Ep 309: The Results of The Earth Book

Bookbinding

In the last week, I have made four or five books of varying skill levels. Mostly, I made three books to test out various hinge gap spacing. Some people recommend one size, others another size. I will talk about those books in a future Tedorigawa Bookmakers podcast, so be sure to subscribe to hear that one. Also on a future podcast will be Solaris Libri (The Sun Book) that will be left out in the sun, the moon, and the stars (plus weather) for a month (30 days). I’m currently making this book (again, A6, five signatures, 100 pages). Both a future podcast and video! Exciting, yes? Yes!

Today, I want to talk about my The Earth Book. The Earth Book was an A6-size book with, I think, five signatures of five folios each for about 100 blank pages. I buried this book in the back garden. Similar to the Snowbank Book that I buried in a snowbank when we had snow. You can see it get made, buried, and dug up on YouTube. Spoiler alert: it got wet.

The Earth Book was buried for 20 days (March 10 to March 30, 2025). And just before recording this podcast for you, I dug it up. Did I bury it? To see what happened. What happened?

As expected, it got wet. And dirty. What was expected was the 100 pages lumping together like a solid piece of paper. Plus, there was a gash in the front that might have been from me shoveling it out or from a vegan giant ancient worm intent on destroying the world. You guess is as good as mine. Now the Earth Book is sitting in a sunny spot, enjoying a refreshing beverage and waiting to dry out to see if it will be a useful (i.e. profitable) member of society.

Fiction

I’ve been doing three things in fiction: 1. writing (good), 2. editing (also good), and 3. formatting for epub (time-consuming). 

Writing is mostly The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Making it more concise, more dramatic, more character-driven, and more suspenseful (I hope). Because of family matters, it is not going as quickly as I hoped, but it is moving forward. We are almost into the US Civil War (the one started in 1860). This requires a lot of research (i.e., Googling) about language and customs in the US pre-1860.

Did you know, for example, that before the Civil War, most African-Americans/Black people identified themselves not by their skin color, but by their tribal affiliation. For example, one slave in Agnes says she’s Ashanti, not Ghanaian or African.

Editing is me reading the books I read and running the pages through the free Grammarly online site. While probably grammatically correct, Grammarly seems to insist on clarity and, in my opinion, a kind of boring way of writing. 

Formatting the books I want to upload is time-consuming and irritating because I have to upload them to iBooks (or another ebook reader) to see if they look okay, and often, they don’t, so I have to tweak them again. Hopefully, to the benefit of you, my reader.

Visuals

TDGB 45 Earth Book Pt 2 is up on my YouTube channel just waiting for you to watch it. Speaking of which, if you subscribe, YouTube will do all the work of letting you know a new video – just for you! – is available for your view pleasure.