In my professional life I write everyday. Sometimes it is just a bunch of email, other times I find myself fully immersed in the most boring type of business documentation project. In either case there is little time left in the end for the type of writing I enjoy.

So when my mind is active but my hands are too exhausted to put in any more time at the keyboard, I watch a little Anime on the Internet.

Anime is often assumed to be pornographic on one hand, or childish and seizure inducing on the other. The fact is that the good Anime films and TV series cross the lines of genre, appeal to a wide range of audiences, and are liberated from many of the constraints endemic to live action story telling.

What all the acclaimed Anime projects have in common is the quality of their story telling. Their plots take viewers through complex weavings of interpersonal human struggle, motivation, and the full spectrum of emotion to confront many of the social issues plaguing us today, as well as many from the past. Admittedly sometimes over the top from an audio and visual perspective, good titles such as Gungrave, Speedgrapher, and most recently Death Note use both audio, visual, and plot devices to engage the viewer and surprise them.

When viewing these series as student of fiction, any writer should quickly be engaged by not only the culturally different story telling, but also by how this wholly Japanese genre has been influenced by our own culture and contributions.

It is for these reasons that watching Anime has become one of my guilty pleasures, and why some of my favorite Anime series have become invaluable sources of example and inspiration.