YuYuKo will EaT YoU

Project: Refracted -聯想録幻- “Rensourokugen”

Refracted – or “Rensourokugen”, which means “An Illusionary Record of Associative Thought”, will be a Japanese Literary/Visual Arts Fan Magazine in English modeled after the Japanese Literary Magazine “Faust” (ファウスト) and its American counterpart (now defunct). Before I really read anything Japanese I bought “Faust” vol.1 and it opened my eyes and introduced me to a great number of authors and series; I want to do something similar even if it’ll inevitably be on a smaller scale. So, I’m looking for translators who would like to contribute. Ideally, I’m hoping to get every participant to contribute at least one original work and at least one adaptive work (ex. translation), and I’ll probably need some artists ^^;.

For the time being, I want to focus on keeping this project copyright infringement free. I say for the time being because part of the reason I’m doing this is I want to give some translators (including myself) publicity, and 99% of the time translators don’t get discovered unless they’re doing something in direct breach of copyright, so in the future there may be a deliberate lean in that direction (especially because copyright free material is usually old news and hard to find). That said, right now I’m looking for legitimate permissions to include chapters from some serial light novels to translate, and even if I can’t find any, I have a pretty good copyright free backup, at least for myself.

What would be stellar is if I could convince some artists/writers in Japan to write a short little something just for use in this magazine – but I don’t want to get ahead of myself just yet.

If the project ends up running a little slow, chances are it’ll be a web publication in pdf and distributed freely. If I get the ball rolling so to speak, I want to publish this thing for real and I’ll use the money that I was planning on using to get to Japan with. In that case it won’t be for free, but I’ll publish a “web/preview-edition” with a cross-section of what the full magazine is so you’ll know what you’re in for.

When? That depends on a hundred thousand different variables and my personal luck. But I want to set a tentative goal for September, that I’ll shift around depending on how fast or slow I can get this started.

I made a new category just for posts of this nature, so I’ll do a couple of progress updates when I know a little bit more about what’s going on.

If anyone around here has experience with the US publishing industry, advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

^A rather accurate representation of my lyrics translation queue.

I’ll try to handle most of the more recent lyrics requests by this weekend. Sometimes I wish I had a team…