Regina Glei's Blog, page 47

The Death of Louie

Maybe some of you remember my blog entry about Huey, Dewey and Louie from last year July.

Now there's some sad news: the wild wine Louie is no longer!

I woke up this morning to scratching and tearing and sounds of work and to my great distress I had to discover busy Japanese hands tearing away at all the plants around the place where I live.

I opened the window and asked the busy, elderly plant exterminator what the hell was going on and he said: "Oh the owner of the building asked me to clean up a bit, the weed growth has become quite excessive."

Weed? Ah… my poor Louie a weed? The three meters of Louie (a bit sad and without many leaves left in winter) were all but gone, hacked away and naked gravel remained on the ground.

I had no clue this was happening or that the building's owner was sneaking around it checking things.

During the worker's lunch break even neighbor's cat came to inspect the collateral damage on cautious paws, sniffing apprehensively at the sacks with alien white pebbles, that now, a few hours later, cover every bit of formerly exposed, juicy earth where Louie and his fellow "weeds" had struck root.

I am quite shocked and sad about Louie's untimely demise. Had I known, I'd have saved a branch and attempted to let it sprout. But too late, Louie is gone and replaced with sterile white pebbles…

Farewell Louie, may you rest in peace!

Dome Child Kindle edition available for free for three days

I joined a Kindle Direct Publishing Campaign and as a side effect of that the Kindle version of Dome Child will be available as a free download for the next three days, February 3rd through 5th.

Please make use of that and get your free Dome Child Kindle copy!

Yoroshiku

Dome Child Kindle Download

What's happening at the writing front?

It's time for a little update about what is going on at my writing/publication front.

1) Dome Child

The biggest problem of the indie publisher is how to reach a broader audience. I submitted the Dome Child to an SF indie book reviewer page – no reply. They are just a handful of reviewers who do that out of sheer enthusiasm and I don't know how many books they are getting every month… a "no thank" you would have been nice, but…

My ad campaign at "Goodreads" is an enigma to me. Maybe once a week their algorithm propels me to some 10,000 or 20,000 views and then I get a few clicks (for which I pay) but for six days a week or so, their algorithm shuns the Dome Child and there are 800 or a 1000 views and no clicks at all. At that pace the money I spent for this ad campaign will only be used up in another couple of months. Hm… don't know if I am supposed to change anything about that.

Next thing I will do is submit the Dome Child to several indie book awards, hope to get into the ranks and that that will attract more readers outside of friends and family.

2) A novella coming out this spring???

I have no clue whether this project is really going to happen. About a year ago, a small US press accepted an urban fantasy novella of mine for publication. Last December I reviewed the line edits and resent the manuscript. The preliminary publication date is spring this year, but I don't know when what is going to happen. I am waiting in suspension.

3) Submission drive

I'm planning to send one of my novels (my other urban fantasy) into the agent submission drive but given my non-native speaker of English, non-US resident, living in Japan triple disadvantage my expectations are very low. If nobody bites that novel is my next indie publication candidate and I'm planning to have it out there before the next SF Worldcon in Chicago at the beginning of September. If someone bites, it will of course not go into indie publishing. I wonder what the chances of someone biting are? 0.00001%? It feels like 99.99999 % of light speed but never getting there .

I've also started to submit some of my yet un-published short stories again, though not as massively as in 2008 or 2009, it just eats up too much time and though short stories are fun, I am much more of a novel person after all .

But speaking of short stories, my "Snotcreek Valley" has found its way into an anthology…

My five cents on Heroes

I must admit that I pretty much have come to like the Heroes TV series. I'm now in the 2nd episode of season 2 (thanks to hulu – internet TV). Heroes is fairly easy to keep interesting, you just throw in a new hero with a new ability and viola you have a new story arch.

I also pretty much like the actors: Peter is a cutie, Sylar is a great bad guy and Zachary Quinto a cool actor and his Sylar character is quite different from the new Spock. Though, if there is one critique point that I have for Heroes it is that the bad guy's motivation is rather lousy. He wants to have all abilities to be something special… dah… anyway.

Then there is of course the Japanese league, Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura is a blast, though I'm not very fond of him tumbling around in the 17th century now in the second season. That felt like they have to desperately find a new story for him after he fulfilled his destiny concerning Sylar. Anyway, he is a cutie too and the only "real" Japanese by the way. His buddy Ando is American (though his Japanese is excellent and I can only hear but a tiny tiny accent). His dad George Takei speaks good Japanese, but you can hear from a mile away that he is American (lol). Anyway, Takei is great and I regret that his character disappeared from the series.

Claire and her dad are wonderful as well and Mohinder is another highlight. Which brings me to another point, the thing I like most about Heroes is its cultural diversity.

"Literary fiction", what snobs perceive to be "real art", still deals mostly with rich white people, whilst the "trivial" genres like SF and fantasy have embraced our planet as a whole and in Heroes there are black guys, Latinos, Asians, Indians and white people and it doesn't matter at all what color your skin has or where you're from. They're all humans and material for fascinating characters.

I think this is the biggest accomplishment of Heroes, that it so completely crosses the cultural, language and skin color barrier and that it is also "brave" enough to let the characters speak in their languages and have subtitles. Heroes is fun TV and I'm looking forward to the rest of season two and seasons three and four on hulu.

Regular Websites

Tell me the websites you're visiting regularly and I tell you what type of person you are… Uh, just joking. But I find it interesting to what kind of websites I am frequently returning to.

The categories:

Several times per day:

I think the two sites I click to most often are the "earthquakes in Japan" site (ahem… kind of obsessed with that. To such an extent that I feel queasy when there hasn't been a quake for 5 hours or so…!) and the BBC's international news page.

My "home" is Yahoo… I don't know why, it's always been that way. When I started out with the Internet Yahoo was my home and it has stayed like that because I am such a loyal person (uh?). So, of course, I am clicking through their news pop ups too.

Once a day:

Germany's ARD news site and the Japan weather site.

Every two days or so:

Wikipedia and the earthquakes in the world site which I find to be just amazing…

The ultimate German/English dictionary: Leo from the TU (technical university) Munich and wadoku.de, the best online German/Japanese dictionary (at least in my opinion).

Every three days or so:

Imdb – the internet movie database – nerd that I am, I need to find out stuff about the movies and TV shows that I'm watching.

Every four days or so = twice a week:

SF scope for SF news and/or Locus online

Once a week:

Facebook, twitter and goodreads, this blog here.

Regular sites, but maybe not every week:

Japan's Movie Walker to know what's playing. Boing Boing for odd news. Stupid amateur vidos of cute doggies on animal all stars to relax and put a smile on my face when I need a cute attack. Some weird stuff on YouTube, mostly metal band vids .

Then of course all sorts of book (= real work) related sites – agent sites, publisher sites, author sites and and and.

So, what are your regular sites? Lemme know

New Year Japanese Style

Although the new year is already a week old this is about what to do on January 1st in Japan. Last week I was just too eager to get my photos of the Ikuta park out there, that I have postponed this little blog entry to today

So, no fireworks on New Year's Eve in Japan, although there apparently was a party around Tokyo Tower where people let balloons into the air with wish cards in it.

Some hard liners then party through the night and wait for "hi no de" = sunrise. It's supposed to bring you luck if you watch the first sunrise in the year.

Then you should go (of course not everyone does that) to "hatsumode" the first shrine visit of the year to receive your blessings for the new year. Arrived at the shrine (after a more or less considerable period of waiting, depending on the shrine you go to) you throw some money in the big box in front of the shrine to placate the "kamisama" the god of that particular shrine. Most popular is a 5 yen coin, which has a hole in it, which again brings you luck. Some people throw 1000 yen bills around, there is no particular rule for the coins or amount of money you offer to the god. Then you bow twice, clap your hands twice, pray, and bow once more.

In case there is a "kane" a bell, you ring the bell (to wake up the god) but some shrines don't have bells to ring. Having done all that you are basically finished, but if you like, there is more you can do. You can go to the shrine's shop and buy an "omamori" – a lucky charm. They come in a great variety. For good health (that's the one I usually buy), for recovery, for child birth, for passing tests (popular with school children), for save driving and so on. You can also buy a "hamaya" that's a wooden, decorative arrow to protect your house (usually I buy one of those as well, since they look so cool).

If you are really correct about everything, you bring your omamori and hamaya from last year and throw them away at the shrine. But don't bring hamayas or omamoris from other shrines, that would upset the god of the shrine you're just at.

Then there is the most fun part: the "omikuji": for 100 yen you can buy a fortune telling piece of paper. You draw it like a lottery ticket and open it and it tells you whether you will have luck or not in the coming year. It depends on the shrine, but usually the omikuji come in categories of: big luck, middle luck, small luck, luck, half luck, you will be lucky in the future, you will be a little lucky in the future, bad luck, little bad luck, half bad luck, more bad luck, and you're fxxing screwed (big bad luck)!

The tiny papers give you detailed explanations as to what's going to happen to you, whether you find someone you're waiting for, how business and study will go, whether you achieve your goals, and so forth, it's a horoscope.

This year I had "small luck" which is the third best from the top and that's pretty good. It's not so positively viewed if you have "big luck", since it can't get any better than that the year after.

If you are not happy with your omikuji you can fold it and stick it to a tree or something around the shrine. You should especially do so if you drew "daikyou" – the big bad luck one. By sticking it to the tree around the shrine, you're asking the kamisama (god) to take the bad luck back.

While I was lining up to receive my blessings at the Hanaen Shrine in Shinjuku, we had a rather fat earthquake again by the way. It was a magnitude four in Tokyo. I think this was more or less the first time I was outside during a bigger quake and it was quite spooky to have the ground shaking under your feet. All the people were stopping with what they were doing and watching a bit anxiously around, but then the shaking subsided and everybody continued on, business as usual. Interesting to see that too.

To make the wait easier you can also get some food from food stalls at the shrine's entrance. The stuff's usually pretty tasty and contributes to the festival atmosphere of the whole event.

So, the walk to the shrine done, there is another nice activity for Japanese new years and that is "fukubukuro" hunting. Fukubukuro are "lucky bags". Shops throw all kinds of goodies into a non-transparent bag and sell them at a cheaper price. A good ratio is usually there's stuff in the bag worth 300 Euro if you bought the items separately, but since you don't know what you're buying you get the bag for 100 Euro. Mostly clothes and cosmetics shops offer these bags and some people line up during the night to get the "best" ones in the morning. A bit like Black Friday after Thanksgiving in the US.

These bags are great fun. It's like Christmas, since you don't know what's inside. Even if you won't wear all of the stuff inside or can't use all of it, usually it's worth it to buy one and sometimes you get really nice surprises with these bags. There's rock shop in Harajuku where I always (if I can and am around during new year) go to buy a fukubukuro for 10,000 yen (currently 100 Euro) and this year there was a pair of pants inside, a jacket, a jumper, a hat and a CD holder case, not bad for 100 Euro.

Well then. Again, Happy New Year 2012!

It's Alive!

As mentioned in a previous blog entry: I hate sports. Nevertheless, I have to move a bit, occasionally, in order to prevent uncontrolled adding of kilos caused by my beloved chocolate. But: the thought of having to do exercise in order not to get fatter and fatter is by far not incentive enough. I need at least one or two additional incentives to make me do exercise.

One incentive for my weekend bicyling is going grocery shopping afterwards, meaning I have to leave the house anyway to fill my fridge. The supermarket ain't that far away though and I needed/need yet another incentive to bicycle some more than just the 5 minutes to the supermarket. Therefore I have searched and found an additional incentive. I "must" go to the Ikuta Park once a week to take a picture of my favorite spot of trees.

The round through the park, before hitting the supermarket, takes me an hour. I have taken photos of that spot for the past one and a half years or so. That has led to an actually very pretty account of the seasons in Japan. I didn't manage all 52 weeks in 2011, due to business-, and holiday-trips throughout the year, or when the weather was just too sucky. Nevertheless I managed 45 pictures, = 45 weeks. I put the photos starring sequoia trees in the center onto Flickr from January through December 2011 = from winter to spring, summer, autumn and the beginning of winter again. The first photo was taken on Jan. 4th 2011, the last on December 26th 2011.

Since a set on Flickr can apparently have only 40 photos, it's only 40, but they convey the message just as well I think. When watching the photos or quickly after one another you can really see that the forest is alive and I find it quite beautiful. Unfortunately, I missed a bit of spring due to over two weeks absence for holidays in Europe and the jump from tender green to lavish green is a bit harsh.

I am at a loss now as for what to do in 2012 (lol). I guess I will just continue shooting photos of my favorite spot to see how it changes over the years = a long term study.

Anyway, I thought this was a nice story to begin the new year with, which, even according to the Mayas, will not be the end of the world, only the end of an era

All the best everyone for 2012!

Always the same faces?

Merry X-mas everyone!

Last weeks blog entry was about the stinking scooters on my way to and from the station, this time it will be about the strange creatures I encounter more or less every morning on that way.

There's:

1) the shirt lifter

2) the hot girl

3) the two moms

4) the suit guy

5) the elegant lady

6) the Rock'n Roll grandpa

Sounds interesting?

Creatures 1-4 I encounter more or less every morning on my bicycle way to the station, creatures 5 and 6 during the walk to the office after emerging from the squeezing in the train.

Number 1, the shirt lifter, is the weirdest of them all and he is the first "regular" I encounter on my route between 8:15 and 8:30 in the morning. The shirt lifter always has a little trolly with him and he seems to be allergic against sweat, since he is constantly fanning himself with his shirt, which he always wears open, not tugged into his pants. The guy is about 50 years old I guess and he fans himself with his shirt while he walks as well as explicitly stops and flaps his shirt about like crazy. He even has a favorite place for extensive shirt flapping. Every other morning, I see him stopping in front of a certain garage, where he parks his trolly and flaps so hard he's almost tearing his shirt off. Amazing guy.

Number 2, the hot girl. Not what you think… she ain't that hot. I am calling her the hot girl because even in deepest winter, she is wearing nothing but a flimsy jacket and a t-shirt, no scarf, no gloves, no down jacket, while I am riding past her packed in at least 5 layers of clothing. She is also always late. She is more running than walking and looks as if a pack of wolves was at her heels. I estimate her age at around 40.

Number 3, the two moms. One of the moms is waiting with her two little kids in front of her apartment house for the bus that will relieve her of them and bring them to the kindergarten. The other mom is even busier, she is on her bicycle as well and her kid sits in a bike child-seat behind her and she struggles up the hill that I am swooshing down. I suppose she heads for a kindergarten as well. Both of them look rather stressed out and as if they were looking forward to be able to park their kids with the kindergarten for a while.

Number 4, the suit guy. Close to the station, the suit guy crosses my way. He looks like he were 70 and I always feel kinda sorry for him that he still has to work. He invariably wears a classic dark blue business suit in hottest summer as well as coldest winter, though in winter he at least has a coat thrown over his suit. Maybe he is only 60 or so, but he looks ancient and I am waiting for the day when he won't be there anymore – meaning he could finally retire?

Number 5, the elegant lady. Once arrived in Shibuya and walking up the hill to the office, there are another two candidates that religiously cross my way. The first of them is the elegant lady. She's around 35 and every morning impeccably dressed and styled and made up. Probably her entire tiny Japanese apartment consists of clothes and shoe racks and I am not talking about Uniqlo here, but high quality, ridiculously expensive brand clothes, bags and shoes. I wonder how long it takes her to style her hair, do her face and get dressed every morning. Impressive.

Number 6, the Rock'n Roll grandpa, – last but not least: my favorite regular, a very cool dude approaching 60, with gray hair and glasses who is always dressed in cool rocker's clothes: leather jackets, fancy t-shirts and sweaters, boots with rivets on them and he looks so relaxed and at ease with himself and the world. Rock'n Roll and heavy metal is good for you! This guy is the proof I'd like to stop him one day and ask him what his favorite bands are.

So, a few weeks ago I wrote about uniformity in Japan, this time it was about individuality. Those six regulars that cross my path every morning are truly creatures of their own.

Stinking Scooters, or ASFP

"No sports" – that's what Winston Churchill said when someone asked him how he had managed to reach 90 years of age. I totally agree with him, I am not a sports fan at all, and yet there is one thing I like doing and that's bicycling.

The further you live away from a train station, the cheaper the rent gets – I guess that's true for every country in the world and in Japan as well. I half chose the place where I live, a thirty minute walk from the next station (in a hilly area), because it was (relatively) cheap and also because it forces me to do some exercise. In sunshine, wind and rain, in summer and winter I am cycling to the station and back home with my "wire donkey" as Germans sometimes affectionately call their bicycles. Long story short, I love my wire donkey and am grateful for the exercise it forces upon me.

Now there is a natural enemy of the wire donkey, which is the scooter. Jeez, I HATE scooters. They seriously impair my cycling enjoyment with their abominable exhaust gasses. Scooters are practical and cheap, I admit, but because they are cheap, scooter makers do not equip these steel donkeys with catalytic converters that happen to clean the exhaust gasses of automobiles.

Every bloody day, when I'm riding to and from the station, one to ten scooters pass me by and blow their fart (sorry for the expression) into my face… Sometimes, depending on temperature and wind, the smell of exhaust gas lingers as long as a hundred meters of distance and it takes forever until the scooter's fart has outrun the speed of my bicycling and I am pedaling inside that cursed cloud for seemingly forever, which is surely not very healthy and surely increases my cancer risk more than passive smoking for example.

People talk about CO2 gases and pollution and and and… so why does nobody do anything to clean the bloody exhaust gasses of scooters??? Whenever I am pedaling inside a scooter fart cloud, which means an average of five times a day, I am thinking about the thousands and thousands of liters of scooter fart that are being blasted into the air of our poor little planet worldwide every minute! I am tempted to found the "Anti Scooter-Fart Party", short ASFP, and lobby globally for attaching catalytic converters to scooters. Hey, I am being very tolerant here, I am not asking to abolish scooters, I am asking to improve them.

If you agree with me, answer to this post and let's design a little ASFP campaign web page!

Total Lunar Eclipse

We had a total lunar eclipse last night over Japan (and much of Asia and North America). Thanks to clear weather with only an occasional cloud in between I could watch the whole spectacle. The moon had a nice dark red color during total eclipse. The photos are not masterpieces, since they were shot with the photo function of my little video camera, but they still convey the eclipse quite well.