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Creating Handmade Books and Writing Fiction in Kanazawa, Japan 金沢市
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Bookbinding
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been binding quite a bit; not crazily, but more than usual.
I made three A6 (pocketbook)-sized blank notebooks with between 140 and 160 pages. I’ve used kettle stitches and French link stitches; mostly to practice the French link stitch which I think looks nice on an open spine (similar to the Coptic stitch) but is more inspiring? creative inducing? artistic? Maybe all three at the same time. Let me know which you prefer when sewing a few signatures together.
The other reason I’m throwing myself into more bookbinding is to 
create covers. In the past, I have made covers with the titles on the front and the spine. I have made covers out of recycled paper. Now, I want to experiment with an Islamic cover. A few years ago, I made some Islamic covers but that was in the past. I need to renew my Islamic cover skills. Plus, I think they look good, especially on smaller books where people can shove receipts, memorabilia, and other memos they write on scraps of paper and insert them in their notebooks.
Fiction
The Post-humous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver (the title alone is a short story in itself) progresses as we speak (or as you read). Agnes is meeting a few political and business leaders. She is also having visions of people dying violent deaths which she can’t understand.
Her children are growing up and making their marks in the world, kind of. Ishmael, her elder son, will be a shipmaker/carpenter/nice guy who helps people in trouble.
Marlowe, her second son, is destined to be an artist working primarily in Vienna in the early 1900s (aka when Klimt and Schiele worked, lived, and died — 1918, the both of them).
Rebecca, her daughter, will succeed as a weaver, like her mother, but without the visions of the future but with the talent of making complex patterns seem easy.
Plus, the Oregon Duo of Feeding Vicki’s Corpse and The City of Cocks will be available soon, I hope. I haven’t uploaded anything anywhere but I wonder if the title of the second book is going to cause the gatekeepers problems, even though the final word is in some versions of the Bible and is the technical term for those in the chicken-breeding business.
I’ve proofread The City of Cocks and am formatting it this week. I proofread Feeding Vicki’s Corpse. As I proofread, I’m also making dramatic or clarifying changes. Feeding Vicki’s Corpse requires a bit of big changes. Major backstory has to be addressed.
Both novels take place in a small town in Oregon about twenty years apart. The protagonist in Feeding Vicki’s Corpse helps the local police solve a murder and a rape. The crime in The City of Cocks is a random murder.
Video (killed the radio star)
TDGB 41 is me attempting to sew a case-in book without skipping too much. A ten-minute video of me fumbling through sewing a kettle stitch requires a bit of dialog and I have included more. Not dialogs, but a monolog as I’m the only one talking.
If you’re interested in bookbinding, please check out Tedorigawa Bookmakers Video.
Friday Jan 31, 2025
Friday Jan 31, 2025
Bookbinding
In January 2025, I made my second attempt at a French link stitch on a 160-page, A6-size blank notebook called, appropriately enough, The 2025 Blank 160-page French Link Stitch Notebook.
It has eight signatures of five folios each for a total of 160 pages; the title page and the Tedorigawa logo use two of the pages. The other 158 pages are blank.
I used an interesting scrap of paper I found in my To Be Used Later pile. I glued this scrap to a thin upcycled envelope to make the front and back covers.
I found a chiyogami endpaper, also in the To Be Used Later pile for the endpapers. I think the cover paper and the endpapers work well together; one is mostly abstract while the other is more realistic (but not overly realistic as are most chiyogami papers.)
Finally, I sewed it all together using a French link stitch with blue thread. For the end stations of the signatures I used a kettle stitch.
The end sections use a simple kettle stitch but on future French link stitch notebooks, I’m going with the more traditional style which I believe looks a tad better.
Other than the end sections completed with the traditional style, what else am I going to change? Possibly to make the sewing tighter and the book less loose. But then I say that about everything I sew from Coptic-bound books to jeans.
Fiction
I continue to work on and confuse myself with The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Two plot arches are shaping up. One, Agnes sees visions of people who are about to die or be injured or people who kill someone. Two, her children grow, become independent, and make their mark on society (or societies, in one case). She observes their growth but also “sees” in her trances their deaths, which she can’t prevent or warn.
A complication, at least for me as I’m writing this novel, is coordinating Agnes and her children’s lives with real life in a sort of Forrest Gumpy kind of way. Unlike Forrest, Agnes is not the center of attention for most of the historic action that takes place.
For example, she knows the grandmother of the person who assassinates a US president but not the actual assassin. She has a very tenuous connection with another killer who happens to be a greatx3 or 4 child of a person she used to work with.
A grand scope of a couple of centuries of change surrounds this novel; quite unusual for me. Most of my novels deal with one or two people and truncated time frames. Heart of November, for example, takes place in one month and concentrates on three or four people (with lots of minor characters, of course),
Video
My updated Tedorigawa Bookmakers YouTube channel.
Today’s video is me punching holes in paper for your tactile enjoyment. This time, I don’t shove the awl through my thumb. Success! TDGB Video 40 Punching Holes.
Monday Jan 13, 2025
Monday Jan 13, 2025
Bookbinding
Playing around with DaVinci and Gemini I requested a nun with a smirk on her face in an abandoned village. And got this lady with an uncharacteristic moon hovering above her head, a detail a living artist would not have included.
I turned her into a 50-page, A5-ish notebook. The recto page is 10x10mm graph paper. Verso is lined. I used Coptic binding with green thread.
The cover has three or four papers from my To Use bin under my workbench. As you can see the cover includes:
1. A very thin towel (called tenugui in Japan) turned into book cloth with the help of fusuma paper and glue with what could be called clouds or waves or fans. They are 
predominantly blue with shades of white;
2. A red vaguely Indian-designed thicker paper with a delightful design in gold;
3. A light blue slab of book cloth that has been hanging around in my workspace for at least a decade;
4. A dark green book cloth that has accompanied the blue book cloth for its entire life;
5. A rabbit offering a monkey a sip of water or about to scrub the monkey’s back (as they’re in water and the monkey has his or her back to the rabbit.)
6. And a red strap with a dandelion-style brush at the end.
The back has a similar motif. The blue fan-shell-cloud cloth is larger; the blue book cloth is thinner; the red & gold cloth is smaller and vertical rather than horizontal; the green book cloth is much bigger; and the monkey is sans rabbit and smaller.
All in all, a nice activity that is useful as well. The only change I would make if I were to labor over Grandma again would be to add pages. Fifty is too few. One hundred feels about right.
Fiction
I continue to be puzzled as I work through The Posthumous Autobiography of the WidowAgnes Grout, Death Weaver. First, this book juggles six major characters (so far) and progresses through about 200 years of life. Agnes, herself, lives to be about 215, mas o menos. I’ve done quite a bit of online research into such topics as women’s underwear and public transportation in the early 1800s.
Video
The first video is my gluing up the cover of a French link stitch book. French Link Stitch.
The second is a video of me writing Agnes Grout. If you’re a writer, you’ll understand the sentiment in George Stenson: Writing.
Coming soon, I hope, a video of me sewing the French Link Stitch blank notebook. Stay tuned!
Tuesday Dec 31, 2024
Tuesday Dec 31, 2024
Bookbinding
I delved into prefect binding – the binding that uses glue instead of thread to keep the signatures together; the style of binding most common in ordinary store-bought, factory-produced books that sometimes results in pages falling to the floor on the 787 flying to London, if you were so lucky as to be heading to Europe while re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow. Or your classroom floor.
I made three blank notebooks using the perfect binding. They are all in the landscape orientation to make it easier to use more of the pages as I envisioned them as notepads for artists.
Book One is A5 with brown endpapers and green tactile covers. It has maybe 50 pages. I grabbed a bunch of a massive amount of paper I got years and years ago from a printing company that was going to throw them all away. The spine edge is tinted blue and there are printer’s cut marks, also on the spine edge. The title is 303. It is pasted on the front using the same paper as the brown craft endpapers.
Why 303? I read about Lennon and McCartney talking about their song One After 909 and the journalist wondered why 909? I assumed it was either a train designation or a departure time. In the article, Lennon mentioned that he had an affinity and connection to the number 9 (Number 9 Dream, Revolution Number 9, One After 909) being born on October 9, and the Beatles first performing in the Cavern Club on Feb 9, 1961, and on Ed Sullivan three years later, also on February 9th. Well, if he had a connection to 9, I wondered, like the journalist, what number do I have a connection with (Other than my birthday and Mick Jagger’s being the same day (different year))? 303 was my draft number back in 1969 when the Nixon administration was handing out draft numbers so that 18-year-old men could know when to move to Canada to avoid the draft. Or plan their lives around being drafted. As it turned out, some draft boards began drafting men in reverse order. I switched my 2S student draft deferment to 1A available but was not called up. Whew, a long and winding road to explain a three-digit title.
Book Two is smaller. Rather than A5 it is A6 (about the same as an American pocket book). I used part of my supply of Chiyogami paper for the title (again, 303). The endpapers are the same brown craft paper as the first book.
This book is completely blank, so it’s useful for doodling or planning trips to Liverpool with your significant other to check out the Mona Lisa Twins (or on YouTube) covering Beatle songs in the Cavern Club. It is small enough to fit in your pocket for easy access to sketch fellow travelers or musicians. It has about 60 plus pages.
Book Three is also A5 with the endpapers pulled from a local newspaper’s stock page. The front title is also pulled from the newspaper but the final 3 is a colorized advertisement for osechi-ryori which is a traditional meal prepared for the New Year’s holidays. Enough food, technically, to feed a person for three days. The colorized final 3 is echoed on the back cover where the 303 is duplicated but in a smaller size with the final 3 upside down. Book Three also has a title page: 303 Tedorigawa Sunrise and the Tedorigawa logo and QR code on the final page.
I’m not sure if I will be making more of these perfect-bound blank notebooks. I’m not sure if I will be using them or selling them. If you’d like one, let me know. I’m also not sure how long they will last as perfect binding is not known for holding the pages in for long periods, as I mentioned above about pages spilling out all over your classroom floor or the floor of your flight to Barcelona, among other European destinations.
I once bought a book that the entire cover came off about an hour after I bought it. The store clerk sympathized and offered to give me a replacement which, of course, I accepted with gratitude. The cover of that perfect-bounded book has stayed on for about 40 years.
Fiction
In fiction, we have two stories to tell. First, the Proust–Mann Connection. No, I’m not writing a novel called the Proust–Mann Connection (although that might be a nifty title for a time-warping adventure story). I’m reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (I’m in book three: The Guermantes Way) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I have noticed some similarities.
First, they were published within two years of each other which means they were probably written simultaneously (in different countries and languages). Second, they both deal with memory or mis-memory or daydreams. One scene, in particular, is when the unnamed narrator in Proust daydreams about an activity he hopes to have with Mme Guermantes. There is a very similar scene in Mann when Hans Castorp similarly fantasizes about Madame Chauchat. Third, minorly, the unnamed narrator in Proust talks about a memory of his when he was in the Alps at a spa recovering from an unnamed ailment which, of course, is where The Magic Mountain takes place, in a spa in the Alps where the rich recover from lung diseases (probably tuberculosis).
In my fiction, I’ve worked a bit on The Posthumous Autobiography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Now, for a long time, I was stuck on it. I moved neither forward nor backward. Then, while looking at a very partial and incomplete outline, thoughts appeared in my head about the structure of the life of Agnes. And a flood of revisions and changes swept across my keyboard (normally, liquid on a keyboard is a bad thing.).
Changes include a new opening chapter, a strengthening of three characters to bring them forward in the plot, and a very large narrative arc for one incident. This last one, the long narrative arc, starts early, includes hints along the way, and concludes near the end of the book. It is a vision that frustrates Agnes because her visions confuse or and most of her visions conclude several chapters after their introduction.
Videos
A blank notebook using a recycled bathtub lid (cleaned, by me), and suitable for spilling drinks on at your favorite coffee shop is available at Ofuro no Futa (Bathtub lid in the lingua franca of Japan).
Saturday Nov 30, 2024
Saturday Nov 30, 2024
Bookbinding
This week, we have a notebook called Blank Proust. I made it because I wanted to make a blank notebook with an interesting cover. Simultaneously, I’m reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. (I’m at the beginning of book three: The Guermantes Way). Combining the two, I landed on Blank Proust, if memory serves.
This A6-sized Coptic-bound notebook has nine signatures of five folios for a total of 180 pages. All but two are blank. One has the title: Blank Proust with a snapshot of Marcel. The other has Tedorigawa Bookmakers and tedorigawabookmakers.podbean.com. It’s not exactly A6 because the papers are off-cuts from a larger production that were given to me about 10-12 years ago.
The front cover is brownish with an Edwardian-esque (?) subtle design. The front has four photos of Proust (one a caricature in color; one other is in color, but two are sepia-ish). The back cover has, of course, and as expected, a picture of a few madeleine cakes. If you’ve read or heard about In Search of Lost Time, you’ll understand the significance of that particular dessert.
The endpaper on the front cover is the first paragraph of the first book (Swann’s Way) where the unnamed narrator complains about not getting to sleep.
The endpaper on the back cover is the last paragraph of the seventh and last book (Time Regained) where the same narrator contemplates the passage of time. Or, as Proust wrote it 102 years ago: Time (capitalized).
Fiction
Life, making Blank Proust, and reading The Guermantes Way plus another novel from the same period: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, have put a crimp in my writing time. I have edited one book (Feeding Vicki’s Corpse) and dabbled in another (The Saigawa Strangler, a mystery). But mostly the fiction side of my brain has sat idle these past few weeks.
Not entirely idle. I have been editing Feeding Vicki’s Corpse. I’ve been both line editing it, developmental editing it, and proofreading it. In the overall story part of the editing, (developmental) I moved a chapter from about Chapter 10 to Chapter 1 because I thought it made for a more dramatic opening.
In line editing it, I, of course, found many typos and misspellings but I have also made it more unique and not so cliche-ish or stereotypical. For example, instead of someone ‘glancing’ at someone else, they ‘take a peek’ or ‘glimpse’ or ‘study surreptitiously’ look at someone. As if surreptitiously looking at some is possible, which I doubt, but I go with the flow.
Videos
Coming soon to a YouTube near you: something. Maybe. If I have the time and inclination.
Saturday Nov 16, 2024
Saturday Nov 16, 2024
Bookbinding
Today we have two blank red notebooks. Both are A5 (pocketbook) in size, about 100 pages each, and with stylish endpapers. Useful for sketching, scheduling, taking notes, or practicing ransom notes or whatever you wish to do with it.
Book one is entirely blank. Not even a Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo on the penultimate page. No page numbers, no title page. Freedom! It does have a bookmark to assist you in finding a page you find important. The bookmark is brown-purple (mostly brown) to match the endpapers. Yes, the endpaper is brown with a British empire-era-esque semi-floral design. I hope that makes it clear enough.
Book two is blank but for the title page, the Tedorigawa logo on the last page, and the page numbers. Similar to the Dibujo Sketch Book of an earlier post (296), this one has a train, rain, cloud, and umbrella on the page numbers. There are 105 numbered pages. The endpapers are a floral design with what look like pomegranates or peaches or kiwis (formerly known as Chinese gooseberries) or all three.
Fiction
I continue editing Feeding Vicki’s Corpse and formatting City of Cocks. This means other novels on my stove have been reduced to the back burner of such. Novels like The Posthumous Autobiography of Agnes Grout and Ferrell on Ferrell: An Autobiography Based on a True Story.
In editing, the most common change I’m making – but, by far, not the only change (other changes deal with timing, clarity, and suspense) – is deleting conversation markers. Those ‘he said’ phrases such as:
“You can’t pay me enough to steal his Munch-themed underpants,” he said as he hoisted a bale of cocaine into the airplane’s cargo hold. “Know what I mean?”
I change it to:
“You can’t pay me enough to steal his Munch-themed underpants.” He hoisted a bale of cocaine into the airplane’s cargo hold. “Know what I mean?”
A small change, but I think it reads faster and more naturally. Naturally, I put the ‘she said’ or ‘Roberta said’ in if it makes understanding who is speaking clearer. If I want to make the conversation clearer; sometimes I don’t for suspense, timing, or to make the reader feel as confused as the characters. If I want to make it clear he is speaking while moving product, I divide the spoken words with some action. Like this:
“You can’t pay me enough…” He hefted a bale of cocaine onto his shoulder. “…to steal his Munch-themed underpants.” He tossed the bale into the airplane’s cargo hold and caught his breath before turning to her. “Know what I mean?”
More difficult but maybe more important is putting in the characters’ emotional thoughts into the story via actions and language.
Ya’ll’sTube
Not yet. Coming. Soon. Maybe. Don’t hold your breath.
Saturday Nov 02, 2024
Saturday Nov 02, 2024
Bookbinding
I took a plane flight the other month. As soon as I saw the vomit bag (waterproof disposal bag, according to the airline) I thought: Book Cover! As one does when one makes books. On the same flight, I was given three pieces of paper to prove my existence on the flight: a yellow flimsy paper with my flight gate, seat, destination, etc; a formal boarding pass with the same info; and a pink paper with, yet again, the same information. And I, of course, again, immediately, thought: Book Cover!
So, I made a Barf Bag Book.
This barf bag is technically called, judging by the inside front title pages: Airplane “Bag” Art Sketchbook and Waterproof Disposable Bag Art. It is a 100-page A6 blank notebook Coptically bound so the artist/user can access all the pages.
The cover is made of the barf bag but bits and pieces of the paper are glued to both the front and back; more are pasted on the front than the back so users can tell which is which.
One difficulty with the barf bag book is that the interior of a waterproof disposable bag is waterproof; i.e. resistant to liquid substances, including glue. It took a bit of maneuvering to glue the bag to the book board but eventually, I succeeded.
By the way, the book board for the particular book was a thick envelope used by the Japanese post office to transport documents worldwide. Not quite so thick but thick enough to support this book. And a reasonable repurposing of a source that would otherwise end up in my city's incinerator.
Fiction
Aside from galavanting across the nation in relatively cramped quarters, I wrote a bunch on a few novels. None, of course, finished to my satisfaction. None, in fact, finished at all.
• The Posthumous Autobiography of Agnes Grout: Death Weaver. A young woman ‘sees’ deaths and accidents of loved ones as she weaves in 19th century New England.
• Ferrell on Ferrell: An Autobiography Based on a True Story. The fictional author of a series of tragic novels writes his autobiography which greatly parallels that of his fiction.
• KZMG #1. A mystery by Doro Ferrell about a thief in Kanazawa, Japan who continually taunts her victim.
YouTubeski
A short (about 5 minutes) Youtuberesque video of me unsuccessfully making City of Cocks into a book about six years ago. The Kanazawa Art College is no longer there; it moved several blocks away.
Friday Jun 28, 2024
Friday Jun 28, 2024
Bookbinding
Not much in the way of bookbinding this week, but I have an excuse: heat and laziness on my part. I did, however, purchase several tenugui that I will eventually turn into book covers. The latest (and second overall) book cloth I made came out very wrinkled. I attempted to iron it flat but I should've ironed it flat Before I added copious amounts of glue and backing (shoji paper, in my case.)
Fiction
Fiction‽ What can I say about fiction? I’ll tell you what I can say about Fiction! Creation and Forgetfulness.
First, the Creation part.
I started writing two novels simultaneously. One is progressing nicely while the other is kind of in the doldrums. The first is called Ferrell Baits Ferrell: The Autobiography of Doro Ferrell; Based on a True Story. It’s about the author who wrote The Fear Trilogy. This author is fictitious so it’s appropriate he has his own autobiography complete with AI-produced portraits (younger and older).
The second, doldrum-bound novel is called The Autobiography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. I’ve written about her before (Ep. 297). The reason it’s fallen off the charts is because I need to do more research into 1800s Lowell, Massachusetts factory workers, history, and environs. Not that it takes place in Lowell, MA but because Lowell is easier to research because people post a lot about it on web pages.
Now, the Forgetfulness Part
I’ve written before that I thought I finished a novel (Heart of September, about a high school kid’s tragic adventures in the Congo), but had not. I wrote the last chapter, but not several chapters before the last one. Having written the last chapter, my pen moved on. Going back to print and bound Heart of September, I discovered the missing chapters. And I finished them. (See Ep. 290.)
Well, I did it again. I was editing a novel called Growing Slurry. I got to the Twelfth Chapter and it was going smoothly and as I was about to check the Thirteenth Chapter I made a discovery: it didn’t exist. Nor any subsequent chapters. Again! I hadn’t finished a book I thought I finished!
It gets worse. It gets worse in two ways.
First worse way, I remember writing a section about the main character of Growing Slurry doing some sleuthing in either Costa Rica or Guatemala. I can’t find it. I searched using the title and the main character and fraud and sleuth but I can’t find it on this or my other computer.
Second worse way, while looking for a chapter I remember writing for Growing Slurry, I found another novel I don’t remember writing. At all. Nada. Zip. And it’s 250 pages! How can I not remember writing a 250-page novel‽
First on my agenda, write the missing chapter and finish Growing Slurry. Second on my agenda, edit this new novel I don’t remember writing. Third, continue with Ferrell Baits Ferrell. Fourth, read more about the weaving industry in 18th-19th-century New England.
I’ll keep you posted.
In this month’s issue of Substack by Tedorigawa, ie me, we have Chapter 19 of Heart of September, in which a pygmy woman who is bought and raped wreaks vengeance upon the sinner, Tip Tipu, the slave trader. There is violence.
Saturday May 25, 2024
Saturday May 25, 2024
Bookbinding
We (meaning I, i.e. the royal We), made an A6-sized (pocket book) Coptic-bound, blank notebook with seven signatures of four folios for about 112 pages. Pages are numbered for easy reference. Unremarkable really as I’ve made a few of these bunkobon (文庫本) books in the past. So, what makes this edition warrant special mention?
First, 文庫本 is an A6 size book equivalent to what Americans refer to as a pocket book (but not a pocketbook which is an accessory for holding cash and credit cards). A pocket book measures about 4.25" x 6.87" whereas a 文庫本 measures 4.1"×5.8"
The remarkable part? I used tenugui (手拭い) as a book cloth. What’s tenugui? It’s a towel. A traditional Japanese hand towel (35 by 90 cm; 13" x 35") that dates back about a 1,000 years (to the Heian Era, if you’re interested in Japanese history – back when Lady Murasaki was writing The Tale of Genji).
It’s the towel that often gets wrapped around the heads of people who wrap towels around their heads to inspire themselves and others. And used to dry hands or sweat from brows.
I got the towel wet, applied a healthy chunk of glue, patted down some shoji (障) paper to back it, allowed it to dry for 24 hours, and cut it to size. Using the tenugui was an experiment on my part that worked out quite well, I think.
So, I hear you asking, What is shoji paper? It’s the paper used in those paper walls Japan is famous for but 
increasingly doesn’t use much anymore unless decoratively for a ‘Japanese’ accent in homes with tatami mats which are also not used as much anymore.
One advantage of using 手拭い for a 文庫本 book cover is that I can get two book covers out of one 手拭い. Plus, many 手拭い have quite stylish designs. (And you thought you couldn’t read Japanese, you silly goose (gachou – 鵞鳥)).
Fiction
Whilst waiting for somebody to get her act together, I started fooling around with my computer and wrote a title then started writing a story to fit the title. Over the last fortnight I finished it. Called The Gangsters of Love, it sporadically includes lyrics from Steve Miller’s The Joker while maintaining a plot about a missing woman, her daughter, and an attempted murder all seen through a first person narrator with synesthesia. It is a short story topping out at about 25 pages.
Plus, after a few hours of research into Lowell looms in the 1800s, the novel The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver continues unabated. But with a few changes.
One big change is pushing the birth of Agnes back a decade or so as I have her being born at about the same time the Lowell factory was fading out which was in the 1830s. Caused by, among other things, economic depressions esp the 1837 one; immigrants allowing factory owners to pay them less for their labor (owners already employed females because they could pay females less that males, a tradition that continues to this day); an oversupply of cloth driving prices down; unionization, which both the government and factory owners ignored; and the elevating of profit over people even more so by the factory owners.
Another change was learning that Lowell factory workers worked 80 hours a week plus had to attend church services on their only day off plus were encouraged to attend lectures to educate themselves.
Research is fun! Writing is work. Having written is Fun!
Substack
Check out Chapter 18 of Heart of September in which Hairball squeals on a fellow antique book buyer who is smuggling several valuable volumes out of England.
Friday May 10, 2024
Friday May 10, 2024
Bookbinding
We finished the renovation of a client’s well-used travel book. It got a new map, a new cover, and new endpapers. The client also requested a blank notebook so I sent two blank notebooks. Knowing that one book was going to an artist, I sent a coptic-bound book because coptic-bound books open flat and are much more useful for drawing and sketching than case-bound books. Case-bound books are your usual hardcover books.
Secondly, I finished a creative outlet book that had two purposes. One, to see if I could make a book in one day. Two, to see if I could use up some scraps of paper and other supplies I had laying around. The result: A Cat Balloon Blank Notebook.
Purpose #1 ended in semi-failure. I didn’t finish it in one day; it took two. Purpose #2 ended in success. Cat Balloon Blank Notebook has seven signatures of four folios. It is B6 in size. It has no page numbers because I don’t like my printer so I’m snubbing it. Plus, it’s running out of one color ink which means I can’t use it to print a completely different ink.
Fiction
In fiction, we have failed to write a detective novel in thirty days. It has been about 15 days and we only have the first three or four chapters. We have a dead body, though, so that’s a plus. My problem is research.
For example, the dead body is found in a lake. My questions: what animals that live in the lake would help devour the dead body and what is the timeline for decomposition due to those animals, bacteria, and the water. And it’s not just any lake because lakes in different parts of the planet have different creatures living in it. This is Lake Washington in the Seattle area which is sometimes colder than expected. It’s also deeper than people think. But the body was found in a small cove which is not so deep. How does the temperature and depth affect deterioration of a full-clothed (minus shoes) female? These are the questions that hold progress back but fill my brain with useful (?) information.
So I resurrected a different novel. One that deals with a character who can read the future deaths of people around her. And 18th century New England loom factories. Which lead me to a zillion other questions that required more research. (18th century loom factories, for one.) Titled:
The Post-Humous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout: Death Weaver.
And she lives to be 170 years old so that hit me with a lot of research into American history.
Ever wonder why news stands in court rooms were often managed by blind people? Thomas Gore (Albert Gore’s relative and Gore Vidal’s grandfather) can answer that. In this episode of Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly I write on the history of the white cane and seeing-eye dogs.