Hajimemashite

Hello, Open Book reader. Welcome to my first post! I had big, overachieving plans to create a perfect post, then realized how weird it will sound without any context about myself and who I am as a writer. Then I added more, and more, and when I saw how long it was getting, I got really disheartened and scrapped the whole thing. It needs work. (It will also make sense if I post it later this month, you’ll see why.) Now that I have this light appetizer of an introduction, I feel good about myself again. So here goes:

Hi there. Nice to meet you. My name is Sifton and last autumn I saw my first novel, Yume, finally sit on a public bookshelf. (Context: I have two…no, three self-made copies of the oldest draft of Yume hiding in various bookshelves in my house.) If Yume brought you here** then you’re already familiar with my being a Black Canadian who lived and taught in Japan. Since there’s already a whole saga about my experiences, I won’t expand on them too much this month, with the exception of one of my favourite Japanese festivals that happens in February. I might also cook a Japanese dish, if I can work up the courage (I will expand on that a bit further down). I’m still planning what to write about during my in-residence time, but as of now you can expect to get to know more about the things that have influenced my creativity in general. I’ll talk a lot about my past, occasionally my present, but maybe not so much of my future. I mean, I’m not doing much planning towards that these days, what with…you know… *gestures to everything happening with the world* But during our time together, I will do my best to bring you somewhat entertaining content. Please anticipate some sitcom humour, and a number of kaomoji, memes and/or gifs because that’s mostly how I communicate now. There may also be some sass. (My inner monologue these days hasn’t had this level of sass mouth since Japan so you can expect her to seep into my future posts. I can try to curb it, but no promises.)

There will be at least one post about my growing up with video games. I might also talk about my history with cartoons (mostly Western animation as a kid and anime as a teenager). There may be a reference or two to how much I love dancing. I might complain every now and then about my current struggles with fitness and health since there is some tie-in with video games involved (and if that sounds vaguely interesting, then yeah, get excited for that post ^_^”). Depending on how my month goes, I may include a post about cooking. As you can guess from Yume’s content (and cover), I’m a HUGE fan of food, but believe it or not, I have grown to hate cooking. Cooking and baking. They used to be my biggest passions, but now I can only do either one when I know I’ll be the only one eating it. When it comes to making something that other people will eat or even see, my heartrate skyrockets and I wonder what convinced me to attempt any of what I’m doing when Uber Eats was a perfectly good alternative. So yes, I may post one of my cooking adventures later, but if I don’t…well, now you know why. Finally, I may allude to future writing now that people are asking about Yume’s sequel. Truth is, I recently re-started it. Then impostor syndrome (or something like it) kicked in and I gave up. But now that it sounds like some people want to see it, I’m starting to reconsider. (There’s also a whole other book between Yume and its sequel so…we shall see!)

Okay, this looks like a pretty decent post. No typos, grammar looks okay…and I’m done! Thanks for stopping by. I look forward to sharing more about what a big kid I am and all the hilarity that goes into my creative writing self. Until next time, またね!***

(**If Yume brought you here, I’m so grateful for your time to check it out. I hope it was at least mildly entertaining)

(***Here’s my overdue disclaimer about how I occasionally add Japanese phrases when I talk. Hajimemashite is roughly translatable to “how do you do” when meeting someone for the first time, and またね (mata ne) is like a casual “see you later”. Hope that’s okay. Otherwise…no, wait, I promised I’d curb the sass mouth ^_^”)