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Why Do I Write?

Categories: Characters Drawing Jake Rambling Writing
September 5th, 2010 by Jake

Why do I write/draw?

Spar­ing you the tedious expe­di­tion of my own his­tory of writing/drawing or the his­tory of this par­tic­u­lar ques­tion, the answer is sim­ple:  It makes me feel like I am a god.

When I write and draw, I am cre­at­ing some­thing.  That act of cre­ation, how­ever small it may be, is my own in that moment.  Through writ­ing and draw­ing I can cre­ate new worlds and new life.  One could say that from our per­spec­tive I am merely putting things on paper, but the feel­ing I get when I “put those things on paper” is a hint that some­thing exists beyond what I’ve laid down.  Even if it is intrin­si­cally tied to the paper I put it on, the idea of the world or char­ac­ter itself tran­scends it.

When I write and draw, my mind holds worlds in its palm, cre­at­ing the hori­zon as it tends to them with care.  My char­ac­ters take on a sense of indi­vid­u­al­ity, being fully part of me but at the same time being their own, indi­vid­ual selves.  I mold them to have flaws and faults, know­ing that in over­com­ing the for­mer that I have cre­ated some­thing that is some­how greater than per­fec­tion.  I chal­lenge my worlds and inhab­i­tants, dar­ing them to rise to the great­ness I have placed within them.

When I write and draw, I imag­ine myself as a glow­ing, celes­tial fig­ure, float­ing in a void of dark­ness and stars.  With a thought, I bring forth a world, and then begin to detail its past and future and present.  Slowly, over long peri­ods of time, I inscribe these details onto paper, and the world and its inhab­i­tants become filled with life as the idea within them reaches out to read­ers and observers.  As long as their name is spo­ken and their story is told, they will live on, grow­ing into some­thing greater.

That is why I write and draw.  The love for my cre­ations that per­me­ates my being when I cre­ate is addict­ing, more than any­thing else in the world.

So, let me ask you:  If you write or draw, or just like com­ing up with ideas… why do you do it?

Keep on dreaming.

Jake the Dreamaniac

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D&D: Leaving a Group

Categories: Badass Characters D&D Gaming Rambling
August 12th, 2010 by Jake

As many of you know, I am a total nerd; I vora­ciously read fan­tasy and sci-fi, know far more comic book trivia then I ought to, enjoy anime and manga on occa­sion, have been play­ing videogames since I was six, etc.  D&D is at once the pin­na­cle of my nerd­dom and the activ­ity I get to do the least out of all of those other subjects.

Dun­geons and Drag­ons first cap­tured my inter­est in my early teens, when I had first decided to take pride in being a nerd.  The D&D player was stereo­typ­i­cally depicted as the pin­na­cle of nerdi­ness, and thus I assumed the game would be of inter­est to me.

When I found out the game was essen­tially make-believe with a back­bone of rules to pre­vent con­stant one-upping amongst the play­ers, I fell deeply in love and never looked back.

For the past year (add a month or two) I’ve been a part of a ridicu­lous and enter­tain­ing cam­paign run by my friend Andre.  How­ever, with col­lege fast approach­ing (ONE WEEK!), I will no longer be able to attend ses­sions.  My char­ac­ters… Laika the sword­mas­ter were­wolf, Solace the beau­ti­ful and divinely-inspired quasi-angel, and Thera the cho­sen war­rior of Thor… will have to fall under Andre’s con­trol or sim­ply pass out of the story alltogether.

I’m unsure which part of those ses­sions I’ll miss the most: the deep, com­plex, twist­ing story, the incred­i­bly detailed and thrilling com­bat sequences or sim­ply ban­ter­ing with my friends as we crashed our way uncer­tainly through Andre’s painstak­enly woven story.

Scratch that.  I’ll def­i­nitely miss that last one the most.

While I plan to take my D&D equip­ment with me to col­lege and start­ing my own group, it would be impos­si­ble for me to for­get the mostly fun, some­times emo­tion­ally charged, always inter­est­ing times my friends and I had play­ing a slightly grown-up ver­sion of make believe.

Farewell, my friends.  Keep me posted on what hap­pens with Card Shark and the Inqui­si­tion, alright?

Keep on dreaming.

- Jake the Dreamaniac

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Poetry Post: Torrential

Categories: Jake Nature Poetry Rambling
June 28th, 2010 by Jake

On occa­sion, the poetic spirit take my fancy.  This is just such an occasion.

First a flash, a sear­ing bolt,

Fiercely flick­er­ing between white and black

Then, the crash, res­onat­ing to bone,

Fol­lowed by the thou­sand pound­ing ham­mers of hail,

And then the down­pour, the bib­li­cal flood, soak­ing the dry earth,

and then… silence.

Lin­ger­ing droplets, gen­tle as a zephyr, persist.

A moment of refrac­tion, nature’s prism, cre­ates a faint band of colors,

The calm after the storm.

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The Dreaded First Post

Categories: Drawing Jake Rambling Whippy
February 15th, 2010 by Jake

Salu­ta­tions!  I guess.  It’s rather awk­ward try­ing to fig­ure out what to say on the very first sen­tence of the very first post on a blog, because    you know any­one who’s actu­ally read­ing it is only there because you know them personally.

But I digress.

My name’s Jake, and I’m the tit­u­lar Drea­ma­niac.  I’m an aspir­ing artist, writer, and car­toon­ist, but at the core I’m a thinker.  I love to explore every realm of thought, chal­lenge my own philoso­phies, and cre­ate worlds, char­ac­ters, and ideas.

I’m also a bit of a nar­cis­sist (like most artists), but that’s sec­ondary to my hunger for praise (also a trait of many artists.)  While I cer­tainly love to do my own thing, I love it even more when that thing is praised by other peo­ple.  Hope­fully this dis­tin­guishes me from the stan­dard atten­tion whore.

My inter­ests, aside from think­ing, are as follows:

  • Comics: I love comics, includ­ing japan­ese manga, and as a deriv­a­tive, car­toons and anime.  You’ll prob­a­bly see me upload a few comics here and there.
  • Videogames: I was intro­duced to videogames at a young age.  While I’ve got­ten over the addic­tion I had in my youth, I still have a great love for the medium in gen­eral; I believe videogames are just as capa­ble of being art as movies, paint­ings, and poetry are.
  • Spec­u­la­tive Fic­tion: Tech­ni­cally this is a genre, not lim­ited to any sin­gle medium, but see­ing as my love for fan­tasy and sci-fi spreads across books, movies, games, and table­top games, I fig­ured I’d con­sol­i­date the category.
  • Lit­er­a­ture: I love to read.  I can devour books in a mat­ter of hours; my favorite story regard­ing this was when I bought the 7th Harry Pot­ter book at a mid­night release party, and fin­ished it around six in the morn­ing.  When I arrived at school that day, I learned that one of my friends had stayed up all night read­ing the Wikipedia entry on the book as it updated so he could spoil it for me; when he found out I’d already read the entire book, he gave me quite a death glare.
  • Dun­geons and Drag­ons: Me and a bunch of my friends get together every once in a while to talk, eat junk, and play a game.  The only dif­fer­ence between this and the stan­dard bowl­ing night is how awe­somely nerdy D&D is.

Well, I sup­pose that’s it for now.  If you’re actu­ally, against all my expec­ta­tions, read­ing this…

Thank you!

Keep on dreaming,

Jake and Whippy

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