Category Archives: Writing

Art Without Po' verty

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I saw this post by Roger Fan at YouOffendMeYouOffendMyFamily: acting without dying, happy while trying.  In his end-of-the-year blogpost, he says that if he could jump back in time, he would counsel his younger self to “BECOME A DENTIST YOU DIPSHIT.”  He says that if he couldn’t convince himself to get into dentistry, he would recommend, “Pursue and develop a fulfilling, pragmatic, non-Hollywood career path in parallel to your efforts of becoming an actor.”  He then goes on to list the reasons why actors should have parallel careers, reasons that include having more cash, moving along with life, and being able to travel.

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"Orange Days": Review and Ideas

Orange Days

Orange Days

I’m going to post this with the fore-knowledge that no one is going to watch it. Like I said in my last J-Drama post, I don’t expect anyone here to watch J-dramas unless that person has a prior interest in Japanese culture and language.  Maybe that frees me a bit; I don’t have to worry about dropping spoilers. If you’re going to watch this drama, feel free to stop reading, watch, and then come back (One of the links was broken, so I had to watch about fifteen minutes of the last episode with Spanish subtitles.  You may need some knowledge of spoken Japanese and Japanese sign language to make that 15 minutes work.  :)   )  If you’re not going to watch this drama, feel free to read and comment–you won’t need to see it to understand the ideas.  For those catching up, I’ve been checking out Japanese dramas just to get a feeling of the narrative style of Japanese TV.  It’s supposed to help my writing.  It’s pretty cool to see media by and about Asian people.

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Kamisama Mou Sukoshi Dake

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Takeshi Kaneshiro and Kyoko Fukada

One of the issues in converting from blogger to novelist is getting out of oneself.  Blogging is all about writing from the blogger’s perspective, while novel writing (I think) deals a lot with understanding and becoming your characters.  When blogging, it’s all about you.  When writing creatively, it’s all about everyone but you.  Maybe that’s why there are so few blogger-novelists.

With my novel writing, I’ve been trying to get out of myself. How does one do that?  I don’t know how others do it, but I’ve been trying to expose myself to different viewpoints whether by reading, observing, or watching. For me, it’s about stepping back away from myself, from activism, from blogging, from everything that I’m used to doing.

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Futari (Japanese Drama) and the Need for Female Stories

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Futari

I’m cutting back slightly on the posting frequency.  I think I’ve been pretty good at posting once or twice a day, and there are still tons of stories and thoughts I’d like to post, but I really do need to cut back.  My novel is underway, and it’s going well.  That should be a priority.  Plus I’ve got a whole lot of other things that need to get done.  I think I can still post once every other two or three days though.

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Show me the money

Saw this post by Phillip at offendmeyouoffendmyfamily.com.  I found it through TMM who found it through AAM, and now it’s here on BW (oh wow, I didn’t realize that my site has the same initials as my name.  Wow.)  In the post, Phillip mentions the protests against Ken Jeong–I’ll admit that I haven’t been following this one–and he mentions how he feels that these protest “victories” are not really victories at all, and that real change will come when Asian Americans start supporting Asian American arts with their dollars.  The blog post is interesting, as are the comments that follow.

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3 Steps to Novel Writing

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Continuing our Strategy and Motivation series, Alpha-Asian has written about Overcoming Writer’s Block.  As you all know, Alpha is a successful writer for bodybuilding magazines, as well as a successful self-publisher of fitness books.  As an author, he has achieved what most of us dream of achieving.  If you’ve got writer’s block, definitely check out his post–there’s lots of good info there.

Posted in Features, Knowledge, Strategy, Writing | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Some of the stuff I'm working on

As I mentioned in my last post about the Thymos book project, I finished my submission.  Actually, I finished my first submission.  I enjoyed writing it so much that I’m now working on a second submission.  My second submission is an essay about why Asian American literature is different from mainstream lit, how it is similar to mainstream lit, and how I hope Asian Americans can join the dialogue when it comes to human issues, even though our situation is very unique.  I’ve already rewritten the first page at least three times, so blog posts will continue to be more sporadic than usual.

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Ray Bradbury in action

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

88 years old and still fighting.  That’s how I hope to be.

Ray Bradbury is fighting, speaking, and fundraising for public libraries in California.  The famous sci-fi writer is helping to save the libraries, which are suffering due to declining property tax revenues in the Ventura area.  I remember reading Bradbury’s account of writing Fahrenheit 451, where he rented space at a typewriter to start and complete his novel.  That’s some serious history.  I love this guy’s take on libraries:

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Writing Ethnicity

I saw this blog post from a gay White male author named Michael Thomas Ford on how it’s assumed that authors always write characters of their own race.  This goes back to a point we made a while back about being race blind to the highest extent possible.  When is it acceptable?  When is it desirable?  Most Asian American authors explicitly mention race or ethnicity in their writing.  Why do we focus on race?  Is it holding us back, or does it make a point?

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Medium's Genius Screenwriting and Acting

Natasha Bedingfield's Soulmate

Natasha Bedingfield's Soulmate

If you didn’t catch the last Medium, you need to.  Check it out here (look at the episode list and click on “Bring Me the Head of Oswaldo Castillo.)  Not only was it an awesome episode; it also had a really dark song as the backdrop, Soulmate by Natasha Bedingfield.  Medium itself has always been dark, and it was a great finale for NBC before Medium moves from NBC to CBS.  I’ll talk about it below.

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