Otaku Links: Keeping up with the industry

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Lead painting by Eva Johnson for Pieces—A Thousand Albums at the End of America.

How I’m silencing my inner critic

Writing

It’s a lot easier to critique than create. I should know.

It was in August 2014 that I started as a weekly streaming reviewer for Anime News Network. There are four seasons of anime each year. I usually reviewed three anime each season. Each review was required to be 500 words or more (I usually erred on the side of way more). With 52 weeks in a year, that’s 80,000 words of criticism a year, or around 300,000 total by today. This isn’t even counting the Blu-Ray and manga reviews I’ve done.

That’s upwards of 300,000 words of nitpicking other people’s work. Of scrutinizing. Of giving praise when it’s deserved, but always under a watchful, judgemental eye.

It’s food for thought because National Novel Writing Month starts this week. After writing 300,000 pages critiquing other people, will I be able to write 50,000 of my own words without stopping to tear them apart the way I’ve done for so many other peoples’ work?

In November I’ll have been writing in this blog for eight years, and almost each of those years I’ve said I was going to finish NaNoWriMo. I’ve done it exactly none of those times. But I’ve spent a lot of 2017 thinking about mortality and realizing I don’t have infinite time to accomplish this goal I’ve had since high school.

Even so, I’ve been practicing by writing short stories this year and I run into a major problem with every fiction writing session—I feel the urge to restructure every sentence almost before I’m finished writing it. I find my characters two-dimensional—before I’ve even finished fleshing them out. I have a tendency to size up my drafts as if they are finished products.

But this year I don’t have time. I need to write 1,667 words every day of the month and finally achieve this goal that I’ve postponed for half my life. If you also struggle with this compulsion, I’ve made a list of the ways I’m working to silence my inner critic, just this once:

Overload on writing material

If November is novel writing month, October is novel planning month. I have been taking a lot of time to shape the world of my novel before I have a chance to start judging it.

I’ve built character profiles, so I’ll have an idea of who I’m writing about before I begin automatically hating them. Since the novel has science fiction elements, I’ve been reading books about quantum physics and taking copious notes on how it all works so I can retain this world’s believability for me, at least.

Less helpful has been reading and reviewing the work of my favorite science fiction writers, like Philip K. Dick. I forgot the golden rule: never compare somebody else’s final product to your first draft.

Use tools that don’t let me critique

While preparing for NaNo, I found about about a writing tool called I Love Your Stories (ILYS for short). It’s a browser-based writing client, but what makes it unique is that it does not let you use the backspace button. You can’t edit at all until your writing session is complete.

For somebody like me who is constantly reshaping sentences, I really think it’s the only way I’m going to be able to keep moving forward with my writing—by physically preventing myself from going backward. Editing my novel is what December will be for.

Show it to exactly nobody

One year I showed my draft to any friend who would look at it. And of course, my friends had thoughtful, justified criticism, much of which mirrored my own. I proceeded to spend days editing the draft before finally discarding it in frustration and quitting the endeavor.

This time, nobody gets to see my novel, maybe ever. Telling myself this draft will never see the light of day is the only way I can convince myself to work on it.

Remember that writing isn’t personal

It’s interesting that I have this fear of criticism from myself and my friends—when it comes to fiction—because my journalistic and nonfiction work is regularly torn to shreds. That’s the nature of this profession: my editor will scrap sections, or have me rewrite a whole piece. Even as a professional, I get stories flat-out rejected. And this rarely bothers me, because I know it’s not a reflection of my skills, but of the publication’s editorial need that I don’t always meet.

Now I need to realize that even when it’s about something personal, writing isn’t personal. Writing is work. And I have a lot of work to get done.

Shitty first drafts only need to exist

The originator of the phrase “shitty first draft” is Anne Lamott, who wrote the book on writing advice and cautions against perfectionism above all else.

My need to critique comes from a need to be perfect, and that’s never going to happen—and it doesn’t need to. At the end of the month I’m either going to have a 50,000-word draft or a 5,000-word draft that I spent a month editing and still hate—and only one of these things is my goal. Editing can wait. Now’s the time to make the material I’ll want to edit exist in the first place.

Otaku Links: Past, Present, and Future

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Screenshot from the Ancient Magus’ Bride via Emily’s post.

Every Anime I’m Watching As Described Through My Neuroses

Uncategorized

Ancient Magus’ Bride

I interviewed Kore Yamazaki, the creator of Ancient Magus’ Bride, at Crunchyroll Expo. It was one of the worst interviews of my life. Yamazaki kept deflecting my questions, or answering them in a way that felt more diplomatic than revealing. Later I found out from an industry friend that Yamazaki had been harassed pretty relentlessly by fans (particularly regarding her looks—and that was why she didn’t allow any photographs at CRX). This evasive interview wasn’t about my skills. I need to realize that more: Sometimes it’s not about you at all.

In Ancient Magus’ Bride, Chise is a girl who has never been wanted or loved. Only after a mage purchases her for an outrageous sum does she begin to see her own value. This is a Mary Sue story, but one with heart. I hope that while she watches world fall in love with her character through the anime, Yamazaki realizes she has given us something magical.

Anime-Gataris

There is an inferiority complex inherent in being an anime fan of a certain age. I remember being teased in middle school for my homemade Gundam Wing binder. Today anime has gotten increasingly mainstream and accepted as a hobby, but I am too self-aware to think that basing my identity on my interest in pop culture somehow makes me more interesting than other people—there lies the madness of the Rick & Morty fandom.  

Meanwhile, Anime-Gataris is a fantasy world where outsiders find anime fans the most fascinating thing in the world. The show at least has the decency to be shocked about this, like when meganerd Kai asks newbie Minoa, “You’re not bored… listening to me?” This is honestly how I feel any time I’m talking about anime with regular people.

Diary of an MMORPG Junkie

If you and I have met at an anime convention, chances are it goes like this. We talk for a bit, then I turn to you and say something like: “So? Do I seem like I do online?” If they say yes, I’m thrilled because of course my online persona is carefully constructed to be like the real me, only funnier and wittier and with better lighting for selfies. The next time I log on, I’ll squint at your latest tweets for glimpses of the person I met IRL, too.

Morioka has it even worse—her online identity is a dashing young man, while she’s a female NEET in her 30s. There’s nothing more relatable than her budding romance with Lily in the digital world, while the real life Morioka blushes and stammers in her darkened apartment.

Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World

Sonder: the sudden epiphany that every person you pass is living a life filled with strong ambitions, deep relationships, and vivid emotions as powerful as your own. Living in a major American city, it’s hard not to be distracted by this feeling when I walk down K Street, or pass a political protest, or see tourists from Ohio on the National Mall. This feeling is why I became a journalist: because I care deeply about the stories other people have to tell. If you’ve read some of my Anime Origin Stories, you know we’re not so different from one another.

Kino encounters people with different laws, beliefs, and understandings of their place in the world. And somehow, they always manage to find common ground with at least one citizen of each new county. Someday I want to master empathy in this way.

Land of the Lustrous

John and I picked out the diamond for my engagement ring together. We were young and poor and chose a stone that was far from perfect, an SL2 in gemstone-speak. The jeweler let us view it through a magnifying scope so we could see its imperfections inside, shaped like X’s and V’s. Until then I was having an identity crisis, coming to terms with becoming the kind of person who wears a diamond on her finger and is seen by others not as a whole, but half of a whole. But seeing the way this diamond was scarred made me feel like it could be my own.

Diamond is a 10 on the Mohs scale, the hardest gem there is. But even they can fracture and break. I think about how those imperfections make them more resilient and more unique.

Osomatsu-san

Am I living up to my own potential? Is the idea that I have unused “potential” itself a self-inflated one, suggesting that I could be so much better if only I tried? Is “potential” an excuse I use to feel better about where I am in life right now, by telling myself I’ll improve later?

The Osomatsu sextuplets experience this kind of insight in season two as they’re given a glimpse of their pathetic future selves and vow to do better. Of course they never do, because that wouldn’t be funny (unless “live action” counts as doing better). If we can’t help but compare our own lives to other people’s, we can at least rely on the Osomatsu boys bringing up the rear.

URAHARA

Every day I don’t create something new, I feel like a failure. If I didn’t write something today, do I really deserve to call myself a writer? NaNoWriMo 2017 will either finally reward this mentality, or cause me to feel even worse about the days I don’t write. 

In Urahara, the main characters’ creativity is literally their superpower. Their art allows them to save their neighborhood and combat greedy extraterrestrials. This might be the only show in which artist’s block could prove deadly.

Zodiac War

There is a chance that you could die today. It’s a thought that has been on my mind since this summer, when my friend died suddenly and unexpectedly. Some days this thought makes it hard to get out of bed. Other days, this thought drives me toward pushing myself in ways I never expected. Most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle, where I try to live each day prioritizing the things I say I prioritize, like my friends and my writing.

Even when they’re healthy, clever, and skilled in self defense, the warriors of Zodiac War already have their fates sealed, and they’re sure to drop one by one like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. They spend the hours before their untimely ends with their worst character traits on display, with hardly a chance for repentance even at the moment of death.

All but one of these anime are airing on Crunchyroll. Land of the Lustrous can be found on Anime Strike.

Otaku Links: Analog fun

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Lead image via Playing Grounded Puzzles.