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RE: A Chance Encounter (A Japanese Folktale)
Wow! You didn't just translate this one, you gave the tale a modern feel and really gave the characters their own personalities. Great choices for the accompanying art too. Looking forward to the next one.
I took a lot of liberties this time around. Writing this one was kind of a strange experience. I only meant to revise an old draft, but when I read the draft, I thought it was horrible and decided to try redoing the whole thing. Somehow that became a 5,000 word story that took a full month to write.
After finishing this (maybe it’s finished), I went back and read my original draft again. The second time around, I liked it. I have no idea what I didn’t like about it. So now I’m a little confused as to how to proceed.
I’ve begun looking into how to get these published, and it seems to me I’m going to need an angle. I’m hoping a modern feel will interest a publisher somewhere.
It would be great to see these stories published in a nice hardbound edition, but an option you might not have considered would be a paperback book marketed to the military exchanges on American bases in Japan. Military families assigned to foreign bases love to learn about the folktales and legends of their host countries.
That’s a market that never would have occurred to me. Do they have bookstores on military bases, or libraries? I wonder how I or a publisher would make military bases a target audience.
I’m starting to do the legwork that I’ve always found too daunting to carry through with in the past: looking for journals and publishes, researching competing books, contacting other authors for advice, etc. I’ve finally just accepted it as a reality that I have to face. We’ll see what happens over the course of the next year;-)
American bases in Japan have schools and libraries on base. Books are sold in an area within the Exchange, which is a department store on base that sells clothing, appliances, electronics, etc. When we lived in Japan, I bought books on learning Japanese on base, and in Guam I bought books about Guam, including a book of Guamanian folktales and legends. You might be able to get some information by calling the Exchange. Here's the contact info for the exchange at Misawa Air Base.
I’ll make a note of that. Thank you!