My Inari

 Way too much research. Also feeling frustrated at how slowly the plot is coming together, and the story doesn't quite feel "real" to me.

This is the problem of writing a series that progresses. If I had one solid Origin Story book, then the rest would be formula. Well, Penny Bright still hasn't quite morphed into Athena Fox. I mean, there's going to be conflict between these two parts of her experience. That's a constant for the series. Although I do want to move more towards it being inherent conflicts in the role, and less her conflict with taking on a role in the first place.

Plus the ninjas were maybe a mistake. I brought them out too early and too strong so now I've got to back-pedal because Penny is being too blasé about it. Both about how much ninjas aren't really running around Japan (well, they are, but that's another story), and how Penny isn't really being cool and collected about people jumping out at her with weapons in their hands (even if the weapons are weird fantasy weapons).

So basically she's having a small breakdown. That was a given -- I was aiming for that in this book already. But now I have to tell the reader without telling her because otherwise she's not coming across as, well, a real person.

So I've barely introduced the main cast, my protagonist is acting strange, the Japanese setting is still so alien all the narrator can say is, "It looked like some sort of..."  And no wonder I feel disconnected from the novel.

***

Finished the Turnbull book and there were a lot of things I hadn't known. Well, duh. That's why you do research. Better way to put it is that there were things I didn't expect I'd be learning. I wanted more about history and geography and he explained a lot more about ninja in contemporary culture, the religious connections, and...well all sorts of stuff there's no chance of fitting into the book.

I'm also reading a paper right now on Inari shrines and, hoo boy. Okay, here's a simple one. You'll hear in various places about the "Five Great Shrines." So go to one. Ask the head priest, "What's the other four?" You'll get a different answer at every shrine. As Karen Smythers puts it, "Even the regional variability is variable."

And I'm resisting now the urge to properly cite everything I write now, to academic standards.

I got the reminder email and I'm still paying JSTOR for a monthly membership. I went over there thinking about cancelling (I'd gotten it for my Bronze Age novel) but ran into several papers I wanted to read for my current book.

So I'm reading general background on the Genpai wars, the Imperial Treasures, magatama, the bubble economy... Seems like every scene is giving me questions I really want to answer, and they are deep questions too. Once again, doing top-level internet research pulls up forty identical copies of the same surface gloss. It is harder and harder these days to drill down to proper detail.

Citations, people, citations!

I pinned this story on knowing a bit about Kyoto, Ancient Astronaut stuff, rock climbing and fitness stuff. Even on the stuff I knew, though, I'm needing to know more. Frustrating stuff because all I need sometimes is a word or two in a description. But it isn't a description I can pass over.

When they drive up to the factory in Nara the workers are doing calisthenics. Which happens when, and does it still happen at Japanese companies, and what kinds of exercises? Where in Nara can I place this; are we looking at lake, river, mountain, forest, city...? It's just one word but I need the right word.

There's a reason I keep needing to take a break and sit back drinking beer and watching Bones. Although I really should be watching the six different programs on Japan I have lined up in my watchlist already...

Echo...co...co! But why...y...y..?

Part I is finished. Just under 20K. I've accepted that this basically ends the "traditional Japan" part of the story, or at least the tourist in traditional Japan. It will be back at the crux, but for now the rest of the story is going to be increasingly modern Japan, fancy high-tech stuff, plots that are largely divorced from the specifics of the setting and, basically, jumping the shark.

Not the only tough choice I've had to work through over the past few days. I've been wresting with how to present language and language difficulties. I'm at the "write an apology in the back matter of the book" stage on that. 

Refining my vision of the plot sort of following the three Imperial Regalia as a set of three red herrings, with the plot seemingly pointing at the implications of one only for the inconsistencies to finally re-direct.

And the nature of the cult. The next scene is the introduction to some of their buildings and operations so I really do have to nail down things now. They definitely have to collect artifacts, because that's how I get the plot to work.

But I still haven't decided how deep they are going into Ancient Aliens stuff. There's some good reasons to do it. There are also some good reasons to mine popular science fiction for cult terminology; lots of other cults do it. But at the same time I don't want to make them too silly. I want to respect what is actually going on in the New Religions of Japan. And I feel like I want to write a book that is really centered on Ancient Aliens stuff, possibly built around a Bro Adventure crew shooting a cable TV show. And maybe wrapped around a murder mystery which is only archaeology-adjacent.

And I even have a strong leaning towards two different and seemingly incompatible belief systems going on between two different founders of the thing. A dialogue if you will -- and my character gets into the middle of it. Which is sort of my dialog, too. Silver jumpsuits are a little too silly, but I'm not going to read fifteen books on esoteric Buddhism either.

Well, right now I'm trying to nail down the "factory" of the first visit. After looking around a bunch of maps I'm stealing the actual location of the Miho Museum for the cult headquarters and their own museum. I haven't quite decided if the factory for the first visit is elsewhere -- I'm thinking Nara at the moment, as I am attracted by the ancient Nara jades, but I'm finding it extremely difficult to pull up good information on the modern Japanese jade industry.

(It's all Myanmar, Myanmar, Myanmar. Which is true, but I ran across something about jade carving in Japan so even if it is just cottage workshop artisanal stuff, it does exist as an industry. Somewhere.)

And Godzilla is in the book now. Sort of.

(I also just watched The Octogon all the way through. Now I've started Enter the Ninja. All ninja, all the time!)

Bell, book, and candle

I love and hate discovery writing.

So I wrote the Giant Crab scene, and did Osaka Castle right up to when the ninja leaps out.

I needed something to hang the scene on. A way to set up the physical environment for the coming fight, and a way to justify this being Osaka-jo, as opposed to any other spot in Japan. And the fun answer was to have her do one of her lectures there.

Yeah, but Osaka Castle? Pretty much famous for getting burned down. Twice. And a few more rounds of destruction but it is the two big ones that matter here. Once at the death of Toyotomi Hideyori in the final act of the wars that brought the Tokugawa Shogunate into power. And once during the Meiji Restoration, and a key incident in the final defeat of the last Tokugawa.

The first period being something I'd already ended up with a history-drop on when I did some background of the ninja in history and myth. The second being a major visual at Toei Eigamura, from the Meiji part of the park right in front of the entrance hall, to the popularity of the shinsengumi.

Which means I've been setting up a ton of history bracketing the Isolation Years, the period of the Tokugawa Shogunate, when the archaeology that might actually come into play is around the Genpai Wars four hundred years earlier. Plus, you know, extremely early, kofun and "time of the gods" stuff.

While at work I listened to an otherwise not terribly good podcast on kusanagi no tsurugi, which had a couple of stories I hadn't run across before about the sword. I'd been planning to wave the idea of the sword as a red herring but concentrate on either the mirror or the jewel...but I'd already laid in stuff on the jewel with both a kofun tomb and a jade necklace on a minor character...

And half-way through that podcast I realized I wanted to do all three. To have the purpose of the cult be unclear in the unfolding web of games and masks and lies, but to have it consecutively appear to be about first the jewel, then the sword...and finally be revealed as the mirror.

Which means among other things Mishima is back on. The silver pavilion is in Kyoto. But more than that, all the stuff about the shinsengumi and the Tokugawa Shogunate and the shinsengumi can fit into a suspicious leaning towards militarism, with the cult's possible aims being connected to, well, the sorts of politics one of its real-world models is connected to.

Except it is all still a false trail. And so is the one that points towards the jewel, the yasakani no magatama. And all the stories from Amaterasu in the cave to the battle of Dan-no-ura to whatever men of former powerful clans or renegade priests are around in the present-day of the story, are all dropping hints that lead towards the final what-it-was-really-all-about.

It's gonna make my job harder. But I already needed to make some complicated skullduggery to fill out the middle of the novel. It also, though, may end up making it longer.

Makeup and Motorcycles

I finally got to the Mall Ninja scene. It's a mall -- a shopping mall called the Kyoto Porta, under the train station Gamera attacked that one time. And there's a ninja. I think I finally figured out what the Ninja Club is, even though I'm only half way through the Turnbull book. These guys are basically experimental archaeologists. They are nuts for ninja, smart enough to know the legend is largely bunk but unwilling to accept the possibly quite boring history. So they are seeing just how far you can push the envelope of the possible, both academically and practically. So basically Thor Heyerdal with shurikan.

Or at least that's the polite way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is that these are obsessed otaku (if that isn't a tautology). Young and sure of themselves and willing to spend way much more time than is rational learning how to use a blowpipe and climbing claws.

The other reason for the mall is a soft introduction to Dr. Bronner's Pure-Castillian antiquities-trafficking end-of-the-world cult. Their product line is now officially called Genki and they make a very nice face cream.

Wikimedia CC, taken by Omegatron

And I almost wrote a bunch of paragraphs on makeup before I dialed it back. In any case, between seeing the Christmas lights, being tailed by a motorcycle, learning about Genki and getting another language lesson I've already burned 1,700 words. Bringing me to 15K and I'm still in Part I.

There's three scenes to go before Ichiro shows up to even come close to introducing the actual plot.

***

At the moment I'm regretting bringing in the ninja. Because I had to context them. I did so at Toei Eigamura but I could have done so a lot more organically. The story of the ninja basically begins in the Warring States period and got the most traction during the Tokugawa Shogunate. So explaining the ninja in any real way meant at least name-checking those. But due to the nature of the place, I also touched on the Meiji Restoration. And the thing is? The plot is largely going to hang on an event of the Genpei War, which is in a significantly earlier period. Plus it is looking like she might get a chance to visit a keyhole tomb, which is Kofun Period. 

I am trying very hard not to go into all this stuff and name everything. I took her phone away at the Kabuki theatre (actually, they block cell phones there), and didn't even let her have a program but I am getting very tired of "looked something like" and "might have been a sort of" circumlocutions. 

I'm still ending up with way too much Japanese. I've written myself into a bit of a corner here. She has an extremely good memory and there's only so much I can do a "he said something so fast I couldn't catch the words" or whatever. She is very much reaching out for whatever scraps of meaning she can get and that means I want full, idiomatic sentences to be in the text.

Here's one of the worst bits so far:

Hanae covered her mouth with one hand. “Kawaisō,” she said.

“Hey,” Aki told me. “I know that one. It means ‘pitiful.’”

“I thought I hung up on you,” I whispered back. “How do you say ‘shut up?’”

“You mean her, or me?” Aki giggled. “The only one I know is ‘Urusai yo!’”

“Urusai yo?” I echoed uncertainly.

Hanae paused. Just…paused.

“It’s my friend,” I pointed at my bluetooth. “She’s in Boston. She likes anime.”

“Sonna desu ka,” Hanae said in a tone of it all being very clear now.

Plus I'm reflecting that despite my many lectures on the subject, I really don't do character voices. I mean I should be finding distinct and unique speech patterns but I don't. I just throw a couple of verbal tics at it when I remember but otherwise everyone in the story sounds like me.

That's extra tough, considering one of the things I want to do with this is have Penny consciously trying to behave just a little more adult, to talk in a more professional and serious manner, and for that to slowly bleed into her narrative as well.

(Plus I'm backing of from the extremely choppy speech and all the lightning reverses of Hounds. )

***

I'm unhappy, too, with the rococo. But I guess that's just how I write. When I set up the first ninja scene the outline just said, "ninja attacks." Then I started thinking about what was a possible clever move. That led to a memory of the shakuhachi being used by traveling monks. And reading up on busking led me to "'Round Midnight." And by the time I'd gotten there I'd already come up with the Octogon gag and was going to do it there. And when I checked my maps it was just off the Gion-bashi, the bridge that RoBoHon had lectured James May about in one of the most-viewed clips from his show, and there was a statue of the founder of Kabuki right at the same place, and I'd figured out the song had been written by Thelonious Monk.

The Toei Eigamura scene went the same way. I watched several videos and took a stroll with Google maps (besides having, after all, been there myself) so the Meiji stuff, and the make up of the shops, and the ninja cafe, and then the costume rental led me to wakashu and setting that up made me do a whole bit about theatre geeks, and that set up something that let me involve her in the chanbara, and of course one of the activities I found on a video included a mirror maze...

So that ended up at 3.8K -- and there aren't even any ninja attacks.

The Kyoto Porta scene is done. Now on to Osaka!

Pigeons on the roof, aloof

9,000 words in 9 days, and it is time for a bath.

Well, actually. I wrote that scene too. Followed by the fancy dinner that gets served at a ryokan.  I'm going to have a lot of trouble backing Penny down to Budget Traveler again for the Paris novel (even if I didn't intend to send her to the Jules Verne Cafe).

Based on how things are moving, I'm going to come up short of my targets on the "Tourist in Old Kyoto" section, and the "Penny works out a bunch" section. Which means I really am going to need some complicated plotting when she actually crosses wits with the cult.

There's no real way to describe a wealth of detail. Take for instance this place:

A picture may be worth a thousand words but that isn't reversible. Not if you want words that aren't boring. In the current draft, I got 114 words out of them, and that included a brief comparison of Chinese and Japanese architectural styles. The entire shrine, complete with food stands and prayer bells and a bit of meditation, ran 1,200 words.

And then there's stuff like this:

Penny doesn't read Japanese, and she doesn't know Kabuki. So she can't give the names of anything she is looking at and that is entirely intentional. As I said in an earlier post, well, let me let Penny tell it:

“Minami-za,” she told me. “It is the Kabuki theatre in Kyoto. Stay on Shijo-dori and cross the Kamo-gawa on the Gion-bashi and it will be on your right.”

“Aki…” I said. It was starting to make sense. “Did you just say stay on Shijo Street and cross the Kamo River on the Gion Bridge to get to the Minami Theatre? Why not just say that?”

Which only underlines (ahem) why I'm not italicizing foreign language. In any part of the books. It would look really awkward, and then the lines get very blurry; do you italicize sushi? At what point does a word grow up to be a real boy?

So the latest problem I've been having is over English-speakers. The reality in Japan -- this was particularly my experience in Kyoto -- is that native fluency existed but many people I encountered were somewhat better in English than I was in Japanese. (Okay...make that a lot better). It really should be rendered that way in the book. 

Not necessarily spelling out the pronunciations (there's a whole discussion about that but basically modern thinking is that in the hands of almost all writers it detracts more than it adds flavor). But the grammatical errors and elisions should be there.

And I tried it. And immediately fell into a crazy wormhole because there are underlying ideas of Japanese grammar and Japanese language culture that would want to be expressed. Japanese is almost as dogmatic as German about word order, for instance. And I haven't even touched on the idea of politeness levels (largely because I'm saving it up for a later bit).

So you would expect confusion about the "particles" (as a Japanese would see it) like "The" and "And" and "Is" -- the desu-series doesn't quite translate the same. The usual answer to confusion over the nuances of connective words and verb endings is pidgin; to omit them all. But then add the obligatory politeness words on top...

And you end up with a sort of "We very sorry honorable Smith-san" that just grates. It makes it look like I am making fun of the culture. 

Well, there is the added layer to this linguistic turducken that is English as it is taught in Japanese schools. Which is rote-taught and bears about as much resemblance to English as she is spoke as phrasebook speech does to the actual language in question. (And, yes, native Japanese speakers have expressed their bemusement at certain usages that crop up in every tourist guide, comments along the line of, "Nobody actually says that!")

In a large way, phrasebook language and first lessons in language is more lies-to-children. Such as the advice you get starting out that Japanese words do not have accented syllables. Well, hell no. It actually does have tones, and if you get the tones really wrong the locals won't even be able to understand you (yes...personal experience this time).

Of course there's also the problem that I can't help but use any passing speaker as a mouthpiece to explain things to the reader. Even Hanae, who I had meant to be a woman of few English words (and too polite to speak up most of the time, at least until Penny began to understand her better), has been enlisted to explain things and, in an instant, morphed into the same Oxford Lecturer voice I always fall into.

Well, the chambara is next. I've been updating my online "examples of notes" page as I go, and the next scene to write is at Toei.

https://writingdownthesherds.wordpress.com/wedding-live-research/

Air Flute

 

Was sick today. Lay in bed and watched random videos. One of them was a recorder player who found an actually decent bass recorder for under a hundred euros. And that led me to a flautist comparing a couple of cheap flutes she had bought, one of them being my own Medini (in the same cute pink color, too -- she got it for a video).

And in the hands of a good concert flute player -- the tone was badly airy. Yeah. So it may not be the fault of my embouchure at all. It may be I am fighting against a cheap instrument.

Well, I only wanted flute for the additional tone colors. I can live with a breathy sounding one. I took it to work and the past couple of weeks I've been practicing with that and I've finally gotten some basic control and endurance on it and can make it through a tune.

Hi no youjin

Well, this proofs the idea of having boots-on-the-ground experience. So far all of the action of the story has been in a part of Kyoto I didn't really explore. But the ryokan is informed by the ryokan and minshuku I stayed at, all the way up to Hanae copying my own landlady with a fondly exasperated "Kawaisou!"

And the atmosphere of the hole-in-the-wall place Penny eats her first meal at is based on the feel and what (very) few details I could remember from my first meal in Kyoto.

Here's two bits, though; when she is falling asleep the first night she hears the cry of the volunteer fire wardens making their rounds. That's a detail I haven't seen in any of the research I've done from home. (In fact, it was extremely difficult to track down the actual phrase they were using). I knew about that because I'd been there. Just like I know that when you get downtown in Kyoto the crosswalk lights play a traditional and oddly minor-key sounding Japanese song. (Which song, I haven't tried to track down yet.)

I'm around 7K in draft now makes it a bit under 1/10 of the projected length of the novel. And taking a break because I'm at a place where I could drop 500-700 words on a Kabuki performance but I don't know if I should.

At this point I really don't know what is working. It feels rushed and like there's still too much nihongo in it although I went through and deleted a bunch again. It is so very hard to describe Japan in words. The look of the place, that is. And worse when I'm throwing so many contrasts at the reader.

I mean, I am very consciously starting her in the traditional part of Kyoto, putting her in a ryokan and staying away from department stores and pachinko and robots and even keeping her away from English speakers. 

But you still can't help but have an experience that veers all over the map. Sigh. If I was filming this, I'd just start the whole thing at Toei Eigamura and then only gradually allow anything modern in the picture.

***

Most of the reviews I traded for at Pubby have posted. One them got taken down again by Amazon. I think. I just remember the number being higher, then going away. I have just enough to balance out that damned 1-star now until it doesn't look fatally bad. On the other hand, two of the reviewers mentioned the "choppy" narrative and the third complained about typos.

I won't say there aren't any of the later, but these reviews are so brief and I don't have any way to contact them so I have no idea if he was running into slang, British spelling, or just plain unfamiliar words -- or if he really did hit a few of the ones I know are there and they bugged him. Or if he felt a need to say something -- he still gave me five stars.

Terrible thing about Pubby -- my review of THEM is no better than three stars -- is that the writer is asked to provide descriptive words, favorite scenes...a whole page of basically Cliff Notes to crib from so the reviewer doesn't even have to read the book. I think their system is slipshod. My last reviewer was required to purchase his own copy. According to Pubby, he did. According to my sale figures, nobody has done so in a month or more.

And there's a monthly fee for the service. I want to use the credits I've saved up to "splash" Wedding a little, but I don't see it even reaching first draft sooner than three months from now.

Well, at least I have all the scenes planned out -- research and all -- to get me through the next several chapters.

James May, Sumimasen

 I got a reading light, but the biggest chunks of research time I have is during mealtimes. So I've seen a lot more video than I have read books, so far.

The Kyoto sequence is really coming together. The more I research, the more I find things that are right there in higashiyama ward, that is, the part of town centered in the Gion or old geisha district (which in Kyoto are called geiko. Just because. More kansai-ben, like "okiini" for "arigato" (which I learned when I was in Kyoto myself, but had forgotten.)

And now I just read an article on kansai-ben and realized a language bit I did in chapter two is wrong. Unless Hanae isn't a Kyoto native, she wouldn't leave off the final vowel of "desu" or use "ikemasen." Although I really don't want to get into dialect on this story! I'm reluctant enough to have much language at all!

Anyhow. The ryokan I picked is a short walk to one of the major shrines, which also marks one end of the Gion "strip," which if you follow it across the Kamo river passes by the Takashiyama department store and ends up at Kyoto Station and the Kyoto Porta. Plus the oldest and most important Kabuki theatre is along that same general line.

But I'm still getting to the south west of Kyoto for the Toei Eigamura. Which, after I'd done so much chasing of links, I cued up one of the videos on my streaming watch list and...they did twenty minutes on the place and showed the inside of the costume rental and some of the stuff that happens before and after the chambara.

And possibly hit the bamboo forest of Arashiyama because it is right there. But I've also settled on Osaka for her third very busy day in Japan (not counting the evening she came in).

Because here comes a bit of a research failure. A method failure, that is. What I am doing these days is researching enough to get the general idea and to work out the bones of the plot. Then when I start drilling down to specific scenes, I go back to the research for the intensive stuff. I really like doing this during the actual writing instead of trying to get down to that level during outlining, because if I did it that way, I'd have to go back and find my place again in all the material three months later when I finally got to that scene. 

This way, everything is fresh. I've got windows open to half my stuff on Yasaka Shrine right now. I'm only bookmarking the things that I might need during re-writes. Or if I have a computer crash.

But...the plan said to start off at Atsuta Shrine, the place where Kusanagi is strongly rumored to be kept. And then have an episode at Osaka Castle.

Oops. I'd entirely forgotten I'd made two stops on the Shinkansen to Tokyo and Atsuta Shrine is a couple of hours away. It really doesn't work to have her go there (plus it is such a sprawling, all-day shrine). So I can't do that bit. Well, there's a central shrine in Tokyo that holds the other two important regalia...

Osaka also seems far...an hour and change itself. But I can get away with doing one. And here is where Bim, I mean Jim, comes in again. Because he reacted to Osaka as being a bit more dirty, boisterous, cosmopolitan city than polite Kyoto. And this is a contrast I want to do.

And it also turns out -- and I've only just started reading Turnbull, and not that Turnbull, but the recent one where he deconstructs the ninja myth a bit -- that Iga is really close to Kyoto as well. So I can do it. If I can find a place where I can stick not just ninja, but yamabushi...and snowmobiles.

Yeah, I still don't know what the "Ninja Club" is. And the first one is going to show up about three scenes from now.

***

And this is a lot of work for the "pure tourist" part of the book. I haven't done anything on plotting out the rest of it. Basically, part one is being a tourist. Part two is training. Part three is spy stuff. Part four is the final fight. As it were. And at this point, not only am I still quite vague on how exactly she's going to be working her way into the cult's secrets (or even what they are), I also don't know if describing doing some running in the woods and getting training on how to walk from the Takarazuka are going to fill out 20,000 words or if I'm going to fall terribly short.

Well, so far none of my reviewers have seemed to think the plots doddled around doing nothing when ninety percent of the books are just that kind of tourist activity and fluff. So I am relatively confident that I can blow 2-3000 words on having yakitori is going to be just fine. (In the current draft, the "look at the Yasaka Shrine" is almost exactly one thousand words.)