Happy Hours, Bites of Life and Updates

It's been almost a year since I desperately needed a break from the four walls of my apartment and sought out the Culver City Farmers Market. It was a spur of the moment decision that has had enormous impact on our lives. I can say that most of our produce is not purchased at that farmers market or another. I've been serving a lot more fresh fruit and cooking a lot more veggies. I am certain that those changes are why I had dropped a nice bit of weight before my last visit to the oncologist. The weight loss was a delightful surprise, because I did not practice moderation of any sort during the holidays. Oh my, no. I was eating everything in sight that was bad. But the good food and the walking staved off a weight gain and helped me lose some. I've really enjoyed just getting out around people and watching the children at the market. The outings got even better when Marie began joining me. I had been missing my friends during my very long recovery. While I am very grateful to have networks like Facebook to keep in some contact with civilization, there is nothing like a face to face conversation. I'm certain that aside from strengthening a great friendship, the Farmers Market outings helped jump start Sybaritic Press. The martinis may have had a small role in that as well. We each have stressful lives. It is lovely to get together and shop and let our wonderful bartender and the staff at the Culver Hotel pamper us for a couple of hours. I really miss the uber cute porter who used to kneel to serve us, but what can you do. He may be on his way to being a movie star. Yes, he was that uber cute.

Life in a Bite – Part One

I was very excited to see two of my favorite food related celebs, Anthony Bourdain and Nigella Lawson, were in a new show together. The Taste  is a competition show in which the contestants must make the perfect single bite of a dish. I'd seen similar challenges in other competition shows like Chopped or the Next Iron Chef where it is asked that the chef demonstrate their cooking philosophy in a single bite of food. I will say right now that I am not interested in a food competition of any kind. I am wide eyed and hopeful or arrogant enough to believe that I can get to cook for those chefs I admire without the trauma and potential humiliation of a competition. Still, I became obsessed with my cooking philosophy (do I have one) and whether it could be expressed in a single bite. Jon had an eating philosophy of a bit of croissant with butter and honey on a spoon. I thought of something that would have a bit of complexity. It would be a recipe that I had mutated and fused with other cooking cultures I've explored. It should be something that means a lot to me personally.

I had an idea that would work reasonably well, but it seemed to be too simple. And then, I saw Bourdain on an episode of his newer travel show, The Layover. And there I found the missing elements. I figured out an original recipe that was very much from my roots while reflecting all of the methods of cooking I'd learned from other cultures. I even involved my father in its creation. He's been very much pro-cultural fusion in cooking since I gave him beef short ribs Boeuf Bourguignon style. And he helped me with that final element that really shows some creativity. I am mid-way through executing the recipe for the first time, so I can't reveal much more. I hate to be a tease, but I want to pull this off before I really start crowing about how clever I may be. What I wanted to talk about today is how absolutely giddy I felt figuring out an original recipe. There are many recipes that I've put a spin on, but this one is made of groupings of ingredients and procedures that are my own. It is writing of a sort. Chefs have said over an over that cooking can be storytelling. One element of this epic bite of food is collard greens. Each time I make them, I think about my grand uncle KC and how he taught me how to cut the leaves. Of course, thinking about him involves tomes of some highly entertaining Warner family history. Or I think about how my version of collards was a direct result of my Mother's stroke at age 46. In the aftermath, I took my immediate family through a tectonic shift in how the traditional foods were prepared. I started using olive oil, garlic and smoked turkey to flavor veg like collards or black eyed peas. This dish is definitely the story of a world traveler who has wandered mostly through foods of different places and peoples. This excitement is the same as that of writing a story when it's going very well. I wanted to share. The next blog will have full documentation of how I made the dish and how it turned out. There may even be a video. It's my plan to make sure that the chefs I kibitz with on Facebook and twitter have a read.

Updates

Jon and I begin our marathon journey this weekend. Remember, we take any donation. It's for the entire walk as a unit – not per mile. Donations go directly to the organization. https://www.justgiving.com/Deborah-Warner . I should have the interview with Sean Hepburn Ferrer done by next weekend. I'll also have a couple of cooking videos aside from the one bite up next weekend. And I am really, really hoping for the safety of everyone near me that I can find the time to write some fiction.

Stay tuned.

Writing and Publishing -- The Perilous and Profane

Before I begin, I must warn my gentle readers in the strongest of terms that while this blog is about my current writing endeavors, the language and content are very, very naughty. It is very likely not everyone's cup of tea. There are unseemly things done with bud vases and other things too raucous for delicate sensibilities. I'm looking at you, Maw-in-law! Though a bit of that salty language is your son's. Onward then!

It has been very correctly pointed out to me that there is a great deal going on in my life as a writer and editor that is not reaching this blog. I blame the nature of social media branding. I have to have blogs that are aimed at particular audiences who read my work, so they can easily find it in searches. However, a lot has been going on lately, and since this began as a blog about my writing, it's only right that I bring everyone up to speed.

The Return of Sybaritic Press

Things have been fairly quiet on the publishing front save for works by Marie Lecrivain and me. That is changing in a very big way with our first anthology of creative non-fiction. It is called Alternate Lanes, a compilation of works about modes of transportation in Los Angeles that don't involve automobiles. From walking to cycling, buses and trains, the writers talk about their experiences warts and all in poems and essays and photographs. Mine humble contribution is called Crosstown Express. It details the wild dichotomy of riders and scenery on the two bus lines I take to the hospital a few times a month. I have not seen as many swings between affluence and poverty nor as many types of citizens since riding the route 23 trolly line in . That route has been documented by Urban studies researchers and sociologists. There is even a YouTube video that lovingly shows the line. Marie has a wonderful piece on the strange adventures and perils of walking in LA. Yes, people, there is quite a lot of walking in LA. We're getting some serious buzz about the book, and there isn't even a galley. We're also going to do book fairs once again this year though I'm not sure there will be any drunken parrots in the booth. It's a long story.

My Debut in a New E-Zine

Last week, I made my short story debut in a Full Metal Orgasm or FMO, a cyber sexpunk e-zine. The editor takes a deliberately provocative title to make sure there is no doubt that the content is unflinchingly adult in nature. That not only attracts the desired readership, it should warn away those who would be offended by the material. Being the contrary soul that I am, my contribution is not like the others. The Companion is about a dystopian society where someone can be arrested for stealing food and get a decades long sentence in a hell-hole of a prison or sold to a farmer on a colony as a full service slave (yes, service extends to the bedroom). It sounds like it should fit with the no holds barred, brutal sexuality of the rest of the amazing works in this collection. I certain started to write it that way. Somehow, it became this delicate, sensual character study with a very sweet ending. I was really pleased with it and knew it would find a home somewhere in my other works, but the editor very kindly bought the work anyway. It's become a point of controversy with the zine, but that's what I do. I hope my fans who are kind enough to buy it will read the rest. Despite protestations to the contrary, the rest of the stories are very smart and are often saying more that they seem. Reading the entire zine will be like taking an excursion into dark and fascinating places. It's well worth the trip.You can buy it from the website HERE or on Amazon for Kindle HERE.

The Perils of Localizing Yaoi Manga for DMG

I work as an Editor for the DigitalManga Guild(DMG). We work in teams called localizers (they make the material readable for a local audience). Each team consists of a translator, an editor and a letterer. My primary job as editor is to take the raw English translations into more colloquial English. The casual way people talk in the US. That sometimes means translating Japanese pop culture references into the US equivalent. I pass the edited script to the letterer who replaces the Japanese dialog with the new dialog. The whole team is responsible for QC on the finished pages. Finally, I also write the synopsis that will appear on the various websites where the manga will be sold. We're typically given 90 days to finish a 200 page book. We've finished two thus far. We're just finishing volume one of a four part series that we will be working on through the summer. The second one, Wild Boyfriend, just turned up on the company website (see photo above). This means it will be published soon. Working on the localizing team has been an education I really didn't expect. I wrote a blog about one aspect of it on our official site. DMG tweeted it to all of its followers.

Without further ado:

My localizing team mates and I were lulled by the sweet, funny romance of Again Tomorrow. While there were some epic sex scenes in every chapter of Nabako Kamo’s manga, there were a lot of other things going on as well. There were intrigues at the office or at various schools or, in one case, on a crowded subway. If there were eyes that were too young and tender for yaoi, it was easy to move to a benign location in Again Tomorrow. Curious little ones would likely find a panel with two salarymen working in a cubicle very dull and move on. Don’t get me wrong. Again Tomorrow is a white hot, sexy manga. However, the mangaka likes to build the tension or ratchet up the jeopardy for each of the couples before the pages and pages of heated coupling. Thus, the localizer who is also a parent has ‘safe’ pages on which to click when the children wander too close.

This is not the case with the current manga Heaven’s Blade is localizing. Sakira’s Wild Boyfriend covers many more couples who come together in a swift and explosive fashion. The safe pages are far fewer in number and really hard to click on when in a panic. I’m lucky as I only have the Hubs peering over my shoulder periodically. All I have to put up with are comments like:

‘You can’t tit f***k a guy!’
‘He put a bud vase with a flower in there!’
‘Who keeps that many sex toys at work?’ (That one gave me pause.)
‘He just happened to be carrying roofies to school.’
‘Sweat is NOT the same as lube!!’

The comments are a bit distracting, but  could never derail me. I have been thrown into fits of giggles – mainly at my Hubs’ consternation, but I always manage to find focus after a while. My team members, however, have a stickier problem. They have young ones with curious eyes. Fortunately, they are none too stealthy. My team mates have to use cat-like reflexes to switch to a different screen and avert disaster. Of course, the little darlings who never seem to pay attention to their parents before, notice when their parents move so abruptly. Thus, they hang around hoping for a glimpse of what was so interesting. To combat that strategy, my team mates have taken to doing their part of localizing when their little ones are fast asleep. They have been a lot punchier during Skype or email exchanges with this manga. I admire them for soldiering on with their fatigue fuzzy brains through their regular workloads while still churning out quality translations and lettering.

I don’t think any of us anticipated such perils when we signed up to be localizers. Still, it’s a fun gig, and the problems are amusing in their own way.

Again Tomorrow - Ashita Kara Mouichido © Nabako Kamo. All rights reserved. Original Japanese edition published in 2010 by Taiyoh Tosho Publishing Co., Ltd. It’s available for Kindle HERE, for Nook HERE and other formats HERE.

That's covers everything going on at the moment, book wise. There is a whole lot of film related stuff in the works that I'll cover another time.

Stay tuned.