I just finished writing Year of the Dog ! It had a massive plot hole that I had to fix which turned out to be more work than I expected. Here’s a snippet: “Hey, Auntie Nell.” He wrapped his arms around her, bussing her on the cheek and breathing in pikake flowers and shortbread cookies. And suddenly he was nine years old again, and her solid presence had made his chaotic world stable once more. “What are you doing here?” He usually took her to dinner on Wednesday nights, but today was Tuesday. The edges of her smile faltered a little before brightening right back up again. “What, I can’t visit my nephew?” She angled around him to enter his home. “Is this your new house? Looks lovely.” Which was a blatant lie, because the fixer-upper was barely livable, much less acceptable to a neat-freak like his aunt. She also left four matching pink and purple floral suitcases on the stoop behind her. Only then did Ashwin notice the cab driver standing slightly to the side of the walkway. “Can ...
It’s been a couple months since then, but I did the worship music for our church’s Good Friday service. The service is a combination of people from both the English-speaking and Japanese-speaking services, so the worship leader has to sing at least a few songs in Japanese. I could do five songs, but I decided to sing all of them in Japanese while my other singer (in this case, Captain Caffeine) sang the lyrics in English at the same time. It’s a bit confusing, but I wanted the Japanese congregation to feel very included (which they don’t when the songs are in English). The service went smoothly—well, I didn’t make any mistakes, at least! I had been practicing the songs in Japanese for weeks before the service. One of the songs my pianist really likes is “10,000 Reasons”, and while it’s not really a Good Friday song, I thought it would be a good upbeat song to end the service with. So I had to search for the Japanese lyrics for the song and came across this version by Lauren Horii...