In my thesis, I will be exploring the relationship between the sociopolitical phenomenon in the real world and how that influences the written works of fiction authors, songwriters, and poets. Works like Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire, Spider-Man, Superman, and more use allegories of oppression, persecution, freedom fighting, resistance, and revolutions within their worlds of villainy and heroism.

Pieces of Fiction Media:

1. Life is Strange – Explores Max Caulfield’s reunion with her childhood best friend Chloe in her hometown Arcadia Bay.
2. Degrassi: The Next Generation – A Canadian series about the life of teenagers growing up in Degrassi Community School.
3. Spider-Man – Peter Parker/Spider-Man balances his great power with great responsibility.
4. The Flash – A Speedster superhero deals with being out of sync with the rest of the world.
5. Back to 15 – A woman finds out that her old blog transports her back to her teenage years

I have been playing Life is Strange again over the past week and it has actually helped me with my brainstorming process. Max Caulfield’s journey is one where she gains the powers to rewind time. It mostly her learning how to use it to her advantage, using her powers to gain knowledge about people without making it awkward, helping out her classmates and friends with their issues, trying to reconnect with and protect her childhood best friend Chloe Price, and also trying to uncover the mystery of the missing Rachel Amber. All the while she has premonitions/visions of a gigantic tornado that is coming to wipe out the entire town in only 4 days. Yes, the events of the game occur within a 4 day time period.

Some themes that I will talk about concerning Life is Strange:

• Misogyny and violence towards women
• The transition from childhood to adulthood
• Abuse; Abuse of Power/Relationships Abuse/Relationships Grooming
• Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression.
• Self-Confidence and figuring out one’s future.
• Friendship, Comradery, and Romance.

“Worldbuilding touches all aspects of your story. It touches plot and character as well. If you don’t know the culture your character comes from, how can you know what he’s really like? You must know your characters on a much deeper level than you would if you just shrugged your way into a cookie cutter fantasy world.” – Patrick Rothfuss

When I decided to tell a story about grief and use the fantasy genre as a vehicle, I knew that I was setting myself up for a major worldbuilding experience. I wanted to be able to play with the magical species in my world, be able to mold their views on death and grief in a way that would let me explore a variety of viewpoints and ideas. Essentially, I decided to do research and then beg, borrow, and steal from different religions and cultures to create what my magical species’ views on death would be. The independent study I completed over the summer, gave me the knowledge I needed to do this, and this week, I really sat down and starting piecing things together.

In Which I Cheat a Little

When you start playing around with preestablished traits of magical species, you run the risk of making a lot of people really irritated and/or getting yourself made fun of. Hello sparkly vampires from Twilight, I’m talking about you. I knew I needed a way to keep things similar enough to be recognizable and avoid ruffling feathers, but still give myself some wiggle room to worldbuild. In Memento Mori a filter was created to keep he human world from discovering the magical one. It allowed magical species and humans to live in close proximity without fear of detection. Melia learns a bit about it in Chapter 2

***

A chill ran up my spine. This was it. I waited breathlessly to see what he would do next. I don’t know what I was expecting, but watching him pull out his cellphone and snap a quick selfi was definitely not it. He fiddled with his phone for a few moments before turning it to face me. 

“This is the picture I took,” he said, giving me a few seconds to look at the screen before swiping to the left to reveal a second version of the picture. “This is the same picture after I put it through a filter.”

“Okay…”  The colors were a bit brighter on the second picture and it had gone through red eye correction. Handy, but hardly impressive, or relevant. My four year old cousin Molly knew how to put a picture through a filter. What did this have to do with Simon?

“The world as it exists is the first picture, Melia,” the mayor said. “What you think the world is, is the second. Everything that you see and experience goes through a filter before it hits your eyes. It changes certain things, hides them, makes them appear normal. 

“Okay, first of all that sounds crazy. Second of all, even if it was true, the government couldn’t keep that kind of thing a secret. There’s no way we have technology that advanced and if we did, someone would have heard of it, spread rumors or conspiracy theories. It would be like Area 51.”

“Technically you’re not wrong. That kind of technology doesn’t exist.” Mayor Navarro said. “It doesn’t have to. The filter is run by magic, and the government has nothing to do with it.” 

That’s not possible. Magic doesn’t exist.” I said.

“Let me make sure I’m understanding you correctly. You came to this town following what you believed to be a sign sent to you from the afterlife, but magic is where you’re going to draw the line of impossibility.

***

What is super handy about the filter it gives me the wiggle room I need. If the filter works completely, then humanity should have no knowledge of typical magical species, but they do. To keep themselves safe, magical species began spreading misinformation to humans, things that would give them an advantage if they ever had to fight. For example, vampires are known to only come out at night. Why do humans in my story know that? Because vampires have superior night vision. By spreading the rumor that they are nocturnal, if humans wanted to fight with them, they’d have to do it at night where the vampires would then have the advantage. This idea lets me keep a lot of the stablished mythos of fantasy while still leaving myself room to play around.

Free Writing and Mind Mapping Combine!

Both my free writing and my mind mapping centered around worldbuilding. My freewriting was pretty much a word vomit of all the things I need to do as far as worldbuilding. My mind mapping was a bit more focused on the death views of my magical species. Feel free to skim what comes below if you would like. I mostly wrote it down as a way to synthesize all the notes and have legible scribbles I had written down.

Magical Channelers (we would call them wizards or sorcerers) – Their death practices are based on the two most popular forms of disposition, burial and cremation. The rationale here is that since they have the easiest time of all the magical species fitting in with humans, they are the ones most affected by them and their cultures/traditions. Fun Fact: Channelers have the highest percentage of mixed families out of all the magical species.

Werewolves/Shifters – For my werewolf and shifter characters, I brought in a lot of aspects of ancestor worship. With most animals forming groups of some kind, I thought it would make sense for werewolves to have a strong connection with the packmates who came before. It also explains why they are so territorial. They must stay close to where their ancestors are buried so that they can tend the graves and make offerings. Fun Fact: Werewolves/shifters have had the most clashes with humanity in the years before the filter because they refused to leave their territory. While other species fled to avoid detection, werewolves/shifters were willing to fight to the death to keep control of the lands where their pack’s ancestors are buried.

Elementals – This is where I had some of the most fun! I was able to bring in a lot of different methods of disposition, some modern and some ancient. For elementals, it is all about returning the body to the element they used in life.
– Fire Elementals – Cremation. I’m going to blend some of the elaborate details and structures used in Bali to make this ceremony an extravaganza.
– Water Elementals – Alkaline Hydrolysis. It’s a newer technique that is essential water based cremation. The body is stuck in a giant metal hot water heater that is filled with a mixture of water and a highly basic chemical like potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide. The solution is heated and the body basically dissolves, leaving only bone behind. The bone is then crushed into a fine powder (just like in regular cremation). Water elementals will then spread this powder over a large body of water that was significant to the deceased.
– Earth Elementals – Natural Organic Reduction – Its a fancy name for human composting. The body is laid with a huge amount of woodchips. Fire and pressure are added and boom you have soil. This soil is returned to the families of the deceased who use it in their gardens both in remembrance and in honor of the circle of life.
– Air Elementals – Sky Burial – One of two methods I researched that really creeped me out, but it made a lot of sense for air elementals. The process involves dismembering the body and essentially feeding it to vultures or other birds of prey. For air elementals, this process returns their body to the sky since the bird that ate them tasks to the skies until it dies and then is consumed by another flying predator which takes to the skies and it created this kind of cycle where the air elementals feel that their bodies will be one with the sky for eternity.

Fae – Mass graves/ mass cremations – As an immortal race, I wanted their practices to reflect the fact that they don’t deal with death a whole lot. They don’t have complicated death rituals because they have never needed to have any. The only real time they would have to worry about death would be in war or conflict. They have less concerns about what happens to the body after death since dying is not a typical part of their life. During war, when soldiers were killed, they were either buried in a mass grave or cremated with their other fallen comarades in a huge bonfire, whichever was more convenient. Fun Fact: I’m going to lean into more of a Scottish view of fae with the seelie and unseelie court, but Melia will learn that the words they have been using are just two examples of a set of words used to describe the time of year when a fae is born. The fae thought it was hilarious and enjoyed watching humans come up with sets of traits they thought belonged to each court.

“You’re telling me that humanity has been writing stories and spreading folklore throughout the years based on what are essentially magical star signs?!?”

Okay, I have rambled and taken up enough of everyone’s time. See everyone tomorrow!

---

free writing

During our last class session, I could not wait to jot down a few brainstorming ideas and thoughts swirling through my mind regarding my free writing exercise of the week. Once the dreaded historical Holocaust was mentioned, Adofo Hilter came to the forefront. But not the way you may think. I instantly began thinking about Adofo’s childhood. For instance, what was his relationship like with his parents? I’m wondering what misguided choices his parents made and actually what intergenerational trauma he may have endured, molding and shading him into the evil monster he had become: a world-renowned mass murderer. A vile Nazi manufactured horrific plans for a mass extermination of the Jewish population at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, in Berlin, as the plan has come to be known as the “Final Solution.”

As it is agreeable, the entire Holocaust was undoubtedly a heinous act, while its innocent survivors suffered emotional trauma to the extreme utmost. My focus and area of concentration is on the how and whyꟷchoices that occurred behind intergenerational trauma. In other words, what effect and impact (cause and effect) do the choices of others, like parents, grandparents,  guardians, etc., have on the development of children ages two to eighteen years old? Although I do not cosign nor do I defend Hitler’s sick and evil ways, I often wonder what exactly prompted him and others like him to cruel intentions. 

When I watched Netflix’s Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, it made more sense as to how someone like Hitler could become such a bastard. Over six episodes, the documentary traces Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the major milestones of WWII. Hitler’s personal history paints a picture of someone who desired to be famous from a very young age. Born in Austria, he dreamed of becoming a renowned artist. But he was rejected by Vienna’s top fine arts institute because he could only paint landscapes and couldn’t paint people very well. While living in a men’s shelter for a few years, he sold paintings copied from postcards. His worldview was shaped by “blaming other people for his misfortune and the rabid anti-Semitism that existed in Vienna at the time,” Joe Berlinger, director of Evil on Trial, tells TIME. Through the history and horrors of the Holocaust—the propaganda and dehumanization—it’s a warning that “normal people can do horrific things.” (Waxman, 2024). There are no questions; I surely agree.

mind map

Next steps

As far as the next steps, I will continue my library research on the how and why of choices made that prompt intergenerational trauma from father to son, mother to daughter, Hitler’s childhood, and so on. I intend to read books to start, such as:

• It Didn’t Start with You (Audible) by Mark Wolynn. Emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever been understood. 
• The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color (The Social Justice Handbook Series) by Natalie Y. Gutiérrez: how trauma is connected to grief, how it can affect both the mind and the body, and how it can persist from one generation to the next. 
• Breaking Generational Curses: [Overcoming The Legacy of Sin in Your Family] by Marilyn Hickey: A generational curse from your family line may be the root cause of these issues. Don’t let past sins from your family tree continue to wreak havoc in your life. 

if I was not working on my MA thesis

If I were not working on my MA thesis, I would indeed be teaching high school or college and writing best-selling books full-time. I would rise each day en route to teach eager minds the knowledge I have been taught throughout my academic years.  I would then find quiet places to visit, sit and write. I, too, would travel to a well-grounded writer’s retreat in a woody environment and work alongside like-minded individuals for more inspiration. Thus, at present, I will not be off-leaning back and sipping on a nice ice-cold lemonade in the vibrant, warm place I have envisioned for a long while until my next book is successfully published. So, I simply look forward to diligently working on my thesis for a meaningful outcome.

The hardest part of this entire project is really coming to fruition: the structure and formatting.

So, I didn’t really explain my thesis too much in my last post but it’s essentially my journey exploring my family’s past growing up in El Salvador and rediscovering this part of myself that I hid away from for so long. Before this, I’d never asked about my parent’s childhood, my grandmother’s or her mother’s childhood. As I grow older, I see parts of them in me and so I see this as is my way of exploring their lived experiences versus mine and seeing how they relate to each other. My vignettes consist of my memories and their memories, which are all stored away in small piles of photo albums we managed to save in our three moves.

These photos have always been the only pieces I had of my relatives in El Salvador since I hardly visited as a kid out of sheer embarrassment. I barely knew the people in the pictures but I had always imagined what they were like and what their interests were.

So, when I decided to move forward with this thesis project, I thought I’d take advantage of the yearly trip my parents take to their aldeitas and I tagged along in January 2024. My grandmother and grandfather’s land was the same as it was in 2008, the last time I visited, but everything was quieter with only my one aunt and one uncle watching over the house and its scattered remnants of my grandparents. Still, it gave me the chance to ask the questions I used to ask myself looking at those photo albums.

With this ‘research’ and a few museum visits to give me a better understanding of the country’s socioeconomics, I journaled a lot of my interpretations and understandings of the histories and stories I heard and learned about there.

All this to say, I am taking on the massive effort to typewrite all of the pieces I’ve written (and will write) to create a scrapbook-like format. My photos, both old and new, will be linked together with my vignettes and, hopefully, tie together this insanely daunting yet kind of fun thesis. This upcoming week, however, the InDesign trials begin and my poor laptop fans start to scream for mercy. RIP.

Whenever I free write I find myself trauma dumping and sometimes I can’t help it. However, free writing is one of my favorite types of writing. It is completely raw, there is no format, and you just focus on making sure everything makes at least a little bit of sense. I free write almost every other day because as much as I love my job, it can get quite boring. I keep a journal with me at all times so whenever I think of a good line for a poem or a thought in general, I end up jotting it down. My best work develops when I am alone and listening to absolutely anything by Sufjan Stevens. As I am currently writing this, I am at work and listening to Olympus by Sufjan Stevens with one of the most beautiful chorus melodies I have ever heard.

I have been going in circles with this thesis because I want this to be my best work yet. I am very proud of myself in getting to this point of my life and I am so passionate about almost anything that has to do with discovery and possibly helping others. Which is seemingly why I am gravitating towards the paradox of emotional abuse by mothers. I feel like I have a lot to discuss but I would also like to deep dive into this major contributor in the decline of mental health of daughters who go through this. Not only is mental health the issue, it’s the insecurities that have developed, as well as the inability to sustain healthy relationships that followed them into adulthood. Again, I don’t know if I’m trauma dumping into this thesis (which is what I want to avoid) so please let me know if this seems good or should I re-route this. Basically, I want to research why this is such a common relationship between mothers and daughters. I am worried about this being too specific. But then again this is very common, and I have read articles and watched too many shows with strained mother/daughter relationships aka Gilmore Girls. But why is this so common? Why do some women make it a goal to grow up and NOT turn into their mother? I was going to only stick to South Asian mothers, but I feel that it isn’t a cultural thing. It’s generational; trauma that gets passed on with many women. Again, why? I have looked for articles that includes all of the subtopics I am searching for, and I haven’t found anything, So maybe this is the right direction. As dark as this sounds, I want emotionally deprived daughters to find my paper one day and see that there are answers, there are theories, and there are many women in the world who have gone through this trauma and bettered themselves. I want the daughters to realize that in no way shape or form, is their existence a burden. Now that I am writing this all out, I feel like I am trauma dumping but again please let me know if this isn’t the right direction for me.

An etude (also known as étude or study) is a short musical composition designed to provide practice in a particular technical skill in the performance of an instrument. (Yousician.com)

Band members use etudes as warm-ups, which aligns perfectly with the “warm-up” writing we did this week with our spiral journal, free writing, and mind mapping exercises.

Even though I came into Thesis class knowing that my project is the marching band novel I started back in my first semester of grad school, I took Dr. Zamora’s words to heart when she said we should explore all the things we might be interested in writing about. The result of this was a list of writing projects I’ve dabbled with since starting grad school, most of which I do want to return to at some point.

• marching band novel
• poetry collections (a few different topics in mind)
• memoir of teaching experiences
• fiction story about a woman who can contact her teenage self through a diary

Writing this list out was helpful in that I was able to reassure myself that these projects are all important, and just because I can’t focus on all of them for thesis doesn’t mean they’re not important or never going to get done. It might be nice to work on some of these over the course of the next few months when I need a short break from focusing on the marching band novel.

Another thing I free wrote about was the obstacles that I will probably encounter over the next two semesters, including balancing my time, energy, and social battery between work, school, family, friends, and personal relaxation time. I’m good at multitasking and getting things done, but the problem is that I often don’t know when to stop and take a break. I don’t wan to burn out in any area of my life. I need to set reasonable goals for myself each week, and learn to turn off my brain once in a while.

The last thing I free wrote about was questions that have been on my mind related to the thesis project, and more specifically to the Lit Review. I’m curious about what a Lit Review for a creative project looks like, and would love to see an example. Should it include other novels with similar topics? What kind of “academic” research should be included? How many entries should there be? (I might ask Gianna what the Lit Review for Retrograde looked like.)

I used the mind mapping exercise to brainstorm ideas for “research” I want to conduct for my marching band novel. Here’s what I came up with:

• find and read novels about marching band
• research statistics of existence of marching band novels vs. other sports
• watch movies, tv shows, or documentaries related to marching band
• research history of high school marching bands
• look up history of Sayreville marching band through yearbooks
• attend a marching band practice and/or competition
• And somehow in the midst of all this research, continue to actually write the novel!

I’ve definitely got my work cut out for me this semester, but I’m looking forward to seeing this project through to its conclusion. I’ve never finished writing any long form story I’ve started, so I’m looking forward to the feeling of accomplishment I’ll get when this project is complete. Because there’s no doubt in my mind – by the end of next semester, I’ll have written my first novel.

I’ve started and stopped and started and stopped this blog 4 or 5 times now. I’m determined to get it done tonight before the weekend start as I know it’s bound to be a hectic one. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to blow the imaginary dust from At the Last, brush the cobwebs aside, sit down, and really look at it where I left off.

An old friend used need to be the voice of reason when I’m feeling how I am these days. We’d sit at her dining room table, straining our eyes and hands over keyboards while the blue lights of computer screen blinded us from everything else. “Progress not perfection,” she used to tell me, as if I’d buy into that crap. I know it’s sound advice, but I’m not very good at doing the right thing.

I’ve been looking over the old notes I’d taken for this book, trying to analyze where my mind was at when I even came up with the concept of it. I guess I was lost in my own head. I remember the dinner, the people I was with, and the way the wick of the candle felt as I would run the palm of my hands through the flames in an attempt to keep myself present, and the image of a desk where my main character sits to write his journal, his autobiography, and his memoir. Three distinct forms of writing in one convoluted story where time passes not by seconds or years, but by the people that come and go along the way, some disappear to drugs, many die of natural causes or the relentless wear and tear of life.

I guess this is the part where I have to explain why I keep referring to this story as convoluted. It’s a journal, what can be so confusing about that? Well, as you’ll come to find out, my main character holds onto this journal for much of his life and takes it everywhere. He carries it until the binding frays and the pages spiraling to the ground like autumn leaves. He picks up the pieces, but never assembles them back in the order in which they were written. The person who finds this journal notes common theme among the pages, an underlying decision that weighs heavily on our main character’s mind for most of his life. It is this order in which the story is read, separated by entries related to the five stages of grief.

Maybe that’s what I’m grieving through this. Can it be as simple as “I miss _____” If it is, well that’s goddamn foolish of me. But, I’ve always played a good fool.

Obviously the structure of the novel is loose, and because of that I’ve been all over the place while writing it. I know my ending and my beginning because they’re one and the same; those were the parts I discovered while failing to be present that dinner. Six years later, I’m supposed to go out for drinks with another friend tomorrow and can assure you I won’t be there either.

I’m struggling hard in looking at the early proposal guidelines for this book. I wish I could have made class and not got stuck in the lab. Shout out to Erik for being my eyes and ears in the class. I just don’t see how to propose this book in a way that would make sense to someone who isn’t me. (Wondering if anybody will catch the use of that particular phrase. If you do I applaud you). If I were to try to some up what this book is about, I’d probably say it’s an exploration of the greatest overlooked resource in all of history: time. We squander it, we waste it, we spend it, we’re on it borrowed. Time is a detrimental asset, a paradox, because we can be so unhappy with how we move through it or it moves through us. Time feels limited because we don’t quite know what the limit is. It’s not a glass that overflows or a train where you can see the end of the track. If you choose to keep living, how long you get to is not up to you.

This book, much like my life, is a very lawless place. Some chapters within the five sections may be three or four thousand words long (I’m around 77k in). Other chapter’s are as short as a sentence and it’s with one of these shorter chapters that I’m choosing to end this blog. One sentence, one question.

“If you could go anywhere else in the world, who would you be?”

Storyteller’s Innovative Expansion is the working title for my thesis project. About 4 months ago and some change I had decided on doing a project on fiction and storytelling. I’m still in the brainstorming stage of the process, but I thought about studying the affect the fiction has on reality and vice-versa. So, I will be expanding on our understanding of the world’s relationship with fiction and how the world of fiction represents and tells stories about the social dynamics of our world.

I have thought a lot about the many sociopolitcal factors affecting us over the summer. Through that, I want to explore the connection how real life political phenomenon, social events, and human relationships influence the kinds of stories fiction authors write. Another thing that I have thought about over the summer is capitalism and the economic plight that plagues the country. Ever since May I have had my hours at my Home Depot order fulfillment job reduced exponentially, which also means that I am not capable of switching to another position at my job in order to get more money. I might try to tie in the sudden lack of available hiring into the fiction writing relationships with real life social and political events.

It’s insane to believe that:

1. This is my last semester of school after a whole 20 years or so! A lot of the time, I wish I wasn’t working full-time so I could fully immerse myself in this last semester. It frustrates me that I started working as soon as I started my thesis too. Honestly, during the first thesis class, I was doubting myself a lot about the quality of what I plan to create; I really didn’t want to rush something so monumental and important to me. But, I’ve come to find that working on my thesis has been kind of an outlet for me this past year.  I was able to keep my half days on Wednesdays to go home early and have time for myself and my own thoughts, nothing and no one else to bug me. Being in the city every day for 80 percent of the day has been mentally draining and it still is, but I still plan to use the time I have to give myself room to think, be creative, and push all that energy towards my thesis work.

2. I was absolutely terrified to even think about my thesis a year ago. I thought I was going too far with the project, considering I had to travel and have untouched conversations with family. These days, I still reminisce about my time in El Salvador. In January, I went with my parents and I dove right into what I planned to do, yet it wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be. They are family after all. I ditched some of the complex ideas I had like recording audio and video. (I took some but I plan to use the still images instead). I decided that I wanted my work to focus on the writing and too many sensory details can overshadow that. So I stuck with photos from my digicam and extracted stories/memories/emotions from them. Here are a few of the more scenic ones I took, just because they’re pretty

I also took more personal photos of seemingly mundane things that mean a lot to me or somehow relate to my family’s past in El Salvador, but I’ll save those for later since they’re more connected to the pieces I wrote.

In terms of the writing, in the creative nonfiction class most of us were in, I tried to gear most of my “little delights,” as Professor Sisler called them, towards my culture, family, etc. During the summer, I sifted through a lot of those and polished them up, making them longer and just more unified, while also sifting through my photos and pairing them together. I also “interviewed” my aunt, who maintains my grandmother’s home in El Salvador, and it was such a sincere conversation I almost didn’t want to share it. I still wrote about it, but it definitely needs heavy revision.

I’m not going to be a liar here; I fully had a good three to four month slump of nothing. No productivity and no urge to even look at it. It started in April when I lost my childhood dog of 17 years. I could still break down in tears if I think about not having him between my feet right now as I write this. I haven’t written about that loss yet but, when I do, that’ll be somewhere in this web of memories. He was family too.

I’ve been pretty open about the losses I’ve endured in the past three years or so. It was my first encounter with grief, so I naturally gravitated towards focusing on what I still have and taking advantage of those connections by studying them, rather than run from them as I always have. It’s really emotional to think about wrapping up my entire student experience with a homage to my family, who have waited for me to do this all their lives. I am ready to be plastered all over my parents’ Facebook pages and living room walls with a Salvadorian sash around my neck as I grab my diploma.