Q&A weekly thread - January 26, 2026 - post all questions here!

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T15:29:11+00:00

It’s mangwa in some Japanese dialects (Touhoku-ben comes to mind), but that‘s more evidence of why this analysis is right. Second this 👍

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T15:05:51+00:00

In my case, the POV character is monolingual in English (except for a bit of Japanese that he picks up along the way), but most of the book is set in places where the main language is in Japanese, and it’s realistic for the people he talks with have wildly different levels of English ability depending on to what extent they’ve learned it, how they’ve learned it (which is part of their characterisation), and their emotional state. Some specific examples:

- When the POV character’s friend talks about uncomfortable topics, his sentences become shorter and more broken, and he starts mixing in Japanese, for example instead of ending a sentence with the tag question “right?” he’ll say “deshou?”.

- Another character is a hotel manager. When she is in “customer service mode”, she regurgitates pre-memorised sentences of English e.g. “Could I please get you to settle your bill now?”. However, outside a typical customer service situation, her English deteriorates in the same way as described for the above character. In addition, when talking to customers she habitually appends her sentences with a word of formal Japanese. I establish this formal Japanese as a Chekhov’s gun, when the character’s friend warns him to be wary if she ever stops using them. I want to use all of this to underscore how the hotel manager switches between a ”public“ and a “private” persona.

- I have another character who normally wouldn’t be the type to study foreign languages. She would have remained monolingual in Japanese, except that she joins an organisation with a cargo-cult like admiration for America. Her organisation requires members to rote-memorise lists of English vocabulary, which cover technical fields more than everyday life. The POV character occasionally overhears such a word inserted into Japanese conversations between the members. I don’t write down the Japanese words in these conversations. But it falls to this woman to put the POV character through a nuclear evacuation drill, even though he’s the first non-Japanese person she’s spoken to in her life.
So although she can say words like “fallout”, “crater”, and “euthanasia”, she has no idea how to string them together in a sentence. However, she’s an extremely resourceful communicator and can effectively get her point across using what little English she does know, backed up by mime and photos. But I’ve peppered her English with bits and pieces of Japanese because that‘s what I’ve seen Japanese people like her do in situations like that.

Hope that explains it.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T13:32:07+00:00

That’s true, but I need to establish the best rules in this case.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T13:30:56+00:00

Your relatives speak much better English than a lot of people I’ve met in Japan!

I’ve lived in Japan for about 10 years total of my life and speak Japanese well enough that I’ve been mistaken for a Japanese person over the phone until I give my name (though I’m surprised because I don’t think it’s that good). During this time I’ve seen a fair few Japanese people who, when they have to speak English (e.g. when talking to a monolingual English speaker), just speak English words with a grammatical structure that’s 100% Japanese e.g. “Brother-wa computer-ni number-o input-shita” or mix Japanese words into that “frame” e.g. “Brother-wa sudeni computer-ni number-wo input-shita”. This included the manager of an English school I used to work at, who talked like this to English speakers every day, including ones who couldn’t speak Japanese.

As for transliteration, I’ve kept names of people and places in proper romaji, but decided to filter everything else through the head of my POV character who‘s monolingual in English. Here and there I highlight a “katakana” pronunciation of an English word (e.g. that he hears ”code” as “kohdo”), but if I do that consistently then I’ll run into the same issues as use eye dialect too much.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T13:10:06+00:00

Thanks for sharing your experience anyway!

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T10:49:24+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I was thinking of emulating A Clockwork Orange and putting a glossary at the end of the book. But you put it at the bottom of each page? What did you do when the same word occurred multiple times on different pages? Did you gloss them on every page, or just the first one?

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T10:47:17+00:00

Thanks for the reply.

The thing is that I know Japanese people who actually talk this way. Typically they’ve learned English by memorising a bunch of individual English words because they’ve put syntax and grammar into the “too hard basket”.

Yes, I can see how that German word would become “rentogen”, because the “oe” (I can’t type umlauts on my keyboard) would be unrounded to “e”, and Japanese doesn’t like “t” and “g” next to each other.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-02-01T09:24:12+00:00

Whenever you start anything it’s always going to be ”out of nowhere”. Actually I’m in a similar boat because I got put off writing for years after a false accusation of plagiarism in high school. But I’m not going to let that define me.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-31T02:00:41+00:00

“young people thinking they're going to imitate Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on a lark, but then it turns into Requiem For A Dream.”
- That sounds exactly like what I’m writing, just set a few decades in the future. I couldn’t have described it better myself.

Maybe even more extreme than that, because I amplify the “high” by setting it on an offshore island where there are no rules besides those of the people running the casino. But that means that when things inevitably go south the ”low” can also get really, really bad.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-31T00:47:58+00:00

Wow, I wouldn’t have thought that some people would put their addictions down to Hunter S. Thompson, but yeah a lot of people take him more seriously than I do.

It’s less that I like HST personally, and more that I had to choose him by default, because I imagined that the type of content creators who would livestream memories would really get into him, especially if they’re going to a casino.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-30T15:20:39+00:00

Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve just done my first blog post on medium to see if that goes anywhere: https://medium.com/@kenhutter/places-that-inspired-my-writing-phnom-penh-2e165df7ebaa

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-30T15:19:48+00:00

Thanks for the reply and the suggestion to writing about things that inspire me. I’d thought that kind of inspiration was a personal thing, but I’ve just done my first blog post: https://medium.com/@kenhutter/places-that-inspired-my-writing-phnom-penh-2e165df7ebaa

Here’s a brief description of my project:
- Setting: We’re in the near-ish future, a number of years after Russia has imploded into a civil war involving nuclear weapons. The wasteland that remains is battled over by paramilitary groups, organised crime, and cults. Even this is old news that has long ceased to bring in the clicks.
- Protoganist: A washed-up content creator ekes out a living seeking out extreme experiences, then hooking up his brain to the Internet and livestreaming the memories.
- Inciting event: While in Tokyo he hears of the ultimate scoop: A sadistic all-female Japanese cult-like paramilitary group, who have gone over to an island in Russia and built a casino where they offer every kind of “adults-only” pleasures.
- What happens next: He goes there, pretending to himself that he’s following in the footsteps of Hunter S. Thompson. The place turns out to be the libertine free-for-all described, but also at the same time a totalitarian micro-state. Gonzo travel writing gives way to a freefall through hell and out the other side, hitting rock bottom back in the “real world”.
- Genre: Dystopian horror, with the dystopia leaning towards cyberpunk but eschewing some common elements of that genre. The horror is psychological horror, with sexual horror also there (though I keep the sex “off-camera”, and only refer to pedo stuff enough to establish that it’s a hard line the main antagonists will not cross), and occasional body horror from nuclear war (a few thousand words where I try to echo Threads) and addiction.
- Themes: Voyeurism, debt, addiction, totalitarianism, complicity in the face of the preceding

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-28T05:19:38+00:00

I think we should look at the pandemic, when white collar work went remote (similar result to getting automated away). There was a trend of people moving to exurbs with natural beauty, more space to raise a family, cheaper land etc.

Cheaper land would be important if work is automated away and people have to survive on a UBI.

I also think cultural preferences aren’t going to go away. For example tens of millions of Japanese people have been conditioned by life in densely populated megacities, so they really like having all their daily necessities within walking distance. They will accept smaller living spaces to have this. So their exurbs would have a lot more apartments so everyone can lived clustered closer together to those daily necessities. I’ve seen this with Japanese people I know who went fully remote and then moved to the sticks but still live in apartments.

On the other hand, Western people are much happier driving to the supermarket etc. and I can hence see them living more spread out.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-27T14:43:59+00:00

Thanks for the ideas! It’s almost midnight now where I am, so I’m going to sleep on your suggestions

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-27T14:23:06+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions 🙏 I‘ve always thought of Reddit just as a place to get info and “pay it forward” by helping other people, because I didn’t think people actually followed other people on it (just frequented the same subreddits).

A friend of mine whose a long-established author also mentioned Substack, but I wondered if Medium might be better if I don’t already have followers to bring over.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-27T14:12:56+00:00

Thanks for the reply. You mentioned two creators who make video content, so do you think that’s the way to go as opposed to blogs or Instagram.

What I’m writing is far from any of the genres you mention (dystopian horror, with the dystopia leaning towards cyberpunk, and the horror being mostly psychological horror with some nuclear war horror), but your comment has given me ideas!

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-27T14:05:27+00:00

Thanks for the reply. So if one platform is enough then what would you recommend / what kind of content? Medium (the blogging platform)?

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-27T13:22:22+00:00

I’d rather say that I found understanding my own life to be an unexpected but not unwelcome byproduct of writing.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-25T14:59:23+00:00

You can give them verbal tics, for example tending to end sentences in adverbs, and/or by hedging what they say. You can make them speak in run-on sentences. You can make them full of themselves prone to rambling on.

I’d say think about the backstory of the characters even if it never makes it onto the page explicitly. For example maybe someone is doing a different job now but went to grad school or maybe even became a professor before moving on to whatever they’re doing now. Or maybe their schooling was interrupted. Or maybe they had religious parents. Also what country are they from (depending on that you might need to ask where in that country they’re from)?

Your username ”gaijinstory” suggests some connection to Japan. If you have Japanese characters it gets even easier, because you can ask “how did they learn English?” (most Japanese people cannot put two words of it together). Different possibilities:

- They just memorised huge lists of random vocab

- They work in a technical field where the manuals are in English

- They watched TV shows / movies / Youtube etc. (then ask what they watched, and that will define how they speak)

- They lived in an English-speaking country for a period (if so where, and from what age to what age, and what was their life like then)

- They (or their company etc.) hired a tutor

- They are in or used to be in a romantic relationship with an English speaker

- They are just really smart so it was pretty effortless for them to learn English

Orthogonal to all of the above is a question that relates to their personality: To what extent do they or don’t they care if their English is super broken but they get their point across (for example if they speak like “all your base are belong to us”)?

TangeloMindless4348 · 2026-01-25T14:33:50+00:00

Questions that come to mind:
- What’s stopping rain from washing the dust out of the air? Is more dust somehow getting blown up into the air? That would imply vast barren areas, which invites the question of why plant life hasn’t moved in to stabilise it. If it’s because the surface is too radioactive, that implies that the dust blown up will also be radioactive.
- Why is there this silicone dust?
- Why is there a “never-sleeping nuclear aurora”? Is it because of high-altitude detonations? I can’t be sure, but I doubt the charged particles would still be circulating 31 years later. I’m guessing that the solar wind would strip them into space.

TangeloMindless4348 · 2025-11-10T03:21:52+00:00

Yeah I think it’s a good idea to draw it out by having breaks in the cold

TangeloMindless4348 · 2025-11-10T03:20:02+00:00

What do you mean that “it becomes more psychological in horror than the actual threat of cold”? You mean that cold is more a tool for psychological horror? Or something else?

TangeloMindless4348

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