Sons of Loki

Found a job! Yes, I’m sort of working freelance for Demand Media, an online publisher who run eHow and LiveStrong, among other things. Of all the “work from home” schemes I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot) it’s really the only one that works. It’s absolutely perfect for me. You pick a title from the database – I’m doing how-to guides, like how to write a personal statement or how to fix Guitar Hero drums – write the guide, which takes me anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour, and submit it. Either it gets approved straight away, or a copy editor has you make a few changes before it’s (hopefully) re-accepted. And boom, $15 (£9.50) for an hour’s work sent via PayPal. Any time of day, any day of the week. One a day, and that’s my rent and utilities for the week covered.

I mean to write a post on here about my experiences from my first few articles and tips for newbies like myself, so keep eyes peeled.

It’s 2011, the first year of the 10s if you don’t believe 2010 is in the 10s (which it is, as any sensible non-pedantic person agrees). Resolution time!

• Write a radio script! I realised that while writing a play requires you to get a director and a stage and actors, you can write a radio script and submit it to the Beeb and you might get feedback, if they like it enough, and if they really like it they’ll buy it from you for megabucks and make it into a radio play. How ace would that be?
• Join the theatre society! I wouldn’t really say I’ve always wanted to be an actor, but I do kinda feel like I need to do acting at some point in my life, when I think about it. I didn’t go to no fancy acting schools and I have only seen about three plays and my only experience with Drama is a term of Drama enrichment in sixth form, but someone’s got to be the extras.
• Have a shower! No, wait, that’s my plan for today.
• Start jogging (again)! I’ve been running on-and-off for three years now? I used to use the treadmills at TUFS, which was really convenient, but there’s no sense paying silly money to use the gym at Leeds when I have the beautiful wood near my house to run through.

I discovered an amazing app called RunKeeper (currently free for the pro version) which – get this – you set up a route, like run 0.5 miles then walk 0.25 miles and repeat three times, and then you pop in your headphones and listen to some banging tunes and a synthesised voice tells you when to start running and when to stop running and how far you’ve run and your pace and speed and stuff all in your ears automatically. And it tracks you by GPS so you can see exactly how far you ran, how high you climbed, and then overlays it on Google Maps.

It’s so weird. You know your forefather William Gibson told us how technology would revolutionise the world. And while we don’t have nanomachines in our bloodstream or skull-guns or brain-cyberspace interfaces yet, I honestly think the age of better living through technology is here. My phone tells me when to run for optimum fitness. My PC makes the screen warmer in the evening so I can sleep better. Then my phone monitors me while I sleep so it can wake me up at the right time. I know it seems like iPhones and smartphones and app ecosystems are overhyped, but it really is a revolution in the way we use technology. The future is now, people!!

Things have been pretty quiet lately. Everyone’s gone home for Christmas; I have been hanging around working on my dissertation, which is moving along at a fair old clip. It’s changed quite a lot from my original intention, which was a big unfocused grab-bag of topics about the future of Japan.

Instead I narrowed it down to the future of youth in Japan – the big question being whether freeterism (flitting from temporary job to temporary job in your 20s and 30s, not settling into a career path) and NEETism (basically giving up on life and living in your parents’ house) has a viable future. But then I kinda got lost on that, so it changed again to the causes of this crisis in Youth Employment. This is important, because it’s what’s gonna happen here in a year when all the jobs are gone and I can’t get on the career ladder, although thankfully the UK is a little different to Japan.

Anyway, stick a conclusion on that, get it ring-bound, and that’s that done. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a few articles on HubPages to get my writing out there and hopefully earn a few bob from advertising. It would probably make more sense to write on this blog more, but I’ll try this in the meantime and linking here helps with the old SEO:

Best of Seoul: top places to go in the heart of Korea
Top places to go in sunny Seville
Hangover from hell: Climbing Mt Fuji
Malaga: Where to go in the Andalusian City of Culture
Top European spas: three of the best
Buying a title: can anyone become a Baron or Lady?
Tokyo on a Budget: Top tips to survive in Tokyo on the cheap

Anyway, Christmas is coming and I’m back at home. I’m writing my first play, although I don’t know anything about drama beyond a couple of Alan Bennett plays I’ve been reading. My plan is to join the theatre soc in the new year, become an accomplished AC-TOR! and then move on to playwright. Also, to keep on with this Beatles tribute band I’m in. And get a job. And pass third year.

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?

On the road, he became anonymous, a nobody. Just another gaijin tourist; no more worthy of note than that the sky was blue or that birds sang. He didn’t so much blend in as simply not be present; he was discovered as a suitcase in a luggage rack, or seen as wallpaper plastered against walls, or spotted as a railing affixed to the pavement.

In Kyoto he saw the temples and the forests and the geisha. In a town called Yamaguchi, he brushed his teeth with the complimentary toothbrush, and ordered a cup noodle from the vending machine.
Down in the far south, from a city called Kagoshima, he took a train ride down the coast to the end of the world. The sea thrashed and boiled in a desperate frenzy as it poured over the rim. From the edge of the Earth, hanging out over eternity, a peninsula ran out into a thick grey fog; there he found himself as far from Tokyo as possible, surrounded by mountains and empty highways, vending machines and deserted high schools. There was a TV shop here, too: big-screened Sonys and Toshiba plasmas. A man was carrying wet cardboard boxes from a pile and tossing them over a railing off the edge of the world, where they tumbled down into infinity.
A little further down the coast there was a white-painted metal stairway leading down to an observation platform, proudly proclaiming itself as the most remote point on Earth, a kilometre out from the rim and into space. An elderly couple – the man in a grey coat and flat cap, the woman wearing a purple headscarf – were leading on the rail, staring out at God’s creation, enormous lilac nebulae and supernovae erupting across unimaginable distances.
“It’s cold,” the man said, in Japanese he could just about understand.
“It is, isn’t it?” his partner replied.

Trying to get back into this writing lark, now I have some time. It’s what I want to do, more than anything – it’s what drives me. I think I possibly explained before, but if I was a famous singer, I could lose my voice; if I was good at piano, I might not be able to afford one; were I a playwright, I still need actors and a stage. But being a writer, and specifically a novellist, it’s like you don’t need anything. You can write on a train or write on a mountain. You can write on a PC or scrawl it down on a napkin. Even if you’re completely paralysed you can still write.

The last days have been a little hectic. I was worried that I’d have nothing to do this holiday, but it’s been quite the opposite; karaoke on Wednesday, nomikai (drink-meet) on Thursday and then again last night. Everyone else sensibly went home before the stroke of midnight but Kaz and I, determined to make a proper Friday of it, ended up wandering around Kichijoji in the rain.

Kichijoji is a nice place, and it can be a pretty good spot for nightlife, but by midnight everyone sensible has gone on to Shinjuku and it was raining, so the town was kinda dead. Went to Hub for a few drinks, then an izakaya I’d been to before for a few more drinks, then got waylaid in a bizarre tiny shisha bar I’d noticed before, one which spills out on to the street under a plastic awning. The drinks were expensive, and the girls – well, I suspect they weren’t there for the atmosphere, if you get my drift – but it was kind of fun in a seedy underworld kind of way, the ten of us crammed into a tiny space on wooden stools, me alternately getting dripped on from the awning and having my ass grilled by the portable heater. Had it been more inside with the burly Sly Stallone-lookalike (right down to the porkpie hat!) between me and the exit, I might have been a little worried, but if they were running a dodgy clip joint it was an honorable dodgy clip joint where we were free to leave any time.

So we did. It was about 3am, and we had some time to kill before the first trains, so Kaz took me to this place he used to drink, and it was beautiful. It was an old-timey, Showa-era place, with vintage posters on the walls and that beautiful jazzy old Japanese music (I think ryūkōka?); you could imagine that it was the 1950s and you’d just got the new-fangled Chuo-line locomotive back from your labouring job in up-and-coming Shinjuku and decided to pop into your favourite haunt for a glass of nihonshu. It’s like a long-forgotten Tokyo, the Tokyo you see in old photographs. It was cheap, too, and I tried frog for the first time (exactly as Kaz said: like fish, only … like chicken).

So in the end, I spent a whole lot of money, but it was worth it because I learned stuff! I think I learned more Japanese just chatting to Kaz for a few hours than I do in a week of lessons. And such is the point of language learning, no?

Here’s the sunrise over Chofu airfield.

A little bird keeps visiting my balcony, which is nice. I leave out thawed frozen veg for him.

I decided to head back to Asakusabashi, for a stroll along the Sumida River. The trip out was weird; first time I’ve been out in daylight for a while, first time I’ve seen Tokyo in the morning for a long time.

I went to Asakusa, to Shitamachi (lit. ‘down-town’, meaning ‘old town’), way back in 2007 to find a department store that apparently specialised in fancy paper. While there I ended up down strange ancient alleys that seemed the antithesis of the Tokyo I knew, and wandering along the Sumida River, so desolate and empty compared to the Thames or the Seine or whatever municipal rivers you care to name.

It was a stroll that inspired a short story for my Writing Fiction class last year, and that little short story grew into a novel that’s 60k and counting. Head down the right passage off the Sumida embankment, you see, and you stumble across the secret artist commune that’s at the heart of my novel. Which sets most of my novel in old town, in Shitamachi. Which meant I wanted to head along and do a little research. (It’s not every day one’s in Tokyo, after all.)

After lunch at Maccy D’s, I walk.

I always feel some strange connection to rivers. I’d love to own a boat one day, go chugging along, watch the scenery go by…

The titantic bulk of the (Shuto?) Expressway.

I bother a few pigeons for cool shots.

Strange little buildings, as far from the towers of Shinjuku as can be imagined.

Could this be the secret entrance, I wonder? (Naught but a concrete wall and bags of rubbish could I peek behind it.)

The riverside walk stretches on for an awfully long way, but is desolate except for old people, the homeless, and a couple salarymen on a smoke break.

How many live here?

Fabulously wealthy Tokyo has a shanty town too. It's just that this shanty town is thousands of elaborate cardboard hovels stretched in every nook and cranny across the city.

I end up walking quite a ways along the river, all the way down to Tsukishima and its Hong Kong-esque apartment towers at the tip of Tokyo Bay. Here I stop for a sit-down at the top of a steep embankment and catch a quick nap in the less-than-blazing January sunshine.

Walking back inland towards Tokyo Station, I pop into a Starbucks populated mainly by businesspeople rather than the usual student crowd (and a woman in a kimono chatting to a Yank for reasons I couldn’t discern) and get a café latte while putting a few ideas down. Writing in cafes. It’s practically the entire point of being a writer.