Just Write, Brian

The Title Will Come to Me Later

March blurred past, and I’m gasping as April arrives—rabbit, rabbit!

This is a photo I took in April 2023 at a shrine in Tōkyō. It shows a bucket of mums, daisies, osteospermums, and pansies.

On the first of each month, I open up my Hobonichi journal and plot out my goals for that month. I’ve loaded one of my fountain pens with a sparkly purple ink called Persephone (which is rather appropriate as this is her time of year).

What’s up for April? I will soon complete my revised book proposal for my memoir, thanks to

Greg Mania

and his proposal generator course (for which I gratefully received a partial scholarship). I will also restart my querying process, contacting literary agents with my new proposal (and shiny new query letter to match). I will start listening to my completed re-draft of my memoir to find the not-so-obvious errors and echoes (where I reuse words within too short of a timeframe), and I will complete a new platform essay and submit it to literary magazines.

And yes, as my social media followers already know, I finished the memoir’s re-draft. For four months, I underwent the following process.

1. Review the prior manuscript and draft a storyboard in Scrivener to capture the scenes.

2. Narrow the timeframe so the memoir begins at my arrival in Japan.

3. After getting feedback from a mentor and after reading You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by

   Maggie Smith
   , reconsider the overall structure and shift from longer chapters to shorter ones, to better reflect the impact of my emotional closets during my years in Japan. Start referring to those shorter chapters as Polaroids.

4. Use the storyboard to identify where flashbacks are relevant to the life-in-Japan narrative.

5. Use the storyboard to identify where excerpts from relevant source material (which includes everything from CDC reports and White House press briefings to scholarly journal articles and literature) can provide layers of context.

6. Use the storyboard to see which narrative or flashback elements are missing and to add those in.

7. Write the missing chapters and research the suitable source material for context.

8. Make sure each chapter aligns with one of the memoir's themes, and write a single-sentence synopsis for each chapter.

9. Check (and date) the chapter titles to make them sharper.

(I started the list thinking that the work I had done had been simple, but no, it apparently was not.)

This is the breakdown of the new manuscript, complete at 245 Polaroid chapters and 86,191 words.

Now that the new manuscript is complete, I was able to look at data (I’m such a nerd) and compare the prior version to this new one.

I find it fascinating that, without intending to do so, the words I cut from the prior manuscript were roughly equal in volume to those I added to the new version. And in the new manuscript, 69 of the 245 chapters comprise newly written material.

---

I Boarded the Grammarly Bus

On the recommendation of an old friend, I purchased a subscription to Grammarly.

Do I love it? No. My writing style waxes ornate and oblique at times—and I like it like that—and Grammarly is fond of suggestions that dumb things down.

However, it catches little errors, such as subject-verb agreement, that my eye can too quickly gloss over.

And it shares weekly reports with me, like this:

Clearly, the words analyzed count does not reflect my memoir alone, but when moving content from Scrivener to Word and back, Grammarly keeps checking things (and I wish I could say no more! I’ve already checked this paragraph!). It also checks my written content in email and online, so yeah, it adds up.

---

Other News Updates

• Thailand has approved legislation for marriage equality. Japan? Still crickets.

• As it has been every year since 2009, March 31st was International Trans Day of Visibility. Visibility is all well and good, but equal rights protections under the law would be even better.

• 2024 marks the Fiftieth Anniversary of Seattle Pride. Come to the parade on June 30, and I’ll see you there!

• Happy Birthday to the writer who helped me fall in love with science fiction, Samuel R. Delany. His 2017 essay in The Boston Review made me think differently about growing older as a queer person.

• Another of my goals for April is to update the subscription plans for this newsletter.

• The next (subscribers-only) issue will focus on things to see and do in Kyōto.