What happened to the love, Japan? We used to be best friends? You and I, cramped together in my tiny dorm room. Your map on my wall. Your music in my mp3 player. Your media icons and fashion sense and animated entertainment all around me. It used to be everything! Everything, everything, everything… The amount of money I spent, the amount of time I wasted, the amount of inspiration I accumulated where did it all go?

Lost, decayed, caught underneath end-of-the-world theories and television shows with real live actors. Speaking English no less.

Sometimes, I feel at a loss.

A large chunk of my life was carved out with pretending Miami wasn’t really Miami at all when I lived there and instead it was some proto-future Tokyo that I was immersed in with my friends. I could recite fall anime schedules by heart come late August and I had lists! Charts! Things I needed to remember to watch and see and share with friends. It was a good time but I must have got craggy and old. Sometimes those things happen.

I have an amazing friend, Anna, who I have served a vast chunk of my life in sharing absurd nerdery and other things with. Last night there was a collective cry about Japan! In an absurd promise, I said I would remember all the things I loved and put them back into my life.

(Because that is what life should be about, I think. Keeping in all the things you love, no matter what…)

So, with that, I stalk out old music videos just to say, man, I’ve always loved that coat….

Excuse me while I dance around my apartment now.

Ashley Lorelle as interviewed by Amanda McLoughlin

Magen Toole as interviewed by Melissa Dominic

It went something like this:

I was able to get though most of From Russia With Love while sitting in the Emergency Room a few weeks back with my Grandmother (who is well, for those who are wondering). Six hours or so there, in between bouts of finding hot coffee and shooting off emails with my phone. I was able to spend good quality time with my best friend James Bond.

James Bond, though, mostly talked to me about how nice his sheets were and what kind of food he ate. In fact, I was left wondering if there was some sort of James Bond cookbook available, because all I read about was eggs and weird stew meat. I was confused. I showed up to the party hoping to hear more about guns and sexy women and maybe about out-spying a few other spies here and there. But no, I got a lot of food talk and train talk.

This isn’t 2-chan, man. This isn’t the /train/ board. I wanted to read about violence!

There was one really great section of the book I realize I shouldn’t have enjoyed – when two slightly feral women beat the ever-living out of one another for the sake of some man. How unfeminist and uncouth of me to enjoy, but, at least there was some action happening. I read the book hoping for action. In fact, I was hoping it would teach me some action.

Still, though, my love for you, James Bond, has not diminished. I know now that you like to talk to me endlessly about mountains and food and maybe we can watch Thomas the Tank Engine together, but, as for decent action literature? It wasn’t enough for me.

At least the cover still looks nice.

There’s been a slight change of pace when it comes to getting the writing done lately. I’ve invested in a pair of tiny laptop speakers and set up shop literally in front of my front door. The kitchen is in the midst of being renovated and I’ve taken the opportunity to make this new little spot my home, for as long as it’ll last.

It’s narrow and slightly dark, but the chairs and the wide, round table we inherited from the previous owner make it alright. It’s right underneath the air conditioning vent, so the white noise sound creeps on every so often, playing against whatever I can find on internet radio.

A change of scenery is good for the story, I think. I’m working on editing my latest short story – longer than anything I’ve done in a long while, really, and the calm atmosphere of house music and pale walls have done it well. Four-thousand words and counting, taking place inside a Laundromat when a pair of rollerskate thugs pay our hapless hero a visit.

Soon the renovations will be complete and this area will go back to being a hallway. I’ll miss it then, so I’m sticking it here.

Remember it was a nice spot.
Remember you got some good work done here.

Sloane Leong as interviewed by Valerie Valdes

Amanda McLoughlin as interviewed by Ashley Lorelle

Valerie Valdes as interviewed by Sloane Leong

The biggest point of interest though, is this:

Earlier this summer, my favourite partner-in-crime, Magen enlisted my (marginal) assistance in a project we’ve called Summer Sessions, a writer-on-writer interview series that we hope will bring in new readers to one another’s work.

I’m a little behind on my own cross-posting, so, I’ll be throwing up the links to some interviews today. I hope that you guys will go read and enjoy them, because I know so many people worked so hard to get them together.

i have very many unpopular opinions

It is not an easy thing to say, so I am going to just come out and say a lot of it. I have a lot of unpopular opinions on writing and the state of fiction these days. Things like, I think the over-saturation of urban fantasy is totally obnoxious and I am really tired of everyone writing YA Fiction and Whatever happened to fiction being something you pull apart and understand on more than one level?. I don’t know, maybe I am looking in all the wrong places or staring too deep into the abyss of words, but, really, it is all I see around me and I’m starting to wonder, maybe, you know, it’s not just me.

I don’t think getting into all three of these (and all the other unpopular opinions I have) at once would be good idea, so, I’ll just start somewhere. You can punch me in the face afterwards. But I have to put my foot somewhere, and really, it isn’t as bad as it sounds.

I’ll start off by saying I like a lot of fiction. Truth be told though, Sci-Fi and Fantasy were never my strong points. I skipped over the young adult literature when I was in high school, skipping to adult fiction at the time (I was reading Girl, Interrupted and The Virgin Suicides at age 15). Arthur Nersesian’s books were everything to me late high school and early college (you know, The Fuck-Up and Dogrun and my personal favourite Manhattan Loverboy). It hasn’t changed much since then. It still takes a lot out of me to read a fantasy novel (and I rarely do it) and I’m really picky with my Sci-Fi (and I’m sure I’ll never read anything written by certain classic Sci-Fi authors, I just can’t do it).

And I think, because of this, it puts me in a weird place. I think I just don’t understand Teen Fiction (yet, somehow, I do really well with Middle Grade fiction, because I can read those books like a champion) and I especially don’t understand Fantasy Teen Fiction. I’ve read some teen fiction I do like, I think, but mostly it leaves me wanting more. I don’t understand why the plot moves so quick or why the characters seem the same all the time. And I really, just really, don’t get everyone’s obsession with it. It’s wonderful to get the youth reading (and maybe I am dating myself here), but sometimes I think the stuff they are reading is so disheartening. Maybe it’s because it moves fast people love it. The problem is, I want to understand it, because I want to love it too. But I think, at this point, it may be time to make my peace with it and move on for now.

Because for me, I want to do more.

Maybe I have high dreams and maybe the things I look up to are a whole different thing. I can appreciate the Weetzie Bat series, but I could never aspire to write something like that. It isn’t me. It isn’t me at all. But give me the slim volume that is House on Mango Street and I’ll start to cry when I am trying to explain it to someone (And yes, I consider that book to be an all-ages kind of novel). Give me a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy and I will hyperventilate when going over the stylistic use of setting and parallels to the time frame it was written. It goes on and on. I get skitterish and excited over Junot Diaz and Heim’s Mysterious Skin and everything I ever needed to learn out of fiction I learned from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and I wonder if I really did miss that boat and I am stuck, not connecting with the people who I see all around me writing because they are writing Teen Fiction and I have absolutely no understanding of the concept. And it is okay because it has to be okay, but I do wonder if I am missing something. It leaves me with the unpopular opinion of why the heck is everyone so into this, because I’m not – no matter how much I’d want to be.

And I’m not saying I can’t read it here and there (I’ve enjoyed such fun things as parts of the Princess Diaries series or The Mortal Instruments series or, like I said, the Weetzie Bat series), but it ends up hurting my skull if I read too much. It’s a shame, really, because all over the internet, everywhere I turn, everyone I talk to, it’s all they read. It’s all they write.

I totally lost out here guys. I am a boring stick in the mud. Hold it against me, sure! But at least, tell me what it is about it that does it for you.

Someone? Somewhere? Anywhere…?