Travel Plans: Confirmed!

I'm really glad the Korean girl is showing up on Thursday, else I'd have a hard time containing my excitement about the trip to Japan on the 17th. Turns out my editor and I were able to coordinate flight plans so as to be on the same flight from San Francisco to Japan (I think we're going to have to thumb-wrestle for the window seat), and we'll be staying at this pretty swank-looking place in Osaka for 3 nights. We'll be meeting with the guys behind two of the games I'll be authoring guidebooks for this year. I don't geek out about the people I meet in this industry and am rarely, if ever, star-struck by celebrity but I do look forward to meeting the creative mind behind this masterpiece. I won't ask for any autographs, but I do hope for a photo.

Two full days at their studio in Osaka should be enough time to get some solid developer insight into the book I'm currently working on, and to also get a head-start on their big release coming later this year. Nevertheless, I have some homework to do between now and then to make sure the business portion of the trip is money well spent.

Not about to fly halfway around the world for two days of meetings, I've decided to head to Kyoto for a couple days of site-seeing. Better still, I won't be traveling alone since my editor decided to stick around for the rest of the week as well. So we'll be a couple of fish out of water together, wandering the cold, hopefully not-too-rain-soaked temples and UNESCO sites in Kyoto. We'll be staying at a little Japanese guesthouse for a couple nights then splitting up, as he heads home and I venture to Nara, home to the largest wooden temple in Japan, for one final night before coming home on Saturday. I was hoping to spend an extra couple days in Japan and just hang out and try to catch the local vibe a bit more, but that was back when the trip was originally scheduled for December. I don't want to have to leave Kristin alone with the foreign exchange student for too long since it's going to be a bit hard to juggle with work and school. Not to mention, I'll need to get home and finish work on these books I'm writing.

Now I just need to get that G10.