I did feel like my amended version of the scene by scene breakdown was more easy to fill out compared to the original version. In particular, it is certainly more suitable for my needs due to my tendency to lose access to my characters. Or rather, I should say that I’m mostly in contact with them via thoughts and their logical thinking and less so regarding personal feelings. That makes sense given the type of person I am but is a weakness in terms of being a fiction writer. Basically, this amended version allows me to home in on my protagonists rather than worry about sidecast and their reactions which often bog down particular scenes in my draft.
On the other hand, the original version is a more bird’s eye view on a scene in terms of its key elements regarding what the ‘key players’ each want and their emotion changes. Depending on the goal for the scene by scene breakdown, that could be more useful.
There are two aspects to which left versus right is important in Chinese culture.
The first is that unlike Western society where right is considered the power position, it’s the reverse in Chinese culture. By the power position, I mean both seating arrangements and whether you walk to the left or right of someone else. The core reason is that left is associated with Yang and right is associated with Ying. Being male dominated for much of ancient China, it is not surprising that the left is favoured. So in Australia, Mum always walks on my right but in Hong Kong, she walks on my left. I don’t think she’s doing this deliberately to express power over me or in our relationship because ours for the most part is a relatively equal relationship but it’s just one of these cultural cues that she reacts to.
The second is that being left-handed does have very practical implications on those you dine with in Chinese culture. Essentially, the problem is that if you are left-handed and sit next to someone who is right-handed, it is very likely that the two of you are going to impede each other when you try to reach out towards dishes with your chopsticks. So Chinese parents were known to at least attempt to educate children born left-handed to try to change their habit towards right-handedness in order to avoid this kind of socially awkward outcome.
That’s it for today. Let me know in the comments if you have additional insights or want to know more about something I mentioned here.
Due to an accidental hand injury which lasted for a week and the two changes in approach I made for this particular task (first changing from index card to Excel and then leveraging FATE scenario creation technique for my novel), I’m expecting that it would probably be closer to the end of this year that I finish the re-outline of my WIP. But the good news is that I’m finally being able to integrate some of the new scenes that have emerged in the process of my decimal drafts. In fact, I believe that I can finally increment to draft 0.84 after this (it has been stuck at draft 0.83 for 3 years now, looking back at file properties, it was created in September 2022).
And that’s all I have to report for progress. As I’ve said time and again, onwards with it!
This topic is actually inspired by my study in translation (I started my graduate certificate in translation in the middle of July) and I thought etiquette does play a very important role in Chinese culture, all the way from ancient times.
Before I delve into the topic area of this post, I will just list the following facts to put into context how important etiquette has been for China:
Dynasty changes often come with revision to the Record of Etiquette which is about how things should be according to etiquette for everyone from the Emperor to a lowly peasant
Etiquette is one of the core standards of operation for a human according to Confucianism which has been in dominance as a philosophy in ancient China for a long time, probably starting some time in the Han dynasty as far as I know
The Bureau of Etiquette has been one of the Six Bureaus (top tier administrative areas) in central government in ancient China ever since the Sui dynasty
Now, we move on to talk particularly about titles and personal addresses. What I mean by this specifically is how the nobility referred to themselves in ancient times but I will also talk about applications to modern days.
Growing up in Hong Kong, the first title I think of is 朕 (pinyin-wise, zam in Cantonese or zhen in Mandarin) which Emperors call themselves. This term goes all the way back to the Beginning Emperor of the Qin dynasty, the first dynasty accredited with unifying all of China under one rule. Basically, he was the one that decided that this is now a title reserved only for the Emperor (before then, it was essentially just a term meaning “I” that everyone uses) when he’s referring to himself. Similarly, there were special reference terms that only a Lord could use such as 孤 (Ku or Gu) and 寡人 which both have the connotation of being someone alone. It reflects the Chinese cultural value that humbleness is a virtue but also the fact that you only inherit that position from your father when he has passed on (you have become a fatherless orphan).
Now, modern equivalents- we don’t have titles anymore in China, Hong Kong or Taiwan but what is kept is the general idea of humbleness i.e be humble when referring to yourself while praising others. In modern days, this is used less for humans now- it used to be that you would refer to your own wife as ‘stupid/non-nimble wife” and calling someone else’s wife “respected wife” but it’s an ancient practice that didn’t carry to modern times. Instead, we might use this type of language differentiation when talking about our own homes versus someone else’s home for example. And when we do that, it usually indicates a quite formal tone that perhaps means we are talking to elders or people we don’t know too well. The specific term for my home in this context roughly back-translates into English as “abode below” whereas the equivalent for your home is “grand abode upper”.
That’s all for this topic. If you want to ask me more questions, let me know in comments.
Technically this is the subgenre of urban fantasy or supernatural fantasy but to be honest it felt more like a family story to me because it’s all about two sisters’ efforts to find their missing Mom. It’s okay, the pacing is a little slow at bits but I think that’s to be expected given the storyline and focus. The ending is satisfying.
Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare
This is more the traditional fantasy that was my main reading interest and love and I do think it is a good story interweaving between two interesting protagonists. In fact, I like how their stories were at first separate but then became intertwined with each other. Not quite sure whether I will continue onto the next book yet but considering it.
Strike the Zither by Joan He
I already covered it in a separate post so won’t repeat it here.
Mystery
The Secret of Three Fates by Jess Armstrong It’s a good enough mystery in the sense that I didn’t guess the culprit and it does a good job of introducing that it’s set in the past with the vocabulary at the start.
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
This is part of my Broadening Horizon Read for this year. I had started it but it’s too early to say anything about it.
Literary Fiction
The Lost Legends of New Jersey
This is the 3rd of my min-reading challenge- the first chapter is titled Constellations. It is really a family drama story, focusing mostly on the son but there are a few chapters written from the father’s perspective too (although in third person rather than first person for the son) and there is definitely an echoing effect between the two characters. And the story is set in New Jersey and apparently that’s the theme for the novel too.
For me personally, this is not a story that has me really engaged because my reading taste does not lean towards literary. But it is engaging enough in its own way.
We caught a Flibus from Seville to Faro and didn’t do much at all on the first day because once we moved to Portugal, my prepaid Spanish Orange 20 stopped working. And basically despite us receiving a printed out map at the hotel on how to get to the city, we ended up going on the wrong street altogether and all we achieved was for us to get two pepsis at a fast food place where I could borrow their wifi to find us back to the hotel. For that entire day, the other landmark we visited was the Arco de Vila. The place I booked for dinner was right across the street and we ordered half a dozen oysters and the mariscada or seafood platter. It was two storey high with a whole crab and two oysters at the top and prawns and two different sizes of clams at the bottom. It was too much for two of us and I think we only finished half of it. The collection of the seafood together was also far salty for us (basically the sea in the region must have higher salt content than the Tasman Sea or whatever the New Zealand sea is).
Day 2, we asked the hotel to book a taxi for us to the train station and we did that every day at Faro (in general, we catch taxis a lot this trip because it’s that affordable. Usually each trip is under 10 Euro excerpt when we are travelling to and fro airports.) We bought a three day Travelcard for the Algarve Regional train line and went to Ferragudo. I thought I should be able to catch a taxi at the train station but the reality was that there was no taxi (it was a tiny train station and felt like situated in the middle of nowhere) and when we asked someone about it, apparently we had to call for a taxi with a number that should be posted at the train station. So the end result was that the entire trip just ended up being a Macca’s lunch following by an attempt to find a church that ended in a road that went nowhere. We called it quits. We could have caught the train back and stopped at Albufeira and a Google search suggested that it would take a whole hour to get to the attractions from the train station and we always wanted to have dinner early and just stay in our hotel after dark. So instead we returned to Faro where we spent the afternoon visiting the Cicada Velha which we went past on the first day but did not venture into it due to the steep street at the entrance and it being slippery to the pair of non-runner that I was wearing (it was a pair of shoes I bought from Hong Kong, sort of like first-gen Sketchers runners but with air). Anyway, the steep incline was actually just a little bit and it was no longer slippery when I changed to my Nike runners. But there wasn’t much to see- one big church and then the Arco de Repouso which was basically just an arched door. I cancelled all the dinner bookings after the first dinner’s experience and we ended up going for Hawaiian pizza. It was okay but didn’t have enough fillings for it to be really great- the pineapple did have juice but there wasn’t enough pineapple on the pizza.
Day 3 was Portimao and Praia da Rocha. We bought two pairs of sandals specifically for this beach trip (nowadays we buy clothes and everything trip wise online for the affordable prices) . We were a bit hesitant on going onto the sand initially because we didn’t like walking on sand but we finally took the plunge because otherwise we would have bought the sandals for nothing. We didn’t enjoy the sand walking experience- me specifically because I could hardly walk, my sandals kept wanting to slide off every few steps, but actually the sand were really really fine, so much that after we went back onto the non-sand area, there was hardly any that clung to our feet and we didn’t have wash them with water at all. And somehow time went past pretty quickly in that we spent way longer at the beach that I expected. We had lunch at 2pm or something at the beach as opposed to having it at the marina like I had planned. I ordered a tuna sandwich and Mum something else but actually my tuna sandwich was much more tasty. For dinner, we went a little further to a different street and had the seafood cataplana. It was okay- again tomato based but I found it tolerable.
The last day at Faro was spent at Lagos, the end stop of the Algarve Line. We walked past the Premenade which apparently was an attraction but didn’t see much in it. We went straight to lunch because it was pretty much that time and it made more sense to start the actual sightseeing after lunch than do a little bit and have to interrupt it for lunch. To be honest, we didn’t see much in Lagos. We went to the old town after lunch but didn’t feel like there was much. Then again, most people would have come for the Bengali cave boat tours but we were not interested in that due to similar things we had done in New Zealand (not the same type of caves but we just didn’t feel like it was an experience we would be keen in). Dinner was spent at the other place I didn’t cancel because I was curious in their crabstuffed. I thought it would just be the crabshell stuffed with things but actually it was still a whole crab and we also ordered sauteed clams and crispy bread to go with them. The crab shell had its own unique texture and flavour-very creamy in texture and the other parts of the crab that was the stuffing did feel like they ‘showed up’ (the crabs claws and legs, however, felt totally tasteless to us because they were boiled). But to be honest, such creamy texture usually gave us a feeling of fullness that shrunk our appetites (I remember I did write about how we almost left a truffle oil pasta untouched in Switzerland last year, or at least that’s what the waitress saw since it was a very big plate and we just took the top layer off which wasn’t very obvious, I have to admit. And basically it was the same thing). The waitress told us that the crab was 625g or something and Mum and I routinely have crab cooked in Chinese style up to 1kg. But on that day, we basically left half the crabshell with fillings and only had one each of the crab legs/claws (so 2 pieces out of 4 between us and we couldn’t even be bothered using the crackers to extract the meat from the claw or the leg). The clams were also very tasty so to be honest, it was a meal I had appreciated except for leaving so much leftover food that can only be discarded. The waitress did try to pack it away in a takeaway box for us but we had to decline it because we couldn’t possibly want to snack on it in the middle of the night and we never had seafood leftover from one day ago for fear of causing diarrhea.
The jump off lines is from Collecting Light by Deb Cooper and this is from a day when I’m not feeling the prompt:
I see the way my fingers dip into the trough of hand cream and withdraw while leaving the shape intact. I see the way, or rather feel the way, this pen I’m holding to write slide up and down my hand because it is slippery with cream.
I see the way my hair falls across my face like a curtain that obscures vision because I had gone for the ionic straightening treatment. I see the way jigsaw puzzles click into place as I line up the right pieces next to each other.
I see the way bad actresses tense up their muscles as they smile or act angry. I see the way right ahead of me, the pavement right in front.
I see the way the timer ticks down in seconds but the blue line that goes around the circle with the countdown in the middle hardly moves at all. I see the way white cursor on my PC screen stays motionless because the mouse is still, nestled below me. I see the way the blue line is now visibly shorter as time ticks off. I see the way a porcelain work can change colour under different lighting or I imagine it does. I see the way.
I am running out of writer craft insights to share and so I’m branching out to this other enterprise that I have been running for my fellow students from the UBC novel writing courses. I created this back in 2018, off this random idea I have of providing a platform for us all to gather after the courses are done to see each other through the novel writing exercise but also for collective learning etc.
One problem I continually have been running into is the issue of engagement. Basically we only had one administrator and no one had expressed an interest to join me when I asked around (small membership was an issue and probably continues to be an issue. To date, there are a total of 62 members, the most recent joined 8 months ago- the course instructors kept about my group and directed new students to this group of mine so I get occasional new member requests). One solution would be more activity from me which I think did work on a short term basis when I had daily craft questions or themed months that focused on a particular craft element with weekly tasks. However, usually there would be only one person who would engage with me on a given thread. Also, it does take energy out of me when I was the only content provider.
Recently, I had played with the idea of bringing the themed months back but tried to elicit more content providers to reduce the workload on me. However, I’m very doubtful of this working.
On the other hand, there have been subsidiary groups run off this particular FB group of mine in the form of writing sprints. I was even asked to join as a member but it’s not really my thing so I ended up declining the offer.
In summary, is it easy to run and manage such a FB group as I had created? Yes and no. It is not hard if I want to maintain the status quo of minimal level of engagement and just a platform for general encouragement for each other. But it does get hard if I want to take it beyond that. Which I haven’t.
The last leg of the Spanish journey is based in Seville. My original itinerary would cover the Santa Cruz neighbourhood in the morning and the signature landmarks such as the Royal Alcazar, Cathedral de Sevilla and Plaza de Espana etc in the afternoon on the first day. But as is our norm, we skipped most of the original itinerary. We had brunch at Alameda de Hercules and found our way to Palacio de las Duenas Seville and that’s all we covered for the Santa Cruz neighbourhood. Then, somehow we stumbled our way to Setas de Seville (see pic above, it was actually taken on the third day though) which I didn’t even put on the agenda because I wasn’t sure that it was close to anything.
I had booked dinner at a place close to Maria Luisa Park but due to the drastically changed itinerary, we had dinner again at Alameda de Hercules because that was the closest location where restaurants clustered that was in proximity to our hotel. We basically just had dinner at the first restaurant we came to since it was on the list of recommended restaurants from our hotel. We ordered the egg with asparagus and seafood paella (for lack of anything else that appeals) and neither was good. The asparagus tasted like what Cantonese call sword beans (not fresh beans either but leftover beans) to me and Mum commented that “it must have been leftover from several days ago and reheated”; the colour definitely says it’s leftover- that tinge of dark green with a sense that it’s wilted. The seafood paella didn’t really use fresh ingredients either even though it has sufficient seafood in it- mussels, calamari rings and other stuff. But none of the seafood tasted particularly good, the calamari rings basically tasted like frozen stuff.
Day 2 was spent at Cordoba and we were pretty much lost already once out of the Cordoba train station while trying to get to the Mezquita (I tried to look for an information booth at the train station but couldn’t find it) so we ended up getting a taxi there. After the obligatory photoshoot of the outside and the courtyard, we got another taxi to the Alcazar Viejo area for the Patio Festival because according to online information, it was the most beautiful area. The rest of the day was pretty much spent queuing outside each house on the San Basilio street. To be honest, the queuing up was a bit tedious and each of the patios were really tiny. But the photos did come out great overall. Then again, we actually stumbled across one business that was part of the Patio Festival near the Mezquita and perhaps because it didn’t have the crowds, I actually felt it was a better experience than the San Basilio patios which just had the advantage of having many of them clustered close together so you could visit them all in one go by going down one street. The Festival was done at around 2pm and we didn’t actually get to go into the last house we queued up for which was finally not on San Basilio. We languished at the Cordoba train station for a few hours because I had prebooked a return trip. For dinner, we went to Alameda de Hercules again and had seafood pizza. Actually, I did not book dinner for that day because I was unsure whether we would go to Eslava Calle or have seafood pizza. We went to Eslava Calle first because it was closer but apparently we had to sit at the bar if we did not have a reservation and so we chose pizza at the end. It was okay but not great.
According to my initial itinerary, we were supposed to visit the Triana and Macarena neighbourhoods but since we still have a bunch of Seville landmarks to go, we completely scratched that. The morning was spent trying to find our way to Setas de Seville to retake photos for me because my face was completely dark in the set of photos taken on day 1 at Seville. We had lunch at the nearby plaza where we ordered black paella (again for lack of anything else that appeals and I was curious whether it would have a different base than tomato sauce, and the answer is nope). Slightly better than the dinner version to be honest but Mum’s already sick and tired of paella by this third encounter and told me explicitly “no more paella”.
We spent the afternoon of the third day visiting Torre del Oro and then Plaza de Espana and called it a day. To be honest, Torre del Oro wasn’t that interesting and the riverside was quite boring if not for the fact that the local flora of purple flowers attracted Mum. Plaza de Espana was way more picturesque with the marble columns. Maria Luisa Park was just right next door but we couldn’t be bothered visiting it after Retiro Park since it’s nowhere as famous and we figured one park is enough for one trip. Actually, before Plaza de Espana, I think I was trying to find the Royal Alcarzar unsuccessfully but we came across an unknown palace, snapped some photos of it and just decided to go to the Plaza de Espana instead because it was way closer. I booked dinner at a place that offered roasted suckling pig and both me and Mum were looking forward to it due to Segovia. But the restaurant didn’t live up to its beautiful interior design at all. The roasted suckling pig was really oily such that there was a very thin crispy skin covering a whole layer of fat AND the meat was very tough and completely tasteless. We did order an appetiser of crispy artichokes that was okay but not great.
Continuing with Striking the Zither by Joan He, I think it’s best seen as a fantasy set around certain historical events as detailed in the Romance of Three Kingdoms. In fact, after section 1, the fantasy element is so much that it’s enough to tip the whole story into the fantasy genre. On the other hand, I feel the novel did not make clear what was the actual gender norm for the story until the Author’s notes right before Acknowledgements- I basically got confused over whether it was matriarchal versus patriarchal society and it turns out that it was neither- people stood on their merits irrespective of gender.
I don’t want to nitpick but there are also typos impeding my understanding at more than one place. Overall, it’s still solid work but I’m not sure I’m on board with the story enough to follow it to its conclusion.
This book is probably a good model for me to follow if I ever consider historical fantasy like that other project I put on the back burner because it was turning too straight historical on me even though I made up a fictional protagonist who inserted herself into history.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 