Diverse Wisdoms

Heya,

Well, it's not fiction writing, which I what I'd like to be doing, but if anyone reading this has been following my personal blog, things have been kind of busy this last week or so, what with four jobs and all. I still managed to squeeze in this mini-essay, which I needed to write today as part of my application for Expo2005.

Man, I really hope I get this job. I'd be great at it. And this time, I'm going to do the Japan thing right--well, okay, there's no right way of doing it, but instead of focussing on going out and partying, I'm going to master the language, staying in and studying and maybe signing up for a martial art class and all that. And I'm going to buy a laptop before leaving, one with wireless capabilities (maybe one of those new centrinos, though Dell?), and I'm going to write my ass off. Anyway, here's the essay.

Well, here it is. This is the essay I wrote as part of the Expo2005 Canadian Pavillion application process. I'm not bad at writing essays and I've won stuff through my writing before... but I found this one more difficult than expected. Not nearly as polished as I would have liked, but here it is.

Diverse Wisdom: Promoting the Canadian Pavilion
By Michael N--

Japan was my first true international experience. My initial impression remains blurred: I vaguely recall being jetlagged and exhausted while sempai JETs (Japan Exchange and Teaching program) herded us through Narita airport and onto a bus, finally depositing us at the Keio plaza in Shinjuku. That first night, I ended up in a small downstairs restaurant in Shinjuku with a mixed group of similarly stunned newcomers. We had all just met. We ordered at random from a menu we couldn’t read, flushed with an early willingness to try anything new. If a single image endures from those first three days in Tokyo, it is of that first meal in Japan: an oversized sashimi prawn, all glistening white, and its decapitated head glaring sullenly at me with beady little eyes from within my soup. The strangeness of the food seemed appropriate, somehow, and I think I took grim satisfaction in eating something I could barely stomach.

This story, and the many that followed, made its way into my journal and into the updates that I e-mailed home and posted to my website. Soon, complete strangers began to write to me asking about Takamatsu, my new host city, and about life in Japan in general. One of JETs primary goals is ‘internationalization’ and I easily slipped into that role—not just in promoting Canada in the Japanese classroom, but also in reverse, bringing my perspective and experiences abroad back home.

As a member of the hosting staff for the Canadian pavilion in Aichi, I see my responsibility as being similar: to provide an exemplar of ‘Canada’ in Japan; to promote Japanese culture back in Canada; and to promote the event itself, Expo2005, and the Canadian Pavilion specifically.
I believe that there are diverse methods both direct and indirect by which these goals can be achieved. A top priority for the Canadian pavilion, through the Engaging Canadians program, is to share the Expo2005 experience back on domestic soil; and I see the hosting staff as being integral to that purpose. The high-tech instruments—webcams, virtual technology, and so on—made available at the pavilion offer a direct method through which hosting staff can communicate with people here in Canada and share the diversity of their personal experiences and individual perspectives.

I also employ a blog—a weblog, an on-line journal—that I have maintained and written in for over a year now. I have recently started a new one dedicated to Expo2005 (2005expo.blogspot.com), in which I plan to write of my experiences at the Expo and in Japan. Through the commenting system friends, family and visitors are welcome to ask further questions about the event. Through the addition of digital images and of links to sites relevant to the pavilion, something as simple as a person weblog becomes a powerful multimedia tool for the promotion of an event.

But promotion of Expo2005 begins before the event itself. I am currently working at Glebe Collegiate high school. I teach Beginner Japanese on Saturdays to roughly forty high school students who have sacrificed their weekend mornings to learn more about Japan and the language. The classroom is a great venue through which to not only promote Japanese history and culture—which makes up a significant component of the course—but, an event poised between two nations and as a vehicle of cultural understanding, also of Expo2005 itself. Through previous connections with the Ministry of Education in Japan, I would like to establish contact between my students and their peers in Japan, as suggested in the Engaging Canadians program.

The ‘internationalization’ that began with my work with JET continues to this day, and I hope to promote Expo2005 through this process as well. As a supply teacher with the Ottawa-Carleton School Board I occasionally work in local area high schools, and as part of my self-introduction I present my previous experience living and teaching in Japan—and also use the occasion to advertise the Canadian pavilion. I work occasionally as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher here in Ottawa and, especially with my Japanese students, I believe that it is an effective way to promote the event internationally, beyond my community.

Ultimately, however, the most effective promotion of Expo2005 may simply be word-of-mouth. As the event draws nearer and excitement grows, as family and friends prepare for the hospitality staffs’ departure, as I (hopefully) prepare myself and pack and wonder at what is to come—Expo2005 will inevitably creep into my day-today life, into conversations and e-mails and my weblog, and advertise itself in everything I do. My excitement at being a member of the Canadian Expo2005 staff and at once again representing Canada abroad is genuine, and it is as a medium for honest, simple excitement—for an optimistic and wise vision of the future—that Expo2005 may end up best promoting itself. I only hope to be a part of that process as well.

There you have it. Hopefully I make it to the next step.

Inspiration put on hold

Hey,

Didn't do so well on that final post, did I? I'd been reading Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode--so far, it seems an excellent book--specifically the section on Hamlet and it had me all inspired. So I started copying a bit out and no doubt had something very witty and profoudn to say... but something pulled me away, I can't remember what, and now it's gone. Oops.

So's the drive to keep writing the story. I mean--not forever, or anything like that. Actually, I do still want to keep working on Choices, but I'm forced to put it on hold again. Life's just suddenly gotten crazy busy. Picked up a couple new jobs just a week ago, and settling into the new routine is chewing up all my time. I hope in a week or so things will settled down and that I'll be able to get back to my own stuff. Right now it's all lesson planning, studying, and all that jazz. Then I'll come back and tackle that Hiroshi scene... him in bed after his first sexual experience.

Poem Unlimited

Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not "seems."
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath
[...]

Hiroshi

No writing as of yet today--got distracted by a job interview. Now i think I'm gonna kick back for a short nap before work. But I'm thinking about this Hiroshi guy. Who is he, and what is he doing?

Who are these people?

I'm slowly getting back into writing Choices. I've reread some of what came before--stumbled across references that I'd forgotten I put in there and found obvious hooks connecting to... I'm not sure, anymore. A problem, I guess, with writing a story part-time over such a ridiculously long time is losing certain threads kept in mind. Hopefully the story doesn't feel too disjointed to new readers.

The latest stuff kind of took me my surprise. In my outline I wrote: "He’s at her window, asking to come in. She lets him. They talk… he asks her to ignore everything else, wants to talk about the party. Why he went, why she was angry. Finally she asks where he was all day. He begins to tell her."

So. 3100 words just to get to what I really wanted to write about, and I'm still not done. Ranma and Akane chatting were just supposed to be a little bit of intro leading intro his first-person perspective (something I've never done and want to take a crack at) account of what he'd been up to for the last 24 hours, which leads into the 'decision' of the chapter title. I'm starting to understand how books get so thick--it's easy to spin off into background details and all that.

Saying that... this little detour turned out pretty good. I'm not too happy with the scene itself--it's got a bit too much of a patient-on-couch feeling to it, or maybe the unnatural openness of an episode of Dawson's Creek--but thinking it through led an unexpected discovery... possibly the most important since Tofu revealed what was going on to Ranma. I've never quite had a solid grasp of the character of Akane, which has probably hurt how's she's come off throughout the story. (Recent feedback certainly seems to suggest so, though I don't quite agree.) Anyway... yeah, I never quite sat down and thought through why she was so angry; how Ranma had managed to hurt her so badly, beside the obvious; in essence, I hadn't quite figured out what was driving her throught the first 150k words of this story--and now I have, and it came out of her talk with Ranma.

This is great--kinda. Problem is, I'm really, really trying to wrap up this damn story, but this new stuff could take up quite a bit of space... done properly, it'd take some well thought-out flashbacks to before the manga began, and some stuff from the original as well. Not sure how I'll handle it just yet.

But for now, I've got to start the next scene--I'm switching over to Hiroshi's POV, since the guy launched the whole story (and will end it, I think), but I'm not exactly sure what to do with him. I've got some great scenes for the guy lined up later on--probably in the next chapter, once he finds out what's happened to his friend--but right now I'm not sure. It's my own fault. I took a short cut in Decison, part one, but skipping over his confrontation with Sayuri. I'm still not sure what happened there. Did he dump her? I know I want Hiroshi to act as a sort of mirror to Ranma; and Hiroshi/Sayuri as a mirror (or contrast) to the relationship between Ranma/Akane; but I've started doing this too late, maybe, for it to be effective. Man. Choices is a story in dire need of a rewrite/revision. Anybody out there have any suggestions? What would they like to see Hiroshi up to?

Picking up Choices once again

One thing I've learned through fanfiction is to take criticism with a grain of salt. It's the bread and butter of many online authors, I'd wager--an ignored story is a soon dead story, probably, and the immediate feedback that internet publishing allows for fuels much of the 'industry'. Fanfiction may not be 'real'--which is a whole different issue I might touch on some other time--but that doesn't make the initial posting of a story any less nerve-wracking. After all, if you've spent hours and days and weeks working on something, if you've put a great deal of effort and thinking into something... yeah, you're going to want to know what people think of it. This isn't like submitting an essay at school--those you have to write, and while the grade is important it's not an entirely voluntary production. Fanfiction you write because--well, I suppose there's a whole wack of reasons, but ultimately it's not something you have to do. It's certainly not for the money.

So--feedback's important. I'm lucky, I suppose--generally, what I post garners commentary, though not nearly as much as some. At first it's very easy to take it too seriously. A story can easily be derailed or abandonned because of a nasty or thoughtless piece of criticism. I've never had a story destroyed by someone's feedback, but I have changed or rethought things. That's actually a good thing--that's what feedback's for, right? But what is an author to think upon receiving something like this:

This is the... I dunno, but I have read lots of dark/angst fics like this,
and while the yourway of writing this fic is good, however your plot holes in
this story degrades it. It is ok tohave a Ranma/Akane ending however they way
Akane was written in this fic, is for a lack of abetter word a b!tch, thus when
you are making it a R/A ending it will lower the quality of this fic.

Per se, if you were writting Akane in a better light, I do believe most of
us won't mind if Ranma ends with who however I would stress that you pair Ranma
with someone else who is betterthan Akane (anyone will do, even an OC) or
rewrite Akane's behaviour in this fic. If you are really interested in improving
or finding out what other plot holes you have, try getting reviews from the
people in this forum http://forum.anifics.com/ as there are lots of great authors
in it if not the best of Ranma fanfic authors. (posted to fanfiction.net)

At the same time I received another e-mail commenting on my story:

There was even one instance of my life where I had to explain what just
happened in my life and I came up blank. I shoved your fic to my friend
told her to read it and then I'd explain later. Talk about escaping
responsibility. Heh.Sorry, I was young and sixteen back when that
happened.
[...]
Kidding aside, there's something about Choices that moves a person.
Well, at least it moved me. All these emotions that have been brought to life by
your pen, or rather your keyboard are amazing. Sayuri's hate, Akane's pity,
Nabiki's helplessness -- and though I might misread some of them, I find that
your fic has the most *emotion* one could try to integrate into
writing.

I thought I had a point I was reaching for here but in looking both over again, I guess they're not all that mutual exclusive. The second is the kind that I love to receive, that's kept me, in all honesty, from just abandoning the project ages ago. If anything points to the 'miserable plant in a lone flowerpot' quote, it's a comment like that; and maybe the plant isn't so miserable after all. As for the second: it's the kind of commentary that, being as vague as it is, doesn't bother me as much as it might once have (though obviously it miffed me enough to want to write about it here). And the criticism is still worth noting: the characterization of Akane throughout a lot of the story has been less than complementary, and that needs to be worked on.

The comment came just a little too early, though. I was just about to do that--I think. The story, quite by accident, I think, has just reached a major turning point; one of the most important recogniztions of the entire work thusfar; and I'm hoping that it'll go a long way towards recitifying the very problem the first piece of criticsm points to. But I'll save that for the next post.

My Blog of Disquiet

"We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who's crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it's even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or it isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life." The Book of Disquiet (#14), Fernando Pessoa (Penguin Ed).

I'm establishing this blog, my second, on a kind of whim, to jot down random ideas I might have as I write, comments about my writing process or whatever story I might be currently working on. Not sure if it'll be of any use or of interest to anyone. I'll probably post infrequently.