Otaku Links: How to write stories, play dating sims, and create new anime fans

Otaku Links
  • Comic-Con 2015 attendance was 49% male and 49% female, and the Washington Post thinks this indicates the death of the “fanboy” stereotype. Female attendance at anime conventions has been equal to or higher than male attendance for years, and it’s nice to see others catching up.
  • I’ve had a generally good experience with episodic reviewing for Anime News Network, but I still related to Zac’s ask.fm answer about women reviewers. It’s important to remember, as author Chuck Wendig reminds us, that online is IRL—whatever you say affects people in real life.

5 Summer Reading Manga Recommendations

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Whenever I need a break from writing all day, I walk to the local park with the best Wi-Fi connection, settle in a shady spot, and browse my Crunchyroll Manga app.

Manga always feels like a guilty pleasure to me, perfect for summer. And predictably, I’ve been reading a lot of it lately. Here’s what I’ve read and would recommend:

Scum’s Wish

This is the Harlequin Romance of manga: soft, gentle art with a junk food plot. Witness a tangled web of unrequited love, with two seemingly perfect teens at its center. Hanabi and Mugi are dating, but only so they can “use” each other physically and forget about the ones they really love. This manga is definitely not for anyone under 18.

Orange

A high school romance, complicated by time travel. Naho knows that in the future, her friend and crush, Kakeru, is going to commit suicide. She’s received a letter from her future self about how to keep that from happening. This bittersweet plot is complemented by art that’s all sweet, making me feel real emotion whenever Naho makes Kakeru smile.

My Wife is Wagatsuma-san

Another high school romance about time travel, but it couldn’t be more different. Aoshima timeslips into a future where he’s married to the prettiest girl in school, and does whatever he can to preserve that reality. The best parts of the manga star him and his geeky group of friends, whose over-the-top commitment to gags results in prime comedy.

Kiss Him, Not Me

A wish-fulfillment fantasy for fujoshi, this reverse harem manga has four guys (and one handsome girl) vying for Kae’s affections, but all she wants is to watch them enact her boy’s love fantasies! This manga is currently ongoing, and BL fans will recognize current fandoms like Touken Ranbu. I love this manga’s spot-on parody of fujoshi obsessions.

Princess Jellyfish

Tsukimi is a jellyfish-loving geek whose life gets spun into chaos when she meets outgoing, crossdresser Kuranosuke. With a cast of unique characters that don’t fit into standard anime “types,” well-timed joke delivery, and a professional-level translation into English, Princess Jellyfish is the highest quality out of all the manga I’ve listed.

I’m current on all the manga above, so now I’m looking for something else to read. Any recommendations?

Let the audience decide

Journalism

When I first started my career as a journalist, the reader comment I most dreaded seeing was “this isn’t news.” It made me feel like I was wasting time and not providing any value with my work.

I didn’t think about this fear of mine while I was being paid hourly. But now, at Forbes, I get paid based on how many hits my articles get.

That means to make enough to live on, I need to be constantly publishing. To adapt, I’ve developed a scattershot approach to blogging, where I vary the amount of effort I put into each post to keep my output high. That means that for every multi-source feature on waifus, there’s a less intensive opinion piece on something like, say, Wonder Woman’s shoes.

At first, I felt guilty about these shorter pieces. When I started at Forbes in June, I planned to make every single article a feature with a week of reporting behind it. Even if a story seemed accurate and informative with just one interview, I thought it would serve my audience even better if it had two more interviews and an extra 1,000 words.

Luckily my brilliant editor, Helen Popkin, stressed early how important quick pieces are with what she calls the “ConAir Method.” It goes like this:

In order to get the studio backing to make Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack agreed to be in ConAir, a lowbrow movie he really wasn’t interested in. But since ConAir was a box office hit, Cusack was able to jump right from that to his passion project.

I didn’t understand how this made sense, until I discovered just how often readers are clicking on the low effort pieces. Readers want to be educated, but they also want to be entertained.

That’s the dirty secret of journalism: there is zero correlation between how much effort you put into an article and how much traffic it gets. Just look at Buzzfeed’s lists for proof. Or this little story about Ghostbusters and Internet Rule 63, which took me 20 minutes to write—but got thousands of hits.

Obviously, I am not in favor of “clickbait,” which misleads or flat out misinforms your audience. I’m just saying that some blog posts, like opinion pieces, profiles, and photo galleries, can be interesting and informative without being taking a lot of your time and effort.

I realized I’ve been snubbing things as “not news” before even giving my readers the chance. I’ve been letting my perfectionist tendencies take over. Now, I let the audience decide.

Your audience isn’t waiting around for your masterpiece. They don’t care how long it took to write. They just want to see what you have to offer them today. Let them decide if it’s news.

Welcome to Otaku Journalist 4.0

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Here it is, Otaku Journalist’s long overdue overhaul. Today’s new look features a logo by Ben Huber and the Impreza responsive WordPress theme. It’s the most major design change I’ve made since I started the site.

The initial shift you might notice is a farewell to Otaku Journalist 2.0 and 3.0‘s sky blue #0099ff in exchange for the distinctly Caribbean #2b9eb5. This was Ben’s idea, in order to make the site match my pink-and-teal book covers. It’s going to take some getting used to, but I like the consistency.

Another big change is that Otaku Journalist is now serving as my portfolio site as well as my blog. My previous portfolio site, laurenraeorsini.com, now redirects here. Since I began working at Forbes, my work life and my hobbies have connected in a beautiful synchronicity, so I don’t feel the need to maintain a less geeky front to clients when it’s obvious I’m all geek, all the time.

The part I’m most excited about, however, is this new course I am offering. The Niche Reviewer Crash Course is a free, five-day email course you can complete at your own pace. You can get access to it simply by signing up for my newsletter. Find out more about it here.

Otaku Journalist has been around for almost six years and four redesigns, and I like to think its evolutions have been more than skin deep. Every iteration is a renewed effort to improve this site’s usefulness and encouragement. Here’s to the latest chapter.

Otaku Links: Soooo good!

Otaku Links

teengirlsquad

  • Speaking of Akira, here’s a definitive list of all the times anime has attempted to predict the future. Props on including so many oldies.
  • Which anime characters do you share a birthday with? This site helps you find out. My birthday is December 21, and I share it with Jyusirou Ukitake from Bleach, plus a loooot of others.
  • Recently found out about this comic about a time-traveling attorney in space, which sounds like it could go either way but waaaiiiit a minute… is that… is that Koro-sensei?
  • I don’t think Derek Padula ever sleeps. He’s been releasing his Dragon Ball ebooks in such quick succession, and they’re astoundingly thorough. His latest, Dragon Soul, interviews 81 fans from 25 countries and 27 professionals who worked on the show. I haven’t read it yet but holy crap.
  • Speaking of ebooks… like I could go an entire post without mentioning Build Your Anime Blog. Pro anime blogger and OJ interviewee Humberto Saabedra shared his thoughts. He also reviewed my previous book, Otaku Journalism.
  • Remember that book about cosplay that I wrote in seven weeks last fall? And it was up on Amazon, then removed from Amazon, and now up on Amazon again? Traditional book deals are complicated. I am 99% sure it’s up for sale for good, both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Also, people are actually reading and reviewing it now: here and here for starters.

Teen Girl Squad cosplay photo via Tim Cronley