A month or two has gone by since I
revealed myself to be a mambu. It is time to take stock of my tank-mates,
once again.
Tuttle Publishing’s faint show of
interest in my book on the Keicho Expedition – a book proposal I had sent to
them ten months earlier with not a
peep of reply in the meantime – in the first week of March sent me scurrying to
produce something on this project. I
left off work on my promising Big Novel (on which I had two chapters done),
typed up and edited two lengthy translations I had made for the Keicho book
nearly four years ago, and the began upon the text itself, sending all I did,
as I finished it, to Tuttle. A truly
nasty virus in March and weeks of substitute-teaching in April slowed me down,
but I have made steady progress, and now, back at my California desk for two
months of good, hard work, I am ready to finish it off.
Ironic, then, isn’t it, that when
I pushed Tuttle for a decision today, they told me they were not interested
after all, especially when all I brought with me to work on from TX was
material for this one book?
Yet I have meant to write this
book since I first learned of the expedition while living in Sendai in 2006,
and swore in the spring of 2010 to bring the story to a greater audience, just
before setting it aside to be Head of School at Saint Michael’s. I have worked for nearly a year with my
friend Seiko Sato to have a major sourcebook about the expedition – Distant Voyage to Rome -- translated
into English, and she has submitted a grant to Suntory Corporation with the
help of Sendai academics to see it done.
She has bravely rented a hall in Sendai to inform the public about the
proposal, on this July 19th. Distant Voyage’s author, in frail health
and unable to make the trip to Sendai from Tokyo, will be sending her a
powerpoint presentation on his book. I
will also be sending her one on mine, so I had better be sure she has something
to talk about.
It is time it was written, whoever
does or does not publish it. The Big
Novel will have to continue to wait.
Good luck, because I definitely want to read it.
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