Is This an Intersection?

Or is it a highway?

I had been thinking that this issue would be one of many different things.

At first, I wanted to revisit the topic of sex positions in Japanese, mostly because I’ve written an essay on the false binary of sex positions and as I try to pitch this essay to magazines, the topic keeps floating through my mind. So much so that when this meme weaved its way into my intertubes, I chortled at the apparent synchronicity.

I’ve been collecting data on lodgings in Tōkyō, too, to share, and am also outline a piece on vending machines in Japan (and I deeply regret not snapping a photo of neither the 小籠包 xiao long bao (soup dumpling) vending machine nor the champagne vending machine I saw in Tōkyō’s Hirō neighborhood last April).

I see Out of Japan as an intersection between Japan and my queerness, and that framing, I believed, had a lot to do with my writing. So I ask you, gentle reader, for a small indulgence as I zoom out and talk less about Japan and queerness, just for today, and more about my writing in particular and my creativity in general.

Most of you know that I write, and some of you know what, but to review…

I have written the manuscript for a memoir of sorts, Crying in a Foreign Language: The Deity That Answered My Plea, that details the different ways I responded to grief and fear over a roughly twenty-year period: from 1978, when my puberty began, to 1998, when I left Japan after ten glorious years there.

It’s a hybrid memoir, which means that amid my narrative there are smaller chapters that go into detail about topics relevant to both the United States and Japan, like the medical response to both homosexuality and then to HIV-AIDS, the late 1970s and early 1980s boom in gay pornography, and the depiction of queer people in films and television. I also write on topics specific only to Japan, like the impact of Buddhism and Confucianism on native Japanese views of sexuality, the history of love hotels and of Tōkyō’s largest gayborhood, Shinjuku Ni-chōme, and of Tōkyō’s oldest Buddhist temple, Sensōji, where Hiro and I had our first date late in November of 1993.

I’m not sure what draft of the manuscript I’m on now, because there were several drafts that focused on specific writing problems. The very first revision took the word count down from more than 105,000 words to 93,000, and although subsequent drafts bit the 70K region, I’m currently pretty happy with a count of 89,000 words. One draft removed all filtering languages, verbs like to see, to hear, to think, and to feel, that tell the reader instead of showing the reader. Another draft removed nearly all instances of the to be verb, which is also filtering. I retyped the entire manuscript for another draft, and then I used Microsoft Word’s text-reading feature to catch more mistakes and repetitive phrasings. And as fond as I am of adverbs, I tried in yet another draft to be as merciless as I could. There was even one draft where I used all the advice in Dreyer’s English to remove very common language mistakes. (By the way, I have two copies of Dreyers’s English and will happily send one to anyone interested.)

The first draft, which was titled I Should be Dead by Now, was complete on December 31, 2020. Five or six revisions later, and I thought I was ready to query after attending a workshop on that topic in late August of 2021. I have therefore been querying for two years now, revising as I went, writing and revising the proposal too. I query in batches of between ten and twenty agents at a time, between four and six months between batches. I might have passed the 100-agent mark. I keep track of who I query and when, but I don’t tally the numbers.

Another important milestone was my participating in the American Writer and Writing Programs (AWP) Writer to Writer program in the fall of 2022. Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased, chose to work with me, and his mentorship has been an incredible blessing.

I also write book reviews, mostly for Hippocampus Magazine. Knock wood that my latest review, of Manuel Betancourt’s The Male Gazed, comes out soon.

I’ve written essays on the craft of writing, and essays on memory and on marriage equality. I’ve been interviewed on podcasts.

I hear you muttering: Brian must be writing all the time.

Some writers do that, but me, no. I do not. I cannot.

I wrote the first draft during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, from September through December, to be precise. I was blessed to be able to work my wonderful full-time job from home and because the two or three hours I normally spent commuting every day were mine once more, I adopted a habit. I woke at five every morning and wrote for at least an hour, sometimes two. On average, I wrote just under one thousand words a day. It was as if the words were just waiting, and they all came out in a torrent.

But I could not and I cannot maintain that habit. Revisions are harder to work on, for one. There are days when the torrent is back but most of the time it is a trickle. There’s an essay, for example, that I am both writing and revising about meeting an old friend in Tōkyō this past April, but the twist is that I had forgotten how I knew him. Those of you who know either my sexually adventurous days before meeting Hiro or who know Hiro himself will not be surprised that he assumed that this friend had been a hookup.

This essay seems like it should write itself, but no. The revisions are dogging me, and so I committed to attending a Zoom meeting of Seattle writers this coming Monday night as a way to make sure I get enough writing and revising done to have something to read and get feedback on.

But if I can’t write? If the torrent is not even a trickle?

I let my creativity flow into different channels.

This morning, for example, I drove to Heronswood, an incredible garden in Kingston, Washington, across the Puget Sound from where I live. Many of my favorite plants are in bloom now, including autumn crocus and toad lilies, and in addition to the macro photography I love taking, Hiro and I nattered with garden staff and friends, ending the day by lugging a big pot of Zingiber mioga (a Japanese ginger relative known as 茗荷 (myōga) whose buds fetch outrageous prices at our local Japanese supermarket.

Our friend Riz, an assistant director at Heronswood, picked a few buds for us and we found the tiniest baby slug on one.

I have a big collection of gemstone beads as well and design bracelets for myself, Hiro, and for friends. I’m not someone who believes that minerals have powers but I also don’t disagree with friends who do, and when someone asks for a bracelet that, for them, will bring greater emotional security, for example, I know what to do.

I design t-shirts, too. This one is a favorite of mine, combing traditional Japanese patterns, the colors of the original Pride flag, and a curious cat (and brings in tiny bits of pin money every month, too).

I’m currently working on two new collections of designs. The first one is based on a traditional Japanese wave pattern but with cats thrown in for fun.

The second one uses a lot of gradients and is based on an arabesque pattern I added layers of transparency too.

For me, and I can’t emphasize this enough, your mileage will vary, I find that other creative outlets aren’t always a way back to my writing, refreshed and inspired as some would assume. Instead, having those other outlets lets me get away from the frustrations I sometimes face when writing. When the trickle’s drops are few and far between. I can shout at my iMac, vainly hoping to coerce inspiration into being. Or I can pause, do something else, and keep my blood pressure from spiking because I cannot figure out what the next sentence should be, dammitalltohell.

So thank you, gentle reader, for letting me share some of my progress and process.

I will share writing updates in future, but expect me to return to my usual topics next week.