Ep. 284: June Blank Journal Soul of September

Bookbinding

This week you have an A6 pocketbook blank journal, similar to the other A6 pocketbook blank journals I have been making but with the addition of two pages With Print!

The first page has the title of the book: Tedorigawa Bookmakers and the date: June 2023. The final page has the Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo. That’s it. The other pages, as you can probably guess from the title are blank.

The front is mostly green book cloth with two chiyogami-esque strips plus a red stripe that surrounds the entire book made of red book cloth. Yes, we are trying to use up as many leftovers, scraps, and bits that we can while still practicing the art of making books. 

This book I like. It fits in your pocket (if you have any) and is very handy for drawing, doodles, notes, or any other activity you have in mind.

A previous book you can listen to about in Episode 281: How many mistakes can I make, I have made into a longish to-do list, interspersed with language tips I’ve picked up in Spanish and Japanese.

Included in that To-Do list is WIP Long Term Goals which includes finishing novels. Like The Dancer, The Sound of Fear, Heart of November, and, now, The Corpse at Oyama Shrine.

Fiction

Yes, I have started yet another novel The Corpse at Oyama Shrine but in my Work-in-Progress Long-Term Goals (soon to be shortened to WIPLTG, I suspect) we have Edit, Write, and Finish Heart of November. But also on that growing list is Edit, Print, and Case in Sakate and My Year of Drinking Kanazawa.

But what have I really been working on in the last week? Heart of November. And why have I been working on it?

Because several months ago I thought it was finished. I thought I wrote the final scene of the main character asking another high school student what Heart of Darkness was about since he lived much of it.

And I did. I did write the final chapter. But I sort of missed writing about five or eight chapters before the final chapter. In re-reading what I wrote, I discovered a lot of confusion; on my part, of course. So I rewrote what comes before the final chapter; expanded parts, made parts a separate chapter, deleted some parts. And rearranged parts in order to make the plot move faster.

Almost finally, I changed the title. Originally it was Eating November. Then it was Heart of November as a homage to the novel it resembles: Heart of Darkness. Now, I’m contemplating using Soul of September or Heart of September primarily because the action takes place in September after school starts in the US.

Finally, I started a Substack of Heart of November until I realized the book was not finished, so, once I finish it, I can restart the Substack.