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.

Shoots, Truths and Finding Footing

Everyone has recovered from their colds -- including Magic the office cat. Onward to the blog!

 

There are two truths to any film shoot – no matter how small. The first is that the more hats one wears, the less time one sits. I was on my feet for five full hours to shoot two segments that will be under five minutes in length. The other truth is that filmmaking prohibits going to the bathroom. I wasn't sure if this truth would hold up on such a small shoot. After all, I had no Assistant Directors, P.A.s or caterers around to stop me from reaching the restroom with dozens of questions. There were no questions to answer, but there were dozens of things to do at any given moment. Thus, I could no longer blame not being allowed in the bathroom on a pervasive conspiracy amongst my crew. The third truth is  not a part of the filmmaking process but my own issue --  I would pay for all those physical shenanigans. I spent Friday curled up on one end of sofa in a state that I hadn't seen in over a year. No worries. I was almost back to what I consider normal by Saturday. On a side note, Robert Rodriguez may enjoy being a one man crew, but I believe that if you can pay for a full crew, get the danged crew!

Why did I go through this hair-brained scheme and endure such physical stress? There are a number of reasons that don't sound too crazy. The primary reason is that I'm learning to shoot films on my own, so that I don't have to depend on hiring anyone other that production assistants to help me shoot The Secret Cancer. I realized that if I had a cinematographer shoot footage in Los Angeles, I'd have to have the same person travel with me wherever I went. Otherwise, the footage wouldn't have the same look from city to city. I was also getting hung up on even getting started waiting for crew to be available on a consistent basis. Jon was certain that I could easily pick up what I needed to learn. All I would need to do is practice. He suggested I shoot simple things that I could control easily and that I could shoot fairly often.

At that point, I was looking for a clever way to promote my yaoi titles that didn't involve paying for ads. I was also interested in doing video responses to recipes by my favorite Youtube chefs. I could shoot cooking videos easily. I've been doing those since the fall of last year. It's been neat to have a video dialogue with some talented chefs that I admire. I've also found an innovative way of promoting some of my titles. The foods that appear in manga and anime are real Japanese dishes. Cooking and eating are often central to character relationships. Everyone who has read my work knows that food plays a big part of character interaction. It was a natural to have a food based video promotion. The first videos for Cook Like a Uke (oo-kay) featured my hands and a voice over announcer. And they aren't doing badly as far as number of views goes. I've even made some book sales from what is a very modest effort is a thrill. But yaoi readers like pretty men. There were calls for actual ukes cooking food.

I'm a filmmaker in Los Angeles which is not lacking in pretty men looking to act. I realized I could move my film school training to the next level with actors in front of the camera to light and frame properly. I could not only promote my own titles, but I could also promote manga I edited for the Digital Manga Guild. It happens that a meal cooked in gratitude moved the main relationship in the book toward romance.

As I said a blog or two ago, I did a casting breakdown and signed a four actor pool. I knew that I could probably only handle shooting one or two segments at a clip. I'm hoping to do a few shoots and get as many segments in the can that I can before I'm forced to move on to the upcoming projects. I also expect these very talented young men to move onto bigger things fairly quickly. I must make hay while the sun shines. For the first shoot, I picked a beef curry dish to promote the manga, Again Tomorrow*. The actor I chose to play Yuusei (upper left), the handsome leading man with amnesia was Donal Thoms-Cappello (below right) who is great looking and resembled the manga character. The other was the next dish I'd been planning to film anyway, Tonjiru or Pork Miso soup. The actor playing Misaki who made the dish for a tutor that would later become his lover in Junjour Romantica was Ryohie Watanabe. This actor is actually Japanese and has more than a passing familiarity making that dish. A third actor, Kevin Chambers (He's left in the apron being geeky. He's also about to eat that whole bowl of stew.), agreed to come by for a photo shoot. While here, he read the lines from the voice over announcer who is the antagonist in the videos. That was helpful for the guys on camera, and really kind to me. And I was most lucky to have make-up maven, Cat Elrod, in the house. Aside from being highly skilled at her job, she is always a delight to have on set. She even helped me do the dishes!

All in all, things went rather well. Jon did what set decorating there was before he went to work. I had weeks to clean and organize the apartment. Incidentally, this shoot finally pushed me to change the apartment from being a place where a sick person was recovering back to an apartment. I find I really like not being surrounded by pill bottles. But I digress. There was food prep for each dish, photographing ingredients and the actors, running the sound and shooting the video and selecting wardrobe. The whole five hours went by in a blur. I hope I seemed competent during the whole ordeal. I did manage to get everything on my shot lists. The sound for each segment was recorded properly. It's not all done perfectly. There will be challenges in post, but they are minor enough that I'm certain I can make the required adjustments on my own. The performances were very good. I think the yaoi readers will get what they were hoping for. The Yuusei character was flirty and really funny. The Misaki character was shy and sweet. Above all, the food was really good. Each dish was consumed immediately after I took the last shot of it plated up. What was really wonderful to hear for this amateur chef was that, for Ryohei, the food turned out like real Japanese cooking he would get at home. In this case, I had the sense to listen to him when he adjusted the recipes I was using while cooking on camera. A great chef knows when to get out of the way! I admit that I'm really jazzed that this went off well.

That said, this shoot also drove home that I can't handle running all over a really big sound stage or location for days on end during a feature. I'm going to have to be rigid about what I will be doing on these projects. But I am pleased to know that I will be able to have some role. That wasn't really clear until this past Friday. Yeah, I'm jazzed.

Now, it's back to juggling the scripts and manga and video editing and cooking. A lot of wonderful things are on the horizon.

Stay tuned.

*Again Tomorrow - Ashita Kara Mouichido © Nabako Kamo. All rights reserved. Original Japanese edition published in 2010 by Taiyoh Tosho Publishing Co., Ltd.

Banned in Boston (and elswhere), Slanguage and Updates

 A book of mine was banned this week. It was only banned for 24 hours, but it was banned in Boston and everywhere else Amazon.com services. It was a sudden kerfuffle with Digital Manga Publishing over explicit content that was quickly resolved after a whole lot of hell was raised from all quarters of the manga community. This comes on the heels of Paypal demanding that certain erotic content be pulled from Smashwords.com. This, too, was reversed when the policy ignited a fire storm of protest. I am not a fan of rape, incest or bestiality as content. However, the wording of the policy would have affected classic literature like Lolita or any shape shifting fantasy that involved werewolves. It was also loudly pointed out that Paypal had no problems accepting money from Craigslist and other sites that sell porn and facilitate prostitution. Likewise, Amazon is in a glass house where content is concerned selling everything to 'inflatable friends' to toys that even I've never heard of before. I'm not going to link them here. Just search the site for any sort of kink, and there is a book, DVD and/or product that caters to it. I always thought I'd be banned or stoned by Trek fans because of The Secret Logs of Mistress Janeway, not for a sweetly sexy and funny collection like Again Tomorrow [Now available on Amazon Kindle at  http://amzn.com/B007FN03L6;
On Barnes and Noble Nook at:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/again-tomorrow-nabako-kamo/1109212837 and And On EManga at: http://www.emanga.com/books/Again_Tomorrow]  that was legally published in another country and properly licensed here. I'm glad that the issue is resolved for DMP. I'm really glad that I didn't have to battle to keep my books widely distributed. It would be hard for Sylvia Beach to champion banned authors in an era where one or two companies control so much of either online payment processing or actual content distribution.

Manga Editing – What DO You Do?

The book banning brings up the question of what does this company do and what do I do for it. I know my gentle and curious readers. Digital Manga Publishing is a US distributor of manga, light novels and soon literature from Japan. The Digital Manga Guild is a group of translators, editors and typesetters who work in teams called localizer to convert Japanese title into English. My team consists of LW Hubbard, an ex-pat professional translator who lives in Japan, Hentai Tenshi, an independent music producer who lives in the LA area and little ol' me. Our team works under the name Haven's Blade. I thought that we would be working largely independently of each other save for proofing the final pages. It has been far more collaborative, and it calls on skills and knowledge that are far beyond the manga stories on the pages. There needs to be a broad knowledge of past and current Japanese culture and pop culture. We've had instances where we've had to figure out what to call a product mentioned that is a parody of a wildly popular snack food in Japan. In the last week, we've come across popular TV shows and a catching hit song that had to be factored into the translations. Then we had to figure out what would be a stateside equivalent for those things while not making them too American. The author or mangaka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangaka has to recognize the work. That was why I was listening to the RubberDucky Song earlier this week. What's been more challenging is making the dialogue sound natural and realistic when the characters are 20-something guys. Though the audience is certainly not 20-something guys, the characters have to sound as real as their Japanese counterparts. Since none of us are members of this demographic, that takes a bit of effort and all three of our brains. Among this weeks puzzlers was whether or not young punks would use the term German aphrodisiac and what could be used in its place. I couldn't find any reason for the substance coming from Germany, and I really looked hard. 

The other thing we had to be really careful of was trying to be too current with the slang. The readership has a really wide range in age, and dialog that is too set in a particular time gets dated and looks sill in just a few years. The slang has to be something that has passed into the general lexicon of speech. My rule of thumb is whether or not the Hubs uses the slang. He is so square, he's a cube (that's his description of himself). If he uses it, the term has been around for some time and is likely to stay in use. Overall, the team is aiming at a loose, informal way for the characters to speak that reads as natural to anyone that may pick up the book. I'll talk about the joys of sound FX translation and proof reading on another day. This is just a taste to show that our work is challenging but above board despite the occasional banning. It's also cool to work with some really interesting people that I wouldn't have known otherwise. We all enjoy sharing creative energy and solving each new and often amusing puzzle.

Updates

I do apologize for being such a tease about what's going on in the background. I don't mean to be. I'm torn between wanting to convey a reason for my very upbeat demeanor and just keeping mum until I can spill the beans. I can say that the schedule for these projects is holding firm, so that they day for announcements is coming as promised. Also, I have been taking notes, so I will have detailed blogs about every aspect of the mayhem that is coming.

Stay tuned.