Miscellany – Page 284

Selling books

Saturday, November 30, 2013

I had a blast today selling books at Bookpeople as part of the nationwide Indies First celebration. (I’ve written before about my indie bookstore awakening.) For the record, I was pushing Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing, Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, and Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote. I also bought a book myself: that’s Doug Dorst above, signing my copy of the amazing S.

Best of all, I got to sign books for some really cool readers! Thanks y’all for coming out.

Oh, and dig this: Oscar Ocuto showed up to get Newspaper Blackout signed and what was in his book but a bunch of fresh-made blackout poems! Too cool.

If you’re looking for a cheap stocking stuffer this holiday, BookPeople has tons of SIGNED copies of Steal Like An Artist available. They ship everywhere! Get one here.

Interview with Joel Bush

Saturday, November 30, 2013

I talked with Joel Bush for over an hour on his show Capital. (Mostly about the way I operate online and the origins of the newspaper blackout poems.) You can listen above or download the MP3.

Flip through the Show Your Work! galley

Friday, November 22, 2013

We had a few printing errors in Show Your Work! galleys, so here I am cutting and pasting some corrections in before sending them off.

Here’s a 6-second Vine video of me flipping through the first half:

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Putting the finishing touches on Show Your Work!

Saturday, November 9, 2013

It’s been a long year and a half, but Show Your Work! is almost a “real” book. (That’s the cover, above.) We’re currently making edits to the second pass of the manuscript, which means being fussy about word choices, taking out a sentence then putting it back in, etc. Here’s a little screengrab of my edits to the first pass:

I like to do all editing on paper, but sometimes it takes a few days for the full manuscript to get from my publisher’s doorstep to mine, so I use the iPad app Goodreader and my trusty stylus to make annotations that I can then export as a PDF and send back to my editor.

There’s a lot of miscellaneous work to be done, too, like filling in the “back matter” of the book, with these “deleted scenes” (as this is a book about process, it would be wrong not to show my work):

Now that things are pretty settled, I’m entering what Jonathan Lethem calls “The Gulp”—the dangerous phase of publishing where the book is done, it no longer belongs to you, but it doesn’t belong to anyone else yet, either. (Or, as Alain De Botton put it recently, “The process of publishing a book is like telling a joke, then having to wait for 2 years to find out whether it was funny or not.”)

I’ve been making a few little teaser posters for fun:

But, as the book doesn’t come out until March, I’m going to step back and take the rest of the year to regroup, make art, doodle, catch up on reading, and hang out with my family.

Making this book has not been easy, but I’m glad I made it, and I’m proud of what it is now. (A book can be a pain in the ass to write, but it can’t be a pain in the ass to read.)

You can pre-order it here.

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Questions and Answers (my interview with Chase Jarvis)

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Can’t see the video? Watch it here. No time to watch? Download the audio podcast.

A few weeks ago I flew up to Seattle to film an interview with photographer Chase Jarvis. We talked a lot about my books (including the new one) and art and creativity in general. We also took a lot of questions from the live and online audience. The resulting video is sort of a 90-minute primer for my work. It’s probably better than any talk I’ve given.

I’m trying to figure out what it is about the Q&A format that puts me so much more at ease when speaking to an audience, and how to bring some of that ease into my talks. Chase made a joke at one point that I’m like a machine for giving 140-character ready answers. I joked back, “I’m a writer. Putting sentences together is my job.”

But it’s something more than that—I have a terrible memory for names and events and everyday things that happen in my life (which is why I need my logbook), but when I’m faced with a question from someone, it’s like the RAM in my brain boots right up and I can immediately access this database of quotes and lines from stuff I’ve read and written. I’m reading Temple Grandin’s Thinking In Pictures, and in the first chapter, she describes being able to access a library of images in her head like a computer. When she’s faced with a design problem, she can grab these images and try them in difference combinations in order to come up with a solution.

To me, a question is a kind of problem to solve, or maybe more like a prompt. Sometimes I do feel like I’m flipping through my blog tags and tweets and book sentences in these Q&A sessions, but I’m also making up new combinations on the fly—thinking on my feet. However: I’m making the thinking up on the fly, and most of what I say I don’t even remember later! This is why I try to record all of my Q&A sessions on tour: you never know what tossed off thought is going to become a new piece of writing. For example, one of Chase’s fans transcribed this line in his blog comments:

That’s the thing you have to understand about the whole process of art (or the work that we do) – you’re only half of the equation. It’s an interaction between you and the person who’s going to experience the work. The person who’s going to experience the work is bringing just as much to it and is just as important as you are.

I don’t even remember saying that!

Anyways, thanks to Chase and his team for being such great hosts. Seattle was really beautiful, and I hope we can swing back for the next book tour. If you ever get a chance to take the Coach Starlight from Seattle to Portland — do it! So beautiful. Some photos and video from the ride below: