The winter of my (dis)content

HOTEL update: Still waiting for approval of the final manuscript. No news is…no news. My agent is holding off on the sale of foreign rights pending approval, though it sounds like there’s been some decent inquires. How do you say hotel in Dutch?

I grew up in Seattle where a dusting of snow brings about apocalyptic responses from the general public. Schools shut down. Hardware stores suddenly sell-out their rusty supplies of tire-chains and snow-shovels. Windswept yuppies in frozen Kenneth Coles stand on street corners huddled together for warmth, sharing the glow of a roaring cup of Starbucks. (Half-caf, non-fat latte, with a shot of hazelnut, hold the whip).*

Even emergency response units—the police, the fire department—seem to shut off their porch-lights and pretend that no one’s home, like a house on Halloween night that’s run out of candy.

So it never fails to amuse me when I look outside and see the thermometer at 12-degrees. (Or colder). It dipped below zero a few times this past week. It’s different out here on the hinterland. Not only do they never cancel school––they don’t even cancel recess unless kids are counting their fingers during math quizzes and having to stop at eight or nine.

It’s a different world. People plug in their cars. Put booties on their pets. And wear winter hats that even Elmer Fudd would laugh at. They stay in and “get things done.” In my case, it’s that whole writing thing. When the temperature drops, my productivity goes up. Maybe because there are fewer reasons to go out, or maybe it’s just the warmth that comes from my iMac.

*If you’re in Seattle and you deign to order a cup of coffee using less than twelve syllables you are immediately escorted to Enumclaw where you’re issued a dented thermos of day-old Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

Once upon a time I worked in a strange land called Advertising. This is not a land inhabited by normal people, which is probably why I thrived there. When employers interviewed me and asked what my primary career goal was, my answer was usually “to get a corner office so my dog can have a better view.” And by golly, I achieved that goal.

It’s a strange business. One that was suitable to my short attention span and my proclivity for wearing shorts to work. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a lazy mans (or woman’s…or pre-operative trans-gendered person’s) game. It’s fiercely competitive and the hours involved are somewhere between a Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop and The Gulag under Stalin. Tons of brain-breaking labor, but kept just below the level where Amnesty International puts you on a watch-list as an abused and exploited sector of society.

The business often moves at a pace which can stretch one’s ability to make normal decisions. Some of these weird decisions I’ve witnessed first-hand include:

• Working on an airline account that would regularly place ads in the L.A. Times that cost $20k each and then cancel at the last minute when they couldn’t determine a fare price. They’d still owe for the ad, the ad agency would still make a commission, but the airline had just flushed $20k down the noisy blue airline toidy. It happened so often we created an office pool.

• A major packaged goods company gave away a vintage 1928 limousine during a promotion. Yay! Then they found two unopened bags of contest entries at their office and had to buy the limousine back and give it away again. (Boo…) At least my partner and I got to take it out for a spin. It desperately needed shocks.

• During a crowded late-night meeting a diminutive Nancy Reagan-like client jumped across a table and covered a bunch of papers with her body. She saw a janitor walk by the window of our glass conference room and thought he might be a corporate spy. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or stuff my wallet into her mouth thinking she was having a grand mal seizure.

• Another memorable executive decision was by a marketing manager that decided to cancel a radio campaign because he thought it would be insulting to deaf people. Radio. Deaf people. I’ll let you think about that one for a moment.

• But probably my all-time favorite bad decision was when a major recreation client sucked me into a conference call the evening of 9/11 wanting to offer 10% discounts to victims in NYC. This is a client that wore a crayon-yellow suit to meetings, and once gave us a toilet-seat with his logo on it––so subtlety was not in his DNA. We balked. He eventually fired us. I’ve pimped a lot of things in my advertising career—but my integrity has never been on the auction block.

Despite all that, marketing is still in my bloodstream. So when I see a particular locomotive heading for a marketing train-wreck, I can’t seem to avert my eyes. The latest being Kool-Aid and Reebok’s (drumroll please) scented footwear. No, do not adjust your set; this is not an SNL commercial parody. Scented sneakers. As if kids don’t have enough reasons to beat each other up on the playground.

Apparently these shoes come three scents:  Beat-Me-Up-Cherry, Steal-My-Lunch-Strawberry and Gang-Tackle-Me Grape. A line of branded hoodies will also be available, to hide the bruises.

Beating the !@#$%! out of cancer

When I was a kid I had a comic book collection and a purple Schwin with a banana-seat. That’s about as complicated as life got. Now I’m a grown-up and I have a mortgage and life insurance and an accountant. (I still have the comics).

Back then, if my friends went to the hospital it was to have their tonsils removed. Now my friends go in for chemotherapy.

It started a year ago with friend and fellow author, T.L. Hines. In the middle of signing a new four-book deal he found out he had a rare non-hodgkins lymphoma. Tony has chronicled his journey at http://www.tlhines.com/lymphoma/. His journal is full of wit and honesty. And according to the latest PET scans, he’s taken his cancer to the woodshed.

Which gives me hope.

Because In case you haven’t heard, another author, Patry Francis, has recently been diagnosed as well. So some folks over at Backspace.org rounded up a bunch of bloggers to tip our collective hats to Patry. (Nodding). At last count there were 300 of us. Probably more as we speak.

Writing for the most part is a solitary business. And health benefits are often scarce. So it’s nice to see so many people taking the time to offer their support. If you have the time, pop over to Patry’s website and give her a virtual hug.

And if you have the dough, why not check out Patry’s debut novel, The Liar’s Diary and Tony’s debut, Waking Lazarus, or his latest, The Dead Whisper On.

Be well.

Blog 0. Research 1.

That pretty much sums up all of last week. I’ve been creeping ahead with book #2, but I’m about to “cross the Rubicon"––hitting the point of no return. In this case, the book crosses over to Japan—a place I’ve never visited. I’m not Japanese. I don’t speak Japanese. I’m Chinese, so people sometimes think I’m Japanese, but that’s about as close as I get. So, what’s a writer to do?

Risa-chi––research my brains out.

I’ve been told: “write what you know.” That made a lot of sense at the time. But, if I actually stuck to that advice all my novels would be about comic books, waffles and who’s on American Idol this week.

Instead, the better advice is “know what you write.” So I’ve had to do more homework on Japan––specifically a farming community on Shikoku.

And yes, a two-week sabbatical to Kochi, Shikoku for “research” did cross my mind. The only thing that held me back (aside from the en versus the dollar, or course) is that I need Shikoku, circa 1940 and no matter how many Delta Miles I have saved up I can’t get there from here.

So basically, I’ve been binging on research. I did plenty before, but I always feel the need to over-prepare. I’ve poured over books on culture, geography and history. Keep in mind that some of these texts are translated and not the most palatable of reads, nevertheless…I needed appropriate pre-war employment for a female lead (switchboard operator). I needed a religious affiliation (Shingon). I needed a tension-causing racial background (Burukumin).

So I’ve spent most of the week (and weekend) reading, taking notes, printing out and marking up pages, revising a timeline and searching for maps.

Speaking of maps, I can’t seem to write without one. I don’t always write from Point A to Point B, but there’s comfort in knowing where they are. In the case of HOTEL, I found hand-sketched maps of Seattle’s Nihonmachi in the 30s. For the new book, I found National Geographic maps of Shikoku, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, all circa 1940. They cost me a whopping $1.25 a piece at a local antique store. $1.25!!! (That’s a ¥134.14!!!)

When I’m done, maybe I’ll go for a visit. (Not sure if my accountant would approve). At the least, I’ll look up a historian or regional expert to interview—to confirm or correct historical details. That's what I did when I finished HOTEL. Lawson Inada, author/editor of Only What We Could Carry was kind enough to read my unedited manuscript. His reply? “Wow, you’ve certainly done your homework.”

If only my teachers in high school had said that once in a while.