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Monday, January 16, 2012

The Wordsmith’s Craft

Some may have seen the New Year’s TV program showing the tsuikidoki craftsman who takes a flat sheet of copper and over three days to a week beats it into a gracefully shaped teapot, complete with spout, using only a hammer, a high-piled rack of toriguchi forming tools, and the accumulated experience of two or three decades (reference here). The completed work is functional, durable, beautiful to look at, and comfortable to hold in the hand. A work of polished craft is honest work indeed.

For those of us who think of ourselves as wordsmiths, the work of the tsuikidoki craftsmen strikes a recognizable chord. Like them, we have our “forming tools” (though they can’t be hung on a rack to show off to visitors), and we have our years of accumulated experience that tell us how to get a grip on our materials and how to aim our “hammers” to get the desired results. And yes, it can take a week to refine a manuscript from its original material to the polished, crafted work that we call our product, but the result will long communicate its message in print or on the Internet, quoted, paraphrased, and reforged by others for years to come.

Thinking about this model of craft and professionalism is encouraging as we return to our routines in the New Year.

In 2012, SWET starts its thirty-second year. SWET exists because many people who work with the English word in Japan wear more than one professional hat—we may translate, write, edit, proofread, develop copy or captions, compile indexes, offer advice about design, guide the layout of tables and charts. We are charged with getting a grip on words and shaping them in the desired form for a desired purpose, and are paid to do it skillfully. And beyond that, we build bridges between cultures.

Tasked to cover so much professional territory, we can benefit not only from collaboration with each other, but also from the experience of those who have done these things before us. SWET is a repository of that experience, both in its archives and in the living body of its membership, a valuable repository to tap and to build upon.

SWET’s website is in the process of being redesigned, but SWET has to redesign itself as well. The membership is shifting. SWET was founded by wordsmiths who worked predominantly with the printed word and who were accustomed to face-to-face interaction and networking. Today is an era of Internet-based communications and social media, e-books, websites, and “cloud” computing. What will SWET be in this era? Who wants and needs it? What will it do? How will it operate? These are questions that members with initiative and a sharing impulse will answer, and we hope that will include you.

A spirit of information sharing and mentoring has driven SWET and its activities since its founding. We hope that spirit will be carried on, giving what we do enduring value and a heightened presence in a world that needs the right words and good communication more than ever.

Lynne E. Riggs

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Happy New Year from SWET

Friday, July 08, 2011

E-book: Tsunami: Japan’s Post-Fukushima Future

Tsunami: Japan's Post-Fukushima Future, is an e-book sponsored by Foreign Policy Magazine and selling for $4.99 per download. All proceeds are to go to the Japan Society for transmission to victims of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the Tohoku area.

The book was edited by Professor Jeff Kingston of the Temple University Japan Campus. The essays cover the disasters from the cultural, media response, experiential, scientific, historical, political, and diplomatic perspectives.

The URL for the Foreign Policy announcement and order form for the e-book may be found at:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ebooks/tsunami_japans_post_fukushima_future

 

Table of Contents of TSUNAMI

Chapter 1: Tales from the Hot Zone

By Mariko Nagai, Kaori Shoji, Steve Corbett, Robert Whiting, Shijuro Ogata, and Kumiko Makihara

Chapter 2: Japan’s Quakes, Past and Future

By David McNeill and Gregory Smits

Chapter 3: Looking Out on the World

By Christian Caryl, Devin Stewart, Jeff Kingston, and Noriko Murai

Chapter 4: The Economic Future

By David Pilling, Bill Emmott, and Brad Glosserman

Chapter 5: The Political Future

By Rod Armstrong and Jun Honna

Chapter 6: The Nuclear Future

By Lawrence Repeta, Andrew Horvat, Paul J. Scalise, Andrew DeWit and Masaru Kaneko, Robert Dujarric, and Gavan McCormack

Thanks to Rod Armstrong for forwarding this information

July 7, 2011

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Japanese Children’s Books in English

Published and aspiring translators of Japanese children’s literature into English have e-networked for several years through the SCBWI Tokyo Translation listserv, an email list open to members and non-members of SCBWI.

Several members of this list have now begun a group blog about publishing Japanese children's lit in English translation. The blog also highlights the children’s literature and culture of Tohoku in the wake of the March 2011 disasters.

The latest post on the blog is an interview with SWET member Cathy Hirano about her translation of the fantasy novel Mirror Sword and Shadow Prince by Noriko Ogiwara (VIZ Media, May 2011)—the sequel to Dragon Sword and Wind Child (VIZ Media, 2010), which Hirano discussed in an interview for SWET Newsletter No. 122.

Several SWETers participate in both the SCBWI Tokyo Translation listserv and the group blog. To learn more, please visit the blog or email the organizers.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

SWET in the Wake of the 3-11 Disaster

Among the majority of wordsmiths active in Japan today who stayed put, despite the recurrent shakings, the upset economy, and the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis, many have been quietly contributing both to helping out and to helping understand what has happened. Here are just a few heard about recently. Please let us know of others to share from this page at weblog@swet.jp.

• More than fans of Wm. (Wilhelmina) Penn’s weekly TV column in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper will appreciate at “This Week in Japan” the skillful weaving of what we see on Japanese television with facts and the social commentary in her blog.
• Writer and translator Leza Lowitz’s article about marching against nuclear power plants appeared on the Huffington Post “Red Room” site. A Berkeley-bred powerhouse sounds in her element.
• SWET and SCBWI translators have been helping get the word out in English about the “3.11 Picture Book Japan in Iwate” activities to support children whose lives were overturned by the tsunami.
• Sapporo-based translator and writer Deborah Davidson introduced in SWET Newsletter No. 125 is doing a “humanizing the quake” series of etegami, prefecture by prefecture. 

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Inspiration for Editors

Editors continuing to ply their trade in a world often unwilling to recognize its importance can use a dose of enthusiasm from a veteran. Be sure to catch this interview with New York editor Robert Gottlieb (80), who is not afraid to say he much prefers editing to writing and that he doesn’t want to be “creative.” If drudgery is getting you down, the words of an editor of famous authors so eager to see a revised manuscript he doesn’t care about dinner will bolster your confidence.

(Thanks to Julie Kuma for bringing this to our attention.)

The SWET Weblog invites readers to alert us to articles, interviews, and websites to bring to the attention of Japan-connected wordsmiths. Send messages and contributions to weblog@swet.jp.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Machine Translation (New York Times)

Thursday, January 28, 2010

About Mori Ōgai on translation

Friday, January 15, 2010

Help Haiti

All royalties from sales of my ebook edition of Beneath Gray Skies for sale ($3) on Smashwords from now until 21 January 18:00 (Japan time) will be sent to a relief organization (TBD) to help Haiti.

For more on Smashwords, please see the article on my blog–-it’s a very interesting approach to the whole ebook concept, including Kindle and B&N distribution. Kindle, iPhone, PDF, Sony, Palm, etc. formats all available, covering almost all the bases.
Please download the ebook and help Haiti.

Friday, October 23, 2009

ebooks and the author

I’m considering all the new options by which we can now read books (i.e. the ebook reader market, which appears to be coming of age - sort of), and it seems to me that there are both technical and business issues here.

The software to convert existing material to ebooks does not seem to work at all well. For example, although Adobe claims that InDesign CS4 produces ebooks, it doesn’t - these are simply strings of text, rather than organized and formatted books).

Though there is obviously some technological skill required to produce an ebook, many producers of ebooks will be the authors, with sub-optimal technical skills, and the situation, with its different standards (Kindle, Stanza, nook, PDF, etc. etc.) seems to be much worse than, say, the start of the Web, where we were all learning what these strange “tags” and weird angle brackets meant.

Although there is an easy-to-use conversion service provided by Feedbooks, it comes with a very large string attached - the demand that the material enter the public domain, which to me seems an unfair restriction to put on an author who has something original and worthwhile to say, and who has taken the time and trouble to say it.

So… Any ideas on how ebook publishing should proceed? I have a little more to say about this and ebooks at my own site.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Channelling Jonathan Swift, or, Never Throw Anything Away

Some years ago (actually, quite a few years ago) I went back to college to “retool.” One of the courses I took was “Child Growth and Development,” a worthy class in which I learned a lot. But by the time midterm exams came, I’d had enough. One of the short essay questions asked, “In your opinion, what will be different in breast-feeding practices fifty years from now?”

My resistance was low. Possessed by some demon or other, I wrote:

“I believe that in fifty years breast feeding will be much more common than it is today due to two factors. The first is that advances in medical technology will make it possible for men to nurse as well as women. The double-breasted suit from C & R Clothiers will be a much different affair from today’s version. Power lunches will include a shot of brewer’s yeast and other substances believed to increase milk production.

“The other reason that breast feeding will be more important in the future is that this country will have had almost seventy-five years of uninterrupted Republican rule, a leadership which has nearly completed the elimination of the single-breadwinner family and the dismantling of what few family support services created since the New Deal still survive. This and the support of the monopolization of food production now in progress will mean that the American child will be breast fed until he or she is old enough and earning enough to be able to buy his or her own meals at the local MacDisneySears.” (11/13/90, revised slightly)

Midway down the page the instructor scrawled in the margin, “You’re serious?” There was a second question to the exam which I answered more sanely and she gave me an A.

But that’s not why I saved the thing. I save all sorts of writing. I came across it recently when going through papers from that time and laughed out loud when I read it. I saved it because I thought it was funny. And I still think it is funny. And despite my mis-prediction of presidential elections, I think it remains true in spirit.

With my writing I’ve had to be patient. I’m just now placing poems written ten and fifteen years ago. Some of them are real world travellers, having crossed the ocean dozens of times. I may no longer feel much emotion when I look at them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t exactly what some editor might need for a particular issue. Or that they won’t affect readers seeing them for the first time.

And even the goofy answer to a long-ago exam can find a path to a few more readers.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Biking the Yamanote Line

Monday, September 14, 2009

Seven Pounds (with Will Smith)

I would definitely recommend seeing this movie (twice): Seven Pounds (with Will Smith). In Japanese it’s 7?????. Nanatsu No Okurimono. The DVD and Blu-ray disc went on sale in Japan on September 2, 2009.

It’s not as fast-paced as the trailer would have you believe, and Will Smith has a pained expression on his face for most of the movie, but if you can get past those things, the film has its rewards. Not the least of which is Rosario Dawson. Or the more cerebral reward of figuring out the English title. I won’t say more.
But my concern about this movie, and the reason I’m posting about it on the SWET blog, is a key subtitling error. (I don’t think revealing the dialogue will spoil the movie for first-time viewers.) I’m wondering if it’s a legitimate error, in the sense that the translator hired by Sony Pictures Entertainment (or production) made a mistake, leaving out a “~” to indicate a span between two numbers.
The reason I have to wonder, is that I received the DVD from a friend in July, so it was likely downloaded from a torrent. In the past I’ve watched “fansubbed” videos, and the MO of the fansubber is usually a prominent display of his “name” at the beginning. (I don’t have an example at hand, though.) This DVD didn’t have that and seemed like a legitimate rip (I know, an oxymoron), perhaps from a rental DVD.
Anyway, here’s the dialogue for the scene with subtitles. “W” stands for “Will” and “D” for “Doctor.”

W: Do you have any more..any optimism about Emily
???????????
than you did the other day?
????????????????

D: When..when you’re looking for a donor with a rare blood type
???????????????????
the odds go way down.
???????

W: To what? They go down to..What’s..give me a percentage.
???????????
????

Give me a number!
???????

D: Three? (Shakes head) Five percent?
???????

I…I’m sorry…
?????????
I wish the numbers were higher.
??????

W: Thank you.
??????

(Here’s the video of the scene.)
——-
That subtitle sure looks like “35” to me.
Three to five, not thirty-five!!!
I wonder if Japanese audiences who only read the subtitles will be misled by this mistake. What do you think?

Friday, September 04, 2009

Marketing fiction on the Internet

Well, Beneath Gray Skies is starting to sell a few copies, and when I say “a few”, I mean a few. It’s more than the number of thumbs on one hand, for sure, and I wasn’t expecting enormous sales in the thousands. But there’s not even any record of even one being sold through Amazon Japan - I would have thought at least one SWET member might have bought a copy (sniff!). Maybe they have, and the Amazon sales returns just take a long time to come in. Hope so, anyway.

Of course, without a commercial publisher, all the marketing has to be done by the author - this is one of the drawbacks of independent publishing. But so many of the little tricks mentioned in the “get your book out there” advice on the Web are useless if you live outside your main target market. “Get on your local radio talk show”, for example. Useless here in Japan. Kathleen Morikawa’s book is excellent, but many of the promotional tips seem a little more directed to non-fiction than fiction.Yes, there are local English-language newspapers and periodicals - and I have yet to send review copies to them, since the price of buying copies and getting them shipped over has been prohibitive up to now, and it would hardly have been worth it, compared with the potential local sales (if the current figure is anything to go by!). However, Lulu has reviewed its shipping prices somewhat, and I can now actually get the US trade edition for significantly less than the Amazon Japan price, so I may well end up ordering a batch for review, etc. and even have a few left over for book events or whatever[1].
Many of the textbooks and gurus on Internet marketing talk about improving your Google rank. Now for non-fiction books, this makes perfect sense - after all, if you are looking at (say) repairing and customizing your 1972 Chevy and you need the book to help you, then you look for the relevant terms, and hopefully, Chester Bludgett’s Make that ‘72 Chevy really SHINE! pops out of the search engine. Even if it’s a self-improvement or health-related or inspirational (Linda Whelkclencher’s How the Spinach Diet and Meditation Cured My Agoraphobia) - and these are some of the most popular genres in self-publishing right now - a high Google ranking will be a great boost to awareness, and maybe even to sales.

But who goes window-shopping for fiction? Especially when it’s a slightly off-the-wall subject like mine (alternate history, a 1920s Confederacy, airships, Nazis, etc. etc.). Unless you knew such a book existed, how would you ever go about looking for it? Well, the answer seems to be linking, but getting your way onto other people’s sites seems to be tricky. I have a few mentions out there, and the site describing the book gets several hits from these each day, but if the links only live on other low-ranked fiction sites, this doesn’t help.

So you can take your book to special interest groups, like (in my case) alternate history groups, airship enthusiast sites and so on. But people don’t like comments on their sites that are too obviously there to sell a product or service. So it takes time to be tactful and ease your way into sites (SWET, for example, has pretty much zero tolerance for such comments, even when they’re on target).

Even when they get to your site, they have to be persuaded to buy your book. I could start selling from the site, I suppose - it’s not something I really intended doing when I started out, and it’s probably better for me to do what I have done - put up links to the book’s pages on the various international booksellers. Is there a better way?

I knew that marketing my book was going to be the hard part of self-publishing - and I knew it wasn’t going to be just a matter of building a pretty Web site and watching the orders flood in. But it does seem to me that fiction is somewhat of a rara avis when it comes to sales on the Internet - the books are just a little too expensive to be an impulse buy, you can’t kick the tires (i.e. read the product specs) and though you can provide excerpts, you can’t really provide a demo like the software makers do.

So - I am genuinely looking for ideas and support to get the book out there into people’s hands. I still have enough faith in the book and the writing to want it to go there (apparently, my 13-year-old nephew thinks it’s a great story, and it’s started him writing his own book!). Comments on how to market (including “you’re doing all this completely wrong”) are welcome.

[1] If you think you’d like to order a copy through me, I think I can deliver within Japan for ¥2000 - Amazon price is about ¥2600. I guess it will take 2-3 weeks to deliver. I can take payment by Paypal and you can contact me through the Web site. Hey, if you order this way, I might even sign the copies I sell to you!

Technorati Tags: writing

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Learning to submit

Well, here it is, the end of August and I haven’t yet kept my promise of at least one posting this month. I have my reasons, sloth among them, but the main one is my wife and I were in the US on a family visit. But we’re back and I want to keep my promise. And the mail waiting for me gave me something to write about.

When we got home there was a little note from Marilyn Johnson. She is one of the editors of Pearl, a literary magazine published in Long Beach, California. They wanted to use one of the poems I had sent them a few months ago in an upcoming issue. She needed to know if it was still available or had it been accepted or published by someone else since I had sent it to them. I sent an email letting her know the poem was theirs and I was happy it had found a home. So I’ve got my first pending publication for 2010. A nice little welcome home gift.

But Pearl and I have history and I want to talk about that in a roundabout way. About twenty-five years ago, I began writing poems again after many years of writing almost nothing. Most of them were pretty terrible and I knew it, but once in a while, one would click. This was enough to keep me at it. But aside from entering a writing contest run by a local community college, I didn’t try to get anything published. Then, about twenty years ago, I moved to Long Beach to study music and Music Therapy at the Cal-State campus there. At the urging of a friend, I began attending a poetry-writing workshop led by Richard Garcia at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

This was a wonderful experience, although it didn’t always feel that way. The group met once a week, mostly on Saturday afternoons. Garcia, now in South Carolina, is a talented, widely published poet and a gifted, hard-working teacher. The group was a cantankerous mob of egomaniacs who squabbled and snarled and carried on, and occasionally produced some remarkably good work.

After I had been working with this group for awhile, writing and revising poems and taking them back to the group for further kicking-around, I began to think I should do something with the poems which seemed to be pretty good. They weren’t doing much sitting a folder at home. At about the same time I read somewhere that the mark of a professional writer was a hundred rejections. I loved the irony of the statement and it gave me a perversely achievable goal. I could do that, I thought to myself, I could be a professional writer. I could get a hundred rejections.

And so I started to send out poems. I set a goal of at least one submission a month. I sent them to the “big” little magazines like Prairie Schooner and The American Poetry Review. I also sent them out to the “little” little magazines and the “tiny” little magazines. Often these brave little efforts were (and are) no more than a few photocopied pages folded double and stapled. But they are where people can start publishing careers. I learned about the various magazines from publications like Poetry Flash, a San Francisco Bay area journal, and Poet’s Market, published by Writer’s Digest Books.

The “big” little magazines were unimpressed with my work and I began to rack up my rejections. (An aside: For the most part, they remain unimpressed.)  But to my surprise and excitement, some of the smaller venues began to accept and publish my poems. In a sense, these little successes were a setback—after all, my goal was a hundred rejections. But I could live with it. And I started to keep track of my acceptances and publications.

Some months into this project I had a problem. The end of the month was coming up and I still hadn’t sent anything out. And I didn’t know where to send. I had poems out to most the places I thought I had a chance. Or at least a chance of a fair read before the “Thank you for showing us this work. Unfortunately…” note went into the return envelope and mail.

For some reason, Pearl came to mind. I knew the magazine, had read it, and had an outsider’s surly attitude about it. It was the local version of The Establishment.

Pearl started in Long Beach in the 1970s, went dark, and was revived in 1987. It had become the local powerhouse, publishing Charles Bukowski, who also contributed drawings, Billy Collins, Dorianne Laux, Frank X. Gaspar, Denise Duhamel, Gerald Locklin (one of the funniest writers alive), and any number of “real” writers and poets. It was Big League. I wasn’t. And they seemed to publish a lot of their buddies. I wasn’t one of those, either. So it appeared that this was a perfect place to to go for my next rejection. But I didn’t want to. I was afraid.

Now, I hadn’t been afraid to be rejected by the majors far away. I mean, so what if they don’t like me in Philadelphia? I don’t know anybody in Philadelphia. But this was different. This was local. I probably wasn’t going to meet anyone from the Swanee Review in the supermarket. But I had a fear of being known as a loser in my own neighborhood. I didn’t want to put myself at risk.

But my twisted ambition, the desire for one hundred rejections, got the better of me. I made up a packet of poems. Knowing Pearl wasn’t going to like anything I sent, and since it was a free-verse magazine, I included a formal poem. I knew they wouldn’t like this quiet little love meditation since their content tended towards social commentary and they favored an in-your-face style. Rejection was guaranteed.

So I was stunned a few weeks later when I got a little note saying how much the editors liked “From A Doorway at Angel’s Gate,” my little formal love poem, and could they use it in an upcoming issue of Pearl, please? Recovering quickly, I wrote back, Yes they could and that I’d be very happy to see my poem in Pearl.

And I was. And I continue to be. Over the years they’ve published seven of my poems. I send them a packet of poems every two years or so and they usually accept one. Although I have since met the editors, I’m not one of their buddies or part of the “in-crowd.” I am simply someone who writes poems they tend to like.

One of the odd things about submitting, even to a magazine which has used my work before, is I never know what editors are going to like. I hate to admit this, but I’ve even been so presumptuous in cover letters to suggest which poems might be especially good in their magazine. Never has an editor agreed with me. I’ve grown up and quit doing this. These days I simply offer my goods. The editors choose or choose to pass. 

I reached my goal of a hundred rejections long ago. Now the goal is a hundred publications and I’m almost there. But Monday is the end of the month and I haven’t made a submission yet. It’s time to get busy and get a packet together.

 

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