Sorry about not keeping the blog up to date; work has been busy. Actually, what’s happened is that I’ve had a bad couple of days for getting writing done, so work has piled up. Today I finally got a decent amount written, but I think I’m going to have to work over the weekend anyway. The fact that I’ve had to do my income tax and now need to get my passport renewed is not helping; I’m losing a day or so every week to that sort of administration. Still, at least that should be over relatively soon.

Mayuki is fine. She’s still healthy and smiley, and generally seems to enjoy her bath. She’s getting better at reaching out and grabbing things, and is showing an intense interest in her books. She even turns the pages herself. She’s sleeping a lot less during the day on average, and isn’t waking up too many times during the night. She practices making strange noises a lot, which is also good. In short, everything seems to be going fine. She doesn’t roll over yet, so that’s a bit later than average, but nothing to be concerned about. Yuriko seems to be fine, too. In fact, I seem to be the one in the worst way, what with work pressures. And since I’m not that bad, I’d say the whole family is doing well.

Our Child, Work | Comments Off

Sorry about that, I’ve been busy with work. On the bright side, I’ve now got most of my work up to the point I wanted it to be; I’ve caught up with all the editing that was left over from last year, and dealt with what arrived this year, and got my reading up to the right level. Teaching is also going pretty well; at least, I’ve not let it slide to any extent. Writing has been rather neglected, but with everything else caught up I’m planning to get on with that from next week.

The people who are bothered about me not posting probably want to know how Mayuki is. She’s fine, still a happy, healthy baby. She’s grabbing things around her much more than she was a little while ago, and we’ve had to start being careful where we put her down; she is capable of pulling things over on top of herself, now. If we leave her on her back on the floor, she can scoot herself along, although I don’t know whether that’s deliberate, or just a side effect. She’s also looked to see where we’re pointing on a couple of occasions.

The most interesting reaching out she did was for her own image in the mirror, a couple of days ago. I don’t think she quite realises that it’s her, but that will come in time. Particularly if she keeps trying to play with it.

I’ll try not to neglect the blog quite so much next week, but I suspect I’m still going to be busy. I have to start catching up on writing, after all.

Our Child, Work | Comments Off

Oops, I seem to have skipped a few days there.

We went back to the clinic on Monday to have Mayuki looked at, and she now seems to be putting on weight at an acceptable rate. We’ve increased the amount of formula she’s getting in addition to breast milk, because she’s still a bit behind where she should be. However, the nurses seemed to think that she would be able to catch up over the next couple of weeks, which is good.

She’s being a really remarkably good baby, all told. She doesn’t cry much, she basically sleeps quietly between about midnight and eight am (admittedly with wakes for feeding, but she’s quiet then and goes back to sleep quickly), and doesn’t complain at all about her bath. In fact, I think she slept through it a couple of days ago. Even more important, yesterday I had my first English lesson since she was born, and she was good and quiet all the way through.

I don’t imagine that we’re going to be that lucky all the time, but overall I think there’s a good chance, at least at the moment, of her being quiet most of the time I’m teaching, which is a relief. I rather need to be doing that, and teaching away from home is, in general, inconvenient. On the days when I have several consecutive lessons, it’s pretty much impossible.

Other than that, things have been going pretty well, settling into something of a routine. The Shinto course I’m taking started again today after the summer holidays, so I was able to go to that; it was interesting, but confirmed that I still have trouble following jokes told as muttered, fast side comments during an academic lecture. I followed just about all of the actual content, though.

If life continues in this general pattern, it looks perfectly manageable.

Our Child, Work | Comments Off

I have a new computer. Specifically, I have one of the new metallic iMacs from Apple, the 20″ one. (Wait long enough, and that link will point to the newer versions, but for now, it’s the one I have.) It arrived Tuesday morning.

It’s really nice. Big, bright, clear screen, really fast processor (2.4GHz), enormous hard drive (750Gb), nice keyboard and mouse; the hardware is great. I took it out of the box, connected up, plugged in, and put a DVD in to enjoy the show. Box opening to use: five minutes, if that.

Of course, I want to run Ubuntu Linux on it, so that wasn’t the end. Next, I had to download and burn four live CDs from Ubuntu, to find one that worked with my machine and booted it. Then I partitioned the hard disk, reinstalled MacOS X, and restarted again. Next, start from the Ubuntu CD, and install. I had to use the Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 testing release, because the 07.04 stable release doesn’t seem to work with this machine. (This isn’t surprising, because the machine is newer.) At this point, it wouldn’t boot into Linux, so I had to poke around on the web a bit to find rEFIt, which I installed, and which worked flawlessly first time.

So, at this point I had two working systems, and I copied my Linux files over from the tarball I’d made on my external USB drive. In the process, I discovered that USB 2.0 is about twenty times faster than USB 1.1. I knew it was faster, but I hadn’t realised it was that much so.

Moving data to the Mac side was held up by the fact that my old machine was not working at all well in Target Disk mode, so in the end I copied everything to the USB external drive, and then copied it on to the new machine. My photos took about four hours to copy onto the disk, and about fifteen minutes to come off again. The old computer only has USB 1.1…

A couple of pieces of software I use a lot weren’t in the Ubuntu repositories, so I briefly pointed Synaptic at the Debian repositories to get them. Then I had fun and games trying to get Japanese input working. The software was easy, but I ended up having to set environment variables in /etc/environment. Still, all working now.

Thus, all told and including sleep and teaching, it took a bit less than 36 hours from delivery to fully-functional. That’s still, I think, fairly fast, given what I needed to do.

And if you understood everything in this post, I am afraid that you are indisputably a geek.

Work | 4 Comments »

I’ve let the blog slip a bit this week (book reports get written in advance, in case you hadn’t guessed), but today I have a bit of space, so this entry will be a quick overview of what we’ve been up to.

On Monday, we had another appointment at the clinic, and got to see more ultrasound pictures of Yudetamago. She’s still growing right along the average curve, which is good, and there were no grounds for concern.

This week, Yuriko’s mother was in Yokohama for the International Esperanto Conference, and Wednesday was a day off for excursions. So, instead of going to see tourist sites in Japan, she came to see us. I was working most of the day, so, more specifically, she went shopping for baby things with Yuriko. They bought lots, and had it delivered here, so that it all arrived on Friday. We now have almost all of the basic necessities, plus a push chair, which we can’t use immediately. The only things I think we’re missing are the cot itself (coming), and nappies. There was another moment of it all seeming more real when I looked at the baby clothes Yuriko had bought, and realised that we were going to be putting our daughter in them.

I did have time to have dinner with Yuriko and her mother on Wednesday, and we went to a relatively new soba restaurant near Mizonokuchi station, which was nice. We talked about the baby, and about Esperanto, and I discovered that I can already basically read Esperanto. It’s based on European languages, so a background in English, French, and Latin makes it pretty easy. Since it was designed to be easy, I might be able to learn to speak it fairly quickly, too, but I don’t think it’s a high priority.

Work has been busy. I’m doing preparatory reading for a new writing project, and it’s been taking a lot longer than anticipated. I’ve nearly finished now, though; I suspect that I will actually finish tomorrow. Then, of course, I have to do the writing. I might be able to get it done before Yudetamago is born; I certainly hope so. However, that depends, to a certain extent, on exactly when she decides to join us.

My teaching is in a slightly odd state. On paper, I have plenty of students. However, with the summer holidays, I’ve had rather less than I’m aiming for every week for the last four weeks. So, I might get a brief period at or above the target level, before I have to take time off to help look after Yudetamago, and everything gets disrupted again. While freelance work definitely has its benefits, stability and predictability are not among them.

We have a few things left to do before the baby arrives, and then we’ll be as prepared as we can be. Of course, there’s no way we can fully prepare for the event; all we can do is look forward to it.

Japan, Our Child, Work | Comments Off

I had another big job to do to a very short deadline through the latter part of May and the beginning of June. I developed an outline, got it approved, and wrote 40,000 words, in four weeks.

At the end of last week, I had an email discussion with the editor which went, paraphrased, like this.

Him: I’ve decided I don’t like the outline I approved any more. I want you to massively rewrite this, in two weeks.

Me: No.

Him: Er, OK. I see your point. What can you do in two weeks?

Me: Well…

And then we got into a much more sensible discussion, which has now resolved into a plan for getting the revisions done within the timescale.

Actually, I agree with the revisions he wants. As I was writing, I was thinking “This outline isn’t working as well as I thought it would. How can I make it better within the outline and deadline I have?”. My changes were clearly on the right lines, because we’re now going to make them much more central to the chapter, essentially restructuring the chapter around it. Had the deadline been more sensible, I might have been able to do it without completing a draft first. That would be ideal, of course, because obviously I don’t get paid for the revisions; I only get paid the original amount.

This is all normal in creative work, as far as I know. Outlines not working out is certainly normal. I think it happens less as I get more experienced, and the quality of the my outlines is, I think, getting better in general, but I suspect it will never go away altogether. I’d bet that even Shakespeare had occasions of thinking “No, this scene sucks. Start again”. (I’d also suggest that Titus Andronicus is what happened when his deadline didn’t give him time to do that.) I suppose if you’re a salaried employee of a company, and writing, they don’t stop your salary while you’re doing revisions, but I think that’s standard practice for freelancers. Arguably not ideal, but being on the publisher side as well I know perfectly well that the economics of RPG publishing simply won’t allow for handing out more money.

Oh well. The book will be better for the revisions, I’m sure.

Work | Comments Off

My latest book has now been announced. I contributed to Monster Manual V for Dungeons and Dragons. On the one had, this is just a handful of monsters in a big monster book; it’s not a book by me in any reasonable sense, just one I contributed to. On the other, I have now written for Dungeons and Dragons. This will be immensely useful to me when people ask what I do, because “Oh, like Dungeons and Dragons?” is quite a common response.

I can now just say “Yes, one of the games I write for is Dungeons and Dragons”, rather than having to say “Yes, like that, but not actually D&D”.

Also, D&D is the original RPG, so there’s a sense in which I really wanted to get a D&D credit under my belt. As a bonus, the process was easy, and Wizards pay well and early.

Once I know which of the monsters I wrote made it to the final book (they paid me for all of them, which is promising), I’ll add a books page for D&D.

Books, Work | 2 Comments »

This post on the White Wolf forums has made me feel all warm, fuzzy and competent.

So, obviously, I have to tell everyone about it. Look! Look! I have a fan who isn’t my mother!

OK, more seriously, this is one of the things that makes writing worthwhile. The Guardian had an interview with Keira Knightley, in which she said that, if she believed the good stuff, she’d have to believe the bad stuff as well, so it’s better not to believe anything. While we’re in very different situations (like, she’s actually famous), I can’t agree with that position.

I think one of the things that’s hardest to learn, really learn, when going into a creative industry, or just being creative, is that you can’t please everyone. I mean, everyone knows that. It’s a cliché. On the other hand, it’s remarkably difficult to really understand and accept it on a gut level. You can’t please everyone. That means, in concrete terms, that there will be actual people who do not like your work. In this age of blogs, mailing lists, and internet fora, there is a reasonable chance that they will tell you so. Possibly at length, and almost certainly in terms of objective failure.

All this tells you, though, is that you really can’t please everyone.

On the other hand, I’m not creative purely for myself. Some people are, but I want to give pleasure to, and maybe inspire thought in, at least some other people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with creating purely for yourself, and I do it sometimes; there are files on my hard drive that are not intended for other people to see (and not exclusively because they’re about sex, either). But it’s not what I’m doing in the material that I have published.

Thus, the appearance of people, like the poster in the thread I referenced, who like my work to the point of describing themselves as a “big fan” of it, means that I have succeeded. Obviously, the more people who think that way, the better, all else being equal, but if there’s even one such person, I haven’t failed. I’ve merely chosen a minority form of expression. (If there were only one, I’d have failed commercially, but that’s a different issue.)

So, I think you can believe both the good and the bad. The bad tells you nothing new, just that you can’t please everyone. The good, on the other hand, does tell you something new. It tells you that, in at least some cases, you have succeeded. It tells you that your work was artistically successful.

And that, I think, is well worth knowing.

Roleplaying, Work | 1 Comment »

So, I’m a bit busy at the moment, largely due to having a touch under 30,000 words to write in the next ten days. Other than that, I think I’m fine, but I’m getting a bit behind on email, especially the non-urgent kind.

Lots has happened while I’ve been busy, which is one of the reasons I still have 30,000 words to do; we been back to the clinic and seen our baby again, dancing to the ultrasound. (So the 3D photo is a bit blurry, because Yudetamago just wouldn’t sit still.) One of my US cousins has been to visit. Yuriko’s art fair happened. Yuriko’s brother came to visit, for the art fair. Teaching has still been going on. And did I mention the tens of thousands of words in not very long at all?

So a short blog entry before I go back to work. (Actually, 5,000 words written today, so I won’t be doing any more writing today. I might be burned out tomorrow as it is. And I don’t have time to be burned out.)

Our Child, Work | Comments Off