Infinimata Press isn't about focus groups or trends. It's about individual vision -- seeing only what one person can see, doing what only one person can do.
To commemorate the release of my new novel Shunga-Satori, I'll be making a series of posts to serve as an extended introduction to the book — its origins, its influences, its themes, its setting and characters. Enjoy.
In my previous installment in this series, I talked about the major influences on my forthcoming novel Shunga-Satori. Here, I'm going to talk about the way those influences came together to form a story.
To commemorate the release of my new novel Shunga-Satori, I'll be making a series of posts to serve as an extended introduction to the book — its origins, its influences, its themes, its setting and characters. Enjoy.
Back in Part Two of this series, I talked about the bare idea behind Shunga-Satori, and the general outlines of the story it inspired. Here, I'm going to dive into some of the other media that influenced how Shunga-Satori took shape and direction.
Note that this is not an exhaustive list; for all I know, there may well be others I wasn't even aware of as I was writing the book. But they are the most significant ones.
To commemorate the release of my new novel Shunga-Satori, I'll be making a series of posts to serve as an extended introduction to the book — its origins, its influences, its themes, its setting and characters. Enjoy.
In Part One of this series, I talked about how Shunga-Satori started as a project about an artist trying to make sense of another artist's legacy, and how the failure of that project to coalesce led me to think more about how to make a story out of one of its components.
To commemorate the release of my new novel Shunga-Satori, I'll be making a series of posts to serve as an extended introduction to the book — its origins, its influences, its themes, its setting and characters. Enjoy.
Of all the books I've written so far, Shunga-Satori arguably has the most roundabout and tortured path from origin to destination. In fact, I'm not even sure at this point what exactly counts as the "origin" of this project, but I'll do my best to parse the fossil record.
But if this project started anywhere at all, it was with the title.
I'm almost done with editing the proof copy of Shunga-Satori, and I found ... well, a fair number of things that somehow managed to elude me in previous drafts.
Briefly: I'm almost done with editing the proof copy of Shunga-Satori, and I found ... well, a fair number of things that somehow managed to elude me in previous drafts. This is not a show-stopper, merely a show-delayer. I might have to write a few things, and do some close checking for a few things, but the book is 99.5% there as far as I can tell.
Editing with the proof copy is a radically different feeling than editing even on regular paper. It feels a lot more like being handed someone else's work and asked to weigh in on it without reservations. I found myself raising questions I'd completely missed before — not normative ones that would have forced a full rewrite, but ones still big enough they deserved close attention before the book went into other hands.
I am not an absolute perfectionist, although I'm close enough to one sometimes to play one on TV. There's some things about the book I've gone back and forth about — certain aspects of tone or voice, for instance — but at the end of the day I've decided those things are the way they are for a reason. If they turn out to be a bad idea, then I'll just have to keep that in mind next time around.
For reasons I've mentioned in these pages before, and some I've not, 2022 was a deeply stressful and difficult year. My wife and I put our house on the market — right when the market popped, too — bought a new one, moved, pruned down, rethought. I started Shunga-Satori and mostly finished it (it's now just about finished). And on top of all of that, I came up with more new ideas, more viable new ideas, for stories than in many of the previous years put together. I don't even know if I'll be able to get to all of them, but the sheer explosion of riches in my hands deserves some thought. What happened?
I do feel like I've crossed some kind of personal Rubicon in terms of how I come up with ideas and treat them. Once I adopted a certain new way of looking at the ideas that come into my head, I couldn't look at them any other way. It was the implications of an idea — and not just any old implications, but the way the idea's implications create or transform a worldview. Also, the people who are embodiments of that worldview. I'll try to explain what I mean.
