Infinimata Press: Projects: Factoring In The Lag Factor

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-04-07 17:00:00-04:00 No comments

Constant readers might have noticed I'm a little behind on a couple of regularly scheduled things here. One is my monthly Rogress Preports [sic]; I'm cheating and assuming that just getting it up any time at all during the month will suffice. Not a good habit, though. #2 is the Behind The Scenes rundown for the rest of Flight Of The Vajra, pending me excavating my notes. Turns out some of them got slightly trashed at some point — horrific for someone like me, who typically preserves everything from the making of a book in meticulous fashion — so I'm forced to reconstruct my recollections entirely from memory. Third is the remastering of the last (actually, first) three books in my catalog — Summerworld, Tokyo Inferno, and The Four-Day Weekend.

Some of #3 being behind schedule is due to two things. One is a certain resistance on my part. All three of those books date from the early part of my current writing career, what I call the "Genji Press era", which kicked off in 2006 or so. That was when I'd decided I wanted to get back into writing as my major creative endeavor, after trying and failing at a bunch of other things.

As a result, those three books stem from a period in my life when I was diving back into writing with a giddiness I hadn't felt in a long time. I was proud of all three of those books, and still am. But I'm not as proud of them as I am my later works, and I can't deny that has made it harder for me to take up the job of assembling them into new editions.

In the case of The Four-Day Weekend, one of the thornier things has been finding new cover art. The original art was a rush job which I never really liked and couldn't find a decent replacement for. After some fishing around, I found two kinds of images that were replacement candidates: A) those that were of high technical quality but didn't really reflect the aesthetic I wanted, and B) those of low technical quality but the correct aesthetic. I eventually gave up and threw something together that used the least egregious image from the A) pool. Maybe someday the right thing will come along and suggest itself, but for now I'm stuck with making do. I'm unhappy enough about it that I would rather just reveal it when I'm done with the remaster instead of post a sneak preview here — and there's always the chance I'll blunder across something else good enough to replace it in the time between then and now.

To make things easier on myself, I'm setting a loose goal of one remaster a month for the next few months,. That's time enough to get everything done while I work on other things. And by "other things" I don't mean Unmortal and all the other creative projects, but other things, the yammer of real life that got kinda loud the last couple of weeks and remains that way.