When the Well is Dry
Since December, I’ve basically not written any fiction. I’ve written a few blog posts and managed to keep up with my class — checking my students’ writing and making comments on their papers. But I’ve barely been able to write fiction.
I learned long ago that my creative output is unpredictable. And I generally don’t really worry about it. I know that it will bounce back in time. But it’s still no less frustrating when I try to do some creative writing and the words just aren’t there.
I did manage to write a haiku today. And tonight, I did got a few manuscripts that had been previously rejected back out to calls for submission.
It’s been a discouraging year.
I understand why so many people drop out of trying to get their work published. It’s easy to get depressed and lose hope when your work gets rejected over and over and over again. But this is not my first rodeo.
I know that at some point, the words will come. And, like a geyser, they’ll come pouring forth so fast I’ll be hard pressed to get them down as they come spraying out.
Until then, I just need to hang on.
Languages of Tsukimichi
I read a chapter or two of a manga a couple of years ago and, at the time, it didn’t grab me enough to keep reading it. But my son wanted me to try an anime he liked and, after an episode, I realized it was the same one: Tsukimichi: Moonlit Fantasy. After watching a few episodes, I decided to read the manga, Tsuki ga Michibiku Isekai Douchuu. (I have not read the light novel, though it might be interesting to do so.)
I mentioned to Philip that I was watching the anime. I said something like, “It’s an isekai about a guy who is dropped into a kind of wasteland. He makes some powerful allies and things just go pretty well for him.”
“It sounds like slime,” he said, meaning That Time I Was Reincarnated as a Slime.
“It is!” I said. “It’s exactly like slime! But completely different.”
What I really want to write about, however, is how Tsukimichi manages representing different languages. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a manga that tries to manage so many languages like this.
The protagonist, Makoto, is picked up from Japan (where he spoke Japanese) and is sent to the other world where he meets with the “goddess” who is repulsed by his ugliness. She banishes him to the “edge of the world” but gives him “the ability to understand what demons, monsters, and other non-human races say”, but not to speak the “hyuman” language.
The Edge of the World is a wasteland inhabited by powerful monsters where hyumans (people) rarely go. And, sure enough, he can seamlessly communicate with monsters and a girl orc that he encounters there. She is rather puzzled that a (seeming) hyuman can speak her language. When she teaches him magic, she apologizes that the chant “isn’t in orcish”. It’s represented in the manga with some weird script.
You don’t learn the background of what the script actually represents for another hundred chapters. But this is one of the ways that other languages are represented.
When Makoto first encounters hyumans, their speech is represented in a different odd script and (as the goddess had said) he can’t understand them and they can’t understand him. (He writes a tanka about it — see the top graphic above and read the alt text for the translation of the tanka.)
He subsequently discovers that basically everyone can speak a “common tongue” — except him. Even when he studies it, although he gets so that he can understand it, he can’t make himself understood by speaking. But he discovers he can generate written speech with magic that people can see and read.
In this graphic, you can see the protagonist using the written speech that someone can see. But you can also see a speech balloon with a doubled line that is a horse (actually a kind of monster called a “bicorn” hiding its two horns) that is talking to him in a language that others can’t read, represented with the doubled line — what others can hear “buhii”. And then his thought balloon with the hashed outline.
A little girl explains the common language to Makoto. She says its a blessing of the goddess that people receive after visiting a shrine. It makes it seem like she considers it something separate from just learning a language as a child. But her description makes it seem indistinguishable from just learning a language as a child. The demihumans, who lack the blessing of the goddess have to learn it in addition to their native language. But basically all of them seem to do so.
As an aside, I would be interested to learn more about the common language. It seems like it could be Esperanto-like. But we really haven’t learned much about it at this point or why hyumans don’t have separate languages or even regional variation. In Japanese, of course, there are a lot of regional variants (e.g. Kansai and Osaka-ben).
In the end, he needs to address most hyumans using magic writing. But he discovers an alchemist who can speak an “ancient language” (normally used for spellcasting) and can speak with them. He can also speak with demons and all of the demihumans, including bicorns (pictured above), werewolves, forest ogres, etc. There are a vast number of different kinds of demihumans.
In addition to speech, some characters can use telepathy with the protagonist. This one is a bit complicated but represents the linguistic complexity being represented pretty well. Read top-to-bottom, right-to-left.
First, the upper panel. The first statement, “They even had quite the fanbase in Tsige” is a telepathic communication by an interlocutor (not the person represented in the panel). The statements, “Aqua-san went to Rotgard?! Our Eris-sama!!” are comments made by those people in the common tongue, but recollections — not part of the current conversation. Makoto says, “And won’t fans be sad about their departure?” is a telepathic communication from him that is part of the conversation.
In the lower panel, Eris (a demihuman forest ogre) is speaking the common tongue (which you can tell by the font), to which Makoto replies in the forest-ogre language. Then Makoto switches to using a new form of secure telepathy that Eris can’t eavesdrop on, which is identified by the thick black inner border.
There are also a number of nods to Japanese. The only characters that can speak Japanese are Makoto and his contracted magical servants, that gain it through their connection with him — plus two other characters that were isekaied from Japan. One of his servants is a dragon who decided to contract with him after studying his memories and becoming fascinated with period dramas. She styles herself as a samurai and adopts various aspects of samurai dress and speech (using “washi” instead of “watashi” as a pronoun, for example.) Another older, more powerful dragon, is revealed to have lived with a previously isekaied person who has since passed away. They haven’t yet had that character speak Japanese, but I’m looking forward to it.
It’s a charming story and I’ve enjoyed reading it so far. I’m looking forward to further releases as they become available.
A Much Needed Spring Break
When I was the Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center, Spring Break was just a chance to get caught up with software and hardware updates. Since then, I’ve used it to accomplish significant bits of writing. This year, however, I really needed the break. And I took full advantage.
I used my time for self-care. I slept a lot. I got in a lot of walking. I hung out a friend on the patio. It took some time, but I finally started to feel like myself again.
For the first time since December, I felt like I could write some fiction. I wrote a short story, A Persistent Curse, and submitted it for publication.
With his paws on the back of the sofa, Makul poked his nose through the curtains and looked out. A misty drizzle was falling — it always rained when the curse was bad. The raindrops passed through an assemblage of shadowy spirits clustered just outside the window trying to get in.
Makul waited, watching, until she came around the corner: a short, wizened crone with a dowager’s hump who shuffled along with a stick to hold her up. She gathered her black shawl around her shoulders as she hobbled around the corner and into the shade from the lone cloud that hovered over the apartment building. Her mouth made a hard line when she looked at the building and saw the swarm of spirits jostling around the first-floor apartment of her grandson.
“Tiom da fantomoj!” she muttered. “The curse is bad this morning.”
It was rejected. But at least I feel like I have some creative energy again. It was a long dry spell.
I’m still getting some extra Tanuki time. But little by little, things are returning to baseline.
I remind myself that it’s my last Spring Break. This is my last semester as an active faculty member. I’m trying to be particularly cognizant of the milestones and rhythm of academic life as I experience them for the last time.
In any event, today is the last day. Tomorrow, the students come back and on Tuesday I’ll start teaching again. I have a fair amount of grading I’ve been putting off — and my regular service commitments this week: Faculty Senate and Rules Committee.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends!
Using a Text Editor for Writing
I use a text editor for pretty much all of my draft writing. I can date this pretty much to 1993, when Microsoft Word 6.0 was released. It really sucked and, after many years of using a word processor, I quit using one for writing.
I did most of my early writing by hand or using a typewriter. I took “secretarial typing” in high school — they changed the name that year to “business typing” which was perceived as less sexist. I was the only boy in the class. There was a “personal typing” class that required students to learn to type 45 words per minute. But in secretarial typing, you needed to learn touch typing (to not look at the keyboard) and type 60 words per minute. It was perhaps the single most useful class I ever took in my life.
I also learned to use DEC computers with a paper terminal in high school. Mostly, I was programming in BASIC. There was rather crude text editing, but I could see the potential for writing text. There was a text formatting program called RUNOFF that I experimented with a little bit, but it was too complicated for my purposes and so I never actually used it for anything. But I could see the potential.
When I went to college, my family purchased a Smith Corona electric typewriter for me as a gift for going to college.
As an undergraduate, I learned to use a word processing system — maybe ALL-IN_1 — on the VAX computer at Alma College. It used a “gold key” to access formatting commands and you could do a lot of amazing things. I had been using my typewriter to write papers, but quickly switched to writing everything using the word processor.
Around that time, a friend kept asking to borrow my typewriter. I didn’t mind since it wasn’t like I used it anymore: once you got used to using the word processor, the idea of going back to using a typewriter was a monstrous impossibility. I kept suggesting that he learn to use the word processor, but he always claimed to not have time. So I finally said I would type his paper for him using the word processor.
There was a central terminal room, but we went to a small computer lab in the life science building. I logged in and quickly typed his paper. Then I printed it using the dot-matrix printer in the lab. He looked at it skeptically, then said, “Yeah. OK. But it has a widow.”
“Let’s fix that,” I said. I typed a few keystrokes and printed again. When I handed him the output, his eyes got bigger and bigger and bigger.
“You can print it again?” he breathed.
He got an account the next morning.
I had other computers along the way (including the odd typewriter/wordprocessor hybrid pictured above) but when I started graduate school, I bought a Powerbook 100 and a copy of Microsoft Word 5.1. It was amazing. It was perhaps the best word processing system I ever used. I used it to write all my papers as a graduate student, including my gigantic 200 page dissertation that had 88 figures and 15 tables.
Then Word 6.0 came out and it was garbage. It was clunky and unstable. It frequently crashed and you lost what you’d been working on. Its documents frequently became corrupted and were unrecoverable. I kept using my old copy of Word for a while, but it was clear its days were numbered. So I switched to doing all of my draft writing using a text editor — so at least I wouldn’t lose my writing.
On a Mac, the best GUI text editor for a long time was BBEdit. I used that for a number of years, then (when it quit being shareware) I switched to TextWrangler.
Note: I’m leaving out the whole chapter where I learned Unix and the vi editor. I used vi a lot for programming, but there wasn’t a native vi for classic MacOS, so it wasn’t something that was convenient to use for local files until MacOS X came out. So, although I use vi a lot, I never used it much for writing.
When I began teaching the writing class, at first I chose different packages for Macs and PCs. Then I started using Linux myself and started looking for applications that would work identically on all three platforms. Eventually, I settled on Atom, which was released in 2015 and I started using that.
Atom was an adequate text editor. It was built on Electron, which made it a bit bloated and clunky. But it worked exactly the same on all three platforms. It was also highly configurable and had a lot of community add-ons to provide additional functionality.
In 2018, Microslop purchased Github, and in 2022 killed off development of Atom — probably to force people to use their proprietary development environment. But, because Atom was Free Software, the developers promptly forked it and renamed it Pulsar. It works exactly like Atom did and I still use it today.
I had very little success persuading students to use a text editor to write. And I didn’t see many other people using text editors either until this year. Suddenly EVERYONE seems to be using text editors to write. Weird. I guess everything old is new again.
A bunch of people seem to be using Obsidian. Tobias Buckell described building a whole writing environment based on Obsidian. Other people are using Notion and NotebookLM and there are a bunch of others.
I’ll keep using Pulsar, at least until I finish teaching the writing class. Then, maybe, I’ll look at others to see if I can find something I like better. But I’ll still want something that is Free Software and cross platform.
A Reflection on No Kings and Revin’s Heart
I took a trans flag to the March 28, 2026 No Kings protest in Amherst. There are many things to protest about Trump and the MAGA movement: the misguided war in Iran, the destruction of our global alliances, the endless grifting and profiteering. To me their persecution of the trans community has been among their most odious acts. During the first Trump administration, I recognized that the Republicans were organizing to use trans people as a wedge to divide the country. And this was a motivating force behind my fiction writing.
My debut work was Revin’s Heart, a steampunky fantasy adventure with pirates and airships and a trans protagonist. Part of my goal in writing about trans people was because I was moved by their struggle. It’s monstrous that the Republicans have identified a small minority of people to demonize in order to foster division in our society. Letting trans people live their best lives costs them nothing. Yet, they attack and demonize them in a sadistic and self-serving effort to pander to the worst instincts of hateful people. We must stand united in the face of this hatred.
In point of fact, Revin’s Heart is barely about trans issues at all. It’s just a young man’s adventure story, where the young man happens to be trans. He has some experiences that are unique to his identity as a trans person, but — for the most part — it’s just a young man making friends, finding mentors, confronting challenges, and living his best life.
Where Revin’s Heart becomes a critique of our society, is when it talks about feudalism. During the first Trump administration, I was horrified as he anointed his children with government roles — exactly as a monarch would do — and the Republicans did not revolt. This kind of behavior would never have been accepted in the country I grew up in. Neither would the constant mendacity, self-dealing, or corruption. I saw that there was a striving on the Right for someone to be a king and for people to want to be vassals. So I wrote about a society corrupted by these principals and tried to identify both the strengths and weaknesses — and show someone trying to look beyond to what might be possible instead.
I have written three novella-length sequels to Revin’s Heart that continue this conversation. In the first, Revin must confront a revanchist movement that has taken hold on his home island of Devishire. In the second, he works to quell a populist uprising in the town of Campshire that threatens to provoke the worst impulses of the aristocracy. The third, takes place on a foreign island, Ecorozire, that has been devastated by civil war and social collapse. I hope to be able to share these stories with the public soon.
Back in Amherst, I had considered making a sign for the protest, but decided that carrying the flag was the most eloquent statement I could make. I saw a few other rainbow flags and signs advocating for trans issues. A few people didn’t know what the flag represented and asked me. Several trans people approached me to thank me for bringing the flag and a few asked if they could be photographed holding one side of the flag. It made me feel good to help them feel represented.
I wore one other small symbol at the protest: a pin that was gifted to me by Oliver Jensen. Among the flurry of executive orders that the Trump administration issued at the very beginning of his term were a number that were targeted at persecuting trans people. Oliver designed this pin and had several produced which he gifted to people on Mastodon. I requested two: one for myself and one for a trans colleague.
When I first got the pin, I wore it on a daily basis for months. I was proud to wear it again for the protest. Oliver has since moved to Germany, but he said that he was honored and grateful that I wore it to the protest to represent him.
The energy at the protest was generally positive. People are angry and horrified by the terrible actions the administration is taking, but they take encouragement from one another. Awful things are happening, but we can support one another and have faith that things can get better. Amherst is a blue, blue drop in a blue lake. We here are largely sheltered from the worst of what is happening in the country. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is standing up to the worst excesses of the Trump administration. We have not been invaded and assaulted by the masked Brownshirts of the Trump administration. We can protest without fear of being clubbed and beaten by jackbooted thugs. For now. Let us hope for better days for all.
In the Spotlight
On March 29, I was spotlighted by J. Scott Coatsworth. Scott is the creator of Liminal Fiction and QueerSciFi. On his blog, he runs a series of articles that let authors respond to a range of potential questions to highlight their recent work. I answered questions about my first published work, weird things I’ve done for research, secondary characters in A Familiar Problem, my favorite character to write, fonts, writing without dialog, what I wanted to be when I grew up, pets, what I like to drink, whether I’m afraid of snakes or spiders, and what I’m working on now. I also provided a synopsis of A Familiar Problem a brief excerpt.
I’m never sure how useful it is to do these kinds of things. I don’t know how often they lead to sales or get people to learn more about me as an author. But I’m not really sure that’s the point. It was fun to answer the questions and give me an excuse to link to Scott’s blog.
