Nyob zoo! Because two lovely ladies have already stepped forward and did their introductions, it would be crude for me to just ignore their requests and not follow through with what they did. Theirs are much classier, and mine is much simpler and bland in taste. I’m Nou, co-editor of Plundering the Heavens. I’m a simple editor who applied to QI and got the editing role. I’m neither a head honcho like Chrissy, nor an overachiever who works on 5+ different novels like, well, Chrissy. I'm not the top dog like @Lis, nor am I at the bottom of the well.
Before I start, I just want to say, anyone can write an essay about their life, but it takes a special someone like @DarkGem and @Lis to condense it and make it awesome to read. Unfortunately, I’m like everyone else and not special enough to make it a great read. :P However, I can tell you more about me and share with you what makes me tick.
Ready for a little about me?
My first love is with reading. Sadly, a healthy second and third love are a lot harder to come by. Like they say, “You can never truly forget your first love” and, “There will always be a spot in your heart for your first love.”
I read all sorts of books—okay, maybe that’s a lie. I shied away from factual, non-fiction books, mainly because those sorts of books are usually concerned more with presenting facts rather than a story. I steer clear from the romance books featuring things like “hot girl in jeans who fell in love with a dude in cowboy hat at first glance” with the stereotypical half-naked-guy-showing-off-his-chest on pink backgrounds. Those are too dull. I thrive off from the interactions between characters, like Kvothe and Denna from The Kingkiller Chronicle, or the fool from The Way of Kings. I love reading stories from a different perspective like in Looking for Alaska or World War Z; or in different environments like Hatchet, The Black Magician, and I am Legend. I love reading how the good people are not necessarily good people, and the bad aren’t necessarily bad, such as Death Note, Age of the Five, and The Count of Monte Cristo. I read to enjoy, I read to understand, but most importantly, I read to escape.
I jumped into the lightnovel scene shortly after “Edge of Tomorrow” came out in theaters. I found out that it was based off the manga, “All You Need is Kill”. Intrigued by this groundhogesque-type of story, I spent the whole night reading the story online. When I finished, I was left disappointed due to how short the series was. Then, that fateful morning, I saw something in the comments: (Paraphrasing) “If you like this story, then you might enjoy Ark.” Long story short, after some google-fu was used, I found it along with many other stories. Then came /r/LightNovels, which eventually branched into /r/noveltranslations. Then came QI, and I applied. I took the editor’s test. The instructions were pretty clear: fix this, fix that. Find punctuation errors, grammatical errors, etc. But the hardest part was, “Make it readable.” For example (made up example), I see this: “She cried. And she sang ‘Goodbye’ while crying”, and I want to change it into, “Tears stained her eyes and caressed her cheeks while she sang ‘Goodbye’”. But then again, as a fellow editor puts it: “I’m there to edit the translator, and not the author”, so it became “She cried while she sang ‘Goodbye’”.
As a co-editor of Plundering the Heavens, I am mystified as to how some people can churn out a chapter every few minutes. That’s insane. They call me the monster, but they don’t realize how freakish their existence is to me. I mean, I’m only focusing on logical flow, punctuations, names/terms, places, grammar, and spelling. Even then, it takes me so much time to go through them—maybe I need to learn their methodology. Or just have a few thousand more edits under my belts. In the meantime, they do everything I do while restructuring the sentences, and still finishes before me. I work at an extremely slow/snail-like pace—slower than I would oftentimes like to admit. And then I get reviews about how my release rates are so slow and its riddled with pinyin. :S Life is great sometimes.
As for my everyday life? I work a day job from 8-3, another job from 4-6, then a flower farm to take care of whenever I’m free, especially on the weekends. Flower is love, and flower is life (allergic to pollen though). This is what I have to do to make ends meet. After ends are met, I splurge. And I splurge pretty hard. Sometimes, when it’s a healthy splurge, it’s in the form of going out hiking/playing all day. When it’s not, it could be in the form of an 8-hour-marathon of ARAM on League of Legends. Many times, those sessions end up being 10+ straight losses in a row (this, my discord friends, is why I am not often on discord nowadays). And sometimes, I find myself ending up with a brand new device (like a desktop computer) along with a financial hit to my bank account.
Another note: I grew up with Pokémon. When I first saw Ash capture Pidgey with a Pokéball, my first thought in my first grade mind was, “Why did he have the bird zapped! It’s an innocent bird!” Needless to say, I’ve come a long way from that mentality. I have a few favorite Pokémons, but my favorite two are Ampharos and Magikarp.
Ampharos: Yellow is one of my favorite colors, especially when paired with black. Black and yellow makes such a great combination, and it is found on this Pokémon! Plus he carried me through the whole game (Gold) and the Elite Four over and over and over again.
Magikarp: The life of the Magikarp is currently what I feel like my life is. Magikarp can splash about (doing nothing), and when it can no longer splash, it struggles. I splash about (splurge) as much as I can, and when I can splash about no longer, I struggle (with my jobs). Rinse and repeat. Plus, Magikarp is a beast (warning: language).
Sorry guys, I have no pictures of cute cats to show everyone. The closest thing I have to a pet would be my sloth!
One day, I'll be able to support a pet. Probably not another cat due to how the last one died by being ran over, nor due to how allergic to cat hairs my siblings are (I probably am too). In the meantime, I'm just jealous of Lis and Zayn.
P.S. Thank you, my small reader-base, for continually supporting my novel! This is Nou, splashing out.
P.S.S. And I'm horrible with keeping verb tenses consistent, as you could probably see. This may or may not be one of the reasons why I take so long editing, as I have to consciously think of each and every word if I were to edit.
P.S.S.S. It's a bit choppy. I typed one paragraph, jumped to the next without finishing the first, typed it up, add in a few paragraphs in between, back to the first, then to the third, then second, etc. You get my point. I didn't bother trying to connect them. At this point, I just wanted to hit the blue [Post Discussion] button.
