Frank words about dealing with rejection letters and death

This week has been hard for me, I learned that a friend has been murdered in her own house. The person who did it is still on the run. My thoughts go out to her daughter and the rest of her family. I lost my mom last year to aspiration pneumonia after taking care of her for almost half of my life. I know what its like to lose a parent so, I empathize.

I got 2 rejection letters which didn’t bite me as hard as I thought it would. What I really did was I cursed and then I moved on. Basically said to myself, ‘well, thats fine, that just means another polish and send it out again to people who will pay me more for it.’

If you have read posts before about dealing with rejection and all the feelings associated with it. Some talked about dealing with the crushing feeling that maybe you aren’t cut for being a writer.

Honestly, I didn’t have any of those reactions. I don’t want to say that people were blowing it out of proportion but I have to keep in mind that I haven’t had the same experiences as these other people. I’m not here to say that these peoples feelings are invalid. I’m saying your reaction to rejection and to death will differ depending on whats going on in your life. Do I have any doubt that it would affect me greatly if this rejection letter came a week before I learned of my friend’s murder? You betcha. But I would still dust myself off and try again.

Why? Because I’m not the type to give up easy. I’m a stubborn motherfucker. And when it comes to death, I won’t let a death ruin my life and my chance to be happy. I know people who’ve let a death rule their lives and they spent their life stewing in misery over it. You think a standard rejection letter would get in my way of getting published?

I say: Bring your worst.

Signed,

a stubborn writer.

The future, goals, more big scary fun crazy things

So I’m nearing the end of the huge 101 things in 1001 days project. I got a lot that I wanted to get completed but I’m eager to draft up another big scary list and add on all a few from the last list I haven’t completed to the new list. Its version 2.0, I’ma gonna get a ton of creative shit done.

I’ll list some of these big scary fun crazy things I do want to do but of course, I’m still in the process of drafting this so YMMV. In no particular order:

 

1. Write a choose your own adventure as an iphone app or write a serial story for the iphone.
2. Write a RPG book—it might be a World of Darkness fan thing but who knows.
3. I would like to do a collaboration project for an app for the iphone with a couple of friends and use Kickstarter (maybe) to help fund us.
4. Write about demons and bakers (2 books, 80K+ next year)
5. Continue doing Nanowrimo and script frenzy
6. I have a huge stack of unpolished stuff that I’m currently working through at a snails pace. I want to get those that I want to get done, done.
7. I want to write and direct more indy short films.
8. Japanese, Japanese, Japanese, I want to finish playing through every Final Fantasy game in Japanese. Its been a goal ever since I played the first one, which was FF7 at release.
9. Chinese, Chinese, I want to learn some Chinese. I’ve been collecting resources and you should know when I get into a collecting phase, I don’t stop until I know everything there is to know out there on Chinese materials. I have a suspicion I’m going to be playing FF7 in Chinese at some point.
10. I want to release an album of a buncha songs I’ve wrote and do some shows to promote the album.
11. Reading more Japanese, English and Chinese. Comic books, UF, YA, Manga, CYOA, Scifi, Non-fiction, I would like to read at least 60-80 books a year. I know its low compared to some people but I guess I read slow? I never really noticed it. It would be nice to figure out how to read faster.
12. I would like to make my own beer and wine just for the hell of it.
13. I want to graduate from Uni! Its still up in the air if I’m going to go for 2 bach degrees, get one and then do the translate thing/job in Japan for a while and then go back. I’m not sure if I’m going to have to go through some kind of special TLing school or not but I’ll figure it out when I get there.
14. I want to volunteer more of my time.
15. Keep sending more of my short story work out to publishers.

Full list coming soon.

 

Flyjin, Flykokujin, or an interesting slice of the human psyche.

Excuse the informality.

If you’ve been on Twitter for the last week and a half and have been keeping up with other J-enthusiasts. The world Flyjin has crept into our lexicon as “Someone who flys out of Japan out of fear of the supposed coming Nuclear Fallout from the great Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami.” Succinct to say people have their reasons for leaving while those who continue to stay behind have a mentality of “we’re more hardcore badasses for staying. Look at the sheep run in fear”.

I find this squabble within the community fascinating in a “I can’t look away” sense. Instead of the community uniting under a tragedy, and in some ways they are as I’ve seen tons of people tweeting they’ve donated to Red Cross and started doing donation drives, charity concerts, some people are even crowd source writing a book for charity. Some people have decided to enter a US VS THEM mentality within the small oppressed minority of foreigners living in Japan.

It reminds me of this group back at my first high school. More than half of the population in my high school was from a variety of backgrounds. Therey were these two groups that were vetting against each other: one group, students born from parents from Mexico and the other students born in Mexico and traveled here to attend High School. The big power struggle was how much “Mexican” they are. How they portrayed themselves and maintained as much patriotic identity with Mexican values. It was a battle to see “Who’s more Mexican? Who’s the better Mexican?”

I see the exact same thing going on here. As one of my friends quoted once: “Life is just another type of High School.” I was in denial about this but now I’m on the fence about it when Flyjin started cropping up.

My question is: Why is this such a big issue? Why should it matter? Why are we even ridiculing others for their decisions? Who thought that staying behind means you’re better than the people that are leaving? I get the “its different between those who love and live in a country they aren’t born from and those born in it”. And I get how difficult being told that “You Will Never Be Truly Japanese”. But raging on the same folks who are told the same things only makes you look bad. Nobody is getting gold metals from mocking others. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than to squabble amongst ourselves.

I realize its a very small portion of foreigners in Japan that are doing this and am certainly not implying that everybody living there are doing this. This whole Flyjin business is a no win. It creates extra drama where there should be none in the first place.

Thats my 2 yen.