About the Gleeman

My family calls me Macky and so thus my post-college friends and acquaintances. My parents, relatives and college peers call me Bong. My pre-college berks call me as Maxe. And that’s not yet revealing my full name. Too many aliases and now I’m taking another, the Gleeman. The Gleeman is an influential character in Robert Jordan’s epic book. In his tale, The Gleeman is an accomplished story-teller, a poet, a juggler, an acrobat, a magician, a musician, a lady-getter, a politician, a philosopher and an entertainer while wrapped in an air of mysteriousness and self-importance. For my purpose, the first and the last attributes suffice to serve as models to this writing effort. As for the others… maybe when I lost my job, or maybe in the next life …

I like reading novels. The three authors I most admire are JRR Tolkien, Robert Jordan and Frank Herbert. To me their works are the grandest. They have created and shared their universe reflecting in one way or another certain characteristics of our own real world. I have read their novels again and again never ceasing to be amazed and be enchanted.

This blog…

I’m always fascinated at how fantasy novel writers tell their stories. It is mind-bogging how they can make their readers vividly experience their make-believes. They have the power to make the reader see the beauty of their worlds or hear the battle cries of their armies or smell the sweat of hideous monsters or feel the hero’s elation of triumph and sorrow of defeat. While I dream of writing my own stories someday, I am aware of my writing and story-telling capabilities or shall I say the lack of it. Maybe, me blogging is the first step to that million miles journey, who knows?

Though it is very tempting to write like a diary chronicling every single occurrence, I will instead focus on specific passions that I know I will do until mind and body are able to. Concretely, these are running, photography and cooking. And perhaps, a few entries about the novels I’m inexhaustibly reading repeatedly and the sports that I crazily watch with one or two couple of beers. My value proposition will be to try as much as I can to be as colorful, as flamboyant, as commanding as those impossible story-tellers. Every run will be told like gory and glorious battles, every photo shoot described like winning the heart of a beautiful maiden and every cooking like a narration of insufferable escapes from pursuing monsters. I will attempt to be entertaining and interesting.

A beginning…

A tall order indeed! So to start, let me borrow a phrase from one of those magnificent authors, slightly twisted:

“There is no beginning or ending… but it is a beginning…”