Still Writing
when the week ends on odd notes
Agents by the Numbers
I sent out eleven new queries this past week, including one to an agent who happened to be another graduate of my alma mater, Williams College.
Going in, I knew that my query to that Gulielmensian agent was risky. The genres they represented did not include memoir, but I soft-heartedly hoped they might have some kindly alum advice for me.
Their rejection—sent late on a Friday night!—comprised of a single sentence, twelve words long. It wasn’t a mean rejection, but the advice I had prayed might come was, understandably, absent.
Saturday morning, I opened their agency website and found an agent who not only represents memoir but also represents one of my favorite writers. That query is included in the eleven.
A Tale of Two Judges
I also received my scores from the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association writing contest.
The fact that there are two scores is something of a mystery.
I don’t remember submitting two separate entries (although I might have amended my original entry).
One of the scores is dismal. Lots of needs more work, followed by a written summary that makes it clear that the judge did not like my structure. (In the contest entry, I described the short chapters as Polaroids, although I now refer to them as flash chapters.)
The other score is fantastic. Based on the scale in use, the second judge’s overall numeric ranking equates to excellent but needs a little more polish. Nine out of ten.
When I submit next year, which judge will I get? Or will there be two with a similar divergence of opinions? No matter what, my aim is to push that nine even higher.
Research, Research, Research
I started attending a four-week seminar on the researched memoir led by the inimitable
. I’m keeping my fanboy impulses under control, and after the first session’s prompts, I immediately started reviewing additional research areas for my memoir’s manuscript.Two lawsuits that began and ended during my years in Japan came to mind.
Japan’s First Gay Discrimination Lawsuit
Although I never joined OCCUR (I remember thinking it would be an intrusion for me to arrive within a community designed to support Japanese gay men and lesbians), I did hear about the incident that led them to sue the Tōkyō Municipal Government.
Organizations often hold overnight events at community facilities to strategize, build morale, and strengthen membership. When I sang in a small early music ensemble in Saitama Prefecture in the early 1990s, I participated in a few of those events, called 合宿 (gasshuku, joint lodgings).
OCCUR organized a gasshuku for February of 1990 at a government-owned facility in a smaller city (the Tōkyō Municipal District incorporates not just the 23 wards that form the district’s center; to the west are several smaller cities and there is an archipelago of islands extending into the Pacific that are also part of the district) called Fuchū.
As is common practice for gasshuku, all organizations staying at the facility come together on their first day to introduce themselves. When OCCUR noted that they were a gay group, members of other organizations heaped verbal abuse on them. OCCUR complained to the facility, which, in turn, not only did nothing to stop the abuse but also banned OCCUR from ever using the facility again.
OCCUR sued and won both the first case in 1994 and its appeal in 1997.
Japan’s First AIDS Lawsuit
In my memoir, I mention that HIV/AIDS first arrived in Japan not as a gay disease but within the hemophiliac community. The Japanese government attempted to legislate that blood products should be heat-treated in the early days of the pandemic, but Japan’s drug companies fought back. Heat treatment was not officially sanctioned until 1985, but it was too late.
One thousand eight hundred hemophiliacs in Japan were infected with HIV. Four hundred of those people died before the lawsuits ended in a negotiated settlement in 1996. The first lawsuit was filed in an Ōsaka court in 1989, at which point 92% of the people infected with HIV in Japan were hemophiliacs—980 people out of 1,065.
And although fewer than 8% of the HIV+ population in Japan comprised gay men, that was not what the media wanted you to believe. Ever since the first cases were reported in 1983, the Japanese media focused on men who had sex with men. In 1983, that was one person, but rather than expose the missteps of the national government when it came to preventable cases among hemophiliacs, the media initiated a gay panic for the second time in Japan’s modern history.
(The first panic was timed with the promulgation of Japan’s only anti-sodomy law—after legal scholars studied British law. That law was extant only for nine years, from 1872 to 1880, at which point a legal framework based on the Napoleonic Code was adopted; homosexuality has been legal in Japan ever since.)
My Fascination with Maps
I’ve written before about my strong sense of direction (and how Hiro has none).
As I continue to share memories on social media of my first months in Japan, I recall how much I depended on all kinds of maps, from masterpieces of government cartography to hand-drawn abstractions made useful with the inclusion of way-finding hieroglyphics (like the symbol 〒 for post-offices or single kanji character abbreviations like 消 for 消防署 (for fire departments) or even numbers like 7/11 for one of my favorite convenience stores.
Hiro, however, grew up in Tōkyō. Although it remains true that I usually can identify cardinal directions wherever I am and that Hiro sometimes struggles, even after more than 25 years in the Pacific Northwest, he never needed way-finding skills to get to school when he was a kid. If there were a map he relied on, it would have been the map of Tōkyō’s subway system.
Have a great week, everyone. Fingers cross that I will have good news to share next weekend.
The maps really caught my eye in this one...love the geographically accurate Tokyo.
Hi Brian, right there with you in the class. Don't you love it when Melissa says, "I've never done this before," and she gives us a glimpse of her outlines etc?
I like the research idea but I don't like how some people use it bc it pulls me out of the story. I'm waiting for the results of the Graywolf nonfiction contest which is taking forever. I hope I at least get some feedback.
Regarding maps, love them also. When I was raising my family, I kept a world map on the kitchen table and covered it with a clear plastic tablecloth. From my odd notes to yours, Trish