Porthole

Torsdag den 8 april

Will it snow? It's still 49 degrees just before midnight. The temp is sliding and rain is forecast.

Really put work into "Riding the water dragon (silkpunk): intro-excerpt. [70ab]" 

Silkpunk... shoot me now said the cow.

39 damp and breezy degrees at 1:30.

I had to close the window. Too chilly for me to sit there and work on silkpunk. "Silkpunk task #2" 

Blimprider sent a note, in response to my post, about appealing to an American WDC audience. Well... I guess I'm toast! He makes a very valid point. WDC is mostly limited to writers from Britain and the Colonies. They are mostly anglophiles (What country do you want to visit? 30dbc bloggers: England!).

I don't fit in here at WDC even though I've been here 15 years. But not to worry. I didn't fit into Baptist Oklahoma, Drunk Homeless Shelter, We-love-mountains Montana, Rust Belt Blue-Collar Factory, Kansas 4 Croppers, Anal-Boulder, Paranoic-Portland, Government-by-Mafia, Greater Germania. So not fitting in with British Empire Loyalists is okay.

I'm used to not fitting in.

Exposure to the multi-cultural universe over a lifetime has helped me become less snooty and more tolerant ... to an extent. But... I fear that I can't write to a middle-aged, middle-class, mono-cultural, mostly-Christian audience. So ... I'm not going to waste my time trying to. I'm never going to please a mid-America-market.

I know full well that some niche markets thrive on You-Tube while others don't. BL does well and my offering will have that as a plot or subplot.

Folks here at WDC won't get it (it may be outside of their comfort zone) but imho opinion the website has become Whiter and more midstream as marginalized people abandon any effort to reach out as no one reaches back.

I stay here because it's comfortable. But it's foolish to think that I'll ever be understood.

The solution may be to continue writing and posting here (not necessarily for public viewing) while pursuing other places to try to connect to a broader audience or a particular niche.

That takes effort.

I wrote back to Blimrider:

You make valid points.

So, I'm not going to try to appeal to a WDC audience. Part of the frustration of blogging has been the narrow interests of fellow bloggers. It's a revelation how small their comfort zones are and how unwilling many are to expand them. On the surface I have little in common with them. My saving grace is that I've had a lifetime of being the odd duck swimming among swans.

Fortunately for me, there is a large Eurasian population out there (not here) that has feet planted firmly in both East and West. This is obvious on Youtube. I'd make them my audience if I knew how. I'm not good at marketing.

As for hand-holding ... there are ways of saying the same thing in different ways or exlaining them. In the Thai BL "He's Coming to Me" one character has been out of circulation for 20 years (he's a ghost) and things like cell-phones and laptops, paying without cash, bing su (Korean shaved ice) have to be explained to him. I learned a lot about Thai culture!

Similarly the Taiwanese characters could explain many things to the 'visitors' Kago, Walker & Kwong (from Japan, Britain and Hong Kong). And why? Li&Chen are business women. As merchants, language and culture are merely obstacles to be dealt with. Chok-Poh, their younger brothers, are young and that means universal themes of growing up and taking risks.

The 'romance' aspect can be brought to the fore or fade to a side-story. The story will have to be written first though. No need to decide now. If it falls into shenmo-BL-detective-drama with a silkpunk overlay so be it (with a sprinkling of pirates... real or imagined... piracy was frequently a concern on trade routes).

What it won't focus on: the military or violence, be it Britain-rules-the-World (that racism you mention is for real... also classism and religious saints-versus-heathens) or Cowboys-versus-Indians. There's enough tension navigating change. I'm not going to tell a War story, a conquest, or typical teen emo-story about abusive family.

The applicable Chinese color for both change and stabilty is yellow. The story starts in winter (black) and moves into spring (blue-green). This will be expressed in many ways like clues in an Agatha Christie mystery.

I've written more earlier today and now need to flesh out my characters as once I know them I'll know what obstacles to place in their way. The silkpunk-steampunk will make the story seem other-wordly but the characters and situations must be concrete and real. Even if the Gods and Immortals intervene it's still about my main characters and how they navigate the world.

44 degrees at 3:33.

I need to write a poem!

I don't care for what I wrote but 'it is what it is'. Neither is very poetic.

"Gifts of the graves [35]"  "My name is Kåre [34]" 

40 degrees at 8:09.

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