Daniel Clausen's Blog

Statues in the Cloud

Statues in the Cloud by Daniel Clausen




Hello everyone,

I recently finished a video trailer for the book. Please feel free to share the video and leave comments. I appreciate the support!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXs3G...

Synopsis:

One day, a writer in Japan receives a letter from a young fan who is dying from a mysterious disease. The young fan, Aya, gives the writer a challenge: “Come to Nagasaki and help me find seven pieces of a statue. If you can help me do this simple thing,” she tells him, “you will have cured me.”

What the writer soon discovers is that finding the seven pieces means telling the stories of seven unique individuals: a future governor of Tokyo, an American soldier from the Second World War, a folk hero from Miami, a young dancer in a future Hiroshima, an artificial intelligence from the far future, the writer’s own story, and the story of Aya.

As the writer and Aya learn more about this group of individuals, it becomes apparent that their stories are connected and that there is more at stake than just Aya’s life. The disease afflicting her has many forms: a vengeful god, a computer virus, and a contagious illness. If they fail to unravel the secret of Aya’s mysterious disease, the very survival of humanity could be at stake.


Here is a short excerpt from the book:

It was about a week, maybe two weeks, before the letter came.

I was writing. But I felt like my characters were numb to me. I would try to put them down on paper, but they would just sit there like lifeless clay – vague, mute...

Then, I was waiting at a train station one day in my city of Fujisawa, at one of the many train stations that dot the traditional rail line that runs along the coast from Fujisawa to the old samurai capital of Kamakura. The old trains of the Enoden had this classic green look to them that made them iconic and recognizable to locals and tourists. If you went into any tourist shop in Fujisawa you were apt to find postcards with animated drawings of them.

So, there I was, just standing in a suit, with a briefcase stuffed full of student papers and other work-related items of various importance. There were two elementary school kids, maybe eight or nine years old, playing “junken” (rock, paper, scissors). A mother with her infant in a pouch on her chest. I looked down the station platform and saw this young man. An American. He had this jacket on that looked one size too big for him. A military jacket of some kind. He was shorter than me and had this way of hunching over. Other than that, details don’t stand out clearly in my mind.
He wasn’t me, but he could’ve been me. I had this image of him in my mind. He was in some old bar in...in...Pittsburgh?...and was offering up a toast, wearing that same jacket...but now, for reasons I couldn’t understand, he was here in Fujisawa, and he had this look like the world had ended and he was about to throw himself in front of a train. I could hear very clearly the thoughts in his head. Ma, oh ma, I loved you but never told you how much.

I started walking down the train platform to get closer to him, as if I were some trout on a fishing line. I was moving toward him, but I was also being pulled toward him. And then I was close to him, and I reached out to him for a moment, and I realized that he only lived in my mind and that I was...not hallucinating, that’s not the right word...the things in my mind were real, just not real the way others think of them.

Nevertheless, I reached out to him as if he were there. I didn’t have a name to call him by. I didn’t know how to reach him. I wanted to just say “Pittsburgh” out loud. But then I became aware of where I was. I was in this little rustic train station. There were about a dozen people on the platform waiting for the train.

Try to focus on them, I told myself. Focus on the living. I found a salaryman starting to fall asleep standing up. He seemed slightly drunk. Focus on him, I told myself. But the more I tried, the more the man from Pittsburgh was there on the platform with me.

He was just behind the salaryman, and I could see he was seriously debating just throwing himself in front of the train. I could see that look of wild desperation in his eyes. The train was coming now. He was no longer just a person in my mind. He was someone I vaguely knew. I was sure if I reached out, I could touch him. And I said out loud, “No, don’t.” And before I could see what had happened to him, I found several people around me asking me if I was alright.

“Daijyobu,” I said to each of them, a salaryman, a young housewife, and some others... but I wasn’t alright. Something was wrong. I was sweating like I had a fever and I had almost toppled over.

Yes, something was wrong, but I couldn’t say exactly what.

In the height of my delirium I actually checked around the track to see if something had happened. I half expected to see the bloody remains of the ex-soldier...How did I know he was an ex-soldier?

There was nothing, though...nothing that I could see yet.



View all my reviews

Become a Library Tourist

Libraries are kind of an artifact (sort of like me) from a bygone era. Yet, these artifacts could be the secret to discovering meaning and joy in the 21st century. I can't explain exactly what I'm thinking right now. But as best as I can express it: There is something in the touch of paper, the care in organization, the multiplicity of purposes, the mixture of people, the free flow of information, and even the shared experience of quiet community that has the power to rescue us from the tyranny of unrelenting digital efficiency.

So, why not become a library tourist?

As a library tourist, the first thing I like to do when entering a library is to see the library as a whole. How are the magazines organized? Are there any exhibits? Where is the smell of old books most pronounced?

Libraries are lessons in urban geography. You can tell a lot about the character of a city or town by the state of their library. When I was living in the small town of Edgewater, Florida, I remember distinctly how well stocked and organized the DVD section was. The library there was a substitute for the old rent-a-video places that used to exist. If you needed a cheap night out, then you could just go to the library and check out a DVD.

In Omura, Nagasaki, the library - Mirai on Library ミライon図書館 - is named and built as a testament to the future of the city. Omura is a medium-sized city with ambition, this library tells us emphatically. The building is a testament to modern architecture. The library serves as both a library and a museum. The first floor is a museum dedicated to exhibits about Nagasaki. On the other hand, the English language section, though plentiful, is lacking in substantial, intelligent books-perhaps reflecting the idea that the library is more about looks than substance. The coffee shop there, too, is elegant and refined, and yet, it has priced me out of a (good?) cup of coffee.


My university library, on the other hand, is richly stocked with books, both academic and otherwise, and beautiful. Teachers choose the books, meaning that what is ordered and shelved is likely to also be read thoughtfully. The library is on the first floor of the university, and a bridge on the second floor crosses over it, giving students (and teachers) a bird's-eye view of the library and who is reading. You are a bookbird, looking down at all the bookworms, but there is no eating the readers at our university.

What about the big city experience? I remember distinctly going into a library in Tokyo. It was big, modern, beautiful, and packed with people. I had trouble finding a place to sit. Once I had found a place to sit, I wanted to take a quick five-minute nap. However, a minute into my nap, I was rudely awakened by a library attendant, who told me harshly that there was no sleeping in the library. I imagine that Tokyo libraries don't want to become a haven for the homeless. Yet, there is something uncivilized about being told you can't take a quick nap at the library...and I needed that nap, too!

There are many other libraries I have visited in my many travels. Each had its own flavor. Each existed, despite the tyranny of 21st-century digital efficiency. They each taught me something new about the way books bind not only paper but also people.

So, if life and the 21st century have you down, why not become a tourist of the most distinguished kind? Library tourism anyone?

Review of Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger)

I've never been to 1955 New York or had to hang out with pretentious New York intellectuals. Perhaps this makes the book a little hard to relate to. Some of the details and slang are hard to pick up, as well.

But one thing that is indisputable: this book has great pacing, dialogue, and amazing descriptions that set the scene and create a rich world. At the heart of Salinger's great writing is a spiritual crisis that feels immediate, personal, and yet universal.

I have a very clear memory of giving up on this book when I was a college student. At the very beginning of the second story, "Zooey," Salinger describes the story as a kind of "home movie." I remember at the time that I expected the story to meander and go nowhere. I expected that the story would have very little beginning, middle, and end. So...I put the book down.

The book's two stories, however, are very clearly stories. To be fair, they often use a lot of description, rely heavily on dialogue to move the story forward, but they do have clear beginnings, middles, and ends. The characters go through profound changes in very short spaces. In many ways, the short stories serve as a kind of play in two acts--but they are also fantastic examples of short story writing.

For aspiring writers, there are lessons everywhere: how to use description, how to use stories within stories, how to create great dialogue.

One amazing detail that demonstrates just how much aspiring writers have to learn from this book comes on page 126: "Zooey was now gazing abstractedly at an old root-beer stain on the ceiling plaster, which he himself had made nineteen or twenty years earlier, with a water pistol." Details like this, placed thoughtfully throughout the story, give a sense of dimension and history. In short, they suggest worlds within worlds.

If you're an English major, parts of this book will seem hilarious to you: in the midst of Franny's mental breakdown, her boyfriend spends a great deal of time trying to tell her about how awesome one of his English papers is. His urgings, moreover, are usually little more than: "You got to read this goddamn paper, I'm telling you." The book does a good job of making you feel and see what it's like to see the world through Franny or Zooey's eyes. And in true J.D. Salinger style his main characters are not entirely blameless, flawless creatures--they are instead, self-described "monsters," as bad as the things they rail against in their many monologues.

The book is also a great example of a work that effectively uses a story within a story. The book "The Way of the Pilgrim" serves an important point in the book. Also, Buddy Glass's letter serves an important role. Like the long descriptions of parts of the house in "Zooey" the use of stories within stories helps to establish a larger world. (Who knows, some aspiring writer might one day choose to put this book in a short story about a person going through a similar spiritual crisis). The book's world seems three dimensional, a space that could expand endlessly. No doubt, the success of Franny and Zooey comes partly from Salinger's efforts in other stories about the Glass family.

There is also a deep spiritual conversation that takes place at the center of the book. Essentially, this conversation is the same one Holden Caulfield attempted to have with various characters in Catcher in the Rye. This book isn't just a retread of that conversation, but rather a deepening and broadening of it. The key dilemma of the book is one many in their teens and twenties will know well (okay, perhaps even people in their thirties can have this same kind of crisis). The skillful handling of this spiritual crisis is the reason why I think that people, even twenty years from now, will continue to find J.D. Salinger books in their local libraries and think that the book was placed there--almost divinely--for them to find. It has that special power (that only books seem to have) of being written in a way that makes you think the author wrote it especially for you.

The Nagasaki Coast

The charms of brown sand

and jagged rocks

too old to brave jelly-fished water with wrinkled flesh

the waning sun makes me long

for the charming sounds of lapping waves

of the romantic aspiration

of youth

a time when Fitzgerald and Hemingway were both in vogue and tutors

to a restless soul

The coffee grinds of youth

settle to the bottom of an aged spirit

make bitter aftertastes seem romantic

like novelists

who retired into a blissful rest

on the Nagasaki coast

Paradise in the Cloud

Paradise in the cloud

Bliss is thy name

Scars cannot be healed

By cool weather eves

Lazy cats on high

Concrete

Young minds attuned

To recent sorrows

Small comforts in classrooms

With views of the bay

We are but the things that dream are made of

Skin, fog, dust, clouds

Germs too (please mask up!)

I wish to be a bird, a butterfly, a wallflower

Only to reappear in this paradise in the clouds

Summer (a poem)

The green of summer is greener still

Bogged down with minor tasks

A summer sun invites me to mischief

And more

Than summer dream can ever fathom

Still green leads me from one hot adventure

To another

Until summer days cool

Into an epic fall

Rainy Day Gloom

Rainy gloom dashes the world heavy

paints the early morning

sadder, sadder, sadder still

Trims the optimistic pedals of spring

and makes me think

today is not the day to climb new mountains and proclaim myself

the master of all the eye can see

But after the rain

the mud on the heels of my soul

dries quick

and with a kick

turns clean enough

to try again to climb

mountains and proclaim with all the air of new spring,

fresh full-throated

"Let no rainy-day gloom defeat me!"

Kindle Giveaway - The Ghosts of Nagasaki (A Novel)

The novel "The Ghosts of Nagasaki" is free to download on Amazon Kindle for a limited time -- August 18 -- 22.

The novel in a nutshell:

"Blurring memory and myth, The Ghosts of Nagasaki follows an American expatriate in Japan as he confronts specters of war, love, and loss that haunt both the city and his own past."

https://a.co/d/7EUOuQr

Idle Tuesday (a poem)

To be alive on a Tuesday,

Smooth writing pen,

Coffee stains smear,

There are no tears for yesterday on stubborn, half-empty paper

Clouds portend much trouble, still

In the inhuman intentions of a spring afternoon

I find reasons to make deals with angels

For devilish tricks

Such machinations of the mind

That Tuesdays will forever be off-limits

To pen-wielding malcontents

With too much time on their hands.

The Year 2040 - A Statues in the Cloud Research Brief

The Synopsis for the Novel "Statues in the Cloud"

One day, a writer in Japan receives a letter from a young fan who is dying from a mysterious disease. The young fan, Aya, gives the writer a challenge -- come to Nagasaki and help find seven pieces of a statue. If you can help me do this simple thing, she tells him, you will have cured me. What the writer soon finds out is that finding the seven pieces means telling the stories of seven unique individuals: a politician, a soldier, a folk hero, a dancer, an AI, a writer, and the story of Aya herself.



The Year 2040 - or 2045



For the novel, I had to build my very own version of 2040 or 2045. I will use 2045 if the book doesn't end up being published until 2025 or so.



The Rules of Time Travel (through narration). I had to leave this future somewhat vague. The idea is that the writer couldn't see the future clearly in a way that would allow him to change it. For example, he would know that holograms were a thing of the future without knowing which companies would pioneer it. (Thus, he couldn't invest in these companies). I'm not sure if my rules of time travel through story-telling make sense, but in my mind they do.



So, in the future, there are a number of new technologies.



For example:



The sonic rail, which allows people to travel at great speeds using the rail system. Thus, people can commute to Tokyo from very far away places. The speed of the train is supported by technologies that reduce friction with the ground. Other than that, I have no details about this technology.



Solar energy, self-driving cars, and technologies on phones that make it easy to block sound are very popular.



Cell phone technology. This was the hardest to write because for some reason I still saw people carrying their cellphones around twenty years from now. My best explanation for this is that in the 2030s, there were bio-nano phones that you could implant in your fingers. You could simply project your screen into the air by touching your thumb and pointer finger. But for some reason, they weren't popular after a few years and people went "retro." Instead of projecting their screen into the air as they did ten years ago (2030s), people actually prefer to touch a screen. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it makes enough sense in my mind, so I went with it.



The holoweb is a place where you can interact with things and people as holograms. Holographic mapping rooms in Japan serve the same role that karaoke booths and internet cafes do today. If you are poor and need a "poor man's vacation," you can rent out a holo-room for a bit. I think there is also this idea that you could have holo-sensitive clothes. When you wear this special shirt, you can feel sensations.



Things I haven't developed well so far (and may never develop well): a sense of the fashion style of 2040, a sense of popular music...are convenience stores still "the thing" that organize people's lives in Japan? The trick is to think about the future without falling into SF and cyberpunk cliches.



Also, if robots are so pervasive, then how do people relate to them? Like people? Do some older Japanese see them as "foreigners" or are they okay because they are Japanese-made?



Here is a bizarre question, but one worth asking: If you are a childless couple, could you have a robot serve the same emotional role as a child? If you are an elderly person who has no child or whose children neglect you, would you develop a strong emotional attachment to your robot caregiver? (I'm thinking about the movie "Robot and Frank" now).



What a great movie, by the way, if you haven't watched it.


The geopolitics of the 2040s was the hardest thing to write. And it was best to keep it vague. The big idea of the book is that there is some kind of nuclear disaster in France (probably around 2037) that leads to a hibakusha diaspora community in Japan. My best guess is that it involves some kind of attack at nuclear sites or some other kind of accident. The hardest part to explain in this chapter is "the nuclear stain" -- the idea that everything affected by the disaster is in some way tainted. Scientifically, that might not make sense in 2040 since the technology for diagnosing and treating radiation might be very advanced. Europe will be increasingly destabilized, but Asia will continue to be a region of dynamic economies and technology.



Other scattered elements of the future: old media, such as print newspapers and magazines might make a comeback; Climate change will be in full swing and "Save Bangladesh" campaigns will be popular; Pacific Islands will be gone (these groups might be in Hiroshima too).



I will continue to work on these elements and develop them, but my experiment with 2040 will come to a close when Draft 5 of the novel is finished.



What lessons did I learn from trying to write about the future? First, it's hard to be original these days. There is nothing I can write that hasn't been developed somewhere in an SF movie or book. So, don't worry about trying to be great, but try to avoid the worse cliches. Hopefully, I've done that -- avoided too many cliches, I mean. The second lesson...forgive yourself when you can't make a completely believable future.