Website: 8th anniversary

I turned sixty-nine today. The website turned eight. The last two years have been much more eventful for me than for the website, and even more so for this blog, which has continued to survive my benign neglect.

I continued writing over these two years. Six months ago, my son-in-law completed building a cabin in Scofield, Utah. I get to write there occasionally. It’s marvelous. Unfortunately, I have not written enough to complete either of the novels I started. The first, Orpheus Insufficient, is grounded science fiction, the story of a three-year-long voyage to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, in the years 2204 to 2207. Unfortunately, Orpheus, still unfinished, is over 130,000 words. So I am thinking I might rewrite it to add 80,000 or so more words and turn it into a trilogy rich in subplots.

The second novel is US 89. I started writing it for a contest, but needed to do more research than there was time for. It tells the story of a newspaper columnist in 2076 who is writing a piece a week about each of America’s fifty-two states. She ends up in Arizona, and it is suggested to her that she drive up US Highway 89, which goes from Arizona all the way to Canada. I wrote the Arizona chapters with little trouble, but everything past Utah stopped me in my tracks. The needed research may require me to actually drive the length of US 89. You would think that, being retired, that would be a simple thing for me, but my wife and I are surprisingly busy.

I have also been editing and rewriting scenes in The Time Well, the first in my time travel saga which could end up being eight to ten books. I have to rewrite because the science just wasn’t grounded enough. If we’re talking time travel, of course, it can’t be completely realistic. But my premise was too far out there. There’s going to be hand waving involved, but I wanted to stretch credulity only enough that suspension of disbelief would still come easily.

I continue to work on the sixth Time Well book, which has bloated to 399,000 words. It needs to be edited down and will still require three volumes. I am wondering how to make them work as stand-alone books, but it may just be impossible.

My second novel, Neyuki, is getting closer to being publishable. I have a cover artist, and a friend is typesetting it for me. I think that will all be done by the end of the month. It has taken me far too long to get this out. I kept thinking maybe I would go with a traditional publishing house. In the end, though, I have decided to self-publish. Marketing will be the hard part, and prepping the novel’s debut will take long enough that it won’t show up before July or August.

I have gotten much more involved with the local writing scene, working with two chapters of the League of Utah Writers. I have also joined Apex Writers, a writing community with international scope. Finally, I am still on the committee that puts on one of Utah’s largest writing symposia, Life, the Universe, and Everything, each year in February..

Website: 6th anniversary

Hello from America! Speaking on behalf of my blog, I must admit to another year of inactivity. Speaking for myself as a writer, though, it has been a marvelous year. I completed second drafts of two new novels, tentatively titled Writers on the Storm and August. The first is an attempt at a humorous take on writing, and the second is a somewhat more serious exploration of love in the twilight of life.

I also continue to work on book six in my science fiction series, The Time Well, which began as as a National Novel Writing Month project in November 2022. This is the first time I have had a novel grow out of control on me. It is currently north of 311,000 words. My tentative plan is to break it into three books, although they will not be self-contained units.

I have found that the writing community in Utah, where I now live, is quite active. I have not settled into a writing group yet, but I have so many more potential groups than I had in Japan. My wife and I are even volunteering for a local writer’s conference.

Perhaps the best news is that I am still writing full bore. Unfortunately, I am also writing just as obsessively as always, which still concerns me. Maybe this year I can find better balance in my life. While I have not lacked for writing projects, I did skip National Novel Writing Month last November. With as many novels as I have unpublished, it didn’t seem wise to use that month to produce yet another first draft.

Website: 5th anniversary

My blog has fallen by the wayside, but not me. I’ve been distracted by my retirement and the preparations for moving to the US at the end of June, but my days are full of writing. I will have so much to show when publication time finally rolls around.

It’s interesting that writing will no longer be a safe haven from work stresses, because yesterday, I retired from teaching. So if there is any stress now, it will be the writing itself. The bigger change, though, will be sitting and writing in America instead of Japan. I don’t know if I will continue to write books set in Japan. The next two I have on my plate will be set in the US. I expect there will also be a major change in quietude, going from a home with two sixty-five year olds to one with a pair of young kids. I am sure, though, that writing will continue. I enjoy it too much to drop it or even cut back much.

One activity that I enjoyed again this year was writing for National Novel Writing Month last November. I wrote 106,800 words, qualifying me for another yet NaNoWriMo win, but I didn’t finish the novel, the sixth novel in The Time Well series. It has since continued to grow. I fear I have a monster on my hands.

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.

National Novel Writing Month 2021 III

I finished NaNoWriMo today with my biggest thirty-day word count ever: 120,000 words. The novel still has some holes in it and it needs plenty of massaging and patching to make all the pieces fit, but for a first draft, it’s in pretty good shape. As I suspected coming in, already having a world created and characters I know and like made this quick and fun. I am sorely tempted to leave it as it is for a few weeks and start on the next one (book four in my time travel series), then come back to this one and see how the whole arc is progressing.

National Novel Writing Month 2021 II

Today I passed 50,000 words in my latest novel, which is the arbitrary definition of winning set by NaNoWriMo. That makes four wins in four years straight. This year I did it in fifteen days, half of what NaNoWriMo allows. It’s not my fastest win, but it suits me just fine this time around.

National Novel Writing Month 2021

It’s my fourth November participating in NaNoWriMo. This year I am writing a sequel. It’s fun to already know the characters and the world they inhabit. This is book three in my time travel series, The Time Well. I originally envisioned it as a trilogy, but all the content I had conceived ended up in book one. Then, all kinds of other ideas flooded in and now I am thinking about five books. I certainly hope I will be able to keep the the story fresh and unpredictable for that long.

Another problem I have with the series is that I have grown to love these characters. Unfortunately, in writing several books, I will have created too many and not left enough by the wayside. Stephen King says to kill your darlings, and the fact that I don’t want to lose any of these dear characters convinces me that one (or more) needs to go. But which one(s) and how? I have some serious reflection ahead.

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.

The idea: The Time Well

I made my first notes for The Time Well two years ago when I was thinking about what might happen if someone were to travel in time. Someone appearing in the past would automatically create a new future, but what happens to the old future? What if it ceases to exist? Then all that space-time would be annihilated, including all the people. I imagine someone would fight to stop that annihilation. Governments might try to outlaw time travel, scientists might sign agreements never to do it, etc., but in a world where something is possible, eventually someone will do it. So if you didn’t want anyone to travel in time and you had sufficient resources, would you become a vigilante to stop it from happening? That was the basic idea for The Time Well. 

Time travel researchers have been dying in strange accidents ever since the mechanics of time travel were first theoretically posited in 2040. But in 2068, the band of billionaires who have been ordering the murders miss killing a researcher and murder his family instead. With nothing left in this time line for him, the scientist surreptitiously builds the world’s first time machine.

I envisioned The Time Well as a trilogy of novels. As I wrote, though, I realized I did not have enough story or subplots to fill three novels. What I had was working well, though, so I cut it down to one novel with three parts. The second and third parts turned out to be heavy on the love story part of the plot but light on science fiction, so I did a rewrite. Now the middle part is not tense or gripping enough, so I am rewriting again. Unfortunately, in the process the book has expanded (it’s now nearly one hundred forty thousand words). That’s too much story for one book, but not enough for three. So now I must decide what to do with it yet again!

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.