Very much running on empty over here and adjusting production goals for the weekend
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On my own for a long weekend, so, scripts for two episodes of the show, here I come.
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The Catalan edition of NORMAL arrived. Love that cover.
Comments closedI’ve been thinking about buying one of those mini-printers that bluetooth to your phone and let you print out little 2-inch x 3-inch Zink photos with sticky backs. So I could just take a photo of something, print it off and stick it in my notebook, with the digital original waiting to be backed off into an external drive later.
I suspect those little photos don’t have great archival duration. So, in ten years, I or my daughter might open one of those notebooks to find little blank rectangles stuck all the way through it.
I have saved a shitload of photos over the years. I mean, for many years I’ve had an automated system that saves off any photo I post on Instagram, because I do not need them owning the potential only copy of any photo of mine.
And I think several of us, around the same time, came to the momentary position that perhaps we don’t want Instagram to have them at all. Or at least not all of the photos we have a use for. I find, for instance, that I’m happier posting them here, and may do more of that. Even though square photos come with metadata that confuse the fuck out of WordPress and often causes it to post them on a 90 degree rotation for some dumb reason.
I admit, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. It’s an… urge? Without a lot of theorising behind him. I would like to use the available tools as tools more, maybe? Getting hold of these things and bending them more towards personal purpose?
Shit, Robin Sloan is just printing stuff and mailing it out. Craig Mod’s using a one-to-many custom system to MMS out photos from his long walk across Japan at the moment.
(because category jotter is for fragments and randoms)
One CommentGeorges Simenon used to write a novel in eight days, producing between six thousand and eight thousand words a day. He’d start at dawn each day and be done by 10.30am, drenched in sweat. In his younger days, it’s said, he’d throw up after completing his shift. One of my favourite stories about Michael Moorcock is that he’d start a book on a Monday when the bill from Harrods came in and deliver the novel on Friday to get the cheque to pay it.
I cannot imagine what these things are like. I’m a 500-word-a-day novelist. Sometimes I wonder if I’m too late to try it: whether it’d kill me, whether I’d dry up halfway through. Whether it would even be worth it. These things stand like megalithic stones in the landscape of a writer. I know I’m working in their shadows. But I also tell myself: what muscles do you tear and what do you lose when you try it?
Simenon owned wolves. But he had to give them to a zoo after they ate the cat.
Comments closedI am absolutely fried today, so here’s the new issue of NEURAL, which as I recall you can check out at neural.it
- Study: Aegean farmers replaced hunters of ancient Britain
- Jumbo is an iPhone app that clears your old tweets and Google searches
- Ian Cognito obituary | Culture | The Guardian – “He would sometimes begin a set by producing a hammer and banging a nail into the wall before hanging his coat on it. “You know two things about me – I don’t give a fuck and I’ve got a hammer,” he would announce…”
- Lost river returns to Somerset 70 years after it dried up | Environment | The Guardian
- Creeper — Oh Nothing Press (magazine preview)
- John Peel’s Archive Things (BBC – Vinyl LP 1970) – YouTube
Pausing here to do something entirely speculative.
One of my very first books was black and white, 48 pages (I think!) with a heavy stock cover. I remember being sad at the time that it was being saddle-stitched (by which we mean just a few staples in the middle) rather than perfect-bound (the binding that provides the book its flat spine, which means you can shelve it and see the title printed on the spine).
48 pages, for me, is the lower end of the “graphic novella” length. I say “for me” because this stuff is all entirely personal and arbitrary, I’m sure. But when I’ve done 48-page works with a level of control, I’ve had them perfect-bound and called them graphic novellas. CRECY, AETHERIC MECHANICS, FRANKENSTEIN’S WOMB. I’ll get back to this.
There is, I think, a weird space just under that. Forty black and white saddle-stitched pages wrapped in a heavy stock cover. The saddle-stitching says it’s not a permanent shelf-life item. It’s a chapter, a periodical instalment. It’s not a novella. Bit it’s big. And black-and-white means you can probably sell it for the local equivalent of five American dollars.
I have a particular way I would do this. I daydream about it. I mean, I’ll never actually do it. But, as a hobby, I put the occasional note into a document that is becoming, basically, a thing I’m writing entirely for myself, which will never see print.
It is (probably) a five hundred page story, that would come out in this format monthly. Which is impossible, because a comics artist would die or take four years to draw the whole thing before release. And it would take a year to write it. Functionally Not A Thing That Can Happen. But, in my head, it does. It’s like my Bela Tarr movie on paper, with significant text elements, sitting in negative space next to panels.
No more than four panels a page. Each page should only take four hours to draw. Every four days an offering should be burned outdoors, on a grey stone.
Every forty hours the artist must stand by the window and listen to the loveless wind howl outside while slowly eating a boiled potato
And if you decide to borrow all this and do it before me? In the words of someone else: whatever the hell is wrong with you is clearly a lot worse than whatever the hell is wrong with me, so good luck and godspeed.
Seriously, though. Given that 20 pages of comics sell for four bucks now, imagine what would happen if a bunch of people went this crazy. That would, at the very least, be fun.
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