National Holiday

With two days left of the Winter Term school has broken up for a National Holiday. This provides time to gather my strength for the remaining class (on friday) of the semester. It will also be my last class at that Junior High School. Kishiwada city rotates its Assistant Language Tutors every six months between its dozen or so JHS.

* Happy news: Sometimes the best ideas come a long time later than they really should. Listening to the Beeb via the internet should have been a basic discovery way back in 2004 when i first got here. Yet no, however now when i get home from work i can lay on the couch and listen to Radio 4's Today Programme.

* The first of 2 packs from Amazon have arrived; A Science of Sleep (so now i can get English subtitles on the French rather than listening to French and trying to read Japanese subtitles), The Fountain (not out here yet), Delicatessen (classic), a guide to Self-publishing and a book on the SAS (kinda research on a new book - see below). Hopefully the second pack with the Ulysses 31 cartoon will come soon (toons are rare for me).

* Deadlines are approaching, and a good reason not to write a blog, for the Giant Creatures anthology and the Robots Beyond anthology; both by Permuted Press. Both my entries are going well. Xenophobots is conceived as a Transformers/Terminator combo story but aims to tackle two forces on the future of Japanese society; the way of old Japan rooted in feudalism and the equally unbending liberalism of Internationalisation. Tennessee Tumblebug is just about big bugs and giant balls of... well, you can guess.

* On writerscafe, myspace and wordpress i've posted small snippets of a fantasy story conceived in the summer then disastrously lost over the New Year. Part of me feels disinclined to return to that project right now. Its rolling around in my head once more and so i've decided to work on a prequal. When its finished it'll naturally seem like Book 1 or a stand alone book but for me it'll always be a prequal. It will try to make a discussion on language, the randomness of nature and exploration look like an action story.

* As a result of the brainstorming for the novel, while not writing those short-stories, i've been working on linguistics, the environment, archaeology of the new planet as well as science of the future from Stasis, space travel etc.. for someone who tends to keep away from such science its fascinating though perhaps a regression to pre-Arthur C Clarke times. who knows?