So Much For The Sideshow Dept.

Even if I didn't make it to 50,000 words this year, I still think NaNoWriMo was more than worth the effort. Now that Tokyo Inferno is "booted up" and running, I can slow down a little bit and concentrate on getting more of it written at a pace that better suits my current lifestyle.

I've tried to prune out a lot of things from the way I live, as a way to get avoid getting too caught up in distractions, but in the end it always comes back down to a few basic things: my job, my family, my writing, and some online activities including this website. Any one of those things alone eats up a lot of time, and it gets worse when you factor in any number of other distractions that can simply throw themselves at you.

A few new things came my way, though. Among them is an author of the period that Tokyo Inferno is set in: Satō Haruo, author of The Sick Rose a/k/a Gloom in the Country. I stayed up a little later than I would have liked reading it; the beauty of the language and the author's fondness for the world of nature is downright scrumptious, some of the best sort of thing I've seen since Morio Kita's Ghosts.

I also popped in Love and Honor, and while a full review is of course pending, my quick impression is that it's a nice rounding-out to the trilogy of The Hidden Blade and When the Last Sword is Drawn. Old-fashioned, but not in the stifling way that Dora-heita was. (I also have Hana and both Genghis Khan movies waiting to be checked out when time [ha ha] permits.)