Seasonal Color Changes

I've put in new colors for the blog. Just as I started to figure out that HTML stuff, an easier way to do it comes along.

The biggest change is the album I've embedded in the blog. The photography group I'm in rented the Harajuku studio for a Halloween theme shoot.

Credit to Mumi for Justin's pirate style, Camilla for the vampire styling and shoot management, Tim for direction and lighting guidance. Big thanks to Daniel, Kyla and Maya who did an amazing job with make-up. I did a bit of styling with the flowers and dead body and Ryan and I did a lot of the set-up. Okay. I know I forgot people.

I will be adding a few more photos to the album in a few days. I kind of have to laugh a bit at the album cover. It looks more along the lines of beefcake. Yikes.

RWA Conference in Atlanta

Wow, I don't know where to begin. It's been so long since I posted on here that it took four tries to get the username and password right.

RWA in Atlanta was amazingly cool. It's one of those things where you are surrounded by kindred spirits trying to accomplish the same thing so it feels really comfortable even though you are mostly surrounded be strangers. Obviously, since it's romance writing, most of the members are women. I wonder if that is the main part of the dynamic. Everyone was really friendly and helpful. I'm sure that jealousies occur, but that seems to be more in the background. Maybe I'm still to new to it to know better.

I got to meet up with three friends from RT in St. Louis last year. They'd been to the conference before so it was nice to have people to guide me over the rough spots and to hang out with. They are smart and funny women so it was a good time.

I went to a lot of seminars and was determined to avoid the free book signings as I was going to have to lug everything back to Tokyo. Didn't do too well on the avoiding thing. After I went to a couple of publisher spotlights, I decided I wanted to get some books so that I could get a better idea of the different lines. I can get English books here, but the selection is not that great. Mainly, only the big names make it here so it was nice to get some new authors. I also picked up a couple of RITA winners and nominees so I'm pretty excited about that.

I would say that I came away with three really important things.
1. being mentally charged up and inspired to return to my first manuscript
2. finding that I'm really on the right track for a lot of stuff and that I need to stick my ass in the chair
3. looking at writing as a career not just thinking of one manuscript at a time.

I don't want to finish manuscripts and then go, "now what?" True there is no career without a manuscript but a manuscript without a plan won't go anywhere either.

My Writing Membership!

I got my RWA (Romance Writers of America) membership info in the mail today! Yay!

I flipped through the stuff and tried to get up to speed on things. Now I can register for the conference in Atlanta this July. I have a few friends going and so I am really psyched! Actually, I'm gonna go do my registration now!

Getting this is really motivating to me. I guess anything that gets me in the chair and starting to write.

Transistion from Work to Romance Writing

I'm finishing up the math class I have been teaching this year. It has taken a lot of my brain power and staying power to make it through this year. It's kind of funny, at this point, I'm thinking it wasn't so hard, but earlier this year I was in tears and wanting to quit everyday.

Things definitely had an upswing after the Christmas holidays. It was pretty stressful to "get" the math I was teaching. But also, how to teach it. It's one of those things that sometimes takes some time before one even realizes what kind of questions need to be asked or what kind of help is needed.

In some ways, I would even consider going back to Uni to get my credentials for teaching math. I enjoyed the math itself. I actually felt my brain changing. I hadn't realized how much until my husband commented that my way of expressing myself had changed. He said that I use numbers or mathmatical expressions to express a situation or how I feel. That change must be pretty drastic if my husband noticed it. He's really smart, but not so much for the communication aspect of life.

I'm looking forward to not having so much of this math learning and math related panic taking up my brain. I was often having dreams about math... the subject, teaching it, problems in class. Ick... glad to have it off my plate.

I managed to do some personal reading, but that was stress management. Now comes the manuscript in earnest.

My commitment to me....
Two pages a day rain, shine, stress, play.

Tokyo Scenes Shocking for their Simplicity

This scene may shock and amaze you, but I took this in Todoroki which is in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. Yep. Right smack dab in the 23 wards of Tokyo, you can still find land that is being farmed.

These little gems seem to be disappearing though. More condos seem to be popping up everywhere.


Some of the gardens or hatake are community owned or a group pitching in together to pay for the land. Any time I see someone working on this type of property, they look to be about sixty years old. I've been too shy to talk to them, but I should get over that. I wonder if they have always farmed or if it is a retirement thing.

In the same area I found another hatake of hakusai. A kind of cabbage... savoy, maybe? It's pretty tasty but doesn't look like much sitting in the field like this.

Todoroki is on the Oimachi train line. While it doesn't connect to the Yamanote line (the main line that circles around central Tokyo and stops at the many central districts) it takes about 15 minutes to get to Todoroki station from Shibuya.

Maybe this is what I love about Tokyo. Shibuya is bright, loud and a mecca for the young. Get on a train, transfer two times and fifteen minutes later, you're in a area with more houses than apartments, hardly a neon sign to be seen and little gems of farmland tucked away in various spots.

This gives a little more context to how these tiny plots of farming fit into the city scape. For this plot, I liked how they do the same thing as in the country... You can take vegetables from this field as long as you leave a donation in the box.

Work in progress...

This is blog number two for me. My friend Sheri introduced me to this blog. What really hooked me was being able to put short video clips on here. Well, I saw someone's blog who had so I was pretty interested in that.

I hope to use this blog more for my writing and photography than my other blog. We'll see how it goes.

I took this photo while hanging out on the Miura Peninsula in Kanagawa prefecture in Japan. It is about an hour and a half outside of Tokyo. I love the open space here, but on a windy day, the sound of the surf crashing on the rocks is deafening. After 5 hours of shooting, I had the worst headache that even all those negative ions couldn't relieve.