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Skew the time stream a bit, and I likely have had a corpus filled end-to-end with nothing but short fiction stories about cars to present on December 6th.

Of course, skew it enough, and I likely have made screenplays about MMA athletes, but that only leads the discussion astray. I wanted to write about a thousand different things, from a lone hacker who brought down Citibank to a fantasy mystery tale about people turning into grotesque demons in the middle of matrimony or even something as simple as when my head fell in a bathroom when I was a wee tyke (the event that explains the scars at the back of my head).

At one point in my teenage life, I even dreamt up a massive, multi-season story about cyborgs. Still, all those stories amounted to little more than daydreams, committed not to any page of some kind but said aloud with dialogue and hand gestures. They were ethereal, fleeting, vivid one second and obscured by static the next. Even now, I only vaguely remember where they begin.

It's a symptom of being a speaker first than a writer, a preference that took shape when I was in 5th grade and decided that declamation was a fun extracurricular activity. After all, I was already talking back dirty at my family, brother, and aunts, in fights that showed more of my naivete than their failures at raising what relatives thought as a "gifted child." And because I was already fluent enough in English, getting up a stage to say a piece was the logical next step. It's a preference that never went away; even now, as I write this poetics accompaniment, I type at the speed of my voice — most of this first page comes from text-to-speech, taking advantage of my iPhone's excellent voice capture technology.

Such a preference makes me a reasonably good speaker but only a par-for-the-course writer. And that same preference means that I'm content with sounding off my ideas instead of using a pen or a keyboard, meaning that for all my hallucinations and lucid visions, precious few ideas ever become tangible. I tend to abandon the ones I could make tangible either because school demanded more or because I forgot to follow up. I don't regret any of that, but I am frustrated that I could potentially mine my memory only to find fragments that I only recently discovered the skill to stitch together.

That's precisely what happened with "The Tie."

Not only was it a draft made back in 2021, but it also came from an assortment of ideas back in 2017 that only a phone game managed to bind together. I was playing Motorsport Manager 3 in 2020, and my playthrough progressed far enough to reach that game's off-brand equivalent to the Formula One World Championship. It was an idea that lay dormant for a long time but one founded in a burning passion for all things racing.

Because that was my first dream: to be a racing driver. In every instance that the question came up, no matter who asked, I always said that I wanted to be like Michael Schumacher when I grew up. What car-obsessed kid wouldn't after seeing him win the 2003 Italian Grand Prix? The moment I heard that V10 engine scream, I was hooked. Not only was I going to fawn over the car, but also the man who drove the car, the read team he was in, and the new world that the neighbors opened up to me.

For the rest of my life, my enthusiasm for cars only grew. I devoured website after website, logged into as many forums as possible, and commented on many articles and features from many authors. In the internet age, getting involved is easier than ever, even if, admittedly, the number of comments dwarfs total traffic and engagement. But because comments are often visible and readable, they profoundly affect the reading experience.

With communities from all over the world, I developed a sense of belonging, and I could share my passion with even more people and learn about cars as never before. And that feedback loop only revved at more incredible speeds, powering me through high school and the four years that. I held off on college.

But cars are, by nature, expensive -- arguably the second most expensive investment a person can undertake after a house. And racing those cars raise costs to a level that makes it decidedly a rich-person sport (yes, sport, I genuinely believe Ernest Hemingway's quote). So for the longest time, I bought miniature die-cast toy cars from brands like Hot Wheels, Tomica, and Majorette to sate my fantasy about owning the fastest cars in the world (and other cars that tickled my fancy). And whenever there was racing to watch on weekends, I relied on both Radio Le Mans' coverage of long endurance races as well as freely-aired races on YouTube and even pirated live streams of Formula 1 races, all while swooshing the toys that replicate what I see.

That extended to the games I played. In Need for Speed: Most Wanted, I created a new persona and fanfic while playing. I did the same thing in NFS: Carbon and Shift 2 Unleashed, while the F1 games I played centered around burgeoning idols like Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel.

This habit of putting myself in the games I played extended to my playthrough of Motorsport Manager 3.

I called the team Merlion mainly because it sounded cool enough. My team principal avatar is Ysidro Sandoval, a Filipino who owns a dealership network. The drivers come from different backgrounds, but come the big stage, I settled on turning one of my drivers, Daphne Bieshaar, a Filipino-Dutch rising star.

"The Tie," then, is adapted from both my imagination and an actual round of my game -- the round that started with my driver and the 2nd-place AI opponent having the same points coming into the race. The challenge: develop this single story into a full-on F1-based fiction tale so I can post it on reddit.com/r/fanF1ction after a month or so.

Naturally, after completing a few pages, I forgot about it after an errand. And there it sat in my drafts folder for a long time, waiting for any semblance of progression.

Until now.

This revision intends to make something more hard sci-fi, having accounted for the critical input my batchmates and the professor provided. I once seriously thought it was spec-fic enough to pass, but I suppose the overly technical descriptions and otherwise down-to-earth problems proved to be a realist story still. Solution: move a decade further and raise the technology to nigh-unreal levels for all but the now-revamped HondaKal team. It meant doing away with some real-life names, but I can still retain the challenge because I didn't leave Brazil.

Naturally, the workshopped draft remains. I've since split the work into two distinct entities. But I continue to use the lessons I learned throughout the semester to refine both stories. After all, I don't want to stop at this bunch. I want to post either or both on forums, which means foreign audiences will read them. And I want to show how far I've grown as a writer with this story.