The life of a professor right before the new academic year is busier than most students think, I’ll bet. I’m  revising syllabi, updating classroom notes and slides, making certain I’m familiar with the latest versions of the software I demonstrate in class, and gearing up for the onslaught of committee meetings and service obligations that always greet the new semester. Already my wire “to do” basket is starting to fill — isn’t it too early for that? — and I’ve just re-learned how to set up a survey in Flashlight and finally made an appointment to learn the e-portfolio software TaskStream. And in the meantime, I have Harrow editing and research-related projects and fiction writing to keep me occupied, as well.

In the midst of all this, I can’t help but pause and imagine — with a touch of envy — my students cheerfully buying their new fall wardrobes and packing their bags as they look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

Am I projecting an overly idyllic mood on student life? Maybe, but I was one of those university students who actually paused once in a while to think, “you know, I’m going to miss these days when I graduate.” And I did. So much so that I went back to school for the next six years in order to spend the rest of my life in academia.

I wonder if students still feel excited about attending university, or do they see it only as a means to an end? Many of my students seem terribly eager to get out and enter the dreary 8-to-5 working world. I can’t imagine what the attraction could be — a steady paycheck, I suppose, and a sense of independence. But I wish I could tell them all to slow down and enjoy the time the university gives them to question, explore, imagine, and reflect. I wish I could tell them to stop looking ahead for a few moments and pause to look around, instead.

Every fall I scramble to get ready for the new semester and groan at the prospect of fighting for parking spaces, teaching 8 a.m. courses, attending endless committee meetings, and grading hundreds of papers and exams. But at the same time I can’t help but look forward to that magical moment when the quiet campus comes to life again, full of expectation and promise for a new academic year.

I hope my students sense that magic, as well.

I’ve spent the last few days copyediting a handful of manuscripts for a conference issue of a journal that I’m guest-editing. I wanted to get that step out of the way before the new semester, so I could concentrate on syllabus-writing and lecture-revising. Today, however, I decided to turn back to my revising of King’s Monster, promising myself that I’d come in over the weekend to do the semester prep work I’m ditching today.

Unfortunately, now I realize that the chapter I’d planned to insert isn’t going to work out. I thought it would be an easy addition that would require minimal tweaking of the text later on, but now that I take a closer look, I realize that adding it will rip deeply into the way events unfold throughout the rest of the book. It’s like deciding to add a new room to a house only to realize that doing so will require rewiring and replumbing the whole thing.

Not exactly my goal, given how many times this particular house has been rewired over the years. Now that the darn thing is done, I’m loath to do any more major restructuring if there’s any way to avoid it. So now I have to figure out if I can insert  the information the new chapter was going to handle in some other, less story-destructive manner. Sigh. Maybe I should have written syllabi today, instead!

Even though I prefer to travel light, over the years I’ve run across a few nonessentials that seem worth taking with me, depending on where I’m going and how much moving around I’ll be doing once I get there.  None are must-haves, but they have all been very useful in the past.

I find an inflatable, U-shaped pillow easier on the neck than a folded jacket, and it can be used in planes, trains, dubious-looking hotels, and waiting rooms. Yes, they look stupid, but they’re comfortable and they deflate into compact bundles when not in use.

I found some vinyl-soled, net-topped slippers that are great for walking around airplanes and hotel rooms. Because they’re waterproof, I’ve even, on occasion, showered in them, when I’ve stayed in places where I was reluctant to put my bare feet on the shower floor.

I absolutely must bring paperbacks. At the beginning of my trip I’ll be staggering under their weight, but I leave them behind as I finish them, so my pack gets lighter over time. I’m not much of a TV watcher, so if I can’t sleep on an airplane, I might finish two or three novels in the course of an international flight.

Earplugs and sleeping pills are must-haves both on the flight and in hotel rooms. In fact, I’d almost call these “essentials” rather than “nonessentials,” since I’m very sound-sensitive.

I have mixed feelings over taking my iPod; it’s compact, so I usually toss it into my bag, but I don’t use it as often as some do. If weight is no problem and I’ll be staying in decent hotels, I like bringing my laptop for writing, internet access, music, and downloading/editing travel photos. If I’ll be on the go all the time or staying in insecure places, I usually leave the laptop at home and settle for  notebooks and an occasional visit to an internet cafe.

Some of my more experienced traveling friends used to make me laugh when they’d pull baggies of licorice, crackers, sugar, tea, and cocoa out of their backpacks, but over time I’ve come to appreciate the convenience of having extra food around when you want it. When you’re in a strange country at night you might not always find a restaurant open, but you can almost certainly get some boiled water from someone to brew up some instant soup or cocoa. Most dry convenience foods will pass through Customs, although my unopened beef jerky didn’t pass muster in Australia.

I’ve also come to appreciate the sheet bag. It doesn’t take up much room, and if you’re going someplace where sheet cleanliness might not be up to your standards (I tend to stay at hostels and cheap hotels when I’m abroad, to save money) or you expect to be couch-surfing or sleeping on trains, having one of these is pretty handy. I don’t pack it all the time; it just depends on where I’m headed.

I also use small backpacker stuff sacks for organizing things and those vacuum bags you can roll up manually, which can save you a few inches in a heavily packed bag. On longer trips, I pack a flat sink drain cover and small packs of Woolite for doing sink laundry. I use small TSA-approved locks for my suitcase and daypack to deter inquisitive cleaners and pickpockets, and I carry one of those locks with a metal cord you can loop through suitcase handles and around bench legs to help keep my luggage walking off while I’m napping on a train or away from my hotel room.

Travel inventions I’ve tried but abandoned: Inflatable seat cushions, personal air purifiers, personal alarms, a manual hotel door jammer, and two-part baggage alarms.

I can pare down my packing to the essentials when I must, and for the most part I’d much prefer to travel with nothing but a carry-on.  However, there are times when packing a little extra can make the entire travel experience a lot more pleasant!

I’d been mulling over the idea for my story, “Divided Loyalties,” for a long time before finally putting it on the page for this anthology. I think it’s a pity that so little genre fiction has been written about the forcible internment of Japanese-descended Americans during WWII, so “Divided Loyalties” was my stab at writing a horror story set in the Manzanar camp. I did a lot of research about the camp while I was writing — though undoubtedly some expert or former prisoner will point out all my factual errors! — and ended up learning a lot about that infamous moment in U.S. history.  It’s a scary reminder of how easily our human rights can be suspended when the government gets frightened. Do kids study that sort of thing in history classes now? When I was a kid, we never studied anything in K-12 that might reflect badly on the U.S. or capitalism. I imagine things have changed since then, though.

At any rate, I’m really happy that Hardboiled Horror is still on the table; for a while there it seemed like every time I sold a story, the magazine I sold it to would promptly collapse before printing it! Maybe I’ve finally shaken off the curse. Besides, I’m eager to read all the other stories in the antho, ’cause I really love hardboiled fiction….

However, earlier this week we Southern Californians felt a nice little rolling quake centered around Chino Hills that was recorded at about a 5.4.

It was the first decent-sized temblor I’ve felt in several years — it was the largest we’ve had in a metro area since 1994’s 6.7 Northridge quake — although it didn’t do much damage. One thing it did do, however, was remind us that we’re still living in earthquake territory.

Now, you get a bit jaded about quakes when you live in Southern California; in fact, a little rocker can be kind of fun. When this one started moving the walls, I unplugged my laptop, tucked it under my arm, and lounged in the doorway a few seconds until it quieted. The ground and buildings rumbled and creaked a little bit, and I could hear my apartment complex neighbors exclaiming, but that was the extent of it. If anything, I was relieved to feel a shake — when you live in a state that the Big One is destined to knock into the ocean someday, you appreciate the small quakes that, you hope, are releasing some of the seismic pressure building up under your feet.

However, as I plugged my laptop back in, I looked around my new apartment and realized that it wasn’t very earthquake safe anymore. I still have a very basic earthquake safety kit stored in a steamer trunk by the table, sure, and most of the other things I’d need scattered around the apartment, but I’d long since stopped buying emergency food and water. Moreover, the vase of flowers on the shallow mantelpiece, the collection of antique poison bottles on the kitchen windowsill, and the other various objets d’art on flat surfaces hadn’t been fastened down with quake putty, even though I keep a pack of the stuff in my office supplies bin.

As I looked around and thought of the things I should do, I realized that it’s hard to be a renter and follow safety guidelines, and sometimes it’s hard to reconcile voluntary simplicity with safety guidelines.

For example, being a renter: If I put safety catches on my cupboard doors, I’d have to drill into them, and that would mean losing some of my security deposit when I moved out.  If I put earthquake putty under the glasses on my windowsill, the grease from the putty will soak into the paint and discolor it — learned that the hard way! — also dinging my security deposit. My solution? Push the glassware and books deeper into the cupboards and, ideally, move the antique glass out of the windowsill or buy something less greasy to secure them, like museum wax.

For some renters, losing part or all of their security deposit is cheaper than potentially replacing all their dishes and glassware, so they’d install the catches. Since I have minimal dishes and glasses and don’t feel attached to any of them, I don’t care if they break. I just have to be sure not to stand around gaping in the kitchen if a big quake hits. Not a problem — we locals start sidling toward doorways whenever the ground starts to heave.

And then, practicing voluntary simplicity: I moved to an apartment with very little built-in storage space, which is OK, because it forces me to stay light.  And it certainly means I don’t have tall bookshelves to secure to the wall or a big TV to buckle down. But … where am I supposed to store three gallons of emergency water? I honestly don’t know, although I’m going to see if I can make some space on a closet shelf. And what about setting in a bunch of canned food? I’ve tried to get rid of cans and eat mostly fresh food, but clearly I need to re-stock some essentials that can stored for a long time and be eaten cold for a few days.

So, this week’s Chino Hills roller was a Good Thing. It served as a modest reminder to secure my belongings and not get so carried away with minimalism that I don’t keep a supply of emergency food and water on hand. I think I’ll go out and buy some today….

Image: Stock.Xchang: Pugmation

Past reading, especially w/regard to historical conceptions of beauty and critiques of fat prejudice, had already led me to understand that nutrition science isn’t quite as scientific — or objective — as the ideal. You know that too, because almost certainly you’ve joked at one time or another that everything we believe is unhealthy for us now will turn out to be healthy for us in the future. We all remember the dietary flip-flops on eggs, red meat, red wine, and carbs, right? They’re bad — no, good — no, bad — no, good in moderation —

So Pollan didn’t have to work hard to convince me that a “nutritionist” perspective on eating is intrinsically flawed and that we eat most healthfully when we eat a wide variety of mostly unprocessed foodstuffs rather than seek to isolate the chemical keys to health in a few fortified foods. However, he provides a number of citations to scholarly material to buttress his argument, which I appreciate, as a professor. And at the core he’s saying something with which I think most people would agree — that the industrialization of agriculture, dairy, and livestock has caused serious problems in the environment and in our health.

Now, I’ve been more or less eating as Pollan advises for the last few years — I don’t like cooking meat, so I only eat it a few times a month, usually when I’m out — but reading his book gave me fresh impetus to review my cupboards and eating habits.

Eat food:  Pollan expands this a bit, most memorably with the line “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

I ran through my cupboards and frig and took stock. Not bad. My major processed food bad habits are diet caffeinated sodas and Crystal Light-type powders. I could probably ditch the latter, but the former may be with me to stay — sorry, Great-Grandma. I figure it’s a relatively harmless vice, though I suffer some guilt over using so many aluminum cans. The dry soups that I use as a foundation for getting rid of aging veggies probably don’t count as “food,” either. I have a nice book on soups that I bought two years ago and have never used; maybe it’s time to break it out. I’m not sure where condiment sauces stand — my ‘frig contains Szechuan sauce, gyoza dipping sauce, Korean chili sauce, Tabasco, Tapatio, jalapeno sauce, wasabi in a tube, and numerous other “let’s give this meal some kick!” condiments that my great grandmother might have regarded with some doubt.

I figure the canned and frozen stuff passes: canned tuna, canned chiles, canned black beans, frozen fruit and frozen meat is all recognizable as food, except maybe the ground beef. Did people grind meat in Great-Grandma’s time?

Not too much:  I need to work on this guideline a bit more. I know all the rules for portion sizes and understand the problems Americans have with portions (you’re done when the plate is empty, right?), but I’m not as good about it as I could be, especially when it comes to cheese. A serving of cheese the size of a 6-sided die? I don’t think so. My solution at the moment is to buy less cheese. If it’s not around, it can’t tempt me.

What’s ironic is that I’ve read and been intrigued by extreme calorie restriction diets. As much as it intrigues me, though, I couldn’t do it. Someone would wave a pint of Blackthorn Cider under my nose and the whole project would collapse right there….

Mostly plants:  I wasn’t a big veggie eater as a kid, but I’ve definitely grown into it as I’ve matured. There’s chicken, ground beef, and spicy sausage in my freezer, but it doesn’t get pulled out very often, especially over hot summers. My meat consumption rises a bit in winter, when cooked meals seem more attractive. Mostly during the summer I live on salads, corn chips and fresh salsa, veggie-laden Top Ramen, and the occasional fruit smoothie. I’ve mulled over the idea of going vegetarian, which for some reason provokes all sorts of teasing/sarcastic reactions from my family, but I’ve never settled down to it. I guess I’m what people are now calling a “flexitarian,” although I find the term a bit silly.

Since reading this book, I’ve stocked the frig with a wider variety of vegetables and some foods that had dropped off my shopping list in recent years, like broccolini, smoked wild salmon, and flourless bread. Pollan reminded me that I like eating a variety of meals — I just seldom bother to buy what I need to make them. Last night I happily made myself a veggie sandwich (two slices of flourless bread, spicy mustard, alfalfa sprouts, microgreens, a sliced vine-ripened organic tomato, some crumbled goat cheese) for the first time ever. It tasted good, although it’ll be even better once the avocados ripen up…. Mmm, avocados.

Still, it’s hard to kick the nutritionist mindset. I still buy skim milk for my morning bowl of cereal (homemade granola, yeah, I’m like that) because I’ve absorbed the now-being-questioned “reduce fat” rule of nutrition — and the only reason I drink dairy milk instead of soy or almond milk is because my doctor told me to kick up my calcium consumption. I also take a multivitamin and calcium supplement despite research showing that while people who take supplements are healthier than those who don’t, the supplements themselves seem to have nothing to do with it. (It’s probably a matter of correlation rather than causality; people who take supplements lead healthier lifestyles altogether.) And I can’t help but think of calories when I’m cooking or working out on the treadmill.

So, although I appreciate Pollan’s book a great deal, it might be a long time before I can stop thinking in terms of chemicals and calories when I look at food….

I’ve just heard that my short story “Pan de los Muertos” will be reprinted in Electrik Milk Bath Press’s upcoming Dia de los Muertos anthology. It originally appeared in Strange Horizons several years ago. I like the story, which is a bit surreal, so I’m glad it’ll get more exposure.

Also, my short story “Waters Dark as a Raven’s Wing, Flames Bright as a Dove’s Breast” has had quite a roller-coaster ride as the Holy Horrors anthology was  pronounced dead on July 10 but has suddenly been resurrected with a good chance of appearing from Ash-Tree Press. I hope this happens, as Ash-Tree Press is one of those very small but very high-quality publishers well-known among horror afficionados; I managed to wheedle a few of its books as review copies back in the early days of The Harrow and was quite impresssed with its quality. My fingers are crossed!

Now, if only I could find out what’s going on with Magic & Mechanica and Hardboiled Horrors, where I have stories waiting to be published….

I’m not leaping ahead in my editing process to write the chapter, however. I’ve  scribbled some points about the new chapter on my writing whiteboard, and I’m going to continue trudging forward chapter by chapter. My theory is that I might pick up more ideas that I can use in the new chapter along the way. Besides, once I write that chapter, I’ll have to tweak conversations and events in later chapters, so there’s no reason to rush.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d have been able to avoid problems like this if I’d been formally trained as a writer — earned an English degree and/or an MFA in creative writing and learned all about things like character arcs in some kind of systematic fashion, instead of picking it up piecemeal. But then I attend talks or read blogs by well-established writers describing their own problems with plotting and think, “no, maybe this kind of thing is just part of the process.”

However, my goal of finishing this MS before school starts is starting to look elusive. At least, if I want to, y’know, get any class prep done beforehand….

I quickly decided not to, yet this morning as I was reading Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd: The Story of my People over breakfast, I ran into a two-page description of yaoi nerds — provided as one of the few examples of a largely female nerdish subculture — that provides the standard definition of yaoi: “comic-book stories about male homosexual love written by and for straight women” (p. 139, emphasis mine).

I avoided the word “heterosexual” in my definition because although both my 2005 online survey of 478 respondents and my Italian colleagues’ 2006-7 online survey of 315 respondents showed that although many BL readers self-reported as heterosexual — a little less than half in the English-language version and a little more than half in the Italian-language version — that still left a great number of readers who self-reported as belonging elsewhere on the spectrum of sexuality. (These results and others from the two surveys are currently scheduled to be reported in the November issue of Particip@tions).

This last Wednesday I had lunch with a TokyoPop editor who commented that she’d been interested to learn that a number of BL mangaka are lesbian, which then prompted us to discuss lesbians we knew who read BL. I’m hoping this editor will write a paper on the subject for our upcoming anthology, Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys: Japanese Boys’ Love Anime and Manga in a Globalized World.

BL already calls into question certain assumptions about sexuality, with many outsiders unable to comprehend why women might enjoy reading about romance and sex between two men (fans often point out that  nobody wonders why men might like to read about, well, at least sex between two women, though I don’t suppose many men read lesbian romances). If we add the fact that lesbians are among the women creating and reading BL, the issue becomes even more complex. There are a variety of explanations for this, but I won’t offer them here, because I’m hoping Girls Doing Boys will include some well-written articles that  touch on the subject. The point is, boys’ love fans are not all straight women, and defining it that way excludes a large contingent of the BL readership.

In Japan, the genre is called boys’ love, Bōizu Rabu, and I believe that term should be used in English, as well, to label the broad category of male/male romance and homoerotica that is (primarily) created by women for women. I intend, in fact, to define it more broadly than do the Japanese, as I explain below.

I realize that the term boy is misleading, suggesting as it does material centered around prepubescent males and calling to mind the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Despite these potential misunderstandings, however, I think it’s easiest to retain the term because of its existing widespread use among the genre’s readership. Readers concerned over the confusion simply need to make it clear that the genre addresses m/m romance and sex over a wide range of ages.

I’ve chosen to punctuate the term as boys’ love to indicate multiple boys possessing love. Boy’s love indicates only one boy possessing love, which may be the case in some BL, but usually isn’t. Boys love is grammatically incorrect in English.

The term yaoi is used interchangeably with boys’ love in English; I don’t expect the practice to stop, especially since it’s been well-embedded in the U.S. by manga publishers. However, whenever precision is important, such as in formal scholarship, the two terms should be differentiated. Properly speaking, yaoi is a subset of boys’ love. (It could be argued that yaoi should be capitalized as the acronym it is: YAOI — yama nashi [no climax], ochi nashi [no point],  imi nashi [no meaning]. However, its capitalization has already fallen out of general usage, and there’s precedent for dropping the capitalization of acronyms in English, e.g., radar, laser, and scuba.)

I wrote earlier that I intend to propose boys’ love in the widest possible sense. The defining characteristic of boys’ love, I’d argue, is that it is a narrative about the romantic or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that has been created with the intention of appealing to a female audience. The creator is traditionally female, but need not be, just as the audience is traditionally female, but need not be.  Many writers have described yaoi and slash as existing in a “female-gendered” space; this would be the space of BL.

Narratives about the romantic or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that have been created with the intention of appealing to a gay or bisexual male audience and are typically created by men are, properly, gay literature/film/manga/etc. Again, the creator and audience could be female, but it could be considered, overall, a “male-gendered” space.

These two categories are fluid, but at this historical moment, I believe they are applicable and useful, although I acknowledge that in the future they may become indistinguishable. Further work might be done on identifying those themes, narrative techniques, and cliches common to BL works in order to aid in the analytic differentiation between BL and gay narratives.

This broad definition of boys’ love has the advantage, to academics, of expanding it beyond its traditional application to Japanese or other Asian media (usually manga and anime) to encompass non-Asian genres such as slash and to permit the analysis of books about male/male relationships written by women that have otherwise been left out of such categorization, such as The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey, Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, and various works by Tanith Lee, Storm Constantine, and other women that have included male/male romantic and/or sexual relationships as significant or central to the plot.

Subgenres within boys’ love, then, would include those various categories based on setting, source material, age of characters, status of presentation, plot type, and the like. For example:

Setting: Boys’ love manga and anime, especially, are often categorized by setting: high-school romances, salaryman romances, etc.

Source material: Boys’ love that comes out of a fandom and/or is based on somebody else’s characters would be yaoi or slash; boys’ love based on real people would be real-person slash, and so forth.

Age of the characters: Boys’ love can be subcategorized according to character age, as in the case of shota BL or chanslash, in which at least one of the characters is a prepubescent boy.

Status of the presentation: Boys’ love can be categorized according to whether the presentation is professional or amateur — as in the case of mainstream BL manga versus dōjinshi, or officially mandated novelizations versus slash. Note that I hesitate to say “status of the creator,” because, for example, some professional mangaka have created BL dōjinshi and some professional authors have written slash.

Medium: BL might be categorized according to the medium of presentation: for example, BL manga, anime, novels, cosplay, roleplay, videogames, movies, songs, and so forth.

Plot type: Not only could BL be categorized as drama, comedy, science fiction, fantasy, etc., but also in plot terms that have arisen out of fanfic, such as hurt/comfort, mpreg, PWP, and so forth.

Level of sexual explicitness: Some boys’ love fans have used shōnen-ai to refer to  works that are not sexually explicit and yaoi to refer to works that are. I would discourage such usage as confusing. The majority of BL fans have variously adopted other terminology — for example, MPAA ratings (G, PG-13, R, NC-17), manga ratings (G, OT, M), or color ratings (citrus, lemon, lime). Boys’ love material might also be sorted out in terms of romance, erotica, or pornography.

Country of origin: In a debate particularly associated with discussions of manga, some fans have considered “BL” to refer only to Japanese-language boys’ love and have sought to differentiate it from OEL BL (original English-language BL) and other types of native-language BL, such as that arising from creators born in Korea, Italy, Spain, German, and other countries.

Although in certain analytical cases it may be useful to differentiate BL works according to their country of origin, I prefer to apply the term boys’ love to all suitable works regardless of their country of origin. I appreciate Tina Anderson’s useful term GloBL to refer to the current international nature of boys’ love. When differentiation is necessary, it makes sense to use nation-specific or language-specific terms, e.g. Italian BL, English BL, Japanese BL.

My intention in this essay was to propose a slight shift in the use of terms in order to facilitate the discussion of boys’ love, which I feel is a much broader and thus more interesting category than set forth in general discussions of the subject. Including slash and hitherto uncategorized mainstream m/m novels and stories written by female authors into the BL category gives researchers and fans a more organized way to discuss, analyze, and critique the phenomenon.

I welcome elaboration and critique of this proposal.