“What are you doing, son?” the American soldier with the Japanese face asks.

“Drawing.” Seiji holds up a scrap of cardboard on which he has drawn a picture of his old neighborhood before Tokyo was firebombed and his neighborhood erased.

“Nice work!” the soldier says in Japanese. He squats down to have a closer look. “Is that all you have to draw on?”

“Mmmm, I found it over there.” He aims a charcoal-begrimed finger at a nearby trash heap next to the concrete remains of wha...

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Call it writer's block or hitting a roadblock, getting there happens to all writers. It happened to me three or four days ago after sailing along smoothly in my novel about Tokyo artist Seiji. Reaching a scene change, I was stuck, up-to-the-hubcaps in mud, dead battery dead. Stared at the blank space and couldn't think of a thing. Nada.

Then this morning I made a startlingly simple discovery: I was trying to remember something I had deleted ... a bit of scenery from the new chapter, but it wou...
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Last year I wrote a short story about a fictional Tokyo artist named Seiji Matsuda. The story finished and published ("A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories", edited by Mohammad A. Quayum), I turned to other writing projects. Seiji, however, wasn't through with me. So I set the other projects aside and began working on expanding his story into a novel about his life. It is now about half finished, and what a challenge it has been.

A short story is one thing; a novel is something else again....
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If you've been reading my blog, you know I attach a lot of importance to characters and character development to telling a good story. Click on the following link to read a wonderful article by MG Harris, author of the acclaimed series "The Joshua Files". If you're a writer, you'll want this one for your library.

http://www.mgharris.net/2010/04/24/motivating-your-characters-the-key-to-success-zero-moment-blog-tour-7/

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When a friend asked me the other day what role humility plays in creating art, I responded that I think it plays an important role. But when I looked the word up in several dictionaries, I found the definitions less than satisfying: “The defining characteristic of an unpretentious and modest person, someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others.” Others are: “Modesty, lacking pretense, not believing that you are superior to others,” and “Shifting...

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The simplest answer is to begin and never stop, because it's in writing that we develop our skills. The problem with many "wannabees" is quitting the minute discouragement arrives, and just like the next hour and the next day, it will arrive.

What's the best way to guard against being defeated by discouragement? Read books by great writers. And read about them. In the early days, I read everything I could lay my hands on about well-known writers and their experience. I bought every single issu...
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Kokopelli has always been one of my favorite images. He celebrates, he dances, he is playful, and he gets me to seeing and exploring things I wouldn't ordinarily see and explore. Whenever I hear his whistle, I've learned to follow it.

This image is from a painting by my good friend Paul Bauck, and I treasure it. Paul was kind enough to gift me with a digital image of it before we left Seattle for Sapporo, Japan a little less than a year ago.



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This ahuehuete tree is one of my "muses". It represents great age (it is over 1,000 years old), myth, shamanic reality, struggle, history, creation itself. The first time I saw it, I was stopped in my tracks, stunned by its immense size, looking like a mountain in an ancient Chinese painting. The Aztec king, Moctezuma (misspelled "Montezuma" in American English) played at its feet when he was a boy. Ahuehuete trees (Mexican cypress) grow to immense size and age. The one in Tulun, in the squar...
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