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”.
I can’t write longhand. I know a bunch of great writers did, and on even relatively recent books—Infinite Jest was written in longhand! Yikes!
But so I have my tools here. The most important one, the beast with primacy, is The Magnet. That’s the pet name for the IBM Selectric III that I write my fiction on (and which was a fantastic gift from Elana). Called The Magnet mostly because of its electric motor that sometimes won’t turn on till ten seconds after you flip the switch, but also a half-cornball come-hither-muse voodoo epithet.
So… why a typewriter. It’s not for reasons of affectation or insistent Ludditism, I swear. I’m just a believer in keeping writing and editing separate, and the typewriter’s like those weird braces that force a golfer to swing correctly. The belief’s not universal; a number of my friends edit as they work (or “in-between”), they’ll use word processing software to do a quick polish on the last paragraph before moving on. But I’m strictly against it. I don’t want to get stuck over-thinking a sentence that was perfectly fine. I want to spit everything out as fast as it comes, keep moving. The subconscious is where all the best work comes from; when you’re really into some fiction, writing and reading are both hypnagogic. I don’t want to kill the trance or the momentum by taking a break to fix ANYTHING. Let the word be misspelled, let the last sentence be stuff of grammatical nightmare, let the term or the name I can’t remember be a hastily typed “xxxx”.
As you can imagine, then, even though it’s a correcting typewriter, my correction ribbon never gets any use. The Magnet is for first drafts only. Editing is for later. More specifically, the first edit comes later when I retype the pages into a computer.
In the meantime, the typed pages need somewhere to live… They go in the fire-safe plastic/concrete box. Yes, they live in the box, which I’ve been assured will withstand flood or fire. (For the curious or likewise paranoid, this box is a Honeywell File Chest, which when I bought it was sold for $50 and free shipping. The price seems to have gone up… They may have realized offering free shipping for $50 purchases and then selling something that costs exactly $50 and weighs over thirty pounds was a bad idea.)
And then for screenwriting, I use Celtx, which is in so many ways better than than its competitors, and on top of that, is open source and free. I know that my own experience of Final Draft was filled with amazement, a lot of head-scratching along the lines of: “This is a ‘finished’ software product? Why are there so many paint bugs? Why is this abomination a ‘standard’?”
The other thing about Celtx is that it has a lot of built in tools for managing your film if it’s something you’re going to shoot yourself. You can record all sorts of information, like phone numbers and availability of your cast, contact info for locations, details on props you’ve acquired or ones you still need, audio files for temp or final score… And then again, if you just want to write, you can forget about those tools, and it’ll just be the straightforward script software you wanted. The other nice thing is that if you feel obligated to pay something for the work that went in to making Celtx, they’ll only encourage you to donate $5 to Against Malaria.
The contributors to Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson’s What’cha Mean, What’s a Zine? were invited to make one-of-a-kind hand-made zines for a show at Junc Gallery in 2006. I enlisted the help of of illustrator and comics artist Jamie Tanner, and together we produced this zine. Jamie mailed me the tiny inked watercolors and I placed them into a book that I glued and hand-stitched (the gallery provided the paper and cover stock).
As there was only the single copy, not too many have seen it before. But so here it is. You can appreciate Jamie’s ability in light of him turning the art around in just a couple days, on top of his own busy schedule.
This imagined childhood was heavily influenced by actor Jeremy Brett’s (best Sherlock ever) public comments on how he imagined Holmes’ youth, and on the biographies of Conan Doyle that I was able to lay hands on.
It was also the result of research I’d been doing on a dream project, a film script that was jokingly referred to as “Sherlock Holmes Begins.” In the original Holmes stories, Sherlock’s a bit of a cipher, creep, and spider. Not someone you can pal around with or understand. As someone says on the Granada DVD commentary, “his heart is asleep”. So Watson was really the window for the reader; the normal human/heart they could attach themselves to, the source and receptacle of empathy.
I wanted a story that would have the scruples not to conflict with any of Doyle’s stories, but would explain why Holmes was such a misanthrope. And in doing so, allow a viewer to say, Yeah, Holmes is a warped creature, but now I understand him, I get why he is like he is. I don’t need Watson to put a human face on this story. I have an emotional attachment to a man who’s done a great job at becoming emotionless.
But last I checked, we’re going to get hit with two Sherlock Holmes films that threaten to savage the character with poor regard for the original stories. This pet project is indefinitely shelved.
In the meantime, the typed pages need somewhere to live… They go in the fire-safe plastic/concrete box. Yes, they live in the box, which I’ve been assured will withstand flood or fire. (For the curious or likewise paranoid, this box is a 
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