I seem to always be in a race to catch up on all my blog posts.
I’m taking this to mean that I’m just very busy enjoying my “real” life at the moment…which is a good thing, right? But I want to get these posts sitting in draft finished before I forget everything. And if you know me, you know that all the pictures are in order and ready to go…it’s just the writing that’s waiting for me. There are so many words out there and yet for some reason, at times I have a difficult time putting them together to form sentences. But I am going to plow through this.
So in a twist of irony, I thought I’d start off by diving into this post about writing!
Miwa, who always writes beautiful posts for Cranes and Clovers, kindly invited me to this blog hop about writing. (You can read hers here. She always takes the most amazing photos and I love the way she writes!) I was worried at first because I seriously do not write all that much here, it’s mostly photos. But because I was so excited Miwa chose me, I thought I would give this a try! 😉
What am I writing on or working on?
Well, at the moment I am finishing up my monthly letter to my grandma because she is one of those rare people who doesn’t own a computer, much less an email account. (It takes a while to finish because I end up having to look up every other kanji on my cell phone before I write it down!)
Regarding this blog though, as I mentioned above, I’m trying to find the words to fill in my blog posts that are currently sitting in draft. They are mostly posts on my weekend trip to Nasu and other events in the past month or two, including two weddings, a beer garden, and a birthday.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I like to think that each blog is special in its own way.
Am I just saying this because I don’t really know how mine differs from other blogs? Um…yes. I have to be honest here and say that I’m not even sure what genre this blog is. I’d say it’s a journal of my life in photos. Although if I had to think of something, I’d say that a blog written in English by a regular (whatever that means) Japanese female is not as common in the blogging world. Or maybe I just don’t know where to look? What do you think?
Why do I write what I do?
Like many bloggers, it’s a way to remember what I did and how I felt at that moment. It’s a way for me to hold on to the tiny things that fade over time. I think that’s how my writing (especially my diaries when I was younger) has always been.
Without writing things down, I don’t think I would have remembered how anything and everything revolved around getting my ears pierced in grade school (I wrote about it constantly for half a year). Or how confused I was when I came back to Japan as a teenager and first stepped into a Japanese-style bathroom stall (I thought I had accidentally gone into the janitor’s closet). Or how my world shifted when I started living alone for the first time (I’d never gone a weekend without speaking before).
Or even small things like that moment when I overheard a coworker being asked what he thought 少子化 (sho-shika, meaning declining birthrate) is in English and he answered, “uh…small children?” (In his defense, it kind of makes sense when you look at the kanji.)
So many memories. I guess for me, writing is remembering.
How does my writing process work?
As I said, I am not a writer at all so my process is quite slow. I usually start out by figuring out how I want to end the post. Weirdly having an ending for the post keeps me in line when I write. I tend to go off topic otherwise. I have a mind that wanders, which is probably why it took forever to write my college essays and I’d end up having to cut out half of it. And that is usually what happens with my blog posts, too. I love the “research” bit, aka surfing the internet for information. I learn so much and I end up wanting to share it all.
So most of my writing process is hitting the back-space key. To each his own!
Well…that only took about a month to write! (Sorry so late, Miwa!)
Did any of that make sense? I’m not even sure I answered the questions but I will say that this blog post itself was an interesting process of trying to figure out how and why I write the way that I do. And I am currently patting myself on the back because this is the longest blog post I have ever written in my life. Whew.
As a reward to you for actually reading all that and making it down here…I am happy to let you know that I am tagging the wildly witty woman that is Rurousha, who should be writing a book in my opinion, but is currently happily roaming the backstreets of Tokyo under the summer sun and sharing her discoveries with us on her blog.
Happy writing! x
Kaori Square Feet 
