Category Archives: writing

Living with imaginary girls

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For some reason he was praying that he could meet her again – even if no one else could.

No, it is not about my imaginary gURLfriend from City of Heroes and Sims 2, but rather the anime Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai, called AnoHana for short. (I appreciate that. I believe this means “that flower”, and the whole thing means something like “we still don’t know the name of the flower seen that day” or some such.) Spoiler for episode 1.

The main character is a boy who shuts himself in and does not go to high school. This seems to have happened at some time after his mother dies. But what really bothers him is the girl who died when they both were around 10 or so (from the looks of them). She was his best friend and when someone asked if he liked her, he got flustered and called her an ugly bitch or some such. She died that night, falling off a cliff, perhaps while looking for him. Anyway, he clearly feels that he is at fault.

And then she comes back to haunt him – sort of. One summer she appears at his home, looking as much older as he is, but still behaving as the child she was before she died. She is very clingy, which embarrasses him even though she is nor particularly attractive and is wearing decent clothes. She seems not to hold any grudge against him, but neither is she sure why she is there. She thinks one of them has to fulfill a wish, but it is not clear what.

While the main character can both see and hear and feel the ghost girl, nobody else can. When they are alone, she can move things freely, even to the point of cooking (which she does not do very well). If there are other people present, she only rarely moves anything in the room, and always in such a way that people think someone else did it or it just moved on its own.  Naturally the boy decides to not even try to convince others that she is real, and people look at him like he is crazy when he forgets himself and talks to her or make weird gestures seemingly to thin air.

A pretty original story, as far as I can see.  I know of only one other story based on this premise, and it is written by me and never published.

***

The actual story as it develops is different from mine, but the whole invisible girl thing is disturbingly similar.  Admittedly it took me some time to arrive at it: My first story of this sort was not about a girl but an adult “goddess” from a higher-dimensional reality, and due to the doubt of the man he could not touch her, although she could move things when no one else was looking. He was able to hear and see her though.  This was also the premise of one of my NaNoWriMo stories, although it ultimately failed. The story was written from the viewpoint of another young woman, so it is no wonder I had to give it up. I don’t really understand women at all. Or humans, really, when it comes to it.

The next iteration, however, had the “goddess” (now a completely alien being from a six-dimensional world where our universe is just one of many bubbles) take on the exact body of a girl who died in a traffic accident around the age of 10. In so doing it gains her memories exactly as they were at the moment before her death. The main character is a young man in his first year at college. The girl used to live next door and they were very close. When his parents also died, the people in his small town decided that he was cursed with bad luck and he became isolated from everyone. Oh, and the resurrected girl has the power to make herself age up and age down as she sees fit, to his worry.  In any form, however, nobody else can sense her at all, even when she does things right before their nose. They just attribute it to some natural cause.

I won’t exclude the possibility that I have copied the idea from somewhere, but I doubt it, since I arrived at it gradually and still have the writings from the earlier incarnations. There is  a whole series of these on my hard disk, bringing the concept of the female character ever closer to that in AnoHana – which was not even published at the time. This seems to be a direct to anime production, so presumably no one has published anything about it, certainly not in any language I can read.

Regular readers will notice that this is something I am more or less used to already. I still have the original manuscript of two or three stories about a boy who attends a magic school in an old stone castle and his relationship to girls, his learning magic and his repeated fights against evil, for instance.  There is no way I could publish that now; not that it was ever good enough for that. I also invented online persistent role playing games before they existed, and in my childhood invented the entire genre of roleplaying games before they were invented again in Sweden a few year later.  In all fairness I was just a kid then, so there was nothing I could have done. But you see the point here. Good ideas come to me; I fail them; they go elsewhere, to someone who can get them right.

That’s just the kind of guy I am. It is kind of halfway cool and halfway pathetic. I guess on average I am kind of human, after all.

 

Happy blue light worldbuilding

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What if you had the power to change or create anything through concentrating the clear blue light of your mind? (Illustration picture from City of Heroes, featuring my heroic alter ego, The Eternal Newbie.)

I recently came up with another story germ. Or perhaps you would say I came down with it, germs being germs and all. Anyway, I’ve been sketching it out a little in my head and writing a first chapter.

The world in which this story takes place merges two of my favorite worlds: That of my Lightwielder stories, where absolutely truthful people wield a magical power to help others, and that of Happy Science. Well, more exactly TSI, the equivalent of Happy Science in the movie Rebirth of Buddha, itself by Happy Science. I wrote 50 000 words of fiction last November based on that world, and it was probably the easiest writing I had ever done.  The Lightwielders were used for a similar length of text in 2007, but it was not as easy to write.

So this story is part magical and part spiritual, I would say. Much of it takes place in the World of the Mind, where people are what they think. So the people who have Light in them are able to do magical things by that power while they are in the World of the Mind.  They can fly, they can change their clothes with a thought, even change their own mind-body with some experience. They can move to anywhere in the World of the Mind in the blink of an eye, or find another person just by thinking of them. They can even concentrate their light and create things out of thin air, at least for a while. So it is a fun place… for them.

The World of the Mind intersects with Afterlife, though, and that is not a happy place for everyone. I should be able to find all the drama needed for a novel in there. For instance, once in a while a stray spirit from the hells of lust or strife or gluttony or some such wanders into the World of the Mind and starts stinking up the place. What do you do then?

***

Now about the blue thing. See, there are 7 colors of light, like a rainbow bridging earth and sky. Blue, the color of reason, is thought.  Our main character and his  girl classmate both happen to be true blue. In their realm, everyone dresses in blue and shine from within with varying intensity of clear blue light.

Because Blue is the color of reason and thought, their part of the World of the Mind is filled with geeky things, games and puzzles and libraries of textbooks and stuff like that. Basically each part of the World of the Mind is filled with stuff that their kind of people would put there, and they keep placing new things there or improving on old. When you redesign a thing in the World of the Mind, you don’t actually delete the old version, it is still visible to those who remember it or want to see it.

Anyway, part of why I use the Blue Light is to distinguish this story from my Lightwielder stories, in which there is only one Light, and it is white. In this story, there is also only one Light, but it splits into seven colors to accommodate the many different people who live in the World of the Mind.

***

The first chapter is almost completely Happy Science, I mean TSI, except that the main character (a high school boy, of course) can see a faint glow around his classmate when he does not look straight at her, and he notices that the room seems to grow brighter when she arrives and a little dimmer when she leaves. Because of this, he keeps looking at her in class, trying to catch that faint aura, but he never succeeds. Instead, another girl in class who is his childhood friend from they were little, notices that he is staring at light-girl. Misunderstandings ensue.

Light-girl finds out and takes him home to meet her parents, but not the way he thinks. Together, they explain that he has the same kind of light in himself, but his light is mottled and dimmed by negative spiritual influences. This is because he has used pornography (which works like a spell book when seen from the World of the Mind) to summon a sexual demon / lost soul which has attached itself to him.  In order to do combat with the demon, he and his classmate and her father go to the World of the Mind. And that’s where the magic world part begins in earnest.

Kiseki worldbuilding

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“and I will discover my overwhelming strength”. (Screenshot from Kyou Kara Maou.) This is a recurring topic in my fiction writing, but I would not call my current project autobiographical, really. Not in a literal sense, for sure.

“Kiseki” is simply the Japanese word for miracle, although they sure use it a lot more in love songs than we do. That may be because it sounds better, perhaps, or there is some nuance to the word that eludes me, or their culture is simply that much different.

In today’s context, however, Kiseki is the power to perform miracles, inherited by some people in my newest fiction sketch. The origin of the word will probably be explained in passing, at least I have sketched it in, in chapter 2.

As is often the case, this is inspired by some other work of fiction.  This time it is Kimagure Orange Road, a manga and anime from some 25 years ago. You can see it in the style too, it is amusing to see what was trendy back in my youth. Oh well.

When I say “inspired by”, I don’t mean that I am writing some kind of fan fiction. Rather, as usual, I compress the original story down into a long sentence or very short paragraph, then expand it again in a completely different direction. While the two stories may seem identical in their compressed form, it is highly unlikely that a casual reader would recognize any relationship between them when reading the story, if they haven’t read this explanation.

Condensed form: A teenage boy has near-miraculous powers, but have to try to not use them. This is not so easy when there are girls taking an interest in him or the other way around.

In Kimagure Orange Road, the reason to not use The Power seems to be simply to not attract unwanted attention to the fact that they are psychics. Every time the family attracts too much attention, they have to move and break all ties with the past, so that is a fairly convincing reason actually.

In Kiseki, there is additionally a motivation in the way the power works. It can be stored without limits, and the more of it you have stored at any one time, the faster it accumulates.  This is compared to a circle or sphere, which has an ever greater circumference or area as it grows. The larger this is, the more energy is drawn into it, and the faster it grows.  In addition, keeping the Kiseki in your mind for a long time changes you so that you for all future will be able to replenish it faster. It also slows down aging when you grow older.

In the story, it is speculated that this may be a case of intelligent design. People who lack patience and self-restraint are basically not trusted with as much power as those who are more careful and in control of themselves.  It is implied that many of the world’s top athletes and other prominent people are born with Kiseki, but because they use it every day, they never store up enough of it to do anything obviously miraculous. Just enough to give them an edge.

Even so, the young boy is strictly commanded to not have any children out of wedlock.  Even though these children will most likely not have Kiseki, they will carry the gene, and in a later generation they may have children with another carrier, and suddenly some random person grows up to have superpowers but without being prepared for it. The result could be pretty bad.  So the main character, at the age of 15, are told that his sperm is a weapon of mass destruction and could end the world as we know it.  (I did not find a way to literally insert “every sperm is sacred”, but I still may. It is still a rough sketch.)

There are certain things Kiseki cannot do, no matter how much you have of it. Most notably, it cannot bring back the dead. On a related note, it cannot heal someone who wants to die. It also cannot create something from nothing. Among the things that can be done, some take more Kiseki to accomplish, such as transmuting one substance into another, especially if you transmute the basic elements, like lead into gold. Healing is also quite Kiseki intensive, as it has to operate on billions of cells.  Even if it does not require much physical energy, it still takes a lot of “control energy”, which is more what Kiseki is here.

Obviously Kiseki cannot predict the future if doing so would change it. Apart from this, however, it can gather all kinds of information and augment the senses. This is fairly easy. Strangely enough, moving things – including oneself – is also pretty easy.  Flying, teleporting from one place to another in the blink of an eye, or moving at high speed are all fairly easy to accomplish and take little Kiseki. But if you do it often enough, it will still drain you, and there is always the risk of being caught. You don’t want to be “dissected like a frog by secret service” as one parent puts it.

So that’s it for the Kiseki part.  The girls are next up, they are still pretty vague.

***

I think the feeling of being special and having to hide your bright side is pretty common for young people. As for accumulating power and not being allowed to use it yet, I guess that may be derived from the way to wisdom, where you have to store up your reading and revelations and not blather them as soon as you get them. Obviously I still have a tendency to use them at once.  I am sure this will reflect itself in my poor main character. ^_^ But apart from that, not autobiography.

Inferior Lightwielder worldbuilding

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I was imagining something weird again. This is unlikely to surprise regular readers, I suspect…

Actually it is not the worldbuilding that is inferior, although that may also be true. Rather it is the world itself, most notably its people, among them even the Servants of the Light.

I admit that it was Rabbi Steinsaltz’ book that prompted me to sketch out a new story. But it contains nothing I could not have written before. I came up with the idea of vertical, hierarchical worlds when I was still young. I think maybe 19, but I have no writing from that age, so I am not sure. At that time there was nothing religious or spiritual to it: I had picked up the idea of parallel worlds (or dimensions, as they were erroneously called) from a book by Norwegian SF authors Bing & Bringsværd. Their worlds were parallel horizontally rather than vertically, gradually becoming more alien with increasing distance from our reality, I think. In any case, at some point I changed my view of the multiverse to vertical and hierarchical, although at that time it was still pure SF.  Then some 25 years passed before I found this worldview again, in a different context.

In my latest story, the protagonist is from a world much like our own. In the library he chances upon a book that describes dozens of other worlds, in a brief but factual way, as if a textbook for world travelers rather than a piece of fiction. One of them stands out: The world where the community of Servants of the Light have worked tirelessly together to fill the whole world with Light, to the point where it became a paradise and eventually ascended to a higher level. This world again has now given birth to lower worlds, and while it is higher, they are lower.  Our hero decides to try the ritual written in the book to travel to one of these worlds.

The world of Gebir is an instance of Earth, with similar but not quite identical races of humans, animals and plants. However, this world, by virtue of being a little lower than ours, is inferior in details.  The soil itself is less fertile, and life is nastier, more brutish and shorter. The human races there are not only a little weaker physically and more prone to illness, but their lifespan is shorter even when they die from old age: An age of 65, or 70 for the strong, is considered ripe old age.

Worse yet is the mental inferiority of the people. They learn more slowly and forget more easily. Their attention span is shorter, and it is harder for them to see the consequences of their actions, for themselves and for others. Logic is a virtually unknown art, and superstitions reign.  (In all fairness, they do live in a world where a certain type of magic actually works, but they will believe in many other strange things as well.) Their willpower is nothing to write home about, they are easily mastered by their appetites, whether it concerns food or drink or sex or sleep. Quick to anger and easily distracted from work, especially mental work, they progress slowly and backslide quickly.

The sad truth is that these untermenschen are largely patterned on our own ancestors, from the middle ages backward.  It is hard for a modern person to imagine the sad state of mankind 1000 years ago, let alone 1500 years ago.

(Let me briefly once again say that I consider the “Dark Age” of Europe to be from the final generations of the Western Roman Empire, through the violent and chaotic era where entire nations were moving around, to the beginning of Carolus Magnus’ new Holy Roman Empire (which was neither holy, roman, nor – for most of its time – a real empire.) From here on, if not before, there was a slow and fitful progress in many areas. The Middle Ages, then is largely a time of progress, leading toward the Renaissance. It was certainly not guaranteed to end that way – China pretty much ossified before reaching the modern age, despite having a lead on Europe for much of the time – but neither was it some kind of black hole.  Things were even worse before.)

Now I am not saying that our world is in the process of ascending to a Paradise and beyond: There are still so many things that can go wrong, and some of them are indeed going wrong even as we speak. But comparing the English-speaking people today with their ancestors 1000 years ago, not to mention even further, even common people today appear as supermen in health of not only body but mind as well.

Be that as it may, this is the first time in a long time indeed that I design a world that is consistently inferior, and humans who are a breed of losers. I must admit that I had to reflect deeply on my fascination with the depravity I imagined. There is a saying about people who go into the sewers to clean up and people who go there to bathe (social realism anyone?). I am still in a very early phase of this project, having written only a couple thousand words. I am not sure how viable it may be. Let’s say I am not quitting my day job to write on this.  But I make these few notes just in case.

Imaginary invisible friends day

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Chasing rainbows hand in hand with your invisible best friend. I assume the manga was made without knowledge of Calvin & Hobbes…

I got a head cold as soon as I was finished with the flu. Since you still shed flu virus for a couple days after you are fever-free, spraying virus like a garden sprinkler gone wild is a bad thing. I have become a walking biological weapon! Of mass destruction! Well, the fever has destroyed some of my mass at least, though I am now eating like a wild thing to get it back. What is worse is that the sick and elderly are more likely than the rich, trim and tan capitalists to take the bus with me, and the sick and elderly may lose more than just a little fat. They might lose their lives.  I am not risking that, and my boss luckily agrees with me.

So here I have been at home all day.  My selection of edibles is shrinking faster than I expected (yay for getting my appetite back though). I still have pasta for a few weeks of siege though. And my boss sent me chocolate, although it contains too much fat to eat all in one day (or even two).

In addition to eating, I have been watching yet another long anime series: Onmyou Taisenki. It is aimed at barely teenage boys, it seems, but since when has that stopped me? It is set in an alternate reality vaguely based on Chinese philosophy, where some people can form a contract with “shikigami”, literally “ritual gods”, animal spirits with magical powers that can exterminate demons. However, these days they mostly fight each other, as there is a civil war between them. One group is trying to make a profit in the demon realm, more or less. The other is trying to stop them.

The series is very similar to a roleplaying game, in that the characters search for new seals that give them new combat techniques, and grow stronger by defeating opponents (demons or each other).  The human characters don’t normally die when defeated, their contract is only broken and they lose all memories from after  the contract was formed. Not a capital punishment unless you are left in a place where you cannot find your way back to civilization.

I pondered why this series appealed to me as much as it did. In part I think it is because it is kind of cute and innocent.  The whole not killing people, even if you could, is like a throwback to a more innocent age. (It is actually from 2004, which was not really a much more innocent age.) But perhaps what most appealed to me was the intense friendship between the main character and his white tiger spirit who fights for him.  This is intentionally a main part of the story.

The main character is a young boy who lost his parents (that’s a long story in itself and is unraveled gradually) and he does not have many friends except the girl next door. When he has to form a contract with a spirit to protect his grandfather, he does not realize that he is gaining the best friend he has ever had. The loyalty the two start to feel for each other is touching.  Also, he can see the spirit even when it is not fighting (ordinary people can only see it when fighting).  So he spends a lot of time conversing with his invisible friend.

What is not to like about that? I do that all the time. ^_^

There was one thing I disliked though even in this theme. I have never really thought about it before, but I just realized that in all such stories where a seemingly unimpressive person is chosen by a spirit or goddess or angel or whatever, that person always has some hidden great power that eventually (or sometimes pretty quickly) shines forth.  And I realized that this had also been the case in some of my own writing.

So I made a reboot of my story from a couple years back, where a 6-dimensional being from outside the universe makes a pact with an ordinary teenage boy and becomes his amazing invisible friend. This time, the seemingly ordinary boy actually is an ordinary boy (except for being very much alone). And the only reason why he is chosen is “because I love you”.

Apart from that, I did not really do much of lasting value today. Eating, sleeping, playing City of Heroes, watching anime. Coughing up hairballs. Not much to write home about.

Soccer fiction??

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Soccer and miracles. Screenshot anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot. The anime has lots of pictures like this, and some hair-raising music too.

There are some things you would feel safe to bet a large sum of money on. Large sum of money as in borrowing to the chimney to bet. Somewhere around that level of certainty was my conviction, unspoken because it was so obvious, that I would never write anything that had anything to do with soccer (or indeed any sport, but particularly soccer). Well, not anything other than “I hate soccer and wish it was dead”, or words to that effect.

As you can guess by now, I am writing soccer fiction. At least it is not about actual real-world soccer players and their imaginary guy & guy love adventures, which seems to be a very large proportion of the soccer fiction on the Internet. -_- I guess girls have their temptations too, in addition to chocolate cake I mean. And like most things regarding girls, completely incomprehensible. Inscrutable. Obscure.  Impossible to understand.

In any case, I have finished watching all 59 episodes of Aoki Densetsu Shoot, a Japanese animation about soccer. And as usual when I have seen come across something interesting, I started to thing of writing fiction. Not fan fiction really, but the usual. You know, the usual for me is to take the most basic concept of a movie or book or something, then condense it down to a couple lines, and expand those lines into a whole new story which is so different, it cannot be recognized unless I give you the seed.

In this case, the condensed version is: “Talented boy joins soccer club, has adventures and wins miraculously. Girls appear, chaos ensues.” OK, the last two words probably go without saying, but only for us guys.

The story is in all other ways different. It takes place in a fictional version of Norway. The main character does not get help from the spirit of a dead soccer player. He is a psychokinetic, able to affect things with his mind, but he does not know that yet.  (At this stage, he is like the teenage Clark Kent in John Byrne’s reboot of Superman, who uses his unnatural strength and speed to become a great football player until he grows so strong that he begins to become a danger to others.)

My main character, which I at least for now call Martin, takes an interest in soccer after he has to move to another part of the country and live with relatives to go to high school. (This is something I actually did. Everything after that however is so very much not me.) He moves in with three girls who are his cousins. Their father is usually away at work, though he comes home now and then. Apart from being his cousins, they also each have some trait that makes them less than attractive: One is too old for him, one too young, and the one in the middle is boyish, selfish, overconfident and hot-headed.

The middle girl is in the small town’s girl soccer team (actually captain there, but he does not know that until later). Trying to be friendly, he takes an interest in soccer. She teaches him some techniques that go beyond grade school when he last tried to play. After this, during a dream at night, he has an epiphany and becomes One With The Ball. From now on, he can impart his will to the ball just by a touch, and the ball will do whatever he tells it. Simple things at first, like hitting a particular point, but it gets gradually more unlikely as the story progresses.

The story henceforth alternates between his adventures with soccer and his misadventures with girls. In particular Cornelia, the overly aggressive cousin & captain of the girls’ soccer team. Actual quote: I think it says something profound about Cornelia that in her vocabulary, “people skills” means the ability to throw people around and knock them down without getting arrested. Onlookers see her rough behavior toward him as sign of them being very close romantically, much to his despair.

Then there is his classmate Helene, who is volunteering to help at the soccerclub. She has a crush on him, but being a boy, there is no way he can notice. Then there are an ever growing crowd of nameless girls who want to be seen with him once he starts getting famous. There should be at least one more girl, and perhaps a boy, to make chaos complete. But I am not finished plotting it.

I have written some 14000 words over the last couple days though. I basically leave most of the work to the muses in my head, as usual. So writing it is kind of like reading a book, except much slower.

Luminous prose

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Luminous prose! In the movie The Golden Laws (by Ryuho Okawa) a boy in the future finds the book The Golden Laws (a real book by Ryuho Okawa), and a great adventure begins. It would be easy to mock, except his books are actually great examples of luminous prose. Your luminosity may vary.

This morning I read an online friend complain that the word “luminous” was too much used about books recently. But I really love that word. I wish it could be said about my words, and that it would be true.

Originally “luminous” means “bright, shining, light-filled”. Evidently about books it mostly means “easy to read”, and that is not a bad thing in itself. “If you have really understood the Teachings of the Truth” says Ryuho Okawa, “you can explain them in your own words, using common words that even a child can understand. You can talk about a topic for five minutes or an hour depending on who listens. If you cannot explain the Teachings this way, you have not really understood them yet.” (That is not a direct quote: I explained it in my own words. ^_^ But it is pretty close.)

The book in today’s picture is one of the first published by Ryuho Okawa at the time he founded Happy Science. In my humble opinion, he has grown more luminous in some of his later books. But in general, his writings really come across as light-filled. And they are easy to read too. That is what I want to do to others. But it is not easy.

I admit that the English language has seduced me with its riches. There are so many words, so many ways of saying things, so many styles, so many nuances. I tend to use words that my fellow foreigners don’t know, and I tend to use long and complicated sentences. All of this is mostly for the joy of the phrase, not because I love the reader and want him or her to understand as deeply as possible.

There are some people who are very concise, but are hard to understand. This seems to be common among serious spiritual writers. Frithjof Schuon and Sri Aurobindo both have books that I start on repeatedly but give up. They are just too dense (not the writers, but the language). Old or rare words, even by my standards, may be extremely precise. But I may not understand them deeply enough to appreciate all the knowledge packed in them. When I do “get it”, it is a great joy. But at the same time there is a lot that I don’t understand, or at least not the way it should be understood.

I wish to be easy to understand, but sometimes that is not possible, because I write about things that most people are not interested in. That can’t be helped: I am me, after all, and you are not. If I were not me, who would be? But even if I write about strange things, I wish to write as clearly as possible. That requires me to first think as clearly as possible, and that is probably where most of the work will be. ^_^

“Hateshinai toki wo koete”

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“A never-ending journey continues”

Listening again to the song “This is my road” (here on YouTube, but I bought my copy) by Kanon, sung in a mix of English and Japanese with a little Latin and Greek thrown in from Christian rituals. (There is also an English-only version, but they differ a bit.) This is a truly beautiful song, and it was almost solely the inspiration for my attempts at last year’s NaNoWriMo. Eventually I failed that one, but not because of this song. The vision it raised in my mind was simply greater than I was capable of expressing.

The phrase that particularly rang out to me was “Hateshinai toki wo koete” – approximately “unlimited time is surpassed” or words to that effect. So I set out to write a story about a road that surpassed time – a road to immortality. The simple discipline of walking this road day after day would slowly transform the main character as he bit by bit, almost unnoticeably, moved from the barely ordinary into the extraordinary, and then ever deeper into it, into a world filled with miracles.

A lot of people have walked such a road, and some are even now doing so. But I speak then about a spiritual journey. I wanted to dress it in a more concrete language, to make it come alive for those who are yet unable to see that other road. But I failed, which should probably surprise no one.

Perhaps less talk, more walk would help. It has already been a year since then. I am still not one of those “where did the years go” people, for which I am thankful, but I am not sure I have changed as much this past year as I did the year before. Timelessness takes time, and I am wasting too much of mine, when I could be moving deep into a land of miracles, surpassing even the undefined expanses of time itself.

Happy Science fanfic

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This screenshot, found on the Internet, shows that TSI members can be pretty in kimono. Hopefully this will figure in the story at some point. The glowing in the dark part, probably not so much, or only figuratively.

I suppose it had to happen. I started on my fifth novel so far this month. While my main story, “Shadow of Yggdrasil”, was inspired in part by Ryuho Okawa’s claim to be the World Tree, most of the story was to be about other things. The new story, however, is an all-out fanfic. It is set in the world of the movie “Buddha Saitan”, which does not actually mean “Buddha is Satan” but something possibly even more blasphemous to the Theravada Buddhist: The Rebirth of Buddha.

Now, the Buddha was most of all famous for breaking the cycle of birth and death and attaining Nirvana, the endless peace. So the notion that he might return is approximately like someone claiming to have found Jesus’ skeleton. However, the movie portrays it in a different light: The Buddha returns, not because he needs to refine his soul or learn anything more, but because he so loved the world.

I am not going to spoil the movie, which you should be able to see occasionally at your local Happy Science temple. But the movie equivalent of Happy Science, more or less, is called TSI. This is short for “Taiyou Sorano Institute”. The reborn Buddha is named Taiyou Sorano. While Sorano is an actual European surname (and the movie character does look half European, half Japanese), if you write his name in the Japanese naming order with family name first, it becomes “Sorano Taiyou”, which is pronounced like the Japanese phrase “sora no taiyou”, the sun in the sky. I could not stop laughing when I first figured that out.

So, my fifth story has the working title TSI, until I find something better. I started with what I thought would be a short piece, a guy telling a bit about his background and how he came to join the TSI. My plan was to have each chapter be such a story, since I suck at long stories.  But the character unexpectedly came to life and I now have over 10 000 words in a couple days, the fastest I have written in… I am not sure how long. Years, probably.

Strangely writing this story seems to be less tiring on my wrist than the others, even though I am writing more over a shorter time. I do not claim divine intervention for this, however. I think I was just more relaxed because this fellow more or less wrote himself.

It is also fun because he randomly inserts pieces of TSI / HS lore and also the occasional reference to Christianity (he is a Japanese raised in America, so he is familiar with Christianity as well, although not from personal experience.)

Since this is basically fanfiction, there is no way I could ever sell it, but then again National Novel Writing Month is mostly a practice run anyway. There are a few people each year who actually write something they can sell (after months of editing, of course), but I have no such ambition this year. I already have a job where I get paid to help people, so I hope to the Light that I can continue working until I am 75, like my ancestors. But in any case, having some writing skill is no sin. Probably. Although I don’t aspire to publishing 600 books and numerous movie manuscript, like the man behind Buddha Saitan.

“Novel” writing, eh?

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Falling asleep at your desk is perfectly normal while writing a novel. Or so I am led to believe. So imagine writing two!

It is National Novel Writing Month again! And like in so many households around the world (so much for the “national” part), NaNo eve and NaNo day are public holidays. The last hours before midnight are traditionally spent on the NaNoWriMo forums, which slow to a crawl and eventually crash each year.  There is no point in dimensioning the servers for this spike, things calm down after a few days. In the meantime, you can access the forums off the peak hours.  Not hard to do if you live in Norway, of course.  Although peak hours are a bit different when you are a writer, I think. They last till about dawn for some…  (When sanity leaves, creativity comes!)

The first night and the first day are when you pour out on paper (or screen, in most cases) the words that have been dammed up for days, weeks or months as you looked forward to finally bringing your Great Novel (or funny fantasy) into the world.  Of course, the most intrepid (or still reasonably sane) writers have already committed the plot to some kind of external medium in the form of index card (or screen pictures of index cards), charts or “mind maps“. They may also have a character database, so that she does not gaze into his deep brown eyes that were a clear blue, like the summer sky, 14 pages ago. (Although in this age of colored contact lenses, that may be less important and might even add to the plot.) But many of us still have a buffer in our head with a chapter or so of text ready to write.

By the end of Day 1 that buffer is empty. Depending on who you are, the ideas may be gone too. It seemed like there would be enough material for a novel, but actually there was only the first and last chapter and a couple vague ideas glimmering like fireflies in between. Oops.

Yeah, that’s the case for me this year again.  So far I have: Dramatic beginning, dramatic arrival in a strange land, “and then a lot happened”, dramatic declaration of love, “and then a lot happened”, and still working on the dramatic ending.  That does not look a lot like a novel at this point.  I suppose I can still get my 50 000 words by having the main characters discuss their hobbies (which strangely enough would coincide with mine) in painstaking detail, as happened in “The Boy, the Girl and the Werecat”.  But I am planning to take another route this year.

I am starting a second novel. Because, you know, nothing succeeds like fiasco!

Taking a walk is how I get my inspiration. So while walking to the shop and back, about half an hour each way, I got a lot of ideas and completely refilled my brain text buffer. Unfortunately the text had nothing to do with my current novel, but was a reboot of another idea I have had for a long time. In fact, it was a small but important part of DarkEyes, one of my earliest NaNovels. The main character, in times of extreme danger, can escape by sliding to a parallel world. However, he has no control of where. It is similar to his own, but subtly different.

I am sure most of you have had “slider moments” as I call them. (In fact, I called them that before the Sliders TV series. That’s the kind of guy I am. People pick up my ideas and make books, movies and what not from them even if I don’t mention them to a soul. Oh well.

By “slider moments” I mean those moments where you have the distinct impression that you have come to a parallel world where things are almost the same but some significant aspect has changed.  I had that feeling a lot during the Glasnost period.  (Look it up if you are too young to remember it.) The Berlin Wall falling? Not in my world, surely!  Less global examples are where your friend is suddenly going out with that boy she wanted to drop off a cliff and disappear. Slider moments. Dude, where is my planet?

So anyway, this is a comedy mostly.  That is what I write naturally. I may not look like it now, but I used to be quite funny when I was younger. My planned novel for this month is not funny, it is all drama and a little romance and some deep thoughts at the end.  So when I am not in the mood to write that, I write the other.

I am certainly not the first writer to do this. I remember Piers Anthony, the prolific if occasionally indecent fantasy writer, describing his mode of work in his author notes at the end of each novel. You may say a lot about him, and people do, but he did share his technique even though nobody forced him to. And he was a prolific writer indeed. Perhaps he still is, I have moved on from that scene. Anyway, “the best techniques are passed on by the survivors”, and he was definitely one.

At first, when Piers was writing a novel and got an urgent idea for another, he would enclose the alien text in brackets [like this]. Later he would use the word processor’s search function to extract the nuggets, but when writing, the thing that mattered was to keep writing. No matter which book it was for.  After all, that is a writer’s first commandment: Write!

So I may come up with more stories as the days come, if come they do, and then we’ll see what the outcome is.  Perhaps I will have 20 short stories, in which case I may sit down the last day and write a novel about someone who reads 20 short stories. ^_^ Or perhaps I will write hundreds of thousands of words.  Light alone knows, although I have a suspicion.

But now, I have written a thousand words (not counting the picture, which makes it 2000) that are not part of any of my novels.  But perhaps it was “novel” (new) to you?