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Write from the baseline

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I won’t bore you with the details of how I ended up locking myself out of my house last Thursday morning. Just know that no matter how I try to justify it, it was a pretty stupid mistake.

Fortunately, when it happened, my neighbor was home and let me use his phone. I called John and, amid a storm of apologies, asked him to come home from work and let me back in. Then I asked my neighbor for one more favor: could I borrow a pen? After all, this happened on the first day of NaNoWriMo and before the incident, I had been just about to sit down and write.

I settled in on a park bench with my pen and some scrap paper… and proceeded to completely space out instead of getting any writing done.

Some of the stuff I thought about:

  • What time is it? I didn’t have my phone or even my watch. Can I keep track of time with the movement of the sun, maybe? How much time has even passed?
  • What’s going on at work? Right before I locked myself out, I turned in an article on deadline. Was my editor happy, or was she pinging me right now for changes?
  • I’m so stupid. Why didn’t I bring my keys, or double check the door before I closed it? John must hate me right now for interrupting his day.
  • Why am I not writing? I have zero distractions. There’s just this paper in front of me. But for some reason, I still can’t make my brain relax.

It turned out there wasn’t any reason for me to worry so much, as is often the case with these things. My editor had gone to lunch and didn’t notice my absence. John wasn’t upset when he came home, and we made a plan to keep this from happening again.

Even though logically, I knew everything was fine, it took a couple of hours though before I could calm down and get some writing done. I had forgotten the most important truth about writing: the most important prerequisite is a calm mind. Despite, it’s far more difficult to create anything when you’re freaking out.

I love this old quote by Cheryl Strayed that debunks the old stereotype about writers and depression: “You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done. We get the work done on the ground level.”

I think of the “ground level” Strayed describes as a sort of baseline. Everyone’s is different: some are higher or lower than others. But your baseline is your most comfortable mindset, in between more positive or more negative emotions. Positive thoughts don’t get in the way of my work, but negative ones do. If I’m worried about something else those worries occupy my mind, and I can’t give my focus to creation when I’m already fixated on some impending doom.

It’s important to consider during periods of writer’s block or demotivation, it might be something more than laziness to blame. Are you really that undisciplined, or is it something stressful that’s making it tough for you to concentrate? Putting aside physical time for your work isn’t the same as reserving the mental space it requires.

Maybe you know this already. But in a year that’s been tough for everybody, I think it can be easy to blame ourselves for lower productivity when that isn’t always the right reason. If you’re going through something, ditch the self-shaming and take care of yourself, first. When you’re feeling better, your creative projects will still be there.

Since it’s National Novel Writing Month, I’m going to continue with last year’s tradition and conclude every November blog post with my current word count out of 50,000. Right now it’s 7,886. I’m just getting started!

Five Years of Weekly Anime Streaming Reviews

In the summer of 2014, I became an Anime News Network weekly streaming reviewer. I just finished up my reviews for summer 2018 and realized it’s been five years. Interestingly, one of the summer 2014 shows I reviewed was Free! Eternal Summer and one of the summer 2018 shows I reviewed was Free! Dive to the Future.

I started out reviewing three shows every season, though now I usually cover two. My reviews have a minimum 500-word count, though I end up going over that more often than not because it’s easy to get chatty about a half hour of anime. Last year I calculated that I had written about 300,000 words of reviews in four years and that’s probably close to 380,000 now.

Unlike other work, each write-up is simple enough that I rarely take time off for them. I’ve written my weekly streaming review between panels at Anime Boston and in a hotel room over the Shinjuku skyline. I’ve tested the extent of internet connections everywhere. I watched an episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans from John’s grandmother’s house in rural West Virginia in three-minute spurts between buffering (not my favorite viewing format). Another time, at a friend’s forest-enclosed lake house, everyone else agreed to log off their various devices so I could throttle the connection with Luck & Logic.

After my first reviewing season, I wrote up some takeaways about the art and craft of anime criticism. Reading that same post now, all I can think is that I was spending too much time in the comments section, checking out how other people were critiquing my critiques. At the time, I thought the only way to be fair was to write while predicting the comments my reviews would get, but that just made my reviews too cautious. I would read what other fans thought about the show in the forums and try to deliver the median opinion, but it wasn’t genuine. Now I realize people come for my opinion on a show, which gets more nuanced the more experience I get. Five years means I have reviewed 20 seasons of anime, which amounts to a lot of practice!

Ultimately, the main thing I’ve learned is that so much of the anime we watch each season is forgettable. In those 20 seasons, I’ve reviewed something like 40 shows (because of double cours and multiple seasons, otherwise it’d be a lot more), and how many of them do I even recall? Some stick out as winners I’ll inevitably watch again, like Land of the Lustrous and Ushio and Tora. But most of them, I struggle to remember clearly. Remember Clean Freak! Aoyama-kun? What about Gunslinger Stratos? I barely remember Denki-Gai, but the ANN website informs me that I’ve written 6,000 words on the subject.

With five years on the books, I’m not planning on slowing down. I’ve already begun my Fall 2018 reviews for Run With The Wind and Tsurune. While 2018 has been kind of a bust for me as a fandom writer, as health and other personal issues have slowed me down a bunch, anime reviews keep me grounded in a routine while contributing to the conversation. Thanks to so many of you for reading my reviews of shows great, awful, and middling, and I’ll see you around for the next five years at least, if ANN will continue to have me.

(Screenshot from Tsurune.) 

How I unexpectedly found myself doing PR

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Usually, my name can be found in the byline of an article. But last week, it was in reporters’ inboxes, too.

That’s because I was in charge of sending the J-Novel Club Anime Expo public relations (PR) announcements. I’ve been working with Sam, the J-Novel Club founder, since before he launched the site. I even designed it! I never planned to do PR there, but the role fits surprisingly well. I use my own name and my own press contacts that I’ve built over the years. As a journalist myself, I feel confident writing emails that I think other journalists will find helpful. 

In the past few years, I’ve realized I really enjoy this kind of writing. I got my first taste of PR while writing my own press releases to announce each of my books. I’ve managed publicity for other clients and I’ve also helped friends working on cool projects workshop their own press strategies. The highlight to date was when a young communications student at my alma mater and I had a phone conversation about writing PR that’s earnest and doesn’t suck.

When I was getting my Masters in Journalism, there was this idea that press and PR were polar opposites. One of my classes met in a communications building classroom right after the PR track had met there. We’d laugh at the professors’ obsequious strategies on the board about winning reporters over. At the time, I guessed PR and the press had a combative relationship. PR reps would push me to write glorified ads, I thought, and I would have to push back.

But while I’ve gotten my fair share of terrible press releases on boring or irrelevant topics, public relations point-people have helped me immensely. They send topics right to my inbox so I don’t have to search so hard for stories. They set up interviews with hard-to-reach people. They trust me with news ahead of time so I can publish timely exclusives. They offer to send me free stuff, which I usually refuse unless they send me something I am going to review because as nice as PR contacts are, they are not my friends and nothing they send me is really free.

You’d assume there are more strings attached here, but I somehow maintain good relations with PR contacts even when I write negative stories. I incorrectly called my Amazon Anime Strike piece a bridge-burner, because I used my connections and privilege as a reporter in order to write a negative piece about how much the service disappointed me. But after I sent them a link to the article, the PR contact said they looked forward to working with me again.

Just last week, a PR contact thanked me for my critical article about Cosplay Token. So if there is a string attached, it’s this: if I write anything, they win, because they get attention.

Honestly, I wish somebody had told me this earlier in my career: there’s nothing “brave” about writing negative stories that benefit my readers because no ethical company is going to cut my access because of a legitimate, if negative, story. That would just make them look bad.

The thing that does restrict my coverage? Well, doing PR. I wrote exactly one article about J-Novel Club before I started doing regular PR for them, and even that has a caveat about my ties to the company. I wouldn’t have written an article like that today, because I indirectly benefit.

Still, I would be comfortable with say, being a whistleblower if I learned about bad practices there (fortunately, I have not). I feel the same way about basically anywhere I work. Even though I’ve been writing at Anime News Network for four years, I’ve spoken publicly about being disappointed with CEO Chris Macdonald’s decision to join the Otaku Coin board (and following that up with how glad I was when he backed out of that).

You see, none of the places I work really need me. I am not an employee of anyone. A fellow freelancer recently shared a story on Facebook about these tenuous connections: after a year of turning in well-received work, she got pneumonia and was two days late on a deadline. The company paid her promptly as usual, and never contacted her again. It was perfectly legal. Anyone I work for could just as easily sever ties with me.

But there’s a kind of freedom in that, too. I don’t have one master. No one outlet has so big a vise on my wallet that I can’t up and leave. If one of them does something so poisonous that I don’t want to be associated with them anymore, it’s not a major financial hardship for me.

Lives and careers are messy. Even if I never did PR, this would be the case. My articles are full of editor’s notes: “I donated to this Patreon,” or “I met this founder at a con.” I have a lot of allegiances, sure, but my sense of right and wrong is stronger. Ultimately, my most powerful relationship is to my readers, without whom I wouldn’t have anything. As long as I feel like I’m doing right by them, I can sleep well at night.

On writing about cartoons in Hell World

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There’s no going around it: this month has been a hellscape. The discovery that my country is imprisoning children and babies is horrific, even if it’s what we’ve always done.

I have lived in DC for decades which means politics have always directly affected my life. Many of my friends and family are government employees or contractors, so when Trump tweets something stupid, they are the ones who pay the price—getting downsized, losing half their office budget, or spending valuable time creating a report on why it’s not possible to restore WWII era technology to the military, and yes that really happened.

During these times, fandom has been an escape for me. But last week crushed that solace, too, when we learned that there is going to be a white supremacy rally about a mile from Otakon. I’m well aware of our ties to the alt-right; I know that hate is always just a click away in the Crunchyroll or Anime News Network forums. But this is a new kind of closeness.

Times like this, it is more difficult than ever to be motivated as a pop culture journalist. These past few weeks, I haven’t even published anything on my Forbes blog. Reporting is like shining a spotlight, and I keep second-guessing if my coverage deserves people’s attention. When the world is a mess, can we still afford to focus on fandom?

I knew I couldn’t be the first writer to have this concern and I’m not—Vinnie Mancuso wrote What Is the Point of Pop Culture in a World Gone Mad? in 2016. Unfortunately, his essay is even more relevant in 2018: “What’s the use in marveling at dragons on-screen when the dragons are all here, and they’re more terrifying figures than any CGI budget could afford?”

It’s exhausting. When this all began I was calling my senators daily. Now I throw donations at organizations like RAICES and the ACLU as if money will excuse my inaction. At the very least I vote in every election, even dinky little local primaries. I know this isn’t a whole lot. As a white cis woman, I know that I have it easy and that I should be doing more.

This has been the deafening background noise of my life for months, but I checked out my archive here and realized I haven’t written about what it feels like to live in DC in this era. (The answer: suffocating.) Instead, I’ve been posting about cartoons as usual. Part of it is that I feel I should stay in my lane: I’m not a political reporter. Still, everything is political now: from the survival of my LGBT friends to the presence of immigrants like my father in this country.

There is no roadmap for where we go from here, but I know the answer isn’t black and white. The solution won’t be a total retreat into subculture writing nor full-time rage. I think it’ll be a little different for everybody reading this—what we can each contribute, the ways we can support each other in a world that has gone off the rails.

Additionally, I think fandom will be a part of what saves us. What’s incredible about conventions like Otakon is that even when there are 30,000 people in one spot with all the differences that come with that, there’s still at least one shared interest we all have in common. Its very existence refutes what the Nazis next door would have us believe—that some people are so different, they’re not even the same species. We know that’s flat-out wrong.

I’ll be sticking to fandom moving forward, but don’t think for a second that I’m not angry, that I’m not fighting. But like Mancuso concludes, there is a point to all this: “Pop culture doesn’t exist to save lives, but it can be a reminder that every single life is as valuable as your own. Just think to the last time a piece of art truly moved you, and realize there’s a good chance it moved someone half a world away.” I want to believe that still, so I’ll keep writing.

Standing still in 2018

First off, I wanted to let you know I’m giving a talk at the Japan America Society this Friday. You can still sign up for it here. I’ve been a member and language student there for four years, so when they asked me if I would volunteer to give this talk, it was a no-brainer.

This talk is coming two weeks after I gave an earlier version of it as an AnimeNEXT panel. It was one of four panels I gave at AnimeNEXT with John. Five if you count our participation on the AnimeCons TV panel, in which we talked about supporting the next generation of anime fans, something I have a lot of opinions on. 

With these speaking events combined, I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of resting on my laurels lately. I’ve been giving talks about things I have done in the past, without really having anything in the works at present.

Somebody asked me what happened to Anime Origin Stories. I stopped putting these up regularly right after a friend of mine passed away, and never got back to them. I haven’t posted any since November 1, and I still have 100+ stories waiting to be followed up on.

Also in November, I wrote a novel, which I’ve been meaning to edit. But I’ve only sat down with it once since then. That hardly counts as “in the works.”

I wanted to investigate more serious stories about fandom. Now that actually is something I’ve got in the works but no thanks to my own efforts—I found a place interested in assisting me with the resources I need to do this, so uh, stay tuned on that.

I’ve been letting Tom Aznable do the lion’s share of work for Gunpla 101.

Then there’s that blog series I said I was starting in March and stopped after one post. Nobody’s asked about it, but it still grates at me that I haven’t added anything new to it.

What have I been doing? I’ve had a lot of client work lately that’s not fandom related (unless you count writing about niche topics for niche audiences fandom, which I sometimes do). I’ve been doing my work for clients as thoughtfully as I know how and then logging off for the day. I’ve been going on a lot of walks. It’s a little like summer vacation.

We’re halfway through 2018, so I thought I’d give you a status update by writing this. Maybe it’s comforting to see that other people don’t have anything figured out, either? It’s weird not to be working toward a goal right now. It feels like standing still. This isn’t burnout. This is just a blank space in my career, in which I’m not sure yet where I want to refocus my daily work.

Habits are hard to form. It takes 30 days, experts say, for a repeated task to become a habit. And yet, they are so easy to break. Take Otaku Links, my Friday column for years. For the first few weeks, I didn’t post them, I felt like I was forgetting something. It felt weird, but not for long. Now weeks go by without me remembering that column ever existed. I know that in order to break out of this uncertainty, I just need to decide on a goal and start chipping away at it a little each day. But which goal?

The logical way to conclude this post would be to tell you how I’m going to break the cycle. But right now, I’m not sure what comes next for me. As I keep writing here every Monday, I’m going to continue to evaluate what matters most to me each week, and see if it forms a theme.

It’s all a long way of saying, watch this space! I’ll talk to you next week.