Friday, March 28, 2014
Hidemi’s Rambling No.510
It took my partner and I the whole past year to put together a book by
selecting stories about my family from ‘Hidemi’s Rambling’, writing some
new stories and re-editing them. When the book was close to go on sale,
my partner found out about Amazon Breakthrough Award and was lured on
to an entry for it. His excitement about it was caused by a $50,000
advance for the winner. There were several qualifications for the entry.
Firstly, it had to be fiction. Secondly, no selection or collection
from what had been already published was allowed. Lastly, it’s author
had to be one person. We pondered a lot and came to the reluctant
conclusion that we regarded our book as an “I” novel although everything
written in there was what really happened. Also, we decided to stop the
publication of our existing ‘Hidemi’s Rambling’ e-books at Kindle. We
cleared the two qualifications, but the last one was a toughie. Since we
had published everything in the name of 88th Planet that is a unit
name, we needed to change the author name to my name, Hidemi Woods. That
drew an argument between us over who wrote the stories. They were mixed
with what I wrote on my own from the beginning to the end, and what my
partner chose interesting experiences of mine, wrote down outlines in
Japanese, and then I constructed them to the whole story in English by
adding details. Considering his involvement, it wasn’t fair to eliminate
his name from the author. To make it consistent, we also considered
using my name for our music in place of the unit name. We had been
talking about it seriously for a few weeks. Ridiculously enough, we even
talked about how we would split the prize money of $50,000. I had been
moping for the demise of ‘Hidemi’s Rambling’ e-books even though they
hardly sold. When we settled on Hidemi Woods for the author name and
everything for the entry was prepared at last, my partner found out that
there was a length qualification. Our book was simply too short for the
entry. We were brought back to our senses and gave up the entry. I
regretted our useless deliberations and felt disappointed about losing
$50,000 that we wouldn’t have won even if we had entered the
competition. The funniest thing was our desperate attitude toward a blog
that we had started as a break from music in the first place. Our
e-books are on sale as before and the new book has been published, as
non-fiction, but in the name of Hidemi Woods like a relic of the foolish
fuss…