t listen to your family.

Rebel.

I think too much in life we succumb to the norm.  Afraid of marching to our own drummer.  Wary of listening to our hearts let alone follow it.

I wrote a post about themillion dollar question. It asked, if you were guaranteed to make a million dollars a year, what would you do?  Does it match the work you’re doing now?  If not, can you spend an hour a day, five days a week on it?  If that’s too much time, then reduce it to 45 minutes a day, five days a week.  Or 30 minutes, five days a week.  Four days.  Three.  Just start.

What happens, if you truly love it, or like it, is you’ll naturally spend more time on it.  You’ll sacrifice precious things like hours talking shit in the bar, or watching television.  Have your own vision.  It happened to me.  I started writing around five hours a week.  Then it grew to ten.  Suddenly, I was spending an average of 15 hours a week writing.  I loved it.

We all have bills.  We have to eat.  Take care of our families.  Have laundry that we have to wash on the rocks by the river bed.  After we clothespin the laundry on the clothesline, what do we do?  We sit down on the couch and watch TV.  We watch reality TV.  Watch others chase, attack their dreams.  We see a lot of them succeed.  Then we go to bed, sleep, wake up the next morning, and start the circle all over again.

This is called complaining, playing the victim, blaming things outside of ourselves, when it is us who stopped us from chasing our dreams initially.  And that was the problem with Slanted Screen.  A lot of people interviewed said being Asian made it hard to succeed in Hollywood.  Really?

Have you heard of a small guy namedBruce Lee?

Rebel.