I recently wrote about our return to Korea, and about the return of some manuscripts I’d thought lost. But I’ve had another return recently, and I thought it’s worth commemorating in a post. That is: I’ve returned to fiction writing.  I haven’t written a new story in several years—since well before the pandemic—and most of that had to do with having a kid around, and a (more than) full time job, and translation work on the side. I did some RPG writing, including publishing a couple of books over the past few years. But I’ve wanted to get back to …

Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:  Reading Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. I brought a copy with me to Canada, thinking I would have time to read on the plane, and here and there during the trip. Turns out traveling with a kid eats into one’s reading time severely. My copy (the Penguin edition of Robin Buss’s translation) of  is about 1200 pages long, and I only hit about page 150 by the end of the trip. (I’m just past 300 pages now, though, and briskly making my way beyond that. Working on edits for a novella we’ve translated. …

My son is a huge fan of the Japanese anime series Digimon—like, big enough of a fan that when I said, “It’s kind of like Pokémon, right?”I got an earful about how no, it’s not at all like Pokémon. This is unusual for a kid his age: none of his friends are into Digimon at all, and, as I discovered for myself last weekend, most of Korea’s Digimon fandom is much older than him.  The event that established this fact for me was a concert I took our son to: As you can guess from the poster, it was a performance …