Kandachime Horses of Shimokita Hanto, Aomori Prefecture

Sea of Grass, Ocean of Sky

This is a book of some of my black and white photos of Alberta.

Sea of Grass, Ocean of Sky by Lori Ono | Make Your Own Book

Sumi-E on the iPhone.

I came across a review for an iPhone/iPad app called Zen Brush. It looked like a lot of fun and got a good review so I thought I would try it. The frog picture is my first attempt with it. I think it must be easier to get in a lot of detail if you are using iPad. There is no zoom-in function so it is hard to do detailed work on the smaller screen. You can change brush sizes, but the small screen just isn't a lot of canvas. This is probably a plus for me since it means I just have to accept that the drawings need to be simple. Zen-like.

The maker PSoft has some excellent examples on their website. They are based in Sendai and have put together a book to raise money for the earthquake.

Looking at the Idea of Epic Fictional Couples Through the movie Thor

I recently wrote a kind of review of the movie Thor. While it is a super hero movie, I think it has some strong romantic elements and it got me thinking about what makes us elevate a fictional couple to epic love status.

You can read the whole piece at www.naughtynellie.com

Naughty Nellie is a romance novel review site. It's new but I think it has a fresh take on books, and has had some really interesting pieces written by guest bloggers. One, written by dark, Tudor period romance novel writer Laura Navarre, is about dark heroes. The piece about inspirational romance, by Andrea Therese, gives one of the best descriptions I've come across for the genre.

I'll repost my own piece on In The Works tomorrow.

Running Around New York

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to attend Romance Writers of America's National Conference in New York City. I met up with some old friends, made a few new ones, got some great tips about writing and discovered a lot of new authors.

I think the workshops that impacted me the most were Laura Joh Rowland's "Twenty Questions to Answer Before writing 'The End'" and Candace Haven's workshop "How to Write Your First Draft in Two Weeks". I am one chapter away from finishing a manuscript I started a long time ago. I had abandoned this manuscript in favor of other project but one day figured out how to solve a plot issue. I pulled it out of my heap last month and started working on it, trying to get close to finishing the first draft before RWA. It was an interesting experience. I have no idea how good it is, but I learned a lot from the process. I was interested to learn that many of the techniques Candace Havens presented were ones I used to just get that draft finished. I wasn't on a two week regimen but I now have some more refined tools in my writers kit for the next first draft. The next step is, of course, revision hell. After the length of time it took for this draft I'm actually looking forward to revision. Rowland's workshop gave me a chance to sharpen my thinking about revision at a time I really need it. I bought the CD of the conference so I'm looking forward to listening to all the other great workshops I wasn't able to attend.

The week following the conference was spent touring New York and taking a lot of photos. I brought my Petri 1.9 rangefinder and a load of film. I shot at least 6 rolls which is not bad considering I also used a small digital camera to shoot lots of material for my Estello Project. As usual, it was a lot of fun to shoot Estello and it was interesting to see how many people were curious about him. I had been doing more Estello stuff on Facebook, than the blog. Blogger doesn't work as well with Facebook as Wordpress but I'm loathe to move to the other platform.

I managed to see the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met, see fireworks over the Hudson River on the 4th of July, see the Brooklyn Bridge, the Public Library on 5th, Bryant Park, Coney Island, Hoboken, the World Trade Centre rebuilding, DC Comics, New York Botanical Gardens, City Hall, Grand Central Station. I ate hot-dogs, pizza slices and drank lots of coffee. I also saw fireflies in the graveyard of Trinity Church one night. A trip to Zabars and B and H Photo really polished the stay.

I leave New York tomorrow for another week in Calgary before I return to Tokyo. The raw-creative phase continues in Calgary. I have plans to go to Brooks and Drumheller to shoot photos of the Badlands or to do to Banff to photograph the mountains and do some research. Both are great options and it pains me I won't be able to do both.

The last month has been amazing and I'm grateful to have all the opportunities to write and photograph. It's perfect that all this creative work will need extensive editing and formatting because it gives me the perfect excuse to sit in an air-conditioned room and escape the Tokyo summer humidity.

What Does a Drink Stand For?

I read a blog about tea. The writer asked, "What does a drink stand for?"

I always thought it was funny how Brits seem to solve every trouble with a cuppa. After I moved to Japan, I started drinking more tea and my perspective changed. Tea can also stand for personal ritual of contemplation, remembrance or taking a break. That's a big change from how I thought of tea when I lived in Canada. Tea was something to drink if I couldn't get coffee.

Tron Legacy Review

Lots of mixed reviews about this movie. The common complaint is that the story is horrible. Not much argument there. It's not an original story. It follows the traditional son searching for his father and some direction in his life. Done a million times before. At this point in fiction, and for some time, it ALL been done before so it then comes down to how you tell it. Not really any unique twists in the how either. There is even a little bit of Darth Vader in the story. If you are looking for a movie with a compelling story, this isn't it. I can't even really excuse the fact that they are working within a framework established 25 years ago and have a lot of bumps and backstory to cover for those new to the franchise. I've seen worse, but sometimes I watch movies on Cult of UHF.

The most interesting part of the movie was how the idea of The Singularity was dealt with. In order to prevent a spoiler, I'll write more about this at the end.

But Tron really isn't about the story. It's about the visual and the soundtrack. It's visual detail is where it lies closest to it predecessor. I think the 3-D is done pretty well. It's maybe obvious to have the regular world in 2-D and the Grid World in 3-D but it's still a nice touch.
The costumes are interesting and Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett look amazing. Much has been made of Jeff Bridge's youthful character and for the most part is was pretty well done. I actually preferred his rendering of CLU to the Kevin Flynn hippie computer guru. At times I was reminded of the Big Lebowski and while I loved that film, it didn't really work for me here.

Daft Punks soundtrack is amazing and suits the Grid World perfectly. For me, the soundtrack makes up for the story. I might actually have liked it better if there was no dialogue in the Grid World.

I enjoyed myself but wasn't blown away. Hitoshi slept through half and hour of it.

Dealing with The Singularity.**********spoiler alert************

For people who have heard the term but aren't sure what it is, THE singularity is different from the astronomical singularity (black hole or the point where some property is infinite). The Singularity is the point where technology has created super intelligence and so technology progresses beyond what people can predict. Sorry for the soft definition. The exact term is still under debate. I take it to be the point where the computers we created are so much smarter than us that we are no longer in control and that computers replicate themselves without human involvement. Think Skynet or Matrix.

In Tron Legacy, The Singularity is achieved in the Grid where a race of beings comes into conditions because the conditions are right. Not created by Kevin Flynn but as a product of the existence of the Grid. The analogy is that life created on Earth because the conditions were right in the primordial soup. But these beings don't evolve they are already fully formed and god-like in their innate knowledge.

I really liked this idea and what made it more interesting is that they aren't presented as evil as with Skynet and the Matrix, but as benign beings that can't help being what they are. It is Flynn's Grid doppleganger CLU who manifests evil and destroys them.

CLU is another example of The Singularity. Flynn's creation, CLU, takes Flynn's orders to create a world of perfection in a direction Flynn could not have predicted. CLU isn't evil because he is eeeeevil. CLU is the natural extension of what happens in the pursuit of perfection when executed by a machine. I was okay with this idea as well. Then Flynn replies with a California-Guru-mantra spiel about "the pursuit of perfection but perfection is already in front of you." It's supposed to explain to CLU what went wrong but the tone definitely lowered the standard. I know I have misquoted this but it something along these lines and you get the idea.

I think the ending was sloppy. The exchange with CLU and Flynn needed to be earned a bit better. I think the writers didn't earn the ending. Somewhere in the middle of the movie their needed to be more regret on the part of Flynn about CLU being who he is (CLU is Flynn after all) and some more frustration on CLU's part about Flynn being dissatisfied. Maybe the fault is the editors and not the writers'. Dunno. The Flynn-CLU dynamic could have been a much more satisfying conflict and instead it came about as rather patched together.

Repairman Jack

Repairman Jack is a societal drop-out anti-hero created by F. Paul Wilson.

A personal tragedy set him on a trail of revenge when he realizes that the police, and the “system” will never punish those responsible. He finds he has a knack for repairing these kinds of injustices drops out of society and goes into business as Repairman Jack.

Jack has no social security number, he doesn’t pay taxes or have a bank account in his own name. He survives through identity theft. He makes his money by helping people who are unable to get help from the police or the legal system. In typical anti-hero form, Jack breaks laws and commits crimes in his efforts to help his customers regain some justice. He believes strongly in the right to live his life according to his rules, and that others can live their life however they want as long as they aren’t infringing on others. His strong personal moral code makes him admirable, desirable as an ally, fearsome as an enemy.

It’s interesting to see how a person can live off the grid of officialdom inside a metropolitan city. It doesn’t happen without a lot of skills and contacts and requires a great willingness to color outside the lines. To make most of his “repairs” Jack creates or manipulates situations where the wrong doer is often undone by their own vices. Key to Jack’s success is his anonymity. Jack aspires to fade into the crowd and stay outside the system.

As the series progresses, books begin to focus on a Lovecraftian underworld’s battle of evil vs. ambivalent. The evil force is called the Otherness and the ambivalent force the Ally. In one novel (I will omit the title to reduce the spoiler effect) Jack is told that there will no longer be any coincidences for him regarding to do with this battle. I think the fact that Jack is a pawn in this battle helps is a nice foil to the fact that Jack is a master manipulator when it comes to his fix-it jobs.

The fix-its remind me a lot of the con-games in the TV show Leverage and Human Target but are much darker and more violent. But the elements of the bad-guy who is really a good guy, and the satisfaction of seeing the really bad guys brought down is the same.

So far, I like the mythos and how Wilson is creating links between the Repairman Jack series and his Adversary series. Brilliant way to get people reading your backlist!