RichVH wrote:Yuki's Story - Yuki no Monogatari in Japanese - started out as a writing exercise to improve my Japanese, and evolved into a novel aimed at mid-level to advanced students of Japanese that eventually reached 93 chapters, plus the start of a sequel before I got distracted into other things. The complete novel and what there is of the sequel can be read at:
http://www.citlink.net/~richvhClay Boutwell of The Japan Shop and The Japanese Page has been very supportive of this project, and he and his wife have recorded audio and combined that with read-along video for the first few chapters. That this hasn't been extended further is entirely my fault for not providing them with official text and translations for the later chapters.
In August 2009, I happened to meet Lily Cernak at the New Jersey State Fair. She is a young artist who is a 4th generation Japanese-American, granddaughter of Nisei who were interned during WWII. She was also studying Japanese and had read the parts of Yuki's Story that Clay had put in The Japan Shop. When I said I was interested in making a manga version, she expressed interest in drawing it.
After clearing up some financial difficulties so I could afford to pay for her services, we started work on the manga conversion the next spring, which at the current date (Feb. 4, 2012) has reached 28 pages covering most of the first 6 chapters. Meanwhile Justin Stressman, Clay's webmaster, started work on the pages to display it, and I put together vocabulary lists for the first few pages. We're finally ready for launch.
My hope is that eventually the manga version will generate enough revenue to cover Lily's services, but for now it continues to be a labor of love for me.
I was shocked as i just remembered how nice and friendly she was, I feel bad now 
