Learning Everything —mnchrm vol. xxxv

Hello friends! Hope all of you have had a good start to your weeks. 

There's some days where it's very easy to sit down and write for me, and other times where I really repel myself from the desk. Unfortunately, I'm finding today to be more of the latter, but I promise I'll push through for you guys and won't let it get in the way.

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My big project this week on the writing front has been on a new blog, Hibi Kaika. Hibi Kaika, or 日々開花 in Japanese, means something like "daily bloom" or "daily blossom". The idea was simple, to start a daily blog where I write and share something each day about something I find interesting or joyful, to help people appreciate the joy of daily life. Really, I'd say that's the main goal of my work. 

The ideal I aspire for in all my work is to offer people a new perspective to those ends. Even my more high-concept genre work (which I haven't been posting or writing much of, lately) aims for this.

So far, it's been a lot of fun getting everything up and running and sharing these posts every day. I'm still working on building up the site and the plan, but if you haven't taken a look yet, I'd really appreciate you doing so! I'm also sharing the posts daily on Twitter, for your convenience. I'd love to build it up more, so any way you feel like sharing it would mean a lot to me.

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I'm thinking about taking another workshop, inspired by a story shared by fellow writer (and subscriber to this very newsletter) James Yu. James recently took a workshop with famed sci-fi short story writer Ted Chiang, whom you may know as the author behind the story that became 'Arrival'.

I've only taken one workshop outside of a few writing courses while in university, which was lovely. However, that class was focused more on pitching and getting pieces placed rather than on craft. 

I'm sure this is naivety and pretentiousness, but I've felt for  a while that I was pretty solid on the craft side, focusing more on getting pieces published. However, now that I've started to get a little foothold in that aspect, maybe it's time to swing the pendulum back the other way.

You can find James's writing here, as well as a form to subscribe to his newsletter. I can't find the archive to link to the story about Chiang directly, but I'm sure if you ask him nicely, he'll send it to you.

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If you've known me for a while, you'll know I'm a huge proponent of learning everything. I think the ability to draw connections between different fields is as important as knowing anything specifically, and of course am constantly trying to learn new things.

To those ends, I started a sort of informal apprenticeship with a developer I admire. Now, of course I don't necessarily want to become a developer, but having dabbled with a bit of development and also being on the periphery of so many great developers, it's something I've wanted to learn more about for a long time. 

Right now, I'm starting pretty basic, mostly focusing on designing better sites rather than actually coding them. I've been playing around with a website design in Webflow, as well as some UI work in Figma. As well as reading the documentation for Vue.js. Right now, I can write HTML and CSS, and know how to utilize some frameworks like BootStrap. 

Earlier this year, I started to learn JS again, and will probably see it through this time, now that have someone to report to whom I want to show progress. 

Already, the parallels are starting to show. Some of these design principles and the best practices are things I'd began to take for-granted, or at least hadn't been very conscious of lately. Design is everywhere, and all-encompassing. Especially in writing. 

You need to make sure your ideas follow a clear path, and flow from one to another. There should be a hierarchy of concepts, connected with details. 

I'm also thinking more about how things are laid out. My mentor said something recently about how, "If I can draw it, I basically know how to code it.", which rings very true for me, even in writing. I find it's extremely helpful to have something to refer back to, in photography or writing or anything else I do, as a reference point. What emotion was I trying to convey here? What ideas? How can I organize this to best accomplish those goals?

Overall, I'm really excited to start making progress here, and take the "amateur" title out of my GitHub bio. 

What's a field not connected to your main focus that interests you, or has been useful to you for knowing it?

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I recently started following a new account on Twitter, a Japanese illustrator named Nishii Terumi. They have been tweeting (in English, no worries, friends) about the difficulties present in working in the anime industry.

As I'm sure many (all?) of you know, I'm a big fan of anime, and Eastern storytelling in general. I started learning Japanese seriously to read Japanese novels in their native language, and of course have been putting the skills I'm learning to use in anime and Japanese games, as well.

Many are familiar with the difficult working conditions expected of almost all industries in Japan. The plight of the salaryman is well known. So, hearing this insider information about the anime industry doesn't exactly surprise me, though it's still difficult to hear.

Most interesting to me perhaps is just how little the revenue generated makes its way back to the animators themselves. Even if their work is a success, there doesn't seem to be much of a revenue sharing model with the creators, such as royalties and whatnot. I guess the same is true for TV shows and movies in the US, where I work, but still sort of odd.

Definitely seems like something in Japanese culture will have to change to create a better working environment for office workers. Terumi seems to suggest that outside funding from abroad may have a positive affect on the anime industry, but only time will tell.

I'd love to write stories to be adapted to anime and manga. Maybe I should make my debut as a light novelist. With all the "literary" writers in the West pushing into comics, seems like anime and manga should be fair game as well. It's definitely a goal of mine, but even as a fan I'm hoping working conditions improve and the culture changes.

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Thanks again for welcoming me into your inboxes! Please share this if you found it interesting, and if you have questions or want to discuss, my inbox is always open to replies.

Your faithful commander,
 — I