I got back from the United States yesterday afternoon. It took just over twenty-four hours for us to get from the hotel in Tampa, FL to our home in Nagano. After a good night's sleep (the first in over a week), I got up today and got right to work on wrapping up little projects that have been nearly finished for far too long.
What have I been doing lately? Fair question. I haven't posted much about what has been going on over here so I wanted to update and talk about it.
Starting with writing, I have been putting together short stories since the beginning of the year. The one I just finished a third draft for is a rather long (11k words) horror/fantasy story that fits into a world I have been working on. If this draft goes over well with my beta readers I'll be submitting it to Tor and while it is being processed I'll work on the other stories that fit into the setting. I also have an odd speculative fiction story, a flash short, and a story set in Tokyo that I'll be submitting to other markets. I've been bouncing between drafting new stories and redrafting whatever I finished last. I'm finding that's a process that works nicely for me.
I'll be getting back to drawing sometime soon, but that will depend on how some things go on the translation front. I have been in contact with a friend about a promising opportunity, but there isn't much to say right now except that I have been a little extra busy with it. Right now my goat story is scanned in pencils and inked with Sakura manga pens. I need to rescan the inks and clean them up in GIMP. I have used Android apps to draw on my Cintiq, but this will be the first time I really get around to working with it on a PC app. With inks finished, I can color it while simultaneously prepping it to be an interactive iOS application. That, I think, is the ideal way for me to release my work because I want to make it as useful as possible to language education. I'm imagining something similar to the Oceanhouse Dr. Seuss apps: read-to-me features and touch controls prompting audio with pop-up pictures.
I have some new 40k models I've been painting as well and I will hopefully get them finished before next weekend. There is an event in Nagoya I'll be attending and I need my figures ready for transport before then. Time to crack down on painting and get these guys done. There is a post about one of them on my other blog, and I'll be posting about the others as well a little later on.
And lastly, I've been studying like a madman. I have the Japanese Language Proficiency Test coming up this July. I'm taking the highest level they offer and the material covered on it is the kind of stuff you never see in most documents or even technical/business discussions. Even having worked in a Japanese environment for almost three years, I'm not convinced I would pass without studying hard. I don't particularly want to take this test more than once, so I'm going to do my best to do it right the first time. I've been doing practice tests, reading a lot of grammar discussions online, watching YouTube lessons, reading Murakami Haruki and now that I am back home, I'll be setting up my vocab flashcards on Anki (which is an amazing SRS tool).
The other studying I have been doing has been for writing. I read some of the Writer's Digest books on specific elements of fiction. Some were great (Plot; Beginnings, Middles, Ends; Characters and Viewpoint) and some were awful (Dialogue; Action and Suspense). I also read Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, by Umberto Eco and have twenty other books on topics from that period lined up for when I finish this Murakami novel. I posted a picture of those on the Facebook page if you didn't see it.
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