Today was yet another day when neither the agent nor any of the Japanese companies I had contacted sent a single reply. The automated messages from several of those companies said they would be in touch within three days of receiving an email. Tomorrow, we shall see whether they truly keep to that deadline.
Then again, I saw a news headline saying that this week was Silver Week, a run of consecutive holidays in Japan, so I may have to wait a little longer for those replies after all.
Five days remain until departure. I take a deep breath, caught somewhere between anticipation and the fear of being disappointed.
I had planned to buy a ticket and watch the Naniwa Yodogawa Fireworks Festival from inside the venue, but only when I reached the actual ticketing page did I discover that every ticket had already sold out.
I hurried to see whether tickets for Kyoto's Jidai Matsuri were still available. One website required a Japanese telephone number before I could register and buy a ticket; another accepted only Google Pay. Frustrated, I gave up and ordered an eSIM that would work in Japan instead, my sole act of preparation.
Google had also reminded me about differences in electrical voltage, forcing me to abandon the idea of bringing appliances from Germany.
I had been certain there was still plenty of time. How did the days suddenly vanish like this?
It was the same last week: while I was busy developing the website and consuming vast quantities of coding tokens, it seemed as though the tokens burned away in an instant.
This week, I hardly seem to have used the tokens for anything, yet the remaining allowance is already about to reset.
The paradox of relative time, indeed.
After entering a two-week period of recuperation, I have slowly begun writing the middle volume of the Dark Wings Universe again.
It feels a little like writing the final volume did back then: the farther I go, the greater the resistance becomes.
I am stuck at a turning point in the relationships between the characters in the middle volume. The closer the story draws to what is “fated,” the less able I am to write those destined trajectories. Instead, plots and characters I never designed in my outline have begun to take on forms of their own, perhaps because, free from the constraints of a framework, they have been able to grow in an atmosphere of freedom.
Perhaps this is the process of creation: a winding road and a struggle that only the person walking it can feel.
My daily output is, in truth, rather limited.
Once the mental effort spent thinking through a turn in the plot has been transformed into words, I have neither the mind nor the energy left to devise an update for the blog.
And so I shall set down my pen here for today.
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