Sons of Loki

I am quite sure that the majority of blog posts begin “Sorry for not updating sooner”, but even given that, sorry for not updating sooner. To be honest, though, not a great deal has happened. I have continued gainful employment; listened to a number of audiobooks, including the excellent American Gods
ably read by George Guidall; tried my hand at learning languages by ear, with various results (Wo ist die Goethestrasse?); sent a synopsis for a book about Japan to three agents and one publisher and received three rejections; have written a few thousand words of a fledging detective story about a Whovian policeman grappling with a nascent holy war; and, as always, have found hours consumed by the time sink that is Minecraft.

I often have ideas for blog posts – I got a lot of opinions, and my day gives me a lot of long empty hours to think about stuff. But then I get home and slump in front of the PC or TV and suddenly I don’t want to do anything.

I have been considering a rather big change in my future, though. It seems that getting funding for next year will be an uphill struggle, and I may have to pay my tuition fees myself. Even if I could do that, which is unlikely, it has made me really consider if paying £3500 to learn about dead poets is really what I want to do. It is not, if I am honest. So: I may do a journalism course instead.

The main reason for writing this update, though, is that I’m going to Finland for ten days tomorrow morning to stay with the beautiful Milka-Maria in Tampere. Finland! My first stay in a European country, unless you count a day-trip to France with the school. Land of lakes and bears and blondes and Sibelius. I’m well excited, like. Apparently the weather is great and the lakes warm and the Moomins plentiful.

I’m rather excited about sleeping in the airport, because I love airports (and I hope I never get so jaded from travelling that I get tired of airports and airplanes). London Stansted is apparently pretty good for that, too. I can take a shower! Buy a midnight snack! Play video games! It’s like a theme park for grown-ups. I’m reminded of my enthusiasm for the manga cafe in Takasaki, which wore off after ten minutes.

The plane travels over Norwich and the forecast is good, so I’m hoping for some breathtaking shots of my home city.

Been thinking about my future lately. I’ve still got 17 months until I graduate, but it’s been weighing on my mind since I attended this careers expo on Wednesday where they had two very good guest panels on Creative Writing and Publishing careers and the increasingly crisitunity world of Media and Journalism. The Creative Writing panel confirmed my fears that writing a novel does not make you a megastar overnight and that there are no parties and no million-dollar film deals, at least until you crank out more books, the foreign deals come in, and you can begin to make a modest living out of it. The average writer makes £8,000 a year – yer man Steve Mosby said he got £12,000 for his first two-book deal, then another £12,000 for the next two books, before getting a modest success with his third book and raking in £30,000 from international sales. So the other piece of advice was: stick to your day job, at least for a while.

Carter. I can't wait for the day he's throwing me out of a thirtieth-story window.

So what’s my day job gonna be? It’s slightly embarrassing because I know nothing is like the movies, but I think I can trace my interests in magazine journalism back to How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Vanity Fair) and The Devil Wears Prada (Vogue). And I read an interview with Graydon Carter where he came across as … an interesting guy, and then I bought two issues of GQ and decided that I was definitely going to write for them some day, falling in love with the exciting cardigan-wearing jet-setting New York restaurant-dining world of the moderately wealthy. (“I always keep an overnight bag with me at all times in case I have to leave for New York unexpectedly” kind of people.) Unfortunately I have no fashion sense and no money, but I guess I can work a keyboard, and surely that’s good enough?

The Media panel was mostly about news and TV journalism, from which I brought away that in this madass age it’s important to be multiskilled – a writer one minute, a cameraman the next, then a presenter and an editor. I guess I could be good at that. My other dream is to work for the BBC in Japan or something, or Kyodo News, so it might be important to get involved with the student TV network here at Leeds if I can.

Excitedly, I asked John Sutton from the Liverpool Echo how I should get into magazine journalism, and there was an embarrassing silence when he asked me what sort of magazines I wanted to write for, and I realised I had no idea. But then he suggested lifestyle, and I decided yes, that was what I wanted to do, and he said just find out names, find a specialism, shadow editors and writers and relentlessly badger people until you get an internship and an ‘in’. Ins are important, I gathered. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, which is a shame because I’m shit at networking. But who knows? I might just email every single magazine in the UK next spring and see if I can do an internship over the summer. Top goal would be something like Wired UK – if nothing else, I guess I know about tech, and there’s always room for ‘weird shit from Japan’ in geek mags, right?

Meanwhile, life continues unabated. I’ve started research for my dissertation, and I’m starting to think I might actually write it after all. I’ve got not one but two language partners and I can feel my Japanese speaking confidence slowly building. Everything in my life feels just barely under control, like a clown juggling chainsaws on a tightrope, but for the time being he’s catching the chainsaws the right way up. Which I guess is all he can ask for, right?

Got an email the other day from my editor saying about how there was a new capsule hotel starting up in Kyoto and that I could go along to the opening and do a piece about it if I wanted, and I was like hell yeah. One is never truly a journalist until one starts getting freebies.

Read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity recently, and it made me laugh, and I identified with portions of it quite a lot, and what more can you ask from a book, really?

Yesterday after class I headed down to Shinny-Shin Shinjuku (as it will hereby be known) and walked down to Kinokuniya’s South store, the one I tried to get to the other day and missed by about a minute’s walk, in hindsight. (I took the train to Yoyogi that time, which is actually about five minutes walk from Shinjuku anyway, but a totally different neighbourhood.)

I picked up my reserved copy of J301, and then browsed the English-language fiction, and got William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, which – hey! – is set in Tokyo, and is the sequel to Idoru, which I read last time I was here and tragically, just after finishing it, I left it next to an ATM in Kobe and never saw it again.

God, William Gibson. The writer I want to be. Everything I want to write about is pretty much summed up in his works, and he keeps saying things which make me nod my head and make me angry that I didn’t think of it before. Doubtless, in ten years’ time I will look back and laugh at my angry adolescent love of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk and nascent post-modernist evolutionary self-facilitating technological underground networking media nodes, but right now it still fascinates me.

I thought I’d do a bit of photography around Shinjuku, but it was cloudy and the light was bad and nothing quite worked.

shades of SimCity

So I went to Starbucks (where all those chairs are in the above photo) to buy hot chai and catch up on NaNoWriMo, as I was a couple days behind. I wrote and wrote. Then I went to the cafe next door, which sold me disgusting coffee but it was only 200 yen and I wrote some more. In total, 3,800 words, almost bringing me back on track.

I realised about fiveish or sixish that I was going to hit the rush hour of a million Tokyoites passing through Shinjuku on their way home via the westward arteries of the Chuo- and Keio-sen, so I left, straight into a glorious illuminated wonderland. Oh, Tokyo, how I love thee.

I believe that this may be the karaoke place in Lost in Translation, though I'm not sure.