Of late, life has been good. I have been on vacation from work, allowing me to write and sleep in. I recently saw an Egyptian exhibit at the Ueno Museum and last night started up a gaming group with some friends. I worked at an English summer camp in Tokyo for three days and got a nice supplement to my income. And tomorrow, Jamie and I travel to Osaka for the first time. Life is good.
Despite living in Japan for more than a year, I’ve not seen a lot of the country. Osaka is famous as a foodie paradise, and I expect to taste every flavor of the rainbow deep-fried in oil and seared to crispy perfection. I will also be hitting up Universal Studios Japan, which apparently had an awesome Attack on Titan exhibit but I missed it so will not have cool photographs of homunculus kaiju turning me into a horrific vore fetish entrée. If that previous sentence is something you can easily understand without the need of Google, then you have spent too many hours in the internet’s dark back alleys. Beyond food and amusement parks, we will see Osaka Castle and the Osaka Aquarium, take a day trip to the ancient capital city of Nara, and then spend four days in Kyoto. Kyoto is, like Nara, a former capital of Japan, and full of all the shrines, temples, and other architectural wonders you’d expect to come from something like that.
In other news, I had another short story come out with 3ft Left last month. I won’t spoil anything about it, but you should read it. Ok. I’ll spoil three things. One, it has a very hot scene I’m quite proud of. Two, photographer Jason Weller synced up some of his photographs in this issue with my story and I really like how they go together. And three, my editor somehow decided to market it as a “chilling tale.” We laughed about it when he realized this. He just got a new job where he pulls off a proper 12-hour Japanese workday because he has a samurai’s constitution, so he has more important things to worry about than temperature metaphors. But seriously, Will, if you’re reading this, congrats on the job and everything else going on in your life!
A couple other cool projects are going on. I’ll only say two things. One, I’m going to be working on a script to send into 2000AD. They’re looking for new writers, and want 4 page scripts with a summary of the story attached. Anyone who writes and loves sci-fi, comics, or Judge Dredd should look into this. And also, another of the stories I’m working on requires a research trip to Aokigahara, the fabled “Suicide Forest” on the north slope Mt. Fuji. And yes, this is a research trip, so nobody send me emails trying to talk me down from a rash decision. My only up-coming rash decisions will be with the foods I put into my gullet.
The only downside to life right now is money. I am well paid, and love teaching, so that’s not the issue. But since the yen crashed, it’s been a pain to pay my bills back in the states. We wired money back to the states, and lost about $500 USD in the transfer process between fees and the yen crashing in a fiery plummet of economic horror. Then our bank seems to have failed to receive the transferred money and we had to pay another fee. Then our bank’s server seems to have crashed. We still aren’t able to pay our bills in the states. So that’s something.
Hope you all are well, and expect a proper update from the Land of the Rising’s Sun’s City of Ten Thousand Deep Fried Foods. And yes, I did just make up that nickname for Osaka.
Jamata!
The Modern Skald 