For many of us, dreams and goals make life exciting. I enjoy coming up with ideas, expanding my skill-sets, and building relationships. However, sometimes in the midst of our hustle to do well in our lives, we forget the importance of having gratitude for what we have now and accomplished thus far. We get too fixated on what we want and get frustrated when all our efforts are not taking us there. We all love success, but with every dream and goal we pursue, there will be challenges and even failure. Some statistics say 8 out of 10 businesses started will fail. Many have pursued the path to become a U.S. Senator or President of the United States and have fallen short. Others have attempted to reach the highest levels in their field of work but have failed to attain that level. Failure is only failure if we don’t appreciate what we currently have and what we have gained. Shoot to be number one in the world, but number 50 is still pretty darn good. We can make peace with our mind knowing that we did our best, and won’t have the pain of wondering “What if I had given my idea a shot?” Through failure, we gain knowledge in areas we may have not been familiar with; build new relationships; and even come up with more ideas to pursue. With failure, we change and evolve, often leading us to worlds we’ve never experienced. When we embrace failure as part of success, we can keep moving higher to a level where we can keep failing until we succeed, and keep succeeding until we fail.
Today April 23, 2016, I finished my 15th draft of my Writing Project #1, a fictional story that I created back when I couldn’t sleep on October 11 to 12, 2006. In the story, the young male protagonist Ken whose health is ailing meets a girl named Kaylee in his dreams who suffers from memory loss, regret, and deep sorrow. As his relationship develops with her, he realizes that his strange dreams are much deeper than ordinary dreams. While in the dream world, he discovers a powerful secret about energy that can not only help Kaylee with her memory loss and sorrow, but save his life and bring balance between good and evil. However, by helping Kaylee attain happiness, Ken realizes that he would lose her forever.
The love between Kaylee and Ken will empower us to play a role in making our universe more positive. I dedicate “Us” by Kaskade & CID to all of you.
A couple of days ago, while taking a break from my work, I watched the ending part of the movie “Serendipity,” which I haven’t seen in awhile. Here’s the song “When You Know” by Shawn Colvin with clips of the movie in the video.
After 32 days of non-stop work on a development project in Kona, Hawaii and an EB-5 Regional Center based in Hawaii, I’m typing my 15th draft of my first novel that I started in October 2006 that currently consists of nearly 80,000 words, a love story between a young male protagonist and a dead girl that brings forward our fears of being alone, not finding true love in our lifetime, losing the battle against negative people, and dying without resolving the pain resulting from heartbreak and broken families. This weekend, I’m also going to continue working on my novel based in Iraq during the U.S. occupation – a love story that is sure to draw controversy because it is surrounded by violence, something you may either understand or disagree with, depending on where you stand on certain political issues. Nonetheless, the bottom line is that love can guide us through anger, death, and our darkest moments. I began writing my second story in May 2013 and it has just under 44,973 words.
The song “Unconditionally” by Katy Perry describes the emotional depth that the characters in my novels have with with each other despite their flaws and all the craziness around them. Even if the world is burning around them and their fate seems doomed, you yearn for their love to succeed. This music video has a ballroom scene. Likewise, my first story has a climax chapter with a ballroom scene. Such a powerful song.
Today, I just listened to the song below “Graduate” by Handsome Ghost and I immediately liked it. The song connects to my stories because the characters in my novels have enormous obstacles that’s preventing them from being together.
“Swept Away” by Christoper Cross is one of my all-time favorite love songs ever, so much so that I wrote it into my first novel. Every time I listen to it, it brings out this warm feeling in my chest, and when I’m alone or writing a love story, it bring so much emotions out of me.
“Seeing for the First Time” by Britt Nicole is another song that represents the love that the characters in my novels have for one another.
JON RIKI KARAMATSU 