Regina Glei's Blog, page 34

Short Psycho Freeze Update

Hey, I’m just back from an additional driving lesson (two hours).

Teacher’s analysis of my new scare was quick and prompt: you’ve overdone it! lol…

What??? You went on the 246 some 5 times and to tons of places you didn’t know? No wonder you got scared! lol…

You should drive around your neighborhood and around familiar places until you get used to your car and the general traffic, then you can venture out into the world! lol… yes, so that’s what I shall do the next few weeks

It felt like the mother goose scolding her chick for running/flying too far away from the nest

So we went around some places I have to/want to go in the neighborhood and tested that all out and did some parking practice again and now I am released into the wild once more, but the wild close to the nest = home, not the scary world beyond my no-navi-needed area

It felt good that the teacher did not think I was weird but had an immediate explanation. So, I guess it will be smallish stuff around the neighborhood during the rest of January and in February and then in March I can look a bit further out again and resume adventuring

Short Update

Another shorter blog entry today, since I am hella busy.

Loads of homework to do for the Odyssey powerful dialogue seminar, whose second lesson was yesterday. The seminar is great as always with Odyssey and the learning curve steep It also means a lot of homework though, which I have to get to now.

My car – Alfie – has been slumbering in the garage, but tomorrow he will see some action again, when my teacher comes and we do another two hour round. I hope the temporary scare will ease after that. I will drive with her around the closer neighborhood to (more or less) all the places where I need to or want to go with the car. The plan is to practice then on my own a bit at these familiar places before I venture into the urban jungle again where I don’t know my way around (yet).

As for the flu scare, so far I seem to be OK – phew! And Monday, when Mr. Virus will presumably come to the office again I am not there but on business trip to another of our offices = one more day of safety from him!

From Tuesday onwards I have to sit in the same room again though, let’s hope he is not contagious anymore by that point.

So… but now I have to get to that Odyssey homework

Psycho Freeze

Interesting stuff happening with my nerves. Whilst I boldly went out with my first ever car seven days in a row from the 28th of December until the 3rd of January, I am now too scared to do so…

Weird!

Or maybe not?

I went over the scary 246 route towards Tokyo twice, once to go to a friend’s house, once to get closer to the city center for the traditional new-year-shrine-going on the 1st of January. Another bigger trip was one to an Ikea store. The other trips were around my wider neighborhood. All those adventures involved scary parking maneuvers and what not and I mastered all of them without further scratches to Alfie or more importantly to anyone else.

Despite those successes I froze up the past weekend and have not recovered since.

My theory is as follows – I finally fully realized what the fxxk I am doing!

Things went all very quickly. I soon found a driving school after the transcription of my German driver’s license to a Japanese one. I rode around in teacher’s car with the security of her sitting by my side. Then, before the lessons were even over, I started the car buying action and three weeks after the lessons were over, I drove the thing home. In hindsight it was all like “bang-bang-bang” and here we go!

After driving a bit around then, the shock eased and the realization set in! What the hell am I doing? I bought a car?!>?@?>? Are you kidding me? I’m driving around in one of the busiest urban areas of the whole bloody world???!!!:*+<!`@!

(Somehow it looks cooler in comics this +??>@!!?**/! stuff ;-))

Sudden comments of several (not only one) Japanese car driving friends of mine in the lines of – “I actually don’t like driving where I don’t know the route”, are not exactly helping either. Nor does the comment of my black humored boss at the company who said: “Don’t commit suicide with your new car, Glei san”. Nor does it help to hear from a 2 meter tall, young and dynamic German guy who is doing an internship at my company – “Wow, I wouldn’t have the guts to drive around here.”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

So, my brain, unfortunately, has started to think and found my courage and now knocks at its door saying, are you insane???

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm…. now what?

Well, I have emailed my driving school this afternoon and asked meekly for another lesson. If they are as quick as last time the lesson might already be tomorrow, otherwise probably next weekend.

The thing is to come over this anxiety phase now and persuading my brain to realize that I have already driven successfully around the 246 route five times (counting back and forth and the trip to Costco) and went to Ikea and even to Costco before with a rental car!

I shall try to outsmart my anxiety with incentives like driving to the ocean, or to the Hakone mountains, or down the Aqua Line over the Tokyo Bay and having a stop-over in the rest area on top of the ocean where the tunnel and bridge half meet, and stuff like that…

Let’s see how many more driving lessons and diarrhea attacks it’ll take until I’ll laugh about this blog entry!

Cheers!

Welcome 2014!

So, yet another year is gone down the road and we have now 2014. 2013 was good and busy. I wrote the first drafts of three novels, I went to Europe twice, I took paper-driver lessons and “graduated” and bought my first car ever. Also busy working life with loads of domestic business trips but only once to Shanghai.

The outlook for 2014 – maybe twice Shanghai work-wise, we’ll see, and I expect the same amount of domestic running about.

Lots of car adventures are planned, of course, to come into and stay in practice. So hopefully, by the end of 2014 riding my little car will become the most natural thing ever, as opposed to the pangs of fright I am still suffering frequently and the constantly wet hands that get wiped at every traffic light!

Book-wise I am planning to write part two of a space opera whose 1st part is still in the process of being shopped around, and part two of a high fantasy trilogy, whose first part is supposed to come out via Dark Quest at the end of the year, but since That One Minute novella is not out yet either, I rather suspect it will become 2015 before the first part of the high fantasy trilogy sees the light of day.

There is the never-ending hope to land an agent and subsequently a bigger book deal of course – we’ll see what happens.

Right now I am busy with another Odyssey Online course – powerful dialogue – for which I must do a bunch of homework now and which is my excuse for this blog entry being rather short

The first course happened for me on the morning of the 3rd of January and it was great and the course will keep me busy throughout January.

Oh… and yes, Hagen 3 will come out in the middle of the year or so

I wish everyone who reads this all the best for 2014!

First Car Adventures

Man, I’m tellin’ ya – re-learning how to drive and managing my new Suzuki Swift beast whose name is Alfie, is the most challenging and toughest thing I have done the past few years.

My adventures so far:

On the 21st of December I was able to pick up Alfie from the used car dealer and drove him with wobbling knees to the drug store where I always go, did a parking adventure (not very straight, but there was a lot of space and it wasn’t so bad.) Did my shopping there, then rode on to the supermarket where I always go to and even more space for parking and again not straight but nobody cared, did my shopping there and then brought Alfie up the hill to where I live and had to go around the block so that I could tackle parking in my tiny garage from the left side. Trouble is, the streets up there on my hill are very narrow and I made the mistake to boldly go into one of the side streets and was surprised by three cars coming at me, one of them being a bigger delivery truck. There was not enough space and I squeezed and squeezed to the side but was blocked by a concrete power pole and the thing flapped in my left mirror (well I did that by getting too close to it) and then it scratched over my left-hand passenger door. Ouch! (by the way, we have left-hand traffic in Japan and the steering wheel is on the right).

Near panic, I set back a little after the oncoming cars were gone and managed jittery to round the block and to somehow park Alfie in my garage (not really straight and so badly I could hardly get out on the right side.)

Totally unnerved, I did not even check the door but only the mirror who had a slight nudge.

I promptly emailed my driving school and asked for an additional lesson in parking indicating I’d be available on the 22nd (though I thought that would be too short notice and I wrote as such in my email to them), on the 28th and 29th.

They promptly emailed back an hour later that my driving teacher could come the next day (the 22nd) at 15:00. Yeah! That’s Japanese service for you.

Next day, I checked on the door and my first reaction was a helpless laugh. The pretty red door had fat scratches all over! What a mess… I managed to scratch my poor Alfie on the very first day.

In the afternoon, my driving teacher came as promised and we parked her car at the side and took Alfie and did some 20 rounds round the block and parking the beast in my garage again and again. She taught me to wait before that nasty corner and to nudge into it and to wait if another car comes up and only to go into the street when it looks like nothing is coming (which is hard to judge, since that street goes into a steep decline after a few meters.)

We then went on to my drug store and the supermarket to at least once practice parking there but when we arrived at the drug store, the power steering said sayonara and I had to move the one ton of Alfie without it. Teacher said the power steering says sayonara sometimes at these around 1.0l cars (Alfie is 1.2) and it happened because we practiced parking for 90 min.

At the supermarket the same thing happened and it was insanely difficult to move the wheel and to park and I could do it only with the teacher’s help.

Back home I was totally exhausted and anxious because of the not working power steering. Teacher said it would probably “repair itself” while the car rested or if I drive it for a while.

But that was the end of the weekend and the end of practicing possibility.

So Alfie slumbered the whole week in his garage and in the meantime I caught a cold and this morning, 28th, started the big fight with myself.

I must drive! I must learn! I’m not feeling so good, snotty nose, I’m scared! You must drive! How do you wanna learn if you don’t practice? But I’m scared! Don’t be a wimp, you bought a car, you must drive! But what if the power steering doesn’t work again? Just go, damn it!

I was very close to giving into the “I have a cold, I don’t feel well” and give up on it, but then I gave myself a kick in the butt and tackled Alfie. The plan was to drive a round around Ikuta park with more or less only (easy) left turns, then go shopping in the supermarket and go back home.

So, here I went again with wobbly knees. Sticking two fat magnet stickers of the Japanese “beginner” sign onto the front and back of Alfie, which I had bought during the week.

Once on the road things were not that bad, but then I missed one turn and got lost! At some traffic light I had enough time to throw on the navigation (at the moment I am still using Google maps on the iPhone) and let it guide me back home. The getting lost resulted in activating the wiper instead of the blinker twice and happenings like that… ahem…

But I finally found my way back to the supermarket and tackled the parking there. There was a friendly guard man who piloted me around but still I was darn close to the left hand car and the driver there had to squeeze in! lol. The good news was that the power steering was back up and working again, phew for that.

At home I managed to get into my garage at one go = those twenty times training had some effect and in total I drove around for some 90 min without hitting anything and making new scratches etc. Hallelujah!

I painted over the scratches with some car paint bought at the DIY shop along with the beginner sign and you have to stand up close and look hard now to see them. Yeah!

Anyway, totally exhausted again and very relieved that it went well all in all and that I also pushed myself into driving. I have a week off from work now and the plan is to drive a bit every day, next big thing is tomorrow to the year-end party of a friend… kyaaaa…

But I must, I must, I must! Holy crap… Cheers!

Maps and Books

Since I’ll be picking up my first ever car this afternoon, I thought I make one more blog entry concerning books, before a flurry ? of car stuff

Maps! I love maps.

Many authors make maps for their books and I am one of them. Especially for second world fantasies those maps can be very helpful. Since I cannot draw for the life of me, I’m making maps with Power Point. Using blue lines for rivers, brown triangles for mountains and the like. It actually works quite okay and takes me only a couple of minutes to make a map. I think maps are very important for second world fantasies to realize yourself as the author where is what and also how long it takes people to get there given their means of transport.

Depending on the nature of a science fiction story also here maps are helpful. Just as an example I am attaching two maps I have made for Dome Child. One of the entire area, to get the big picture, one of the city core of Shangbei, where most of the action is happening. It helps greatly during the writing process to know where is what in relation to each other. Thanks to maps you can avoid logistical and logical mishaps.

For some stories this of course is not necessary, meaning you can look at a real map as in case of my Hagen Patterson trilogy which plays itself out in the New England states. Another story I have not made a map for is a space opera (currently in the submission circus, fingers crossed). I tried to make a map but since it involves jumping from planet to planet via space bending an attempt at a map was rather futile.

I would have liked a 3D map, but that exceeds my computing capabilities

For all second world fantasies or science fiction that I have in my drawer, I’ve made maps. There is a high fantasy trilogy in the making which will (at least it’s first part) hopefully see the light of day via Dark Quest some time in the future, for which I have made detailed maps and I’m actually planning to ask the publisher to print an artist’s rendering of those maps in the actual books.

For Dome Child the maps were only for me and the movements of the characters through the world are not so complicated that they would have required a map in the book.

Also when reading I love books that have maps so that you can quickly check where is what and where people are going.

So, I’m a big fan of maps and highly recommend them for the writing process as well. If you write novels and haven’t made a map yet, give it a try. It’ll teach you something about your own world and will be helpful as a guide.

Beast on Wheels

I know that for many people driving a car is the easiest thing in the world but there are also a lot of people for whom that car represents a major and in some cases indomitable beast. It has been an indomitable beast for me for many years and getting back behind the wheel feels like a monstrous battle.

Funnily, I had no real problem with getting behind the wheel as long as there was my driving teacher next to me. She had her brake, she’d lunge into the steering wheel, she gave advise, she talked me through it and I was not really scared.

Even during the test drive with my car to be I was not scared, since a good friend and experienced driver was sitting next to me, and even though he had no brake and did not lunge into my wheel, he again gave advise and talked me through it. No big deal.

So, today, I challenged the beast alone, since I wanted to keep in practice and get some more experience before I’ll pick up my car to be.

I ordered a rental vehicle at Nippon Rent-A-Car and asked for the same class as the Suzuki Swift (which will be my car to be) in the silent hope I’d get a Swift. In that same class are also the Honda Fit, Toyota Vitz and some others, so chances for a Swift were rather low.

I had not been tense before any of my driving lessons, but today I was tense and went with wobbly knees into the rental shop. My knees got every wobblier when the dude from the rental company explained about what to do in case of an accident and all these things. Then he went outside to get the car and yes! Even without asking for it, he came up with a silver Swift. I interpret that as a good omen

Walking around the car together with the rental dude and checking for scratches, of which it had none, lowered my tiny bit of confidence again though.

Nevertheless, no way back and I settled into the thing and off to the road.

It’s always better for me to have a purpose or a goal and so I had already in advance decided to drive to the Costco in Zama city, some 22 km from my place. I had programmed my iPhone with Google maps and the non-highway route to the place, which seemed easy enough, just down national road 246 most of the time.

It felt WEIRD to be alone in the car, and that feeling of having to handle the beast all by myself no matter what was quite overwhelming. Also weirdly, or maybe not, I think the tension is higher for me if I’m not riding “my” car. I can do to my future car whatever I want, but this beast I have to deliver back in the same condition as having received it, which increases the pressure for me. I’m handling other people’s property, scary!

The ride to Costco was tiring, loads of cars, loads of traffic jam, loads of stop and go and it took me over an hour to get to the place. I drove into the easiest parking slot (something straight, nose first) and was very happy about that and did my shopping.

Then came the awful task of having to use the rear drive and doing some maneuvering to get out of the parking slot and down the ramp of the parking house. It being before x-mas and a Saturday afternoon had of course the effect that it was super busy in the shop and the park house. I do not act well in the car under pressure and the waving and waving guard-man did not help to easy my nerves. He gesticulated something at me, I did not understand him, did not go back far enough to catch the curve, had to set back once more, more gesticulating from the guard dude, I’m stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake even twice (though, without hitting anything or anybody) and, more or less, the dreaded panic hits.

Note the deliberate switch here to present tense to increase the tension

The guard man looks at me as if I was totally insane and is still gesticulating and I don’t know why, but then I manage the curve and am on the ramp with wobbling legs – aaaaaa! Down the ramp and approaching the exit, I finally notice why the dude gesticulated at me. I have forgotten to switch on the lights! Jeez! Damn!

I manage to get the lights on (it’s pitch dark here at the moment at 17:00 by the way) before I am on the real road. Luckily there is stop and go until I reach the 246 again, which allows me to calm down a bit and to start laughing at my panic attack in the parking house. Jeez, that guard-dude must have thought; revoke that woman’s license!

The road is full and lots of stop and go until home, then, the challenge to get the car into my parking space. I fail twice and curve around the block to redo it… at the third time I make it. Hallelujah!

After unloading the shopping another fat task – refilling the tank and delivering the thing back to the rental company. Luckily there are some gasoline stations here which are still manned and I drive to one relatively close by and let them do the job. I’m surprised that those lousy 45 km in total needed 12 liters of gas. I suppose the stop and go is responsible for that and my still horrible driving style.

I have this horror vision that I will bump into something on the last few meters before the rental place but hallelujah again, I make it and am able to deliver the beast in unscratched condition back to the company who owns it. I am a ton lighter as I leave the place and bicycle back home! lol

After this acid test, I feel a bit better about driving my future car around alone. The Swift rides very smoothly, though the beast has quite some power under the hood, 1200cc after all, double for what I was originally aiming for (mini cars have only 660cc). You feel the beast’s power when you step on the accelerator after all and one day, when I’m more experienced and used to driving, I want to test a car with “real” power once. The Swift I rode was maybe the 2010 or 2011 model and my future beast is even a nudge more modern and has a cooler interior.

One way or the other… a big day for me it was! The best is conquered! Well, more or less… And man, tonight I will sleep well, I know that! lol.

Query Letter Seminar – Aftermath

Just to mention that for fairness sake. In a very decent move, I got an email today from Writer’s Digest, telling me that I will get a refund for the querying seminar I reported about last week.

The mail came ten days after I asked about their policy concerning people who feel they didn’t get their money’s worth, but better late than never.

Thanks to Writer’s Digest – that’s a good and customer friendly gesture.

Query Letters? – Good Luck With That…

Some time in September I took a Writer’s Digest webinar on query letter writing, which promised, aside from a 90 min webinar session, a critique of your query letter from the agent they hired for this thing.

I submitted my query letter even before the seminar. They allowed you to submit one letter until mid October and then you had to wait for yet another 60 days or so to get a reply from the agent = waiting for a heck of a time.

The webinar itself was okay, but more geared towards beginners and I, as a submission veteran, got only some tiny hints and bits out of it. I knew already more than 90% of what they talked about. I had already expected that and subscribed to the thing mainly because I wanted to have my query letter critiqued by a professional agent.

By the way, the price for this whole show was 89,- USD.

Now, on the 4th of December, this is what I got back as a “critique” from the agent:

“Thanks very much for attending my webinar. You’ve written a good letter, but I would watch your sentences: you start too many with “I.” I wish you the best of luck with your writing endeavours.”

My first reaction to this was: you gotta be bloody kidding me!

For this I have interrupted my query letter drive, for this I waited for over two months, and for this I paid 89,- USD?

Below is what I promptly wrote back to the agent:

“Thank you for your email.

However, I am a bit surprised. Is below all advice you have for me?

How about:

Is the letter too long or not?

Is the synopsis paragraph well structured? Does it raise interest? Does it focus on the right details? Any tips to make it snappier?

Is the “this books was inspired by” line necessary, irritating, or helpful?

Are the credentials well structured and the way they should be?

Do I need to mention my day job?

Is it good or bad to mention the other parts of the series/trilogy even down to hints what they are about?

I would highly appreciate if your critique was giving more advice beyond starting not too many sentences with “I”.

With best regards”

I must give the agent the credit that she responded to my mail. I have also emailed the Writer’s Digest customer service asking what their policy is in case a customer thinks he/she didn’t get his/her money’s worth. So far I received no reply from them.

Here is what the agent wrote back:

“I don’t have your original query anymore, but if that’s all the critique I offered, it was because that was all the critique your letter needed. I’m making my way through 109 query critiques; some of them are five paragraphs long, some of them two or three. A couple of them so far have been just about perfect, and I’ve requested those manuscripts. There’ve been about three where I’ve just had to write one or two sentences, and your critique was one of them. In my webinar I addressed all of the questions you emailed me below. So, to sum up, your letter was a good letter, and if I didn’t mention any issues besides the “I” issue, that’s because I didn’t feel that there were any other issues.”

There are some very interesting and important messages hidden here if I interpret them correctly.

But first of all, even if my query letter is “perfect” apart from the starting too many sentences with “I” issue, there is always stuff to improve and my questions about the contents of the synopsis paragraph, the “inspired by” issue etc. etc. etc. remain unanswered. I still did not receive a decent critique. Maybe my understanding about what a decent critique is and the agents understanding are different, but in my book a decent critique is at least 200 words or so long and you give the receiver of the critique some insight about what he/she is good at, what the strong and weak points are, how to enhance the strong points and how to improve the weaker ones. There are always ways to make something snappier, there are always suggestions you can give. To say your letter was perfect except for the “I” is simply not a critique, full stop, I did not get my money’s worth.

Let’s talk about numbers for a second. The agent has given out a number – 109 query letters. To me the comment about the number of letters = the amount of work, sounds very much like fishing for sympathy…

Since we have numbers, let’s do some maths. 109 times 89,- USD is 9.701,- and most likely there were a few participants who did not submit a query letter. So let’s say there were 120 people who paid 89,- USD each = 10.680,- dollars. Maybe there was even a couple more people who have not submitted a query letter, for example 150 in total – that’s 13.350,- USD and so forth.

I will not start a speculation here about an hourly rate, since I have no idea/proof as to how much time the agent spent on this webinar and the query letters, however, the hourly rate for the agent and the money that Writer’s Digest makes out of this are presumably not the worst.

So all that sweet talk that they do this to support us aspiring writers may be true in some cases, yes, but they are also getting well paid for what they do… Nothing against that, this is a business, but there is a fine line between delivering value for money and ripping people off, not to speak of the work ethic implications of making money by exploiting the wishes and hopes of aspiring writers.

For my taste, this seminar was a rip off and I will not subscribe to any other of this company again.

But now let’s take a deeper look at the contents of the second reply of the agent.

So, my query is “perfect” apart from too many sentences starting with an “I”.

The agent has not requested my manuscript. (Fine by me, this agent is not specialized in speculative fiction anyway and wouldn’t be the right match).

But this reads like my query letter and the whole novel behind it were tossed in the bin because of the one tiny tiny tiny issue that this agent thinks there are too many sentences starting with “I”.

By the way, I counted the sentences starting with “I”: there are six of them. They all refer to my credentials, my day job and the last sentence: I am looking forward to hearing from you soon. Sorry for getting cynical, but what am I supposed to write? My mother’s daughter is looking forward to hearing from you soon?

It is absolutely ridiculous to reject a query letter on such flimsy grounds. How desperate they must be to reject work. Yes, they are overloaded, yes, they look for the tiniest reason to toss your query in the bin. Hell, they are tiny indeed.

If your work is being rejected for such ludicrous reasons it means you are truly playing a lottery. Maybe another agent rejects my “perfect” letter on the grounds of one singly misplaced comma, one forgotten hyphen, or whatever…

In short this whole query letter business is nothing but a gamble with serious and committed writers’ hopes and dreams and bone-hard work.

I do not see a solution to this issue. You keep submitting and wait for luck to strike? If you don’t have that luck, well, tough luck! It is extremely hard to not get frustrated by crap like the above…

The only thing I see that might promise anything is personal relationships. I dearly hope it will help in my case of a World Fantasy Con follow-up-chance. That agent has at least now looked beyond the query letter stage and requested the full manuscript…. Let’s see what happens.

As for query letter, or other “getting an agent” related seminars? Be assured, I am done with those, for good.

Bureaucracy hell a la Japan – next part

I can’t believe it… I went to the mayor’s office again this morning to register my company seal for the purpose of some formalities while buying a car. Yesterday they rejected my Japanese character seal because it does not match visually with my roman letter name.

Guess what, they won’t register my company seal either on the ridiculous grounds of it having in-built ink instead of having to thrust it into a separate ink pad for every stamp.

Don’t ask me why they refuse to register a katakana (Japanese alphabet for foreign words) seal with in-built ink, there simply is no rational reason.

So now I have to go to some seal maker and get a seal made with my name in katakana and since that’s “special” it might take a few days according to the official dude from the mayor’s office. Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!

Incredible, hu? I just want to buy a stupid car!!!!!

I have as of now officially lost my humor in this seal matter……..