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Ganbatte! is Japanese, and it means an exhortation to "Press on!"

There's nobody else who will take care of any of the stuff in my life for me. If it's more than I can manage, I suppose I'll have to struggle and stumble along as best I can.

--

On that note, things I've done today:

-Started working on the coursework I had unfinished at the end of Spring term; my goal is to fulfill both my Incompletes in the next couple of weeks. Chinese may take longer...

-Finished processing my application at a school that offers student loans. Maybe I can make up the difference in income lost during the school year and so sustain myself even during the off season. It's also closer to work (though not home).

I'm still depressed, and it's difficult to even move right now. The attentions of Trice and Kimiko, plenty of tea, and sheer stubbornness are about the only things impelling me to action. If not for a very peaceful night's sleep (and some lovely dreams; one involved Trice and myself taking a holiday together in British Columbia), I don't want to think about how useless I'd be right now.

--

I found a shiny new language. I wants to learns it.

I've already started. I can now speak several sentences, including "Hello, my family!" upon returning home, "This is my library", and "My girlfriend has nice breasts." I can also sternly command the cat to leave the room in an aggravated tone.

And what more could you need, in any language?

(Also, I had no idea how many place names here in the Puget Sound were taken from it!)

Lyrics

(8:09:59 PM) Pazi Ashfeather: Hear the loud rumbles? See the bright flashes?
(8:10:04 PM) Pazi Ashfeather: This means only one thing:
(8:10:08 PM) Pazi Ashfeather: Giant robot fight.
(8:10:10 PM) Derrick: ...
(8:10:34 PM) Pazi Ashfeather: I saw particle beams flying into the sky on my way home. I think those were misses.
(8:10:48 PM) Pazi Ashfeather: Or tactical orbital bombardment.
(8:12:04 PM) Derrick: Hear the loud rumbles? See the bright flashes? The city, it crumbles, and burns into ashes.
(8:13:08 PM) Pazi Ashfeather: The robot's melee
Has been running all day
As incoming soldiers
Dive into the frey
(8:15:08 PM) Pazi Ashfeather: On particle beams! These highly charged streams
Of lambent destruction elicit loud screams
As the bystanders gaze
Through the ashen malaise
And suddenly, swiftly are rendered ablaze.

I learned something about writing last Friday. For the last several weeks (maybe a month) I've been trying to divise a new opening for Paper Girl. To say that this has been no easy task is an understatement. I've gone through several different versions and false positives. I researched the experience of other writers -- all far more experienced than myself -- in crafting the perfect first line:

• The first line is your best advertisement next to the book's cover.
• The first line sets the mood and tone of the book.
• The first line should crystallize the plot but only so much as to make the reader interested.

How the hell, I thought, do I stuff all of that into one sentence? Most of the time the first line just comes to me, and I can build a story, chapter, or blog entry around it. The problem with Paper Girl is that it's far, far bigger and a more ambitious story than any I have attempted thus far. Crystallizing that down to one sentence seemed ludicrous. I tried meditation, interviewing the characters, even brute force, but the only thing I was successful at generating was frustration.

On someone's suggestion, I decided to take some time off from the project. I put it out of my mind, or as much out of my mind as is possible for someone with my personality. It helped somewhat that I was out-state on assignment last week. Being away from home tends to make me value my imagination more and I have less distractions available. After all, only so much fits in a carry-on. I put Paper Girl out of my mind primarily for the reason that I felt overworked and needed a break. After a week, my creativity gave suggestions of a return, but nothing solid.

It was on the first leg of my flight home Friday that inspiration struck. I was in a cramped DC-80 somewhere over Kentucky, making my way to O'Hare International. I was convinced that I wasn't going to make my connection since we were delayed taking off, and then there was a ground hold at Chicago. I sat in my seat and thumbed through my music collection on my BlackBerry.

A few songs in, the thought occurred to me that I hadn't been listening to my playlist of Paper Girl related music. I tend to assemble playlists for my writing projects to serve as both focusing and inspirational tools. Lately, however, this habit has fallen out of use in favor of less purposeful listening. On a whim, I decided to change that. The first song I naturally turned to was "Chop Suey" by System of a Down.

"Chop Suey" has been a strong member of the playlist for years. Since college, I've imagined it as the closing song to the fictitious Paper Girl anime. Always the same selection of images flickers in my mind to that song, a building in flames, a girl falling along a mirrored wall, and an assortment of others. Like many of the songs on my writing playlists, "Chop Suey" has a key lyric that is relevent to the story as a whole or a particular character. In this case, the majority of the song has both been parallel, and shaped the nature of the story.

Somewhere near the end of the song I found myself sitting bolt-upright. I'm sure that if anyone had seen my expression at that moment people might have thought I had just witnessed the fuselage being torn to pieces before my eyes. I didn't even voice if it were the right line or not, I simply knew at the gut level that what had come to me was it.

Lacking a pen and paper, I switched applications on my phone and began typing in what I had just written. It didn't take me long to realize that this wasn't the first line of the story. If I hadn't been so caught up in the moment I might have been disappointed at this point, instead I realized that this was the last line of the opening paragraph.

Drawing from some recently generated ideas, an image suggested from a friend, and two failed introductory paragraphs, I began formulating a new opener. It flowed surprisingly easily at 30,000 feet. A flight attendant passed by in the middle of this and asked, "You're not sending that, right?" She thought I was tapping out a text message or an email; I told her I wasn't and she was gone before I could explain further. Some minutes later, I stared at the completed introduction:

NOVELLA:
It's a lot like watching a television set. Everything you experience
has an off-white sense of distance, and a high frequency buzz barely
low enough to hear. Even touch feels rubbery like the buttons of a
remote control. Except, there's no remote, no channels, no off switch.
You're always watching yourself, a puppet made of flesh.

I hated it. I wanted to break my gaze, unplug the world and be free and floating. But then I met an angel who said she wanted to die.

What I had learned as a writer in that moment was that the first line, the very first line doesn't matter. The first line of the above section is actually quite banal, but it does hold your interest long enough for you to read the first paragraph. What is like watching a television set? you may ask. The line also does set the mood of the story as well as tell you something critical about how the main character perceives the world.

Instead of crystallizing the entire story in the first sentence, I decided to make a grabber. The first sentence keeps the reader interested long enough to finish the paragraph -- or the first few pages if they're particularly attentive. The paragraph alone, however, isn't enough for most readers to finish the book. You need more for that. Instead, the first paragraph serves to build up interest and set mood so as to prepare the reader for the really, really grabbing line in the second paragraph.

This line you can call a "nail", as in, "If I haven't nailed your interest by now, you might as well put the book back on the shelf." It's this line that serves to capture the readers interest, as well as act as a point of reference for the writer.

The majority of the analysis occurred over the next 40 minutes of my flight. I was so excited by this revelation that I wanted to randomly show it to anyone that would listen, asking "Would you read a book that starts with this?" I managed to restrain myself enough to compose an email, and set it for delayed send once I was back on the ground.

Since then I've shown the intro to several different people who's sense of writing I trust. The response has been overall positive and I see little reason to change that. Now the problem is crafting the remainder of the first chapter. I have some dialog already, but it's no where near long enough to make a chapter. Now that the imfamous first line is behind me, hopefully it'll be easier to pen the remaining.

When I'm in school, weekends are a very transitory phenomenon. I need to get homework done and I probably haven't finished it all during the week, so they're not strictly "time off" in my head.

Now, even a one-day weekend feels like serious time to recuperate. Friday night and Saturday morning were spent in the company of Trice, thanks to the miracles of Skype. After a lot of relaxing, cleaning and that much-needed connectivity, Derrick invited me out to see a movie. "The Singing Revolution" was playing at a small independent cinema in Tacoma, and Derrick is fascinated with the history of Estonia. When we arrived, it turned out that "Mongol" was playing--a historical biopic of Ghengis Khan that looked promising--and we decided to see both films.

 "Singing Revolution" is a documentary, and while it lays it on thick in places (I don't relate well to nationalism), the history was fascinating to me nonetheless. The narrative is in English, but many of the people interviewed are speaking Estonian, a language I'd never really heard spoken before. It's pretty, and the singing (this film is largely about the cultural resistance of Estonians to the Russian occupation during the Soviet era) is quite lovely. I'm sort of an inveterate nerd--where the film was trying to bill the spontaneous outbreaks of certain songs at the national song festival (and later, actual rallies) as demonstrations of national solidarity, I was more interested in the memetic behaviors evinced in both the narrative and the footage. Sigh. In any case, it was worth watching--I've been rather unfamiliar with the history of the old Soviet bloc, and this was an interesting presentation.

 "Mongol" was better, in my opinion--the film takes a few liberties but gets much right. Most people here know little about Ghengis Khan or the history of Mongolia, but it's a special focus of mine. We actually have very few details about certain of these events,and of course some of it is fabricated simply for aesthetics. That's fine, in my opinion--a biopic shouldn't substitute for history in its own right, and the film is very good for what it is: a portrait of one of the more interesting people in history. Most of the film is actually in Mongolian, which is a nice touch--another language I've never heard spoken, but one I have some familiarity with thanks to written texts. What isn't Mongolian is Chinese; it's an incongruous detail, since the Tangut people didn't speak Mandarin, but their language is lost to us (thanks to, well, Ghengis Khan...). I was surprised to find I could follow the Mandarin by ear, just slightly behind the speed at which it was being spoken. 

 I wasn't overwhelmed by the plot, but the individual scenes, and the character acting especially, are where this film shines. Temujin (Ghengis Khan, before he was known as Ghengis Khan) is actually one of the weaker performances, being moderately upstaged by his mother Oelun and, later, his wife Borte--both very strong female personages in film as well as in life, though Oelun's performance is by far the more memorable to me. However, I found the characterization of Jamukha (Temujin's long-standing enemy-friend) to really steal the show. The little details make this character--the stretching, the throat-singing are nice little touches (and they allow you to instantly recognize this character when we transition from the younger incarnation seen near the beginning, to his adult self after the continuity "fast-forwards" by a couple of decades).

 The combat scenes are nicely-done. They're not as "Hollywood" as I might have feared, and are the more gripping for it. The sense of danger is palpable, and people survive the battles not by being over-the-top badasses but by being smart, quick and lucky...and just badass enough. ^^ The final battle (between Temujin and Jamukha's armies, which ends the film and cements Temujin's rise to power as Khan over the Mongol people) was great, though somewhat disappointing to me. The infamous Mongol archers barely get a nod in this production, despite the fact that mounted archery was what allowed the Mongol horde to ride roughshod over the powers of Europe, Asia and the Middle East). That's a pedantic gripe, though--the battle is nonetheless carried off well, and I love the way this film emphasizes the importance of strategy--not just mentioning it before a general melee, but taking pains to demonstrate it as well.

It's not the greatest of historical dramas, action films, or biographies--but it is good for what it is, and a very worthwhile way to spend two hours and eight dollars. I'd recommend it to anyone who's even vaguely interested in such things.