I am as Hip as a Teenage Japanese Girl
It was interesting to see that the lead article on this morning’s NYTimes.com was on how cell phone novels have come to dominate Japanese publishing. Fully half of the top ten bestsellers of the last year were novels written a little at a time on cellphone keypads, in text message form, and then uploaded to websites like Maho no i-rando (sorry I can’t find a link… maybe because the site is in Japanese) in serial form. These serials were dismissed by writing critics (who seldom, it seems, have any idea what the public wants or cares about) as being short on character development and long on tear-jerky teen angst, but when the stories were collected and published in printed form, they exploded into the marketplace with sales that would make most authors crap themselves.
Why is this interesting to me, you ask? Well, as you know, my novel, The Painted Man (soon to have a new title before publication), was written on my cell phone! Yes, it’s true. While I may not wear a sexy-yet-stylish sailor outfit with a pleated skirt, I am hip as any teenage Japanese girl, thumb-writing away on my daily commute. Even now, when I am writing full time, I do as much on my phone’s tiny keypad as I do on the full computer screen. Even today, when I was on the subway to Manhattan to get my annual MRI, making edits on paper with a red pen (like a sucker), I was still pulling out my cell phone regularly to make detailed notes on how to improve sections, and to jot down ideas.
Also cool to note is that Japan was one of the earliest countries to buy publication rights of the book. Like 6 month ago or so, my agent’s proxy in Japan asked us to send him the book in text or MSWord format, so the publisher, apparently tech-savvy himself, could load it onto his PDA to read it on a plane ride. We complied, and he bought the rights soon after the plane landed. I thought it was kind of ironic, that he was perhaps the only person ever to read it in the same format in which it was written.
I hope I get to go to Japan on a book tour one day. That would be friggin’ awesome!
I just want you to know that if you did wear a sexy-yet-stylish sailor outfit with a pleated skirt, I would still be your friend.
Peat, you would so HOT in a sailor outfit. Your fan base would go through the roof!!
Just remember that forgetting to shave your legs before leaving the house in that outfit would be a major fashion faux pas. Don’t skimp.