Here's Jonathan Frid as Barnabus Collins in the show Dark Shadows

New Book in the Works!

Six years ago I published my first book Planet Lazy. People often ask how many copies I’ve sold since then. The answer isn’t quite so simple. Take Kindle Unlimited, for instance. The customer pays a monthly fee and can read whatever book on there they want (the author gets paid per page read). My book is on Kindle Unlimited, and a number of people read it through that. Does that count as a sale even though the person never actually bought the book? I would say yes. Another example, promotional giveaways. Do those count as sales even though the person got their copy for free? Hey, I’m new at this, I’m counting it! 😉 Factoring in all of the variables, I’d say I’ve sold about 500 copies.

But, wait a minute, publishing books is supposed to make you rich beyond your wildest dreams! You can’t get rich off of selling just 500 copies!

Sure, but I’m not in this to make money. I write because I love to write and have been doing so since 4th grade. I’m not trying to be the next J.K. Rowling. This is a labor of love, people! Plus, I love books! It’s also fun to make them! I love the process of getting my cover designed, picking out fonts, messing with the margins, and such. Then, at the end of the day, I can stick the finished product up on my bookshelf! How cool is that! 😍

Okay, so I published a book six years ago. What have I been doing since then? Well, I started, and almost finished, a second book about magic and hypnotism. However, after two years of researching and writing, I stopped working on it because I was convinced that the book was cursed! I was having the worst luck of my life, I thought the IRS was going to fine me millions of dollars and throw me in jail for not doing my taxes properly, and I swore at the time that this book was the reason COVID-19 happened!

So, after giving up on that, I wrote a stage play about the coronavirus. I knew some playwrights while going to college and reached out to some of them for advice on how to get my play produced. They said that basically my two options were to submit to contests or produce it myself. There was no way I was putting up that kind of money to produce a play, so I just decided to submit it to contests. I guess I lost all of them, though, because I haven’t heard anything back since 2021. 🤷‍♀️

I also started a few social media projects. One of them was a comic strip parody of the Japanese reality TV show Terrace House. COVID shut that one down pretty quickly, so I was forced to give that one up. I also started another web comic since I enjoyed doing the Terrace House one so much. This one was called Why Stay Japan? and was about a Larry David-esque expat living in Japan and all of his gripes and complaints about the country and life in general. When describing the comic, I would tell people that it was Curb Your Enthusiasm in Japan.

Which brings me to my current project. I’ve been working on a horror trilogy off and on for about four years now. Around 2020 (COVID times) I started seeing at a bunch of pictures of old recipes online from the 1950s, mostly those Jell-O mold dishes that were so popular. How disgusting! Some of the grosser ones involved non-sweet ingredients like tuna, olives, assorted meats and vegetables, and even mayonnaise! And on top of that, the Jell-O mold shapes were also pretty weird. I saw one that was shaped like a fish with a smiley face! Who on earth would eat this stuff? Eventually, an idea popped into my head: cannibals and human Jell-O molds. I wasn’t working on anything in particular at that time anyway, so I thought this might make for a good horror book. I’m also a fan of the Dracula story and the old 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows. The idea was to write a gothic horror trilogy in the tone of Dracula and Dark Shadows involving people being cooked into Jell-O molds.

The title of the trilogy is Hillgrave, and it’s about a haunted town in the middle of a forest. There’s haunted houses, cemeteries, ghosts, witches, aliens, monsters, vampires, and even a bit of Frankenstein! I don’t have a release date set yet but am finished with all three books and am currently in the editing stage.

As far as marketing the book, I know that keywords are important, and I have a little experience with that from the release of my first book, but I hope to sell a bit more than 500 copies this time. And this time I want to do it intentionally and not just leave it up to chance or luck! My next post will be about my attempts to educate myself on this. I’m currently reading How to Market a Book, which I got for free from Reedsy.

6 Months Later: A Reflection on Publishing My First Book

Posted on August 23, 2018 by planetlazy

It’s been 6 months since I put my first book on the market. After finalizing all edits, formatting, book covers, and the audiobook, February 22nd was the official day I hit the “Publish” button on Amazon.com.

The major question I’ve been getting thus far is, “How many copies have you sold?”

Well, here are the numbers.

As of today:

355 Kindle (ebook) copies (including free giveaways)
15 Kindle Unlimited read-throughs (number of pages read ÷ number of pages)
29 Paperbacks
19 Audiobooks
————————————–
418 Total

Emily Wenstrom in an article on “The Write Life” says that books on average—meaning anything between Harry Potter and Joe-Schmo-who-uploads-his-book-on-the-internet-and-does-nothing-else—sells 250 copies a year, and 2,000 in its lifetime. I guess for a first novel I’m not doing too bad based on those numbers alone. However, there are many many mistakes I made during the launch that drastically affected sales. This I’m taking as a learning experience for the release of my next and future books. There’s also the problem of the 4 1-star reviews in a row that I just got, which I’ll discuss later.

When I first launched the book, I just wanted to get it out there. All of my marketing and publishing friends told me to hold off and create a launch campaign, but I didn’t listen to them.

“I’ve been waiting since October to publish this thing! It’s February! It’s a science fiction book; the science is going to be obsolete by the time it gets out there! I’m releasing it now!”

In my head everything was already perfect. I had the cover illustrated and ready to go; a good book jacket description; I had set up a blog and several social networking pages; I made the book available in 3 different formats (ebook, paperback, and audiobook); I already had several buyers lined up.

What else could I possibly need to do???

That’s when I discovered the Amazon ranking system.

The goal of any book publisher on the Amazon platform is more about ranking highly in the Amazon store than actual dollars and cents earned. Especially in the beginning.

It’s not about getting on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and shouting at the top of your lungs: “Really awesome book for sale! Get it now while it’s hot!”

Here are a few problems with marketing on social media (especially if you’re going the free route [re: organic reach] like I was). The people you are marketing to are:

Not necessarily looking to buy anything
Not necessarily readers
Not necessarily readers of your genre

Therefore, unless you target a specific group of users (e.g. readers of sci-fi books) on a massive scale, which is largely done through paid advertising—which is debatable in its efficacy—you’re basically marketing to dead air.

And as far as marketing on target-audience-specific message boards (I tried the Facebook Science Fiction Fans one of 65,000 members), there’s a certain etiquette to adhere to. If you just jump on and start talking about your book and posting ads and links, people are going to ignore you (like I was). There’s a more subtle art to selling in this environment, which is taxing if you, like me, aren’t a big sci-fi fan to begin with.

So, instead of marketing through social media, a publishing friend of mine gave me advice on working with a timeline for the initial launch on Amazon. The plan was to release it for $0.99 for the first 7 days (the time period when Amazon gives you the highest boost in ranking), and then after the 7 days, do a 5-day free promo (which means making the book available for free) so that you get another 5-day boost in ranking. Hopefully, after the initial 12-days of your book launch, a ton of people will download your book for either $0.99 or free, and Amazon’s algorithm will predict that your book will be a long-running success. Therefore, your book will rank highly, and stay high, so that more people can see your book and buy it consistently in the long term.

What I did was more something like this:

“Alright, let’s release the darn thing already so everyone will quit bugging me about it.”

Publish.

I make a few sales. The 7-day $0.99 sale ends. It’s time to do the 5-day free promo.

“I’m not releasing the book for free! It took me 3 years to write this thing, and they want me to put it up for free?!”

So I leave it up for $0.99 (not knowing exactly how crucial that 12-day launch timeline is) to see if I can make a few more sales before releasing it to the world for free. Nothing is happening (because my initial boost had expired), so I go ahead and do the free book promo. 20…30 copies downloaded.

“Grrrrr….” I think. “Won’t help a first-time writer by paying a measly $0.99 but will download it for free…” (Actually, that wasn’t the case, which I found out months later.)

After the initial 12-day launch boost, the advice my friend gave me was to up the price to $2.99—the lowest price point to receive 70% commission. I, however, left it at $0.99.

“If people won’t even pay $0.99 for it,” I thought, “why the heck would they pay $2.99?”

That’s when another friend of mine, completely unrelated to publishing or advertising, told me something I hadn’t thought of before.

“If you only sell a 300-page book for $0.99, people won’t see any value in it.”

Through further analysis, this turned out to be true. Even the people who downloaded it for free probably saw no motivation to even read the thing since it was free anyway. It probably just went to the bottom of their Kindle list to be forgotten. If people pay money for something, they’ll use it. If they pay money to read something, they’ll read it.

And that’s what I needed: readers. Readers are what sell books. Those who engage in the story, then write a customer review on Amazon about it (more on this later).

So I worked with my publishing friend a bit. We changed some keywords, put “Funny Sci Fi” in the title (because those are strong keywords), upped the Kindle price to $3.94, and 3 months later I was ready to launch my second free promo.

I only did it for one day this time, and, wow, 75 downloads! In one day! And then the next day, right when I woke up in the morning, I saw that I had made 6 sales in a row for $3.94. That’s 6 sales while I was sleeping!

So it wasn’t a matter of keeping the price low. It was about getting as many downloads as possible to rank highly on Amazon.

And getting customer reviews….

Okay, we’ve finally arrived to that part of the post.

Amazon Customer Reviews

So, I launched my book, I figured out how the Amazon algorithm works to maximize ranking and visibility in the store for making sales. Now all I needed was for the product (re: the book) to be great quality and for other buyers to vouch for it. And the way they vouch for it is by writing an Amazon Customer Review.

In the beginning, some random people downloaded it for free and posted a review. There is an incentive for Amazon customers to review as many products as possible so that they can attain “badges” such as “Top Contributor” or the coveted “Vine Voice”, which is an invite-only club of reviewers on Amazon.

However, I can’t emphasize this enough, as I have learned very recently, just writing “I enjoyed this book. Five stars!” is not enough.

I got a lot of those in the beginning, and some other 5-star reviews that were more detailed, but when you get 4 1-star reviews in a row from people who are very very very detailed, specific, and write several paragraphs, that makes all of the 5-star reviews look fake.

People are always weary of new products available online, and the only way to know if the products are any good is by reading the customer reviews. A few readers of mine recently suspected that all of my 5-star reviews are fake—and they write about this in their reviews—because the 5-star reviews are not detailed and are all 5-star ratings. As we all know, in the instance of books, not even classic literature that has been studied and cherished for generations gets 5-star reviews. I saw 2 Pulitzer Prize-winners with 3.5 stars. Now, of course, those books get thousands of reviews, so the low votes and high votes balance each other out, but when you have a book with only 11 votes, and 4 of them are 1-star and suspect that all the 5-star votes are fake and that none of the reviewers are actually reading the book, that puts a pretty big dent in the future of the book.

However, not all is lost. At first I was upset at the negative reviews, but I quickly got over it and learned that it’s part of the game. You can’t please everyone. Even world-famous authors get terrible reviews.

However, they get lots of reviews. From publications, from random customers. I’m talking tens of thousands. Therefore, based off of the balance of 5-, 4-, 3-, 2-, and 1-star reviews, the reader can decide whether it’s worth reading.

This is also going to be something I look into fixing for the next book: getting legit reviews so that if a couple bombs get dropped it doesn’t ruin the whole book.

⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓

All of the above said, I would like to thank all of you out there who have supported me by buying a copy of my book, and to those of you who have not only bought a copy but also wrote an Amazon Customer Review. My book would not be where it is now without your help and kindness♥♥♥

It’s hard being in my position because I often feel like I’m asking too much of people.

“Hey, guys! Buy my book! And not only buy my book, but also go back and write a very detailed review on Amazon (like it’s a job) of why you liked or disliked it or thought it was only meh! And also click the ‘unhelpful’ button on the negative reviews so that they don’t pop up first on the Customer Review list.”

I really hate doing that. What I would really like is to just share with people, “Hey, I wrote (another) book. Here’s the link if you wanna check it out. Thanks! What are you working on?”

That would be ideal, but since I only have one book out, I gotta be a bit obnoxious.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

On a lighter note, I’ve been working much more diligently on my next novel. I’ve dedicated my entire month of summer vacation to trying to live the author lifestyle of writing 1,600 words a day (a figure I got from a rando YouTube video). It’s going pretty well, and I’m barreling through the first draft quicker than I realized.

The new book is a dark fantasy called The Hypnotism Festival. I read 3 nonfiction books as research before putting pen to paper. Here’s the one-line summary:

A man is searching for his runaway daughter when he stumbles upon The Hypnotist Festival.

It’s a much darker story than Planet Lazy, but I sprinkle in some humor every now and then.

Have you had similar experiences? Are you thinking about releasing your own book but are confused about the process? Do you have any questions? Leave a comment, and let’s discuss!

Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE AND FOR FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED! CLICK HERE!

Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) now available in e-book, Kindle Unlimited and paperback on Amazon. CLICK ME!

What Should I Name My Characters?

Posted on August 16, 2018 by planetlazy

One of the major problems I’ve always had with writing is deciding what names to give my characters.

Sounds simple, right?

Bob!

Nah…too general…

Stan!

…The character from South Park?

The name of my best friend!

…Well, if the character, say, cheats on their significant other…nah, sounds like a quick way to lose my best friend.

Some authors borrow the names of contemporary characters in literature who have the same predicament/moral turmoil. Some even go so far as to sample Shakespeare or use historical and mythological figures.

As a young writer this always gave me a headache. There was no quicker way to writer’s block than coming up with a simple name. Sounds silly, right?

It is.

Copied from http://www.gametab.com/xbox/jsrf.jet.set.radio.future/3235/ website, and intellectual property owned by Sega., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1318105

When I was in college, I really liked the game Jet Set Radio Future from the original Xbox (shout out in the comments section if you love this game!). The game takes place in the ultra-neon future of Tokyo, where rival gangs rollerblade around the city spray-painting public property to mark their turf. It’s a really fun and fast-paced game—killer soundtrack—but another thing I liked about it was the character names. Gum, Garam, Beat, YoYo… How fun! None of these neo-street punks were named after Zeus or Euripides. They’re just cool names!

Actually, these names were so cool and fun that I outright stole them for a short story in class once. Even my instructor complimented me on them.

“Wow, those are some awesome names!”

Ever since then, I’ve been going against the grain as far as naming characters. I opt for fun and memorable over bookworm historical analogs.

Let’s take a look at the way I named my characters for my science fiction book Planet Lazy.

Since it’s science fiction, taking place in the future, I decided to make the names sound, you guessed it, futuristic! The main character, Karturian, I borrowed from a great dystopian stageplay called The Pillowman (written by Martin McDonagh, who was recently nominated for some Oscars for his movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Karturian in The Pillowman has nothing to do with Karturian in my book, but I liked the name, and I loved the play, so I used it. Another person that people confuse Karturian for in my book is a guy named Montag, which is a name used from another dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451.

In the chapter on the planet of talking cats, I describe strange alien creatures and give them boring names like Steve and Phil.

In the zombie apocalypse chapter I drive it to the absurd by naming zombies ChokesonBlud and SpewsupBlud.

For Karturian’s alien love interest I experiment with using a traditional name, Evelyn, and add an R to make it Everlyn—which I thought sounded right, considering he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

Corin is short for Corinthian, which is a book in the Bible, which echoes the religious elements toward the end.

Trixelyse, the villain of the book, dresses in the colors of the rainbow. This made me think of the cereal Trix, then I thought of the name Trixy, and then I just add a suffix to give it a little spin.

There’s two minor characters named Lardly and Ms. Gingerly, where I experiment with using adverbs as names.

In the chapter where Karturian hallucinates, we get into Little House on the Prairie territory. Again I just go for the absurd: Rollin Oats, Victor Potatosack, etc.

Finally, we have the short and senile old man. I called him Mr. Observant ironically because not only does he have vision problems, he also doesn’t notice that he is THE LAST MAN ON THE PLANET!

So, that was my method for coming up with character names in my book. In conclusion, I like to keep the names original, fun and memorable. If you like going about it the other way, be careful. Naming the love interest Aphrodite or Juliet might be a bit cliche!

How do you come up with character names for your books and short stories? Leave a comment below! I’m really curious about how others do this!

Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE AND FOR FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED! CLICK HERE!

Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) now available in e-book, Kindle Unlimited and paperback on Amazon. CLICK ME!

Why Write a Science Fiction Book in Japan?: Part IV

Posted on March 20, 2018 by planetlazy

Previously on “Why Write a Science Fiction Book in Japan”….

Part I (click here for full post): I write my first science fiction story in 4th grade and continue writing until high school, where I receive the creative writing award for a story about sea people. I then go on to meet N, who becomes my good friend. We watch movies together, read books, do creative things, and hang out with college students. But I disagree with him on one key element of creativity, and that key element is…….

Part II (click here for full post): ……well, we’ll get to that a bit later. I’m still young at this point and haven’t figured myself and other people out yet.

I do, however, go on to college and discover that I’m not allowed to have my own opinions or ideas that aren’t somehow piggy-backing off of other scholars, writers, filmmakers, artists, or some sort of renowned predecessor. The teachers certainly don’t encourage original thought, and the other students don’t buy it. I learn that it’s best to just copy other works from people with more clout and sprinkle in a bit of me every now and then like everyone else.

Later, I get my first job out of college working vampire hours at a TV station in central Illinois. I really want to make indy films to show at arthouse theaters, but it looks like I’m going to have to forget about that indefinitely and focus more on rising up the ranks to general manager of my TV station.

Then, a year later, my friend C proposes a rando idea that will go on to help me rediscover that spark that so many years of copying other people had crushed out of me.

“Let’s move to Japan and teach English!”

Part III (click here for full post): Well, I go to Japan and teach English, anyway. C doesn’t even make it through the initial application procedure before throwing in the towel.

I spend 3 years in a northern prefecture in Japan called Iwate. There, I meet some of the smartest and most interesting people I’ve met in my life. They’re all expats from English-speaking countries, and we’re all on the same English-teaching program, the JET Program.

After I finish with the JET Program, I move to a suburb of Tokyo called Yokohama, where I spend the majority of my time alone with my mind wandering. That’s how I enter the headspace I so often found myself in from elementary to high school: the writer’s headspace. Where I would think of all sorts of crazy ideas and make up stories about them.

That’s when I write my first story in 5 years. It’s called “Lonely Momoka,” and it’s about a lonely Japanese girl in Tokyo. A friend of mine from the JET Program reads it, loves it, and I regain my confidence. I don’t worry so much anymore about these so called rules my teachers and peers were so adamant about in school. I can write whatever I want, because being myself is what I do best.

But why science fiction though?!

Thank you, Wallpaper Safari!

I’m in Japan! I should be writing about ninja, samurai, Yu-gi-oh characters with Pokemon faces!

Well, that’s part of my jam. I don’t have to write anything in any particular way. I could go live in Poland and write about ninja. I could live in Russia and write about African tribes on the moon! I could skyrocket to Neptune and write about ants in an ant colony underground in Estonia!

I can do ANYTHING!

And, most importantly, I’m not around people who want me to adhere to certain rules and follow set patterns. If I were in America, I’d still be miserable at that TV station trying to work my way up to general manager JUST BECAUSE I had studied TV production in school, and for me to not pursue a career in that, I would have WASTED ALL OF THAT TUITION MONEY STUDYING IT!

If I were still in America, I’d still be surrounded by other writers telling me I’ll never be published because I don’t sound like Flannery O’Connor—or whoever else their college professors told them to like.

I’d still be surrounded by other filmmakers wanting to make the next Star Wars, and I don’t even like Star Wars!

Wait, Ryan, you’re a film buff, and you don’t like Star Wars?!?!?

I used to get that a lot.

My reasoning even goes so far as politics! If I hung around the writers and filmmakers, they’d all hate Donald Trump, which means that I’d have to hate him too. But hating him wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to hate him in the same way they hated him for the exact same reasons. And I’m pretty sure most of the writers and filmmakers would be annoying SJWs too, and I’d have to agree with everything they said down to the exact word order or I’d be labeled as a racist, sexist, trans-phobic, or whatever pejorative term was trending in the media that week.

But in Japan I can escape it all! I can think, believe, and write whatever I want without people around me telling me I’m wrong and should think or do things a certain way.

I can see the world from an objective point of view from Japan—because of the language barrier—and I don’t have people trying to sell me on their agenda and clobber me over the head with their beliefs down to the damn font size!

Hell, I even think that the average person is a bigger science fiction fan than I am!

All I wanted to do was read more Kurt Vonnegut—who didn’t even consider himself a science fiction writer. I wanted to read more of the stories from Kilgore Trout (the recurring science fiction writer character in his novels). But Kurt Vonnegut was dead in 2015, and had been since 2007. I wasn’t going to be getting any Kilgore Trout stories from any Kurt Vonneguts ever again.

So I could make my own up!

So that’s what I did that one lonely afternoon in the busy and cold city of Tokyo in Japan 3 years ago: I wrote a science fiction story a la Kurt Vonnegut as Kilgore Trout. It was a story about a fat dork that traveled to the planet Tylgum where the people who ate too much shrank, and the people who didn’t eat enough grew into giants….

A bit anti-climactic, this ending, so I’ll go back and say it a different way to make it at least sound better.

I wrote a science fiction book in Japan because no one was around telling me that I really shouldn’t.

Alright, that’s all! I’ll write different posts about different things now!

Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) NOW AVAILABLE ON EBOOK FOR $0.99!

Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) now available on e-book and paperback on Amazon

Why Write a Science Fiction Book in Japan?: Part III

Posted on March 16, 2018 by planetlazy

Previously on “Why Write a Science Fiction Book in Japan”….

Part I (click here for full post): I write my first science fiction story in 4th grade and continue writing until high school, where I receive the creative writing award for a story about sea people. I then go on to meet N, who becomes my good friend. We watch movies together, read books, do creative things, and hang out with college students. But I disagree with him on one key element of creativity, and that key element is…….

Part II (click here for full post): ……well, we’ll get to that a bit later. I’m still young at this point and haven’t figured myself and other people out yet. I do, however, go on to college and discover a brand new environment of what I dread the most.

Rules.

As a student, I discover that I’m not allowed to have my own opinions or ideas that aren’t somehow piggy-backing off of other scholars, writers, filmmakers, artists, or renowned predecessors. Sure, I can have my own opinions and ideas (just like I can go set a building on fire—nobody’s stopping me), but the teachers certainly don’t encourage it, and the other students don’t buy it. I hate that I’m not allowed to make stuff up freely whenever I want anymore, but eventually I adapt. I’m not famous and have no clout; therefore the thoughts from my own head are useless. It’s best to just copy other works of art and sprinkle in a bit of me every now and then like everyone else.

I, however, am not very good at imitating other artists and, therefore, upon graduation, I consider myself a failure. I get my first job working vampire hours at a TV station in central Illinois, and I should be grateful because I’m working in my field of study.

Yippee.

I wanted to make indy films and show them at arthouse theaters, but it looks like I’m going to have to forget about that and focus on becoming general manager of my TV station in a reasonable amount of time.

Then, a year later, my friend C proposes a rando idea that will go on to help me rediscover that spark inside of me that had been crushed out through so many years of copying other people.

“Let’s move to Japan and teach English!”

So C and I had a plan. We were gonna go completely looney-tunes and move halfway across the world to a country we had never been to, had very little interest in, and didn’t even know the language of. Well, I went completely looney-tunes, anyway. C didn’t even go through with the initial application procedure for the JET Program, let alone the 6 months of interviews, background checks, health examinations, and all of the other hoops of fire the Japanese embassy made us jump through.

I was accepted in the end. And I went—I moved to a different country with nothing but the clothes on my back and a couple of suitcases filled with books and CDs. I was escaping my failed attempt at becoming an artist, you could say. I was dissatisfied with where my life had ended up, and the only exit ramp I could see in the hazy distance was the one leading to a land of nowhere, where I could disappear. I was erasing myself by moving to Japan; I was reinventing myself with a new country, a new language, and new people.

Japanese people.

I spent 3 years in a prefecture in northern Japan called Iwate, where I met many of the smartest and most interesting people I had ever met. They were expats from all over the English-speaking world: The US, Canada, The UK, Oceania, South Africa, Singapore…

Every weekend was some kind of adventure. We would travel to different countries together, we’d go camping, skiing, mountain climbing, sing karaoke all night, or even just play beer pong at each other’s apartments!

Image via Getty

I even started learning Japanese in order to make friends and interact with the people in my community better.

It was a much-needed escape, to say the least. After my 3-year tenure on the JET Program ended, it was time to move on.

But I wasn’t ready to move back home so quickly…

Sure, I had connected with my local community in a grassroots way by spreading my language and culture, but I wanted to live in Tokyo, dammit! I wanted the neon jungle to accost me every day! I wanted the noise, the crowded trains, the people in Pikachu costumes screaming from the top of semi trucks!

So I found a job in a suburb of Tokyo called Yokohama and lived and worked there for 2.5 years. However, the problem with living in any big city in any part of the world is the loneliness.

Big city, lots of people, loneliness. The irony.

Image from iwanttobeacoppola.com

That’s when I would find myself sitting alone in my apartment for extended periods of time. I took long walks around my neighborhood. My mind would wander, and I would arrive back in that state again that I was so familiar with when I was younger.

I wanted to write again.

And I had a couple of ideas.

But, wait a minute!! went my internal monologue. I can’t write a story! There’s too many authors I haven’t read yet! Who will I copy? I don’t sound enough like Flannery O’Connor! They’re all gonna laugh at me!

But wait a minute…

I was in Japan! I was surrounded by Japanese people! There wasn’t an English-speaker around me for thousands of miles! I could write whatever I wanted, and nobody would even understand what it meant. If I left my notebook on a bus somewhere, it would just look like chicken scratch to whoever found it.

I said it again to myself, I can write whatever I want, and nobody will know!

And so began my first attempt at writing a story in 5 years—since my senior year in college. It was called “Lonely Momoka,” about a Japanese girl who moved to Tokyo and had no friends and was so lonely that she would pretend to fall asleep on people on the train just so that she could touch someone.

I drafted the story several times before I felt it was done, and I sent it to a good friend I had made while I was living in Iwate. Let’s call him “D.”

“What did you think?” I said.

He loved it. He thought it was gripping and really sad. He said that he read it really quickly so that he could see what happened next.

WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW!

SERIOUSLY? I thought. You didn’t find any misplaced modifiers? No comma splices, no awkward word choices…?

I don’t sound like Flannery O’Connor, though! That means you hate it, right?

A 1962 photo of author Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor, btw (image from The Atlantic)

See, let me explain a little bit about D. He wasn’t an English major in school. He studied physics. Huge difference. Sure, he had read lots of fiction, but he wasn’t judging my writing like a creative writing student.

He was judging my writing like a person who enjoyed the goddamn story!

Was I the next Ernest Hemingway or William S. Burroughs?

No.

Had I written a good story?

Yes.

And that’s all it took. I was a writer again because the person reading my story wasn’t some jaded English professor with a lifetime of rejection letters under his/her belt. He wasn’t some jealous creative writing student who didn’t get their story published in the literary magazine that month. I was a writer again because I didn’t have to follow the rules that my professors crammed down my throat and the students in my college followed like scripture. I could write however I wanted, just like I did when I was in elementary school, just like I did when I won the creative writing award in high school. Creativity wasn’t how much you had read or how many films you had seen, it was about making something up, goddammit!!! Plain and simple!

There it was. I had rediscovered the wild imagination that I had had since I was very young, that school had almost beaten completely out of my head.

So I could write a story about a Japanese girl in Japan, but that brings us back to that original nagging question of mine: why write science fiction in Japan?

TUNE IN NEXT TIME FOR THE GRAND FINALE: PART IV OF WHY WRITE A SCIENCE FICTION BOOK IN JAPAN….

Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) now available in e-book and paperback on Amazon.

: Planet Lazy (A Sci-fi Comedy) now available in e-book and paperback on Amazon

Why Write a Science Fiction Book in Japan?

Posted on March 2, 2018 by planetlazy

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Contrary to popular belief, this is not what Japan looks like.

Science fiction novel Neuromancer takes place in a city just outside of Tokyo called Chiba. This is what Chiba looks like in Neuromancer:

Neuromancer - CGHub Illustrated contest - WIP by sourgasm

Image by sourgasm. Contact him on Deviant Art if you like this image!

And this is what Chiba actually looks like:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

And those cool cyberpunk kids with the black wielding goggles, long trench coats, and leather gloves with the fingers cut off? Here’s what a native Japanese one actually looks like:

Don’t study Japanese until you’ve read this ebook by Japanimal

So, why write a science fiction book in Japan?

“You’re ‘murican, Ryan. You got a ‘murican passport. You can write science fiction in ‘murica.”

This is true. I’m not particularly tied to Japan and its influence on science fiction. Nor do I incorporate Japan or Japanese culture into my writing other than a few passing references.

So, then? WHY DID YOU WRITE A SCIENCE FICTION BOOK IN JAPAN???

Let’s go back to when I was in 4th grade.

I had my first creative writing assignment in English class. We read a short science fiction story about tiny robots coming down from space and befriending a little boy. I can’t remember exactly what the story was, but at the end the robots said, “If you don’t do (such in such), we’ll melt ourselves down.” The story ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so the teacher (Mrs. Bartelle, for those who remember) asked us to write our own ending to the story. I think it was only supposed to be 2 or 3 sentences, but I wanted to change the whole story and write a completely new second half.

In 7th grade, the teacher (Mrs. Remmington—I hope I’m getting these names spelled correctly) gave us a single word: “Isolation.”

“Write a short story using the word ‘isolation,'” she said.

Again, I think we only had to write like half a page, but I turned mine into like a 6-page one that involved people hanging from the ceiling in cages and a light saber battle at the end. I think I put God in there too (hey, it was a Catholic school).

I don’t think I wrote any other short stories until sophomore year in high school when I took a creative writing class. This class was filled with stoners who thought they could just make shit up and get an easy A. And, in a sense, yeah, you could do that in a high school creative writing course. Granted, you’d have to actually write something, print it out, and hand it in on the due date, but, yeah, an easy A is possible.

Oh, and you had to use Times New Roman 12 point font, not Wingdings 72.

Wingdings 72

My story was about a guy who really liked silence, so he swam to the bottom of the ocean and found a community of sea people living in a sea bubble. They looked human at first, but as he lived with them at the bottom of the sea for longer, they started to change. They grew algae-looking skin, webbing between their fingers and toes, and gills in their necks. While they thought he was sleeping, they would swim around in the ocean outside of the bubble, looking all sea-creature-ly.

One day the main character got lonely and swam back to the surface to see his family again, but when he rose up out of the water on the beach, people screamed at the hideous sea monster that had risen from the tide and ran for the hills. He was afraid they’d tell his loved ones that he’d turned into a monster, so he pulled out his laser gun (not sure how he got one of those) and lasered everyone to death.

That story won me the creative writing award in my high school. Granted, my competition was a bunch of stoners with Wingdings 72 stories, but still, it was something.

Then I lost it.

See, there’s this thing called school, and in school you have to teach kids something, and you have to give them an A, B, C, D, or F grade so that universities can judge whether or not they’re smart enough to enter and businesses can feel justified in giving them thousands of dollars in scholarship money. In order to teach kids subjects and give them a grade, you have to have a textbook with facts written inside, and the kids are supposed to memorize these textbooks and pass tests.

In regard to subjects like science, math, social studies, history, and grammar, yeah, you need a textbook. Because there are rules and facts that have been set in stone for sometimes hundreds of years, and future graduates with Masters and PhD’s are supposed to spend their entire careers trying to disprove them.

Then there are other subjects like business, advertising, marketing, and, in my case, filmmaking and short story writing, where certain basic principles and common practices exist, and those comprise the textbook. However, what does mastering the principles and common practices in business and getting an A actually mean? That you’re going to be a successful business person in the future?

I had a good friend in high school that I made a few short films and 1 feature-length film with. Let’s call him “N.” I wouldn’t be the person I am today without N. He taught me about art, about craftsmanship, history, about being critical and having opinions. Before him, I was a socially awkward goofball from a small cornfield town in the Mid-West. I didn’t have any plans for the future, and he straightened me out.

We watched hundreds of movies in my basement together. Movies from all over the world and ranging from new releases (back in 2001) to way back in the 1800s when Thomas Edison was experimenting with the Kinetoscope.

By W.K.-L. Dickson

We’d see plays together in Urbana, IL at The Station Theater and Krannert Center. We’d read and exchange books. We’d write stories and screenplays and critique each other’s work. We’d hang out with the University of Illinois students and go to college parties—even though we were still in high school.

We got along great, and he introduced me to a new world and new way of thinking that I would never have discovered on my own.

But there was one point where N and I differed. One key point that to this day justifies my reason for staying in Japan for 10 years.

And that key difference was……………………………

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT TIME ON THE PLANET LAZY BLOG!…..

Planet Lazy (A Science Fiction Comedy), now available on Amazon Kindle and paperback. (KINDLE BOOK ON SALE FOR $0.99 UNTIL MARCH 5TH! ONLY 3 DAYS LEFT! BUY NOW BEFORE IT GOES UP TO REGULAR PRICE!!)

Why You Will Love Planet Lazy

Posted on February 28, 2018 by planetlazy

I studied creative writing in college.

Not “novel writing” or “writing that people will pay money for,” but creative writing, which is exactly what it sounds like. Writing that is creative.

What are some examples of writing that is creative*?

I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood
and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and
dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies
of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and
hill-sides;
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and
meeting the sun.

Imagine if your major was advertising and you specialized in creative advertising. On first glance you might say, “Isn’t all advertising creative?”

No siree bob. Here, take a look at this advertisement:

Can you guess what it’s for?

No?

Well, that’s because it’s a creative advertisement. Sure, it looks like just a black box, but you’ve got to look deeper than the surface. Here, look at the image below that explains the creative process of interpreting this:

Still don’t get it? Well, if we do a Wikipedia search on black boxes, we find that it is a metaphor for the human brain. Or, more specifically:

[it focuses] upon a thing that has no immediately apparent characteristics and therefore has only factors for consideration held within itself hidden from immediate observation.

In other words, I’m selling AJAX.

“But, wait a minute. AJAX is white.”

“Exactly.”

You don’t study how to be creative. Creative is a given. If you’re a bar of chocolate, you don’t study how to be sweet. You already are sweet. Unless you’re the bitter kind, but in that case, all of the studying in the world wouldn’t make you sweet, because then you wouldn’t be bitter chocolate anymore. And even if you were able to become a sweet bitter chocolate, would you even know how to be sweet and bitter at the same time? Would finding the right balance between tasting good and giving people aftertastes even be a pleasant experience for you?

In creative writing school, the A students write like this**:

The B students write somewhere between this***:

and this:

And the C, D, and F students are based on how many assignments they didn’t turn in.

So, basically, if you don’t write like a famous writer from 50 years ago, whose books are available in the student bookstore, you won’t get an A.

But, remember, this is creative writing school. Your success is based off of your ability to sound creative to your teacher (and you get the Tinder Boost for mimicking their favorite authors).

What if, however, each creative writing teacher had their students print out copies of their work, staple them in the center, have art department students design the cover, and put all of them out for sale around campus? Who would be the A students then? The ones who sounded the most like Virginia Woolf, or the ones who sold the most copies?

When I wrote Planet Lazy, I realized that I was not writing a book to please a creative writing teacher at a university and other creative writing students around me. I was writing to please my readers.

I realized that these days people have many options for entertainment. They can play Call of Duty on their Xbox One’s, post videos on Instagram, read Marvel comics, binge-watch Breaking Bad for the 6th time on Netflix, listen to Kanye West albums, complain about Trump on Reddit, and very last on that list for many people comes reading novels. I was aware of this, so I wrote Planet Lazy in a style that is engaging and competes with all of the other distractions of the 21st century. While I’ll never be as brilliant as Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy) or Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (creators of Rick and Morty), I did have those shows in mind as competition for your attention.

In short, I wrote Planet Lazy so that people could have fun! You love having fun, and now you can do it with a science fiction! That is why you will love my book.

Planet Lazy (A Science Fiction Comedy), now available on Amazon Kindle and paperback. (KINDLE BOOK ON SALE FOR $0.99 UNTIL MARCH 5TH! BUY NOW BEFORE IT GOES UP TO REGULAR PRICE!!)

*Lines from a Walt Whitman poem.
**Quote by Virginia Woolf
***Quote by Kurt Vonnegut