What I've been up to...

[MonkeyLord83]

Hey Monkey! Been awhile since I've seen you around, and let me tell you it's nice to see an old hat like myself come and pay a visit! Come here, you! *Gives them a friendly noggie!*

Personally, I'd like to read the epic fantasy you are making, as it heavily reminds me of Fate/Stay/Night, a visual novel I really enjoyed. However, I don't think its worth the trouble of translating your work to only a small potential audience, so if you don't get enough pull for your work, I'd say save yourself the effort and focus that energy on finishing/adding onto it.

It would be time consuming, yes, but I face writer's block often enough these days that I might as well be doing something productive like translating the chapters I've already written. And it would be a lot less work than you'd imagine because:
1. The first draft I started all the way back in fifth grade (13 years ago, geez, time flies) was, in fact, in English as I was still learning English at the time and was using writing as practice. So translating the work into English is always in the plan, if for nothing else, then to play tribute to that first draft.
2. Thoughts in my head are in the form of motion pictures, films, comic/manga panels, and the dialog can be in either Vietnamese or English. So even when I write my story in Vietnamese, sometimes what I'm actually doing is translating English into Vietnamese on paper.
3. My writing speed fluctuate between that of a snail, and that of a lightning strike. You can't rush arts after all. When ideas come to me, I can write 10-20 pages (1-2 chapters) in 2 hours. When my mind is blank, I can spend 5 hours looking at a blank pages and can't utter a single word. So I'd just be using time I'd be wasting on nothing to do something productive anyway.

And then, there's this:
The majority of Vietnamese readers seems to:
1. Want quantity over quality, so I don't have too many readers anyway. The up side is that I can afford to take it slow since no one cares if I'd be a week or a month late on releasing new chapters (cuz you know, no readers). XD
2. Be too familiar with Vietnamese cultures (or at least, they THINK they do) and seems to want Western/Chinese cultures in what they read. Even though the cultural references in many of the works I've seen are mostly trash due to the other writers having no real experiences and just making bs up. =.=
3. Want harem route. Like I've seen at least 3 requests asking me to write harem route for the main character (who is only 11 in my novel right now for crying out loud, what is WRONG with these people?!) And while I have some romance planned in my novels, I will have it naturally and in ways that stay true to the essence of my characters' building.
4. Want lots of killing and main character being cruel. I swear, some of these people are kids who are realizing life is not how they thought it would be when they were 5 years old and all they see is darkness everywhere. And I refuse to let my main character (an 11 years old kid) to EVER view the world that way. Novels and stories are meant to inspire and make people better (or at least want to be better), not crushing dreams and fill life with cruelty and hatred (like so many other fictions Vietnamese my age are writing), we have enough of that as it is, thank you very much!
So I've been thinking about making it available to an audience who would actually appreciate what I'm doing anyway.

Meanwhile, I:
1. have a small audience anyway, because I don't aim to just gain readers by compromising certain values.
2. take my time for quality instead of rushing for quantity. The site I'm currently posting it on gives "writer exp" for daily posting, and subtract exp whenever I don't post daily, and as soon as that system hit, I've been posting once a month (mostly because I was busy with exams). I would be with negative exp if such a thing exist. And quite frankly, I don't give a heck about that exp system.
3. prefer 1 reader who gets everything I say instead of 1000 readers who just read and don't take the time to feel anything at all. Again, quality over quantity.

So I mean, I could start translating it. And if you like it, you can introduce it to your friends. I'd much prefer a small audience who actually cares over a big ones who just demands more but don't even get half the work I put into every chapter.