Places to visit when I go to Japan #329
Sanrio Puroland? Check.
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Tom
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Tom
Merge! Residency!
Tomorrow, I’m going to have my first Japanese language lesson. Why? Because I’ve received an Asialink writing residency. Next year, I’ll be at Aichi Shukutoku University in Nagoya, Japan for 3-4 months. I’ll be researching various Japanese popular cultural interests to broaden my use of pop culture in my fiction and also to inform my second book. This residency will hopefully bring a few of my artistic interests – both long-standing and recent – together.
I’ll write more about this at a later stage but for now, I give you my thoughts via this video:
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Tom
A sneak preview
I have 2544 decent words so far for what is the second piece of my book. These words have come extremely slowly, especially in the last few days. For the last 2 days, I’ve been writing like the Australian Cricket team has been fielding – i.e. with little in the way of breakthroughs. I’ve never spent so much time working on the same paragraphs before, without success (‘success’ in this case means being able to move on to write other parts of the story). At least now I have manoeuvred myself out of the stuck space I was in yesterday.
So anyway, here’s a sneak preview:
In one case, a business owner became faced with 122 robots in his factory who, despite performing their jobs as normal, were also asking him every day, “How can we reconcile the existence of suffering with the premise of a good and almighty God?” At first, he tried to see if he could find an answer to this perplexing question that was being put to him by his robots. However, after a few weeks of research and contemplation that he later described as “too hard”, he took a hammer to every one of his robots, saying to them, “I don’t know the answer” over and over.
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Tom
Where do you get names for your characters from?
Fiction writers: where do you get names for your characters from? These days, I’m getting most of my character names from here.
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Tom
Making associations
My method of composing fiction is very associative in nature. It’s how I’m able to integrate such seemingly remote concerns in my work – rock stars, gigantism and embodiment; Pinocchio, the Muppets, fictitiousness… and, more recently, robots, art theory and the attributes of God.
Due to the associative nature of my process, I find the Internet is as vital to my fiction-writing as… well, as my computer itself. (Handwriting is reserved for my shopping lists, and that’s about it.) The Interwebs was made for a process like mine, which relies so heavily on linking and juxtaposition. As a result, Google’s search engine also knows so many of my half-formed, embarrassing ideas.
With this in mind, here are a few Google search terms that I used recently while working on my current story:
- feasibility study
- scoping
- community engagement and consultation
- computer errors in logic
- logic error
- Jewish religious law
- the three pure ones taoism
More recently, I’ve also been increasing my use of YouTube to generate further associations still. Here’s my most recently-watched video:
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Tom
I just wrote two funny sentences for my current story. Which is funny, given how unfunny – in fact, downright agonising – it has been trying to write this story. This isn’t really anything new – it seems to be how I compose, really. But the unfunniness has really been brought out by this particular project.
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Tom
Hot damn
I’ve been working on the same damn page all day. But I’m writing and the words are more or less working and I’m even clearing up a few problems that have been perplexing me for most of this year. So, for all of these reasons, I am so damn relieved.
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Tom
I haven’t posted to my website for a while. In fact, I’ve been lying pretty low lately. The reason is that I’ve been a little weary of Tom Cho the author – that is, Tom Cho the public persona who does things like speaking at writers’ festivals and posing for a camera. And that weariness of ‘Tom Cho the persona’ has also made me weary of Tom Cho the person, which I have found hard. (I am also aware that discussing this publicly on my website feels like a staged exercise – yet another pose in a series of poses… a pose in which I discuss my weariness of posing.)
Fortunately, what I am not weary of is my second book. I have had a tough time writing my book this year. I do not have much in the way of finished pieces to show for my work, and I feel terribly guilty about this. But what I have been doing is slowly finding ways to approach what seemed to be the unapproachable – material of intimidating difficulty that I have been thinking about every day.
What’s really good is that I’ve come to realise that the first piece I’ve written for this book is something special. The piece is a good start to what I believe will be a great book. I had a few pretty special moments writing that special piece – the kind of moments that I have really missed having. And these kinds of moments will be crucial to writing this second book.
The starting point for my second book is a series of questions. However, the ‘answers’ to these questions transcend rational thought. And, to write these answers, I think that I will need to have transcendent experiences – involving writing and perhaps more. You see, I believe that in my most special moments of writing, I have the closest to what I could call transcendent experiences. It is really difficult to write of such things. I could say that these experiences are transcendent because they appear to transcend my awareness of time, my awareness of external phenomena, my fear of writing badly (perhaps one of the few times when I do not have this fear), and even my interest in the mechanics of writing. But that description is rather dull and, at any rate, ineffectual.
What or who am I during those moments? Pure thought, perhaps? Surely not this job known as a ‘writer’ (and certainly not Tom Cho the persona).
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Tom
I’ve got a few things on.
Not only is it a very busy day at my day job today but, outside of that, I’ve also been trying to reconcile the existence of human suffering with the premise of a good God.
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Tom
On The Meaning of Life and Other Fictions
Here’s a little update. I was going to talk about it here first but Twitter was closer to hand so I posted a couple of tweets earlier today:
Will be submitting my latest short story to 2 mags soon. Excited about this and also v happy to be back in the world of sending to lit magsBut the most exciting news of all: I got an Australia Council grant to work on my second book!I feel very grateful that the funding bodies – Arts Victoria and now the Australia Council – have been willing to support my ambitious book – a book which has the working title The Meaning of Life and Other Fictions. The project is so ambitious that my funding proposals have read a bit like parodies of funding proposals. While writing them, I was seriously hoping that the assessment panels would at least enjoy reading them.
Anyway, for now at least, I am feeling pretty good about my writing. I’ve had a difficult time this year working on my second book. Over and over again, I’ve been humbled by this undertaking. But, in the last few months, I have started to make some headway. Until recently, everything I’ve done has felt hopelessly preliminary.
And yet such is the nature of this project that maybe it will always feel like a preliminary investigation – a prelude to a work that no one can ever write.
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kalyantreshaky
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Tom
Thank you. If my previous book is anything to go by, I take a long time to write books (and this one is, as I mentioned, very ambitious). But I reckon it will be worth the wait!
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Tom
I, Robot Writer
I’ve been going through a “Let’s write about robots” phase.
I really enjoy writing about robots. However, surely I’m not the only writer to fantasise about getting a robot to do my writing for me?
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Tom
Over-reaching
Well, I have finally finished a draft of the first piece that I’ve written for my new book. Oh, it was such a difficult piece to write. I feel embarrassed that it took me so long to write it, but I have also learned so much from writing it. I also reckon that what I was trying to do has a pretty high level of difficulty. It was one of those “quintuple somersault with two twists and a pike” type of dives, and the whole book has that absurdly ambitious feel to it, really.
And yet the ambitious nature of this project – the sense that I am very much over-reaching – is part of its charm. And, really, that is one of the things I tried to cultivate when writing my first book – the happy sense that, yes, I am indeed over-reaching and that I want to share that joke – and all of the ideas and conceits that are entailed in it – with my reader.
For now, I’ve handed over the piece to two people for their feedback, one of whom is my publisher. I have no idea what they will think of it. Maybe they will give me an ‘A’ for effort and some lower score for the realisation. At any rate, I have tried mightily hard with this piece but, tonight, I’ve been thinking about how ‘A’ isn’t so much a grade. Tonight, ‘A’ is about being ‘Absurdly Ambitious’.
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Tom
Currently struggling with writing the ending of this story. Dolly Parton’s version of “I Will Always Love You” is my mournful soundtrack.
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Tom
Getting closer
I’ve written 3605 words so far for this story, the first one in the new book. It is certainly one of the most difficult pieces I’ve ever written. I should have noticed a red flag of warning when I began reading all those articles about the indescribability of God. Oh well.
Anyway, today, I think I finally finished one of the really pivotal parts of the story. Let’s just say that I’m closer to finishing this story – and thus closer to God – than I ever thought possible.
P.S. Here’s an image that has informed this story. It’s from the film Shrek 2.
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Tom
Ever had a really ambitious idea for a book?
Sick of struggling with this short story but then... it's really hard to describe God. At any rate, my mission today: to get closer to God.Some hours, later…
Update:
About to go home. Am still working on the same damn paragraph, but I've passed the 3000 word mark and, more importantly, I am closer to God.
Tom and 
kalyantreshaky are discussing. 
That book sounds very very interesting… looking forwards to reading it.