Justin Howe's Blog, page 61

Quotidian Pohang

The momentary thrill of drinking can end your happiness forever.

Banga Waeyo!

I started taking a Korean class at one of the colleges here. Most of my fellow students are exchange students from across Europe and Asia. (It's fun being in a class where the Austrian guy makes an "oh la la" joke about the French guy.) Another student is the wife of one of the school's visiting professors, and the rest of us (three including myself) are Public School English teachers.

Let me first say I am lousy at languages. If you've ever had a conversation with me, you'd have noticed I...

Quotidian Pohang

Since I'm posting everyday pictures here it only makes sense to put up one of my classroom. There you go.

Working like this is the only way that makes sense, even if it is tricking myself.

So I've got this thing I'm working on. It's a novel, Science Fantasy, you know, with castles, vat-grown flesh, and pistols in it. Its working title is Clusterfuck, a Novel. It rose out of two distinct stacks of story corpses. The characters in both stacks resemble each other and some of the thematic stuff is similar enough that I'm mashing them together to see if they form a new entity with an actual plot.

Simultaneously I can't forget they're also a pile of story corpses: jagged beginnings...

Quotidian Pohang

Blue skies from school's back window.

A Brief History of Tea

Buddhist monks invented tea thousands of years ago in what is today southwestern China. These monks lived atop the mountains and found the beverage improved their ability to meditate over long periods of time. Also it complimented their other super-powers. Soon the habit spread throughout the lowlands, and in the 7th century Lu Yu wrote his now famous panergeric to the beverage, A Fistful of a Cup of Tea. People became ecstatic — so much so that when Lu Yu died he became God.

Centuries...

Quotidian Pohang

Genre Aphorisms

Find your own golden age. Don't settle for another generation's.

Genre fiction is bigger, looser, and more unexpected than a publisher's marketing department wants you to believe.

Adults who use "–punk" as a suffix are still bitter about how uncool they felt in high school.

The Eye's a Filter For You to See

Jin and I went to the beach to eat at one of our favorite restaurants. I'll probably write about the place one day, but if you're ever in Pohang it's behind Tilt, the foreigner bar, maybe about a block or so in.

Afterwards we wandered around a nearby neighborhood where I snapped the above picture. Posting it here has started me thinking how the city must look to people only reading about it on this blog. There's certainly a trend in my pictures that runs counter to the actual. For one thing...

Five Authors / Five Questions: The End

Last week Shimmer magazine posted the fifth question on their blog. This time we talked about endings.

5. How do you craft the perfect ending for a story? How do you keep an ending from falling flat?

I didn't say this, but thought it was pretty spot on: "I'm always a fan of stories that leave the reader in the mystery, in the wonder. Which means risking not explaining everything, thus (hopefully) leaving the reader the space to make it perfect."

Use these links to catch up with the whole...