the home stretch

Well, I have good news and bad news. With one night and one day to go, I have finished my NaNoWriMo story. The bad news is that, due to my complete lack of planning (I always was a pantser), I've come up 2,500 words short.

Shazbot.

The Taedong River, which runs through Pyongyang, in the 19th century. This is where the real story, the one involving the General Sherman, went down in 1866.

Now I gotta comb back through the book and find places where I can pad it out. That's no problem. I was a bit scanty in my description of Ganghwa Island and Chongjijin Fortress (my story takes place on the Han River, which runs through Seoul). So I'll lengthen the story about the crew's expedition on the island. Maybe I'll introduce a new character...some British or American castaway who washed up on Korea's beaches in the early 1860s but can't leave because of the Joseon Kingdom's strict isolationist policies. Yeah, perfect drama bomb.

Wish me luck...

cocktail review no. 66 - Caipirinha

I never thought I'd get the chance to try this one! The ingredients are kinda out there, so this one requires a didactic preamble. Bear with me.

The caipirinha comes to us from Brazil. It was virtually unknown outside that country a few years ago, but it's gaining popularity around the globe. The word caipirinha is a derivative of the word caipira, which is roughly analogous to the English word "hillbilly."

The primary component of the cocktail is cachaça, which is a type of Brazilian rum. The main difference between cachaça and traditional rums is that it's distilled from sugar cane juice (as opposed to molasses) and then aged in oak barrels. The reason the caipirinha cocktail has been gaining ground outside Brazil lately is the increased availability of quality cachaça.

Case in point, Gecko's Restaurant & Bar in Itaewon, in the Yongsan borough of Seoul, South Korea. I was sitting at the bar last night for a coworker's birthday party and I happened to notice a poster on a nearby pillar, advertising the caipirinha. Remembering the odd name and the eldritch ingredients from The Bartender's Bible, and realizing that this was a golden opportunity (the ₩8,000 price tag notwithstanding), I ordered one.

Enough background for ya? Okay, here's the recipe:

• 1 lime, quartered
• 2 teaspoons fine sugar
• 2 ounces cachaça

Place the lime wedges and sugar into an old-fashioned glass. Muddle well. Fill the glass with ice cubes. Pour in the cachaça and stir well.

This is exactly how I observed the bartender doing it last night at Gecko's. Lime wedges and chunky sugar, muddled well, and then the cachaça poured in over the top. It was delicious, sweeter than I'd expected. I didn't realize sugar was such a large or vital component to the drink, and I didn't recall the ingredient list before I got home and checked online. Nevertheless, the taste was as limey as I had anticipated, and that was a welcome complement to the sugar. The cachaça was milder and more mellow than a lot of light rums I've tasted, and was only just discernible underneath the sugar and lime; whether this was the fault of the bartender's light hand or the cachaça's inherent properties was a mystery to me. Nevertheless I heartily enjoyed the drink and found it soothing, pleasant, summery and delicious.

Yes, it's a drink for a hot day and not a winter's night, but in that warm, smoky gallery at Gecko's in Itaewon, it was just what the doctor ordered. Try it and see for yourself.

my NaNoWriMo project, revealed

I know I've been cagey about the title and premise of my big sci-fi magnum opus, and for good reason. I'm very protective of it, because, well, it's my magnum opus. It's my baby, and I'm its protective father. I'll die of grief if it gets born prematurely or perishes in childbirth, or it comes out incurably deformed and mangled, or (worst of all) someone kidnaps it. I'm keeping the whole bloody thing under wraps until the proper time.

Concerning this novel, though—the one I'm doing for NaNoWriMo—I'm not guarded at all. It's not nearly as close to my heart as my magnum opus is. In fact, it's that crappy novel that I said I'd write. So here it is—you can have it. It's high time I told you what I was doing anyway:

The title is Mugunghwa: the Wreck of the Rose of Sharon. The Rose of Sharon, obviously, is the name of a ship. Mugunghwa is the title and "the Wreck of the Rose of Sharon" is the subtitle. (Subtitles aren't supposed to be capitalized, right? Or are they? Do I need quotation marks around the ship's name?)

Anyway, Mugunghwa is a historical fiction piece set in Korea (or "Corea" as it used to be known) in 1864. It's based on a true story. In 1866, the General Sherman, a well-armed trading vessel owned by a British company, attempted to open the isolationist Joseon Dynasty to trade relations with the Western powers. Things didn't go so well. The ship sailed up to the Keupsa Gate on the Taedong River (near present-day Pyongyang). The crew made contact with the Koreans and told 'em they wanted to trade. All offers of commerce were refused, but the crew was told that the Joseon Dynasty would provision them for their return voyage. The Sherman was ordered to wait at the Keupsa Gate until higher-level officials in Pyongyang could be consulted, and...

Wait, I already told you about this.

Anyway, you know the story. The ship was burned and the crew killed. Nobody really knows why the Sherman sailed on past its agreed anchorage. Whether the crew was motivated by greed, or bravado, or impatience...we may never know. But it makes a smashing good story, so I've adapted it for my own novel. I've changed the names of the sailors and some of the particulars, and I've moved the action to the Han River and Seoul instead of the Taedong River and Pyongyang. But the story's the same. A merchant vessel with an American, Chinese and Malay crew sails to Korea looking to trade. On board is Jabez Fuller, a Lutheran priest and the expedition's interpreter. He's a calm, cautious man, something of a worrywart, unlike any other protagonist I've written. Most of my M.C.s are snarkers, malcontents, cynics or loonies. Fuller is my first man of the cloth, and my first temperate and nigh-timid man. I say "night-timid" because in the end of the book, he...well, you'll find out when it's finished.

Other characters include O'Reilly and Fields, the salty boatswain and boatswain's mate, who have befriended Reverend Fuller; the iron-jawed and icy-calm Captain Richard Henry Pierce; the perpetually grinning chief mate and helmsman Lester Dawkins; the reclusive and neurotic engineer, Isaac Randall; his Chinese assistants Bohai and Chonglin; the fat and friendly Malay cook, Samad; the brave and noble deckhand Tong Lai; and the corrupt, self-centered, and unstable company man H.B. Morton, Pierce's employer and the steamer's owner. There's also the ship herself: the Rose of Sharon, a half-ironclad with wooden uppers—weathered and creaky but armed to the teeth.

The title, Mugunghwa, is a Korean word which means "rose of Sharon." The rose of Sharon is the official flower of Korea and has been precious to the nation's people since time began. In relation the novel, the word mugunghwa encapsulates the Korean's insular nature and their strong sense of nationalism, and the Westerners' misguided attempts at bridging the gap between the two worlds. It symbolizes how even the most genuine and heartfelt gestures can be badly misinterpreted by a radically different culture.

Anyway, that's the story. As of today I'm 14,919 words into it. Our ship and its little crew have penetrated the first line of Korean bureaucracy, thanks to Fuller's negotiation skills. Morton's instability continues to threaten the integrity of the mission and the safety of the steamer's crew. The Rose of Sharon is now steaming toward Seoul, and is close enough to hear the great bronze bells tolling every morning and evening. What will happen when these intrepid men come under the eyes of the suspicious and potentially hostile city, the capital of a hermit kingdom which has spurned all foreigners before? Will Morton's dangerous behavior and bigoted greed bring the expedition to disaster? Or will defeat come from the most innocuous and unexpected source?

I'll have to discover that as I scribble on. This has been my first experience writing fiction under a deadline, and the process has been eye-opening. But there's more to it than that. I started the novel with a clear idea of how it would begin and end, but only the vaguest notion of what would occur in the meantime. In the course of writing, so many unexpected things have danced from my cortex onto the laptop screen, things I didn't see coming until they were literally at my fingertips. The story has changed and twisted and turned in so many unexpected directions, with myriad plot twists and dramatic events coalescing at random. I never expected to have so many characters, for one thing. I started out with only Fuller, Morton, Pierce, O'Reilly and Fields, basically. I knew I'd introduce some other named crew members at some point, but not this many. It's awesome. They're all full-fledged and three-dimensional, too, not flat or generic or stereotypical (I hope). All in all, this novel is fulfilling my dream of writing a book similar in voice to The Mysterious Island (Jules Verne) and similar in theme to The Sand Pebbles (Richard McKenna).

And so, to sum up, here I am. Happy, inspired, energetic, curious, and only four thousand words behind schedule. (Tee hee.)

Further bulletins as events warrant...

the Seoul Lantern Festival

There are a lot of things I could say about the Lantern Festival—about how it takes place every November, and enormous lanterns of every shape and description are erected in the suburb of Jonggak, in the center of the Cheonggyecheon, the gorgeous stream which runs through downtown Seoul. But why bother saying these things when I can just show you the pictures?

(I apologize for the low-quality, less-than-vivid and somewhat blurry images. Either I know nothing about photography or my Canon PowerShot A480 doesn't do low light. Next year I'll have a badass camera and THEN we'll get the stew sorted from the dumplings. I'll photograph the hell outta this thing.)

well, rats

I can't say much right now because it's 1:26 p.m. KST and I have work in thirty minutes. But I've been having a hard time lately. Somebody's karma ran over my dogma or something.

Long story short (pun intended), I'm five thousand words behind on my NaNoWriMo project. I have three tests left to grade and input. Miss H has gone home for two weeks to get some stuff done. The cat's acting crazy and I'm getting over a head cold. But hey, at least the weather's nice. It's cool and moist. There was a luscious thick fog at 5:00 this morning and it was so dense I couldn't even see the neon sign on the church a hundred yards away. (Yes, the churches here light up their crosses with red or blue neon lights, and usually have illuminated names, too.)

Excuse me, I'm going to go grade the hell out of those tests and then eat me some stir-fried squid over rice (ojingeo deopbap, for your edification). TGIF, people. TGIF.

From the correct side of the International Dateline, this is Postie. Over and out.

NaNoWriMo, go!

Let me tell you everything about myself. I'm an intensely private person.

And that's it, really.

Haha, I'm just kidding. Long story short, I got bored waiting for the requisite six weeks to go by before I could start editing my new-and-improved novel manuscript (118,500 words). Stephen King says you should stick a newly-finished manuscript in a drawer and let it stew for a few weeks before you revise it. This gives you some time to draw back from the work and approach it with fresh eyes. So that's what I'm doing. Miss H is reading it in the meantime, and I'm on tenterhooks until I hear her review.

Anyway, I was bored. So I started looking into publishing options just to kill time. First, I thought I'd check out self-publishing. I contacted a free third-party service which connects you with the nearest self-publisher. I was contacted by someone anonymous who worked for a multinational firm which shall remain nameless. They gave me the details. Basically, even though this company was renowned and reputable, I was looking at an investment which was way out of my league; anywhere between $600 and $14,000. I just can't do that right now. Therefore self-publishing has been shelved until I can check into the more traditional methods. Like Baen Books.

Now that we're past that little update, it's time for the big news...

NaNoWriMo!

National Novel Writing Month, obviously. I'm doing it for the first time in 2012. I have my idea all worked out (historical fiction), I've done some pre-planning, the idea is fresh and fun and new, and I'm anxious to test myself against it. (Don't worry, I'll give you a full synopsis in a few days.)

Who knows...this could be that crappy novel that teaches me a lot about writing, or my first success. Who can tell?

The possibilities are endless.