Amache's America - Now Available!

​

​Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that my new book series, Amache’s America, is now up on Channillo.com. 

---

Amache's America follows three-generations of Japanese-American women, centering around Angela. On the same day Angela finds out her grandmother has died, she also finds out she is pregnant. Conflicted over whether or not she actually wants to have children, she attends her grandmother's funeral and is unexpectedly gifted a box of old journals and audio recordings. Over the coming days and weeks, she immerses herself in them, learning about what it was like for her mother to marry a white man in the 1960's/70's and what it was like for her grandmother in the Japanese Internment camps. As she grapples with her own biracial identity, and what the cultural identity of her baby will be, she ultimately takes comfort and strength in the stories of the women in her life and rediscovers the importance of her family's rich heritage in this country.

So, why is it a book series and not a book? Well, I will be posting a new chapter every two weeks (usually on Tuesdays) for the foreseeable. I have a lot of stories about this family I’d like to tell and I thought this would be a cool, on-going way to do that. 

So, how can you read the chapters? Channillo.com is a subscription based website. You can create your profile and then you pay a monthly fee to read stories on the site. There are different membership levels. For example, the “bronze plan” costs $5 a month and you can subscribe to up to 10 stories at any given time. So, if you decide to subscribe, you can read Amache’s America and then check out 9 other indie authors. 

How does your subscription help me? For every Channillo user that subscribes to my story, I get a cut of the subscription fee, so yes, this will be a way for me to bring in some income. Do expect it will bring me in a lot? No, I don’t. 

So, why am I doing this then.? The answer is: 

• To keep writing! That’s the ultimate goal here, right? 
• I like that this site gives me a deadline (even if it is an internal one), and moreover a feeling of commitment to anyone who subscribes.
• To meet other authors and the readers. There are communication tools built into the platform so anyone who is a member can leave notes for the other person, either to the person directly or on the book’s profile (I need to do more of this).
• To read what others are doing. So many indie authors out there. Amazon is literally that - an amazon. This is so much smaller, I can get a sense of who the authors are. I like it so far, and I know there’s a lot more exploring for me to do. 
• And yes, the small amount that may come my way will feel like a piece of legitimacy in this big scary leap of faith I’m taking this year. 

So, if you’d like to read Amache’s America, please do sign-up. One good tip is that you can go in and change your notification preferences and get notified every time something new is posted to one of your subscriptions. I like to do this, a good reminder that a series I’m subscribed to has something new. Another tip is that after you pay for membership, you can technically read a series without subscribing, but this won’t help any of the authors. Only a subscription will give them a cut. 

A final FYI… as a part of the terms of agreement for publishing on this site, I can’t post the content to my website or my blog, but I can tell you this… although not an autobiographical story, it is one of the more personal things I’ve written. Very different from the rest of the science-fiction work I typically do. I hope that one day, when the series is done, I may find a way to share it out more broadly. For now, I’m looking forward to having a platform, and some external motivation, to write and finish the story in a unique way. I’m loving the story so far. I hope you will too.

We will see how this goes together. Thank you for continuing to come along with me on my journey. I am excited to be moving forward in one of the avenues I’ve been pursuing. 

If you decide to take a look, let me know what you think. 

XOXO