In which I discover the shogun wanted to have the emperor exiled

Dorking it out at 1 a.m., high on black tea and juicy historical details from Art and Palace Politics in Early Modern Japan.  Best book ever.  Also learned the date of Meisho's accession, happily.

Starting my second year, back to writing after a lazy summer.  First story due in a week and a half!  It will be about sweatshops and shame!

Ahhh! behind schedule. Ahhh! panic time. Crunch time, yo.

So, anti-fantasy writers. I think I must have been really lucky to run in to MLC when I started taking creative writing, rather than one of the anti-fantasy profs in the English department. Like for my novella class. Now, it's kind of depressing to meet another anti-fantasy prof for workshop. I guess it's a little harsh calling them anti, but they're certainly not supporters of writing fantasy. Well, like the prof said, genre and literary kind of exist on two parallel planes. It's okay to cross over and do a hybrid, but apparently not all the way. Blah.

(And my story wasn't even pure fantasy. It was mythological. And historical. And steeped in long-established cultural sensibilities. And yes, fantasy, if you look at it that way. In your face.

...I guess I just don't like being told I shouldn't write fantasy for a graduate workshop, just because it's fantasy.)

New semester

A new semester! The first week is over, and things are looking good. My first-year composition class is really with it this time--I don't know if they're always like this during spring semester, or if I just have a savvier group this time. Anyways, they talk, they ask questions, they form groups of four like I ask them to and work together. Things my class in the fall couldn't or didn't do. So far, they're a good group.

I'm taking another fiction workshop and also a creative nonfiction workshop. Both workshops will require three pieces each during the semester, plus some readings for discussion and miscellaneous work. Hope I'm up for it. At least I know my fellow fictioneers this semester and what to expect from them, but it makes me a little nervous, wondering how my writing and ideas will be received by the professors who are teaching this semester.

Also taking Archiving Theory and Practice, which promises to be awesome. At least, I hope so. The idea of being an amateur archivist is exciting. Also, it's a service-learning course, so we get to interact with community organizations. Archive for them. I guess it's different from anything I've taken so far, so tanoshimi ni shiteiru.

Other than those three courses, I'm taking the mentorship course again, in which we were promised a lighter workload than last semester, haha. I dropped the Between Essay and Narrative course just because I suck at writing and I need more time to focus on it. Also, the idea of a three-hour discussion seminar with six students following the three-hour archiving seminar promised to be more stressful than I'm up for.

In other news, Julie Otsuka is visiting and giving a reading next Thursday evening, and I volunteered for driving duty on Friday to drop her off at the airport. Whee!

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.