Regina Glei's Blog, page 35

Bureaucracy Hell a la Japan

Man, Kafka at its best again. I went to the mayor’s office this morning expecting to get a paper that certifies that my seal is my seal… (Which I need to buy a car…)

Ha, I have not taken the Japanese bureaucracy jungle into account. It shall be noted that I’m using this seal for bank activities since my student times, however I cannot register it………

The character does not match visually, mark me, not concerning reading etc. my name in Roman letters. Well, yes…

The only seals the mayor’s office can register for foreigners are those in Katakana (alphabet) writing. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh

Luckily I have such a seal that was issued by my company some years ago but of course I didn’t have that with me today. Now I have to go there tomorrow again (grumble grumble), bring my katakana seal and 1) fill out some form that certifies that my name reads like that in katakana. 2) Get the seal registered (yet another paper). 3) then, finally get the paper that the car dealer needs that my seal is my seal…

Aaaaaahhhhhhhh

Incredible … Hard to keep your humor facing this jungle but I’m trying …

Buying a Car in Japan – Not So Easy

So, as of today my driving lessons are over and the sooner I get a car the better I will stay in practice. As so often time is money and I am rather using my time for writing instead of browsing through half of Tokyo in search for the best deal. So I decided to keep it simple and go first of all to the used car dealer down the road and see if he has anything that might suit my taste and pocket and wishlist. The car dealer has open only until 20:00 and I arrived at 19:30 or so on the 28th and told a young guy at the front desk my wish list and he was rather irritated that I don’t care about the car maker, I guess that’s pretty rare. Then he led me outside into their car park and showed me some models (they had about 40 cars or so standing around) that would fit into my price range and the most important criteria, the height. This is actually a bit of a knock-out criterion, since many cars are higher than 155 cm. But if the car does not fit into my garage it makes no sense, right?

This dealer is a country wide dealer with outlets more or less everywhere but the place close to my home in Kawasaki happens to be the headquarter of the company, they say they have always 3000 cars available country-wide. Not bad. I am not sure, but it looks like they have nothing but Japanese cars, well, fine by me.

Considering the height and price and the wish for a relatively new model boiled things down to a Toyota Passo, a Mitsubishi EK Wagon, a Honda Fit, a Daihatsu Esse and then the Suzuki Swift. So, the whole range of smaller Japanese cars

Looking deeper into the wish list it boiled down further to the Suzuki Swift. It’s the 2012 model, has run only 11,000 km, next inspection is due July 2015, it has (of course) air con, ABS, automatic transmission or better to say CVT, keyless, has “brake assist”, black interior and is red, whilst the other four were black, black, black, yellow. Nothing looked rusty and it is 151 cm high and the dealer guy said that this car never had an accident. Sounds damn good to me. Nevertheless, I asked for thinking-it-over-time until the 8th of December, since a) some formalities have to be done, more about them later, and b) I want to drag a Japanese friend along for the actual buying to have him check the car and to have him as a helper with all the formalities and stuff.

Formalities:

People do not sign things in Japan, they stamp them with their personal seal (which is kinda cool after all). Now I have a seal since my exchange student times, because I needed it back then to open a bank account. My seal is pretty much one of a kind and maybe a bit silly, it’s one Chinese character that sounds vaguely like my name in one of its Japanese readings. It is not a common Japanese family name and therefore it might be the only seal like it in all of Japan, lol. Most foreigners get seals with their names in the Katakana alphabet, but mine is with that one Chinese character. Now I have to go to the ward office next week to get a piece of paper that confirms that this is my seal and show it to the dealer when I stamp the contract.

Next, Japan is a small country with limited space. Therefore all regular cars (and the Suzuki Swift is not a mini-car but a regular car) must proof that they have a home = a regular parking spot like a rented car port or a garage, so that they are not in anybody’s way when not in use.

Now for this I need a paper from the owner of my apartment that confirms I have a parking space, then I need to draw a map of the thing and go with both to the police. If the police have too much time on their hands, they personally drop by your place and measure your parking spot and after that they give you another paper that confirms you have a parking space and “allow” you to buy that bloody car. Awesome formalities jungle again, isn’t it?

Now I will try to get these three things done next week and then drag my friend along to the dealer to buy the beast I just showed the offer to two (male) Japanese colleagues in my company and they both said, “Oh, this is good!!! Buy it, buy it!” Let’s hope I’ll get all those formalities cleared out until the 7th of December

Another funny thing, the dealer does not accept credit cards! You can pay for your car either in cash (!) or you make a bank transfer. Though I just heard from my sister that they want cash in Germany too.

Even if I have all the papers already by the 7th and my friend and me approve of the car and I end up buying it, I can’t take it home immediately. The dealer will exchange the battery and wipers and apply for my number plate and all these things.

If everything goes very smoothly and that Swift is gonna be it, I can take the car home on the 14th of December, but I am rather expecting it to become the weekend after that = short before X-mas. Impatient! Lol, wanna have the thing! Cheers!

Car Shopping

So, here I am almost done with my paper driver lessons and now I have the fun task to go shopping for a (used) car!

This is my must have list followed by the wish list:

Whatever the car will be it must have:

Automatic transmission, ABS, airbag, air conditioning, be under a certain money limit, be as new as possible, have as few miles on it as possible, have as long time to the next inspection round left as possible. It must not be brown, or white and preferably, not silver metallic either. The most important criteria is though the height of the thing. It must not be higher than 155 cm otherwise it will not fit into my 160 cm garage! Lol. It should also be a hatchback if ever possible (though they are of course higher than sedans and thus the height issue will come into play).

The nice to haves are:

Keyless, an ETC (electronic toll collector for the highway) machine, and a navi perhaps? A parking assistant? Be not too box like?

It may be odd, but I don’t care what the maker is or whether it is a mini car or a regular car. According to my driving teacher the difference in tax is only some 300 euro per year, which does not seem the world. So, let’s see whether it will become a Honda or Suzuki or whatever

Any advice from car owners? Have I forgotten something important?

That One Minute – Teaser

The cover is released, I hope the rest of the book will soon follow

After Lord of Water, That One Minute will be my second title with US small press Dark Quest Books and I hope it’ll see the light of day in January or so??? Honestly, I don’t know yet when the book will come out. Let’s say, I would not be surprised if there was a delay.



Nevertheless, the cover is out and it was again done by Naoyuki Katoh and he never fails to surprise me. While the other covers he did for me so far (Dome Child, Hagen trilogy parts 1 and 2 (She Should Have Called Him Siegfried and To Mix and To Stir), Lord of Water) were all drawings, he integrated photos into the cover for That One Minute. It’s three photos in total from one river and two lakes in the greater Tokyo area.

One of the key scenes in the story are happenings at a small lake in a park where the water retreats, gates to “hell” (?) open up and where the story’s hero, Chris Burns, makes first acquaintance with certain ghostly gray hands.

There are two funny things about this cover. I described the scene to Katoh sensei and wanted to have an old fashioned pocket watch with roman letters above the actual scene from the book which shows one minute to twelve. I got my watch and if you look closely my name is inside the watch where otherwise the watch maker’s name would be. I didn’t ask for this, that was Katoh sensei’s idea.

Then I sent the cover to Dark Quest and got another funny surprise when Danielle from Dark Quest got the idea to use the watch as the “O” for That One Minute. I had thus two big happy moments with this cover – a nice start.

Now what’s it all about? I don’t know yet how Dark Quest will label the thing but I like to call it a “Fantasy Horror Comedy”.

Behold, we all exist twice. Once here and now, and once more in a parallel world that is one minute closer to heaven and hell than we are. We lead happy blissful lives here, not aware of the “demonics” and “angelics” playing chess with our souls next door.

Under circumstances I shall not describe in detail here, the complete loser Chris Burns gets transferred into the parallel world where he meets his know-it-all second self, his much nicer wife and where he gets the job to save their world and ours from dark demonic plans.

It’s a tongue in cheek experiment with a lot of POVs. More or less every major and even not so major character gets one or more POV scenes. It’s all 3rd person limited. I wanted to find out how many POVs you can have without confusing the reader. The trick with that is that you have to make clear very very quickly whose POV you’re in at the beginning of each POV change (usually a new scene and/or chapter). I hope I managed to make that clear and I hope nobody gets confused .

I like what Neil Gaiman said during the awards ceremony for the World Fantasy Award a few weeks ago in Brighton. In these days and times with so much stuff out there and “no rules” anymore – just write what you wanna write.

Well, I always write what I want to write, but from the experiment point of view this motto fits all the more to That One Minute than to some other stuff I have written. There is no deep philosophy or message behind That One Minute, it’s just a “movie” that I would like to see and I think that Mr. Undersecretary Adrian Stern from the “Ministry of Spirits” (the bad guy) is just sooooo cool

Travels – Brighton and Cologne

There I was on the road again, this time to attend the world fantasy convention in Brighton, UK. For the convention reports check this blog entry and this one.

The flight from Tokyo to Helsinki with Finnair was excellent, very quiet and smooth and I had two seats for myself. Nevertheless no sleep was in sight so I watched movies instead, them being

“Lone Ranger”, the kids animation “Rio”, “Unstoppable”, a runaway train drama with Denzel Washington and the new James T. Kirk player Chris Pine, and last but not least once more “Star Trek: Into Darkness”.

Going through Helsinki airport was smooth as well and the flight to London Heathrow no problem either. Traffic on the ground was unfortunately less favorable, due to an apparent accident on the motorway, my bus to Brighton was ridiculously delayed and I had to hang out in the cold and drafty waiting station of the bus terminal for 100 minutes for my bus to Brighton. Not much fun in a highly jet-lagged state.

I slept throughout the entire ride to Brighton and arrived there, heavy winds were greeting us, though luckily it had just stopped raining.

By sheer coincidence my hotel had the National Express Bus final stop of Brighton in its backyard and I only had to walk around the building to arrive. I fell into bed and slept like a stone.

The hotel was also right around the famous Brighton pier and also in five minute walking distance of the royal pavilion and thus in an excellent location.

It rained on and off but luckily stopped for the ten minute walk up the promenade to the Hilton Metropole Brighton where the convention was happening.

I must say I am very happy having changed hotels. I was originally booked into the Hilton but found the price just too steep, especially since the Pound (and Euro) have picked up again against the Yen and I was very pleased with my hotel. It was in a much better location than the Hilton (at least for my taste), I had free wifi in my room, continental breakfast (and a good one) included in the price (the latter two not the case at the Hilton), queen sized bed in a large room, pretty, newly refurbished bathroom, very friendly staff, and that for 64 pounds a night instead of 107 (at least) at the Hilton. Looking at the halls in which the programming happened, the Hilton hotel looked old, I saw several holes in the ceiling, and in the art show it was even dripping from the ceiling and buckets had been placed under the flow of water…

So, if you ever go to Brighton, I highly recommend the Royal York Hotel.

Brighton

I did not have much time in Brighton but it was enough for a visit to the Brighton pier and the royal pavilion aver the convention was over.

The pier is an amusement park with some smaller rides out in the ocean at the far end of the pier and UFO catcher etc. machine games in an arcade in the middle. The rides are nothing spectacular, and are often closed due to high winds etc. but they are spectacular in that sense of course as they are on a pier out on the water.

The royal pavilion is quite impressive: a lavish fantasy of a rich king, pseudo Indian on the outside and pseudo Chinese on the inside. It’s an interesting structure and the dining hall and the music room are really beautiful (if decadent). I was very astonished about the open fires in the fireplaces of the pavilion and even asked one of the guards about that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before – open fires in a historical building. I learned they are burning gas, not charcoal and that they do it simply for heating purposes and also to show the visitors the atmosphere of what it must have been and felt like a hundred and fifty years ago.

In the garden behind the pavilion half tame squirrels (well, at least not shying away from humans) are hopping about your feet next to the ever present pigeons. Cute, we don’t have such “tame” squirrels in Japan, at least not around Tokyo.

The weather was rough and half if not more of the time extremely windy, which of course caused very pretty waves. I walked up the beach every day to the convention hotel and took a million pictures of clashing waves – the best are here. The North Sea is the first ocean I ever saw and its brownness looked familiar, if weird, meanwhile I am used to bluer, greener and prettier waters

I’m quite proud of this particular snapshot (in large on Flickr) of a seagull in flight. Thanks, bird, for posing so nicely

The beach in Brighton is quite remarkable in that way that it’s made up of large pebbles, not sand. They are very tiring to talk in and in summer I doubt you can go barefooted into the water. Most of the stones are round thanks to constant friction from the sea, but nevertheless – ouch! Also, when there are waves, the stones must turn into projectiles inside the water. All in all the waterfront is very beautiful though and I hope I have the chance to go back to Brighton one day again.

Dome of Cologne

The next leg on my journey was Cologne and I flew there via Easy Jet from Gatwick airport. It was my first time with Easy Jet and yeah, this is mass transport. The flight was perfectly on time though and we all survived the beastly stares of the you-definitely-don’t-want-to-quarrel-with-me head purser on the flight

Cologne’s dome is and remains an impressive building and I was astonished at the rather lack of tourists (well, it was a weekday in November) and also that the dome is for free. You are encouraged to donate, which I did, but there is no entrance fee in contrast to the quite horrendous prices you pay in London and also in Prague.

I have been to the dome of Cologne several times, but had never seen the dome’s treasure chamber yet. It costs just five Euro entrance fee and man, it’s impressive. It’s located at the northern side of the dome and goes deep into the earth and hardly anybody was there. I am not sure whether I was allowed to take pictures or not, but since nobody was around I took a couple and there was quite some interesting and cool stuff in that treasury. In the lowest level you can see some bits of the roman city wall and the morbid feel of these vaults deep under the church was pretty awesome. If you are in Cologne, visit this treasury

Traveling in Germany

I rode in stages down to Munich via train and was surprised at the massive use of public transport. Somehow my image was that German trains are not full. Far from it. The regional express between Cologne and Bochum was full to bursting, the ICE from Bochum to Stuttgart was full too, and people had to stand between the wagons since there was zero seating space left. The train from Stuttgart to Munich filled up at Ulm and though nobody had to stand it was full.

All in all Germany felt more tightly populated than in my imagination or memory. Sure, in Japan it’s more crowded, but actually not by that much. Both are small countries after all. All those travels were during weekdays and non-rush hour by the way, which makes the amount of passengers even more amazing to me.

Time flew by very quickly and I soon sat back on the plane to Tokyo via Helsinki, which was this time sold out to the last seat and even overbooked. They asked me at the terminal in Helsinki whether I’d be willing to wait for a day and get 600 Euro compensation. An inviting offer, but I had to get back to work, so I unfortunately had to decline. I wonder who took the offer.

The next big trip is not yet planned – let’s see where I’ll go in 2014

World Fantasy Convention 2013 – report – part 2

Sat 02nov13

On Saturday my first seminar was the obligatory agent panel.

Any news? Not really… John Jarrold said there are no absolutes in publishing.

Someone else said that 90% of all queries generate an instant “no”.

The market is over-flooded by content (heard that phrase quite a number of times during this con).

An established agency like JABberwocky has a 75% placement rate.

However, even an agent like Barry Goldblatt sometimes needs to send out one or the other manuscript up to 25 times until someone picks it up.

The first ten pages of your manuscript are ridiculously important.

Good luck with getting an agent (and/or a publisher) – you’ll need a lot of it.

I Just Had a Crazy Idea… (spec script) panel

For one brief panel I returned to my “roots” and attended the TV and movie spec script writing panel of the WFC. I got the impression that nothing much has changed since my screenplay days. You should have several brilliant spec scripts under your belt and preferably not ridiculously expensive ones, that you can pull out at any occasion. The old familiar phrases like pitch sessions, high concept, be relentless, “Final Draft” (screenwriting software), build up your network and have a high tolerance for frustration and rejection flew around the room.

And, oh, be prepared for the production company hiring in another screenwriter after you maybe maybe sold them your spec script and be prepared for it to be totally rewritten to the point of being not recognizable. If you cannot deal with that: write novels. And yes, that’s what I’ve done

What Else Have You Got (editor) panel

At an editor panel about “what else have you got” or what editors have seen an awful lot of and don’t want to see again, there was no general consensus. Even if you write about stuff we’ve seen a hundred times before but manage to pull it off in a mind-blowing way you might be able to get away with it.

That said, Jo Fletcher is getting too much of not so well written literary fantasy. Gordon Van Gelder gets a lot of contemporary fantasy short stories with not enough fantasy in them.

Gillian Redfearn from Gollanz only said she is getting too many submissions that have not followed the submission guidelines. Just please read the darn things and follow them.

Further, no more teenagers or housewives turned vampire hunters please, and zombies are now awfully ripe as well. However, as mentioned before, if the cliche is exceptionally well done, they might still buy it.

Another few don’ts: Just don’t say your stuff is the next George R.R. Martin in your query letter.

Don’t say your aunt, granny and cat liked your book very much, that’s just not professional.

Another thing is don’t say you have a funny novel, give an example for why it is funny instead.

Label your book intelligently and while some editors like comparisons to other authors (intelligent ones), some don’t. It’s a gamble as so many things in publishing.

Other editors like stuff in the lines of “I noticed you edited X and X and therefore I think my story might appeal to you.”

Taboos don’t really exist, however, cruelty to animals and children are close to taboos, and if you do rape it must be the center of the story and not just a side plot where who has been raped comes over it just like that and forgets it quickly, because nobody who has been raped comes over it quickly in reality.

Again here the statement that the first few pages, or even only the first few paragraphs or sentences are the knock out criteria. You better get your beginnings super super right (no definition given for what “right” is, of course). You “gotta hook the reader” with the first sentence.

Sun 03nov13

On the last day, I only attended half of the pseudonym (“By Any Other Name”) panel, since I talked to two other WFC members and also left the “How To Write That Difficult Second Book” panel since I am long past that stage and did not find the discussion very engaging.

The banquet and ensuing WFC and British Fantasy Award presentations were fun though and an artist I had talked to for quite a bit during the days before won the WFC award for best artist! Wow! His name is Vincent Chong and check out his very cool stuff under this link.

Congratulations Vinny!!!

After the dead dog party, things winded down and in another epic wind and rain storm (more about that in the upcoming travel report blog entry) I took a taxi back to my hotel sharing it with another acquaintance from the days past.

So what’s the difference to the World Science Fiction Convention? The most important one is that there are less fans around. Of the 1000 or so WFC participants more or less everyone is a writer, agent, editor or otherwise professional in the F and SF world.

I found the nature of the panels to be quite similar to World SF Con, at least the kind of panels I am attending there. World SF Con has of course also “fan panels” and not only ones that deal with one or the other aspect of writing and publishing.

The parties are less wild and there are no “hallway” or hotel room parties like the ones you can find at World SF con. The Fantasy Con is more “professional”.

Unfortunately it is always end of October, beginning of November, which means it is rather hard for me to take off from work. Next year I’ll be at the World SF Con again, which will happen in London. I don’t know yet what to do about 2015.

It was well worth going to WFC13 and to “show face”, but I again realized that networking etc. works only one at a time and is an arduous endeavor (at least for me). But: “never give up, never surrender”

World Fantasy Convention 2013 – report – part 1

This year, I went to the World Fantasy Convention instead of the World Science Fiction Convention for the first time. Here are some reports from the panels I attended:

Thu 31oct13

PS Publishing Kaffeeklatsch

PS publishing is now the “UK’s smallest big press” according to its owners Peter and Nicky Crowther. They started about 15 years ago with the Postscripts magazine but soon expended into full blown publishing. Nowadays they publish about 45 books a year. They are in principle only taking agented submissions, though for short fiction to be published in Postscripts magazine, they take (of course) unagented stuff.

Asked how they get the word out about their publications, the answer was that they have about 7000 subscribers to their newsletter and a solid customer base that they built up over the past fifteen years.

Concerning how they manage such a large volume of books, the answer was that they have a horde of freelance people working for them in editing, artwork etc. departments.

In principle they look for “quirky” stuff, whatever the definition of quirky is.

Harper Collins Kaffeeklatsch

Editor Jennifer Brehl works in the Harper Voyager department where they have 3 editors in the US.

I found it interesting to hear that despite Harper Collins having a no unsolicited submissions policy, Jennifer said she still gets some 20-30 unsolicited queries per day. There are pushy people out there…

She is dealing with some fifteen to twenty books per year, most of them being from already established authors. An editor’s success is measured (more or less solely) by his/her profit and loss sheet 18 months after the launch of the book.

When not editing an editor spends most of his/her time networking within the company, trying to convince the sales department etc. of the benefits of book a or b. The positioning of a book = the sub-genre definition is extremely important according to Jennifer.

And one tip, she won’t become the editor of a book that has unicorns in it

“Buddy, can you spare an e-reader” panel

I attended a panel on eBooks that day where the story was the same as always and centered around “cream will rise to the top” “naturally” in the self-publishing department. However, some good stuff may drown in the too much content out there when people don’t know how to get the word out. The lessons learned here being: not everyone can be John Scalzi.

The only interesting idea I got out of this panel was that you can change the cover and maybe even the title of your book and put it out there again in case the book does not fly well under its current cover and/or title.

Fri 01nov13

Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft and the Development of the Weird Tale panel

On Friday the first panel I attended dealt with Arthur Machen’s influence on H.P. Lovecraft.

While Lovecraft read a lot of junk and had the gift to refine some of it, he of course also read non-junk like Machen. Lovecraft seems to have liked Machen’s work, however the two men were fundamentally different concerning their religious points of view with Machen being a Christian and Lovecraft an outspoken atheist. Machen glorified mysteries, Lovecraft feared them. In essence he was fearful of everything and everybody and believed that nothing but a thin veil lies over the true and horrifying reality underneath.

Style or Substance in Fiction panel

In this panel the general consensus was that you need both as an author but that you might get away with a not too brilliant style if your content is gob-smacking. In general one might say, looking at the best seller lists, that plot is more important than pretty prose.

The more transparent your thoughts are on the page, the more you can nail down your meaning, and the better will be your style, which is essentially the sum of the choices that you make in your prose.

One mistake aspiring writers often make is that they over-dramatize and overwrite. As so often, simple is best. Writing is like being a cartographer, who is standing where, doing what, what’s happening, who is the POV character, etc. the sooner and more precisely you can convey that, the clearer will be your prose. Don’t think a story but imagine it. One cool statement from panelist Geoff Ryman was – you don’t know what the story is about until you’ve written it. Once you have your first draft, go back and rewrite it, knowing now what it is about.

The End is Now panel

Some key words from the “apocalyptic panel” that stuck in my mind were: there are personal and large scale catastrophes. SF has the tendency to tell about large scale apocalypses, since in essence SF is all about change. The more comfy you are, the greater the downfall when it is all taken away from you.

Fiction is a way to structure life.

Even if SF is dealing a lot with the apocalypse, usually there is a hero to survive at the end. That grain of hope is important, don’t end a full length novel on a bad note, William F. Nolan, author or Logan’s Run, said (several times).

Do Awards Really Matter? panel

During the awards panel I had hoped they’d talk a bit about all the scam contest out there that are not worth their submission fees (and to which I have fallen victim as well…) but they rather talked about established awards like the Arthur C. Clark, Philip k. Dick or Bram Stoker etc. awards.

The problem with popular awards (= majority vote) is these days again the masses of content out there. Since the market is so diversified, the lesser known magazines / books etc. get looked over and people go back to what they know, which is, for example, one reason why Locus Magazine keeps winning the Hugo all the time.

Another interesting comment was that publishers don’t care so much about awards, for them rather the sales figures are interesting.

I’ll post the second half of my panel reports tomorrow (or so).

Loud Park 13 Report

In contrast to the previous year, this years Loud Park was two days instead of one but I went only on the last day, the 20th of October. On the 18th they announced that the headliner of the 20th, King Diamond, had cancelled with the reason of not having managed to get their equipment to Tokyo in time. On the Loud Park homepage they said they had offered the band to play with spare equipment but the band refused. Not nice for the fans who paid for expensive tickets, but I guess this falls under the category of “shit happens”.

A few words on the organization of Loud Park which was in stark contrast to the festivals I just visited in Europe during the summer. Somehow this did not strike me as such the year before, probably because I hadn’t seen any big European festivals yet…

The amount of security personnel at Loud Park is insane. The number of places where you are not allowed to hang out for non-obvious reasons is equally insane. It smacked of the desperate try of the organizers to control the individualistic crowd. Oh god! These metal heads might want to have fun! We must see to it that they don’t completely freak on us!

To enforce such (stupid) rules, fences etc. are supposed to guide you around and the one and only cloak is at the end of the world outside the building and you had to go back through the main entrance once more after unloading your stuff there and it was just ridiculous and annoying how they tried to channel the crowd. A big minus for that for Loud Park … Sometimes less is more. You need some rules to channel 30,000 people yes, but we ain’t kindergarten kids… well, maybe we are worse?



Anyway:

The first band on the menu was a Japanese band called Metal Clone X, rough vocals, they invited a, I presume, famous enka singer lady for one song, much like Heino appearing on stage with Rammstein, only that she seemed to have more fun Later someone told me she is actually not an enka singer but a blues and jazz singer, well, but she looked like enka in her pretty kimono.



Finnish band Mokoma that does mostly rough vocals in Finnish has played this year in May in Japan already at Loud and Metal Attack – by Finland fest.

They were a big hit there which is mostly due to the fact that most of the Japanese audience doesn’t really care whether they understand the lyrics or not. Most don’t speak English all that well, so it doesn’t matter that nobody understands Mokoma’s vocals. The guys are so wonderfully quirky and the Japanese audience just loves them.



After an excellent Amorphis, who never really seem to get their sound right during the first few songs came something WEIRD: Baby Metal… Three Japanese teenage girls who are about 14 years old supported by “invisible” real musicians clad in masks. They hop around on stage like AKB 48 and whine in girlie fashion = a hundred miles away from any real female metal vocalist.

Nevertheless they are so popular that they had their own goods queue…

Totally weird and absolutely awful from my humble perspective, but you can’t argue about taste can you…

Apart from Amorphis, Stratovarius was my personal highlight, who gave a solid and great performance and as far as the gigs are concerned that I did not watch from the arena this one was the one that fired up the audience most of all.

Last In Line was good but the audience a bit lame, maybe due to an apparently new singer? Finally, Yngwie Malmsteen’s line up of some ten fat amplifier towers next to a lost looking drum set was not enough to generate enough sound? Just joking. They had sound issues and at times they seemed rather un-noisy and the mikes were not working well. Among those ten amp towers something created a feedback loop and an annoying “feeeeeep” made your teeth hurt. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen such an amp tower arrangement!

To escape long queues at the cloak corner and full trains, I left before Yngwie was finished. Sorry! Would have liked to see Carcass and Angra on day one, but too busy with books and work I was and am.

Despite the police state character of the event, I guess I’ll go there next year again, depending on the line up if course

Typhoons and Izu Oshima

Every year some twenty to thirty typhoons are brewing in the Pacific. Most of them generate around the area of Palau, which thus never gets hit by typhoons. They all head west and hit either the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, or Japan and Korea.

In Japan we just give them numbers and don’t bother with names.

So the typhoon that wreaked havoc on the island of Izu Oshima is known here as typhoon number 26 instead of Wipha or whatever its name in the non Japanese media was.

I find the numbers much more practical. What does a typhoon need a name for?

Anyway. Most of the twenty something typhoons per year don’t reach Japan, but sometimes they take their route north and pay us a a visit.

Since the Pacific sees twenty something of them each year there is nothing special about it.

Most of the typhoons that reach us are not that bad and it’s quite windy and it rains a lot, but usually they last not longer than twenty four hours if at all and they mostly leave us with warm and wonderful weather once they are gone.

Trouble starts when the wind and or rain get so strong that train services are disrupted and when that happens it affects a hell of a lot of people since more or less everybody commutes to work in the large cities via public transport.

I am here for thirteen years now and have seen quite a number of typhoons come and go. The worst one in my memory is not the typhoon 26 of this year, it was the typhoon number 15 (or was it 16?) of 2011, which hit in the afternoon and the office building I work in shook in the gales as if we were having a felt magnitude three or so earthquake. This typhoon splintered a hell of a lot of trees in my favorite park and was very scary. But in principle I find typhoons rather bothersome than frightening. Most of out typhoons are smaller than hurricanes in the Americas and less potent and their general wind speed is slower and thus also the damage they cause.

But, what I have also learned over the years is to not underestimate a typhoon, since they are considerable forces of nature after all as typhoon 26 has just proven in the case of Izu Oshima island. The heavy rain caused a massive landslide that buried half the village of Motomachi under it.

So far 27 people are confirmed dead and 22 are still unaccounted for and are probably buried under the rubble.

The Izu Oshima incident leaves me with a bit of a bitter feeling, since I visited the island for a few days in May during our Golden Week holidays (here is the link to the first of the Oshima blog entries from May). My hotel (the bug infested one) was/is only one district next to where the landslide came down. I expect the hotel to have escaped the landslide only by a maximum of 100 meters, presumably less. Now that feels kind of awkward. I didn’t like the hotel but I liked the island with its big volcano Mt. Mihara that looked pretty awesome – as these photos show.

In the original movie, Godzilla calls Mt. Mihara his home, he sleeps at the bottom of the crater of Mt. Mihara.

The island has a rustic charm and is a bit neglected and its population is rather old. This landslide now will be another blow to the island, since I believe the in general already few tourists will go elsewhere now, at least for a while.

So, even if the typhoons are often not much more than a nuisance, it is a grave mistake to underestimate their force and caution in dealing with them is a good idea.

Of course the local media over-dramatize things, but nevertheless this typhoon and its consequences are a reminder of the potential destructive power of these things. They are still far less scary and dangerous than earthquakes… Just to keep things in perspective. I feel a bit queasy and empathetic though for the people of Oshima, I drove the bus along one of the roads that is now buried under rubble just a few months ago. The pictures of the mountainside that I took from Motomachi port have become historical documents, since a part of the side of the mountain is now gone. You feel different about it, are more involved, when you know the place where a disaster has struck.

I hope Izu Oshima will recover from the happenings soon.

Publishing Woes and Complaint Work

On the 28th of September my novel “To Mix and To Stir” – Part two of the Hagen Patterson trilogy was released and available and I thought everything is fine and ordered 50 copies as I always do to sell them here in Japan. I began waiting for the Kindle version to become available as well.

Then, suddenly, without me having done anything, the book appeared as “out of print” in Amazon and I went into my project “dashboard” at Createspace to find that the title had reconverted to “incomplete setup”.

I wrote an email to the support team asking what is going on and received the following reply.

“Our system shows that somehow you were able to place your book into “incomplete” status, from “available”. I have requested our PrePress Department reinstate your book to “available” status as soon as possible. Once this is done the “complete setup” link will go back to a green check mark.”

Nope, I had not done anything, but what the heck. I was a bit frustrated but hoped they’d repair this glitch.

Then a day later or so the Kindle version became ready and I did the necessary steps in KDP (Kindle direct publishing) but it remained as “requires attention” in the dashboard and I emailed them once more asking about that and also about the progress concerning the paperback and to that received the following answer.

“I have cleared the attention regarding Kindle in your account. This was just a courtesy step you needed to close after we notified you that we uploaded your files. We still need to send you the author copy of your book, which we are preparing to do. Once we ship this, the complete set-up and cover services will appear complete again.”

Wait a second? Author copy? I got an author copy end of September already.

I went back into the dashboard and things had gotten worse, now suddenly also the cover setup was on red, not only the entire setup.

I wrote them again notifying them of that and also that I don’t need another author copy and, by the way, I have already ordered 50 books.

To that I got the following grand answer:

“It appears the project was reopened based on an internal issue with your cover file; our quality team noticed that it did not have enough bleed when it went to print, so we are currently correcting this issue. When complete, we will need to send you a revised author proof.

You may want to consider stalling your order to make sure all files are the most up-to-date. If you need to do this, please reach out to our Member Services Team at …”

WHAT???

So, it seems as if Createspace has a communication problem. The quality section does not talk to the project team and the first reply was sent by the project team in a state of not knowing what is wrong.

Meanwhile a bit more than frustrated, I phoned their service team number and explained to the dude on the other end what is going on and he was saying stuff like “oh my” and “the order has already been shipped”…. great………..

He told me to “refuse” the package when it gets delivered and in the meantime he will see to it that the order is reissued after the stuff’s been all put on green status again……… I do not trust this promise yet for one moment and have summarized it and sent it to Createspace in writing.

By the way, although the book shows “live” in KDP, the Kindle version is nowhere “live” at Amazon…

= nothing works! Ahhhhhhhhh…

Apart from this giant Createspace hiccup, I was fascinated by this customer service dude I had on the phone.

He sounded like he came right out of a customer service / complaint management seminar. He was very empathetic to my problems with comments like “oh my” and “oh dear” and other expressions of sympathy next to his very caring and soothing tone.

It was kinda funny to listen to him. Man, they got that dude brainwashed! I could see the teacher standing in front of him saying things like: “…and never forget: the customer is always right! and you have to show empathy and sympathy for his/her problems.”

I mean the guy was really friendly and all but it was a bit too thick and thus not real. It’s hard to work in the service industry, yes, no doubt about that. I wouldn’t want to have such a job. You listen to complaints and various degrees of angry, upset, and maybe even verbally aggressive and abusive people all bloody day long. Man, that’s a tough job. How do you manage to keep a positive mindset? How do you manage to not go home totally frustrated and down and out?

So, to a certain degree the guy has my sympathy, his job wouldn’t be one I’d like to have, but nevertheless – I want a good looking and available book out there……….

Let’s see how long it’ll take until Createspace will achieve that………