手取川製本 ~ Tedorigawa Bookmakers

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. Substack 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.

Bookbinding We found ourselves finishing up two blank notebooks this week. One yellow and one mostly red with a slightly floral motif.  The Yellow One has a title on the front cover: Dibujo & Kaku (the Kaku being, in Japanese, 描く. Both carrying the meaning of Draw or Drawing. On the inside title page of the yellow one is a sketch of the front of a steam train, an umbrella, a cloud, and rain. The word Train is over the umbrella. T/Rain was the idea.  There are 105 numbered pages in Dibujo/描く. Each page has one part of the sketch on the inside title page: the train, rain drops, the umbrella, or the word train hovering over the page number. Both the Dibujo/描く book and the red one have the same William Morris-esque end papers that give the books a bit of elegance to them. The red one has a inside title page: Sketch 描く Dibujo and sketchbook in Japanese which is スケッチブック. It also has 105 pages but it is not numbered so the artist/scribbler must remember approximately where in the book they scribbled or arted (?). It does, however, have a yellow band around the lower portion both as a way to discover the front and to use up a band of yellow book cloth. Fiction While I finished Molly Bright, I started yet another novel but this one a slight twist for me. There seems to be two (or more) ways of writing. One is outlining everything and being label a planner. The other way is to wing it, let the story meander about until the author discovers both a plot and character; this called winging it or a pantser (seat of the pants type of thinking). I wing it. Usually. I  outlined a previous novel. And lost interest because I knew where it was going so I never finished it. The one I just started I have outlined but I also set a goal of finishing it in 30 days (not unlike NaNoWriMo but not in November). It’s a murder mystery set in Seattle with the main character (Max McKenzie) and his female assistant (JT Proust) being Seattle Police Department detectives. Titled: The Abandoned Corpse. But it isn’t just abandoned because the woman is dead, but also abandoned by a lover (jilted), and she in turn abandons several friends, ambitions, dreams). The first Max McKenzie Murder Mystery explores the dark lives of rich people who abandon people and things to make, they think, their lives better.  Substack Chapter 16 of Heart of September (formerly Heart of November and Eating November). Amelia, Hairball, and Sakombí battle it out with some of Tipu’s henchmen. A very large snake attacks one henchman. He spills the beans about Tipu’s location. Our heroes march off to do battle with the Congo’s biggest sex & drug trafficker

Bookbinding A client sent me a book that needed to be rebuilt, repaired, and improved. I need to fix the covers, the spine, and a map is glued to the back cover. Because I have to fix the covers I was thinking of updating the map, too. This is an exciting proposition because I have to investigate maps! Also, the client wants a soft cover so he can cram it in his book bag without fear.  Fiction I finished Molly Bright! I have included sub-plots concerning Molly (trouble with her boss), Merengue & Early (who want to help homeless orphans) and the marital problems of Keiko of Kyosuke. I have also, always, strengthened characters. I wrote the ending where all the main characters are happy do what they dream of doing. Of the two bad guys, one begs for Frank to send for the police rather than have Frank take care of him. The other bad guy escapes in a shoot out and disappears into the Osaka night.   Other than Molly Bright I have been improving my four-book Fear Trilogy. More action, of course. More excitement, naturally. And fewer spelling mistakes, perhaps.  The Fear Trilogy (in four books) follows the life of Max McKenzie from his incarceration at age eleven for the murder of his mother to his status as a war hero in a dystopian society. In this society three things have happened: the Conglomeration owns and runs everything; beings from a moon from Jupiter have landed; the beings, called Jeeters, are severely discriminated against. The Conglomeration gives them third or fourth-class rankings in society; menial jobs, substandard housing, discrimination on a daily basis. This results in a civil war between the Jeeters and the Conglomerate and the governments of Io send troops to aide the Earth-bound Jeeters. In the course of the war Max is made a foot soldier, then a manufactured war hero, an advisor to a Senator who becomes President, then a liaison between Jeeters and the Conglomerate. Substack The Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly focuses its paws on the canals of our body, our planet, and our nearest planet (Mars).

Bookbinding In the last few days or weeks, I’ve created an A5 Blank Notebook with page numbers on slightly yellow paper with a bright yellow cover (red threads, though), and red headbands with a dark red (maroon?) bookmark for your viewing and using pleasure.  This monstrosity has nine (9) signatures of four folios each for a grand total of 144 pages. It also has a William Morris-influenced pair of endpapers that set off the yellow of the covers quite nicely, I believe. You are more than allowed to decorate the front cover as you see fit. You bought it, you name it (as Joe Walsh wants titled an album.) It opens nicely, too, so it can be used for sketching or doodling to your heart’s content. In this project I believe I might have improved slightly on the spine. I've experimented with the space size between the cover and the spine quite a bit. I think I've managed to find the sweet spot for this book. You professionals might (or not) disagree but I feel like it's better than most covers. The more I experiment with design and dimensions, the more confused I make myself. I have taken to writing down information for the Next book and sticking it on my cork board To Do panel that hovers over my workbench. Fiction This probably happens more often than not among writers. Taking a character from one novel and placing them in another novel. I’m not talking about a series like Harry Potter. I’m talking about a minor character in one book showing up as the major character in another book. Like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (consisting of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea.) Or, more recently, David Mitchell’s novels that contain many of the same characters with different emphasis in different novels (Ghost Written, Number Nine Dream, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.) I’ve done that with Molly Bright. One character in Molly Bright is a Japanese dancer who changed his name from the very common Suzuki (which is why Ichiro is called Ichiro and not Suzuki, too common) to Merengue (the dance, not the sugary pastry). When he worked in a medical supply company he called himself Suzuki but when he began meditating in an ashram in Bari, Italy and learned to dance, he switched to Merengue. He is a free-spirited dancer who learned dance in Italy and the Dominican Republic. He continues to dance when he returns to Japan and is often rousted by the police for his unusual life style: no permanent job or home, sleeping outdoors, walking everywhere, holding no great quantities of cash.  I have put him in another novel in which he is the main character. He relates and learns from a variety of people in Italy and the Dominican Republic. He helps Molly and Early in Molly Bright with the police following Sawako’s kidnapping. This episode shows up at the end of his novel. The tentative title is Merengue or The Dancer Merengue or Merengue the Dancer but I’m not pleased with any of those titles.  Meanwhile, Molly Bright is staying the course and rapidly coming to an end. I need to develop all the characters a bit more, clean up the chronology a tad, fix typos, spelling errors, check my grammar, and make sure the plot is relatively hole free. Hopefully, it will be wrapped up by the next episode of Tedorigawa Bookmakers. Don’t hold your breath; I’m also reading Infinite Jest.  Substack On Substack you can read Chapter 15 of  Heart of September / November. While you’re there, read about Tarzan’s connection to Electric Cars in the previous post.

Bookbinding In my New Year’s Resolution (NYsR©) to podcast more frequently, I require more content. This is good for you the listener/readers. Thank you. For this episode, I made two A6 blank notebooks which you can use for sketching or doodling during Zoom meetings or, and more importantly, taking notes during real face-to-face meetings with other real flesh-and-blood humans. The first notebook is 112 pages in 7 signatures. It also has page numbers for ease of referencing and finding your masterpieces. The name of this book is Sketchbook in both Japanese – スケッチブック–, and Spanish – Cuaderno de Dibujo. And has a stylish yellow vertical sash. This indicates both the front cover and the fore edge. The other one is 128 pages in 8 signatures. It is completely blank, no page numbers or bookmarks to differentiate pages. But it sports three titles: Japanese – スケッチブック–, Spanish – Cuaderno de Dibujo –, and English – Sketchbook. It also displays a chiyogami sash near the fore edge to give the artist/writer/user a front cover design.   Fiction Molly Bright continues. Last podcast I told you about Sawako being related to water in all its forms including waterboarding and stale, scummy rain water in the corner of her cell where she’s being held captive. Today, you’ll learn about Molly herself.  She’s a businesswoman out of Phoenix, Arizona. She’s a buyer of home decoration furnishings. She is often worried about money: prices, costs, profits, and has no qualms about ripping off creators to make a bigger profit for her company. She assumes by making money for the company that the company will be loyal to her; this is a mistake she learns in the course of Molly Bright. Substack Chapter 14 of Heart of November (changed to Heart of September) is up and waiting for you to read it. Amelia meets her rapist. Violence ensues.  A new series called Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly is on its first issue. The first issue is about Soup. What is the relationship between a children’s game-show host and David Bowie? And what is the relationship between the children’s host and soup? What is the origin of Soup? All these questions are answered in  Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly: Soup The next issue will be on Tarzan and Electric Cars. Only on Substack.

Bookbinding In mid-December a client made a request for a 2024 schedule to be ready soon. By soon, I think they meant before January 2024, which, as you know, zoomed by quite quickly. I told them that was impossible because I was taking a short break for New Year’s and subsequent joys and regrets about failed New Year’s Resolutions. However, I finished it and shipped it off. The client was disappointed that it came so late but not with the final product itself. I warned them it would be late. I guess the lesson here is I shouldn’t take orders for schedules so late in the year. Each schedule I make is personalized for the client. I ask them to send 12 to 14 photos that they’d like in the book and in what order if they have a preference. I also ask what style of schedule they’d like. For example, if the week starts on Monday or Sunday, if holidays are named or just red. Plus other desires the client can think of. This all takes time, of course, but if I weren’t so lazy, I could probably do it quicker. Fiction Molly Bright is being edited nicely. I’m tightening up action, dialog, characters. Making supporting characters more in tune with the major themes of friendship, honesty, loyalty etc. Plus, the end is in sight! I mean, action and reaction, tying up loose ends, facing a lot of editing is in sight. Themes for the major characters are occurring naturally. For example, the kidnap victim, Sawako, is linked to water: surfing, swimming, bathing, and waterboarding.  The first paragraph of Molly Bright. Any comments are appreciated. Sawako loved the freedom of the sea, of swimming in it, of floating on it, of sailing over it, especially of surfing in, over, and on it. Sweeping down a wave; curling left or right. Dangling her toes over the front of the board or to the side. Crouching down to slide under the lip. Leaning back to flip away. Skimming over the water, her face inches from the wave hurtling down on her ready to crush her bones; the sea was liquid as solid as concrete. For a few exhilarating seconds her fear concentrated on the Here. The Now. The Wave. Not on them. In surfing, she was free. They disappeared. Substack  I’ve posted here about why I haven’t posted on Substack which I’m renewing posting on. Sort of like many people promising to post more on all their various social media sites but then they fade away … Actually, remember a novel I wrote about last podcast (listen here) called Heart of September? This post on Substack is a recap of what I have posted on Substack up until February 14 of last year, so a year ago.  

Bookbinding   The second book of 2024 (maybe I’ll stop numbering them. Maybe.) is a 2024 Schedule delivered to the client halfway through January of 2024; a bit late. But not as late as the next one. It’s an A4-sized schedule perfectly bound (a style that uses a lot of glue, not that I bound it perfectly) of 16 pages (two for each month and some endpapers). The cover is of a textured paper I acquired years ago plus two parallel red lines of the same type of paper indicating the front. The client then attached their favorite stamps on the front. The back is decoration-free. The client complained the numbers for the days was too big taking up valuable writing space. But, fortunately, not so big the client requested a re-do. However, as the client orders schedules from me regularly, I’ve adjusted the letter size.  Fiction I continue working on Molly Bright. In order to familiarize myself with the inner workings of the characters, I’ve started reading it from the beginning and editing as I go. I believe I’m making it clearer to understand, more dramatic, and further develop the characters. While it is basically an action novel, it is overall character-driven. Here’s the basic plot: Woman gets kidnapped; strangers try to find & help her.  Here are the characters: Sawako, a Japanese computer whiz/chemist, spends five months avoiding a religious group who want her to make a dirty bomb.To relax she surfs on a beach in Miyazaki on her way to Kagoshima. The religious group finds her and snatches her off the beach. Molly, a buyer for a housewares company, is in Japan buying housewares. She surfs on the same beach in Miyazaki on her way to Kagoshima. She sees Sawako get kidnapped. She also gets a good look at the kidnapper; the only eye witness. Early, a recent vagabond, surfs the same beach (Ibii, Miyazaki). He sees the kidnapping but not the kidnapper. Together Molly and Early run to the police. At the police station they meet Merengue, a Japanese vagabond, who speaks English. They discover the kidnappers are in Osaka. In Osaka, they meet Frank, an former gangster turned ramen shop owner, and Arisa, a craft maker with health issues, who help Molly, Early, & Merengue discover the kidnapper’s hideout. Violence ensues. And there are a few important supporting characters: Bald Headed Guy the man in charge of Sawako’s kidnapping and a religious leader; Henchman, his second in charge who is not so enamored with the religion; Keiko and Kyosuke, Sawako’s parents who are university professors (she in chemistry, he in English); Tachibana, a former gang member turned university professor who teaches with Kyosuke.  Substack  I have revived a dormant Substack. Please check it out and subscribe if it pleases you. The current post is Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly: Soup. All about soup (not a recipe post; a history post.)

Bookmaking The first book of the year 2024 is a B6-sized coptic-bound 100-page blank notebook with a nice endpaper, red paper cover, and a cup of cocoa which I thought was coffee, but it came off of a bag of cookies from Miyazaki (Miyazac). I can’t believe I started it last year. It’s been sitting on my workbench for at least two months. I finally finished it as part of my New Year’s Resolution(s)tm Speaking of NYR(s)tm, one of them is to read more real books. I’m currently plowing through Joyce’s Ulysses (again; I read it in college, too.) and Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove (Book two of his seven book In Search of Lost Time). I finished the first book, Swann’s Way, last year.  Another NYR(s)tm is to give you a podcast more regularly; that is to say, more frequently. Realistically, I’m hoping that means every two weeks. Now, in order to have something for you to listen to on this podcast every two weeks about books I make and fiction I write I’ll need to make books and write fiction. See what I did there? If I make more books and write more fiction, I’ll have something for you every two weeks.  Fiction I finished Heart of September! Oh, perhaps you remember last year when I posted that I was still working on it? Last November? Well, I finished it. This year. In January. It is complete. With our heroes going there separate ways tremendously changed by their experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: • Our hero (who, by the way, is never named) is back in Madison, WI in high school; • Sakombi is off to France to live with his sister and avoid being murdered by a warlord; • Amelia is also heading to France to recuperate and recover her former self in a monastery. However, in looking through my folder of novels cleverly named Novels on my computer, I opened Molly Bright a novel about a kidnapping in Miyazaki (see above about cookies) and redemption in Osaka. To my utter horror a novel I thought I finished Two Years Ago was – you can see this coming – Unfinished! Another one! Now, yes, I’m working on it. You can expect to see more of Molly in future episodes. I hope you’re looking forward to it.   An Observation on Real Life, if You would indulge me. January 1, 2024 at 4:10 pm the Noto Peninsula here in Japan (near Kanazawa) had a terrific earthquake. The Noto Peninsula is about two hours by car north of here. Yes, we felt the quake. And it was one of the scariest earthquakes I’ve ever been in. It lasted longer than most, it shook harder than most. Cars rocked back and forth; buildings swayed dangerously. It devastated a couple of towns in the Noto area. It killed about 200 people. Survivors are dealing with lack of water, heat, and the destruction of their homes. As roads are blocked, helicopters are constantly in the sky carrying personnel and supplies in and injured out. One woman was helicoptered out and gave birth the next day. One 90-year-old woman was found alive after being buried in her house for four days.  It was a bad time, but things are looking up. Lives are recovering, but it will take a long time, maybe years, for people to get their homes back. We’re doing what we can (donating food and money). Please, the world needs people helping each other.        

Bookbinding I discovered cardboard. Not originally, but in my stack of leftovers and the myriad boxes that my local grocery store piles up after receiving shipments of everything from drinks to bananas. More importantly, I’ve started to use them in my bookbinding. Yea! Free supplies! Last month I made two French link stitch blank notebooks wherein I used cardboard strips to strength the covers. The covers are usually paper folded over to match the size of the book. Flexible but not suitable for what I want to do with the books: write on them while sitting with them on my lap. This month I made the cover completely cardboard. An A6-size blank notebook with 140 pages.With two colors of thread: green and blue. The front has symbols for the box it came in: no water, no sharp objects, and be careful? hold it in your hands? This might be used in a foreign language study milieu rather than the red brocade one I made last month. (Visible below) Ficition Still! Still working on Heart of September. Will this cauldron of confusion never end? However, it is progressing. Slowly but moving forward. Maybe toward the end. Unfortunately, I have already thought of a companion piece, a novel whose main character is Amelia, one of the main characters in Heart of September. Whether this novel comes to fruition or not is questionable. I should concentrate on finishing my current work in progress. Speaking of coming up with stories, I am attracted to the story of a novel in several ways. The most common, for me, is to envision a character and try to find a situation that fits the character. For example: once I saw in my imagination a Japanese artist wandering around Spain looking at art. I put him in 17th century Spain, where he meets Cervantes and has an adventure with two body guards and a disgraced nun. The novel, Giapan, uses Don Quixote in several ways: plot, characters, Cervantes, and Cervantes’ style of tangents.  Another way a story slaps me across the face is by using dialog. I hear, again in my imagination, a conversation between two or three people and have to find a place where they could be. I had an entire dialog between a man and a robot once. I decided the man would be a blimp pilot and he was spying on his girlfriend but the blimp was controlled by a robot; a robot with an attitude. The novel, A Year Without Days, evolved into a conspiracy of religious scammers and how the man and his girlfriend had to stop them from bombing places in Tokyo.

Bookbinding My first year in Japan I was surprised at how fast the seasons changed. One day it’s summer and Boom! the next day it’s fall with a drastic fall (pun?) in temperature. Over the decades I’ve gotten used to it. But this year of record high temperatures? September 30 it was about 33˚ (96˚) with humidity in the high 50s. October 2? About 20˚ (68˚) with the humidity in the mid-50s. Which meant working in my work space was tolerable. And I got two books cased in. The first book, an A6 100-page blank notebook, found me practicing the French Link Stitch after a long time of not using it. Five signatures of five folios each were stitched onto a brocade-like thick paper that was folded over. I added a chopped up ticket to a music performance here in town, keeping the location, time, and seat assignment. I don’t remember the exact concert but feel like it was probably a chorus group or two. I stitched this book twice. The first time it was too loose. I also made a couple of mistakes inserting the thread into its proper place. I took it apart, glued in some cardboard to make the covers stiffer (so I can hold it in my lap), and re-sewed it. Much better, I think. It is destined to be my notebook for learning a foreign language; foreign to me, native to native speakers. The second book is a B6 100-page blank notebook but with the thread doubled up for a thicker and tighter stitch. Again with five signatures of five folios each. I used a link stitch on four stations and the French Link Stitch on one, near the bottom, for an artistic flair. I covered it with a used envelope from a local university and added cardboard to make the cover stronger and stiffer. This book is destined to be a art/doodle/sketch notebook as it opens quite flat and is of a reasonable size.  I have a third book on my workbench. It will be 140 pages, A6, blank notebook using a French Link Stitch (which for some reason I insist on capitalizing), with an experimental cardboard cover. Hopefully.  Fiction Still working on Heart of September, which I hoped to finish in September, but it had other plans. Re-reading sections I find not just typos and confusion but instances, sentences, and dialogs that hinder or slow down the plot, the action, or the emotion. I need to fix these before sliding on to the next chapter, paragraph,   or sentence.  For instance, one of the main characters (A French drug smuggler who calls himself different names depending on who he’s talking to – Tristram, Joseph – but his main nom de pseudonym is Kurtz. Kurt Kurtz), is driving a car.  An innocent act anywhere, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Except to get to the city (Goma) where the main action takes place, he flew. Where’d he get the car? I had to devise a scene or dialog about him getting a car. One that fits five people and their luggage. And that he doesn’t mind abandoning when the going gets tough.  

Bookbinding Nado. Nothing. Zip. Why? A perfectly good reason why. My bookbinding studio doesn’t have air conditioning and like most of the planet, Kanazawa is hot. Hotter than some other places but cooler than a few (like Texas, which is on fire).  Rather than sit and sweat a bucket load in the first five or six minutes – which would dampen the paper and make it ew ugly with sweat stains — I’ve turned to reading and writing more. In an air conditioned room in my house or the local library. Fiction First, I’ve been editing one-fifth of my Calvado Pentalogy, Calvado, in hopes of making it available on Apple Books soon. Within this year. Just in time for Christmas shopping! I hope. I’m also going to edit the other four-fifths to make the entire pentalogy available for your reading pleasure within this, maybe, decade. In Calvado, Calvado, the female protagonist, has a lucrative job as a fashion model but is also a second-year medical student. Mack is a delinquent and singer who believes he is followed by Death. All who care for him seem to die. Therefore, he avoids any attachment to anyone. But he meets Calvado.  The Calvado Pentalogy follows Calvado as she moves through time and space. She’s in Venice (twice) in the present (in The Venetian Slime Woman) and in the 1400s (in The Idiot Runs). She’s in Istanbul both in the present and the past (in The Priests of Hiroshima).  And she’s in Gutenberg Iowa in the present when a typesetter falls in love with her even though she’s several decades younger than him (in Tristram’s Printer). Second, I’ve been writing and rewriting Heart of September in hopes of finishing it soon. Like this year. Although the end is fast approaching. Not the novel, the year. The end of the year is fast approaching. I’ve juggled, added, deleted, and severely edited chapters to make the whole thing fit together much better.  I’ve added atmosphere and details, caused more of the Congo to appear, and raised the importance of certain characters (the snake lady, for example).  Plus I’ve renamed it again back to Heart of September as there are so many references to Heart of Darkness I had to make sure you all understood I know there are references to Heart of Darkness. I’ve also been writing the final few chapters of a novel I finished some time ago but needs to be improved called Molly Bright. This novel is about a woman who is kidnapped. Three unlikely people decided to save her. The unlikely people are: a buyer for a major housewares company; her name is Molly Bright. a Ivy League drop out who has spent the last year begging for food in India a dancer. Also involved are a university couple whose daughter was kidnapped, a former hitman for the Mafia who moved to Japan to run a cheap ramen shop, and, of course, the two (formerly six, but four were killed) kidnappers.

Bookbinding Having finished My Year of Drinking Kanazawa I cased it in. Without a few mistakes and some successes. First, the spine is too large by a half a millimeter. Second, the space between the spine and the front and back covers is too small. It is 3mm when it should be about 5mm. While the book opens adequately it is not sincere like a book of short stories should be; it is mocking us. I like the black cover and the white band toward the bottom that announces, on the front, the title. There’s nothing on the back. I considered putting my name on it but decided to be humble. Besides, it didn’t look good. At the same time as I cased it My Year of Drinking Kanazawa I also cased in its companion piece: Sakate. This is much smaller (in page count) than MYDK. The book boards are necessarily thinner and cover itself nearly monotone. I experimented with a vertical band with the title in both Japanese (さかて) and English (Sakate, of course) while forgetting to include, possibly in a larger form the other Japanese ( 酒手). I slapped my name on a horizontal band on the back which is where I got the idea that it didn’t look good. Maybe a small horizontal band on the front?  Fiction Both MYDK and Sakate feature Ishikawa saké and cityscapes. However, the reader, you, hopefully, doesn’t need to know about either to enjoy the story/plot/characters. Whereas Sakate takes place in one bar with one bartender who encounters a variety of customers, MYDK takes place in 13 different bars, 14 different bartenders, and one customer (the unnamed narrator).  While Sakate was realistic, MYDK is sprinkled with magic and spookiness. Not all the stories have ghosts or strange coincidences; just enough to spice up the reading experience. I hope.  Secondly, while working on Soul of September (which was formerly called Heart of November) I had what you might call an epiphany. Parts of the novel were completely unnecessary: they didn’t move the plot along, they didn’t develop the main character in any unique way, they didn’t illustrate much at all for the reader. So I jettisoned them. Then, I realized a couple of chapters could be reduced into one chapter while simultaneously reducing the wordiness, verbiage, and ploddiness of the story as a whole. So I combined them, reworded them, and enjoyed myself.  I dare not announce that Soul of September will be finished soon, but the major obstacles (as listed above) have been corrected. I’m hoping no major hiccups will appear in the next few chapters. But there probably will be. Fingers crossed, wood knocked on, and all that. I might change the name back to Heart of September. Help! Support your local podcaster and bookbinder/writer! Go to Apple Books and look at what George Stenson has available for your reading pleasure. This week: Two related mystery novels: City of Cocks and Feeding Vicki’s Corpse.  A small coastal Oregon town has a murder on its hands. They turn to a retired Boston policeman to help them solve it. But he has a ghost following him; or so he thinks. In City of Cocks, in the same coastal Oregon town, a disgraced businessman must rely on his wife and her drunk poet friend to save him from a life in prison.  The poet sees things that aren’t there, making him an unreliable witness.

Bookbinding I made a small book as practice in making small books. It’s about 75 pages and measures 100 mm x 75 mm which, for our Imperial users, is about 3.9 inches x 2.9 (3 15/16 by 2 61/64) inches. The cover is wrapped in red paper but there’s a chiyogami stripe down the front cover that doesn’t spread itself to the back cover. It has a bookmark so if you’ve lost your page, you can find it.  It’s blank so you can use it for whatever purposes you choose. It’s also smaller than the palm of my hand and I have small hands; or, according to everyone I know, small fingers. Fiction I’ve been writing on three or two things. First, Heart of November which I’ve decided to call Soul of September. I’m making the story clearer. For me, at least. Hopefully for the reader as well. Second, My Year of Drinking Kanazawa is finished except for a small bit. Next I will print it out, case it in, and make it available to those who wish to read it. Third, a detective novel that stemmed from one of the stories in My Year of Drinking Kanazawa. Detective/mystery novels are a technique of writing that I am not so confident in; I’m learning, though. I hope. In this episode I will outline how I write. It will be quite simple. There are five basic steps I take in my writing practice.   Dialog Action Emotion Dialog Tags Drama I write the dialog first. After the dialog I bless the characters with some action. Meaning, if two people are talking, the reader can see them doing something. Pouring a drink, looking out a window, frowning. After the action, I sprinkle some emotion on the characters. Sometimes the action and dialog match the emotion, sometimes it’s the opposite; whatever makes the story strong and the characters more believable. After the emotional support is slapped in, I read it for the dialog tags. Those “...,” she said lines.  If I set the story up properly, you won’t need the dialog tags. Also, if the characters have a distinct enough speaking voice, you won’t need the tags.“Y’all come uppa my house, now, hear?” vs “You’re welcome to come visit me at my place, if you want. All of you.”  Once the dialog is set, the action is proper, the emotion guaranteed, then I read the fiction for pacing, for dramatic affect, for speed of story. Once those are all set, I’m pretty much done. For the time being. Until I have other thoughts about plot, character, location, emotion, and everything else. I am no longer a One-Draft-I’m-Done kind of writer. Sometimes I do all five things at the same time. Sometimes I space it out over the days, weeks, months, or, in the case of Soul September, years.  I hope this helps you with whatever you’re writing. What works for me might not necessarily help you, but I hope it does.

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. 

Bookbinding First, the new music for our intros and outros. It’s called Who’s Using Who by the Mini-Vandals and downloaded from YouTube Music. Last week I wrote it was probably downloaded from Pixabay. I was wrong; it’s from YouTube. Here we have two blank notebooks who are the same only in size. A6 and 100 pages. the covers vary dramatically with one multi-colored and the other veering toward the monotone side of the color wheel. The first, on the Front: the Matsushima (松島) one is coptic-bound with three different colors on the front and one basic color (green) on the back. Also on the front is part of a ticket from the Viennese tram system, a cut out from a takeaway menu showing the website of a Kanazawa bakery (Hug Mittens), and, of course, a large Matsushima rescued from a box or pamphlet extolling the virtues of a locally brewed saké. At least it’s brewed in Japan.  ver, On the Back: the back is not the same as the front. There is a thick hemp string (currently invisible) which was added for variety and spunk that was added after this photo was taken. It was added in the small holes you can see between the coptic binding threads which are blue (to match the blue of the front). While the front of the book has three major colors (red, blue, green) the back has a green book cloth with two stripes of chiyogami-esque paper running down the left side of the back and a strip of green book cloth separating the chiyo-gami paper (gami being paper, I just said chiyo paper paper.) This one, the Here! book, fits quite nicely into my hands and is superbly done, if I do say so myself.  The second A6 blank notebook is more subtle and subdued. It is cased in with a book cloth that was given to me by a store owner over 20 years ago. I wandered into his stationery shop and asked him if he had any book cloth. He didn’t know what book cloth was but decided this whitish-brown paper would fit the bill and shoved five or six sheets into my hands. He was right. They make excellent book cloths. This is the last of the sheets he gave me. On the front cover are three details liberated from a business card for a local coffee shop. I have forgotten the name of the shop as I don’t drink coffee, but there’s a tiny map if you’re interested. The shop is in Kanazawa, if that helps. The top shows a train station, the middle a highway, and the bottom, with the exuberant “Here!” plastered to it, the location of the coffee shop. With those three hints it’s practically impossible to find it, however. The back is blank of decals or other adornments. Fiction Last podcast I allowed as how I was finished with My Year of Drinking Kanazawa. It is waiting for me to look at it again and put it up on Indesign to make it into a real book. Among those 13 short stories the narrator mentions, twice, reading a book by a friend of his called The Corpse At Oyama Shrine, a murder mystery solved by a private investigator and his henchmen and woman. He mentions it twice for when he started reading it and when he finished reading it three months later. So, I started to write it. I got three or four chapters into it and thought, hmmm. How can this be improved and not a copy of Columbo or Sherlock Holmes? I started over, adding more intensity. Yes, before finishing either Heart of November, The Dancer, or The Sound of Fear, I’m embarking on another Journey. In one short story, the narrator begins to tell the plot but the bartender asks a good question, why is the PI investigating and not letting the police do their work? This is a question I have asked myself as I begin re-thinking and rewriting those first few chapters. Thus I have written another short story collection and ignored the other works in progress while starting a fourth work-in-progress. I need more hours in the day or less coffee or fewer ideas. Naaah. I’ll just plug along. Thank you for reading this. Hope to see you again on the next blog/podcast.

NewMusic: Who’s Using Who by the Mini Vandals (probably found on Pixabay Music) Bookbinding In the last weeks or so four A5-sized blank notebooks were created. They were created using scraps I had left over from other projects in a failed attempt at reducing leftovers and scraps. Making books and covers creates more leftovers for future use. Sometimes. They are all 100 pages and Coptic bound for two reasons. First, Coptic binding requires a lot less glue and I was, for some odd reason, trying to conserve on glue. Second, my printer isn’t working up to snuff so I’m not worrying about typography or printing anything which frees me up to experiment with different books. In the coming weeks (hopefully) I’ll tell you about a Small Book. They didn’t take me too long to make. Maybe I made one every two or three days, time and real life permitting. And I only made one major mistake on one of the books. One the last signature, of course, I sewed the Coptic bindings incorrectly and tried to save it; I failed. But the book is still useful as a blank notebook. It's just that the inside back cover is pitifully ugly. The Green one at top is a paper I’ve had forever. And by forever I mean FOREVER. Well, at least 20 years. It’s a thickish paper with a great feel to it. It was also, if memory serves and I doubt that it does, fairly cheap. Why I kept it for 20+ years, I have no idea. The Octopus one – purplish-blue-grey – with 88 (in Spanish) and the Red one with Save plus 97% UPF are the same book. The 88 is a Kanazawa restaurant serving, naturally, Spanish food. I stole the Save from the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which is pushing for citizens to make donations (taxes) online to Save paper. The UPF 50+ is from a hat. Except for that one with the ugly inside back cover, the notebooks are good. I shipped them off to my wholesaler and she received them with, uh, trepidation and a touch of annoyance. But confident she can place them. Somewhere. Maybe. Fiction I had a thought. Bear with me now, it will take a bit to explain. My collection of short stories (My Year of Drinking Kanazawa) has 13 stories. While doing something completely different, I discovered that there were 15 Japanese emperors during the Edo era (1603 ~ 1868). I thought it would be interesting, and a second layer of intrigue, if the characters (all bar owners or tenders of said bars) were named after those emperors. I had to read about them to see if I could had a third layer of value to the stories; if the bartenders or the narrator was involved in something a emperor was involved in. That didn’t happen. Plus someone said some conservative people might be upset that I had usurped an emperor’s name for a mere bartender. Fortunate. Changing the names, even with a Find Replace function would be tiring. Despite all that, I changed three characters to three of the emperors’ during the Edo era not because there is any relationship between character and emperor but because I liked the names. Also, I finished all the stories and the complete set is a mere 50+ pages with 13 short stories all taking place in a bar. With alcohol. But, Finished! Yeah! Want to read it? Let me know.

Bookbinding How many mistakes can I make on one blank A6 notebook with 200 pages bound with perfect binding and still get a book I’m relatively pleased with? The short answer is: Lots! • First and minor mistake: I counted 200 pages. I mistakenly assumed the book would have 200 pages. But I only counted sheets, not sides so it actually has 400! pages. Gads. • Second visible mistake: The front book board and the back book board are not the same size. Off by a millimeter or two or half. But I can see it and the book doesn’t stand upright by itself. • Third Really Big Mistake: The endpapers are Both! the wrong size and incorrectly attached. I attached the endpapers to the entire inside cover rather than leave a border. That made the part of the endpaper that attaches to the text block too big. Ugly even after I attempted to repair them. But generally speaking I like the book. It has three different book covers on the front plus four attachments (Enjoy, a diagram, and kanji), and the spine is a book cloth from a previous book so it has part of the previous book’s title and part of my name on the front & back. And it’s a handy size, fits in the palm of my miniature hands. Fiction Exciting times in the writing factory! Working on My Year of Drinking Kanazawa I had a revelation and jumped on it. I completely rewrote the first story as it didn’t fit the structure of the other short stories. While working on it, I had an additional epiphany about two other stories and revised them. I believe I’m 90% through with the collection. Two nexts on my agenda: ① I’ll finish off the last story which is longer and more convoluted than the others. ② I’ll let it fester for a while before looking at it again and try to improve it by eliminating Tell scenes with Show scenes and action verbs versus passive or boring verbs. And more descriptions of the weather in Kanazawa during the year. Exciting times ahead!

Every three months is a schedule, isn’t it? Bookbinding This week in Bookbinding we have two A6 (pocketbook) blank notebooks with colorful covers. Mostly. Why? Because my  printer broke. This saves you all the time and effort of reading what is inside but gives you the opportunity to write whatever you wish! A win-win situation for all. The First Book is A6 blank notebook with a Japanese protruding rectangle on the front covered in a Chiyogami paper. 100 pages (five signatures of five folios each). Suitable for drawing, notes, and scheduling podcasts.  On the back we have a small protruding item; a hanger from a local internationally known shop. These two notebooks are coptic bound which means the front and back covers can touch each other and the book can lay flat, making it suitable for drawing and using the entire page rather than up to the spine edge. The spine is covered with sticky black book cloth; the kind you don’t need glue for. I figured the black cloth coupled with the pale greenish cover would make the Chiyogami stick out more. This book was two or three things to me. One: an experiment using doubled up thread. A bit tricky at first but useful. I think I’ll loop the thread over itself in future bookbinding adventures. Two: an attempt to match stations of the thread with the book; painstaking measurements were required but for the most part faithfully carried out. Three: make the pages tighter. This, too, was a success. The Second Book was fun. It is also A6 (pocketbook size), coptic bound, 100 pages, blank notebook but with dramatically different covers. The front is predominantly red with the same Chiyogami-esque paper on the spine edge with another design on the fore edge. Plus a bit of an envelop with International Priority Airmail printed on it. Yes, as a matter of fact, I was using whatever materials I could muster up. Scraps of  Chiyogami paper, book cloth, random items garnered from whatever caught my fancy. This is evident when we examine the back of the second book. It has a larger portion of the design that is on the front of the book in a smaller size. It also has the Chiyogami design on the fore edge with a cut out of a bell with animal shapes closer to the spine edge. Where I got that from, I don’t know or remember. This was also double-threaded but I pulled the thread through itself to make it a bit more secure. I liked it and will try it again the next time I’m make a double-threaded coptic-bound book. Which might be soon. It is tourist season and I have ideas for a book tourists might like. And a couple of stores that might stock my books. Fingers crossed. Fiction Yes, I have written fiction. In fact, I’ve worked on a couple of the novels I talked about earlier, but not oddly Heart of November. I have mostly worked on My Year of Drinking Kanazawa; research is invaluable. More importantly, I only need to finish three of the thirteen stories. Of the three, one is nearing completion (and is the longest and last). It is also the thirteenth store, a bonus story. Like the thirteenth donut in a baker’s dozen. This collection of short stories has a bit of a Twilight Zone vibe to it. Ghosts. Strange occurrences. Unsolved mysteries.  The other books are coming along. Slowly, slowly, like a thirsty turtle in the middle of a expressway.  Thanks for reading. Catch the podcast. Read a book.  

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.

Bookbinding I have completed two A6 (文庫本 / pocketbooks) books. The first colorful one is a practice coptic binding with colorful covers as practice for the second. Both are, as I mentioned before, A6 (4 by 6 inches for our north American brethren who life south of the Canadian border). The colorful one is 100 blank pages. Suitable for scribbling, drawing, or note-taking. I practiced not only the sewing (with a thread that was new to me) but also cover design (?). Not really design, but variety. On the front with the yellow streak, there are four different ingredients: red, red & snowflake ribbon, washi, the yellow streak, and blue. The back is equipped with only three ingredients: blue, a red square, and a yellow ribbon under the square. The green is part of the book board. The second book, the one I practiced on the colorful one with, is for a client. It is an A6 (4 x 6) schedule with a yearly calendar, thirteen monthly calendars, and a weekly calendar. A total of 9 signatures with 5 folios each for 180 pages total. Blue book cloth with yellow (can barely see the yellow in the photo) thread. I neglected to include a photo of the end papers which, as this is Japan, a chiyogami style paper; very colorful in greens and florals. Unfortunately, I finished it January 3, three days after the beginning of the new year. Fortunately, in Japan, nobody is busy doing anything until the fourth or fifth except eating (Osechi ryori ~ food traditionally eaten over the New Year holiday), watching TV (Kohaku ~ a popular singing show with competing red vs white teams), and visiting a local and popular shrine so the client wasn’t upset at all. In fact, I just got a postcard from her saying how she loved it. Before finishing it, though, I changed the yellow thread for a blue one that matches the cover. As you can see, I got my colorful variety of ingredients passion out of my system before I made the schedule. Fiction In Fiction! Amazingly I finished what I thought was going to be a novel but turned out to be a novella? or shorter. Called Satan Râins. It is the inner dialogs of the band members, their engineer, and the floor. It’s called Satan Râins because the lead singer/guitarist misspelled reigns. And it is only 18 pages long. Where was my head when I thought it was going to be a novel; it’s not; it’s an anti-novel. Or a short story. I continue with The Dancer about Merengue from Molly Bright. He is in the Dominican Republic and about to enter a merengue contest where he hopes to win enough money to get back to Japan after a year or more in Italy. I have started and am currently stuck on two mystery/detective novels centered on Kanazawa. A group of five samaritans investigate crimes in Kanazawa. In the first two mysteries they’re looking into the murders of two females. Not being an avid reader of mysteries, I am having a slow time of it. I’ve begun to read a little bit more mysteries to wet my writing skills. Wish me luck.