PigsGoMoo.

Pigs go moo? Only in worlds fictitious. Worlds that never were, and never will be. Worlds that exist only in our minds. And that's what this will all be about, fiction. Flights of fancy so far out, the realm they call reality is left behind, dwindling and shrinking till it is barely a speck on a horizon so vast. I do it injustice, it is not merely vast but infinite. An infinity of unexplored space for us to wander through and stumble upon, for our imagination knows no bounds.

Fiction is powerful. It can be joyous, melancholic, frightening, soothing or any number of adjectives you'd care to apply. It arrests our conscious minds and pervades our unconscious (our dreams.) It lifts you out of your everyday humdrum and transports you to fantastical (and quite fantastic) realms. It is escapism, yes. To be able to attach yourself to a character and experience his highs, or even his lows, which have nothing at all to do with your own life and whatever situations you are caught up in. For a page or two, an hour or a day, the problems you face mean nothing. All that matters is the hero slaying the dragon, solving the crime, romancing his lover.

Everyone remembers the fictional characters from their childhood. There are so many. Your fairy tales, Cinderella and Snow White and more. Dorothy and Toto and the Wizard of Oz. The Secret Seven and Famous Five, also the Wishing Chair or something. The Bookworm Club with Ah Seng and Kuku, Mimi and Edison. Harry Potter and Dumbledore, Frodo Baggins and Gandalf Greyham. Alice and the Mad Hatter, Aslan the Lion and his frosty nemesis the White Witch. And more contemporary we have our favourite EDWARD CULLEN immortalized on the silver screen by our favourite handsumman ROBERT PATTINSON!!!!!!!! (Oh wait he's already immortal, sparkly vampire that he is.)

There are so many more examples to draw on, I've only just barely skimmed the childhood ones. These characters are so memorable, despite being nothing more than ink on paper. You remember them more clearly and know them better than that primary 5 classmate whom you'd spent at least a year with.

I started reading at a tender young age, impressionable young child that I was. Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl of course, the most beloved of authors to kids everywhere. Asterix and Obelix, Tintin soon followed. Animorphs, that was truly awesome. No Hardy Boys for me though, my little mind then perceived it as a series that was trying too hard to act cool, for all those pseudo-cool boys out there. I remember this girly (euphemism for YUCKS!! when you're a young boy) series Sweet Valley (probably) although I hasten to add I was a manly boy and never read anything so effeminate. I do remember my sister reading it so it was probably quite prevalent while we were young.

At maybe primary 5/6 I started reading thrillers and those war books so appealing to a young boy with grand notions of being a hero with the shiny sword or the sniper who never misses or the lightsaber legend. You know. Tom Clancey, Stephen Coonts are some of the authors I remember reading. Not exactly comprehending, though. Even worse was attempting Dreamcatcher at P6. I tried again at Sec 2 and still didn't really get it. And also Mario Puzo's Godfather. My dad saw me reading it and promptly returned it while I was in school, then telling me that I was way too young to be reading something like that. All that sex and violence! Of course, LOTR + The Hobbit and Harry Potter also surfaced sometime then thanks to the movies. One of the best presents I've received in my life has been all three LOTR books and The Hobbit shortly after I expressed an interest in The Fellowship Of The Ring. Awesome.

After that, much older and wiser (I was in secondary school after all!) stuff like Dan Brown's thinking thrillers came in. Satire too, Ben Elton and Terry Pratchett. I can't recall what else though. I should mention a healthy interest in fantasy (to a lesser extent sci-fi) since childhood. What was cooler than imagining myself Padawan to a Jedi Master in the mould of the great Qui-Gonn Jin? I read quite alot of fantasy series, some of which unfortunately have been forgotten.

And now I'm quite into a vein of books I'm not sure how to classify. They're not exactly literature (what they're filed under in bookstores.) Or maybe that's just me cause I classify stuff like Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare under literature. Literary fiction maybe? I think of them as books about life. These are usually very insightful and more often than not, very brilliant, at least those I've read. Insightful with regards to humanity, our failings and sometimes even our merits, our capacity for good. Khaled Hosseini, Milan Kundera, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Safran Foer are those I can clearly recall. They have written some of the best books I have had the fortune to read so you should probably read them someday too. If you're half as moved and impacted as I was it'd still be awesome.

I'm hoping having a separate blog here will give me the motivation to write some of the stories I want to write (and there are alot of them.) I also wanted to have a place where I can read through the stories I've come up with cause it's really cumbersome to trawl through all my other posts. Dunno if I should copy some of my thoughts after writing those stories too though, as I feel some of them are actually quite important. Then again stories should be able to speak for themselves, so if it doesn't then it's a lousy story anyway.

Originally I had no idea whether or not I wanted to go about telling people about this. It's human nature to want to be noticed right? If I write a story I want it to be read. For a story to be liked is not always necessary, sometimes the important thing is that it was even written at all.

I've got nothing much to add I guess.

In case anyone was wondering though, PigsGoMoo was originally my Viwawa account (mahjong + bridge + dai di yeah!) that I created in sec 4 while feeling particularly eccentric. More accurately (and honestly) put, I was probably trying to act cute. I have to assert that I no longer play Viwawa so do not flame me for being lame.


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I had this none-too-bright idea almost exactly a year ago now to start a separate blog where I'd post my stories and talk about bookz and nothing but bookz. I think I was in the middle of a massive brain-drain and I thought that with a dedicated blog to fiction I'd write more. Hahaha clearly didn't work out! This was the only post I had apart from some thoughts on Milan Kundera's The Joke, mega-fail obviouslyz.

It's actually fun to look back at the stupid ideas you've had in the past. I remember digging out this primary school exercise book where we did very important primary school exercises i.e. listing out your future Wife/Job/House or sth. Hahahahahaha! I think mine was... Emily/Astronaut/Mansion or something. Hahahaah unbelievable. Actually no, I think Emily was my brother's crush, not mine, so.... I can't remember who mine was actually. I can't believe I actually did this with my brother though, I'd never have thought he and I would so freely share the names of the objects of our affections!

But yeah, it was always gonna be Mansions/Bungalows. I think we were a bit too old for Castles/Palaces and not old enough for Fortresses. And Lawyers/Doctors/Astronauts (if we were feeling fanciful.) Based on my vast knowledge of course, of me and my brother's dreams at the time! You'd think it was a one-off exercise, but the best part of it is that we'd do it again and get different results! Except for the Wife part though, I'm pretty sure they remained the same, although I might have been fickle-minded enough to have to choose between two... What a juggler.

In a mere 10years though, I have wholly different dreams. I retain none of those 3 parts anymore. And in another 10years, everything will seem so different again. And again. It's amazing how life works really. And scary too.

Anyhow I spent 6 hours on skype with my parents and my brother in the morning just now. Absolutely ridiculous! Although closer to the end me and my brother were talking about cyptozoology of all things. And giant isopods (yuck) and diving penguins and ugly elephant seals etc. I am secretly relieved though, that we can still talk with each other so much. There was a time there when I was pretty worried about how anti-social and reticent and depressed-looking he seemed haha!

But there's no going back to the happy days of our childhood when we were the Twin Terrors of Trains (and buses and more) He'll be enlisting soon enough and university will follow soon after. Neither of us can lay claim to being children any more, and we're right on the precipice of adulthood now. Work and family and a thousand other commitments will set in all too soon and it seems inevitable that the trajectory of our lives are on divergent courses. So it is with everyone else in your life, I suppose. But this is my little brother so.. I am feeling quite melancholic about it haha.

I'll be home in 2014, which is when he's starting uni. I'm hoping he studies overseas as well, and I'm pretty sure he's going to. That means that for the next 6 years, plausibly, our room will have only one occupant. That's pretty depressing!

Okay on other less depressing notes.. I had a christmas dinner yesterday involving carrots dipped in humous with moroccan sauce, potato mash with mustard-custard and pestoed pasta. Followed by crêpes deliciousés de Eeva, made by my housemate Eeva and obviously, named by her as well. This was accompanied with oven-baked-apples and vanilla ice cream and on my second piece, nutella. After that was cheese and biscuits, and you should be aware that the British take their cheese very seriously indeed. We had smoked-something-cheese and chili-cheese and onions-and-chives(?)-cheese. Coupled with port wine, apparently a tradition of over a hundred years old. We ended off with coffee and supposedly chocolates, but since that would have been a gastronomical and physical impossibility, we decided not to eat anything more, so just coffee it was.

I decided I had to learn how to make the crêpes, cause I know my sister will be well impressed and possibly even delirious if I made that when I'm back home. So I got the recipe and instructions hehe, and it's is going to be legendairy. Yep, I've been watching HIMYM.

I watched The Beach after that, even though I was really tired. Good choice though, I thought it was a great movie. I only watched it, really, because it had Leonardo DiCaprio, since I had no idea what it was about and I'd never heard of it. What I don't understand though.. is how can anyone ditch Etienne?! Handsome and nice and good at soccer and french to boot. Why would anyone choose an obnoxious Yank over him, even if that Yank is Leonardo DiCaprio?! Bah. Women!

Okay I'm done now, thinking of watching either Chicago or Into The Wild (seems rather pertinent before embarking on a holiday alone haha) or reading a book. In any case, goodbye and happy christmassing!