Over the pasts few years I've read a lot of good novel, and a few great ones. Two novels that I've found truly memorable are Garth Stein's marvellous "The Art of Racing in The Rain" and Lizzie Eldridge's "Duende". 

I'll begin with "The Art of Racing in The Rain". Had Kathleen McKenna not recommended it ("insisted" fits better), I would never have known about it, and had I known about it, I wouldn't have read it. Auto racing is nowhere even close to something that interests me. But this novel a...
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I just finished my novel "Bear: The Story of a Boy and His Very Unusual Dog" this afternoon, and sent it off to Taylor Street Publishing. 

Who is Bear? Bear is a brown dog that looks exactly like a brown bear. He also acts a lot like one. He's a great companion, listens well (unlike most dogs who will go to sleep soon after a human begins to talk), and has a roar that is the most chillingly terrifying, zombie-monster roar anyone ever heard. He only uses this roar when it's absolutely necessar...

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In a previous blog, I announced to everyone that my novel Seiji was finished. It was. Problem was it had not yet been given to an editor (though it had been shared with friends, whose responses were quite a bit less than, erm, "enthused" about it. After giving it to my editor here in Sapporo, Derek Chamberlain, I discovered that I had (and have) a lot of work to do to make Seiji the great story I want it to be. Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets and novelists. Here is what she has t...

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Seiji is off to the publisher in January. Watch for it sometime next year. Here is a brief introduction to the character and his story: 
 

At five feet nine and a half inches Seiji is taller than average for men of his generation. To see him in a crowd, you wouldn’t take him for anyone special; his rectangular-shaped face is so ordinary looking that it is easily missed. It is his way of walking and his eyes, which take in everything and express kindness and humor that catch one’s eye. That ...

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“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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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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Writing, for me, is a love affair. Rewriting is what makes the love affair with a writing project blossom. To a painter, rewriting is like looking at a painting and adding a bit of color here, additional brush strokes there, sometimes adding something in ... or removing something that doesn't fit. I saw my mother, who was a painter, standing in front of her easel with a brush in one hand, looking at the painting she was working on, making the necessary changes.

But rewriting isn't always fun. ...
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No, this isn't a travel article, it's about the few months I spent in Mexico City in 1973-74 and how I was captivated by the city. It's also the title of a poem that I wrote for my son Michael back in 1974 that was published in the magazine "Valley Views, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio later that year, about which a friend recently said "You really fell in love with Mexico City, didn't you?" Oh boy, did I ever! I am now in the middle of writing a novel about it, called "The City Has Many Faces". But ...
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I recently ran across a quote that perfectly describes my experience with writing short stories and working on a novel, both of which I am doing. The quote is from novelist and short story writer Haruki Murakami, and is in the Introduction to the English edition of his short story collection "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman".

"To put it in the simplest possible terms," he writes, "I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy. If writing  novels is like planting a forest, then wr...
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