Yay, my novel's backstory was better received in workshop than I expected. I expected lots of criticism because of the poor writing, but I guess it helped that I was writing in a world I've been developing for a while now, about characters I'm invested in. Part of me wonders if it was the best piece to do for workshop because a lot of the things people wondered about are going to be answered in the novel. Also, because this was more of a backstory than an actual chapter (in my mind, anyway), I'm not sure how useful some of the more specific suggestions will be. Still, I got lots of great feedback and some good ideas and things to consider as I move forward with the novel.

Hm. So, my second piece was workshopped tonight. Not as successful as my first piece, I think. This one was set in the Edo period and was based off of the nopperabou kaidan. I think two of my readers did not like the story overall, and these two, I think, just really didn't get it. There was confusion from other readers too on various points, and they made the good point that the characters were too flat and template-ish. I think that's why my two most negative readers took issue with the story. Also, I evidently did not bring a unique aspect to my retelling of the story, so I need to do that. Ouch. Reading two critiques without anything positive or encouraging in them was kind of painful.

There was the expected confusion over various historical aspects--did they have divorce back then (heck yes), what was Edo like (I guess I could have been more descriptive), were foot soldiers not commoners (how to show that at least in terms of class, even the lowest samurai were not considered commoners, per say)? And it's hard to know what to do with some of this, other than just show it. As much as possible, I want to avoid the Shogun-esque approach of writing while assuming complete ignorance of the audience--that way, the people who are in the know can go, ah ha, and feel smart. That's part of what pissed me off about Shogun, other than the bad Japanese and obvious exoticization of Japan. On the other hand, I also want to present historical Japan to the uninitiated, but it's frustrating, trying to figure out which of their modern preconceptions I need to address, and how much background I actually need to explain, and so on. Edit: And then there was also this comment, when I wrote that the man had married into the woman's family: "Isn't that what everyone does?" =_= No. That's not what everyone does. Even if you come to this with a completely Western mindset, where do you come up with this matriarchal society where "everyone" marries into the woman's family? I don't know where the reader came up with that misconception or what was so misleading about my original statement.

It's so frustrating, but then I think about why I love Tokugawa Japan and how I want to share that with a wider audience. Maybe I was too absorbed with being faithful to the original nopperabou tale that I wasn't able to give my characters more dimension. Anyways, I will try again with something else historical and Japan.

I turned in my first story on Tuesday (after almost dying from lack of real food and sleep for two days), and I'll be workshopped next Tuesday. My story is set in modern Japan, and is about a woman who secretly lives in a man's closet (unbeknownst to the man) (this is the first time I've ever used "unbeknownst" in my life, and it is awesome).

Things I Think I Have Going for My Story:
-An overload of cultural details and information. I can write Japan way better than I can write America. Maybe because I don't write America. Or anywhere else, besides Vague Generic Unidentified Land.
-Plot. I do have a real plot with developments, and it might be kind of interesting. The progression is mostly logical, though perhaps not linked as well on paper as it is in my head.

Things That I Think Suck About My Story:
-The ending. I struggled so much with the last scene, and it's only the way it is now because I ran out of time to mess with it any longer. I'm sure I'll be embarrassed when I go back and read it. Lame.

-My writing. I am not a lyrical, poetic, or flowery writer. I suspect my style is "fanfic style," if there is such a thing. Direct and unadorned. Gets to the action, but doesn't really have any literary merit to speak of. I guess that's what I get for reading too much fanfiction and too little of other things.

-My man character is not developed enough. I spent most of my time trying to figure out my woman, since it's her POV.

-Information overload? I think I stuff too many ideas into my story, and not all of them are necessary. Some of this is probably information about Japan that I just wanted to stick in for the sake of having it there to educate my readers.

Anyways, there is so much wrong with my story, I can't wait to be ripped apart and shredded into tiny pieces (with some sugar coating, because the workshop folk are all nice people).

Whee, Purdue. Whee, teaching. It's the second week of classes, so I'm still getting used to it, plus my fiction workshop class won't meet for the first time until next week, so I don't quite feel like I'm here for writing yet. まだ慣れてないから、なんかめっちゃ寂しい．．． Trying to socialize really depresses me too.

Last week, I finally decided to take the plunge and make my story as historically accurate as possible. Though I'll have to do some rewriting to reflect revised ages and backgrounds for the characters, there are too many tasty historical coincidences, with just the right dates, not to take advantage of them. It's funny how close history was to what I had originally come up with.

Last Saturday I made this awesome Excel spreadsheet, taking in the birth and death dates of all 27 of Emperor Gomizunoo's children who survived infancy, their genders, as well as their mothers, color coded by rank. It's a very neat, very colorful spreadsheet. Extremely pleasing to look at. You can tell at a glance who was still alive in any given year.

This morning, I cleaned up the timeline of background events, matching it to historical people and dates. Also, I simplified the chain of past events and deleted a dead character (deceased grandmother) who would have required too much explanation. A very productive two hours today.

Argh, research paper draft. What an ugly, incomplete draft. Die die die.

Nothing quite so vexing as when people who know nothing, or very little, about publishing try to give you tips about the process to try to be "helpful." The following is a conversation I had a dinner:

Random Dude A Who Sat Down At Our Table: "I think if you have a few chapters, you can submit them to the publisher and they'll tell you if they want you to finish the manuscript."
Me: "...No you can't. At least not in fiction. And certainly not for an unpublished writer. You need the full manuscript, yo. And who submits directly to publishers these days anyway? Agents, dude." (Okay, I didn't actually talk that way. That's my revisionist head voice version.)
Random Dude A: "Uh, yeah, I think that sounds right."
No, really?
Random Dude B: "How do you know this? Have you gotten in contact with publishing people already?"
It's called the Internet. Seriously.)

And particularly vexing, I say, because I don't have the patience for such useless chit chat when I haven't yet started writing the 10-15 page paper on Confucius and Mencius due the next day.

Sometimes writing is like pulling teeth, but boy oh boy, trying to read Japanese for research purposes, now that's pulling teeth. I can barely get through a whole page of any one book before I start flipping through other books.

My paper topic for my research seminar is supposed to be women and politics with a focus on Tenshouin Atsuhime (wife of the 13th shogun, Tokugawa Iesada)...But I have this distinct feeling that I'm just getting sucked into the world of the Great Interior Quarters, the Oooku. It's super interesting in ways not entirely beneficial to my research paper. I spent about five minutes studying diagrams on how to partition and tie up one's hair in the way of the women back then. And many of the books that talk about the Oooku have a ton of information on clothing and hair and accessories. It's perfect material for my stories, but as for my research paper...well.

Oh, and today I finally looked at two of the library books I'd borrowed a couple weeks back. They're so awesome that I squeed with nerdy glee. See, I do have a researcher in me, somewhere, deep, deep inside, who gets excited by old books. One book, published I think in the 1930s, came with huge fold-out maps of the Oooku, while the other one, published in 1902 (!!!It's great how Yale lets you take such old books out of the library as long as they're not falling apart--on a related note, they wouldn't let me take a copy of the Analects out because it was falling apart) has a few awesome fold-out color prints and all the kanji text is glossed with hiragana. Win! Although I still have doubts about how much of these books I can actually get through or make use of, but it's exciting to flip through them.

It gets hard sometimes, refraining from clicky, mindless computer games. I haven't played any of those since last October, so four whole months (with the exception of playing iPad games at home over winter break, but those were tappy games rather than clicky games, and now I can't play them anyway, seeing that I don't have any Apple products around me). Instead, when I feel the need to do something mindless, I go read manga online. Sometimes it gets bad if it's a series because then I need to finish the series, or catch up to its current point, before I can do anything else productive again. That was the case with Kimi ni Todoke two weeks ago. I read the whole thing up to the current chapter in three days. =_= So there's manga. Sometimes, fanfic, but I'm not as interested in it as I was before since I'm not into any particular fandom at the moment.

They're still a bad habit, the clicky games. Even if I don't play them anymore, the mentality is still there. I have the urge to spill some creative juices, so I open a story file or two. And look at it. And then I have the urge to play clicky games, so I go and read manga instead. I may have broken my addiction to clicky games, but I need to stop running from my Word files every time I open them because that's where the real problem lies.

New semester. I hardly wrote anything over break or my first week back at school. Watching Bakuman anime is inspiring though. I need to make some progress this weekend.