書く、だから、いる：　何かをする為に

Moving Again: The Nexus of Misc

2011-03-23T16:11:00.004-09:00

Subsequent posts to be found on The Nexus of Misc and associated blogs.

(My Facebook profile still links to this site, and due to a glitch in the new layout, I can't edit that info. So if you got here from there, go ahead and head to the Nexus.)

Xetum Tyndall Watch Review (Coming Soon)

2010-02-25T17:02:00.003-10:00

I recently discovered and purchased a Tyndall automatic wrist watch from Xetum, a new start-up watch company based in San Fransisco. Their current models, the Tyndall and the Stinson, are named after local California landmarks (Tyndall Park and Stinson Beach, respectively), and exude a minimalist, function-centric design aesthetic that I find appealing. (It doesn't hurt that they employ high quality Swiss ETA movements, like the 2895-2 used in the Tyndall, which usually find their way into far more expensive pieces.)

More to come once my package arrives!

AkeOme, Dimension Diver's Rockman

2010-01-01T21:57:00.008-10:00

AkeOme = Akemashite Omedetougozaimasu = Happy New Year!

Ever since I first laid eyes on an article about Mega Man 3 in the Nintendo Power magazine (I must have been around seven), I've been a rabid Rockman (Mega Man's original Japanese moniker) fan, snatching up nearly every Rockman-related piece of merchandise that comes within my range of vision. In fact, some of the first manga I special ordered from Japan were Rockman-related, including the prize of the bunch, Ariga Hitoshi's Rockman Megamix series. My biggest disappointment, however, has been that, in the 20+ years since Rockman was first introduced, the beloved character has yet to be treated to an truly exceptional three-dimensional rendering. Then, about a year ago, I saw it:

I first laid eyes on the figure above in some preview pics from WonderFes 2008 (I believe). At the time, I naively believed that it might be a part of the Revoltech 2.0 releases slated for May 2009. Eventually, I came to terms with the fact that it was a garage kit--i.e. fan made--and that 1) I would probably never get my hands on it, since it would be released on a small scale and only in Japanese garage kit markets, and 2) even if I did get my hands on one of them, I'd have to perform all of the finishing work (cutting away the stray bits of resin, assembly, painting, etc.) myself. I've never been a modeling enthusiast in any sense of the word, and my elementary forays into the hobby (a pair of X-Wing and Y-Wing fighters I've long since lost, a few Warhammer 40K Necrons, etc.) did little to change my apathy. Nevertheless, unabashed Rockman maniac that I am, I vowed to procure one of the kits for myself if one ever popped up on the internet.

Flash forward to this November, when, out of the blue, a search for "Rockman Megaman figure" on eBay yielded an auction for the kit pictured above. It was a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity, and I knew that I wouldn't be the only one who would bid high and often to win it. The fact that the kit originally sold in the doujin markets for 7000 yen made me feel a little better in applying my highest bid (an amount so obscenely large I feel compelled to omit it here . . . though I will say, despite several others sniping bids at the last minute, the final price was less than half of what I was willing to pay. Yay for consumer surpluses!).

After the kit arrived, I took stock of the joint pieces and modeling tools I would need to complete it, and made a corresponding order on HLJ.com. The tools and pieces arrived yesterday, so I ended up spending the last hours of 2009 assembling the figure. I finished around 12:11 a.m., just a few minutes into the new year.

This is what I ended up with. I decided to keep it as unfinished as possible (in part because I probably lack the skills/confidence necessary to clean things up without botching the job, in part because I'm just plain lazy), but pride demanded that I paint the power indicator on the side of the Mega Buster, and paint the eyes white before applying the eye decals (which was probably the most harrowing part of the entire ordeal). I had some experience putting together a jointed figure from a Volks (I think) model I picked up in Japan in 2008, which really made the process this time much easier.

The gray ball joints are from Yellow Submarine, which produces them in gray, dark gray, white, and flesh tones (light and dark). At first I considered painting the joints blue, but the more I looked at them, the better they looked in contrast to the rest of the figure, so I kept them the way they were.

The Dimension Diver team did a really great job on this mold, and I'm quite pleased with the results that even an amateur like me could produce. (They also made a kit for Roll, but, as many other observers have noted, their rendering of her legs seem a little too thick compared to the usual artistic renderings.) All in all, the whole ordeal won't stop me from purchasing another Rockman figure of equal aesthetic quality--or even purchasing the same one again, if a professionally finished one were ever to pop up within my consumer radar. Such is the curse of a lifelong Rockman otaku.

And a parting thought on the subject of Rockman: Rockman 10 comes out in early 2010. Otanoshimi!

Chapter Three: Done; Keyboard Woes; Prepping for NaNoWriMo

2009-10-19T01:29:00.009-09:00

Reading: Great Fool: Zen Master Ryokan: Poems, Letters, and Other Writings (Ryuichi Abe & Peter Haskel, eds. & trans.)
Listening: YUI, "It's all too much"
Redraft: Book One, Ch. 4, v.30.0 (on hiatus until after NaNoWriMo 2009)

Looking back through my redraft printouts, I came to the unpleasant realization that it took me a full (read: neither the-better-part-of-a nor even a-day-less-than-a) month to rewrite Chapter Three. Granted, I could only make this realization upon actually completing the Chapter Three redraft at roughly 12:08 a.m. this morning--an accomplishment which fills me with equally inordinate levels of pride and exhaustion--but the cold, clear fact remains that this will likely be the last chapter of Book One I shall rewrite before diverting my creative attention to my project for NaNoWriMo 2009. That I still don't know precisely which story will comprise that project only underscores the need to prepare before I type out the first word on Nov. 1st.

Before I delve headlong into the month-long distraction that is NaNoWriMo, I thought I should pause for a somewhat elegiac note. Early last morning, I came to the sober conclusion that my Kinesis Contoured Keyboard, despite having provided what I believe was the best, most ergonomically sound typing experience of my $1000+ foray into the realm of ridiculously priced keyboards, would have to end up on the eBay chopping block. The reason, infuriatingly enough, lies in its American build quality: the tiny membrane switches at the top of the keyboard, which control hotkey essentials like the function keys and the print screen key--the latter of which I remapped to open My Computer at a key press--have either gone slightly non-responsive, or, in the case of the aforementioned print screen key, hyper-responsive, resulting in my email responses being incessantly interrupted by a never-ceasing torrent of My Computer windows. Seeing as this particular keyboard ranks among the most expensive to have ever crossed my desktop--the only 'board to top it is the Topre Realforce 91U that I'm typing on right now--its failure after a mere two years of ownership becomes particularly distressing. Coupled with the battleship-like build I've come to expect of my Japanese-made keyboards, along with my previous abortive ownership of the U.S.-made Das Keyboard Professional, my outlook on all U.S. keyboards has pretty much soured. A true shame, as no keyboard quite stacks up to the Kinesis Contoured's design. Only its implementation leaves much--too much--to be desired.

(Even as I type this entry, my RSI started to act up, and I was forced to switch to one of the Filco Tenkeyless models--ironically, the one that shares the same Cherry brown keyswitches as the Kinesis.)

(EDIT: and two hours after typing this post, I'm switching the Cherry-brown Filco for the Cherry-black. I swear, if the Kinesis Contoured came in a Cherry-black model, I'd plunk down another $300 just to give it a whirl, despite Kinesis's quality issues.)

I'll follow up shortly with my progress in whittling down the three potential NaNoWriMo candidates this year to the one that will, with any luck, grow to 50K words (or more) by Nov. 30th. That and an updated entry on my writing desk, as soon I get it tidied up enough so that it won't break the camera when I take the picture.

Writers' Rooms, Cont'd.

2009-10-18T05:11:00.002-09:00

As a follow up to my recent posting on writers' rooms (and my obsession thereof), I present a horribly insatiable time-pit from the Guardian: Writers' Rooms.

Also, as I realize the layout and makeup of my own writing desk has changed since the last picture I've posted here, I should probably upload an updated picture sometime soon. Consider it forthcoming.

Fatalistic Optimism, Bar, Writers' Rooms, NaNoWriMo

2009-10-17T05:15:00.005-09:00

It was about a week ago that I received word through the mail that I had passed the bar exam. There have been moments this week--many, in fact--where it all felt strangely surreal. I felt confident enough in my performance, walking away from the test site on the second day, but over the course of the three months I spent waiting for the results, my confidence disintegrated like rice paper in a warm bath. I began to visualize what I would do in the wake of failing the test, steeling myself for a disappointment that, on each successive consideration, seemed increasingly inevitable.

A part of this progression likely stemmed from my outlook on life: hope for the best, but expect the worst. I tend to exercise a sort of fatalistic optimism, largely indistinguishable from ordinary optimism, except that I explicitly force myself to consider the worst-case scenario, and accept that fact that it may very well come to pass. It's the same way that I eventually overcame my adolescent crisis of faith, where I used spend sleepless nights pondering what would become of a human being if there truly is no soul to carry one's consciousness beyond this mortal coil, no God Almighty to guide us, and if the sum total of human life is destined to return to all-consuming nothingness. The thought of a state--if one could truly call nonexistence a "state"--of thoughtlessness, of blindness without darkness, of soundlessness without silence, frightened me unlike any other horror, waking or dreaming. However, somewhere along the way in college, studying the luminaries of Western Philosophy, I somehow managed to come to terms with the possibility, accepted it as a necessary contingency if all that I believed yet could not prove were, in the final calculation, proven to be false. Nevertheless, even as I accepted the object of my deepest-seeded fear, I chose to believe what I had grown up believing, what I've seen and interpreted to be true in every detail of this existence. This was my interpretation of the traditional Christian concept of faith: to behold the wonders and depravities of this world, and choose to recognize the spark of Providence in each of them, a jewel of the divine set in countless facets of an intricate and unfathomable setting, composed of sometimes unremarkable parts that somehow fit together to form a whole beautiful and awesome beyond all human reckoning. The evidence is plain and abundant all around us, though they require a leap of faith in reaching any genuine conclusions; where I see God in his heaven, another could envision Chaos in its entropy, or, even more simply, nothing at all. Even scientific certainties are predicated upon an implicit faith in the reliability of sense perceptions, the inherent reality of the world around us, and the immutability--and knowability--of the physical relationships that bind this existence together. If every conclusion, whether hopeful, pragmatic, or pessimistic, requires the same implicit act of faith, then why not put my faith in the one I want to be so? From this perspective, a leap of faith is perhaps the greatest volitional act an autonomous actor is capable of, the ultimate expression of free will.

Granted, failing the bar pales whiter than alabaster next to utter nothingness, but the adjustment process for me was quite the same. Seeing as my faith--or, at least, plaintive hope--proved well placed in the bar's case, I can only hope my faith in the grander dilemma proves equally true.

And hope I will.

I've been fascinated with the writing desks--and by extension, rooms--of the professional writers I admire, ever since I first laid eyes on a photograph of the late-Robert Jordan's work desk. There is some poignant yet ethereal connection between an author's finished work and the means, process, and--yes--even locale of its creation. One concede that, much in the same way that we as people are largely shaped by the people, places, and events that ensconce our lives, so too must these artifacts, the products of human thought, toil, and rapture, be influenced in subtle but sensible ways by their author's surrounds at the time of their crafting.

I was, therefore, understandably delighted to discover a photo project called "Where I Write: Fantasy & Science Fiction Authors in Their Creative Spaces," which features several well-known authors in their workspaces. It satiates some quasi-voyeuristic urge that I think we all share, to a certain degree; yet at the same time, it also humanizes the works that, when rendered to us void of the human story of their production, can seem like godly, unwieldy things that we are doomed only to worship, an Asgardian fortress or Olympian height to which we may never aspire. It tethers them to the earth, brings them close enough for us to see the cracks, dents, and defects we might otherwise overlook, and forces us to acknowledge that the giants who built them not only were once human, but are human still.

It kindles hope where a hero worshiper and pedestal placer is apt to find an overabundance of despair.

And, on the apt segue that "despair" provides, I should come to acknowledge that NaNoWriMo 2009 is two weeks away. I thought that I would use it to write the historical fantasy I codenamed "Wander," but as the month approaches I increasingly fear that I may still lack the confidence to tackle a story that takes place not in a fantasy world of my own imagination, largely and safely divorced from our everyday reality, but in a doppelganger milieu whose verisimilitude relies so heavily upon its resemblance to the real world. I thought about working on a story in the fantasy milieu I codenamed "The Year of Our Lord," which would be a welcome respite from science fiction, and a way to hone the skills I've gleaned from the copious fantasy novels I've read in recent years, but I fear that that story is not yet ripe enough to pluck from the aether. Lately I thought of writing the first of two "prequel" novels to Book One, which actually may be ripe enough to be written, but a part of me feels that I should focus my efforts on something that lies outside the familiar SF milieu that I've developed and dwelt in these past thirteen years.

In the meantime, this weekend is, once again, to be sacrificed on the altar that is Chapter Three. I'm hoping it will be done before the weekend is; and if it is, then perhaps I can turn greater attention toward deciding which story most deserves to be told next.

Overclocked & Overdue

2009-10-03T02:03:00.008-09:00

Re-reading: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Redraft: Book One, Ch. 3, v.30.0

So it's been about two weeks since the last post. As could be expected, the lack of activity is mostly due to the fact that I haven't gotten as much work done on the redraft as I'd hoped--though with any luck, I might be able to make up for some lost time this weekend. If so, another post will be quickly forthcoming.

In other news--all of which, oddly enough, are computer-related--the new CPU heat sink I ordered from Amazon arrived this week, and after working up the courage to open up my desktop again, I removed the old stock heat sink and attached the new one. The new heatsink is nearly three times the size of the original, and required that I remove a vent tunnel from the side of my PC case in order to fit. At first, I was worried that I had done something wrong during installation, because the temperatures seemed to actually be a little higher than they had been with the stock cooler. However, after some digging through the BIOS, I realized the sink's fan was seriously underpowered, running at roughly 10% of its full RPMs. With a small tweak, things started to work smoothly, and I managed to improve my previous overclock (2.0 to 2.4 Ghz) to 2.66 Ghz, all with temperatures equal or better than they had been when the CPU was running at factory settings. Now other overclockers have apparently been able to crank this particular CPU model up to 3.0-3.2 Ghz without resorting to water cooling systems, but I found the system to be a little unstable--and running a little too hot--when I pumped the speed up to 3.0, with what I perceived as only a marginal performance boost over 2.66 Ghz settings. Moreover, at 2.66 Ghz everything from Photoshop to Fallout 3 appears to run just fine, the latter without the occasional drop in frame rates that I encountered at 2.0 Ghz, so I think I'm perfectly fine with the computer's current settings. At the end of the day, the desktop named Episteme now has the following stats:

Case: Antec NSK 4480B
Motherboard: Asus P5K-VM (775 Socket)
CPU: Pentium Dual-Core e2180 @ 2.0 Ghz (overclocked to 2.66 Ghz)
CPU Heat Sink: Thermaltake TMG i1
RAM: 3.25 GB (x2 2Gb Kingston PC2-6400 (800 Mhz))
Graphics: Palit ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256mb
HD: WD Caviar SE16 640GB 7200 RPM SATA
External HDs: x2 WD MyBook Essential 3.5" 7200 RPM (one 500 GB, one 1 TB); Seagate Free Agent 2.5" 500 GB 5400 RPM
Monitors: x2 24" Monitors (Gateway & Unbranded HP (refurbished unbranded, so it technically doesn't violate my moratorium on HP products); each @ 1920 x 1200 resolution)
Keyboard: Filco Majestouch Tenkeyless 87-key FKBN87Z/EB w/ fake ALPS "fukka" keyswitches
Mouse: Kensington Slimblade Trackball
Tablet: Wacom Intuos4 Medium

I had been using what has, up to this point, been my favorite keyboard of all the myriad models that I've acquired and used over the years: the Kinesis Contoured. Its ergonomically cupped design, coupled with its brown Cherry keyswitches, really made it a powerhouse for a typist like me. The only thing that could have made it better was if it came in black Cherrys, which I've always found superior in tactility over the "tactile"--though I would call them mushy--browns. However, the Kinesis has a questionable build quality that makes it susceptible to nigh-inexplicable bouts of phantom input, especially around the membrane-type command keys at the top of the keyboard. Once before, an overactive keypad button rendered the keyboard nearly untypeable--it would convert several of the QWERTY keys into a makeshift number pad. Somehow, a thorough cleaning and unplugging/plugging of the keyboard's internals managed to bring it back from the cusp of death, and it served well for about six months. Then, when I was rushing to send an email before heading up to work, it started to actuate the Print Screen button over and over and over again. Now, on a normal computer, these incessant phantom keystrokes wouldn't affect functionality, but I've remapped that particular key to open up My Computer at a single button press, and so it resulted in me being interrupted every other second by a My Computer window. I'm going to try to clean it again in the hopes that the problem once again resolves itself, but even if it does, the unreliability of the keyboard makes me think it's future may lie in an eBay auction. When compared to the battleship-like build quality of Japanese keyboards like the Filcos, Topres, and Happy Hacking Keyboards, the Kinesis--like so many of our consumer goods--put U.S. manufacturers to shame.

On the bright side, the Kinesis's persnicketiness has enabled me to get to know my newest acquisition better, a Filco Tenkeyless with the newly revised "fukka" fake ALPS keyswitches. White ALPS keyswitches were renowned for their clicky-clacky feel--about as close to a buckling spring as mechanical switches have come--but, as far as I know, are no longer in production. Another "fake" ALPS keyswitch was previously available, dubbed "XM" by Filco, but it possessed a very balky feel, requiring too much pressure (even for a hammer-stroke typist like me) to be used effectively. The fukka switches are supposedly manufactured in the same facilities as the original ALPS keyswitches, and thus more closely replicate their feel (though I've heard from true connoisseurs that the original ALPS are still a touch better in tactility). purchased this keyboard based on my faith in the users geekhack.org forum, planning to resell my other "fake ALPS" Tenkeyless on eBay if I found the difference definitive, and their advice did not disappoint. This keyboard is a close second to the same model fitted with black Cherry switches, though it's quickly growing on me, and I am generally partial to clicky switches, the only (somewhat inexplicable) exception being blue Cherry switches, which just seemed too anemic to me, and somehow interfered with my usual typing tempo.

Slow Going, Check's In the Mail

2009-09-13T04:42:00.003-09:00

Reading: China Mieville, Perdido Street Station
Rereading: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Writing: Book One, Chapter 3, v.30.0

Nothing much new to report this week. It's been a little slow going on Chapter 3, as the flashback scene is taking some time to bend in the direct I need it to go. (The problem is a common one for me when it comes to writing scenes with a specific end goal in mind--getting from A to B sometimes takes a few twists, turns, and false starts.) Odds are I'll have to trim down the scene before the end, but first I'll have to finish it.

In other news, I received word that the ASCAP check has reached the dean, which means I should expect a payout soon. It's technically the first money I've made off of my writing, so I'll be sure to keep the stub (and probably scan in the check before cashing).

CGing Result, Part II

2009-09-06T06:25:00.008-09:00

After approximately 12 hours, from pencil sketch (which didn't work out right . . .) to finished CG:

Now, back to Chapter 3 . . .

Goodfellows, Another Article, Chapter 3, New CG Project

2009-09-04T23:07:00.005-09:00

Writing: Book One, Chapter 3, v.30.0
Watched: Monk, Season 7

This week marked my start as a post-graduate research fellow, and things seem to be much as I anticipated. One exception is my on-campus work space, which is lighter on the space (read: virtually nonexistent) that I was led to believe. Not really a problem, as it gives me a rather compelling argument to work from home more often than not, which really is more conducive to editing anyway. So in the end, the others at the office get dedicated work spaces, I--the homebody--get to stay home, and my supervisors still get the finished product they're after. In a way, it's not so different an arrangement from freelance editing, except that I have a dedicated client base built-in.

Crazy as it may sound, with Article Two only recently added to the publication queue, I'm entertaining notions of synthesizing the content from my previous articles with indigenous cultural issues inherent to my fellowship position. It would bridge the gap between my previous scholarship and my current job, and because it's Center-related, would be a boon for the department as well. I've got the go ahead, provided I take care of my editing / cite checking projects first.

So let this be a lesson for law students: when one is writing articles, like when one is eating potato chips, it's really, really hard to stop at just one. (Or two, apparently.)

Because I spent most of the week getting the hang of my new position, I really didn't make much progress on Chapter 3 until today, and most of that was due to a new approach that occurred to me (and, fortunately, I wrote down) around bedtime yesterday. That's one of the reasons you'll never catch me without some form of notepad and writing implement: you never know where inspiration might strike, and--at least if you have a short-term memory like mine--if you don't write it down right there and then, it's as good as gone.

I suppose absence does make the heart grow fonder, because when I logged into the blog today, the CG result I'd posted looked a lot better than the last time I laid eyes on it. Coupled with the fact that I now have a scanner for penciled drawings, I might tackle another small but important task: CGing a new avatar pic for this blog and my other various presences on the internet. The current image, while a reasonable facsimile of my real visage, is not perfect, and it's always irked me that I've been forced to conscript another artist's work for my anime-styled image. (That this particular artist has apparently disappeared from the internet does nothing to assuage my wounded honor.) Within the next week or so, I will seek to rectify this situation. The result will, of course, replace my current image, once the deed is done.

CGing Result

2009-08-27T16:44:00.006-09:00

As promised, the result of (roughly, on and off) a week's worth of fiddling with--and cursing at--Photoshop:

I wish I could claim that the oil-painted look was intentional, but it wasn't--my goal was the soft gradients usually seen in manga-style CG artwork. As best as I've divined, that requires a technique of applying brushstrokes at extremely low opacity, and using an equally low-opacity eraser to shape / smooth things out. It's a lot harder than it should be, but I suppose with practice it'll get easier.

Unfortunately, this is all the time I can spare for CG training in the immediate future; I have to get back to Book One revisions, and my job begins September 1st.

Publication, Expedited Review, CGing

2009-08-25T16:16:00.002-09:00

Playing: Professor Layton & the Diabolical Box (Nintendo DS)
Writing: Book One, Chapter 3, v.30.0
Drawing: Protagonist's profile image (hours wasted so far: over 10)
Watched: Monk, Seasons 1-6; Deji E no Bunpou

I received a publication offer from the Seton Hall University Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law this morning, and quickly set off a slew of "expedited review" requests for the other law journals on my list. This would normally be a simple matter, if I had used Berkeley's Expresso submission system; however, with a fee of $2 per submission, and with me submitting the article to over 100 law journals, I decided to go it alone this time and do my submissions manually, by email. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to send the expedite requests one at a time. In all, it took about two-and-a-half hours to send them all.

My goal in writing the article in question was roughly three-fold. First, I'd been tipped off to the ASCAP competition and cash award. Seeing as being paid for my writing is my desired career path, I figured that would be right up my alley. Second, I was disappointed that, by my own oversight, I allowed my first article to be published in an online-only journal. (In the long run, I did end up with a print copy of the issue with my article in it, but that's another story.) The moment I realized my mistake--which, come to think of it, was about a year ago--I vowed to write another article that would see itself print . . . literally. Third, it was a goal of mine in law school to publish an article that would appear as a search result in both Westlaw's and LexisNexis' law journal databases. The Denver SELJ isn't included in those databases--which, again, I didn't think to check up on until after I accepted the publication offer--so this subsequent article was my only remaining shot. Fortunately, the Seton JSEL is both a print journal, and one that is represented in both Westlaw and LexisNexis, so even if it's the only offer I receive, I'll still achieve the aforementioned goals.

The offer expires on Sept. 1, so if I don't hear back from any of the other journals before then, it looks like my second law article will find its home at the Seton Hall JSEL this fall.

I've managed to rework the first two chapters of Book One, but I realized last week that the third chapter will require some extensive reworking. I've learned that an optimal word-count-per-chapter for proper pacing is 1000-1500 words, a rule that I've confirmed with my own reading habits. (The rule can--and, in fact, should, I believe--be broken in the later, climatic chapters, but it rings especially true for the opening ones.) The first two chapters adhere loosely to these guidelines, but the third, in v.29.0, weighed in at 4600+. I didn't see a way to cut it down before, but on the latest reading, I could see how the necessary events and plot elements could be rearranged and condensed, so that what once required no less than three scenes could, potentially, be reduced to a single one.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make much headway in this rewrite, not because of writer's block, but because I've been wrestling with a different creative muse--namely: CG.

I've always wanted to become competent enough an artist to render some scenes from my novels--perhaps even provide book cover art, if the opportunity for such an edition might arise. (Truth be told, I've also entertained the notion of rendering some of those novels in manga form, but the amount of skill and technique I'd need to acquire before that could become even remotely possible would probably take too many years on top of those I'd hoped to spend honing my writing skills. Ultimately, I'd say my only hope for seeing any of my stories in full manga form would be in the form of a licensing agreement with an interested publisher and mangaka. But if it's possible, I'll see it done before the end.) I recently upgraded my Wacom tablet to an Intuos4, so I decided to dedicate the weekend--and, as it turned out, the first half of this week--to acclimating myself to my tools and rendering a test illustration using the various CG techniques I picked up from watching a series called Degi E no Bunpou, a J-TV series that looked at the CGing techniques of several well-known Japanese artists.

I'm still waiting for a recently purchased scanner to arrive, so in the interim I attempted to create an illustration purely on the computer, sketching it out with the tablet, inking it, and then coloring it with Photoshop. The sketching process was relatively painless, and the inking process, while not without its own set of beginner's mistakes and setbacks, was mostly completed by Sunday. However, the coloring process has proven to be a daunting task, on several levels. First, my inexperience with Photoshop really shows through my attempts to replicate some of the techniques featured on Degi E. Second, my limited background in drawing (some classes in elementary school, and an introductory course in my last undergraduate semester) means that I probably lack the proficiency necessary to produce the results I'm seeking, even if I had mastered Photoshop's full potential. The ultimately result is that the illustration (which is really nothing more than a portrait of Book One's main character, for use on his character profile sheet) has taken at least 10 (or, less conservatively, 15+) hours so far, with a significant learning curve still to come. I'm hoping to have it presentable in the next few days, but I'm going to be transitioning back to the Book One rewrites whether it's done or not.

Perhaps I'll post a thumbnail here when it's done. (Or not.)

Transitions, Submissions, & Vows

2009-08-17T19:09:00.005-09:00

Reading: David Anthony Durham, Acacia; Jack Campbell, Relentless (Book 5 of The Lost Fleet)
Playing: Street Fighter IV; Fallout 3 (Point Lookout & Mothership Zeta DLCs)
Writing: TSW, Chapter 2, v.30.0

With the bar over and done with, I plan to build and maintain some serious writing momentum over the course of the next year, rewriting and polishing Book One (codenamed: TSW), completing Book Two (codenamed: CotF), and preparing for this year's NaNoWriMo work, Wander. I also hope to be able to churn out around half-a-dozen short stories, with the goal of getting something published and building up to the membership requirements for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. A part of accomplishing writing goals like those is telling others about them, so that, at least indirectly, those people will help to hold one accountable for meeting those benchmarks. Thus, this blog will see more regular updates--to the tune of at least one per week--to keep me honest and perpetually moving.

Also, on the subject of submissions and publications, I'm currently shopping my second law article right down the Washington and Lee listing, from Harvard at #1 to the fifty-somethings. There's a sizable block of law reviews that I've skipped, primarily because they require submissions via Expresso--which, at $2 a pop, I've decided to pass over for the time being. (While the article should net me at least $600 from the good folks at ASCAP via the Nathan Burkan competition, that egg has not yet hatched, so I'm loathe to spend any more money on publication than I'd otherwise have to.) So far, Yale, Georgetown, and a few others from elsewhere on the list have turned in their "thanks-but-no-thanks" notices, but more are almost certain to follow, so stay tuned!

Law Articles, Graduation

2009-04-24T02:09:00.002-09:00

Read: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America

When I published a law article in a small, online-only law journal, I didn't think much would come of it. But, after googling my name out of morbid curiosity a few moments ago, I found that usual search results had nearly doubled.

As graduation nears, and after my change of heart regarding private practice, the possibility of pursuing a career in legal scholarship--most likely in Intellectual Property or Legal Writing--has pressed itself upon me. The cardinal rule of entering the at-times Byzantine world of law faculties is simple: publish, publish, PUBLISH!

(Seeing as my dream job is being a novelist, you might detect a pattern here . . . .)

To this end (and because I want to see my legal scholarship in actual--rather than electronic--print), I've devoted a good portion of this semester toward writing a follow up article. And, as luck would have it, a prof. has encouraged me--and given me the sources I need--to expand a class paper into yet another full-length article, again dealing with the same area I've eeked out as my own scholarly playground: fan-based activities. The first will almost undoubtedly earn me a few hundred bucks worth of a cash reward--possibly more, if I have any success with a national competition. And, with any luck, both articles will see publication by the Fall.

Implicit Association Test

2009-01-22T10:33:00.003-10:00

I took a Gay-Straight IAT as part of the reading assignment for my Law & Psychology class next week. The results:

You have completed the Gay - Straight IAT.

Your Result

Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Gay People and Straight People.

Thank you for your participation. Just below is a breakdown of the scores generated by others. Most respondents find it easier to associate Gay people with Bad and Straight people with Good compared to the reverse.

Attitudes vary in the degree to which their expression is socially acceptable. For example, to express liking or favorability toward one's school or local sports team is socially acceptable just as it seems to be acceptable, in the appropriate circumstances, to express negative attitudes toward a rival school or sports team.

In recent years, it has become less socially acceptable to express negative attitudes toward some groups, for example groups defined by race or by physical disability. In this context, attitudes toward gay people are of special interest because laboratory studies show that the social acceptability of negative attitudes toward gays has changed relatively little in recent years. We also know that anti-gay attitudes are observed on measures of implicit attitude such as the IAT, and that a person's conscious and implicit attitudes toward gays are more often in agreement with each other than they are for some other socially significant domains.

Many of the questions that you answered on the previous page have been addressed in research over the last 10 years. For example, the order that you performed the response pairing is influential, but procedural corrections largely eliminate that influence (see FAQ #1). Each visitor to the site completes the task in a randomized order. If you would like to learn more about the IAT, please visit the FAQs and background information section.

You are welcome to try additional demonstration tasks, and we encourage you to register (easy) for the research site where you will gain access to studies about more than 100 topics about social groups, personality, pop culture, and more.

FAQs || Research site || Demo site || Project Implicit Home

Find this IAT and many others at http://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit.

Fall 2008 Grade Report

2009-01-15T00:40:00.006-10:00

I set an uncomfortable precedent for myself in the fall of 2006, receiving the highest grade in my Legal Practice section. The onus fell on the next semester to repeat the feat, but was ultimately unrealized. Then, the focus became to repeat it the following fall--an event again unrealized, albeit much more narrowly. The final permutation of this precedent coalesced into a desire to reflect my mastery in my chosen--I like to think of it as "sovereign"--area of law with the highest grade in Intellectual Property, or at least the first A+ final grade of my law (or, in fact, my entire) school career. (This was due in part to the grading scales applied in college and high school, but the emblematic nature of the "A+" grade, I think, mitigates those niggling factors.)

Also, on a smaller level, I hoped to get at least an A- in my Child Law class, as I had opted to take it for a letter grade in an attempt to bolster my overall GPA into more solid cum laude territory. (My whole matter-of-pride preoccupation with graduation honors I will reserve for another day and entry.)

Today, the grades for these two classes were reported:

Children and the Law: A
Intellectual Property: A+*

*highest grade in class

Ergo:

"Victory is mine!"

Mood: tired, but pleased

NaNoWriMo 2008: CotF (50,012 words)

2008-11-30T23:06:00.005-10:00

Kinda says it all, doesn't it? ^___^

Mood: Utterly Exhausted

Oct. 31st, NaNoWriMo, Exile, "Marriage"

2008-11-14T16:25:00.010-10:00

Reading: Ender in Exile, Orson Scott Card

Yes, Oct. 31st came and went, and I still don't have a 2nd draft of Book One. But I sucked it up, and started on Book Two promptly on Nov. 1st. I was making good time, too, until the proverbial shit hit the fan in one of my clinic courses, and I was forced to take a week's hiatus from noveling.

So I find myself behind the eight ball yet again.

I'm going to try to get as much as I can done this weekend--if I can coax a good 9000 words or so per day, I'll be back on track for the full 50K by Nov. 30. Gambaru!

The recent protests regarding the 52% to 48% passage of California's Prop 8 have pushed me to step up onto my soap box. I usually avoid venting my political views, but it seems that the distinctions that I find to be key to the issue are often overlooked or trodden upon by pundits on both sides.

To begin with, I side with the gay and lesbian viewpoints in that their civil unions should be granted the same rights under the law as traditional married couples. Simply put, it is constitutionally required under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, and, even without the Constitution, the time-honored principles of equity, I think, would vindicate their request for equal standing.

Nevertheless, I believe the passage of Prop 8 was a good thing.

The key battleline that most people tend to overlook is one of semantics. The institution of "marriage" extends back into antiquity; it is a cultural touchstone that has shaped human society since the dawn of time, and will likely continue to do so indefinitely. At the same time, inextricably bound up in its cultural significance is its religious meaning--it's no coincidence that the vast majority of marriages take place in churches, and are conducted by religious officials. For a great segment of the multitude of religious perspectives out there, there is spiritual and theological significance bound up in the union of a man and a woman. In this way, the term "marriage" itself is, at its core, a religious one.

Therein lies the danger in the gay and lesbian activists who clamber for their "right" to "gay marriage." They couch their demands in arguments for equal protection, but in demanding that the government sanction their expansive conception of marriage, they seek to have the government impose their view of this quintessentially religious concept upon those whose religious views endorse the traditional viewpoint. That goes beyond the rights ensured by the 14th Amendment; it trods upon the 1st Amendment right to freedom of religion, by demanding that the government impose their conception of marriage upon the masses, or, at least, endorsing it over the traditional conception. Either way, the government finds itself in a position of intermingling matters of church with matters of state, something the founding fathers would find scandalous, and antithetical to the core values of our democracy.

Thus, I find myself in the position of affording gay civil unions equal status under the law as married couples, but insisting that any government recognition of the status of those civil unions restrict itself from treading upon the religious conception of marriage. Some may warn that drawing a distinction between "civil unions" and "marriages" is analogous to the "separate but equal" fallacy of the civil rights era. But I disagree. The inherent weakness of the "separate but equal" doctrine was that the separate institutions provided to whites and blacks simply were not equal--the problem, essentially, was logistical in nature. Here, the separation of the terms "civil union" and "marriage" is semantic: it allows the government to grant equal rights to gay and lesbian unions--rights they are constitutionally due--without taking the extra and unconstitutional step of endorsing the religious viewpoint underlying those unions at the expense of those who favor the traditional conception of marriage. It ensures that neither side of the debate has their constitutional rights abased.

This distinction between "civil union" and "marriage" need only be legal in nature. If U.S. culture grows to include gay and lesbian couples within the popular purview of "marriage," that is something for our culture itself to decide. But the legal distinction must be drawn, lest we, in our zeal to uphold the rights afforded by one amendment, despoil the rights espoused by another.

ノベルの2nd Draft: Communications Blackout

2008-09-28T23:52:00.004-09:00

Thought I should make at least one post in September. Basically, I have just a little over a month left to complete the second draft of the novel by my self-imposed deadline (Oct. 31st!), all the while juggling my law school responsibilities at the same time. As a result, the going is . . . well, going to be tough, so I'm instituting an official blogging communications blackout until Oct. 31st or the 2nd draft is in hand, whichever may come first.

Here's hoping it's the latter--and peace until then.

Expresso & Publication

2008-08-23T23:09:00.003-09:00

Watching: Macross Frontier #19, The Middleman #10
Reading: A Feast For Crows, George R.R. Martin

No word count for today. Too busy gearing up for the start of the semester.

About three years ago, when I first sent out a slew of short stories to various SF periodicals, I took the advice of Stephen King (and several other authors) and established a "rejection" folder, for all of the rejection letters I would receive. And soon enough, the letters arrived for me to start my collection. All of them are the standard form letter--the only minor exception being a letter from the Writers of the Future contest, which included a handwritten note consisting of three words: "send more soon!"

Well, my novel gobbled up my off year, and then law school came by, so I never did.

Flash forward to this summer. I had a law article burning a hole in my pocket--the fore-mentioned seminar paper focusing on doujinshi, fansubs, and fair use--but refrained from submitting it on the promise of my seminar professor, who promised that he would contact his students during the summer in case any of them wanted to further refine their papers for future publication. Well, come August, and I still hadn't heard anything from him. So, on a whim, I decided to send out the paper as-is.

A note on the Expresso website is called for here. Berkeley Press has a wonderful submission hub website, which allows you to easily submit your law articles to over 500 law journals with the click of a few buttons. The only limit on the number of submissions is the size of your wallet: Expresso charges $2 per electronic submission, minus the first, which they send for free. I checked off mostly IP law journals, and sent it off.

For the first week, I received two rejection emails, and one email noting that I had submitted to a journal that only accepted student-written pieces that were authored by its own students. (Chalk that one up to an overactive clicking thumb.) Another rejection followed a few days into week two. Feeling a bit desperate, I took a (figurative) axe to my paper in order to trim it down to the rather tight space requirements of my alma mater's law review, and sent the resulting frankenstein to one of our EICs.

Then, early this morning, I received a different sort of email from one of the Expresso law journals, entitled "Offer of Publication."

While the sight of that email left me positively giddy, never for a second did I forget that the battle is only beginning. Yes, with an offer in hand, I can be assured that my paper will be published in a scholarly journal, and that I now have a publication credit add to my resume (my only other published piece was in the high school literary magazine, hardly worth a line or two of precious resume real estate).

There are, however, considerations to be made. The accepting journal is relatively new, and, from my own investigations, doesn't seem to be represented on Westlaw or LexisNexis's online databases. As a result, I would much prefer to see my article published in a journal with greater name recognition and/or a wider sphere of distribution. So the tool of choice to exact a response from as-of-yet silent law journals is the "expedited review request."

Through Expresso, one can contact all of the law journals that one has submitted to, and inform them of your standing offer and its acceptance deadline. With that deadline in mind, you then request that the journal "expedite" its review of your article, so that you'll know whether they want it before you have to give your response to the initial offerer.

So, while publication is now all but certain, it's still a waiting game.

The acceptance deadline is September 8th.

I'll keep you posted.

Cable

2008-08-15T01:08:00.002-09:00

Watching: The Middleman, Episode 9
Reading: Bitterwood, James Maxey; A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin

Today's Words: 205
Weekly Total (1 day): 205 words

Due to cable issues, I wasn't able to access the internet for the past few days, which was just as well, as I didn't get much (read: any) work done on the novel. I mean to make a strong push tomorrow and over the weekend, but today was lost to getting the cable back on line, and coaxing the muse back into place after a few days' respite.

1st Week: ~ 600 WPD

2008-08-09T20:13:00.002-09:00

Today's Words: 1051
Weekly Total (7 days): 4277 words

So for this the first week since I've started day-by-day word counts, I've averaged a little over 600 words per day. A rocky start--especially considering that one day I wrote no more than 80--but one that's likely to improve over the coming weeks, even with law school about to begin again soon. I could have written a bit more today, but I've got to get in a few hours on work-related projects as well.

2008-08-08T23:34:00.001-09:00

Today's Words: 267
Weekly Total (6 days): 3226 words

2008-08-07T23:19:00.000-09:00

Today's Words: 246
Weekly Total (5 days): 2959 words

894 Forward, 420 Back

2008-08-06T23:57:00.000-09:00

Today's Words: 1314
Weekly Total (4 days): 2713 words

1314 words/day is damned good for a nebosuke like me, but 420 of them had to be scrapped before the end. (That, and I realized that, in order to fix the problems that have been slowing me down as of late, I need to go back to the middle of Chapter 3 and rewriting my way back up.)

Oh well. Every crappy word written today is one less left for me to write tomorrow. Hopefully, soon enough, I'll have expended my quote of crap, and only the sweet, sweet ambrosia of good prose and sharp dialogue will remain.

Absens Allocutio

2008-08-05T23:39:00.000-09:00

Today's Words: 81
Weekly Total (3 days): 1399 words

New Formats and eBay

2008-08-04T22:41:00.009-09:00

Watching: The Middleman, Episode 7
Reading: A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

Yesterday's Words: 769
Today's Words: 549
Weekly Total (2 days): 1318 words

As you might have noticed, I've decided to abandon the wordmeter, at least insofar as redrafting is concerned. The steadily increasing blue bar is wonderful motivation for a writer to keep chugging along through the initial draft, but as the second (and third . . . and fourth . . .) drafts inevitably must entail some element of editing and rewriting, the trusty `meter no longer serves its inspirational purpose.

Instead, I will be posting day-to-day reports of how many new words I've managed to eek out, and, when the redrafting takes a turn toward substantive edits, I might adapt the format to reflect the number of words I've looked over, fiddled with, and hopefully made better by the end of each day.

I'm finally into new territory in Chapter 6, which represents the beginning of the portion of the first draft that I've decided to chuck out wholesale and do over completely. It extends from Chapter 6 to 10, though Chapters 11 through (can't remember exact details, but I'm going to take a stab here and say:) 22 will require substantive redrafting to get it to mesh with what I've worked out. Chapters 23 through the end are the gravy chapters, the ones that worked well from the get-go, the ones that served as shining beacons of hope while I slogged through the dregs that were my original opening chapters, and the messy plottage (an amalgam of plot and pottage that I came up with just this very second) that currently is my middle act. Now, that certainly doesn't mean that they'll require some significant revisions before they're perused by eyes other than my own; it just means that doing so should be a hell of a lot more fun than rewriting chapters from scratch.

Oct. 31st is still the goal for the second draft, after all. And if I can get a draft clean enough for some first readers to read before I sacrifice my every waking moment to the Bar review gods next summer (because though I'm no longer a lawyer-to-be, per se, I'm still graduating this Spring, and a J.D. without bar membership is like a bookend without its partner: lonely, useless, and from certain angles just plain sad), so much the better.

A convoluted but funny eBay story, all my own:

About a year ago, I purchased a used Zaurus SL-C1000 for about $230 on eBay. (The Zaurus was discontinued in mid-2006, so eBay and a few select retailers with a remaining stockpile are the only buying options nowadays.) The Zaurus, for the uninitiated, was a Sharp-branded clamshell handheld device that ran a fully functional version of Linux, a device about as firmly wedged between the roles of laptop and PDA as possible, this side of an Asus EEE. I lovingly used it for notetaking for the Fall semester, and started to put up a post on this blog showing off its neat little features and compact form factor . . . until the little guy gave up the ghost.

Basically, it just died on me, right in the middle of class. I tapped the power button. Nothing. I pressed the reset button. Nada. I took the battery out and put it back in. Ziltch.

After cursing the tech gods--and the eBay user who'd sold me the device--I scoured the internet for an explanation. The most plausible painted a dire picture: apparently, using the wrong sort of AC adapter could very easily cause the Zaurus' power fuse to blow, which then would require some surgery and soddering to bring the device back to operational status.

Now I've gone into the bowels of my electronics before, and soddering is well within my admittedly limited mechanical prowess. But in order go in, sodder, and get out with minimal loss of life and frustration, I needed a schematic to point out the connection that had burned out.

Amazingly, the Internets failed me in this regard, as Google, Wikipedia, and several Zaurii-specific forums failed to provide me with so much as a snapshot of the dreaded power fuse. Desperate, I took the Zaurus apart anyway, and scrutinized its circuits for a burnt out fuse. Sadly, I couldn't find it.

Now hope spring eternal, so I decided to see if maybe--just maybe--the problem lay in the battery rather than the device itself, so I spent about $20 on a replacement battery. It came. It didn't work, though it helped me to deduce that the precise problem was that the Zaurus wasn't charging the battery.

So, I reasoned, the solution lay in finding an external charger for my batteries. One such charger was available, though it seemed to be selling somewhere between the ungodly sums of $60-$80, plus another $20 or so for shipping. Considering what the Zaurus cost me in the first place (and that a brand-new Zaurus originally retailed for about $399), that was more than I was willing to spend on the mere chance of rehabilitation.

I noticed that a similar charger was being sold on eBay--similar in its power output, but noticably different in its configuration. Not so different, however, that I wouldn't be able to modify the terminals to accomodate the Zaurus' battery, or at least so I believed. Best of all, this charger would only set me back $9, with the cost of shipping from Hong Kong included.

Long story short, the charger worked, and the Zaurus was once again alive, though reliant on an external device and the ocassional battery swap for life support. I discovered, however, that while the original battery could still hold a charge, it simply would not power on the Zaurus. I was forced, therefore, to buy another replacement battery to complete my swap-in, swap-out plan. Another $15 sacrificed to the eBay gods.

The battery arrived, and lo and behold, the HK manufacturers had modified it to better fit the Zaurus' compartment. However, when I plugged the battery in to the AC adapter, I discovered--against all logic--that the Zaurus was charging it! Almost a year after the device failed me, a single, $15 replacement battery had set everything to right. Happy ending, right?

Happy, yes. Ending . . . not just yet.

In the Zaurus' absence, I started looking to the discontinued line of Sony Clies as a potential replacement portable. (Some may recall that I once wielded a PEG-NR70V, a monstrously large Palm-based PDA with a ludicrously huge touchscreen, a lengthwise clamshell design . . . and an hour-and-a-half battery life. [Hey, it was the turn of the 21st century. With that list of features, you had to have seen that coming.] Well, back when I bought the Zaurus, I sacrificed the NR70V to the eBay gods to be able to afford it.) I used to have some buyer's remorse shortly after buying my initial Clie when the SJ series was released six months later, as the upper models of the line matched the features of my PDA (sans ludicrously huge screen and clamshell form factor) in a device that was roughly 2/3rds as large, and to add insult to injury, roughly 2/3rds the price. But I had always had my eye on the basic PEG-SL10, which originally retailed for $120, a monochrome model that ran on two AAA batteries. Of course, the Clies were abandoned by Sony back in 2004, and in today's world of smartphones and iPhones, the PDA is quickly becoming an exercise in obsolescence.

On a whim, I decided to check the Amazon marketplace, and discovered a refurbished SL10 available for $26, shipping included. I bought it, and quickly rediscovered why I loved the Palm OS. It did everything that I needed the Zaurus to do, and in the case of handling my novel's chapters without formatting degradation, it actually does it better.

So I put the Zaurus back up for auction, along with all the accessories I'd accumulated along the way. I set an aggressive buy-it-now price of well over $300, because Zaurii are even rarer on eBay than they had been a year ago, and lo and behold, someone bought it now! I'm still waiting on payment, but if the transaction goes through, I'll actually end up making a profit on the whole Zaurus ordeal, at least as far as the dollar figures are concerned.

eBay--and the Invisible Hand--can be funny sometimes.

BICHOK, Exile, Warbreaker

2008-07-28T16:25:00.012-09:00

Redraft: Chapter 6 of 33

22632 / 139570

My progress on the redraft has been slow going as of late, in part due to a writer's blockish road hazard that required the scrapping and rewriting of the last scene of chapter 5, and in larger part due to a deadline for a prof's research assignment. It ended up taking far more time that I would have liked, but I managed to get it done by the deadline I'd promised, though it screwed up my neck something fierce to be planted in front of the computer for hours at a time. (Despite the magic of BICHOK--butt in chair, hands on keyboard--as advocated by the crew at Writing Excuses, my neck problems demand that I take periodic breaks from that position. Not taking those breaks inevitably ends with me flat on my back, as I rediscovered yesterday.) I still have another active project for the other prof, but I'm going to try to work in more redrafting time, at least a couple of hours each day.

October 31st won't wait forever, after all.

Visiting OSC's Hatrack website today, I noticed a banner that announced the November release of Ender in Exile, the long-awaited direct sequel to Ender's Game (i.e. the one that I wanted to read back in the ninth grade, but had to settle for the Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind triumvirate--which weren't bad, per se, but certainly a far cry from what I'd been longing for). I hope that OSC has successfully chanelled at least a spark of the old 80s-era Card magic, as I've grown increasingly convinced that he reached the apex of his writerly prowess before the turn of the 21st century. (One only need compare his earlier work--Hart's Hope, Songmaster, Ender's Game, etc.--with his most recent--Magic Street, Empire--to realize that his style has shifted noticably over the years, and not entirely for the better.)

Inevitably, however, returning to the Enderverse after three years (or, if one discounts the Enderless Shadow books, almost ten) will prove somewhat painful to me, I fear. Back when I first read Ender's Game, it was the gold standard against which all other fiction had to be measured, and found lacking. I really couldn't find anything to critique about it, even if I tried. I still occasionally go back to it, as a portrait artist might refer to the Mona Lisa, to give me insight into the way that a novel should be paced, how a story should flow from point to point.

As of late, however, I've begun to see certain flaws in the story--not so much a reflection of the writing or craft OSC employed, but a reflection, I think, of the potential flaws in the propensities of the author himself. Card has established a career on crafting intelligent, often times genius-level characters, and while he generally succeeds in humanizing them to the point of drawing a reader's empathy, some of the character traits he infuses them with I suspect are ones that he himself shares; and they are traits that serve, as far as I can tell, to alienate them from the reader. Perhaps that could be justified in Game; the whole plot turns on Ender's isolation from his peers, his loved ones, his superiors, and even, to a certain extent, the enemies he is destined to fight. That isolation closely parallels the estrangement many pubescents experience from the world and others around them, a link that may have in no small part contributed to the popularity of the novel, and its retroactive label as a "young adult" work. But I see strains of that alienation--something deep inside of me suspects its roots are in some nascent sense of elitism--pervade practically every character that Card has created since the new millennium. In this respect, there is a danger in borrowing too much from my first writerly shisho when modeling my own fiction.

Fortunately, I've come to know many more shisho in my time, all of whom bring with them their own distinct sets of strengths and weaknesses, both of which have helped me to respectively foster and compensate for my own. Flewelling--her consumate insights into human relationships and immersive world buidling. Sanderson--his immaculate plotting and astounding depth of his milieus. Jordan--perhaps one of the greatest milieu-smiths since Tolkien himself. And now George R.R. Martin--whose strength of prose I noted within the first page of the Prologue to A Game of Thrones, and whose character craft and turns of phrase I'm happily savoring at the moment. There are many more I've yet to look into: Vernor Vinge, Robin Hobb, Tad Williams, James Maxey, to name just a few. The gifts I've received are legion; yet the gifts I still stand to gain outnumber them. I only hope I learn enough to produce works that might serve the same purpose for another in the future that theirs has served for me.

On the subject of Brandon Sanderson, his online novel project Warbreaker provides fans and would-be writers alike a unique opportunity for insight into his editing processes, one that I hope may aid my own. He's graciously made available the first complete draft of the novel, along with each subsequent redraft all the way up to the current one--version 6.1. The novel will go through a few more rounds of edits that won't make it to the electronic page, and then be released in final form around the same time that A Memory of Light hits bookstores--sometime in the first quarter of 2009. Sanderson's hope is that if people like what they see on their computer screens, they won't hesistate to purchase the print volume when it becomes available.

I haven't read enough of the online drafts to be 100% sure, but given the lessons his drafts are likely to teach me about my own, I'd say I'll be one of those who gladly picks up the novel from the bookstore when it finally arrives.

Revolution, HHKB2, Das, Kensington

2008-07-27T01:03:00.011-09:00

Watched: Slayers Revolution #4
Reading: A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

Slayers Revolution is like coming home for someone like me, who cut his otaku teeth on the original Slayers anime, more than ten years ago. (Astroboy, of course, was my very first. But its profound age puts it in a different class than the 1990s-era anime series that my otaku sense was weaned on.) I've always viewed Slayers NEXT as the pinnacle of the series, though I appreciated TRY's attempts to expand the milieu. It's too early for me to say whether Revolution will come to rival NEXT for Slayers supremacy, but after roughly ten years of Slayers withdrawal, it is certainly good to be back in the thick of things again.

I am, however, still awaiting the reappearance of my favorite character with bated breath. Fortunately, the preview for the fifth episode indicated that Xellos will be making an appearance next week. Otanoshimi ni!

With a vow that its purchase would herald the beginning of the end, as far as my keyboard collection goes, I bit the bullet and ordered a Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 from beNippon a few weeks ago.

The diminuative, capacitive-switch keyboard didn't do much to impress me when I tried one out at Cleverly 2 in Akihabara. But to be fair, the display models looked to have been put through more than their fair share of abuse, and back then, I still considered the buckling spring keyboard to be the pinnacle of typing nirvana. Now, it's a toss-up between the Cherry brown tactiles in my Filco Majestouch, or the capacitive switches in the newly acquired HHKB2. The Filco, with its full layout, is still my mainstay keyboard of choice, while the HHKB2 is the one I'll turn to when it's time to type out my finals this 3L year. (Would it be too much to beseech the legal gods to allow would-be lawyers to type out their Bar essays this upcoming year? If not, then at least I know of one or two fountain pens that should serve me well, if I am forced to put pen to paper one last time.)

The third iteration of the Das Keyboard looked promising enough for me to pre-order it, with the belief that I would simply return it for the guaranteed refund if it failed to bunk the Filco from its pole position.

The keyboard utilizes Cherry blue tactile keyswitches, the very ones that I've heard many "clicky" keyboard enthusiasts on the geekhack.org forums describe as their favorite, besting even the renowned buckling spring switches in certain circles. My experience with the Das was mixed, however. The acoustic quality of the key clicks seemed hollow, perhaps due to the unique construction of the keyboard (I've heard reports that the previous iteration, the Das II, was far louder, and therefore, I assume, more acoustically satisfying). But worse than that, the clicks themselves seemed to throw off the natural typing tempo that I so easily maintain with the quieter cherry browns in the Filco. As a result, after a single day of experimentation, I packed up the Das and sent word back to the manufacturer for a refund.

I soon realized, however, that I would have to pay an exhorbitant amount of money to send the keyboard back, a shipping investment that the manufacturer would not reimburse. As a result, I decided to sell the practically new keyboard on eBay, assuming that I would probably be able to get a better rate of return from whatever the final bid ends up being--especially considering that, with the $99.99 preorders done with, the Das currently goes for a MSRP of $129. Better still, the winner of the auction will be the one who has to bite the shipping bullet.

All of this serves only to reinforce the consumer goods stereotype that I have come to recognize as being more of an ironclad rule than an overgeneralization: all other things being equal, a product made in Japan for the Japanese market will always be manufactured to a higher degree of quality and satisfaction than a nigh identical product made in the U.S. for the U.S. market.

The only exception to this rule--which may very well prove its veracity--follows below.

For years now, I've used a Microsoft Optical Trackball mouse as my pointing device of choice. It began in college, where desk space was at a premium, and once I switched to a trackball-type mouse, I couldn't go back to the more traditional style. However, I soon found that the thumb-reliant trackball setup exacerbated my carpel tunnel ailment, and I started a slow search for a worthy replacement.

I quickly discovered that the Kensington Expert Trackball mouse was widely regarded as the gold standard, as far as trackball-type mice go. Even on Japanese webisites, the finest--and most expensive--keyboards were always sold beside the Kensington.

Amazon provided a significant discount on the Kensington, though the wait for it to arrive via free super-saver shipping was excruciating. It does, however, live up to its expectations, and makes mousing tasks between the two screens I currently use noticably easier to boot.

Horrible (SPOILERS)

2008-07-18T22:05:00.004-09:00

I began this post moments after watching the final part of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but decided to postpone publishing it until the 20th, to minimize unintentional spoilage.

At first, the climax of Part III seemed a bit incongruous with the tone set by the first two acts. Perhaps the musical medium and witty humor lulled me into a false sense of security, as far as the plot goes. But the pathos of the conclusion--its sheer cathartic power--seems to redefine the first two acts, tempering the silliness of the first act and the comedic and emotional crescendo of the second with a hauntingly chill resonance. The ultimate effect on the viewer is both, well, horrible and beautiful at the same time.

Joss Whedon has acquired a reputation for plots laden with gut-punching twists, doing the surprising so often that, ironically, it's become something of a calling card for his productions, and therefore, Whedonesquely predictable. Nevertheless, his mould-breaking writerly ways has got me to thinking about my own. I cannot get too comfortable with the usual formula; to be poignant, events must deviate from the predicted path in a way that the reader does not expect, but finds to be utterly inevitable, once all is said and done. The writer's task is to ensure that seeds are sown well early on, and watered and tended so that the plot will reach its full fruition by the conclusion. For me, that's often a backwards process; it's not until I get to the end that I know--at least for sure--whether a main character lives or dies, or exactly how the end result I'm striving for will be attained. As a result, after I write the end, I inevitably have to go back and reincorporate the underlying elements into the earlier portions of the story. The boon is that, in the process of reincorporation, I often discover other elements that need incorporation, elements that lend a richness and depth to the story that it lacked in the first telling.

THIS WEEK ONLY: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

2008-07-16T00:56:00.011-09:00

I typically gravitate toward writing longer, more substantial entries than this, but time is of the essence, and I'd like to help spread the word as much as I can.

Joss Whedon, creator of all things shiny (read: Firefly, Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, etc.) is releasing, for FREE, during this week only, a three-part musical comedy featuring a wannabe mad scientist named Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), his superhero archnemesis Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion, and the girl who makes it all a love triangle, Penny (Felicia Day). Words really don't do it justice, so its best if you simply check it out, here:

As you can see from the site, Part I was just released yesterday. Part II comes on Thursday, July 17th. Part III on Saturday, July 19th. The episodes are also available for download on iTunes; simply search for "Dr. Horrible."

Everything disappears on the 20th, so check it out ASAP!

Slayers & Monitor

2008-07-04T23:04:00.010-09:00

On July 2, the Slayers anime series (one of my first, and a permanent fixture in my top ten list of anime) began its fourth season with Slayers Revolution, after more than ten years in hiatus. The original vocal cast returns, including the inestimable Megumi Hayashibara as the protagonist Lina Inverse, and while the animation style remains true to the series that came before, the quality has clearly been updated for 21st century standards.

It couldn't have come at a better time. The anime series that comprise my active watch list nowadays don't seem to satiate in the way they used to. The last great series I can recall was Fullmetal Alchemist, which was nearly three years ago; the others that have sprouted up to claim its place have lacked the depth of plot and character necessary to achieve a sufficient level of catharsis, and some popular series appear to garner their popularity even while troding upon the most time-honored principles of good storytelling. (I think of the absolute lack of peril to the godlike protagonist of Heroic Age as a prime example. No crisis, no interest, no story.)

Some readers may feel like paraphrasing C-3PO from Return of the Jedi, shortly after viewing this post: "I'm afraid Tensai's gone and done something rather rash."

Yes, I switched the layout of the desk since the last time I photographed it, but that wasn't the rash part.

The new Gateway FHD 2400 24" LCD monitor is. It's a widescreen, but I bought it for use in portrait aspect. Here's why:

It helps with web browsing, but when viewing documents in Word, the entire margin-to-margin page fits easily within the screen, and a single tap of the page down button actually does what it says--cycles down to show the next page, in entirety. Best of all, after an update to my Vaio's graphics chipset (and a little cursing, fist shaking, and configuring), I managed to increase the output resolution from 900x1440 to 1050x1680.

It was a bit more than I meant to spend, but freeing myself from the eyestrain of the previous 15" monitor was worth it.

Redirection, Retrograde, Hunt, Who, & Robots

2008-07-04T22:07:00.003-09:00

Watched: The Stolen Earth, Doctor Who, Series 4, Episode 12; WALL-E
Reading: The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time, Book 3)
Redraft: Chapter 6 of 31

20928 / 139570

As you can see from recent updates to the wordmeter, I wanted to push myself to commit to at least 1000 new words a day for the rest of the summer. It's a tactic Stephen King suggests in his On Writing, with a warning--from personal experience, no less--that not coming up with those words each and every day have a tendency to make a story go stale, so that you'll have to spend extra time trying to get back into the flow of things. As I've been floundering around, redrafting the preliminary chapters, I've learned on my own just how much King's warning rings true. Thus, damning all other demands on my time, I've resolved to commit to the 1000-words-per-diem requirement, at least for the duration of the summer.

Which may still be biting off more than I can chew, as you'll see below.

You see, as I've been making my way through Chapter 5 and now into the beginning of Chapter 6, I realize that I need a clearer vision of my story's milieu, and a firmer hold on the characters I'm introducing at this juncture. There is an elegance to the milieus and minor character development in my favorite books that is sorely lacking in mine, and I suspect the reason may be simple: I haven't thought things through well enough. It's a falling that links up with my weakness in developing settings, one that I'm slowly overcoming, though slowly be the operative word.

After wrestling with my 1000-word goal on Sunday for six to eight hours, I finally relented on Monday and returned to Chapters 3-4 for revamps. By early Tuesday morning, I had made some headway cleaning up the plot progression, and I felt compelled to write what I'd like to call a "retrograde" outline. Retrograde, in that it is being written after the complete text, instead of the reverse. I've only filled in summaries of the first two chapters, and the chapter titles for the other chapters, but already something seems to have fallen in place. I discovered a brand new plot element that I'll need to introduce in Chapter 1. I see a connection between two characters that heretofore had no link between them. I may not have written 1000 new words, but my efforts have broken through the inertia. To borrow an image from Robert Jordan: the Wheel turns, and the Pattern weaves what it will.

The second book in The Wheel of Time series is shorter and--I think--stronger than the first. I still stand by my belief that Jordan used the first to grow into the writer who eventually garnered such a devoted following, and a little bit of his journey remains in the first part of The Eye of the World, lodged there, perhaps unintentionally. But it taught me more in the past few weeks than a learner could reasonably expect from a mentor he will never meet in person, from a lesson begun only after the teacher had passed from this world. As Brandon Sanderson observes, there is an amazing depth of fore-planning at work in Jordan's epic; details that seem cryptic in The Eye come to the fore in latter volumes, I'm told. Now, I realize it is likely that some of those things were written before their ultimate significance could be cemented in Jordan's mind, just as others may have been intentional from start to finish. But his example has shown me the depth of vision I must aspire to--via design and serendipity alike--and my sight as a storyteller has grown deeper in the process.

I've been religiously watching the new Doctor Who ever since David Tennant took up his Time Lord mattle, despite the fact that the series has never achieved even the barest suspension of disbelief, at least to me. It's camp, but neo-camp, a kind of pulp audio-visual medium with the fit and finish of a modern dramedy series, but lacking any real internal consistency. The penulitmate episode in season 4, The Stolen Earth, is a great example. Without spoiling much, a great master plan is put into action, jeopardizing the Earth and twenty-something other "stolen" planets--and, ostensibly, the entire universe, once the plan reaches fruition--but the cliffhanger ending hinges on the fact that the Doctor is grazed by the "extermination" ray of a passing Dalek soldier, and about to undergo a regeneration.

I should pause here to explain to the uninitiated: the Time Lord "regeneration" ploy is a wonderful device used to allow the smooth passage of the Doctor's mantle from one actor to the next. Essentially, it is said that his race, the Time Lords, are capable of spontaneous regeneration when mortally wounded--the old rule of thumb was up to 13 regenerations per individual, but that rule has been breached in the past--in which they are revived in a different body, complete with its own new set of character quirks. This has allowed ten different actors to take on the role and make it their own, and given the legions of fans a plethora of reasons to argue about which doctor is "their" doctor.

Therein lies the problem with using the crisis of a "regeneration" as the episode cliffhanger. First of all, the sequence in which the Doctor is wounded is one of the most hackneyed of melodramatic shots: the slow-motion, lovers-running-across-the-expanse into-each-other's-waiting-arms sequence, which inevitably ends with one or the other being shot or otherwise intercepted before the sequence can be completed. Second, the Daleks have established a nearly mind-numbing inability to act on their strident impulses to "Exterminate!" the Doctor in the past. (Seasons 1-2 are replete with examples.) Nevertheless, this lone soldier finds his trigger (assuming that the weapon has one to pull) just in time to graze the Doctor and initiate the cliffhanger scenario.

But worst of all, besides the fact that the Doctor's feelings for Rose might change with his next regeneration (which, at this point, after said love interest has been MIA for the better part of two seasons, has the emotional potency of tepid water), the central crisis seems to eminate from the assumption, on the viewer's part, that David Tennant will no longer be playing the Doctor after the regeneration--that is, that the current actor will be replaced by the eleventh. (That is the underlying crisis; however, I believe the writers will find some convoluted means by which to keep Tennant in the role, no doubt at the expense of further compromising an already broken plot mechanism.)

It is a sad state of affairs where one of the most popular shows on BBC1 has to rely upon a matter of casting rather than plot to captivate its viewers. It's reasons such as this that Doctor Who remains a very guilty pleasure of mine--though if it continues to degenerate, who knows--it may not even remain that for very long.

The first time I laid eyes on the trailer for Pixar's WALL-E, I knew I'd have to see it during the opening weekend. I have always harbored an inexplicable affinity for robots, and so this animated movie seemed tailor made for me. (It also helped, hot on the heels of my Doctor Who rant, that Pixar has established a reputation for solid plotting along with its spectacular computer-generated visuals.) WALL-E skirts the wonderful balance that allows a movie to transcend audiences--delightful for kids, thought-provoking for adolescents, and satisfying for adults both young and old. Profundity and humor. Darkness and hope. And that thing which is often so purely distilled in dramatic representations of robots--which may be the reason they move me so: the unbridled luminescence of the human spirit, a light that we ourselves tend to forget. I was moved to tears more times that I'd care to admit during the movie, but they were tears of joy rather than sadness--bursts of kinship with thoughts and behaviors that make the experiences of our lives uniquely human.

Loeb & Linux (& Updated Wordmeter)

2008-06-29T02:37:00.000-09:00

Reading: The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan; Poetics, Aristotle
Watching: The Big Bang Theory, Season 1
Redraft: Chapter 5 of 32

19911 / 139570

In college, I noticed a neat selection of tiny green- and red-bound volumes in the office of one of my philosophy professors, and one day in the midst of a discussion I asked him about it. They were volumes from the Loeb Classical Library, he said, a series of texts published by Harvard University Press featuring writers and works from the ancient world, with one particularly useful feature: the original text (in its original language) is printed on one side of a page, while its corresponding translation is printed on the opposite, so that when the book is open at any give place, the original text and the translation can be viewed side by side. Now I read neither Latin nor Greek, but I'd been searching at that point for a pocket-sized edition of my favorites from ancient philosophy, and so the Loeb series seemed to be a godsend. The downside, however, is that each book in the 500-or-so-volume series is about $24.00 retail, which means that buying the whole bloody thing would cost as much, or perhaps even a little bit more, than a basic car. (On top of that, no matter how crazy a person might be over ancient texts, who the hell would bother to read every single volume, anyway? Even I'm not that obsessed.)

So, I decided that I'd limit my sights to a single volume: one containing, among two others, Aristotle's Poetics. One of the earliest extant analyses of the storyteller's craft, I had the pleasure of reading selections from it in high school AP English (and creating an interesting riff as one of my class projects: the Poetics of Anime). I believe the other two essays--Longinus' On the Sublime and Demetrius' On Style--are written in a similar vein, so I look forward to reading them as well.

Elysia--the ill-chosen name for my much-maligned HP Pavillion 5170 series laptop--ate one of its own system files yesterday, rendering XP unbootable. I'd long since given up on the computer--the last straw being when it blue screened while I was working on my application for law school, back in late 2005--and I had meant to dump it off on someone else for a few hundred bucks on eBay back then, but my mother decided to adopt it intead. She's been using it for email, typing notes, etc. for the past few years, but yesterday it wigged out and trapped her latest notetaking on its hard drive. The all-but-worthless repair function of the restore disks didn't work, surprise surpise, so I had to turn to a contingency I'd come across back in 2005--a Knoppix LiveCD.

Knoppix is a distribution of the Linux OS that is able to boot and run directly from the CD itself, allowing one to try out the OS without having to risk an install. One of the most useful features is that it automounts the computer's hard drives to its desktop, meaning that transfering files from the misbehaving computer to a flash drive is as easy as drag and drop. I had to download the latest distribution of Knoppix--which took about an hour or so, at 696 MB--and burn it to a CD-R, but after that everything worked out smoothly. The file was retrieved, sparing much fist shaking and nashing of teeth.

The whole ordeal has me thinking about Linux again; I'm a complete n00b in all of its arcane commands, but it's always been an object of fascination for me. Seeing as the fore-mentioned laptop is down and out until I either reinstall Windows or another OS, I thought it might be a good opportunity to give Ubuntu Linux a go.

Ubuntu has become one of the most popular distributions of Linux in recent years, and most of the buzz I've heard from those in the know is positive. It's free, and given the star-crossed nature of the hardware I'm planning to install it on, I've really got nothing to lose.

Shadows, cont'd

2008-06-25T20:32:00.003-09:00

Read: Shadows Return, Lynn Flewelling
Reading: The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time, Book 2)
Redraft: Chapter 5 of 32

17609 / 139570

Found myself in the unusual quandary of having two books burning holes in my pockets at the same time yesterday, as I had cracked into the first few chapters of The Great Hunt as I waited for Shadows Return to be released. But my anticipation for Flewelling's latest won out, and in the end, there wasn't much of a conflict: I finished Shadows Return by the end of the day. (That it was shorter than the previous Nightrunner books was one reason; that it was well-written and plotted--though perhaps a bit more linear and less multi-layered than some of the previous books--was another.) I get the distinct impression that it was the first half of a book that grew too long in the telling, and therefore had to be split up into two in order meet publisher demands. The fact that the next book is projected for 2009 would seem to reinforce that suspicion. That is one thing that Flewelling seems deficient in; after being spellbound by her work in The Bone Doll's Twin, I was utterly gobsmacked by the terse and virtually cut-off ending to the book. She sheers the end a bit more smoothly in Return, but it still feels hasty.

Meanwhile, I've continued well past the middle point in The Great Hunt, and am continually impressed by Jordan's world building. I've come to realize that, with the years its spent percolating in my mind, my own novel has worked up quite a milieu of its own, but nevertheless, there is much I still have to learn, and I'm glad to have found several masters capable of teaching me what I need to know.

Dragon, Shadows, & Fragments

2008-06-24T02:58:00.004-09:00

Reading: The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time, Book 2)

Robert Jordan passed away last September of a rare blood disease, with eleven of a planned twelve books written in his acclaimed The Wheel of Time series. I had never read them, and I might never have, had his wife not read Mistborn, and chosen Brandon Sanderson to finish what Mr. Jordan started.

Ever since I finished Elantris and Mistborn, I vowed to read everything that Sanderson ever penned, unless some future book disappoints me so completely as to sour me towards his writing forever. As The Well of Ascension proved that that day is far, far away (if it ever comes, God forbid), I realized that I'd never be able to read A Memory of Light without reading the other 11 books first. So, even as I picked up the books from Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series from Border's, I bought The Eye of the World (a rare $6.99 paperback in this brave new world filled with $7.99s) and figured it would be as good a read as any to bide my time until June 24th, when the fourth Nightrunner book would be released.

Well, simply put, it was.

It took Jordan the better part of the 800+ page book to get into his own, but by the end his was a terribly well-rendered world with distinct, memorable characters, and that wonderful sense of bigger things to come that lies at the core of every sprawling epic. I have heard opinions that Jordan's writing floundered a bit in the latter books, but the man's passion for his creation never waned; it is said he dictated the rough outline of what he foresaw for the last book from what would prove to be his deathbed. And knowing that Brandon Sanderson is the one who has been tasked with breathing life into that outline gives me great hope for what the ending of Jordan's epic might bring. He isn't the best at the craft, but he is a worthy mentor all the same, and the world is just a bit dimmer for his passing so early (for what are the mid-fifties in the 21st century but the prime years of one's adult life?), when he could have brought forth so much more wonderment and magic.

Though I could not have known the man or his works in life, I am glad that his The Wheel of Time series remains to light the path that he left behind.

Today is the 24th, so very shortly I'll be delving back into Flewelling's world of Aurenfaie, warrior queens, and beautiful gods of death. Expect an update (or another post) once I'm through.

Finally, I thought it might be of interest to some that I've written this post on the ultra-tiny keyboard of my Asus EEE laptop. Why? Because my Vaio's going through a defragmentation at the moment, and doing nothing while the computer cleans itself--especially when there's another perfectly good computer waiting in the wings--is just plain silly.

Aphorisms, Associates, Zones, & Teleologies (& Wordmeter)

2008-06-22T03:32:00.000-09:00

Reading: The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
Redraft: Chapter 5 of 32

17075 / 139570

"An artist is he who feels that the last word of creation hasn't been spoken yet: and that he was sent into the world to utter it."

-- Hermann Bahr, literary critic (1863-1934)

So reads an aphorism attributed to Mr. Bahr in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, one of the best collections of aphorisms I've come across. Instead of a hodgepodge of different aphorists cobbled together under rough headings (Love, Art, Death, etc.), Geary's organizes by the calling of the aporists, with a suitable index for subject-based searches. Bahr's quote is one of the best encapsulations of my perspective on creative writing: in many ways, it's as close to playing God as we creative types can get.

(You may note the link above contains an interesting referral code: talefromasoft-20. Yes, I've finally broken down and joined the Amazon Associates program. So if you do ever happen to find yourself interested in a product that I link to, please feel free to purchase it through the provided link; it costs you nothing, and I end up reaping a small percentage for it. Or, if you're feeling charitable, shop at Amazon through this link.)

One of the subject blogs that I occasionally visit is Moleskinerie.com--essentially, a blog centering around that famous little black notebook, new and exciting iterations of it, and the various uses different people find for it. Moleskinerie linked to another blog called The Writer's Bag, on which I disovered an article about getting into the writing "zone."

Essentially, the "zone" is where you become so involved in the piece you're writing that time seems to stand still: one moment, you're setting down to write after lunch, and several pages later, you realize the sun's gone down, and your stomach is growling for some dinner. Despite being somewhat distraction-prone, I've eased myself into such a state a few times while writing my first draft (though not as often as I would have liked), and I last touched upon that zone while revamping the second half of Chapter 3. Since then, my other summer obligations proved too much of a distraction for me to find my way there again.

My solution? Well, I'm actually writing it right now. Putting down these words is a great segueway for me; once I have a rhythm here, it's rather easy to transpose that momentum to the fiction writing front. Another tried-and-true source of writerly momentum is reading a really good book; in fact, the zoneful progress on Chapter 3 was due in part to my reading the Nightrunner series at the time. Nothing seems to whet my appetite for my own imagined milieu like submerging myself in the milieu of another, and the better the experience, the more powerful the drive. In my estimation, Flewelling is something of a master when it comes to pacing, so much so that often times within a hundred pages of the book's end my plan actually backfired, in that I couldn't bear to tear myself away from the story to go and work on my own. Jordan's book has a more bucolic opening, which has at the same time allowed me to sip the story rather than chug it, but also kept me from reaching the zoneful state that I want to.

Which brings me back to this entry. If inspiration won't come to you, then you'd better be prepared to track it down yourself.

While I'm in a reflective mood, I thought it might be a good time to mull over some of the reasons for my recent change of heart regarding the practice of law. I think of life changes as a change in teleologies: swapping one final end for another in the midst of one's journey. I've made a few admissions up to this point, but a few others should join them.

One, I've been hearing (and ignoring) a call toward fiction writing for a long time now. My law school experience has taught me that one should pursue the things that one is passionate about, rather than those things that one finds tolerable or mildly interesting. Mildly interesting is how I would describe my relationship with the law; I find its intricacies intreguing on an intellectual level, but it does not move me, spiritually or emotionally, in the way I've seen certain areas move others at the law school, professors and peers alike.

It would be one thing if nothing moved me; that would mean that I'm still searching, and some people have to search for their passions longer than others. But it is quite another when I find my attention drifting to storywriting in every unguarded moment, when I realize that I could writing for twelve hours a day (as some others gladly toil on their passions) and never consider it work (though at it's core, good writing always is). That is where your passion lies: where you would gladly do what others consider to be "work" every day for the rest of your life. Not because the task is easy--in fact, passion and ease strike me as two diametrically opposed concepts; it is in agon that our truest passions are full-born. Such conflict rarely arises in a life devoid of challenges--a life of ease.

Two, I forsook the path of a writer because I too greatly feared the archetype of the starving artist. Many who attempt to make a living as an artist fail in the attempt, if not for lack of artistic talent then for the inability to generate a proper income. In this light, I always viewed legal practice as a kind of safety net; even if my writerly pursuit refused to bear fruit, at least I'd still be able to pay the bills. In this, I neglected the biblical adage that one cannot serve two masters; one will inevitably spurn one, and adore the other. Beyond that, each master deserves his servant's undivided attention; in seeking to compartmentalize writing and practice alongside one another, I inevitably would have neglected both. It wouldn't have been fair to my clients if I labored on my writing in place of work product. Nor would it have been honorable to join a firm who welcomed me as a potential new partner, only to spurn their interest and investment the moment that writing alone proved itself viable. As I waited for the last of the OCI employers to make their decisions last fall, I wondered if I would have to place myself in the awkward position of turning down a summer offer not because I had already accepted another, but because my heart was no longer in it. (No refusal is quite the slap to the face as "No, thank you, but I no longer have the heart to become what you already are.") But perhaps the firms saw something in me that I myself didn't until many weeks later, as none of them chose to place me in that awkward position. (Now that I think about it, I did pray, prior to the OCIs, that I would receive no offers but the one that was right for me. Of course, at the time when I prayed it, I assumed that my rightful place lay among the firms I met with.)

Although it pains me to admit it, a third reason for my change in outlook is what I discerned laid among my motivations for pursuing a legal career in the first place. I am by nature a very insecure person (though I suppose such is true of everyone, to one extent or another), and so part of my reasons for seeking to become a lawyer lay in the prestige and accolades that come with establishing oneself as a pillar of the legal community. Such impetus does not a meaningful career make, and it horrified me to realize that, once I stripped this prize away, the remaining rewards of private legal practice seemed, at least to the bias of my eye, paltry indeed.

I note with regret that I have rarely taken much wisdom first hand from sermons in my time, despite a life-long faith in Christianity. Much of my personal theology was forged in silent communion with my Creator, so perhaps it should be no surprise that many of the lessons that strike other parishioners as epiphanies are often to me things heard at least once before. Nevertheless, in my recent decision the testimony of one pastor stood as a cautionary tale for me, one that barred a path that I, if not forewarned, might have taken, never realizing that it was a detour until many years down the road. He was once a lawyer himself, and a judge after that, before he was called to serve as a pastor. Once of the greatest vices he had to overcome was his own hubris, his pride in the vestments and authority of his position. They say that Wisdom teaches gently, though her lessons can only be gleaned by those who are willing to listen. Experience teaches those who cannot, and though she is a harsher instructor, she is equally effective. By that pastor's testimony, I like to think that my ears were perked up just enough to hear Wisdom's gentle whisperings, before Experience could step in to take her toll.

Pride and the other Seven Sins--and in truth, all of human emotion, both good and ill--are strangely conflicted things. The most timid and doubtful among us are, paradoxically, often times just as prideful as those who boast of their virtues like crows cawing in the chill of the night. To a great extent, it is the secret pride harbored within our hearts--the belief that we are better than others, and the associated desire to live up to those expectations--that impels us to keep silent sometimes when we alone know the answer, for fear that, once uttered, our convictions will be proven wrong. In this way does pride often abide strongest in those who seem the most abject; it is pride that shames them in the most casual of missteps, a belief that they should be far better that makes them obsess over the mistake. In the same way, pride itself is born of insecurity: intrinsic to the belief that one is better than another is the doubt, the fear that one in fact is not. Pride, then, is not an end in of itself, but a byproduct of a desperate, voracious need for validation.

It is the same for the other Seven: Sloth is born of a need for convictions; without them, one collapses in on oneself. Lust, in turn, is born of desperation for love. Greed, for sufficiency. Gluttony, for satiation. Envy, for fulfillment. Wrath, for understanding.

Even my newly chosen path is not devoid of dangers. Pride can enter the heart of any writer who muses that his prose could bring Shakespeare to his knees; envy festers at the heart of every author who covets the success, financial or otherwise, of the fortunate and gifted few like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. But passion--love for the craft itself, and the creations that spring forth from it--can conquer even the mightiest of the Seven, if one pursues it for a purpose greater than one's own.

For me, that purpose is inextricably bound with the great intention I perceive in every stitch of the manifold tapestry of existence, the gentle touch of the Creator imbued in every living moment. For others, it need not be couched in the same religious or metaphysical terms. But I suspect the underlying conviction is largely the same. As for me, as I cast my mind's eye over the sum total of creation, I know that I am but the tiniest cog in a monumental machine whose ultimate end I may never fully see. Nevertheless, there is a place appointed for me within the construct; there is a role that I must fulfill.

And I, a cog gifted with the power to decide whether to turn or not, choose to do so willingly.

Nightrunner & Knives (Now With Pictures!) ^__^

2008-06-17T23:23:00.004-09:00

Read: Lynn Flewelling, Luck in the Shadows, Stalking Darkness, & Traitor's Moon
Reading: Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, Book One)
Redraft: Chapter 4 of 32

16081 / 139570

After the poignant Tamir trilogy, I was only too happy to look into Lynn Flewelling's previous work, set in the same world as the trilogy, but several centuries in the future. The first two books in the "Nightrunner" series resolves a plot thread alluded to in the trilogy but never completely resolved--it couldn't have been, it turns out, as it had already been resolved in a story written several years before, but taking place roughly four hundred years later. The plot along the series descends into dark waters similar to those in the trilogy, but overall there is more an an adventure feel to the series. It feels--and is, by design--more open ended. The overarching plot arc of the trilogy centered on the coming of age of the central character, and her fulfilling her prophecized destiny; once she did so, the story was clearly at an end (though like every good entertainer, Flewelling leaves her reader wanting more).

In the Nightrunner series, the adventures of the Aurenfaie spy Serengil and his protege (and eventual lover) Alec are far less rigid. I was surprised at first to find that the series had been appropriated by many Amazon.com user lists involving "gay fantasy"--my first impression from that affiliation cast dark romance-novel aspersions on the series. However, upon reading the books, I discovered that, as in the Tamir trilogy, the main characters travail a good amount before friendships blossom into something more. On top of that, the relationship between the two mains develops behind the scenes between the second and third novels, and while it features in the third novel, it is done in a low-key manner that suborinates the relationship to the story rather than the other way around. I'm no slash fan (not on principle; simply not my cup of tea), but the relationship is well-rendered and easy to empathize with. As luck would have it, the fourth book in the series is due for publication on the 24th of this month, so I won't have to wait too long for the next installment in this worthwhile series.

Until then, the first book in Robert Jordan's ponderous The Wheel of Time series should be more than enough to carry me through.

From keyboards to desks to pens . . . my acquisitive nature has turned toward the kitchen in its latest escapades. I've been biding my time to select my own chef's knife, and after a prolonged consultation with various knife forums, I chose a Japanese brand that's known for giving people the most bang for the buck: the Tojiro DP series. It's a 8 1/4" chef's knife with a core of high-carbon steel encased on top and on the sides with a layer of chromium-laced stainless steel, to add both durability and the reactivity of the cutting edge, which is rated at an approximate hardness of 60 on the C. Rockwell scale, a good deal harder than most european-style knives. It's the same technique that's used on the well-known Shun series of knives (endorsed by none other than my cooking shishou, Alton Brown), sans the damascus patterning. Also, rather than a price tag between $150 and $200, I got the Tojiro DP from Korin.com for a measly $49.95.

I also found a 4 1/4" folding cook's knife (santoku-style blade) from A. G. Russell's:

Both are razor sharp, and I picked up a honing steel from Korin.com to keep them that way as long as possible. Might have to look into investing in a couple of whetting stones before the end of the year.

Wordmeter & Tamir

2008-06-10T17:56:00.010-09:00

Read: Lynn Flewelling, The Bone Doll's Twin, Hidden Warrior, & The Oracle's Queen
Reading: Lynn Flewelling, Luck in the Shadows
Redraft: Chapter . . . 4 of 32 (There's a reason for this. See below.)

After two years, it's officially back:

13474 / 139570

The blue bar represents the number of words in my novel that have passed from first to second draft. The current word count represents the first three chapter's worth. The second number was the final word count of the first draft--without a doubt, the word count will shift as I bring the book from first to second draft.

(Incidentally, if you look at the picture of my desk in the last post, you'll see a large stack of paper on the shelf beside the laptop, bound by three very large rings. That's the manuscript as it was at the time.)

Between the last post and this one, I actually worked my way into the beginning of the new Chapter 5, but quickly fell into a quagmire. The set up I'd used in the first draft was holey to begin with, but I'd sloshed through it simply to get to the good parts, and also to get the bloody thing finished. With the redraft, it's time to pay the piper, and had to bash my head against the first bit of writer's block I've had since starting the redraft. It seems that my abilities have grown a bit since the last time the block and I met, because it only waylaid my progress for a single evening. The price of my solution, however, was rewriting much of my redraft, starting with middle of Chapter 2, and the whole of Chapters 3 and 4. I put the final period mark on the new Chapter 3 this weekend, and work had me occupied until this evening, so I'll set pen to paper (OK, fingers to keyboard) tonight. I'll post another wordmeter once Chapter 4 is squared away again.

As I've mentioned before, my goal is to have a second draft complete by this October, so I write a fresh 50,000 words' worth of the second book as a part of NaNoWriMo 2008 in November. Law school, work, and other non-noveling responsibilities be damned. I'm adding another goal to the pile, however: by the end of Summer 2009 (which will include the bar exam, happy happy joy joy), I'll have the first book in as good a shape as I can manage myself, and then it'll be time to call upon my early readers. (You know who you are; and if you want to be, just drop me a line.)

I've told only one other person so far, but these books are a part of a currently three- to four-book series, with two prequel novels also planned. Each will be stand-alone (though truth be told, for what I envision the 3rd book to be, that may not be easy), so hopefully, if I can get any one of the group published, the others will have a fighting chance as well.

After I vowed to reread a bunch of the best books that I read last year, I went back and read a book that I bought in 2006 but never got around to: The Bone Doll's Twin, by Lynn Flewelling. Three days later, I'd gone back to the bookstore, and finished the following two books in the "Tamir Triad," Hidden Warrior and The Oracle's Queen.

Bone Doll finds Flewelling at a transitional phase in her writing prowess, I think. The first few chapters are passable, interesting, with a well-fleshed out milieu, but lack the polished prose that I've come to expect of first-tier speculative fiction. By the middle of the book, she seems to find her stride, and, though I picked up the book with the intent of redeeming myself for my Mistborn binge and learning Stephen King's lesson about reading both in big gulps and little sips, I couldn't put the book down, and rocketed to buy the other two books the moment the store opened. Reading the other books back to back, it was an exhausting but transcendent experience, highly recommended to anyone, fantasy fan or otherwise.

The premise is an interesting one: "For three centuries a divine prophecy and a line of warrior queens protected Skala. But the people grew complacent and Erius, a usurper king, claimed his young half sister's throne. Now plague and drought stalk the land, war with Skala's ancient rival Penimar drains the country's lifeblood, and to be born female into the royal line has become a death sentence as the king fights to ensure the succession of his only heir, a son. For King Erius the greatest threat comes from his own line--and from Illior's faithful, who spread the Oracle's words to a doubting populace.

"As noblewomen young and old perish mysterious, the king's nephew--his sister's only child--grows toward manhood. But unbeknownst to the king or the boy, strange, haunted Tobin is the princess's daughter, given male form by a dark magic to protect her until she can claim her rightful destiny. Only Tobin's noble father, two wizards of Illior, and an outlawed forest witch know the truth. Only they can protect young Tobin from a king's wrath, a mother's madness, and the terrifying rage of her brother's demon spirit, determined to avenge his brutal murder . . ."

The trilogy sees Tobin-cum-Tamir grow from a frightened, isolated boy to the warrior queen she was destined to be, and is filled with memorable and wonderfully rounded characters. But the interaction between Tamir and Ki, the low-born knight's son chosen as her companion, is where the story truly shines. As boys they are the fastest friends, brothers in all but blood, but once her true self is revealed, the nature of their relationship necessarily changes along with it. A beautifully written tale, the only thing I can really cite against it is that the first book ends without real resolution, almost necessitating the purchase of the following book or two.

There is much I can learn from Flewelling, so she now joins the pantheon of other authors whose works serve as much-needed lighthouses for me as I navigate my own work to its intended port of call. Because I still haven't had enough, I'm working through her Nightrunner series, which is thankfully set in the same world as the Tamir trilogy, though several centuries later. I'm currently on the first book, and have two more to tide me over until the fourth is released at the end of this month. After that (or in the interim between third book and fourth), I've broken down and purchased the first book of Rober Jordan's The Wheel of Time epic, The Eye of the World, and have queued George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series as well.

Reprise: Pens & Desk, F-Word, The 3 "Re-"s

2008-05-28T21:05:00.005-09:00

Watching: The F-Word, Seasons 1-3
Playing: The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS)
Redraft: Chapter 4 of 32
Reread: On Writing, Stephen King

It's been more than a month since I posted pictures, and as I recently received what (hopefully) will be the last fountain pen I'll buy for quite some time, I thought it'd be a good time to check up on how much things have changed since then.

First, here's what the desk looks like now:

As you can see, I've doubled up on a few things, namely keyboards and monitors. After getting on rather well for a few weeks with the new Filco keyboard, my fingers were longing for the Kinesis Contoured again. The solution? I reattached the keyboard drawer from my previous desk and placed the Filco and trackball mouse on it. The Kinesis is the big black device situated in front of the monitors.

Because my main computer is a laptop, it can't by itself support the symmetrical dual screens that I've always wanted. The next best thing is to spread my desktop across the external monitor and the onboard laptop monitor. The two screens make strange bedfellows: the external is a 15-inch Samsung SyncMaster 151v, 1024x768 resolution, roughly six years old and a hand-me-down from my dad after I convinced him to upgrade to a new, more vibrant 19-incher. The Vaio's screen is an 11.1-inch LED-lit LCD, a whopping 1366x768 resolution crammed into that small real estate. That means that the dots-per-inch between the two monitors are noticeably dissimilar, so that text that looks just right on the external will seem microscopic on the other. I might try to replace the aging external with a larger and more lucid screen, but that's some time away, I think.

I realized earlier in the month that I needed to cut back on the FPs, so I decided to draw the line on the FP I've been eyeing since the beginning: the Lamy 2000.

Along with the Pilot/Namiki Capless, the 2000 has won over most of the FP aficionados as far as non-traditional designs go. Originally designed in 1966 (the same year that a certain future-themed TV show began to boldly go) as the FP of the future, the design has changed very little in the forty-plus years this pen has been in production.

The pen uses an integrated piston filing system, so there's no mucking about with converters. The body is composed of Makrolon plastic with a wood finish, and the seam between the main body and the piston mechanism is invisible once the chamber is filled.

The tip is partially hooded by the metallic grip.

The nib is platinum-plated 14-karat gold, but has less flex to it than the Decimo. I decided to fill it with Noodler's Eel Blue. I realize I never gave a side-by-side writing comparison for the previous FPs, and I received a Pilot Prera (an intermediate FP roughly equal to the Lamy Vista in price and quality) since the last pen post, so here's a comparison of my four FPs:

From top to bottom: Lamy 2000 (Noodler's Eel Blue), Lamy Vista (Noodler's Baystate Blue), Pilot/Namiki Prera (Noodler's Eel Blue), and Pilot/Namiki Capless Decimo (Noodler's Bulletproof Black).

I am addicted to cooking shows, though the current Food Network lineup (sans Good Eats and the cooking competitions) doesn't do it for me anymore. As a result, I've been watching shows from the BBC like Jamie at Home and Gordon Ramsay's The F-Word.

The F-Word is Ramsay's current flagship program in the UK, featuring a smorgasbord of competition (groups of amateur chefs trying to win a chance to work for / run Ramsay's restaurant for a single service), random food issues (from the production of foie gras to the reasons why people shouldn't throw used cooking oil down the drain), and the season-long ordeal of Ramsay and family picking, raising, and then slaughtering and cooking a group of turkeys (season 1), pigs (season 2), and lambs (season 3). It's strange how much one can pick up from just watching culinary professionals do what they do, though it's always sobering to remember that as much as the mind may pick up from watching, one's cooking skills only improve with actual cooking time. (Though a bit of book knowledge often goes a long way.)

The first "Re-" is for Redraft. As you can see, I'm still on Chapter 4 this week (though, truth be told, I was just barely finishing Chapter 3 when I posted last week). I'm beginning to hit the wall in that I've begun to write into the point where I'm going to have to drastically revamp the plot, so I'm repeating the painful process of writing a section for the first time. I wholeheartedly subscribe to Ernest Hemingway's time-honored adage, at least as far as my own writing is concerned: "The first draft of anything is crap." (OK--Hemingway said "shit," but I never liked the word apart from its use as an exclamation ("Oh, shit!"), and I think "crap" sounds better to boot.) I think I might need to resort to working out a new outline for chapters 4 through 10 in order to get back on track.

The second "Re-" is Reread. I recently reread Stephen King's On Writing, or at least the portions about writing. I think the best books stand up well to multiple readings, and King's is no exception. I've decided to reread some of the best books that I've read in the past few years--The Name of the Wind, The Thirteenth Tale, Old School, The Princess and the Hound--this time not as a reader, but as a writer, picking each apart to see what writerly skills I can divine from each. Essentially, I want to figure out exactly what it was that fascinated me in the first place. I'll report on each one as I complete them, starting with On Writing.

On Writing should really join other classic fiction writing books like Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing. It does two things equally well at alternating times: pass on the gems King gleaned from telling stories and unveil King's own life story. In a way, the two are inextricably bound; where does one separate the writer from the man? (I'm certainly the person least ideally poised to answer that question. I'm not even sure it can be done.)

One of the greatest lessons that King has taught me is to write the first draft with the door closed, and the second with the door open. That piece of advice contemplates Hemingway's--you write the first draft purely for yourself, to experience the story firsthand. The last thing you should be worrying about at that fledgling stage is what others might think if their eyes happened upon the paragraph you've just finished penning or typing. As I've learned through personal experience, that's one of the surest paths toward writer's block. You write with the door closed to symbolically cordon the world out--when you're still pathfinding your tale, you're the only audience that matters.

Writing the second draft with the door opens means that you should redraft with your readers in mind--in particular, what King calls the "Ideal Reader." For King, that reader is a real person, or at least his mental version of her: Tabitha King, his wife. But I think it needn't be. Essentially, the Ideal Reader is simply the reader you envision to be the one you'd want to enjoy your tale.

The third and final "Re-" is Research. As in I've just been assigned to pull every federal district court case featuring the National Parks Service as a plaintiff or defendant from the last eight years. That, as a rough estimate, could amount to more than 400 cases, each of which I'll have to summarize and organize in a memo for my Prof by next week. Fortunately, I won't be printing the cases out, as the Prof said that a collection of the cases in electronic form would be good enough (and it ought to be--I'd rather not contemplate the irony of the Environmental Law Program killing reams of trees to print out 400 cases featuring the National Parks Service. If every scholar did that, the Service would be out of business--there'd be no parks to serve, because there'd be no trees to put in them!).

Lawyer, Heroes, WEWY, Davids

2008-05-21T17:22:00.007-09:00

Read: The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connelly
Playing: No More Heroes (Nintendo Wii), The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS)
Redraft: Chapter 4 of 32

I found a hardcover copy of Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer in the bargain stack at Barnes & Noble, which was the excuse I'd been waiting for to look into this titan of the mystery genre. Interestingly enough, I had acquired the audiobook version of the book about a year ago, but had never gotten around to listening to it. After reading the first few chapters in print, I finished it off with the audio version.

Connelly has the genre down cold; his straightforward prose is the kind of writing I'd hope to produce if I ever tackle a book in that vein. Moreover, as far as my law student knowledge goes, he seems to have the legal jargon and experience of a criminal defense attorney down pretty cold. I found myself craving more--and discovered that a sequel, bringing Lawyer's Michael Haller and Connelly's mainstay protagonist, Harry Bosch, together. Proving that it never rains but it pours, the release date is Oct. 14--the same day the third Mistborn novel will be released.

I managed to play No More Heroes for a few more hours last week, raising my assassin ranking from 10th to 9th and trading in my beam katana for a new model. It's a great game with an irrepressibly cool style, for a great price--so if you have a Wii and $30 in your pocket, there's really no excuse not to buy it.

The World Ends With You (Subarashii Kono Sekai, or "This Wonderful World" in Japanese) is Square Enix's non-FF entry into the DS market, with character designs from the designer of Kingdom Hearts, and a unique "pin"-based fighting system that has players potentially controlling two characters at once--the main on the touchscreen with touch controls, and the partner on the top screen with the keypads. Add a hip-hop/J-pop soundtrack and Square Enix's usual brand of plotline insanity, and you end up with a game that may be among the best on the DS. Playing the entire game through could take more than 20 hours--perhaps even more than 30 if played for completion. The control scheme takes some getting used to, but it's a must buy for any Square Enix fan, or any gamer who likes games that force you out of the usual box.

I usually ignore a season of American Idol after I've had a good laugh at the (un)talent showcased during the audition episodes. I don't subscribe to the judges taking pot shots at people for their appearance or social awkwardness, but I have no qualms about laughing my ass off at tone-deaf delusionals who are utterly convinced that theirs is a talent for the ages, and attempt to prove it by puffing up their egos to, quoting the Doctor, the exact size of Belgium. Occasionally a member of the top 10 catches my fancy to the point where I occasionally tune in to monitor their progress as the finalists are whittled down.

David Cook won my unwavering audience with his rendition of "Hello," which I still find to be his finest performance. Any singer who can take on a well-known song like that and utterly own it--blowing Lionel Richie's original rendition not only out of the water, but into outer space--earns my interest, and I was pleased to see him consistently prove that he has what it takes to be a great performing artist--a great voice and a great ear for music--with or without the American Idol crown.

David Archuletta impressed me as well, having as good (or better) a voice as Cook and proving, with his late-round triumphs in song selection, that he may have the better ear too. That Archuletta is only 17--a full eight years younger than Cook--only makes his accomplishments even more praiseworthy. But Archuletta is, for lack of a better term, a love songster, and no matter how well he sings his genre of songs, Cook will always win more style points for his rocker stylings.

*SPOILER: For those hoping to enjoy the American Idol Finale, please do not read any further until you have witnessed the results.*

Cowell was mostly right the night before: Archuletta dominated the final performance show, consistently out-picking and out-performing Cook in each of the three rounds. (In my opinion, though, the second round went to Cook for doing more with his song than Archuletta did with his.) But it seems that, in crowning Cook the winner of season 7, America agrees with my appraisal of the genres.

Rock beats love songs every time.

Wii, Mistborn, Revisions, NaNoWriMo

2008-05-14T15:20:00.006-09:00

Read: Mistborn & The Well of Ascension, Brandon Sanderson
Playing: No More Heroes (Nintendo Wii)
Redrafting: Chapter 3 of 32

In the latest demonstration of the fact that I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, the luckiest member of my family, my mom won a Nintendo Wii at a school raffle last week. And, in a demonstration of the fact that it is good to have said luckier family members, that Wii is now a fixture in my room. (The living room TV has no AV ports to spare. Mine, as luck would have it, does.)

I inaugurated the Wii with the one exclusive game that I've had my eye on for quite some time: No More Heroes, by Ubisoft. It's an action game with some interesting gameplay mechanics, a semi-otaku main character, and major style points for presentation. It also is one of the few games for Nintendo's hardware to sport a MA-17 rating.

Top all that off with the fact that it was on sale at Gamestop for $29.99, and you end up with quite a nice deal.

Not that I've been able to play much of it this week.

Instead, I picked up Mistborn from where I dropped it (read: lost it) in my room about two years ago. It was the second book by the precocious Brandon Sanderson, a new power in the Fantasy industry whose debut novel Elantris impressed me mightily. While Elantris was a stand-alone novel, Mistborn was heralded as the first in a trilogy, which I looked forward to, especially since my first novel is essentially part of what may end up as a tetralogy or quintology. Sanderson has a strong grasp of character and plot, but what impressed me the most was his ability to create a tightly woven milieu with its own internal logic and cohesion. Since the beginning, my weakest attribute as a writer has been setting, in which milieu plays an integral part, especially in speculative fiction. Studying at the feet of masters has been one of the greatest sources of improvement for me, so reading Sanderson's latest works have been a wonderful crash course on the subject.

Of course, I never read a novel for didactic quality alone.

His novels are also just plain fun. The plots are fresh and largely unpredictable (a positive aspect for me, since I can generally predict the plot of any given hour-long TV drama within the first 20 minutes), but nevertheless inevitable in a way that satisfies the reader. He can turn a phrase when he wants to, but he doesn't have quite so lyrical a grasp of language as some of the others I turn to for a good read.

In any event, I finished Mistborn over the weekend, and then, realizing from the copyright that it had been published in 2006, wondered if the second book in the series had already been released.

It had. In 2007.

So I rushed down to Borders (Barnes and Noble didn't have any copies; the paperback is due out in June 3) and grabbed a copy (when it comes to a really good book, who can wait for Amazon.com's free shipping?), and read it in just about a day. Which, in retrospect, was a bad thing, since the third and final book in the trilogy isn't due for release until October 14th.

Rationing was never my strong suit.

But, on the bright side, a strong influx of good narrative prose often gets the creative juices flowing on my part, so I've broken through the "revising" part of my redraft and have started working on the substantive, well, redrafting--that is, throwing out crap chapters and rewriting them from scratch. In the process of writing the first draft, I knew that the initial chapters would need some serious attention in the redrafting stage, but I ignored the whinny voice in my head because my goal was to have a completed (read: crap) draft come hell or high water. Now that I've got that, it's time to get a completed (read: passable) redraft for possible first reader feedback. (Possible, because if I still feel that the redraft isn't up to snuff, then it'll face a redraft of its own.)

I've also set the tentative goal of having the redraft of the novel completed by the end of summer, or at least before November, which is the traditional NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Lunatic wordsmith that I am, I've decided to draft at least the first 50,000 words of the second novel in the series as my part of the NaNoWriMo frenzy. (There are numerous sound industry arguments against writing the sequel to a novel that has yet to--and, therefore, likely will not--be published. To those arguments, I say: I have to do what I have to do, and if that means writing out a multi-book story arc to its conclusion before moving on to another, perhaps more marketable stand-alone, then so be it. Besides, one of my goals as a writer is to never publish a novel that requires the reader to be familiar with my previous work. I seek--and only time will tell if I can be consistent on this count--to have every book in a series work as a stand-alone novel in its own right, even if some of these "stand alones" may end up with something of a cliffhanger ending.)

And yes, my NaNoWriMo participation will take place during my 3L year at law school. If nothing else, law school drills time management and multitasking into your brain like few other graduate schools, so I don't think I've bitten off more than I can chew.

Well, that's enough blogging for one week. Back to the redraft.

Barely an Admiral

2008-05-08T01:36:00.003-09:00

Gleaned this test from the podcast "Make It So." My score was 939 (or 93.9% correct)--what's yours?

2YS, Teaching, Fountain, Iron

2008-04-29T16:45:00.010-09:00

Reading: The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch, with Jeffrey Zaslow
Watching: To Rabu Ru #1 (To Love Ru, pronounced "tora-buru" which sounds like the Japanese pronunciation of "trouble")

I have a ritual that I like to go through when it comes to academic papers. I like to front load the work, and that way have a polished draft ready for professorial consumption at least a day or two in advance of the actual due date.

Why?

Because at our core, we're all show boaters, in our own little way. Some are more overt at it than others. Me, I subscribe to the precept that the loudest voice isn't necessarily the one with the biggest impact. Like the old proverb, it isn't the howling winds or pouring rain that defines strength amidst a hurricane; it's the tiny leaf unmoved by the storm. Turning in a paper 24-48 hours before it's due is just my way of saying to myself (and OK--a subliminal message to the professor) that I'm confident in the work I've done, and that I recognize when a work is as done as it can be. Running backs do their end-zone dance when they score a touchdown; I turn in papers a bit early when I'm sure that they're ready to go. Different manifestations of the same sweet, sweet feeling.

I've been putting a lot of thought into how I will spend my remaining year of law school, especially since I most likely won't be using my degree to practice law any time soon. As I plan to be parlaying my experiences into a writing career, I've been actively searching for ways to tailor my remaining law school courses to best suit that objective. A part of that search made me decide to apply for positions as a T.A. and a S.W.A. next fall.

The first acronym you probably know: as a teaching assistant for the 1L Legal Practice course, I'll be helping the fall's 1Ls muddle through their transition from undergraduate writing to full-blown legal writing and research. It's a sometimes tumultuous road, I know, so I'm happy to help. And you know the funny thing about teaching? Often times the teacher learns just as much in the process. I just got the OK earlier this week, so I know that I will be one of the TAs this fall.

The second acronym builds off the first: senior writing associates make themselves available for one-on-one sessions with anyone who needs help with a paper, giving them feedback and advice. I'm especially looking forward to this, since this writer-to-writer critique is more up my alley than the general guidance that T.A.s provide, but I don't yet know whether I'll be tapped as one this coming semester.

Here's hoping!

I can't quite recall what exactly spawned my initial interest in fountain pens. I do remember my first one: a blue Pilot Birdie that should still be around somewhere--but which I haven't seen for ages.

I promised pictures of my fountain pen acquisitions, so:

This is the first of my recent acquisitions: a Lamy Vista. It's basically a clear (or "demonstrator") version of the very popular Safari, which is widely regarded as the best entry-level fountain. Great flow, solid design, and an optional converter for using your own inks.

This is what I stepped up to last week:

It's a Pilot/Namiki Capless. In the States, the "Capless" is a single model, known as the Vanishing Point. In Japan, it's three: the Capless, the Decimo, and the Fermo. The Decimo is a lighter, skinnier version of the Capless, while the Fermo uses a twist mechanism rather than the clicker. The pen pictured above is a blue Decimo, which I had to import from Japan. Very, very smooth, some nice flex in the tip, and the clicking mechanism works like a dream. The only downside? The click can be awfully loud in a quiet room.

These are Noodler's inks--the one on the right is "Bulletproof Black"--so named because of its resistance to UV light, time, water, and other solvents. The other ink is a colonial-style indigo blue called "Baystate Blue," which is very finicky and feathery to use, but has a very appealing hue.

This Friday heralds what for me is the best superhero film of this summer, and--just perhaps--the best of all time. Others may be more skeptical, but every indication I've seen tells me that Iron Man will be up there with Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins at the very pinnacle of the superhero genre--if not above them. Robert Downey, Jr. wouldn't have been the one I'd peg for Tony Stark, but from the trailer material I've seen, the role fits like a glove. I may be biased, since Iron Man is my favorite superhero among the U.S. Marvel/D.C. pantheon, but I have a very good sense of when a movie is shaping up to be something special. (Yes, count that as a prediction: sight unseen, Iron Man will be the new benchmark for the superhero genre.) More than that, all of the best movies I've seen in recent memory have had a release date only a day from an important due date on my schedule. Serenity, for example, I saw on opening day--the day before the LSAT. Here, Iron Man will open the day after the fore-mentioned 2YS paper is due.

Desk, Keyboard, Pen

2008-04-05T00:26:00.008-09:00

Watched: The Green Mile; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Dan in Real Life
Typing on: Diatec Filco Majestouch FKB104M/EB

I promised updates about the new desk, so:

The new desk is really three pieces: the hutch (top part with cabinets), the credenza (the desk space where my computer, monitor, lamp, etc. reside), and a mobile 3-drawer pedestal. The pedestal can be wheeled out a bit to provide additional surface space.

Of course, the purpose of the six-foot long desk space is to spread things out.

Up until today, I've been using a Kinesis Ergonomic Advantage Keyboard, which is very comfortable and easy to touch-type on, but is a bit too thick for the new setup. I discovered a specialty keyboard shop the last time I was in Akihabara, and spent a good forty five minutes testing the various display models--including a Happy Hacking Keyboard, which I found to be something of a letdown, given the hype and the price tag. However, I fell in love with another Japan-only keyboard: the Filco Majestouch. The Majestouch is actually a series of keyboards, all of which impressed me mightily. Unfortunately, the keyboard was approximately five pounds, and bulky--not something I wanted to lug back with me (along with ~25 pounds of doujinshi and other anime/manga paraphernalia) on the overnight bus to Kobe. (I did end up lugging back a metal airsoft gun, but that's beside the point.) Only recently did I find a website willing to ship a Majestouch to the U.S., which brings us to today:

It uses the brown Cherry keyswitches that most typing enthusiasts recommend (though I recently discovered that the Kinesis does too), but the typing sound and tactile quality are, for lack of a better description, utterly addictive. The anti-slip matte finish on the keys, overall heft, and, to top it all off, blue LED lock indicators (all Filco keyboards using Cherry browns apparently use the blue variety) made this a must-buy for me. One user on a keyboard forum describes this model as "a typist's nirvana"--and I'd have to say that, for the most part, he's right.

Oh yes--and the tiny computer that crept into the last few pictures is my 2G Asus EEE laptop, which is now my primary school computer, allowing the Vaio to assume the role of desktop computer. Both seem happy in their roles.

I've also been dabbling in fountain pens again, but I'll save the pics for next time.

Break, SYS Revisions, Hutches & Credenzas

2008-03-23T20:22:00.003-09:00

This coming week begins the law school's Spring Break, which, as always, is welcome. It coincides with the end of the required Professional Responsibility classes, which means that even when school starts up again, I won't have classes until the afternoon, and only one class each on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. (God bless once-a-week clinical courses, though I'll be paying for them come next semester, when I'll likely have to fill my schedule with traditional classroom courses.)

My schedule ultimately evens out, as the other casenote editors and I have begun the processes of selecting a case for the write-on competition, and my SYS prof was kind enough to return our papers the Thursday before the break, so that we can make full use of our time off to work on revisions. Revision has always been my favorite (if time-consuming) part of the writing process, so I'm looking forward to polishing up my work. The goal--whether realistic or not--is to have a finished draft ready for a quick second review by the end of the week. Just so long as my
other tasks don't interfere--the fore-mentioned case search, a client meeting, an environmental law paper to be cite-checked, and the subject of the next section.

I went out and bought a credenza, hutch, and rolling 3-drawer file to replace my current desk, which has been in my service since the third grade. (A quick bit of math makes me admit, to my general disbelief, that that comes out to fifteen to sixteen years . . . .) The desk is really built for a third grader, with a hutch too low for a computer monitor to fit on the desk itself, and a surface too narrow to accommodate the mounds of papers that necessarily accompany legal scholarship. So, taking that into account, the new credenza/hutch is 72 inches--6 feet--wide. The expansion requires the removal of one of my two remaining drawers (which, incidentally, date back to roughly the same period as the desk) so from now until the time when the new desk elements arrive and are assembled tomorrow afternoon, my room looks like it has been overrun by books, anime figures, starships/warships, and electronic equipment. More updates once the new desk is in place.

Two Weeks, 24, & SYS

2008-03-06T11:15:00.004-10:00

(Re)Reading: Armor, John Steakley
Watching: Minami-ke ~Okawari #8-9
Playing: Professor Layton and the Curious Village (weekly puzzle updates); Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

Here I logged into my account thinking that it had been a week since my last post, only to discover it's been two. Oh well--baby steps, right?

Today I turned twenty four (hey, like the TV show!). In a lot of ways, twenty four seems to resemble twenty--one year away from the next milestone (here, 25--though instead of being able to imbibe liquors, you're half the way to thirty and can finally rent a car on your own).

For the reasons below, though, the greatest birthday gift I'm liable to get is one I can give myself: a good night's rest.

Today was also the deadline for the rough draft of our second-year seminar papers. I forewent sleep the morning of March 5th to finish it up, attending the morning class as a walking (or, I suppose, sitting) zombie, took a four-hour nap, headed back for my afternoon/evening class, then went through the draft from 8 pm to 12 am. (I never realized how long proofreading a 41-pager could take when you're sleep deprived.) I emailed the paper to the prof at 1 am, and called it a night. (Should have called it a morning, in retrospect.)

Headed to school early today to borrow the high-capacity stapler from the law review room, only to have the blasted thing destroy my printed copy with a tangled mess of industrial-strength staples. God bless LexisNexis, which along with Westlaw, gifted the law review with complimentary printers, so I could reprint the paper (on LexisNexis-branded paper, no less) and get the stapler to do its job properly. Turned it in, only to notice by sheer luck the plagarism statement attached to another paper, which reminded me that I needed one too. So, with less than five minutes remaining before the morning class, I rushed back to the law review room, printed out the form, signed it, and clipped it to the draft. Made it to class with a full thirty seconds to spare.

What lessons can we learn from this fiasco? One: never trust a high-capacity stapler (or the bastard who used it before you, gumming it up). Two: thank God for law review's free printing privileges.

Speaking of SYS, I suppose a general summary of my topic is in order. In a nutshell: doujinshi and fansubs both constitute cases in which loose enforcement of copyright actually benefit both public domain and the economic and creative incentives for the copyright holder (which, though often diametrically opposed, form the dual purposes of copyright). From those cases, I seek to establish a definition for a class of "fan-based activities," which I then use to propose two addenda to the current four-factor test for fair use, as prescribed by 17 U.S.C. section 107(1)-(4). These addenda expand fair use to include overarchingly beneficial (though technically infringing) uses like doujinshi, fansubs, fan fiction, etc., thereby furthering the purposes of copyright while requiring no legislative change because the addenda aren't for the specific factors described by section 107, but for the courts who employ the four-factor test.

Reticence, SYS, Clinics, and Professor Layton

2008-02-13T12:08:00.007-10:00

Reading: Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law To Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity; Peter Drahos, A Philosophy of Intellectual Property;Kembrew McLeod, Owning Culture; Susan Scafidi, Who Owns Culture?

Watching: Minami-ke ~Okawari #5-6; Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law Seasons 1-4

Ah . . . so let's see. It's been more than six months since my last post; eight months since I promised to end my dereliction of duty in the blogging arena. Admittedly a lot has passed since then, but in a way, that leaves me even less of an excuse for the long, languishing drought between posts.

Maybe baby steps are in order: one post per week. Here's this week's:

This semester at law school is the dreaded "second-year" paper semester, where every 2L has to come up with a topic for and write a lengthy scholarly article. Law reviewers have an advantage here, as they are in the scholarly mode of writing due to their casenotes the previous semester. My topic? As you can infer from my reading list, it has to do with intellectual property: doujinshi, fansubs, and a fan-based commons expansion of the fair use doctrine.

What, you say? Do I dare combine my legal interests (IP) with my philosophical interests (e.g., Lockean property theory) with my personal interests (anime and manga--what else?) into some crazed amalgam of scholarship and obsession? Do I stake a 4-unit grade and publication opportunities on a niche subject that most people at the law school probably haven't given so much as a passing thought.

You're damn right I do.

First of all, if I were obsessed with nothing more than acing the class (maybe getting the top grade, etc.) and getting a publication credit out of the exchange, this semester would probably be one of the most miserable ones in my entire law school career. I was loathe to do the same with my casenote topic last semester, which is why I went with a patent law issue that had as much of a chance of being selected for publication on the law review as a shoreline access case would have in the law review of a land-locked state. The result? Yes, the casenote wasn't selected, but I actually enjoyed writing it. If I'm married to a 40-page scholarly composition for the better part of four months, it'd better be about something 1) that I care about, and 2) really needs some scholarly work to be done on the subject matter. Both criteria are implicated here.

1) is a given, but as for 2), there is a lot at stake in the issue. I've been a beneficiary of fansubber support for nearly ten years now, and I've seen firsthand the good and bad sides to the practice. It's my contention that the good far outweighs the bad, and for specific reasons that not only make sense in the light of the rationale behind copyright protection, but that point toward a specific change in copyright law that, at this point in my inquiry, appears to be a significant step in the right direction.

More details as I finish up my research and begin drafting the paper this weekend.

The research paper class is the only one I'm taking this semester for a grade; the other courses are the requisite professional responsibility course (ABA required), and two clinical courses: Environmental Law and Small Business Clinics. Those clinic courses are basically opportunities for law students to try their hand at actually practicing law--a concept that might seem novel, at first, but really isn't. After all, before the first law school even came into existence, people became lawyers by an apprenticeship system--in essence, learning to become a lawyer by doing the things that a lawyer does. The same principle applies to the clinic course.

Even though I've begun to question whether the partner-track lifestyle of a large firm--or even law practice in general--is the right place for me, I jumped at the opportunity to get some real-world practice experience, and I've yet to regret that decision. The Environmental Law Clinic's first client is a group of Moloka`i residents who are opposed to the development of 200 luxury homes along the pristine southwestern coast of the island. I've never done any work with Environmental Impact Statements or water use issues before, but the more I've researched the development, the more I realize how important a cause those residents are fighting for. Meanwhile, in the Small Business Clinic, I'm getting a crash course in the various types of business entities, as well as the pros and cons of choosing one entity over another, especially from a small business perspective. Moreover, one of the instructors is something of a revolutionary as far as his views go on how a law firm should be run--in fact, his views led him to leave his post as a senior partner at the firm which topped my list of potential employers (topped, not because I no longer hold them in high regard, but because my goals have shifted)--and the benefit of his insights is more than enough payment for the lengthy hours that the client work will exact.

Finally, a short mention of Professor Layton and the Curious Village (Leiton Kyouji to Fushigi na Mura, I think, in Japanese). While some gamers may have a slightly different response to the puzzle-laden format:

From Penny Arcade, at http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic.

For me, it's a delightful throwback to the hours I used to spend reading logician's puzzles at the back of the high school library. Moreover, to sate the storyteller in me, the overarching mystery surrounding the town that the titular character visits only adds to the interest. Highly recommended.

Shorts, Case Notes, and Natty Clothes

2007-08-05T10:51:00.000-09:00

Reading: The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Europe and Latin America, John Henry Merryman and Rogelio Perez-Perdomo
Watching: Glutton for Punishment, Moetan, Chef At Large
Listening: Bird, Mikuni Shimokawa

I've heard of others for whom a whole story concept sprang full-grown from some dark recess of their mind's eye--much like Pallas Athena from Zeus' migraned noggin. Considering the amount of musing and forethought that normally accompanies anything I tend to write, I always harbored some doubts as to the veracity of those claims.

As of this past Thursday, I stand corrected.

I'm not even entirely sure how it came to be. I had just finished penning thank you letters to Judge and his staff and stepped into the shower when I began to reflect on the differences between the Anglo-American legal system--which could be dubbed "the common law"--and those of continental Europe and Latin America, dubbed by the authors of the above-mentioned book as "the civil law." Those thoughts brought me to a sidelong reflection on the War on Terror, the Cold War, and on war in general.

And then, the perfect idea for a short story sprang into my head. I blinked once, twice, in disbelief, then challenged myself, on the basis of this mere notion of a story, to compose the first line of the story, which normally, for me, is like using your fingernails to give yourself a haircut.

But in a matter of mere seconds, the opening line formed itself, and lo and behold: it was first-person unreliable, and in the present tense.

A small word on my writing style is, perhaps, incumbent at this juncture. I am firmly ensconced in the camp of third-person limited, and though I have ventured into first-person before, I was never quite comfortable with it. And I've never so much a penned a narrative line in the present tense.

I have, however, read numerous works of fiction (most of them in the contemporary genre) that thrive in first-person present tense. The short fiction of Jim Shepard (see Love and Hydrogen, a great anthology) is my prime example. As a result, I've come to recognize that for certain types of stories, first-person present tense is leagues superior than any other narrative form.

Though I've only managed to transcribe a page worth of narrative (along with a few quick jots of notes as to where I think the story will go), I'm certain such is the case here.

And then, here's the rub: I'm loathe to work on this short story any further at present, because I'm still in the midst of revising Book One. That story has too strong a grasp on me; and, like a jealous god, it will tolerate no false idols, at least until my prostrations have been performed to its satisfaction.

All this amounts to yet another reason for me to get off my duff, get the Book polished and as done as I can myself, and send it off to be read by others who can help me the rest of the way.

The orientation for Law Review was yesterday, and my biggest fear has been assuaged. Considering that only the top-eight students grade-wise, and up to the top-eight case notes from the write-on competition are invited to join (care to guess which one was my poison?), I had no doubt that the others would represent some (though certainly not all, or even, necessarily, the pinnacle) of the sharpest and most industrious members of our class; I did, however, have doubts as to whether any would possess equally sizable egos as well (which, considering that I would be spending a great deal of time among them for the remainder of my law school career, ranked up there with dining on crickets and cockroaches and bathing in industrial waste).

Given that our associate dean, when struggling to describe how our class had defined itself during the 1L year, did so by saying "you're all just really nice people," I should have known better.

A few individuals were a bit unfamiliar to me, though I did recognize them at least in passing. Others were more familiar, but their names escaped me (though, at least in one case, my name didn't escape them! Lucky for me I managed to divine her name before my virtually non-existent ability to retain names became embarrassing). But all were amicable, good-natured individuals who I can honestly say I look forward to working alongside, the 3L editorial board included.

Which leads me into a discovery I've made as I've ventured farther and farther down the career path of a lawyer. Though I'm sure the same can be said for virtually any profession under the sun, nothing seems to define the career and life of a lawyer more than smooth and amicable social interaction--the buzzword, of course, is "networking." While this can seem like a potential festering point for facetiousness to the jaded, my experience has been that the emphasis on such interaction results in the legal community being populated largely by some of the most friendly and friend-worthy individuals one is likely, in the course of every interaction, to meet.

Yes, the Editor-In-Chief (EIC hereafter) stressed what we all probably knew: Law Review is a hella lotta work, and it'll probably be the most work any of us will ever put into earning a single, solitary unit of credit (per semester, mind). He even said that we all will likely come to hate whatever topic we decide to write about (the previous EIC told that to him as a 2L, and though he thought things would be different, it eventually happened to him), and that tech editing is an arduous and mind-numbing pursuit. But one odd thing that I've learned about myself is that I tend to relish in the editing process--both with my own works, and those of others, as my time copyediting chapters of my Prof's book and editing and cite-checking student papers has shown me--more than any red-blooded human being should. If such grueling tasks will 1) make me a master of the stylistics and bluebooking (read: citation format) of the legal world, 2) a far more discerning and accurate editor of any piece of writing, including my fiction, and 3) allow me to get to know those fore-mentioned amicable individuals, and hopefully befriend them, then Law Review may be the best thing that will ever happen to me at law school.

In the meantime, it falls to me to ascertain the topic of my soon-to-be casenote. It's due, after all--being the first of many, many deadlines in my near future--on the 20th.

I went through 1L OCIs and Oral Argument wearing the same blue blazer and charcoal slacks that I wore to high school graduation, all the while surrounded by peers who had broken out their best single-tone suits for the occasion. I don't necessarily subscribe to the adage that the clothes make the man; but for someone as unsure of himself as I, wearing a suit that is at least as proportionally nice as those worn by my peers is a sizable contributor to my overall confidence--and in the lawyering world, confidence speaks bounds. I had, at the beginning of the summer, made it a goal to procure a suit that would serve me well in the (rapidly) upcoming 2L OCI session.

After looking around Macy's business attire department in vain, I ended up finding a proper-fitting black suit at Banana Republic (a store that has increasingly invaded my wardrobe over the past decade). Given my sore lack of vertical proportion, The coat and pants had to be hemmed and recut (by the same wonderful tailor/designer who helped to short the arms of my leather jacket). After an erstwhile fashion lesson from Judge, I recently went back and picked up a pair of french cuff shirts, along with my first pair of cuff links.

And along with a spiffy machined-stainless Seiko with gold markings (and a blue face!), and the most expensive pair of shoes I've ever owned, I'm now ready for OCIs. Because the true purpose of a properly tailored suit is not to attract attention to its wearer; its purpose is to keep the interviewer's attention focused on its wearer's credentials: his resume, his responses, his overall demeanor. The best suits are like the finest butlers--they tend to blend in with the walls, performing their duties flawlessly and without the notice of their masters (or those who hold their master's future in the palm of their hand).

On the subject of fashion, I've noticed that my own casual preferences have begun to shift as of late, away from single-tone t-shirts to plaid linen or seersucker short-sleeve collar shirts. I gravitate toward them because they are just as cool (if not cooler) than an ordinary t-shirt, appear slightly more presentable and, by their very fabric, obviate the need for ironing. Along with the fact that switching eyeglass shops has allowed me to get the rimless frames (and transition lens) that my previous purveyor had, for reason now inscrutable, long denied me.

The aggregate result is, along with my generally lower weight and slightly slimmer waistline, I'm feeling more comfortable with my appearance than I have in a very, very long time.

Next, Thursday, Potter Predictions, and Law Review

2007-07-23T22:36:00.001-09:00

Reading: The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss; By Cunning and Craft, Peter Selgin
Watching: Manabi #1-3

As promised, I shall begin with a spoiler-free review of Thursday Next's latest, First Among Sequels. This is timely, I think, as tomorrow marks the book's publication in the U.S. (Yes . . . one of the simple pleasures of the electronic age is for a reader in the States to tap the UK stacks, and thereby read a long-awaited book nearly a month in advance.)

Fforde is in his usual form at the start of the book, and, though the feat would have seemed nigh improbable (if not impossible) to me before reading it, he manages to take the literary and metafictional satire to an all-new level. Without giving away any details from the book, I'll say that this is the first book of the series to stand up and demand a sequel, and that any dedicated fan of Thursday cannot afford to miss it! Newcomers to Ffordian space/time would probably do best to start with The Eyre Affair. In fact, given the opening paragraph of the last chapter, I insist upon it.

Having done my usual waltz into Barnes and Noble midday on 7/21, nonchalantly picking up the nearest copy of Deathly Hallows from the copious stacks and cracking it open to read as I waited to purchase it, and having closed the book with a sigh and a contented smile on the evening of 7/22, I can't help but feel that an era in my life as a reader--and indeed, in the lives of countless others--has shifted.

I happened across the Harry Potter books later than most, I think--pride, and my dubiousness of the true artistic worth of anything so popular as to constitute a cultural phenomena made me delay cracking open Philosopher's Stone (I don't care what the US calls it--Rowling wanted to keep it thus, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed!) until the fourth book had been penned and devoured by millions. From the moment I closed the first book, I knew that Rowling was more than a spectacle--she was a genuine storyteller.

And, like any true storyteller, she grew stronger with every outing. Looking back, I can see clearly that Deathly Hallows is in a completely different league from Philosopher's Stone--though both are inextricably bound, like Voldemort and Harry himself, and form a work far greater than the sum of its parts. I can say without equivocation, however, that Deathly Hallows is the cement that binds it all together.

I look back to my commentary of the sixth book, two years ago:

"One thing that has surprised and delighted me is how closely I have been able to anticipate the path along which Rowling's story unfolds (or, perhaps more aptly, how closely Rowling's proclivities in terms of plot, theme and storyline match my own). SPOILERS are forthcoming: from book one, I had hoped that Rowling would 1) depict Snape as a snide, flawed, but ultimately redeemable and noble character, most likely by having him aid Harry's quest to end the threat of the Dark Lord in some surprising or moving fashion, and 2), slowly mold Draco into a sympathetic and conflicted character. Books one through five showed hints of 1) being slowly undertaken, but 2) seemed to be a largely moot point. In the sixth installment (which, one learns by the end, essentially named "Harry Potter and Severus Snape") it is clear to me that Rowling intends to reveal Severus's nobility in some climactic fashion in the seventh and final book: she builds up the case for the reader to believe, as Harry does, that Severus is truly in the service of the Dark Lord, yet leaves sufficient wiggle room for his eventual reveal as a man worthy of Dumbledore's confidence. I reveled in the possibilities of making this initially and overtly antagonistic character transform from sulking menace to apparent adversary to unexpected ally, and it seems that Rowling intends to walk the same path in her books. My personal fascination with the themes of redemption and penance notwithstanding, on a philosophical and spiritual level, this feels like the right progression to make, and I am very pleased to surmise that Rowling--by virtue of her writing--seems to concur. Draco, the one-dimensional antagonist who serves as one of Harry's greatest adversaries in the early books, in the climax of this novel, takes (what I feel to be) his rightful place as a conflicted, rounded character, who has begun to feel his inherent proclivities begin to diverge from the facets of his upbringing.

"And, on the subject of things forseen (note: the SPOILERS continue hereon in this paragraph), I had sensed since the first novel that Dumbledore would, in the penultimate installment, or at least very early in the ultimate one, have to die, in order for the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort to take place. In the intervening years, I have learned that this progression is an archetypal necessity (for the same reason that Yoda must pass on early in Return of the Jedi, in order for Luke to confront Vader and the Emperor): the protagonist's master must be removed, so that the principle character is forced to step up to the herculean task that awaits him. It is as inevitable as the cycle of life: the old must die, and give way to the young, that the next generation may hasten to mature in their absence, and fill-in the roles that the departed have left vacant. I did not look forward to the moment when Harry's beneficient mentor would have to bow and leave the stage, but I knew that, when that moment came, he would do so to fulfill a most dire need, and that his departure would, when the smoke fully clears, not be in vain. Dumbledore's demise is laced with the subtext which will power one of the most powerful plotlines of the seventh novel--the relationship between Harry and Snape--and provides the necessary impetus for Harry to head down the path of his story's inevitable conclusion. Rowling, with the clarity of a truly gifted storyteller, has netted two birds with one stroke of her pen.

"Though I can claim to foresee the path upon which Rowling's splendid story must travel to its conclusion, I cannot, with any degree of certainty or candor, claim to know the steps that will be taken along that road. Rowling's work is her own, and no one but she can bring her tale to its true resolution, whether that resolution be for good or ill, as far as the strength of the Harry Potter series is concerned.

"But if her current six books are any indication--and I largely suspect that they are--I'd say that the fate of this tale, beloved by millions, could be in no better hands."

I can say now that Rowling did not meet my lofty expectations--she exceeded them. She worked literally every element from her previous books into the seventh, in a way that rang true for the story at that stage, and yet also gave her most dedicated readers a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The result was that the Harry/Snape relationship did not take center stage, as I had predicted, but it did captivate a great many pages. The true surprise for me was the way in which Rowling chose to develop the background of Albus Dumbledore posthumously in this book, and the great cathartic effect it had on the story as a whole. If my master work were to be a story in seven parts, I could only hope that I would wrap it up as well as Rowling has her beloved Harry Potter septalogy. She does what every storyteller should do, but only the deftest manage with consistency: She spins a web of lies that tell a fundamental truth, and that truth reverberates from every decision, every action and reaction, that her characters make. As others like Fitzgerald and Tolkien, hers is a feat that will not soon be forgotten. I can only hope that the Harry Potter series will not be her last--that, like many others, once she has begun the path of the storyteller, she will continue to walk it until her dying day. The world, the publishing industry, and the reading public could only benefit from such an eventuality.

Bravo, Mistress Storyteller. Bravo.

At last, I turn to personal events. After months of waiting, with bated breath, I received an invitation to join the Law Review.

I find it hard to put into words the heft of the weight that has been lifted from my shoulders. (Nor does it matter that the same hand which lifted that one weight has replaced it with another--named responsiblity--of at least commensurate mass.)

Next time, a review of what may be the best book I have read in this already stellar year. Until then, gentle readers: Adieu.

Dereliction of Duties, Stupidity Surpluses, and Can You Speak English?

2007-07-15T23:17:00.000-09:00

Reading: First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde; The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss; By Cunning & Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers, Peter Selgin

Read: The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer, Sandra Scofield; Hooked: Grab Readers at Page One, Les Edgerton; The Princess and the Hound, Mette Ivie Harrison

Listening to: Sayonara Mo Ienakatta Natsu, Mikuni Shimokawa

Watching: Cool Japan, Eigo De Shabera Naito, Salaryman Neo, Jamie At Home, Glutton For Punishment, Chef At Large

Yes, I realize that despite my previous vow to post as often as possible, it has been two months since my last post. Moreover, I notice that I set the lofty goal of having my first set of substantive revisions to Book One by July 1st--to which I say, as I am embroiled in the process of rewriting chapter 1 for the fourth time, "Hah!" My recent writerly readings have opened my eyes to the weaknesses in my previous writing, and so the task falls to me now, with roughly five weeks of my summer remaining, to get as much revision as possible done before the Fall semester. Those who I asked to be first readers: your patience is greatly appreciated! I hope you'll still be willing to read the polished product when it finally leaves the assembly line.

A lot has happened since the last post, so perhaps some can be forgiven. I'm still waiting to learn whether or not I made law review or the Asian law journal; and at the eleventh hour, I managed to swap out my plan to take two courses at the law school for a summer externship with a judge at the First Circuit courthouse. Working in a criminal court has opened my eyes to both the litigation process and the role of the judiciary in dispensing with criminal offenders. And the fact that I'll be getting four juicy credits to shave off of my dreaded 2L Spring semester only sweetens the deal.

As was the case with Something Rotten, I enlisted the help of Amazon.co.uk to get the British printing of First Among Sequels roughly half a month earlier than its US release--and with the vastly superior UK cover art to boot! My only regret is that I had to purchase the book at a time where the British Pound was at an all-time high against the US dollar--7 quid and 78 p plus shipping ended up costing me nearly $29! But dear old Jasper appears to be at his usual game in Sequels (or so the first few pages would have me believe), so all's well that ends well, I suppose. I'll give a spoiler-free review when it's finished.

Jasper has managed to waylay my progress on the monstrous tomb entitled The Name of the Wind, a book highly recommended by OSC, and, given the quality of the opening pages, rightfully so. As long as the book is, I'm seriously concerned that the moment I start investing concerted amounts of time into reading it, it will take hold and not let go until I've finished it--a dangerous prospect, when I have court-related duties, ELP projects, and my own rewrites to perform. I'll use Thursday Next to test the waters; if I can manage to go through Sequels without compromising my other responsibilities, then I'll feel more confident about taking on this behemoth.

Mette Ivie Harrison--the author behind the delightful Mira, Mirror--showcases her strong grasp of the storytelling art in The Princess and the Hound, a splendid first book for what appears to be, at least at the moment, a duology. I was deeply interested in reading the book as OSC described it as having an unexpected ending that was nonetheless completely true to the characters and events in the story, a feat that I hope to achieve in my own writing. And the best method of learning a skill--be it cooking, litigating, or fiction writing--is by observation and rote practice. In this regard, The Princess and the Hound is not only a fine example of well-crafted fantasy, but a signpost for the growing writer, reading "This way: the proper way to conduct an ending." Utterly accessible and extremely addictive--this was a book with the fore-mentioned can't-put-down quality--it is highly recommended.

My online sources have directed me toward three pieces of Japanese television (all from NHK) that have become weekly indulgences of mine: Cool Japan, Eigo De Shabera Naito, and Salaryman Neo.

Cool Japan has something of a conceited premise to it: it seeks out to discover "cool" aspects of Japanese culture as viewed by foreigners. Each week a multinational panel is assembled to discuss their findings on the weekly theme ("communication," "lunch time," and "Owarai" have been three recent themes). The common language between the foreigners is English, while the hosts and others speak in Japanese, so it's a bit easier to follow than a purely Japanese-speaking talk show, and occasionally it has something truly cool to show for itself. Other times, I can see quite clearly that the conscripted foreigners apply the "cool" label to a particular finding only under a certain level of friendly Japanese duress.

Eigo De Shabera Naito works under the premise of helping viewers to learn English, so I suppose it is ironic that I'm watching it to brush up my Japanese! Hosted by a number of Japanese personalities and one American transplant (who, interestingly enough, forms one half of the Japanese comedy team Pakkun and Makkun), the mixed language format of the show helps immensely for Japanese-challenged viewers like myself to understand the exchanges.

Finally, Salaryman Neo is the most ambitious of my NHK lineup, since it is completely in Japanese. Neo is a kind of Saturday Night Live, Japanese salaryman style, transfixingly watchable (and, surprisingly, understandable) even if half of what is said flies right over my head.

(In case anyone was curious, Jamie at Home, Glutton for Punishment, and Chef at Large are not Japanese TV shows; they're from Food Network Canada. Jamie at Home is Jamie Oliver's take on the Chef at Home concept; Glutton for Punishment is a new series by the "Surreal Gourmet," Bob Blumer; and Chef at Large is Canadian chef Michael Smith's flagship TV show, where he goes about North America and present a particular place or event in each episode. I'm just as addicted to cooking shows as I am Anime and Japanese culture!)

Well, that's it for this post. I might take the time to adapt some of my externship journal entries for future posts. As always--stay tuned!

Three Down, Fiction For July

2007-05-08T20:12:00.000-09:00

Reread: Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde
Watched: Cook Like A Chef - Georges Laurier - Vegetarian Mains
Exams: 3/4

Three exams down (the in-class ones). Only the Civ Pro take-home--the veritable grudge match--remains. Then I attempt to write on to law review (emphasis on attempt), and then--and only then--does summer truly begin.

Oh, I really should get off my duff and find and secure a pro-bono op pronto, but I'm waiting till after the last exam.

Earlier last week I realized that both Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels (I actually preferred War of the Words as a title myself, though I'm sure the new one more closely reflects the plot) and J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are both due within a week of each other in the U.S.: the 21st for Potter and the 24th for Sequels. I'm tempted to do the same thing I did for Something Rotten--bypass the U.S. lead time and grab the UK version (available July 5th!), but only wish that Rowling's seventh was due out earlier in her home country too (that would make the shipping go down smoother).

And, to give myself some motivation, I've decided to deadline my 1st round of substantive revisions to the novel to July 1st. I'm thinking a total of three substantive rewrites, and at least as many general run-throughs before I knock on my first-readers' doors for a once-over. (Those I've asked in advance--お楽しみに。。。かも。)

~TJN

April Anime

2007-05-06T18:18:00.000-09:00

Watching: Darker Than Black, Hayate no Goroku, Heroic Age, Rocket Girls, Romeo x Juliet, Toward the Terra
Considering: Claymore, Nodame Cantabile

April is the start of the new anime season in Japan, and thus is the time of year when I scrutinize the first episode of any new series that catches my eye. Last year, the most noteworthy newcomer was Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu. There's no such frontrunner this season from what I've seen thus far . . . but that could change in a hurry.

Darker Than Black (Sci-Fi / Action). The usual catalysmic-event-changes-the-world-and-creates-superpowered-people storyline with the characteristically obtuse milieu explication and introduction that I've come to learn is intrinsic to most Japanese entertainment (or at least, the animated kind). In a more heated April lineup, I'd see myself forgetting about this one rather quickly. C-.

Hayate no Goroku (Comedy). Utter nonsense plot. Crazy characters. The epitome of the anime equivalent of a nasty trainwreck - nothing really good comes of watching it, but you can't help but look anyway. D-.

Heroic Age (Sci-Fi /Action). Is it just me, but has the character designer who I first noticed in Infinite Ryvius--and who has left his strong mark on the anime world through the Gundam SEED series--largely run out of new ideas? Virtually every character in this series gives me flashbacks to SEED/Fafner/Ryvius/etc. This sci-fi series has some interest concepts, but they too are plagued by the "haven't I seen you somewhere before?" problem. (Arching laser weapons from Vandread and modular gun pods from Gundam top my list.) A weak series, but in its current company, above average. C+.

Rocket Girls (drama/comedy/slice of life). A slice-of-life plus a small dose of utter nonsensical justification for putting teenage girls into space via light-weight rockets comprises the storyline for what is at the moment my favorite of the season. It's lighthearted, and not very deep, but has the requisite simplistic charm for its genre. A solid B.

Toward the Terra (Sci-Fi / Action). In some ways, this adapted series (originally a series of novels) could be seen as the plotspawn of Darker and Heroic: persecuted superpowered humans + ultra-futuristic milieu. Might amount to something in the end, but at this point its future is uncertain. B-.

*

I looked into Claymore after reading a blurb about it on dannychoo.com. It leans a bit too much toward the horror genre than my usual liking, but it has a compelling main. B-.

I've heard good things about Nodame Cantabile, but I haven't been able to bring myself to watch it just yet (as usually happens when I have an issue with the character designs). Nothing like anime to bring out the most superficial qualities in yours truly. NYR.

*

More substantial updates on life and career after I massacre my last two final exams. Until then, jaa.

~TJN

Settling In

2007-04-29T17:14:00.000-09:00

After five years with the old Xanga site, I've finally decided to move on to new surroundings. Hopefully the move will accompany a more consistent flow of postings. Only time will tell.

~TJN

書く、だから、 いる： 何かをする為に