So this is NaNo, and what have you done?

Alright, so this is a little late, but it's the official word that I rose to the challenge, I wrote 50,000 words towards a singular, novel-like project in the month of November, and I am officially an author. Well, so says National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo if you enjoy torturing your fingers). I'll believe it when my 'novel' evolves into something slightly more than 144 single-spaced pages of loosely-chaptered, loosely-plotted word stew. For now, let's go with "aspiring author."

So what have I got to show for it? Well, it's called The Building, and it's an idea that was loosely inspired by something Erica once said to me and heavily fed by ideas for it that I've been rolling around in my head ever since I lived in my apartment back in Toronto. Here's something that isn't a cover.

Next, as I have a questionable-yet-affectionate relationship with time, I'm going to be back-filling November with random excerpts from what I wrote that appeal to me but aren't yet fully seated in their complete stories. If you're interested in what this all produced, take a browse back through November as they come up or follow the NaNoWriMo tag (man, am I ever tired of trying to type that). If you can't be assed and would rather more Japananese content, well then you can happily pretend that November was the month that never was (much like October, apparently--sorry about that!).

To give you a basis for that back-diving, though, here's one of the most coherent things I've synthesized from The Building that hopefully makes a bit more sense of it all:

What is The Building?

A NaNoWriMo novel excerpt

“What is the Building?”
“Who are you?”

Jeez. Look at you clever apes. Millennia of evolution and centuries of civilization, and still you can only come so far from what you are. I’ve watched your kind come to me for answers for longer than you can properly understand, and you have always approached the problem of this place from the same angle.

“What is the Building?”
“Who are you?”

Always a realm and a power in your eyes. Always a creation and a creator; an aberration and an aberrator.

Well, I can tell you that I’m the Super. Superintendent? What? Never heard of him. I’m the Super. Just the Super. You could say I watch over this place.

But I guess that’s me starting you off with a lie. This Building is not a place. It rarely is. As Michael—our new tenant—will eventually come to realize, the Building is a wish and a promise. A motivation and a denial. Sometimes, It’s a place. Sometimes, It’s an energy. Sometimes It’s a force, or an idea, or a starting point. But It’s always a challenge.

This time It’s mostly a Building. It’s assumed many forms since It came into being, and if It stays in one form for too long, It will start to take on trappings of that form. Sometimes I catch lingering whiffs of the stomach-turning reek of iron from Its sojourn in your blood. I’m still finding and clearing up ponds and pools and oceans in the forgotten parts of It that have sloshed around in here since Atlantis. And it’s a good thing Watson and Crick made their discovery when they did because Its presence in the building blocks of life was starting to manifest weird traits in your young.

Here, as the Building, It’s become a bit more like a home than I like to give too much thought. It’s exerted that same, strange gravity that It always does, and It’s pulled all of these beings into Its orbit. We’ve had this before when It’s been a place. Back on Olympos, when Its traces in the minds of the Greeks turned into a pantheon of Gods on top of a mountain, I was the one forced to put up with all those Gods. That angry family of absolute powers, running around impregnating each other’s interests and setting their togas on fire with lightning bolts.

It’s different here, though: in the Building. It casts echoes and hints of itself into all minds equally, but It casts them most strongly and draws most directly from the ‘locals,’ as it were. And this city It’s set itself up in…have you seen this city? This city is huge in a way I haven’t seen since Babylon. It’s only got a few million people, but the variety of the worlds that they hold in their minds…Christ! Back on Olympos, the locals were all those Greeks: all with their selfsame ideas about incest and sodomy and vengeance. For all of their individual distinctness, their minds were as varied as porridge, and it manifested in here: in the Gods that they created out of It.

But this city…this world city, with its different minds from the many lands of this planet. I keep thinking that if It hangs around here too long, well we’re going to have Babylon all over again: all those languages from all of their minds, filtering into and being forged together in the unique of It.

With all of those minds out there, from all of those divergent places across this world, the Building manifests a multiculturalism of thought. They’ve got their beliefs and their stories and their gods, and all they do is think think think. Think think think all day long, and all It can do is listen until their thoughts all start shoring up in here: the Building filling its apartments with them like hard drives, like back-ups for all the wonders of the world. All of their dreams and their faiths. Makes me wonder if it’s not dangerous to keep It here: to keep this big ol’ focusing lens in the middle of all that variance.

Man, I tell you, it’s like watching TV. It’s like having every channel in the world. There are times when I go down to the basement floors and sit in that forest of eyes that look in through the peepholes, and I just watch watch watch. You get bored and something new is bound to turn up. Out Front, this Building’s got a finite number of rooms and floors, but in the Back I don’t think It knows any limits. It just keeps pulling them all in—monsters and ideas and dreams—and handing them keys to apartments, and giving them physical form as human-looking tenants in those apartments. You wind up with Back things who have never had a Front before, like those wild children up on 17 and 18. They’ve wandered around out Back for so long that they can’t even remember that they were dreamt up by someone out Front. And then I’ve got to follow around after them: putting out their fires and blotting out their floors and making up Frontwards explanations for all of their Backwardsness.

I tell ya: this place wouldn’t last two ticks without me making sure it was all running tiggity-boo. Even with me around, there’s something in It that’s made a dangerous habit out of testing Its limits. There’s stuff that’s been allowed to set up shop in the Building that’s a little too aware of where it is and what this is all about: stuff that’s got too many ideas about where it’s heading and who it needs to step on to get there.

But I guess that’s the way of it, you know? The nature of the Building is a kind of vaguely vectored chaos. It shows up, It inspires, It draws in the one who’s meant to find It, and then It’s gone again—off to some other place or time or level of being. Everything else is just coincidental: distractions operating within the framework.

Still. This one’s a doozy. This one’s like I haven’t seen since sixty million BC. When you’ve been around as long as I have, and you’ve been put through the kind of wringers I’ve been, you get pretty good at spotting where stuff’s headed. But this one…

…Even I got no idea about this one.

Service Interruptions Likely

Well, I can't exactly say that service on here has been regular since that whole Epic Four Points Deally, but this is just a post to say that the month of November will, likely, be a write-off as far as blogging is concerned. I'll still be doing stuff, but when I'm not off and doing it, I should really be off writing.

After years of putting it off, I finally signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I'm now engaged in the process (well, I'm currently behind in the process, if you want to be accurate) of attempting to write 50,000 words--a novel-length work of fiction--in 30 days. I had thought that with all of the prep time afforded to JETs teaching in Japan, the process would be a breeze, but of late I keep getting distracted by work and volunteer responsibilities for HAJET, and, of course, The Doctor.

But, even if it's a little behind where it should be right now, the work is coming along well. It's a still-fragmented something about gods and monsters and buildings, and the hapless, very human tenants tasked with making sense of it all. There are libraries and lions and men who just might be turning into stars. There are gods above and below on undeniable collision courses. There is fiction, and there is experiential fact, and despite the many threads of story I'm trying to weave separately, there is already a terminus: a nice, convenient domino of persistent plot elements that will, hopefully, tie it all up in the end.

So, with that explained, I should probably be getting back to it, but here's an introduction to the idea behind the book:

Tenants in apartment buildings live, more or less, in a community with hundreds of complete strangers. Neighbours only ever see each other for so short a time, and the relationships that develop are one-dimensional: phatic. From the few points of contact with these people, guesses can be made to extrapolate the shape of their lives, but, what is the truth of the other 98% of the time when they go unseen? Are they just people, just as boring and quotidian as us all, or could they be gods and monsters.

Oh, and there's still no snow in Hokkaido--well, at least not in the low parts. That being said, the weather is odd today, and there seems to be hope in the high places. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the possibility of boarding to celebrate the national holiday and the birth of The Season on November 23rd.

Pages 101

I did a “Yay! One year of BLOG!” thing a few weeks back, and it vaguely dealt with necessaries of what’s gone on in the last year. This is the “Yay! 101^st post!” thing, and I feel like I’ve been planning this thing for longer, and it might be a little more the kind of stuff I like to write about than the last one. Here’s hoping it’s the kind of stuff you’d want to read about…

In the One Year of BLOG thing, I commemorated the birthday of this blog, but this blog started as a necessary evil for me—something I had a love-hate relationship with—and I gradually grew into it. I realized that I could channel some of my loathing for “guess what I ate for dinner today!” banal blogging into a motivation to do better. Yes, I’ve been guilty of banality (see: “BTW: Pocky, banana, and milk is AWESOME”), but I like to think that I’ve been guilty of more beauty. I try to put a lot into this thing, and I try to write things that are a little more interesting: things I would like to read.

But anyway. The Blog isn’t where it all started. The blog only served as a channel for the outcomes of the real inception:

My notebooks.

The Claire Fontaines.

The ever-present bundles of exquisite lined white that people infuriatingly insist on calling Journals or Diaries or Day Timers. Infuriatingly because, for some anal retentive reason, I believe branding them as such decreased their net worth—brands them as something much less than what they are. You label a thing with a loaded, clichéd word like that, and it becomes the label, losing all of its unique and inexplicable trappings. To call my books of writing "journals" or "diaries" is to render them less than what they are. It is to cheapen them in thought and risk that cheapening spreading to their bodies—to their physical stuff.

That’s a lot of English nerd talk for the idea that you can’t judge a book by its cover, I guess. I’ve always wanted these books to be something more than journals or diaries, just as I’ve wanted this place to be something more than a blog.

So though I might not have a concrete term for what these books are, I know what they were born of. Their ancestors started as Travel Writing, back in OAC (2001) when we went to Greece on a school trip and I needed a Writer’s Craft Independent Study Project. I took a random black notebook and a random black pen, and I held myself to writing in the notebook every day. People asked if it was a diary or a journal, but even then, roughly a decade ago, I aspired for it to be more than a day-to-day account of the quotidian. I tried to use the days events only as starting points for tangents of thought, grounding myself in the real and here and now only when it’d been a proper adventure. I called it Classical Studies.

It was the first, but when I went to Norway (and Sweden and Amsterdam and Denmark) with Amanda in 2004, I took a random red notebook and a blue pen with me. Though I didn’t keep to the same regimented schedule, I made sure to write as we traveled. I called it Viking Ghosts.

Then I did it again on the trip to Estonia, Finland, Germany, and Sweden with my mother in 2006: this time with a leather-sleeved, Estonian-designed, spiral-bound notebook number and the too-fancy pen mom had bought me for grad. I called it Baltic Son.

In 2007, when MHS sent me to the UK for the ICEI Conference we were hosting, and I took advantage to spin the free ticket out, for good or ill, into an English adventure, I took a blue notebook like the Norway one and a blue pen. I called it A Bit of Stuff.

Hell, when I headed out to BC in July of 2009, even then I had an insignificant—as of yet, unnamed—notebook with me, and I used it to note the thoughts and stories that all that ocean and trees and mountains bred in me.

It became like clockwork. Sure, I kept notebooks, and I wrote when I was kicking around Toronto. Sure, I had ideas. However, something about them was different: the consistency…the flow. I guess nothing inspires more uniquely than the unknown.

So that’s where they came from—their lineage, I guess. But what are they?

They are a record.

A record that I try to make as multi-faceted as possible by pasting in pieces of this or that, adding random pictures people print for me, scribbling stray thoughts and big ideas, noting banalities like (failed) budgets and useful Japanese words. I hold to dating most of the entries, and I hold to only using a particular kind of notebook (frustratingly, Made in France) and a very particular kind of pen (fortunately, Made in Japan), but other than that it’s no-holds-barred. A lot of the things that wind up posted here start as scribbles in there. They are blood samples or cores of wild and unknown trees. They are man made things that have been submerged in a flow of thoughts and experiences, and when they’re brought back up out of that flow you can see where bits of it have latched onto them—have become pressed between their pages or caught up in their spines or blotted into their paper.

As for the books I’ve brought to Japan, specifically, they are still a work in progress. I’ve never held this travel writing regimen for this long before (as this is the longest I’ve ever been away from home). There are, of course, questions of whether this is still travel writing at all, if I might not be considered settled here and if some of the wonder might have gone out of the pages over the months. Regardless, I’m sticking to it, and I’ve filled four of them since I was accepted to JET and started attending pre-departure sessions last May. They still don’t have a name, but ideas like “Hokkaido Nights” or “I Was Promised Robots” have bubbled up from time to time. Some day I’ll do a better job of documenting them photographically, but they’re there if you want to see them, and here are some photos if you’re not kicking around Japan.