First things first, I have a review in today’s Manga Minis, for DMP one-shot, Hey Sensei? which is definitely my favorite of their BL offerings I’ve read so far.

Now it’s time to get around to my final topic from the poll! Originally in my head, this was called “The Futility of Grading,” but the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a silly thing that was to say. It’s not that grading is futile, just that it is tricky and subjective. I might not like being asked to assign a grade to something, but as others have pointed out, it does provide a shorthand for letting the reader know if you liked something or not. Or does it? Heh.

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Good morning, all! I have a couple of reviews in this morning’s Manga Minis, for volume three of Hitohira (see my reviews for the first two volumes here and here), and for DMP/June’s BL one-shot, Love/Knot.

So, something that keeps coming up between me and another reviewer dear to me is a deep insecurity about our own reviews that kicks in whenever we read something written by the other. I think her reviews have an incredible clarity and power of description that immediately tells the reader whether or not a book is something they want to read–something I feel entirely helpless to achieve. She thinks my reviews are thoughtful and especially insightful into the emotional world of the characters, which she envies on some level. Basically, she thinks her reviews are missing the “big picture” and I think mine are missing the point. Most of the time, I think we just admire each other in a very constructive way that inspires us both to do our best, but sometimes we become disheartened by our perception of our own skills, and that’s when I think I have to pull out some kind of lecture on the subject for both of us to listen to. This is my attempt at that lecture.
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I’m mostly recovered from illness, though I still want to sleep too much. My review wrestling is over, though, at least for the moment! That review I was having so much trouble with has gone up, for Vertical’s The Blade of the Courtesans in today’s Otaku Bookshelf column and Manga Recon.

The Blade of the Courtesans is a Japanese historical novel set in at the beginning of the Edo period by author Keiichiro Ryu. The book was nominated for a Naoki Award in Japan, but I found it incredibly difficult to review mainly because, to be perfectly honest, I really disliked it. You can find out why by reading the review, but… yeah. I try really hard to write balanced, objective reviews for Manga Recon, much more so than I do here where I figure it’s my place to talk about how things affect me personally. This time, though, it was really hard. Not that I had to scrape to find good things about the book to discuss. It does have good points. But the less good points were really difficult for me to get around, particularly those concerning the roles of women in the story.

Now that I’ve finished the review, I’ll be interested to look around online and see what other people thought. I really respect Vertical and what they put out there, so it actually quite pained me to grade this as I did. I wonder if other people would agree with my assessment, or if I’m just too picky about the wrong things. I guess I’ll find out!

I’d like to take a moment to seek out some advice from comics artists who work with writers. I know there are at least a couple of you who read this blog regularly, and perhaps you can pass the question on to others.

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A few people have expressed interest in knowing a bit more about my comic-in-progress, and though I think it is really too early to talk about it publicly in detail, I’ve created this short public info page to try to satisfy the curiosity somewhat. I’m afraid it reads a lot like those horrible blurbs on the back of books, and may, in fact, do my comic more harm than good. I guess we’ll see. Please feel free to ask questions, or to tell me that it makes my comic sound awful and that I should kick myself for having put it up, which I strongly suspect to be the case.

In unrelated news, I just read some spoilers for chapter 201 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. Wow. More on this when the chapter comes out, but. Wow.

This blog has become pretty exclusively a manga/anime blog, but initially it was intended to have a broader scope, and I’m going to use it as such today. These are the things on my mind right now.

First of all, I haven’t talked at all about politics here before, but it’s hard not to with the presidential election looming so close. I think Joe Biden was correct last night when he said that this is the most important presidential election I’ve been a part of in my lifetime. Others have felt important at the time, but the weight of this one is overwhelming. I feel it everywhere, too. I’ve been enjoying (and cringing at) Shaenon Garrity’s stories of her mom’s experience campaigning for Obama in Ohio. They remind me of my own mom, arguing with conservative relatives and friends over e-mail and on Facebook. I saw a bunch of old friends last weekend in New York, and with each one of them the conversation eventually turned to politics. My host’s ten-year-old daughter wouldn’t let me leave the house without my own Obama button. People are excited and terrified and energized. I’m not going to pretend this is a non-partisan blog. I’m obviously an Obama supporter. It’s hard for me to imagine, though, why anyone wouldn’t want to participate in a historic election like this one, regardless of ideology. So on that note, I’ll just remind everyone that you can register to vote online at declareyourself.com.

On a completely different note, I’ve been doing a lot of work on my comic over the past few days, and though I know people mainly come here to hear me talk about other people’s work, I’m going to talk about mine just a little.

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I have a jumble of things on my mind today (what else is new?) and I’m going to attempt to organize it all somehow. Let’s see how I do.

First of all, Johanna Draper Carlson wrote this great article, How to Break Into Writing Comics which is pretty near and dear to my heart these days. I’m not exactly sure where I fit in to those options, and I’m thinking I need to figure that out. I mean, I know what I think I’m doing, but I’m not sure if I’m going about it in a useful way. Maybe, too, my gray areas are partly due to the OEL manga industry being (seemingly) a little different than the comics industry as a whole, in that from what I can surmise (and this is the “truth” I’m currently operating on), there is really no way in at all without doing the work of finding your own artist. So I’m doing that, while still holding out hopes that I might be able to get a publisher interested sometime after that point. It seems that this is how it needs to be done. I guess I’ll find out. In any case, I’m grateful to have read the article.

Switching now to fangirl mode, we finished watching Princess Tutu on Friday night, and it affected me so strongly, I haven’t really been able to talk about it yet. I love that. I’ll try to talk a little bit now, but it may take another week or so before I can be, you know, articulate.

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I don’t ever seem to have time enough for anything lately, so just a few brief items today.

I’m having a lot of frustration while trying to write these days, and I expect it’s a bit of anxiety over the self-imposed deadline I have coming up which I don’t think I’m going to make. For the most part, I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m not always going to make the deadlines I set for myself, and that it is still good to set them, because I’ll still get further along than if I did not, but I think in this case I may have paralyzed myself a little bit with the urgency of it, and how much important I’ve placed on it. I guess we’ll see.

In any case, time to move on to my topics of the day, Bleach, Bakuman, and Princess Tutu!

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First of all, many thanks to those who have been leaving BL recommendations for me here! I’ve started looking a bit at some of the recs, and will report back in more detail soon. So far, the series I’ve looked at are Shout out Loud!, Let Dai, and Totally Captivated, and I’ve liked at least *something* about each of them, though I still have some reservations.

Random: This made me laugh for an entire day. Seriously.

Happy: I have at last acquired a scanner, which means that my next installment of the Fullmetal Alchemist Read-a-Long will include scanned pages from the Viz editions, rather than scanlations which I’d resorted to originally. I’ve also updated the previous entries (vol. 1 & 2 | vol. 3 & 4) with the proper pages. I’m also thinking of posting some version of my massive xxxHolic post in this blog (previously posted in fannish places), now that I have proper scanned pages, as I have a pretty much constant urge to try to draw people into that series.

A bit of navel-gazing to follow:
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First off, a few interesting links from the non-manga portion of my blogroll (yes, I do care about things other than manga):

Wil Wheaton says we should try to stop MTV from remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show. W. T. F? I agree. Sign the petition here. AmyM has posted a list of writing contests of many kinds. Very cool, and also a strong reminder that none of us have an excuse to be sitting on our asses. Neil Gaiman is not blogging but links to the Coraline promo video-a-day. Coraline is one of my favorite books, and though I’ve been a little suspicious of the way it’s being put on the screen, I remain cautiously optimistic.

Okay, this is actually from my LJ friends-list (and *is* about manga), but ashura-sama has posted her translation of this week’s xxxHolic spoilers, and I admit I’m a bit giddy. Her cut tag jokes that “-This- should be chapter 104″ and okay, yes, I ’ship Doumeki/Watanuki, what can I say? Note: Link contains spoilers for xxxHolic chapter 163. Click at your own risk.

On other CLAMP-related subjects, I am still catching up on older series, and finally picked up volume 1 of Wish from the used shelf at my local comic shop (Modern Myths, by the way, a lovely store indeed*), and read it last evening.
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