diversityinya:

By Amanda Sun

It’s summer in Japan, and the buzz of the cicadas cuts through the muggy heat that sticks to your skin. Thanks to a writer’s grant, I’m in Shizuoka, living in the setting of The Paper Gods as I finish the final draft of STORM. Every day is filled with details, wandering through Sunpu Park or the tunnels of Shizuoka Station, checking what kind of flowers and bushes grow at Toro Iseki or what kind of charms adorn high school students’ bags these days. Today I’m a tourist in the pages of my own books—I’m visiting Sengen Shrine, just west of the fictional Suntaba High where Tomo, Katie and their friends go to school.

Sengen is a beautiful shrine complex, complete with gardens, bright red bridges over silent ponds, carved golden dragons looming over entranceways, and shrine maidens selling good luck charms. But there’s a steep stairway set into the mountain that I can’t resist, even in this heat—I have to see where it goes, to see what’s at the top.

By the eighth stair I’m sweating, but I make my way up those stone steps to another set of shrine buildings. And then the dirt path wraps around the side to more stairs, and I just have to see where they lead as well.

Before I know it, I’m at the very top of a trail through the green hills that border Shizuoka City, and I’m looking down on the breathtaking view of houses and stores, the greenness of Nihondaira Mountain and its strawberry farms looming back at me from the other edge near Suruga Bay.

Writing a trilogy is a lot like that visit to Sengen Shrine. Some of the grounds are easier to walk and observe than others. Some take more exploring and more sweat. But I needed to see where Tomo and Katie’s story went. I wanted to bring my love of Japan and its culture to readers, to make them see what we had in common at the heart of all of us. I wanted to write a variety of characters that challenge us to think harder about how we view those different from us. I had to follow each step up that mountain until there was a complete view laid out in front of me, no matter how many tears or how much sweat went into that climb.

Writing isn’t always easy—most of the time it’s hard, and there’s no way around it but to go one stone stair at a time. And there’s nothing more wonderful than when you’ve reached the end of that journey, when you can finally catch your breath and look over everything you’ve written and know that you tried your best to tell the story in a way that captured everything it made you feel.
When I climbed down those steep steps, I met an elderly man who was walking through the shrine gardens. We got to talking about the weather, and why I was there at Sengen Shrine. And then he reached into his pocket and placed a candy in my hands, wishing me a wonderful day. The brown sugar candy was sweet and delicious after that hike up the mountainside, and the wrapper came with an inscribed message – otsukaresama, which carries the meaning, “you’ve worked hard.”

There’s something bittersweet about walking away from a trilogy that you’ve finished. But I hope that with the conclusion of Katie and Tomo’s story in STORM, readers will all feel that same sense of wonder in coming down off that mountainside with a new view and experience, that they will be challenged to look at characters, and each other, complexly. For the journeys you take in your reading and writing, and in life, I hope you remember to take a moment and tell yourself: otsukaresama.

Amanda Sun is the author of The Paper Gods, a YA Fantasy series set in Japan and published by Harlequin Teen. The first two books, INK and RAIN, are Aurora Award nominees and Junior Library Guild selections. She has a new YA Fantasy coming in May 2016, HEIR TO THE SKY, about monster hunters and floating continents. When not reading or writing, Sun is also an avid cosplayer. Find her on Twitter at @Amanda_Sun and get free Paper Gods novellas at AmandaSunBooks.com.

Storm is available for purchase here.