So
OK, so this is the first time I've posted blah blah blah on a blog. I supposed I should do this more often, but my life just hasn't been all that interesting for, say, the past two years. Sigh.
I am currently rushing / goofing off in an attempt to get as much translation done for the soulless masters at Nintendo as I possibly can before I leave to meet my Dad in Montana on Thursday morning. I have spent much of the afternoon in a pensive funk, thinking about Japan after seeing thefreak 's recent pictures. As I told him in an earlier chat, I often feel like an Elf longing for the Gray Havens.
The Stuff I've Been Working On Lately (henceforth, TSIBWOL):
- Bucketloads of engineering translation (Japanese to English, roughly 80 thousand characters and counting...). Yaay, money!
- Two novels I'm writing in my head, both of which are set in an alternate-history world where magic kinda works and supernatural creatures live alongside humanity. One is set 100 years in the future / 400 years in the past of Japan, and the other is set in the US of A and Japan during a prolonged War Between the States. In the former, two characters whose lives strangely mirror each other are separated by a 500-year time span; one in a Japan just becoming dominated by a Buddhist theocracy, and the other in a liberated, back-to-Shinto future Japan where most people are addicted to a substance known as Floating World and Tengu drive ultra-bullet trains from Hokkaido to Okinawa. In the latter, Abraham Lincoln is the American champion bare-knuckle boxer and 16th president of the States, Ralph Waldo Emerson is a missing druid, Henry David Thoreau is a proto-ecoterrorist, Miss Ann Pidgeon is an Hermetic Messenger of the Order of Minerva who faces off against the Stovepipe Jimmies, and some other dude who I haven't named yet is sent to Japan to acquire lots and lots of ninjas. Well, maybe one or two. Maybe one day I will post some chapters for your reading pleasure.
- I've been tossing ideas around with my friend Kirk for a film documentary on Dungeons and Dragons and the people who play it. Maybe look at the whole role-playing life in general. We also wanna do a briefer audio version we hope to sell to "This American Life".
- A screenplay, which may have to be a short story or a novel first, also set in the modern day of that aforementioned world about a curious possession by a malevolent spirit, a flight to Vancouver, and a fight to the death with Buddhist hunter assassins.
- I've also been working on a new superhero campaign (HERO System), to be set in Seattle, where the PCs create themselves as normal humans, then role-play the acquisition of their powers and their subsequent responsibilities as a hero, a-la Spider Man.
So yeah. I guess I should make this a regular thing.