“The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought.”
— Ellen Ullman

I’m writing a new book. It’s my third book, and the weirdest one for me so far, because I’m writing it the way you think of someone writing a book: I had an idea for a book and now I’m sitting in the same room every day all day and trying to write it.

Neither of my other two books were made this way. Newspaper Blackout was “written” the same way I’d always made blackout poems — one at a time on my lunch break and my commute to and from work. The only difference was that I didn’t post them to my blog and I made a hell of a lot more of them than usual for about 20 weeks, then half of those pieces were thrown out and the rest were pieced together into a sort of narrative. Steal Like An Artist began as an hour-long talk written in a hotel room which was mostly adapted from over five years of online writing, that talk was turned into a 4,000 word blog post, then over two months of nights and weekends I expanded that blog post into 10,000 words and about 30 or so illustrations.

Both those books presented themselves as books after being something else online. This one is like starting from scratch.

This is what the book look liked a month or two ago — just a big stack of index cards and a few notebooks full of scribbles.

A few weeks ago I jumped over to handwriting on sheets of cardstock — essentially, really big index cards that I could then shuffle and play around with. (Above are the stairs leading up to my office filled with an insane, completely unsustainable marathon day’s worth of writing.)

I’m still working, slow and steady. I’m not quite ready to talk about the subject of the new book yet, but as I alluded to yesterday, I think it picks things up nicely from Steal, and if you’ve been following my Tumblr or my “Show Your Work” videos you have some major hints.

Right now, that messy office above is cleaned up and in the corner under the guitars is a baby swing waiting for a baby. My wife is about a week or so away from giving birth to our first son. With the baby coming, I might be pretty quiet for the next month. (I’ll probably still be updating my Tumblr and posting a baby picture or two or three on Twitter.) I’ve been told that becoming a parent lights a fire under your ass like nothing else, so we’ll see what happens!

Note: this post has been updated since 2010.

People always ask me when I’m going to develop an iPad app for Newspaper Blackout. I’ve always told them that I don’t want to because I think there’s something magic about feeling the newsprint in your hands, smelling the marker fumes as you make your poem.

Even though I still prefer the old analog way, there are times (mostly on the bus or out on the porch or lying in bed) when I don’t have a newspaper and a marker in front of me, so I’ve been experimenting with making them on my iPad.

Here’s how I do it, if you want to play along…

(more…)

See also: “I Am So Over The Rainbow“

* * *

I broke down and bought an Iphone yesterday.

Like any tool, first you get it, then you figure out what to do with it.

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw the following 3 images today, all taken real-time with the Iphone camera and posted online with Twitpic (#1, #2, #3) while I was making the poem.

When does the poem become the poem? When you make that first connection? (Here, it was linking “dead. Now what?” and “Wichita” and then finding “ding” in “including”.) When it’s completely blacked out, “set in stone”? What about leaving behind evidence that could point to other, better poems? Does seeing the process kill the magic?

All questions that popped in my head. Also: what else could we do with this?

What about crowd-sourcing? What if I got stuck on a poem, took a picture of the article, and asked Twitter what my next step should be? Who would the poem belong to?

* * *

Pre-order the book

In neat little rows in Adobe Bridge (which has been a total life-saver):

This is just the “yes” folder. It needs to be whittled down to 150 or less and sequenced.

52 in the “no/maybe/blog” folder.

224 total.

It’s still 26 shy of my goal of 250, but there’s only a month until the manuscript is due, so I might have to just end up short. So it goes.

Here’s what the Photoshop grunt-work looks like:

Wish me luck.

Just a little experiment. Nothing to be taken seriously.

Test Reel #2

Here’s a little Friday treat: me messing around with video capture and Flickr’s new video features to show what goes into carving a throwaway panel…

About a million years ago my buddy Nate asked me if I would design him a tattoo depicting the Buddha-to-be sitting under the Bodhi tree:

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, sits under the Bodhi tree and vows to reach enlightenment and break the cycle of death and rebirth. The demon Mara, who is temptation and death personified, attacks SG with his army in an attempt to thwart his enlightenment. In one fantastic scene, the arrows shot at SG miraculously turn to lotus petals mid-flight and rain down on him. After his army fails, Mara sends in his three hot daughters to tempt SG back to the world. Ultimately, Mara fails and SG awakens as the Buddha. This all happens over the course of one night.

And here I am, giving him a tattoo of the Buddha, but without the tree. (Or the hot daughters.) What kind of friend am I?

The real truth is, I couldn’t figure out how to put the tree in there without it totally overpowering the cool Buddha-to-be.

First, I started out with our best friend, Mr. Google Image Search:

Sketched:

I thought a kind of punky, badass young Buddha was appropriate for Nate:

Carved:

Now all we need is videos of the tattooing—if he decides to go through with it….

A few months ago, Jessa Crispin asked me if I wanted to submit a t-shirt design for the literary website Bookslut. So I said, “Cool, let’s do it.” Last week I finally got around to finishing.

I really didn’t want to go for the obvious slutty-girl-reading-a-book theme, so after about a dozen abandoned ideas, I sketched this one:

Decided Jefferson would be my muse (the pixellated color cartoon is from the wonderful 1993 computer game, DAY OF THE TENTACLE):

Tighter sketch:

Carved:

Thought ol’ Tom needed a companion:

Sketched her:

Carved:

No idea whether the design will actually get used, but there you go.

I did this for our IT department at the Law School. It’s one of those ideas I didn’t have to think about very much: if you walk around a law school at finals, you don’t see students doing much but tapping away at laptops.

A rough sketch for the general idea:

Start cutting and pasting stuff into Photoshop from Google Image Search:

Draw a (slightly) tighter sketch:

Carve:

Then see a much better-executed idea in the NYTimes:

I usually don’t talk much about my individual process here, mostly because I’m not sure who’d be interested, but today I thought I’d break with precedent and take you step-by-step through a recent project I did for my buddies in the band Hawkline.

Long story short, they saw my work on Calamity, said they were putting out an album called “Shipwreck,” and that my stuff might be a good match. So I said, “Cool. Let’s do it.”

I tend to look at everything through the medium of collage: all we’re really doing with art is taking things that we’ve seen and making something we can call our own. Borrowing. Stealing. Mixing. We take the words we know and put them into sentences. We take the notes we know and put them into melodies. We take the experiences we have and shape them into stories.

Etc.

I’d say that 90 percent of my process is fumbling around in a sketchbook, 10 percent is execution. In this case, they caught me in a brush phase, so I came up with this concept:

What did Picasso say? “Good artists borrow, great artists steal?” Well, I ripped that cover idea off of an old engraving I came across:

Anyways, the band liked the idea, but decided they wanted to put out an EP before the album. I thought I could do a lot better than the original design, so I started looking for inspiration. I remembered R. Crumb’s cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills:

Funny story about that cover: originally it was supposed to be the back cover for the album, but Janis liked it so much she had it put on the front. But anyways, I liked the way the artwork was splintered into comic panels, so I said, “Okay, sure — I’ll rip that off with woodcuts.” I began doodling on post-its for a layout:

At this point, I thought I had a good idea of where the cover was going, so before making a bunch of artwork, I decided to finish their logo first. A couple of months back I had already doodled some logos while staying at Corey’s house. Hawkline’s sound is pretty muscular, so I wanted something stark and simple. (Something that would look good on a sticker or a tattoo.)

There just happened to be a Ketel One Vodka ad staring up at me from the back cover of a Rolling Stone:

Now, the font that Ketel uses is just a font called Bradley, that all kinds of places use:

So I ripped that off:

And came up with a final version. Keep in mind, I’m hand-lettering this:

I liked that a lot, so I thought I’d just do the title of the EP in the same font as a kind of anchor for the cover. I also played around with layouts, drawing a bazillion thumbnails:

Now that I had the layout pretty much figured out, I concentrated on the final artwork. I found these cool woodcuts by an artist named Kim Atkinson:

With those as inspiration, I finished the front cover:

Now to the back. The band members said they’d be interested in having me cartoon them, so I had them send me some mugshots:

Which I used to doodle caricatures:

I thought the idea of a band playing in a lifeboat was a fun one, so I used that and hand-lettered the information they wanted listed for the back cover:

I have to admit, I almost like the back cover more than the front. Since the cover and the back were so busy, I thought a simple CD design was the way to go:

So there you have it. Hope that wasn’t too terribly boring. Check out Hawkline. The guys have my favorite song, “Stop Your Cryin’,” [MP3] streaming on on their myspace.