Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

If I have one bad habit as a writer – and in the interest of completely disclosing my own self-analysis, I have more than one – it’s having too many ideas. A published author that I met over this past weekend (Savannah Russe, author of the Darkwing Chronicles series) told me in conversation that there is nothing wrong with having too many ideas, and I have to agree. The only caveat is, there are unfortunately not enough hours in the day to actually put all those ideas to use.

At the time I am writing this, it is around 8:30 at night on June 24, 2008. I have a lot on my mind concerning things both at and away from my laptop. I have a novel manuscript I want to finish by the end of summer, a non-fiction book project whose outline and sample chapters were recently sent (with me hoping that they got there OK – electronic submissions are easy to accomplish but, unlike the world of snail mail with its delivery confirmation sheets and green return receipts for the mailman to send back, hard to trace the path of), two short story ideas that are screaming to be finished, and a shitload of other ideas sitting in various fragmented states on my hard drive – some of which were transferred to my present computer via a CD-R I had fortuitously burned as backup days before my beloved 2004 Apple PowerBook G4 achieved ex-parrot status this past St. Patrick’s Day. There’s a bunch of CD and single reviews I’ve been wanting to do for this blog for several weeks, and I intend to do at least a few of them at some point. (I’ll do one this week, I promise.)

Then there’s the stuff I have to deal with when I’m not putting fingers to QWERTY keys. My current day job, which I am beyond anxious to leave behind permanently, continues to be a source of frustration, amplified by the constant ineptitude of an employer that I have been wanting to leave lying in a pool of his own blood for the past three years (if the job market in the area had been better, this wouldn’t even be an issue). My fiancée’s sister got married two weeks ago; two years and two days from when I write this, on June 26, 2010, I’ll be walking down the aisle with my own bride, and we’ve only just started to discuss the initial details about our own nuptials. (As a matter of fact, Tara called me when I was in the middle of this, wanting me to check out a Shania Twain song she thought should be our wedding song.) There’s the everyday household things that have to be done, and there’s sleep, which I would love to truly make “optional” (to quote the Descendants) in order to get more important things done. Like my writing.

There seem to be more days when I don’t post here or at So Hot She Shits Fire or Your Opinion Doesn’t Count than when I do, but with all of the writing projects I want to do, sometimes the blogging – the most public and immediate of my projects – gets shoved to the side. If my shitty day job was an option rather than a necessity – or better yet, if I was already depending on writing for my main source of income – this wouldn’t be an issue. Obviously, I should show up on here a lot more often than I do. One good habit I’ve gotten into as a writer is having other things to work on if I get stuck on one project. One of the reasons I started Stuck In A Pagoda in the first place was to keep my writing skills sharp. Considering that, for various reasons, I choose to spend my own money on server space and attempt to guide the hills and valleys of Wordpress installations and plug-ins, rather than depend on a “free” account from Wordpress or Blogger, that aspect alone – the investment of money (however small an amount) – forces me to take the blogging seriously. I don’t think I’d have devoted the time that I have over the past two years to Stuck In A Pagoda – not to mention be able to start So Hot She Shits Fire, my worship blog for my favorite J-Pop idol – if I had been using gratis web space. (I’d probably also be cursing out everyone remotely connected with Wordpress if I had been running this blog off of one of their accounts, only to discover my hard work being 86’ed over a zero-tolerance TOS violation.)

A colleague at IW told me today that there are over 200 J-music blogs out there being covered by the IW team alone. With our fearless leader presently on hiatus and the rest of IW’s staff having their own distractions outside of the blogosphere, obviously they can’t all be covered. Some of them weren’t around a year or even six months ago, and some, god forbid, may not be around six months or a year from now. The knowledge that there are so many out there, though, is pretty cool, though. The more, the merrier – I’ll still write about J-Pop on my blog whether there are 30, 300, or 1000 J-blogs out there. There’s probably a few that have been inspired by my own blogging work – Henkka is one guy who has said as much – just like I was inspired by Ray to take my music blogging to the level it was at and beyond after he started writing up what were simply some public posts on my LiveJournal. Hearing that my writing about both J-pop and punk rock on this blog inspired Henkka to do H!P Opinions Of A Metalhead drove home how much of a reach I have as a “citizen musicologist” (hey, if political bloggers can call themselves “citizen journalists”, I can call myself a citizen musicologist). It’s always good to know you’re not just quacking into a void.

And speaking of voids… Ray’s current hiatus has left one for now, which has led me to realize I’m not being fair to myself or the people who follow this blog and/or So Hot She Shits Fire (which seems to generate more click-thrus at IW than the Pagoda sometimes) if I keep leaving little voids of my own. I love to write, and when I can manage to keep my worst writing habits – everything from trying not to edit a piece before I can even finish the fucking thing (a habit that occurs more often with my book and short story manuscripts than anything else) to blowing off an article for this blog that I had been wanting to get out of my system in favor of writing something else that won’t be seen for several months after its finished, to just blowing off writing for the evening because I myself am blown out – in check, I can get a lot done. I keep telling myself that my writing is important, but I’ve come to realize that attitude, however positive, can become a bit hypocritical unless I give equal attention for both the now (my musicalogical writings via the blog) and the later (my novel-in-progress Here Is The Wonderland, the short stories, the non-fiction project, or just anything in general that will bring in either a paycheck, an all important story credit, or both).

George Carlin’s sudden passing on Sunday night at age 71 reemphasized one thing that we all know – and tend to forget: Time is not promised to everyone. Not everyone is going to reach their 80’s like Vladimir Horowitz did. Kurt Cobain didn’t make 30; Lisa Lopes wasn’t even halfway to 40 when she died. Frank Zappa didn’t make 55 – his old friend Captain Beefheart said Frank “died too goddamn young”, but the same thing could be said about Carlin or Horowitz, or even George Burns, who made 100.

To my fellow bloggers, both in and out of the J-Pop/Intl Wota community, let me give this advice for when you think that blogging is a waste of time. There have been times when I’ve been too damn tired to want to even answer an e-mail, let alone write a chapter for a novel or an article for a blog post. Once in a while, that’s fine – but as far as I’m concerned I’ve slacked off much too often the past few months. Time, I have always felt, is best spent when you’re accomplishing something meaningful. Most of us have heard the quote from This Is Spinal Tap: “Have a good time all of the time.” When you accomplish something constructive, that definitely counts as a good time. Like the old song says, let the good times roll.