Pilot.

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.