It’s been a while since I’ve blogged in here, as I was waiting for the news to become official. And now it has: Two book projects I worked on this year have reached completion and the books recently published — and along with them, a good cause for personal celebration on my part.

The first book, Censored 2014, published by Seven Stories Press of New York, contains my analysis of some of the news stories that have been avoided, ignored, neglected or otherwise censored by the U.S. corporate-dominated press, as chosen by the nonprofit media-watch group Project Censored.

In the book’s news-cluster section on “Whistleblowers and Gag Laws,” I offer my own take on Project Censored’s No. 1 censored news story of the year (“Bradley Manning and the Failure of Corporate Media”), its No. 4 censored story (“Obama’s War on Whistleblowers”), its No. 16 censored story (“Journalism Under Attack Around the Globe”) and a couple of others.

It was an honor to work with Censored 2014 editors Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, both of Project Censored, on researching and writing up this essay for the new book, which has “Fearless Speech in Fateful Times” as its very appropriate subtitle this year.

My contribution to the Project Censored book this year follows a chapter I contributed to last year’s book, Censored 2013, on the Fukushima nuclear crisis and news censorship in Japan — a censored topic if there ever was one. I’ve been buying Project Censored’s books and supporting its important work in “uncensoring” the U.S. news media for a number of years now, so it was a real treat to be involved in contributing my part to the Censored book last year and again this year.

If truth in media and uncensored news are important to you too, I strongly encourage you to support the vital work of Project Censored by ordering your own Censored 2014 book and/or making a donation of whatever you can to the nonprofit organization. It all goes to keeping media honest and keeping us informed. You can order the book directly from Project Censored here.

The second book I’ve worked on this year is of a completely different nature, but no less important in reaching readers, especially in the education/ESL field here in Japan. I am one of the authors of the newly released More Step-up Skills for the TOEIC Test (Japanese title: 一歩上を目指すTOEICテスト), published by Asahi Press in Tokyo, one of Japan’s major publishers of education-related materials.

This new book, co-authored with three other Japanese university educators, is aimed at preparing young Japanese readers pursuing English as a second language to challenge the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) and to sharpen their skills in English in a very natural way.

I was involved in the writing, editing and layout/design aspects of the book (and even came up with the book’s ever-so-humble-sounding title in English). Most people know me for my writing and editing work, but I also enjoy doing design and layout work — skills that I crafted years ago as a newspaper editor both in the U.S. and Japan.

This new TOEIC book comes as a kind of sequel to another TOEIC book that myself and the other three authors, through the same publisher, had released in 2010. That earlier TOEIC book has apparently been selling quite well in Japan these past few years (as evidenced by the occasional royalty checks, which yours truly is always thankful for), and I guess Asahi Press was wise enough to go with a reliable team of authors again this time around when it decided to publish this book as a sequel of sorts.

There are hundreds of TOEIC-related books on the Japanese market in any given school year, and most of the TOEIC books out there, in my opinion, are little more than educational junk food — hardly worth the money that people dish out for them. My personal goal for this particular book was to help create something that not only stands up in quality against everything else that’s out there on the Japanese market but also to create a book that is very user-friendly, that doesn’t insult the reader’s intelligence, and that sets a high standard for other books like it in the field to follow.

Only time will tell whether or not we’ve succeeded at that. But just looking at the finished book now in my hands after all these months of work, my feeling, if I may say so without sounding too arrogant, is that we’ve come up with a real winner of a TOEIC book here.

So if you are an educator or teacher in Japan and looking for something new, original and honest, look no further than More Step-up Skills for the TOEIC Test. If you do end up using the book in the classroom here in Japan, I look forward to hearing how you used it and how it was received by your students. Drop a line and let me know.

In closing, these two new, very different books I’ve worked on this year have given me good cause to celebrate and a reason to smile from the inside: I may not be getting rich as a writer here in Japan, but the quality of writing and editing work I’m doing is still high, the work still seems to be relevant to a lot of people and, best of all, I haven’t had to sell out any of my ideals along the way. In these financially tough times, when fellow writers or journalists will understandably sell their souls to get just one more rung up the ladder (or just to keep from sliding back down again), it's personally satisfying to know that, after all these years since starting out, I haven’t had to sacrifice quality for quantity. I can have both.

I’ve had to change with the times, of course. But I find I’m still inspired by the written word, I’m still thankful for my creative muses (always checking over my shoulder, it seems), and I still believe that writing can be something of a force for good in the world when used in the right way. And the proof, dear reader, if you need any, is right here in the pages of these two new books. Read them and enjoy.