Our Man in Abiko's Blog, page 9

Hana’s back

Online and in print. Details here .

No more nukes

Our Man must admit, he’s been sitting on the fence about the whole nuclear power thing. On the one hand: global warming fossil fuels and imminent destruction of our planet. On the other, TEPCO. And as distasteful as TEPCO is, and the horrors of Fukushima not withstanding, Our Man was able to be vaguely pro-nuclear power but anti-TEPCO. At least he was convincing himself.

Our Man’s position was not really very tenable. You’re either for nuclear power as the only workable, if occasionally apocalyptic non-carbon power source, or you’re with the woolly-minded, right-on folk who think all you have to do is throw money at the science and we’ll be able to create energy, perhaps from all their hot air, to power our iPhones and cappucino makers with no consequences for eternity.

Well, Our Man doesn’t like those choices.

Renewable energy doesn’t add up. Yet. But nukes are not the way forward. I’m not sure what is. It may well be a hotch-potch of half-ass renewable efforts and a great deal of sacrifice to get us off our addiction to fossil fuels.

And while former PM Koizumi has no doubt sniffed the electoral air, as they say,
Nukes will not save us, leadership will. 

And I agree. No more nukes.

The Short Goodbye

The first book under my real name has been published. Full details are here . And yes, I drew the cover.

Carry on.

Good days

Like the bio says, on good days I write books, on bad ones I blog and tweet. So, if you triangulate the metadata of not much blogging and only a little tweeting these last couple of months, you could save the NSA and long-suffering taxpayers a few quadzillion dimes and figure that I must have been writing books. 
Well, I have (amongst other things) and there is an imminent release due imminently, as soon as I get the OK from Createspace and Amazon. Yes, it will be a print and ebook. I can say no more about it other than it features stuff about the three As -- Albion, Arkansas, Abiko. But if you really want to know, you can sign up for my official new release news release email newsletter. Here . If I get more than two sign-ups I may even write something for it.
In the meantime, you ought to read Shisaku’s piece on the fall of a Japanese iconoclast here , and the amazing rise of a British one here , who despite being naive, vain and vacuous manages to write thought-provoking, right-on stuff somehow (reminds me of a younger Ourmani, sigh).
Carry on.

New wisdom

Something was wrong with my body. Very wrong.
“It’s like that scene in Alien isn’t, Doc? Something weird is growing and it will take over my body and kill everyone in the room and the only way to save me is to lock me in a vacuum.”
“What? It’s just a wisdom tooth pushing through your gum.”
“Not an alien?”
“Not an alien.”
“But I’m too old for a new wisdom tooth.”
“But there it is. It means you have healthy teeth. You should be happy. But you should schedule another appointment.”
“Why?”
“Because you should remove it.”
“Oh.”

If I were a better writer, or at least had more time to polish this half-anecdote, I could make it into an allegory for all that’s messed up with modern life or something, and you could marvel at my wit and wonder if the episode really did happen in real life because it fits so well. Well, it really did, but what it has to do with anything allegorically is beyond me. You do the math, Our Man’s algorithms are all maxed out.

But the reason for this post, if any, is that I got thinking the other day that things have changed.

We’re talking “historical cleavage” level of change. I don’t actually know what that phrase means either, but if you allow me to grope around in the dark for a bit, I’m sure I could turn it into a meaningful experience for me at least. What? Let me tease out a couple of points…

As the analogue era continues its slow death, is democracy doomed too? The world is complicit in selling off its soul for an ad-sponsored YouTube song, unconcerned at the NSA and GCHQ climbing into bed with Silicon Valley and into our sweaty palms. Well, if you’ve got nothing to hide, what are you worried about?

I have nothing to hide, now. But what about tomorrow when the rules have changed? And who will be making those changes? The US is too busy playing Russian Roulette with itself to worry about who is left to clean the bits of brain off the floor.

Sigh, guess I’m just getting old. It’s probably just more of the same. Go ahead Doc, yank that tooth out, wisdom is sooo yesterday.

The Hunt for the Mid-October post

It’s getting on for mid-October and this is the first post of the month. You might be forgiven for thinking Our Man had been shut down (you know how the Republican body politic naturally shuts everything down when Democrats conceive?) but actually, he’s still soldiering on.

In fact, Our Man has been on his very own Asia pivot, though when he pivots it’s more likely to involve a bottle-opener than a nuclear submarine.

What, you may legitimately ask, is he on about?

He’s only gone and got himself another blog . But don’t worry, long-suffering fellow travellers, it’s not much of anything at the moment. In time it will be a place to run long-form articles and links to his books and essays and stuff far too high brow and, er, long for here (long brow?–ed.). Sensible folk (and foreign country people residents of Japan) may want to trundle off and wait patiently for their number to be called.

Everybody else can stay here, where they can expect more of the same old same old from Our Man.

But you shouldn’t have to wait long for something to read over at the other place. Our Man should be done with his first e-essay in ages that will go on sale in a week or two, with all proceeds to benefit charity, and then he’s going to release a chapter a day of his debut novel for free while he gets on with editing the first draft of his second novel.

You got all that? Don’t worry if not, it’s bound to all be over by Christmas.

How to become a best-seller without selling your soul*

I have come up with a thoroughly naive and counter-intuitive three-point plan to sell novels and live off the proceeds without having to sell your soul or spend any serious money to do it. There is of course a catch.

Write and self-publish a novel in one year. Doesn’t really matter all that much how good it is.Don’t promote it beyond the odd blog post and sending it to your family and friends for Christmas.Repeat.That’s pretty much it. 
But there is a catch. You have to be prepared to do this for 20 years. Oh, and you have to be able to learn from your mistakes. But that really is it.
I have no evidence that this works, mind you, as I’m just on year two, ahem, but here’s why I’m sticking to the programme:
To be good at anything takes practice. So, it figures that your first novel (or two) is going to suck, therefore you really don’t want to promote the hell out of it because you are just advertising your inadequacies. But, you shouldn’t allow being wet behind the ears stop you from allowing the world to see your faults. You can only dry the backs of your ears by getting them wet in the first place. Or something. And you never know, maybe you have written a masterpiece, so it would be a shame to keep it in the sock drawer. But more likely the writing’s not quite there yet, or there’s no market for what you’ve written. Or your cover is just repulsive. So you try something different for the next novel. 
But the thing is, there is a next novel. You keep writing and you keep publishing and you keep improving. Also, you keep everything under your own name.
Plenty of folk will say you should go for an agent or a proper publisher or that you should not sellyour stuff until its been expensively polished to within an inch of its life, but I reckon that’s beeswax turd. Sure, always put your best stuff out there, but if you wait for the perfect work, the perfect moment, the perfect connection, you’ll be twiddling your thumbs when you could be publishing and learning from your mistakes. Hint: You can only learn from your mistakes by making them. So get making them.
Anyway, at some point you’ll have learnt enough that one of your novels doesn’t suck. The cover doesn’t repulse readers and there is a market for what you’ve written because you’ve been paying attention or your readers have. And then, you start selling and because everything is in your name—you didn’t sell your rights to any legacy pimps, remember?—you have a back catalogue for folk to buy. Or to sell to a legacy publisher, if there are any of them left in a few years’ time, for a healthy price.
But it might take 20 years. 
And let’s be honest, it might not happen until you’re dead. But hey, you’ll have 20 novels that you can be proud your grandchildren and great-grandchildren can read. You weren’t really in this for the money, were you? Especially now you’re dead. 
More along the same lines here .
*Actually, I have no idea.

IT’S NOT LOOPY WHEN IT’S TRUE

That was the executive summary. Now I’d recommend cutting two holes in your tinfoil hat* and reading the full speech to the Europeanistas here . It’s an eye-opener, and for the record, I don’t think he’s loopy at all.

*OK, that doesn’t work because how could you read the instructions here if you hadn’t already cut eye holes in your tinfoil hat. Also, it’s a hat not a blindfold, so the whole thing doesn’t work -- Ed.

Time For Games

The Olympics are coming to Tokyo.

It’s reasonable to take the view that this is a wonderful thing , it revitalises the Japanese nation after the tough time it has had since the tsunami and that nuclear mishap in Fukushima (Don’t say the F-word, it’s bad for business-- Ed.) It’s reasonable to point to the enormous costs and pointless public works that will pour billions into corporations’ hands at the expense of the taxpayers as Tokyo gets another 10 stadiums to squeeze into it’s already asphalted footprint. You could take the reasonable view that the Olympics are largely a waste of time and effort but if anyone can absorb the waste, Tokyo can .

But to Hell with reasonable.

It’s shameful.

It’s been two and half years since the tsunami, and still thousands of people are living in worn out   temporary prefab houses in shanty towns. Many children don’t have access to playing fields, let alone neighbourhood schools. And that’s to say nothing of the continuing cock-up in Fukushima that proves day in and day out that 3/11 is not over.

But Tokyo can find an extra five billion bucks to bring the circus to town, get to wallow in the wholly unmerited symbolism of a nation that has overcome adversity, when in fact all it has done is overcome its guilt, happy to consign Tohoku to annual TV specials and to get on with selling Japan Inc. with added Olympic Spirit.

Oh, but Our Man, don’t be unreasonable. The tsunami was hardly Tokyo’s fault and it has to move on. The people of Tohoku will all be uplifted by the Olympics. It’s not either/or. We can have our Olympic cake and eat it!

Maybe Our Man is just being a Grumpy Old Man, but…

As long as the Tokyo higher-ups cash in on the tsunami victims for sympathy but do nothing to ease their plight, as long as the Tokyo Electric Power Company continues to botch the cleanup of Fukushima and evade all responsibility, there’s no time for games just yet.

Talk of the town: A review of Japantown

Japantown works.

It works as hard as San Franciscan Jim Brodie does dealing Japanese antiques to make ends meet for his six-year-old daughter.

But of course he’s more than your average single dad/Japan-hand, he also has a 50-percent share in his old man’s PI business in Shibuya. So when a family of Japanese tourists is gunned down in SF’s Japantown, naturally he’s called in to offer his advice. And naturally, he gets to grips with something the local boys in blue couldn’t fathom: a mysterious kanji left at the scene of the crime. Oh, the same one left at the scene of a fire that killed his Japanese wife. By the way, he’s an expert in various martial arts. Oh and his movements are being watched. There are bad guys out there and he has a cute-as-a-button daughter and who has no mother to look after her.

Get the picture?

Of course you do. This is a thriller. Japantown plays by the rules, even if the protagonist can’t (that’s in the rules too, right?) To say it’s a fast-paced, high-body-count formulaic thriller does not do justice to the formula, or to the book. Look, it’s a thriller. It says so right on the cover. You didn’t come here to read about the lost decades of the Japanese economy, the Fukushima cleanup, Japan greying faster than the hairs on a prime minister’s head.

Of course not.

You came here to read about deadly ninja, international conspiracies and to count the bodies as right defeats might. And Barry Lancet delivers on all of that. And then some. The novel comes into its own in the middle section as our hero relocates to Japan in the hunt for the bad guys. This is the locale where the conflicts play out best -- east versus west, old loyalties versus new realities. What comes before in San Francisco feels flat in comparison. The ending works well enough, leaving no strands untied. But I found myself more intrigued about what Noda, the monosyllabic hard man would get up to once his part was played out. Hopefully, he’ll play a big part in the sequel.

My only problem after having read the book is that it embodies, like all good thrillers, a fundamental cocky conservatism: the hero knows right, the rest of the world doesn’t, so blam blam blam. The hero rights all wrongs with 9mm of morality. But that’s a problem for the genre, Japantown is not the place to fight that battle.

But you want to know the bottom line? I was hooked and pulling for Jim as he overcame each obstacle in defence of the only cause we could all die for: love of family.  It’s an expertly paced page-turner and I heartily recommend it to any thriller reader.

The intrigue now is where Brodie and his crew can take us next.

Read an interview I did with Barry Lancet for the Abiko Free Press right here . Japantown is on sale from today. Check out Lancet’s website for purchasing details.