Japan: 浅草橋祭り

En français
Last June, just after visiting the 目黒寄生虫館 (Meguro Parasitology museum). I went to the 浅草橋祭り (festival in Asakasubashi). It was the same kind of festival than in Asakusa the week the week-end earlier except that there was only one portable shrine and not so many people around to watch. It was a lot easier to take picture. As one of my friends was carrying the shrine it was also easy to go around. The temple is Asakusabashi is also a lot smaller, it was like a mini festival and it was a lot of fun.
Travel table of content
 

Happy New Year 2013

En français

  New Year has come and it's time for every one to start working on the (un)famous New Year Resolutions.

If you do a little bit of reading through the internet, you will notice two current of thoughts. The first being a bunch of people traditionally listing their new resolutions for the current year and the second people telling that it's absolutely useless and that good resolution won't do anything for you if you don't have a serious plan, that they are too vague, that you can decide to do it at any time during the year so why the hell wait until January 1st like everyone else. And that you'll give up before the end of January anyway. 

  Any of you already gave up ? I know I didn't. I just have been a little bit delayed, traveling to France, moving to Sendai completely which is still ongoing as I'm living in a castle of boxing right now. (Updates on both coming soon). 

But I won't give you a list of my New Year Resolution or more accurately New Projects and Challenges, I'll let you discover them slowly through the blog.

So which current am I at ? Well, a little bit of both. I'm starting new challenges all through the year whether with study, writing, reading (more about this soon) so making a list of resolutions is not really going to do much. I think resolution time is more like a way of looking at what you have accomplished this year and to figure out way to improve during the year to come. Then I also agree that goals are more achievable if they are cut into little pieces. I'll give you an example from my personal New Year Resolution list :

I want to learn Japanese : 

 1) Watch drama

 2) Watch anime

 3) Read Manga (with reading contest help)

 4) Read Novels

 5) Do SRS repetitions

 .....

Telling yourself every day that you have to learn a language is not going to help you because you already know that anyway, you already decided it. It sounds overwhelming to look at everything you don't understand in your target language and to realize that you only have 30 minutes to work on it today so what the hell what is 30 minutes anyway, totally useless, right ? 

Well if I tell you that it's time to watch "Bleach" in Japanese even though you don't understand the intro song completely it's not going to hurt you to watch one episode which is less than 30 minutes then to realize 6 episodes later that it might be time to cook diner, I don't know, it kinda work for me at the moment. 

Anyway no matter what your own resolutions are, don't give up on them, don't give up on your dreams even if you can manage them only 5 minutes at a time or five minutes a day, things will ultimately get done.

The start of NaNoFiMo : Demon world part 7

So I won NaNoWriMo twelve days ago but as you would have noticed if you read the current ongoing draft of "Demon World", the novel is far from being finished yet. Therefor as I mostly do every December now, I started NaNoFiMo, the Novel Finishing Month.
I lost the first challenge which was for me to write 2500 words on December 1st. It was a Friday, I'm a bit on a rush in general on Friday between finishing the work of the week and going to Chofu to attend to my normal life.
But I managed to win the second challenge which was to get 25% of your words planned for the month before the 7th. My planned word count is 40000. So I should have written 10000 words for the challenge but entered 15000, as 10000 sounded like not much and  I succeeded.
New characters are appearing, the human world is going crazy in the house. Well you'll see.
I'll post the new part for you to read here as soon as yudu stops giving me a hard time, that is if I don't decide to upload my stuff somewhere more efficient.
All Novels Drafts 

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I won NaNoWriMo : Demon World part 6 & more tips

It is already the end of November and once again, I won NaNoWriMo !

My statistic are not as smooth as they were for the first NaNoWriMo, I guess this is due to the fact that I changed life style since and I have other commitment to deal with while still performing the best I can for the writing contest.

In 2009 the challenge was to be able to win before going on holiday to Peru. The challenge for this year was to be able to write only for four days a week while keeping my Friday's evening and week-end for social activities.
All Novels Drafts 

Word count progression for my first NaNoWriMo in 2009.

Word count progression forNaNoWriMo 2012.

Why did I win NaNoWriMo ? 

I already given some tips on how to win NaNoWriMo. But the real question is not really "How did I win NaNoWriMo?" But "Why did I win NaNoWriMo. Some people say arbitrary things such as : "You are talented", "You are so discipline but I can't do it because I'm lazy", "You have a lot of time but I have a job or I'm a student so I don't have all your free time", "I can't write as fast as you do", "I can't type without thinking about all the mistakes I made".

Well let me tell you one thing, I think that's bullshit.

Fact is, I'm not talented. I consider that telling people they are talented is an insult to their intelligence (and yours). 

I'm not discipline or hard working while other people are lazy. I like to procrastinate and to play, go out and give in to my current addiction (Bleach) like everyone else. It is a lot easier in general to blame a personal trait that you can't fix such as being lazy just because that way you don't have to make any effort to change your method to something that would actually take you where you want to be.

I don't have a lot of free time. Being able to do a lot of things doesn't actually require a lot of free time, it requires energy. Most likely you have more than enough time to success in NaNoWriMo twice in a month, meaning if the word count was double it would still be achievable. I have a full time job at the university where I pursue research about atomic and molecular interaction with laser, I manage to follow 2 to 5 classes on coursera while maintaining social activity, exercising and healthy meal cooking.

If you can't type as fast as I do, well that's easily fixable by few tips :

Think about what you are going to type in your next section during your dead moments

This is very easy to implement and it will save you a lot of time. You are waiting for the elevator (or in the elevator), at the queue at the supermarket, waiting for the bus, etc... this gives you few minutes to thing about where your characters are at, what you want them to do next, who should arrive in the room. You don't even need to take notes (except of you have a considerable amount of dead time on your hand like you're trying to get into Honey Hunt in Disney land alone and without fast pass) Most likely all the ideas of the day will add up nicely when you finally arrive in front or your computer to write.

Never stop at the end of a paragraph/chapter/section

Everybody wants to finish, if you finish this part now you'll feel so happy and accomplish, right. Well wrong. This feeling of accomplishment isn't helpful this way. You can feel accomplish for getting up to the word count you want, but definitely not for finishing a part of the story. Finishing a part of the story is poisonous for your inertia (the ability to keep going on and on). Why ? Because they you need to start again on something new that you possibly don't know about. If you don't finish this particular chapter, then in the next section you'll start by finishing it with the idea you already know about and then you'll be able to directly jump to the next chapter because the more you write the easier it becomes to write. Never finish something at the end of a writing section except for the final finish.

If you can't stop thinking about all the mistakes you made so that you absolutely have to come back and correct yourself, prepare a special time to do that. It is way easier to correct yourself and to check consistency between chapters when you have all the chapter than when you have only one. It is way easier to go back to everything and add clues about what is going to happen when you already wrote what is going to happen. But if despite knowing that you still have to go edit, the answer is ADD only perform the edition part which add something to your word count, if you want to delete something write down the page and line number down, enlighten it with a different color, never cut it on while fighting with your word count because it might like nice in your novel but it is counter productive both for NaNoWriMo and for you ever finishing to write that novel. 

Anyway, after so much digression why the hell did I manage to win NaNoWriMo for the fourth consecutive year ? Well because I decided when I signed up that there was no way I was going to lose it. It is in fact that simple. I would have written until my finger bleed if I had to. Most things you achieve in life is just a decision you make. 

Here is the last part of "Demon World" which allowed me to win NaNoWriMo but as usual 50000 words is not enough for me to finish my novel so I'll be up for NaNoFiMo for the beginning of December. I hope you'll enjoy reading.

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NaNoWriMo : Demon World part 5 & Tips 5

Yesterday I managed to write more than 3700 words.Which means that I also covered the number of words needed for today.
All Novels Drafts 

Normally in my previous novels as I already mentioned earlier I would treat the story somewhat linearly, going from the start to the end with one single character. Actually right now, I find it rather refreshing to be able to jump to another place when I'm getting tired of writing what's happening somewhere. Of course I'm still writing the story from the start to the end but his style seems to be allowing me more flexibility.
As today we are reaching the mid point of this novel writing month, and I know that a lot of you are getting tired of writing and failing with their word counts and putting extreme efforts to catch up, lets me introduce a tool that allow you to write even when you have no idea for a certain length of time.
This tool is called "write or die". I'm linking to the free online version, I also need to save money !
"write or die" allows you to type type type, without break, it's good when you don't know what to write and need words because it forces you to type something and for NaNo, anything is ok, we'll see about editing in March!
So the tip of the day is : Abuse WRITE OR DIE !

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NaNoWriMo : Demon World part 4 & Tips 4

First of all, sorry for the delay, with my crazy internet connection (or more accurately lack of connection) getting to publish something on yudu and having time to post it on a blog is not as easy as it should be. Anyway better later then never (as long as we don't miss the NaNo dead line) here is the next part of "Demon World".
I'm just on track for a normal NaNo but I didn't give up the idea of having few days advance really soon (like tonight).
If you are familiar with my writing ( "Demon Soul", "Demon and Fairy", "Attic Mirror", "Harajuku kiss") you will notice that this one is a bit different as a lot of things are happening simultaneously in three different places. The main reason why I am a bit late with my writing (other than the move) is that I developed some new characters.
All Novels Drafts 

Generally I use the same good old characters (Brownie, Sahel, Seti... ) actually I have a bunch of them, and most things happening at the same place, there is no problem with that. As this time part of the story happens on the bad guys side, I needed to create a lot of different new characters and that took a bit of time. For character creation I generally use few tricks to make sure they are three dimensional.
1) I give them a background (the back ground tells who they are what had happened to them in the past, this can be used as flashback, so it's very useful)
2) I give them emotions (as an example you can see that Davon is mostly driven by fear, fear of quitting, fear of being killed it things change, so he is kinda stuck and don't want to interact much with people) the emotion predict the characters' reaction.
3) I create a like between the characters (See the relationship between Sahel and Brownie)
 Basically you  can either write little paragraphs about each character's background or list characteristics with explanation sentence, just remember that the more details you know about your characters, the easier they will be to handle in the story.
So the tip of  the day is : Flashbacks add three dimensions to your characters and words to your word count.

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NaNoWriMo : Tips 3

Yesterday I was moving to Sendai which is a city 6 hours by bus away North of Tokyo.
Therefore  when I finally had some free time for myself, all I wanted to do was sleeping and I didn't have time to write at all. My word count only raised but 9 words as I edited a part from the beginning.
I use a tool called "Karen's Countdown Timer II" which allows me to decide in advance at what time programs will start on my computer. Therefore last night I managed to write nine words because of it.
It's a very useful tool because you don't have to think about your daily task as it tells you when to do them.

The tip of the day will then be : 10 words are better than 1
By that I mean, don't look for the right word, in a draft, there is not such a thing as the right word. You'll have plenty of time to get the right word while editing and you'll need a lot of editing iteration to get them all right. So write as much as possible. Don't go look for the perfect adjective, describe the thing with bad one instead. What you want is enough words to be a NaNoWriMo winner. So you're character never "puts his jacket on", he "puts on the only jacket he had been wearing for year, it was torn apart at the bottom, the collar was shred on the back side and one of the sleeve color had past away with time, but at least he knew that tonight again he would be warm."
See what I mean, instead of 4 words, I got 49. Isn't it brilliant? Be creative and write, write, write !!!




Update on "Demon World" will probably be added tomorrow, I don't have internet in my new house yet.