Ep. 262: Akai Miyako and Tolstoy’s Influence on Me

Bookbinder of the Week

Akai Miyako is a miniature bookbinder in that she makes miniature books not that she’s a tiny bookbinder. Her miniatures have won awards in Japan and deservedly so as they are exquisite.
She is also a writer who has won prizes in Japan. She also produced her own small magazine in 2002. One of her prizes is for writing a 1000 character novel – This doesn’t mean there are 1000 characters in her novel (surpassing even Tolstoy for speaking parts in novels) but the characters are the equivalent of words. She wrote a 1000-word flash fiction and won a prize for it.
She is on Facebook and has a web presence in English & Japanese at Kototsubo.com

Bookbinding

I’ve been asked to make a schedule for 2021. The customer wants the schedule to start and end in April (I have to hurry), and have no yearly calendar, but 13 monthly calendars, and a weekly calendar. I am also waiting for the client to tell me what color paper I should use for the weekly calendar.

Also, the client asked for an orange cover. I sent jpegs of five different book cloths that could be considered orange. I included a sixth jpeg of one I thought was too yellow but it had a touch of orange. The client took that one.

Fiction

Two things. First, in the last few months I finished reading Melville’s Moby Dick and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. I am now several chapters into Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In comparison to the story-within a-story structure and ramblings of Don Quixote and the minutia and dry biological/humanistism of Moby Dick, Anna Karenina is a relaxing pleasure to read. I think in part this is because you can read ten pages of Tolstoy, stop, and pick it up and know where you are and who is in the scene. With both Melville and Cervantes you might find yourself in a completely different world.

But this is about reading and not writing.

Second, in writing (and influenced by my reading of Anna Karenina) I have written a few pages of my so-called long novel, Molly Bright, but no, Molly Bright is nothing — Absolutely Nothing — like Tolstoy’s masterpiece. But reading Tolstoy has given me the permission to include character insights, my own observations about people, and interior monologs that I most often keep to a minimum or avoid all together. 

Plus, while technically Molly is a thriller, it can be read in smaller chunks. Chapter One, for example, is ten pages. It looks like Chapter Two is going to fall within that landscape as well. I’m also writing Chapter Three and in my head that seems to clock in a bit longer. The three chapters introduce the three main characters and the intrigue and action.

I’m also looking for a better cover.