Stefanie Doing It All Wrong! (Guest Author)

Japanese Misadventures+Rent-free advice

Well, these stories just keep coming! I’m honored to be able to keep proving to my readers that we’ve all got our healthy awkward streaks. This week, we have the pleasure of hosting author Stefanie Santone! Her bio is coming up—we’re starting with her adventures!

Stefanie:

I often do more than read a book or watch a movie. If I enjoyed something I always wanted to learn about it. ‘Frog and Toad Together’ had me looking up facts on amphibians and conservation. When I first read ‘Number the Stars’ it sparked something in me that continues to this day, an interest in history. I even studied Denmark, focusing on the horrific Nazi occupation and turmoil surrounding Denmark of the 1930s, for a special project in 6th grade.

After ‘Number the Stars’, when I was thirteen years old, I saw my first anime, ‘Dragon Ball Z*’. Shortly after that I saw my first anime where screaming was done for character and plot reasons, ‘Sailor Moon’. And it left a mark on me. Not only was writing ‘Sailor Moon’ fanfiction where I would really cut my teeth with this whole writing thing, but it brought a culture I had never considered before into focus; Japan.

(*Vegeta and Mirai Trunks are my favorite characters - don’t @me, I love DBZ.)

What started as fun watching translated, and even untranslated, anime evolved into more. In college, I took a couple of years of Japanese, which I found challenging and fun. Later on, one of my professors asked me to undertake a project to study manga as literature, making an argument for the genre to be included in reading projects for children and teens alike. At this point, there might have been more, but I became very ill and much of my life was put on hold for over a decade as I recovered from a mental illness.

When I was able to, I began to save, and what came about was my dream trip with two of my best friends. Come October 2024, my bags were packed. My Japanese was well enough retained that I knew I’d have problems understanding others, and them me. Also, Google Translate had become a thing, but I was determined to use it as little as possible and to use my own skills.

I wasn’t on the ground in Narita Airport, the largest international airport in Japan, for more than thirty minutes before I officially changed my policy. Putting it down with a stake in the heart at the crossroads.

See, I made arrangements ahead of time to import a medication that is banned in the country. That is to say if I brought it in without the aforementioned arrangements it could result in significant jail time and fines. The man who was doing my paperwork for customs misunderstood this, thinking I didn’t have the paperwork, and I was ushered away from my friends. I panicked, cried, panicked some more, and waited to see if on my first trip abroad I would be sent home, or worse. It wasn’t until I was able to have a talk with a calming woman over a translator app that everything worked out. It did stop my heart when she spoke in a very Japanese way of making a statement of fact (This drug is illegal and cannot be brought into the country) followed by a statement of resolution (However, your paperwork makes this okay. Just be careful next time.).

Every day was filled with some moment like that, learning with a bit of brightness to my ears in embarrassment. I (mostly)loved it. Maybe even because I was so outside of my comfort zone for the first time in a very long time. We got lost in the train system, turned around and taken to the wrong buildings, and sometimes we even ordered the wrong food. But how can you not love that?

On the first full day in Tokyo, we wore a traditional Japanese kimono, long sleeves and a little restricting, no geta (the clog-thong shoes you might have seen others wearing) because I am notoriously clumsy. So clumsy, in fact, that we ruled out the shoes before we entered the country to be on the safe side. Just in case I got it in my head that I had way more talent than I truly possessed.

Still, even in my sneakers, I managed to step wrong off a curb and twist my ankle so badly that I spent both of my days in Disneyland and Disneysea in a wheelchair because walking twenty thousand steps had become an unsuitable idea. My entire trip was spent limping, and because of that we had to change our plans and walk less, taking extra cabs, especially during our time in Tokyo.

My friends and I were coming out of Shibuya Sky, a viewing platform in one of the largest, busiest, most touristed areas of Tokyo. It was early enough, but almost as busy as a Wal Mart on Black Friday because it was October 30th, and people were getting into the Halloween spirit! Children especially were dressed up to go to character parties where they could get some treats. But instead of doing what a lot of places do and lean into a weird holiday, Shibuya opted to cancel their biggest Halloween parties out of an abundance of caution with regards to crowd control. What this meant was that there were police out in force to make sure no one was loitering, drinking, or crossing illegally in Shibuya Scramble, the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world with an estimated three thousand people making the crossing at any given time - midday or midnght!

My ankle was throbbing and the next day would be our day at Disneyland, but we were getting horribly turned around due to the additional layer of major construction that the entirety of Shibuya Station was enveloped in. This was of course all right next to Shibuya Sky, which was connected to Shibuya Scramble Crossing.

After seeing Tokyo from above, we were in search of a bar. Not just any bar. But a bar owned by a specific influencer that was hidden behind one of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of vending machines in the area. We found that we weren’t in the exact area and while it was about a mile away, it would have been much further on foot with my aching feet. So we did something we’d already done a few times that day, we flagged down a cab.

I can only imagine what was going through the cab driver’s mind as three foreign women climbed into his cab. But like all other drivers, he was simply polite. He asked us where we were going and I proudly showed him where we wanted to go on my phone. It had always been that easy before, or so I thought.

“Nihongo e,” he said of my Japanese character-less address before him. His words were clear and easy to understand: “In Japanese.”

Oh crap. I’d fumbled again, because this was something my brain kept forgetting. Yes, some Japanese people do speak, read, or understand English. But definitely not in their cab at night in the middle of the busiest intersection in the world with police around.

I opened my mouth, with something coming out between “I’m so sorry” to him in Japanese and “Ohmygod someone help!” to my friends. I was trying to speak two languages. One of my friends was pulling up her app to talk to him, the other was working on translating the address. And in the midst of this his arms went up into a giant ‘X’ and he said one more word to us.

“Dame.” Which has a wide range of meanings from “Stop” to “Bad” and I like to think we fell somewhere in the middle of that. He wasn’t rude or loud, but he was firm.

All three of us quieted. Two of us spoke enough Japanese to know we’d screwed up, the other watched enough anime to recognize the word. Saying our apologies, all in Japanese, we climbed out of the cab and blinked in confusion as he drove away, moving about twenty feet before getting another fare. The three of us came to a slow realization, especially the friend who had fully translated the address and was ready to show it.

Which is how we got into every single cab for the rest of the trip - address ready, translator app out, and genuine thanks when the person who did take us back to our hotel that night, we decided the bar was a bust, told us to be careful in such a rough neighborhood. Because, you see, I’d also booked our hotel in one of the lesser known red light districts of Tokyo.

But that’s another story.

Stefanie Santone woke up at the age of 13 and decided to be a writer. For some reason, she thought a Literature BA looked less pretentious on paper than a Creative Writing one (which she got at Arizona State, so did she really need to worry?). She puts it to good use at her home in Mesa, Arizona, where she spends much of her time (not) writing. When her editor isn’t whipping her into top form, one can find her reading, journaling, or playing Dungeons & Dragons while sipping coffee day or night.

At least that’s what I tell everyone. There’s a lot more than that, but who has the time? Nice to see you, and many thanks to Taryn for this spotlight, and time to talk about some fun things I have going on. The first is that to my own shock, I am a published author with my breakout novel, “Tangled Magic” being available at all major retailers including Amazon, Kobo, Google, Bookshop.org and others!

I think I’ll let Aspen tell you a little about her world, and the world of Goddesses, Inc.

What could possibly be worse than death? After all, Ragnarök already happened.

Wild pixies in churches and bargaining with my soul probably weren’t what my parents had in mind when I said I’d found a new job. And that was just day one.

Welcome to Goddesses, Inc.—a perfectly ordinary, respectable detective agency… if you ignore the part where it’s run by actual Norse goddesses.

And apparently, I’m one of them. A reborn goddess. Pretty sure, anyway. Maybe.

Now it’s up to me to handle cases that make “strange” look normal. But something bigger is stirring—something turning minor fae infestations into fatal disasters. Swimmers are drowning days after they’ve left Oak Creek, and the body count’s rising fast.

Can Goddesses, Inc. uncover the truth before more lives—and one very confused probable goddess—are lost?

Right now the best place to find me is on Instagram, @stefaniesantone, but I’m hoping to change that... *sneaky eyes*

• Stefanie Santone’s Shop: https://shop.stefaneisantone.com

• Amazon: https://a.co/d/bjaRai6

• Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/tangled-magic-2

• Google: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tangled_Magic/lndeEQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

• Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tangled-magic-stefanie-santone/1147424149?

• Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/tangled-magic-stefanie-santone/d0950ebe8443ff44

My book “Tangled Magic” came out over six months ago! So why don’t I have a website up yet? Or a newsletter? And I’m barely on social media! Well, there’s a long and a short answer to that.

The short answer is: Hold on, wait, I had something for this…

The long answer is that I am human, and prone to many things, the top being pains like migraines and fibromyalgia, and the other is the need for mental health days. Like Aspen, my main character, I have bipolar disorder and anxiety and I have to manage my health, all of it, without putting so much stress on myself that I make myself sick. So I have to pull back, often a lot more than I thought I would, in order to get things done that need to be.

That said, I am aiming for both the newsletter and the website to be live soon, with the newsletter going out on February 1st, and the full website being live as soon as possible around that time. Right now I do have a shop, and that is live with both the e-book and signed copies of my post-Ragnarök urban fantasy novel “Tangled Magic.” Unfortunately, the price for the printed copies is going up on February 1st. So if you’d like your own signed, physical copy of “Tangled Magic” now is the time to get it!”

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Stefanie’s somewhat solicited advice:

My editor has given me two quotes that live rent free in my head from her, which I’m sure she loves. (Hi, Julia!) I hope they do the same with you.

1) Imposters don’t get imposters syndrome.

2) You only lose if you quit.

Now get to doing the thing.

I can’t complain about anyone’s language quirks or inability to spell. I am a notoriously horrible typist and speller, with my grammar following up shortly behind that somewhere. I think I give my alpha readers and editor permanent eye tics. That being said... I will die by the Oxford Comma and its uses.

Thank you, Stefanie! I second you on the Oxford Comma! I even made a sticker about it a while back (note to self: you should put all your stickers up online).

Thanks for hanging out with us today! If you haven’t subscribed, go ahead and do that, because I have many more funny stories, and we all need a reason to smile here and there, right? I’ll see you next time!