Regina Glei's Blog, page 41

“Siegfried” Novel Wins in Awards Contest

I’m happy to announce that my contemporary fantasy novel “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” is the winner of the “genre-based” category of the London Book Festival 2012. Though there has been some doubt as of late as to the “validity” of contests like this, anonymous judges, etc., it’s still kinda cool to win and have your name up there somewhere and the hope that someone actually read the book and liked it.

The psychological factor of being able to call your novels “award winning” ones is also something that cannot be negotiated away. After all something like this allows the author to make some advertisement and to publish a press release for example. Here’s the “Siegfried” wins press release I made for the award.

So I shall take this win as a welcome X-mas present and toast my potion master Hagen Patterson and his father Alberich – part two of his/their story is about to be written!

Guns Do Not Make Free

And so it happened again, yet again.

As the rest of the world, I am shocked by what has happened in Connecticut. Yet another massacre caused by guns. I am convinced that if the shooter had had more difficulties to get his hands on guns, this would not have happened the way it did.

One cannot completely prevent people from running amok. In Japan there was this guy in Osaka who massacred 8 children with a kitchen knife.

Something like that will always happen. But it is quite a different caliber to kill someone with a knife than with a gun. With a knife you have to get up close and touch your victim, with a gun there is no need for that.

The pro-gun people say that it’s the American way of life and that it’s “freedom” to carry a gun. In my humble opinion freedom is something else entirely.

Just last night I enjoyed freedom. I went with a friend for dinner and drinks in downtown Tokyo. I then enjoyed the freedom of walking around downtown Tokyo at midnight and feeling safe. I boarded the public transport system at midnight feeling safe. I rode the train home feeling safe amongst loads of people who are sleeping safely on the subway, talking, jabbing away at their smart phones in peace and safety. I had the freedom to bicycle home at one in the morning without a care in the world, feeling safe. That is freedom, that is quality of life. Not being able to have an instrument of murder in my home.

This freedom, this feeling of being safe is one of the many reasons why I am staying in Japan, despite earthquakes, because I feel freer here than anywhere else I have been to yet because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want.

I will never forget my first time in L.A. I took a stroll at Venice beach and there was this crazy dude dancing around an upended blue bucket. My initial thought and fear was that he has a gun under that bucket and if he feels like it he’ll topple his bucket, pick up his gun and shoot into the crowd.

If there was a crazy dude at a Japanese beach dancing around an upended bucket I would presume he has a bottle of beer or whatever below the bucket, not a gun. I did not feel free when I walked along Venice beach. I felt afraid, spooked and hunted.

There are mad people everywhere, and if you really want to get your hands on guns, you will be able to obtain them one way or the other, as has sadly been proven in Norway last year by Mr. Breivik. So yes, there are mad people in all countries and every corner of the world, but if you give them easy access to guns you destroy the freedom of the millions of others around them. I wonder how many more massacres the people of the US have to endure until finally someone controls gun possession? Guns do not make free, guns let you live in fear. My deepest condolences to the parents who lost their little children yesterday.

Shaken But Not Stirred

Last night we were rattled again quite good in Japan and let me attempt to describe how that feels like for those lucky ones of you out there who’ve never been through a major earthquake.

It was Friday… again Friday. The big one happened also on a Friday, the 11th of March 2011. The big one happened at around 14:30 in the afternoon, yesterday’s quake happened a bit later, at 17:20.

In both cases I sat in the office. A year ago I was still in the 13th floor of our 17 floor office building, in the meantime I moved to the 15th floor.

Fridays is our “no overtime day” and we are allowed to leave at 17:35 and I was already wrapping up things at 17:20 when suddenly an upward jolt that let me utter a “whoa”. Let me add that it of course largely depends what the quake feels like on where you are when it happens. Office building is not like office building. I bet it feels different in every office building in Tokyo, depending on the size, width, age etc. of the building.

So, where I sat, I felt this sudden upward jolt and knew of course immediately – earthquake, since I have been through a hundred or more by now. They’ve become so normal for us since March 2011 that usually nobody’s writing home about all the aftershocks anymore, by the way.

Upwards rings immediate alarm bells, since a “tate jishin” = standing earthquake = up and down movement is NOT good. Potential damage is much worse during a tate jishin than a “yoko jishin” = side to side earthquake. Kobe was destroyed in 1995 by a tate jishin when a minor fault decided to break.

After the first upward jolt there was an uncomfortable, lingering up and down trembling. Meanwhile the whole floor was on alert and one colleague went to our security door to open it. I am currently sitting in the HR section which has special security doors, because we have confidential documents inside our vault. There are two doors to our little prison. I followed the Japanese colleague to the door and we held it open and waited. Our security door has the annoying habit to give off a beeping alarm when it is opened for too long and the door started to beep. My colleague and I decided to close the door, thinking it was over, but opened it immediately because it was far from over yet.

Yesterday, the up and down tremor was only the starting point of the real quake. The all too familiar side to side = yoko jishin swaying started and it swayed pretty badly east to west. That east to west movement already indicated that this is similar to the March 11 big one.

While my colleague and I stood in the open door, our HR boss opened the second one down the corridor and held that one open. Quite a number of colleagues dived under their desks.

I had no desire to return into the closed off room and to my desk and next to tables the second best thing to be during a quake is under a door frame anyway. Since the March 11 quake I have lost a bit of confidence into our office building. It is rather old and if a big one were ever to hit Tokyo I have that horror feeling in my guts that our building won’t make it and break somewhere and tilt.

The swaying continued for an awfully long time, but I was beginning to relax a tiny bit, since I could judge by the amount of noise that it was not as bad as the 11th of March. We have blinds in front of our windows and during quakes they swing of course too and clash against the windows and their swaying and impact noise was considerably lower than on March 11th. Also the remaining building sounds of what reminds me of bellows or the folds of an accordion was less loud and strained than on the 11th of March.

Another colleague rushed to meet us, coming from the bathroom. She latched onto my arm and said the Japanese equivalent of “the fxxing quake caught me with my pants down!” I share the feeling. The magnitude 8 something aftershock of March 11 caught me with my pants down on the toilet as well and that’s NO fun.

Since it takes a while for the building to calm down swaying again after the actual quake is over, I think we got into the 17:30 magnitude 6 aftershock without much pause and swayed some more. It took an awfully long time for the building to calm down again. Since all in all the swaying was much more moderate than on March 11, I was not that freaked out, but admit to wobbly and shivering knees.

When it was finally over, I returned to my desk and checked the Internet for the thing, because we of course all knew that this was something major again. 7.3 in more or less exactly the same spot as the March 11 quake and thus undoubtedly an aftershock to the big one. It triggered a small tsunami which hit some thirty minutes later, but that luckily remained under one meter and caused no damage.

A major concern after a quake is of course traffic, but when I eventually left the building at 17:45, Tokyo’s trains were running as usual. We had a felt magnitude four in Tokyo, in contract to a “five strong” on March 11.

Tokyo, very much used to quakes now since March 11, shrugged the felt magnitude four off and life went on as usual.

Some more things that struck me. I totally forgot and did not bother with the helmet under my desk. That said, none of my colleagues whipped out the helmet. There are some twenty people in that HR section vault and I think all of them have smart phones, I’m also pretty sure that all of them have one or the other earthquake alert app on their phones, me too. None of the apps reacted. Proof yet again that earthquake prediction is bogus. Maybe people will be able to predict quakes in a hundred years or so but not now.

This time we got off with a little shock and some wobbly knees and half an hour later life was back to normal, as so often and as always I hope it’ll stay that way.

Here a link (in Japanese) to the quake from yesterday with a nice graphic of epicenter and a buckling Japan. On March 11 the map looked a lot pinker and redder…

People’s Front?

I can’t help it, I have to write a little rant about Japanese politics. First of all, sincere apologies — I am a complete lay-woman when it comes to politics. I cannot claim to be in any way thoroughly informed about politics in general and Japanese politics in particular, but I believe I share this feature with more than half of the Japanese population. Japanese politics are just not interesting enough to be interested in them…

There are two main parties these days, the Jiminto (Liberal Democratic Party) and the Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan). These two parties have the strong tendency to remind me of the The People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Though members of both parties might wildly disagree, to me lay-woman they appear pretty much the same…

Let’s look at these guys (the future prime minister) up there for lower house elections this month: There’s Noda san from the Minshuto, so far so good. He’s been the prime minister now for a while and appears to want to stay in his job.

Now, finally, the issue that motivates me to give my three cents worth of opinion: Who’s Noda san’s main opponent? Abe san… what’s wrong with that? Well, Mr. Abe has been a completely inglorious, colorless, boring prime minister already in 2007 or so for a year or so. I cannot remember him having achieved anything noteworthy. He left his post for reasons I forgot, but some health and stress issues among them. At least that’s what’s left in my memory and I am rather sure, that’s all that’s left in the memory of most Japanese citizens…

What I absolutely don’t understand is how the hell the Jiminto can put this lame duck at the helm again??? Incredible, impossible… I don’t think something like that is possible in any other country. How can a major political party put a guy back in charge who has more or less completely failed last time around? This is something that totally escapes me and that also totally annoys me.

Why does this guy deserve a second chance? Catching glimpses of him on TV show that he has learned nothing. He is still the same boring and colorless dude, who cannot even hold proper speeches. He has the same speech pattern for every bloody sentence he says and you fall asleep listening to him within minutes.

Is there really nobody in the entire Jiminto who could do a better job? Has the Jiminto sunk so far that is has to turn to past failures?

I asked some work colleagues about how the Jiminto can put this guy in charge a second time around. The answer I got is: dunno. Here’s the major problem of Japanese politics: The average citizen, who is smart, highly educated, works in a demanding job, does not give a damn about the political bickering in the country. Half of the Japanese people do not vote anyway, which of course is not the best thing to do, but no wonder with such characterless and lame creatures at the top.

I have no clue whether Mr. Noda is doing a good job or not, but I sincerely hope that he’ll stay in charge, since the alternative is so unspeakably disappointing.

I don’t think spin offs like Ishihara san (Tokyo’s mayor) and Hashimoto san (Osaka’s mayor) who just found a new party have a realistic chance, because they cannot fool the general public. Too much (nationalistic and radical) propaganda, too big mouthed, but nothing much behind it, only hot air, and the people know that.

Anyway, we’ll see the game of Japanese politics play itself out in a couple of weeks. My tip is that they’ll have to form a big coalition of some sort, since half of the frustrated voters who’ll bother to vote will vote for Minshuto, the other frustrated half of the voters will vote for the Jiminto. In the end, the average citizen knows, from experience, that no matter who’s in charge of the two, nothing big will change anyway and no change has something comfortable and reassuring to it. We’ll all only be happy when it’s over and when those noisy mini buses which bark “vote for me, vote for me”, are quiet again…

First Glimpse at the Lord of Water

Dark Quest Books is about to publish my contemporary fantasy novella Lord of Water and has released the cover and the blurb.

Very excited about this little, wicked story finally seeing the light of day.

A Trip to Wuxi, China

I can’t stress enough that travel is adventure.

This time I went on a one week work seminar in China’s Wuxi, some 120 km west of Shanghai.

The adventure started with my only other Japanese colleague scheduled to go to same seminar missing at Narita airport. It turned out later that there had been booking trouble and all other sorts of issues that only allowed my colleague to join us a day later than planned.

Now how does one get from Shanghai’s Pudong airport to Wuxi? The suggestion of the seminar’s organizers had been to take a long distance bus from Pudong to Wuxi and from the Wuxi bus terminal a taxi to the hotel. They announced that as the cheapest solution.

Following this suggestion, I made my way to the long distance bus station of Shanghai Pudong airport after a quiet flight and arrival. The very moment I descended into the waiting hall of the long distance busses, all English disappeared. All signs were in Chinese only and the woman at the ticket sales spoke only Chinese. Luckily I can read some, if far from all, Chinese characters and recognized Wuxi. People unfamiliar with Chinese characters are rather hopelessly lost here, I suppose. I also learned that 100 RMB means something like ibai after several floods of Mandarin from the bus ticket sales lady.

While waiting for the bus, I noticed that no Westerners were around, because the average one first of all does not go to Wuxi, second, if the average foreigner goes to Wuxi, he so she probably takes a taxi or flies there. Wuxi also has a small local airport.

When the bus was announced, I left the hall and found a small, old and far from Japanese style limousine bus and it had only five customers and the driver, who again spoke no word of English. I asked for Wuxi to make sure and got a nod and Wuxi for an answer. So far so good. The bus rode to Hongqia airport first and waited there for a half an hour. No further passengers joined us.

On went the ride to Wuxi in the dark and I saw nothing much of the surroundings. The further we got away from Shanghai, the thinner the traffic. The bus arrived in Wuxi on time and drove into a dark terminal which looked like a closed-for-today’s-business shopping mall. At basement level where we got off was no other bus and basically nobody was around and that at only 21:30.

A maybe 40 year old woman and a bit younger man were the only people present and they started talking to me the moment I left the bus. In Chinese of course, no clue what they said. I asked taxi and they nodded and were holding fingers in the air for the price. I could not figure out how much they wanted and just said yes for the moment. The official taxi booth was dark and empty. The entire shopping mall was dark and empty for that matter. In an atrium stood several shady looking men, no idea what kind of business they were doing or planning.

The man left for I don’t know where and the woman led me through the waiting men, shouting at them I don’t know what and brought me to the street away from them. In contrast to shanghai, the streets of Wuxi are empty. No significant traffic around the shopping mall, no official taxi far and wide, nothing. I was getting more scared by the minute and thanked my former Chinese travel experience again for having printed out the name and address of the hotel in Chinese. The woman made me wait at a deserted bus stop, shouted into her mobile phone and a few minutes later an old and battered Chinese car appeared, no taxi sign on it of course. Since it was dark and cold and in the middle of bloody nowhere, I saw no choice but to enter that car. The woman showed me bills and wanted to have 70 RMB. I tried to pay her without negotiating, I had no nerve for that, but she shook her head and pointed at the driver, a middle aged man. I don’t remember if it was the same guy who had been with her at the bus terminal or not.

The car left and there I was, at the mercy of this black taxi without a method of communication and nothing but the paper with the hotel name in a town I had never been to before.

The guy drove for quite a while and I was pretty damn scared I must admit, he could have driven me to bloody anywhere… At a traffic light I showed him the address again and he was nodding. I could do nothing but hope. The streets in the outskirts of Wuxi are so deserted it seems like a ghost town. A totally different picture from Shanghai, which did not exactly increase my comfort level. When I started to get really afraid though, we, oh miracle, arrived at the hotel. Man, was I glad to see that hotel! I paid the man and entered the hotel with shaking knees and quite some relief.

So, this black taxi was only desperate to make some money and they were honest people. I don’t know how lucky I was, maybe 99% of all black taxis are honest people who just want to earn some money, I guess I won’t find out. The reaction from my Chinese seminar colleagues to the journey though were rather concerned and shocked, which gives the message that the safety level of black taxis is lower than 99%.

Anyway, I had arrived safely and the seminar started the next day.

We did not get much out of the hotel during the seminar days. There was no reason to anyway, since the area around the hotel was dead. Wuxi is an industrial town and not a tourist place. Even the hotel’s restaurants all closed at 21:30.

One night, we went out for dinner as a group to have Szechuan food, again, deserted streets, deserted restaurant at 21:00 and back to the hotel.

Looking out of the hotel window presented the viewer with nothing but milky, gray, smoggy air. The air smelled stale and as dead as the city.

On the last day, Friday the 23rd of November, our seminar ended at 15:00 and I went by taxi to Wuxi downtown together with a Malaysian and the Japanese colleague.

As far as I saw, I was the only Westerner in downtown Wuxi. The three of us went into two shopping malls and one supermarket on the hunt for some souvenirs for family and office colleagues. Not a word of English anywhere. I felt very sorry for my Japanese colleague. Of the three of us she looked of course most Chinese. Something like, Chinese lady takes her foreign friends shopping and all the sales ladies addressed her with a waterfall of Mandarin that she does not understand. For several sales ladies it took a while to get it that she does not speak their language. Some were surprised and remained neutral, but some also frowned quite a bit at her and the poor thing felt pretty horrible.

At one place we found some souvenir like cookies and a very eager and friendly and non-frowning sales lady, who successfully sold us a bunch of Chinese cookies. She communicated by bringing out samples and I found myself testing some weird candied fruits and oddly dry and stuffy biscuits. Her strategy though was successful and we all bought some cookies that I declared to be edible. We checked the restaurants in the bigger shopping mall, but only Chinese signs, and no chance at communication or ordering what we want or even knowing what they offer. Therefore we gave up and decided to return to the hotel and eat there yet again, since the hotel staff speaks English.

A last adventure lay before us in from of finding a taxi back to the hotel.

Downtown was much more lively than our hotel area and thus posed a different kind of problem, chaotic traffic. There is the lane of bicycles and motorcycles, most of them e-bikes, between the cars and the pedestrians and those e-bikes drive rather recklessly to put it mildly. Nevertheless we managed to get a taxi in the end and with the help of a map from the hotel were able to get back to the place. We made one last try to eat outside the hotel in a fast-food style pizzeria next to the hotel located in a deserted-of-customers restaurant complex but gave up on that eventually. Back in the hotel, whose occupancy ratio, judging from the amount of people at the breakfast buffet, must be under 50%, they had served only a la carte the other days, but to our delight there was a buffet on Friday night. So the adventure of downtown Wuxi had a happy ending.

This left us with the task to get back to Pudong airport on Saturday morning. I had discussed the matter with Chinese seminar colleagues and they were so helpful to arrange a rent-a-car service with driver for us for Saturday. Now that went smoothly and without problem. The driver spoke no English either, but he came to the hotel and the hotel staff translated.

On the highway the Chinese driving style is not the most cooperative as described in earlier China travel blog entries, but our driver managed the situation without major holding-tight-onto-your-seatbelt situations, though he talked on a mobile phone twice while driving with 130 km per hour. The landscape between Wuxi and Shanghai is a sea of factories and apartment blocks, not much green around, so no wonder everything is shrouded in hazy smog. Anyway. We got safely back to the airport and I am writing this blog report while sitting on the plane back to Tokyo.

This time, the plane to Tokyo left again from the main departure hub without buses and last-exit-to-Brooklyn kind of feeling. In total, I have been to China now four times within 13 months and each time was an adventure. The next visit is not yet planned. Let’s see what happens. Most likely it’ll be Shanghai again though and not Wuxi… Lucky me.

Check out some photos from Wuxi on Flickr if you like.

Japan Writers Conference 2012 Report – Part 2

Here’s the second part of my Japan Writers Conference (JWC) report with the remaining four talks that I went to.

Humor

Left over from the first conference day was a great talk about humor in fiction.

British writer Peter Marsh took the heavy task upon himself to talk about humor. Here his very interesting take on the matter:

Humor is not about writing jokes (of course), humor is about making a story engaging and creating empathy, or about taking pain playfully.

Journalistic reporting and writing about history is not funny because it attempts, usually, to be impartial.

Literature though is partial and seeks to evoke emotions of whatever sort. Without a grain of humor in it, prose becomes preachy, pompous and in the worst case: dull.

A stand-up comedian needs to deliver his punch lines at the right time and with the right tone. On paper one has to get the words right.

One can go even so far as to say that the creative part of writing is to find the humor in it.

There are the four humors of the human body.

Yellow bile, which stands for bad tempered, easily angered, if there is too much black bile you are irritable, sleepless, or despondent. Blood stands for courageous, amorous, or hopeful. And phlegm for calmness, unemotional, phlegmatic…

Humor means to blend those four humors or rather the temperaments that they stand for.

Humor is not necessarily funny but it engages.

We did a small exercise during the talk and wrote a rant and then were supposed to make it humorous. A rant is only bile, but mixed with one or two of the other humors it should become engaging and maybe even funny. Unfortunately there was not enough time to seriously work the rant into a humorous piece but I shall try that again with more leisure.

This was a very intense and informative session and I enjoyed it greatly.

Marketing 1

The next two seminars I attended, were devoted to marketing your work and yourself as an author.

At first writer Suzanne Kamata gave us an update on general marketing issues.

It’s noisy out there in the book publishing world. Some 290,000 titles were published in the last 12 months in North America alone and half of them were self-published. The publishing world is in a transition phase and changes happen very fast these days.

In the noise out there each “normal” author starts out small. Of course there are always some glorious examples of nobodies suddenly striking 6 figure deals, but they are the rare exceptions from the masses.

So what do you do? You need a “platform”. That may include a homepage, a blog, your Facebook page, a twitter account. Be “present” out there, comment on other people’s blogs, send links in your blog posts and tweets. Ask friends and fans to request your book at the local library (if it is traditionally published that is), ask them to “like” you on Amazon, even if they don’t read or buy your book, write guest posts for other blogs. Try to get reviews – beware, reviews are shifting to bloggers these days. Resend already done interviews to other places that might be interested and remember, always, always be polite, follow up gently, and don’t respond to bad reviews. Beware of anybody who wants to have money for reviews or other such marketing “services”.

Another two important things:

1) Set yourself a time limit per day or week for your marketing activities and do only what you feel comfortable with.

2) Find your niche. Suzanne gave the example of someone whose passion is fountain pens. He spread the word in his niche and now movie or TV producers ask him for advice what kind of fountain pen to use for their historical dramas. Get yourself invited to book festivals, and talks that have something to do with your niche.

Help people and you will receive help.

Marketing 2

The next talk about marketing by author Hugh Ashton focused more on Facebook and twitter.

Consider making an author page on Facebook and/or fan pages for your series or even single titles in addition to your personal Facebook profile.

Don’t preach to the choir by asking everybody constantly to buy your book.

Consider a twitter “spam”. There are paid services which assist with projects like that, notably “Hoot Suit”. This site sends prepared tweets at certain time intervals that you can define. Another paid service you might consider is “Tweet Adder”, which harvests twitter handles for you. The golden rule of course is also here: always be polite and send a thank you to people who are newly following you.

What do you tweet in such pre-recorded messages? You can use quotes from your (positive) Amazon reviews, quotes from your book, little information snit-bits that readers might be interested in.

To save yourself time you can interlink Facebook with goodreads and twitter.

Some of this costs time to set it up, but once it is running, the maintenance is not too hard.

Again here though, do what you feel comfortable doing. There are lots of marketing tools and possibilities out there, find and use what suits you.

Images and words

The last talk I attended was more artistic and ideal to wind down and close the conference. Author and photographer Michael Stetson talked about and showed us combinations of images with words.

The human visual perception selects images and interprets them, seeking to preserve meaning. We select iconic images to represent for example events in history; to mind come iconic images from the Vietnam War, for example.

A photograph fixes an image and capsules an event, often the climax or the moment before the climax of that event. Photographs do not preserve meaning. Without context, the meaning gets removed. A photograph can be considered a foot print or a death mask of an event.

You can create context for a photo by giving it text or putting it in a series or structuring them via a common theme.

Words change the context. “Naked” images convey different meanings than images with explanatory text. Be aware though that text can also narrow the interpretation of an image down.

As you can see from my short reports – it was a very diverse and interesting conference!

A little side anecdote for the finish:

After the conference, a few of us went for dinner and we had a wonderfully geeky discussion:

X: Star Trek is inconsistent – sometimes a phaser just kills you and you drop dead to the ground, at other times people dissolve and disappear entirely.

Y: Nah, that’s not inconsistent – the drop to the ground dead is a Federation phaser. The disintegration thing is a Romulan or Klingon disruptor.

Z: Jeez, I haven’t had enough beer yet for a conversation like that!

Awesome! At least in my humble opinion

Japan Writers Conference 2012 Report – Part 1

The 6th Japan Writers Conference (JWC) held from the 10th till the 11th of November in Kyoto this year was the third, which I attended. It’s a great opportunity for the English speaking writers of Japan to meet, hang out and to talk shop about what interests us most – writing. Poets as well as literary and genre writers gather for the conference and the variety in talks is of course much greater than at, for example, the World Science Fiction Convention, but its good to look over the rim of ones own genre from time to time.

Since I went to a total 8 talks, I will separate this report into four per blog post = I’ll post part two next weekend.

The first talk I attended came from a Canadian author named Trevor Kew, who is a soccer fan and writes soccer stories for young adults.

He often gets the comment: “but it’s just a sports story”. Yes, however, that does not mean that you cannot get some good story telling and drama into your sports theme.

Writing about team sports automatically means drama. Wherever a group of people gathers is room for drama. Trevor said that besides the sports, the fun and the action, he uses his stories to get a message across: to make children care about things while giving them a fun read about their favorite sports.

Some general writing issues Trevor brought up:

a) Stories are composed of dialogue, description, action and the (occasional?) thought.

b) Action can flow in two directions: from he subject = e.g. John kicked the ball into the goal. But also from the object = e.g. the ball flew past Bill into the goal.

An author should be aware of that and variate.

c) Variate your words in action scenes. You can dribble, kick, soar, fly, float, dive, etc. Make your prose alive with variation and by being precise.

d) The famous showing versus telling also came into play. Instead of saying “John hated Bill”, show the reader how one hates the other = show us what John does that makes the reader see how he hates Bill.

During the Q&A session, a question came up concerning how to deal with large groups of people (like the soccer team). Trevor’s advice was too concentrate on a limited number of main characters and to give the minor ones small but specific characteristics, like for example the kid who shows up at soccer practice in jeans and things like that, which will distinguish him/her from the other members in the team. A fun presentation – not only for writers of YA.

Next up was a highlight of the conference – a reading and Q&A with Vikas Swarup.

Mr. Swarup, of Slumdog Millionaire fame, is the Consul General of India in Kobe. He already came to the JWC for the third time and I have been to his reading in 2011 as well. In 2011 he read from his “Q&A” novel (Slumdog Millionaire) and his novel “Six Suspects”. This year we got something new – he read from the prologue of his new novel “The Accidental Apprentice”, which will come out early next year.

The excerpt was great fun and I am looking forward to reading this novel.

Since Mr. Swarup is a Consul General he is, as he says himself, a weekend writer. And even those weekends are often occupied by non-writing activities, like coming to the JWC for example.

During our Q&A after his reading, someone asked whether Japan has influenced his fiction. It surely has. He said that he comes from a country which on the surface is one of the most chaotic on earth and lives now in a country which is one of the most organized countries on earth. The sheer contrast of that influences the way you think and probably write as well.

Distance lends perspective, he finds it easier to write about India not being right in the middle of it.

India is so huge and diverse that whatever people say about India, the opposite will also be true. And another sentence that I loved: In India you can have the entire population of Sweden at a street corner.

I think part of Mr. Swarup’s great appeal is that he is an action based writer. If a character does something there must be consequences. His novels have resolutions and don’t let the reader hang out there to dry. His novels are very well structured and you know that you will get a resolution when you read one of his books.

One thing I am standing in awe of is that Mr. Swarup is not an endless reviser – what we get to read is a first, maybe second draft, not the tenth, etc.. That is the advantage of being an architect I suppose in contrast to a gardener type of writer. Again, I’m looking forward to reading The Accidental Apprentice.

The next talk I went to was about writing Asia.

Xu Xi led us through some excerpts of English language writing of Asians from various backgrounds and we identified what we liked about those, and which sounded authentic and original or not. I find it a bit hard to recapture the talk or the exercise, mostly because this is not the kind of books I usually read. Ms. Xi teaches an MFA (master of fine arts) class at a university in HongKong and that was interesting to know, wish though that there was something like that in Tokyo.

The following talk was great and a bit more befitting to what I am familiar with. The (correct or not so correct) depiction of the military in fiction.

The speaker, Dwayne Lively, was an air force member (I hope I got that right now) and a great speaker and let us in on some “secrets”.

1) The military loves words: a pencil becomes something like a “hand-held writing device containing graphite” in military order lists.

2) The military loves profanity, when you can’t swear properly – stay home.

3) The military loves reports. There is a report for every- and anything.

4) Most importantly, the military is all about logistics.

Sorry, a scene like 10,000 riders riding against Minas Tirith is bogus. How do you feed such an army? A horse needs one acre of good grassland to sustain it. The entire area of Kyoto is 10,000 acres and you have not yet fed your soldiers but only the horses. So, fantasy writers, beware, don’t make your horse- and knight-armies too big. And if your fighting happens for example in the mountains, don’t give your heroes stately steeds but rather little mules.

And by the way, if you can battle with magic, why do you need an army? Anyway, also writers of fantasy should try to keep up a tiny grain of logic .

Combat in the past, present and future:

The past – In the past well trained knights clubbed each other in melee, along came gunpowder and you could put a gun into a hand of an untrained man and he could shoot people dead. Over time, technology has put more and more distance between the opponents.

The present – Apart from the distance issue, a peace-time army is a kindergarten where everything is about politics, bickering and promotions.

Thanks to drones, fighter pilots are in danger of becoming obsolete.

Submarines are not ships but boats.

The captain never leaves the ship to go on a dangerous mission.

Study your bullets and the damage they do. A sofa is not an adequate cover against machine-gun fire, not even a brick wall is. There is an interesting aspect these days about over-penetration of bullets. They don’t kill you when they just go through, you need bullets to tumble and cause tissue damage. Dear writer, study gunfights (real ones, not the movies) before you write your bullet flying action scene and don’t let people hide from bullets behind sofas.

The future – Sorry Star Trek fans, but why the heck do the panels always blow up? Why does the Enterprise apparently fly without circuit breakers?

Where are the people who maintain the hopefully self-cleaning toilets on the Enterprise? The Enterprise seems to be filled with officers only, where are the enlisted people who maintain the ship apart from the engine section?

And oh yes, Captains never leave their ships, especially not on dangerous missions.

As a side note – Tanks, space battle ships etc. don’t have windows…

Beware of planetarism – after a while colonists on Mars will become Martians, in attitude and behavior. Why should they follow a far away earth doctrine, why should they care?

And why does nobody nuke the Na’vi’s tree (Avatar) from orbit?

So, there are lots of aspects not only the fantasy and SF writer should keep in mind, when dealing with military action in his or her book, though, admittedly some of the blunders are just as hilarious and great fun as this lecture was.

Next week more = the remaining four talks I went to.

Actors and Dancers

Inspired by my Loudpark 12 festival visit, I feel the need to theorize a bit about vocalists

In more or less every rock band the focal point is the singer. They basically come along in two types, those who play an instrument while singing and those who don’t.

Now, when you don’t sing while playing an instrument, but your “only” instrument is your voice, you have a unique situation at hand that none of your other band members face. You have spare time. You’re not singing for every note of the song. If you have no instrument to “hide behind” you must have a strategy for what to do with the time during which you are not singing.

There is only that much “firing up the audience” you can do. You will be left with spare time that needs to be filled, since many of the audience’s eyes remain on you.

Now what do you do with that time?

I think there are four basic categories, the dancers, the actors, the dancer/actors and those who don’t know what to do (yet).

One simple strategy for bridging the time between your lines of lyrics is: you “dance”. That can take various forms, real dancing, hopping around, bouncing around, running from one end of the stage to the other, headbanging and so forth.

The other strategy is to act, to be an entertainer, to go all dramatic when you have a pause in your lines, to act out the meanings of your songs, to interact with your fellow musicians on stage as far as that is possible and so forth.

There are many vocalists who do a combination of the two and act and “dance” a bit.

All those are viable strategies and the performance of the vocalist looks “whole”.

Now, of course there are bad and good actors among the vocalists and if you overdo the acting part, you risk looking silly on stage, which creates an awkward feeling in the audience.

The other problem is when you are neither an actor nor a dancer and look like you don’t know what to do with your spare time on stage. That makes the vocalist look lost and insecure and again creates an awkward feeling in the audience.

So, my advice to all vocalists is – look at your own performance videos and find out what type you are and for those who are neither actors nor dancers, decide on one and consciously go for it. In the worst case you can also take acting or dancing classes

I wonder whether all vocalists are aware of this spare time issue. I wasn’t for the four times I stood on a stage as a vocalist. Looking back now, I quite naturally and without thinking about it chose the acting/“dancing” (= headbanging) hybrid to spend the spare time, down to taking props with me on stage, (a flashing signal staff). It’s fun to realize that now, years after the performances. If I had the time, I’d love to sing in a band again and consciously cultivate that acting/headbanging hybrid more, but alas, the lack of time……

Loudpark 12 Report

Loudpark calls itself Japan’s biggest heavy metal festival and I guess that’s true with a capacity in the Saitama Super Arena of 30,000 people in the main hall and not to forget a huge foyer that fits another couple thousand people. The event had three stages, the “ultimate stage”, the “big rock stage” in the main, 30,000-people hall and the “extreme stage” in the foyer.

I arrived at about 9:40 in the morning and the gates had opened ten minutes before that. I checked out the goods queue and it was so ridiculously long that I gave up and headed straight for the big rock stage where at 11:15 one of my main reasons for going to Loudpark 12 would play, Norwegian prog metal band Circus Maximus. On the neighboring ultimate stage a guy names Christopher Amott was supposed to open the festival at 10:30. The big rock stage was already prepared for Circus and a few people had gathered at the front but I managed to sneak in and catch a spot in the front row to the left hand side of the stage.

The Amott act was a pretty lame festival opener in my opinion. His bassist was missing because he had lost his passport in the US mail (?) and maybe that threw him off line, but nevertheless it could have been more energetic and less “I don’t really want to play today” kind of performance – at least that was my opinion.

It was thus more or less up to Circus to open the festival and they very well accomplished that mission. It was their first time in Japan and you could feel that they were excited being here. The Japanese crowd is always super supportive and did not let Circus down either and Michael said that “we are amazing even before lunch” Circus played two of my favorite songs of theirs too, “I Am” and “Game of Life” and thus left me thoroughly satisfied with the gig.

On the Loudpark homepage had been an announcement that there would be autograph sessions with some of the bands and Circus among them. I have never been to an autograph session in my life and since I like doing new things that was a good opportunity and I had taken my “Nine” album with me. I should have taken the jacket only but had brought the whole CD, well, I’ll know better next time.

I had a bit of a hard time finding the autograph booth amongst the herds that still lined up for the goods but eventually found it. White-clad security people asked me whether I had brought a pamphlet when I wanted to line up, what pamphlet? I had brought a CD I wanted them to sign. It turned out that you were supposed to buy the Loudpark pamphlet and line up with it and let the band sign that. But myself and several people behind me had not heard of such regulations and since there were not too many of us the security guy let us through, which was kinda nice of him.

I chatted with some other people in line and we waited for the Circus. Only some 30 people waited in line and I was the only non-Japanese. This fact, of course, made me have to explain to each of the band members that I am German and live here for 12 years already. The bassist said to me that that’s awesome and that he’s only here for two days and wants to live here . I “revenged” the ‘how long do you live in Japan’ question by giving them all my “Dome Child” and “Siegfried” postcards – you never know what it’s good for

The entire band was beaming at the autograph session and again you could feel that they were very excited and happy to be here and be doing this. I asked them to come back to Japan soon and got a “hell yeah!” I’ll most certainly go to see the Circus if they come to Japan again!

With my nicely signed “Nine” album, I headed back into the hall for Dragonforce. I had missed Halestorm due to the autograph session, sorry for that. Before Dragonforce, a band called Hibria played, good sound, lots of jumping and bouncing. Right at the beginning of Dragonforce happened what I had feared to happen – mosh pit. Suddenly the crowd around me turned into a maelstrom, and sorry that’s just not my kind of thing. I fled from the arena, which was not easy and it took some two songs and a few bruises to get out of the maelstrom.

A bit unnerved by the run in with the maelstrom, I went for lunch and checked out the extreme stage where a death metal act called 1349 was playing. One of them was dressed as the reaper in a black cloak with hood. Man, that guy must lose ten liters of water per gig, respect. I next made my way to the goods and finally there was no more big queue and even a Circus Maximus “Nine” T-shirt left for me

I made my way through to the main hall again and watched the rest of Sebastian Bach and Buckcherry from a seat on the first stand, before heading down into the arena one last time for this day for Sonata Arctica. The Buckcherry guys surely win the contest for the most impressive tattoos of the festival, some amazing artwork on their bodies!

For Sonata I got pretty much to the front again but after the second song, major jumping and squeezing let me flee a bit to the back. Luckily, it was civilized enough to stay in the arena though and Sonata delivered a solid performance with great enthusiasm, especially on the singers behalf. He talked a lot in English between songs, thoroughly ignoring that most of the audience did not understand a word he was saying

That was enough arena for me for one day and after getting a drink, I retreated to the first stand again and watched the rest of In Flames from there and then the two major acts of the day: Helloween and slayer. One word to In Flames – amazing to see the maelstrom from above! The singer said something funny too, “the security guys in the front have nothing to do. They are waiting for you!” – encouraging the crowd to do crowd surfing. Some indeed managed, but the maelstrom was clearly the more preferred method of stress relief of the Japanese crowd

Helloween was pretty awesome German altrockers who still know how to heat up the crowd, they made us sing and me even headbang while being seated Very cool band with a great sound and the most impressive drum battery I have ever seen, one guy with four base drums! Holy lord. He was the only drummer in the festival who got a drum solo, and man, he deserved it. That is quite some machine he is handling there.

Slayer, then, of course, had the biggest and most impressive maelstroms to offer and I was very happy to be sitting save and sound on the first stand and watching the spectacle from above. Slayer made me wonder how four people can generate so much noise but it is not really my line of music. Therefore I decided to leave before the end in order to avoid having to line up for forever at the cloak and having major squeezing on the train home.

It was an awesome event with a line-up very much to my liking and depending on the line up, I’ll surely go again next year. Last but not least some, if amateurish photo impressions (taken with the iPhone 4 camera) – check out my Loudpark 12 photo set on Flickr.