Most of day 3 was in the fox shrine, Fushimi Inari Taisha, where we hiked mountain paths dotted with thousands of vermilion torii gates. Afterwards, we visited the zen gardens at Tofukuji. To rest, we took a dip in a public bath, where I intentionally got zapped with electricity.
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I walked past our hoard of Japanese Kit Kats this week and noticed, according to the dates, that some had “expired” in January. I knew we had to eat them soon, in order to get the best results. So, on Friday, February 12th, we had The Tastening, in which Leslie and I sampled nine flavors and crowned a champion.
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January was a strange month. While Leslie started and finished editing Echo Chamber Heist, I ended up looking for and finding a new job. If it weren’t for Leslie, our manuscript would have stagnated.
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I believe in iterations. I love building a bare-bones product, using it, finding its faults, then making only the most valuable modifications. Time is short, after all. This article highlights some of the changes I made to the blog’s design last September.
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In 2015, we posted the full manuscript for Echo Chamber Heist to an online writing community. This article analyzes how long it took to post each chapter and how our writing strategy for 2016 has changed.
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Last year, 65 critiquers gave feedback on Echo Chamber Heist in our online writing community. This article explores how many chapters each critiquer read and why people stopped reading when they did.
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Since we booked our rooms incorrectly, we only had part of one day to see Osaka. We didn’t have many plans, but Leslie’s top destination was the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan, since it’s among the few aquariums that has a whale shark.
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It is with great pleasure that I am returning to Japan, this time with Leslie. It has been five years since I lived in Sapporo, Hokkaido, but looking back is like watching a movie of someone else’s experiences now. I might even have a hard time believing I had ever lived in Japan, if it weren’t for recently seeing my old friend, Tomohiro Suenaga, when he came to visit Pittsburgh and we travelled together to New York City.
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It’s been a year since we started using a cork board to track and plan our writing goals. In that time, we published our first novella, redesigned our site twice, finished writing Echo Chamber Heist, were selected for #PitchSlam, and had eleven agents request our manuscript. The board is here to stay, but our process will continue to evolve as we learn.
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The Christmas parties are over, New Year’s parties are coming, and it’s time to get back into the swing of writing. However, my mind keeps wandering … I’m worn out from all of our recent travels and need some time to recharge. I want nothing more than to sit on my couch and play Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows. Normally I’d just try to force myself to focus, but sometimes, you have to make a compromise.
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