Ep. 279: Works In Progress

Bookbinding

This month we’ve struggled through a couple of books, one of which is practice for next year’s daily schedule. Why is it practice? Because today is Valentine’s Day 2023, a little late for this year’s schedule. The other one is a finished blank notebook. 

It’s about 100 pages, has a chiyogami-esque cover with blue spine and fore-edges. It is A5 (pocketbook) with, I believe, 7 signatures. I’ve sent it off to the customer so I can’t check the precise number of signatures. Each page is numbered with the number surrounded by a snarly Rabbit because 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit. And I didn’t want a cutesy bunny.

The recto (right) side is blank but the verso (left) side is graph paper thus designed so the owner can freehand draw on one side and be more precise on the left; or write descriptive narrative on one side or the other.

The practice schedule is a work in progress as I practice fore-edge corner placement because of the corners. It has the same chiyogami-esque cover with black book cloth to protect the edges. Also with a black spine for the same reason. This schedule has nine signatures, is A5 (pocketbook) in size, with a bookmark, and rounded corners. And that’s why I’m practicing. Putting the book cloth on rounded corners is new to me; I, too, am a work in progress.

Fiction

I have a dozen works in  progress in fiction. No. Maybe less than a dozen. I’ve got:

• a short story collection called My Year of Drinking Kanazawa which will have 13 short stories (currently it has seven) based on characters the narrator encounters in bars (This is similar to my Sakate which takes place in one bar and how the female bartender deals with customers of various degrees of stress while reading various novels). The entire background should be black, not with grey stripes top and bottom.

• The Dancer about a Japanese merengue dancer (a supporting character in the Molly Bright kidnapping novel). He is about to win enough money to get back to Japan in order to swindle elderly women of a few yen, a place to eat and sleep, and teach dance to enliven their lives before running into a kidnapping.

• a mystery novel, my first: The Corpse at Oyama Shrine. A bit of trouble figuring out how to structure it so that the reader won’t be able to figure out the criminal before the big denouement.

• an action novel about intergalactic war that is part four of a three part series that I’ve been working on for decades. Or less.

Okay, maybe four works in progress instead of dozens; it just feels like dozens.

Substack

After a bit of a problem uploading anything to Substack, I have chosen to use a different browser as Substack claims they have no problem using the browser I’m using which means maybe my browser is too old? 

Chapter 13 of Heart of November in which our hero discovers a deadly dealer and talking cat is up and running. Please read and enjoy it. You can also read the previous 12 chapters, of course.