They are your dreams made flesh. And now they want to wake up.
Hizu: a living doll, one of many who existed only to serve Dhalgra, the “Body Emperor”, in his palace of terrible pleasures. Then came a day when Hizu wondered: what lies in the forests beyond these walls? — and made a daring escape.
There in the woods, Hizu found other, human refugees from Dhalgra’s tyranny. Together, they made new homes for themselves in the ruined houses and abandoned places scattered about. Together they delved into the mysteries of who they truly were, the mystery of “Shunga- Satori” … and discovered the world they lived in was only a prelude to something greater not yet born.
But their master wanted them back at any cost. And to take them back, Dhalgra prepared to destroy not only their world, but the world that lay beyond as well. The world that had dreamed all of them into existence. Ours!
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.
Well, it's almost done. As of earlier today I put in an order for the proof copy for Shunga-Satori, with what I hope are the just-about-final cover copy and interiors. If all is well, then I'll set up the Kindle edition in the coming week, and we should have my latest, and strangest, novel out into your hands long before the end of the month. (Spend some of that sweet tax refund money on it! It's cheap! You'll be supporting an artisanal creation!)
I haven't yet set up an official splash page for the book — that's still to come in the next couple of days — but once I have that in I won't be able to shut up about it.
Here's a few things I picked up along the way while working on this particular book.
