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.

Fans

Brandon Sanderson created quite a stir with his recent announcement of extra novels he wrote during the pandemic. He had the extra time because he wasn’t doing his normal speaking engagements and fan meetings. He was able to produce five novels beyond his normal output. So he and his team put together a Kickstarter drive to publish four of them and raised over twenty million dollars in the first three days. Now he’s nearing thirty-five million dollars (with time left to go).

Thirty-five million.

Wow.

I also wrote obsessively during the pandemic. I wrote a time travel novel in March through July of 2020, followed by a pandemic romance in November of that year. I also wrote a sequel to my time travel novel in July and August of 2021, then three more books in the same series from November 2021 through February 2022. Six novels in two years. I have no plans to use Kickstarter to raise money for their editing and publication. You must have fans for that.

Got few fans.

Bummer.

So, since 2021 was the year I finally published something (Under Shōko’s Bed), 2022 is going to be the year I finally get some fans. They’ve got some good stories coming.

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.

Cover: Under Shōko's Bed II

Laura Duffy sent the final cover pdf files for Under Shōko’s Bed today. They were waiting for the ultimate page counts after my book designer finished. 

This last step was mostly waiting on my end, but it also included what has been the most troublesome part of preparing the book for publication, writing the cover blurbs. I fear that if the book has a weak link, it is the blurbs, the brief paragraphs about the book and me that are supposed to pique the reader’s curiosity and get them to start reading or, ideally, to buy. 

The very short bio includes no writing credentials. What credentials I have are all related to my academic career, not my literary side hustle. But even that bio was easier than describing the novel. The key problem is that the first chapter contains a mystery I cannot divulge in the blurb. That mystery, revealed at the end of the first chapter, drives the rest of the story and its characters. How do I introduce the book without giving all that away?

Of course, there had been a blurb for Under Shōko’s Bed here on the website for three years. Somehow, though, in my mind, what was on the website was only temporary. I could change it at any moment, and indeed I have a few times. Putting it onto the cover of the book, in print, seems so much more permanent, even though with print on demand I can change the electronic file the book is being printed from. It’s funny how the mind works. Anyway, the book cover now has the necessary introductions. I only wish I had a subject pool I could draw on for experiments to tell me which concepts would have been best. My academic training pushes my mind in that direction. The literary part of me is simply supposed to feel what works. And I suppose it does, to some extent. It just doesn’t always lend as much confidence as I would like.

Book design: Under Shōko's Bed

Scrivener has a “compile” function that takes all the hundreds of brief documents you’ve written, all your scenes, and strings them together into a novel with chapters and section numbers and everything. It has some impressive formatting capabilities if you’re willing to go to the trouble of learning how to use them—and it is trouble, a lot. But what do you do when your fancy word processing software hyphenates the word wanting after the I instead of the T? How can you fix something that fundamentally broken?

I obviously could not trust Scrivener to format my novel for publication. Its compiler is fine for printing out drafts for editing, but that’s about it. The tool to use for page layout is InDesign from Adobe. I have Adobe’s Creative Cloud, because I use Illustrator and Photoshop, and I had experimented with InDesign. I wasn’t confident enough, however, to format a novel. I did not even know what rules to follow in formatting.

And I like rules. They’re good to have, even if you break them. (But don’t break the ones for hyphenation.)

I needed a book designer. I wanted a beautiful book, even if it made the likelihood of a profit an even further reach. So I asked my cover designer for a recommendation, and she pointed me to Karen Minster. I have been working with Karen since late last year on the layout of Under Shōko’s Bed.

I had hoped to learn enough in working with Karen that I could format a future novel on my own. (I can’t keep paying all the costs of hiring others to prep my books for publication. I don’t have the resources.) And I learned a lot. I can now format ellipses so they look like they do in The Chicago Manual of Style. I learned the two pages that make a spread should be the same number of lines on the page (unless one ends a chapter or section.) But I wish I had learned everything.

One of the minor inconveniences for Karen was that English word processors don’t know where to hyphenate Japanese words. So I went through the manuscript and checked the end of every line. It sounds like a pain, but it goes quickly. Then I gave Karen the syllable breaks, and she chose where to hyphenate.

A more major inconvenience was that I still cannot read through the manuscript without flaws jumping out at me. In reading to check on the formatting, I made edits. It went on longer than it should have. But Karen was patient with me. I don’t know if she cut me some slack because she knew it was my first time doing this or if she is simply that way with everyone.

Karen has now completed her work. It looks great. Now all I have to do is upload it, along with my cover art, to a print-on-demand service and I will have a book for sale.

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.

Revisiting the decision to self-publish

It excited me when my editor told me my first novel was good enough for a publishing house to pick it up—excited enough to give up my plan to self-publish it, which I wrote about in this blog in May 2018.

The normal way to find a publisher is to land an agent first. So I sent query letters to agents, a few each week. Interested agents will email back and ask for a copy of the novel. No one was interested. So after a few months of knocking on virtual doors, I stopped. My editor was amazed that I had gotten no nibbles. As I worked on other projects, I thought time and again about whether I should go back and contact more agents. But Under Shōko’s Bed is an odd book about a foreigner in Japan. That’s not the sort of thing the average reader is clamoring for. I don’t know what publishers could tap that narrow niche of readers. I also worry that after finding there to be too few, the book would go out of print and that would be the end. Almost every book goes out of print, but I don’t want to face that disappointment so soon.

So after months of vacillating, I have decided to go back to self-publishing. It gives me total control. I get to choose the cover and book design. I get to write the cover blurb. I get to set the price. It also puts all the weight for book sales on my shoulders. There will be no one out there pushing the book but me. That is a sobering realization, since I’m not very pushy. If I end up selling five copies, it will be my fault. If by some miracle I sell more, well, I’ll be thankful for miracles.

Cover: Under Shōko's Bed

Under Shōko’s Bed has a cover that’s not homemade anymore. I found my cover designer, Laura Duffy, on Reedsy.com. She had excellent recommendations, but the thing that swung me in her direction, besides a great portfolio, was her promise to read the book before designing the cover. Under Shōko’s Bed is an eccentric tale, and I worried about what might both represent the text and create enough interest that a browser might pick up the book (either physically or virtually) and read a little. Without that first fleeting interest, I will get very few readers.

I like that this cover is unusual. There are no other books out there that show feet from beneath a bed. I think it has an element of mystery. And the novel begins that way, as the reader wonders through the first chapter just what is secreting itself under Shōko’s bed. I hope the question will be enough to pique more than a few readers’ interest.

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.

The Chicago Manual of Style

I prefer having rules. It’s how things ought to be. There should be a right way to punctuate faltering or interrupted dialogue, to choose between toward or towards, or to know whether to make that last comma italic or Roman. (The answer is Roman.) So I made a major commitment a few weeks ago. I stopped looking up grammar, punctuation, and usage questions at what I hoped were trustworthy online sources. Too often those websites either disagreed or offered no helpful guidelines and I was having to decide on my own what rule to use. In addition, the sites didn’t cover many of the fine points, forcing me to make up too much. I needed a comprehensive style guide. So I adopted The Chicago Manual of Style.

I wish I had a good reason for waiting so long (especially since I am a University of Chicago alumnus). The CMOS is one of American English’s most accepted writing style standards. I suppose I thought it was mostly for dissertations and other academic papers. I was wrong.

It’s a major undertaking to look up all over again the myriad things I’ve wondered about. Plus, I just need to sit and read some sections of the book (perhaps at bedtime?). It will take a long time, but once I learn the Chicago rules of style, I won’t have to look up those answers so much anymore. The most difficult thing for me is punctuation, especially in italics or dialogue. Under Shōko’s Bed has far more italicized text than any of my other novels, so it has been hard to edit. Once I have mastered Chicago style, though, novels I write from then on will not need so many style interventions.

I just wish every topic in the CMOS had a single answer, even if it was context dependent. But some seem to have multiple acceptable styles or even conflicting advice in different sections. (I’m still not sure which numbers to spell out in dialogue, for example.) So some choices remain. Writing is all about choices, after all. In the pursuit of art, any rule is breakable as long as the breaking is purposeful. I’m the one at the computer, so the ultimate decisions are all mine. For stylistic choices, though, I wanted some help. With the CMOS next to me, I have somewhere authoritative to turn.