Website: 4th anniversary

It’s this website’s fourth anniversary. That makes me look both back and forward. In the last year I published my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed. I also wrote four new ones, turning The Time Well into a series. With all that productivity, though, I lost my way with this blog. But that inattention didn’t mean I gave up on it.

Now that the first novel is published, I am working on getting the second, Neyuki, ready to go. I am considering doing the book design myself. I need to become more facile with Adobe InDesign, and working through a novel will be a great way to do that. The path ahead is clear for Neyuki, but I wonder what will follow. I am thinking of writing one or two sequels to my third novel, The Man Terror Club, so that one probably won’t be next in line for publication. I may skip ahead to novel five, Vision More Glorious. I doubt, though, that I can prep two novels for publication in the next year. No matter what I opt for, it’s going to be busy.

One thing that will make this time bittersweet is that, unless something unexpected arises, this will be my last year in Japan. I suspect once I’m gone, my novels won’t end up with as much Japanese content, but that remains to be seen. I still have so many ideas for things I want to write.

Basing characters on friends

Where do authors find their characters? How do they choose their names? I often base mine on people I know, sometimes even leaving the whole thing intact. Students are a great source. Pick a first name from one student and a last name from another, and I have a character name that I know is perfectly realistic. I have to be careful, though, as my students are from all over the world, and mixing and matching in that pool can produce nonsense.

A few times I have chosen names, especially Japanese names, with the meaning in mind. “Ikenami” means “pond wave,” which as far as waves go, can hardly be a big one. It fit nicely for character that was a tempest in a teapot. In A Scowl Becomes Me, I wanted to name the protagonist’s wife Blessed. So then I named several of the Japanese characters with names that all mean “blessed.” I enjoyed having the protagonist learn the meanings of their names one by one.

More often, however, I choose Japanese names that are as different from each other as possible, as I know foreign readers can have a hard time keeping Japanese names straight. This was especially daunting in The Man Terror Club, as there are so many women and they are all important to the story. I purposefully tried to make them sound as different as possible, while still making them mainstream Japanese names.

I have also occasionally named characters I like after friends. It makes them more three dimensional for me. This can be even more true if the friend lends not only the name, but also the character’s personality or appearance. The female protagonist in my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, was inspired in part by experiences of a friend of mine (although it is mostly fictional). In The Time Well, I have based characters on a few friends. They have tentatively allowed me to use their full names, and seem to enjoy becoming part of the novel. I am planning the sequel now and one friend in particular is helping me understand how her character will react to the twists in the plot. The only real problem is that she is too busy to spend much time reading and giving me feedback.

The greatest problem with using friends to create characters is that I can never recreate the original person perfectly. So how does a real life friend feel when a character based on them does something they would never do? It has to be disconcerting. And that uncomfortable feeling could exceed the flattery of having one’s name or personality appear in the pages of a novel.

More importantly, I suspect all my characters are me. I am in there for good or ill. I wonder how my friends will feel about all being hybrids with me? I imagine our faces contorted and merged with Photoshop. It’s not pretty.

Perhaps the best way for me to think about it, though, is in line with advice I recently got from a friend who is a lawyer. I was wondering if the organizational setting for one of my novels, which is not at all flattering, could be close enough to a particular organization that I would wind up getting sued. My friend asked who the publisher was, and when I said I was self-publishing, he told me that I shouldn’t worry about it. He said that chances were no one would read it anyway. 

Final lesson: some problems are more rhetorical than real. It’s important to keep things in perspective.

Website: 3rd anniversary

I have written fewer blog posts this third year, only seventeen. But I have been writing. I wrote a new novel, my eighth, and got Under Shōko’s Bed ready for publication. With that, editing the other novels, and a full-time job, I have been plenty busy. But it’s difficult to stay current on the blog when I have no readers. I trust there will be readers eventually, though, so I will keep at it.

I hope that the next twelve months will see publication not only of Under Shōko’s Bed but also Neyuki, plus significant progress toward publication of The Man Terror Club.

The idea: The Man Terror Club

The idea for The Man Terror Club came to me as I was waking up one morning ten years ago. Who knows what odd places thoughts steal in from when you’re only half awake, but I wondered how an elevator operator might fight back if she was being sexually harassed. As my somnolent imagination meandered, it strayed toward acts of physical resistance and retribution, and the title The Man Terror Club popped into my head. 

It may be the most evocative of all the titles I’ve written, but I worried about creating the story. That title deserved a brilliant book, and I wasn’t yet confident enough in my first two novels to believe they had prepared me to produce something of that caliber. I experimented with the idea in 2010-2012 as a short story, but I didn’t feel ready to write even that much. 

So I waited.

I got more serious about writing in 2017. I rewrote Under Shōko’s Bed and Neyuki and improved both novels. How much more experience would I need before I could do justice to my idea? I thought it best to write at least two more novels before I tried The Man Terror Club. The problem was I didn’t have two other stories that moved me as The Man Terror Club did, so I finally resolved to just do it. In the spring of that year, over two months, I produced the first draft. I did not have the entire plot firmly in mind from the beginning, although I knew things would take a dark turn and end in murder. I envisioned each of the pre-murder chapters as a short story focused on a different member of the club. As I wrote, though, the women’s stories blended together and lost their short story flavor. 

Still, each chapter for the first three-quarters of the novel is told first person from a different character’s point of view. (After that, narration stays first person, but already-introduced characters narrate sections of the chapters.) I didn’t realize at the time that I was flying in the face of writing pundits who warn neophytes and even more advanced writers never to write first person with a large cast of narrators. You should have few narrators and preferably only one. But what I attempted, eleven narrators, is not unheard of. William Faulkner used fifteen first-person narrators in As I Lay Dying. Of course, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, while I remain unpublished. Nevertheless, I wanted to try.

Perhaps the most surprising experience of writing The Man Terror Club was how much I came to like the characters. While all the women have been betrayed, abused, or discarded, they remained kind, giving, and caring. Their love for each other heals them, and that healing is most of the story, not their terrorism as they lash out at the evil men do.

With my ongoing interest in the characters, I have even been bouncing the idea of a sequel around. I am taking notes and considering key characters, plot twists, and terrorist acts. I worry it may be premature to start a sequel before the first novel is even published. But The Man Terror Club, while not finalized, is just about ready for professional editing. I don’t think the fundamental story will change. And I want to spend a few months living with those women again. They are lovely people (who do extreme things), and more of their story ought to be told.

Website: 2nd anniversary

This month is the second anniversary of the website! I have written a lot during that time. I now have a row of seven complete novels in binders on my bookcase. I finished the seventh this week while hiding from the pandemic.

Neyuki is currently with my editor, but the edit should be done this month. I am so looking forward to her feedback. 

The Man Terror Club, Kintsugi, Vision More Glorious, The Keeper, and The Time Well are waiting to be edited, although I plan to introduce them here on the website over the next few weeks. I may have to find more than one editor, as I am getting too far ahead. The Keeper and The Time Well are new in the last year, although they were both ideas I’d been sitting on for a while. I’m casting about for a new novel, and feel a little at sea. What if someone asks me what I’m working on? Having written two novels in the last year, and having spent considerable time editing six of them, I need some inspiration. I certainly hope I have flashes of insight and can produce more than one novel in the next year.

I also want to write some short stories this year. I have a couple on the back burner, one waiting to be finished and one waiting for the idea to fully form in my head.

Unfortunately, I am lagging far behind in my efforts to publish. I still have not given up on traditional publishing for Under Shōko’s Bed, but I’ve got to restart my agent search, which flagged while I wrote The Keeper and The Time Well. That part of being a writer is what I put off most easily. It’s hard.