Ep. 296: Yellow & Red Blank Notebooks+

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