Brighten The Corner

Wanted to give a shout out here to the new site up at my buddies’ production company Population 1280 Films. I won’t be too shy to say I hooked them up with pal Jacob Winkelman’s design shop temp², who put the site together on a shoestring (though you’d never guess).

If you haven’t seen it, Population 1280’s film Pop Skull was an amazing piece of work also made on a shoestring. It’s a freaky movie that really sucks you in, and received a US premiere at AFI Fest last year. It’s now getting DVD distribution from Halo 8.

Little Paper Planes is a great online shop that gathers up work from a lot of different artists and so then you wind up with one of the best-curated stores you could wish to walk into.

They also began putting out exclusive prints every month, which is rad and so they’re inhabiting this space where they’re a store but also a product creator. (Our book company, Narrow Books, is currently getting a site redesign, and the new site will be selling books published by other folks, so we’re headed the same way, but from the opposite direction.)

Kelly Lynn Jones and the rest of the Paper Planes team also maintain a blog that covers a lot of artists and events (naturally with a tendency toward events on the West Coast, where they’re based), and it’s a great discovery ground.

So, yeah, obviously they deserve a shout out anyway, but I started writing because I wanted especially to point up their Narrow Books section, they’re carrying all of our books and I dig the presentation.

Spent real money on a piece of art for the first time. Up till now, the most I’d ever spent was $75 for a Johnny Ryan illustration.

Tell truth, I bought two original pieces of art recently. The first one though, only cost me six bucks. That’s right, only six!

Artist/filmmaker Jim Ether was briefly selling $6 dollar “mystery” paintings. He put up a great video on youtube showing off scores of the random little paintings, and I’m happy to say I grabbed one. He’s taken down the video, but you can still see the paintings at the link above. The deal was, you sent $6, he sent you a piece, you had no way of knowing what you’d get. Great idea. Seems like maybe it was too great (it definitely felt like a steal), so I’m not sure that he’s still selling them. But he does have an Etsy store here.

But then the piece that I actually spent a little bit on was a triptych by artist Skinner, whose work I got sort of obsessed with when I picked up a comic/zine of his at last year’s APE. Check out his site… there’s a recent Citrus Report interview with him… and he’s also got an upcoming show at Minna in San Francisco.

Haven’t been able to settle on a preferred method for sharing fiction online. Here’s the same old story excerpt, printed from a zine-sized (back-pocket) PDF, first with Issuu, then with Scribd.

Scribd on the same document:

The more I think on it, the more similar they are… so I suppose it comes down to interface… and the straightforwardness of Issuu (not having a menu, even the way it tends to railroad you into fullscreen) perhaps makes it the winner. Though both still have issues reproducing my font of choice (in this case, the probably poor choice of Goudy, need to get Janson on this machine).

Last night I read the introduction to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Never read it before, and honestly, haven’t started yet, right now reading Arkansas by John Brandon (McSweeney’s Books). (At the LA Times Festival of Books realized I’d never read a single novel pressed by McSweeney’s—the kids manning the McSweeney’s booth were kind enough to sell me three novels for $10 bucks each (on a cover price $22).)

But so I read King’s introduction and was pleased to find myself in this passage:

“My approach to revision hasn’t changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist’s most insidious enemy, which is doubt. Looking back prompts too many questions: How believable are my characters? How interesting is my story? How good is this really?”

Which the basic approach is the same as I discussed in my Accoutrements post, but the thing that really struck a nerve was the implied fear of going back to revise or revisit during a first draft.

And that’s me! I’ve become petrified of looking at finished pages! I lock them in the fire box and, even though the plan was to once weekly pick them up and type them into a computer, revising as I go… too scared. For largely the same reasons King described: don’t want to sit around overanalyzing. At least not yet. Not until the bulk is there.

Anyway, nice to find an affirmation… I’ve read King’s On Writing, and remember a similar relaxation/relief. Kind of a “there, there, it’s okay”.