Tao Lin's Blog, page 2

Mandala prints

I started drawing mandalas in February 2014. I sold them on eBay that year—I think I sold five or six—then stopped selling them and instead just kept them for myself, thinking that it would be nice to publish a book of them, or to sell prints of them, at some point.

On November 10, I started selling prints. I've enjoyed selling prints. It feels more satisfying and less stressful than some other methods of earning money I've tried, like selling writing on Patreon, which I tried earlier this year a...

Leave Society's "first pass"

After a book is copy-edited and the author goes through the copy-edits, accepting or rejecting them while making more edits, the publisher implements the edits and lays out the book and sends it back to the author in a file called "first pass." Or at least this is what has happened with most of my books.

I blogged about copy-edits around two months ago. My publisher sent me the copy-edited draft of my novel on October 23. I went through the edits on the computer on October 26, 27, and 28. Then I ...

Leave Society's copy edits

Copy-editing is when a person called a copy editor edits a book after the author and editor have finished working on a book. I didn't understand copy-editing at first. My first times getting copy-edited were with my first prose books Bed and Eeeee Eee Eeee. It didn't make sense to me for a publisher to pay another person, besides the author and the editor, to read and edit a book. 
Now I understand copy-editing. A book is so complicated that even with the author and editor going through it many t...

New website

I started my first website in 2005. It was a blog titled "reader of depressing books." I blogged about writing and interviewed authors. I used all lowercase. It is here with most of it deleted. In 2009, I changed the url from reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com to heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com, and at some point I started using uppercase. In January 2013, I changed the url to taolin.info. 
In January 2019, I lost taolin.info because I couldn't get into my Google account to update my credit c...

Leave Society's table of contents

Leave Society has 4 parts and 32 chapters. I worked on each chapter so that they could each work as a short story. The chapters range from ~1300 words to ~8000 words.

Year of Mercury

Surgery

Teeth

Yoga

Dentists

Barcelona

Florida

Year of Pain

Hand

Bunun

Hospital

Massage

Machines

Ankylosing

Thyroid

Prison

Blame

Microfireflies

Year of Mountains

Mediation

Catatonia

Falling

Crestor and Coffee

Friendship

China

Momo

Resonance

Variations 

Year of Detox

Dudu 

Brain

Upset 

Nüwa

Curse

Dustwinkling

Fruitresting

Dudu and Didi

Below is a deleted scene from Leave Society . This scene occurs in a park by Li's parents' apartment in Taipei. Didi was edited out of the novel. The only dogs in the novel now are, I think, Dudu and Momo.  
*
They encountered Didi, a small, male, shirted dog. Dudu and Didi seemed uninterested in each other. “From behind, they look very similar,” said Li’s dad, as he did every time the two dogs met.             The walk continued.             Li’s dad called Didi "dāi bǎn."             “Dāi means s...

Links

I blogged about ily at htmlgiant. Hobart published my poem "Antirelationship Period." I found a paper someone wrote about my Twitter account. I've read a little of it.

I enjoyed the documentary Plandemic. It discusses petroleum-based drugs, Bill Gates, the CDC, the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, Alphabet (Google's parent corporation), and other things. 

I read Alan Rossi's blog today. He is forty and doesn't use social media and has never used it except Twitter for a month it seems. I recommend his ...

Calmness

On December 10, 2019, I tweeted "My novel Leave Society is a threat to everyone including me" but now after two more drafts I think it's more of a gentle, calm suggestion or idea. 

The protagonist of the novel, Li, views leaving society as "a relative thing." He has lived in NYC since 2001 and in midtown Manhattan since 2011, and has been immersed in pessimistic, neurotic cultures and subcultures for decades, and so he feels that "almost any change would qualify."

In my novel, leaving society is m...

Author photos

I got large, round glasses around two years ago because the frames don't block as much of my vision as frames of glasses with smaller lens do, and because there's less distortion on the edges. 

They seem normal to me now, but sometimes I've been aware though that I look "less credible" to some or most people while wearing them, in part because they look somewhat Harry Potter-like. Credibility has been more important to me since 2013 or so when I started reading a lot of nonfiction books, doing re...

Leave Society third draft

I finished the third draft of my novel today. It's 1952 words or 2.4% shorter than the second draft. I worked on the third draft from July 29 to August 25. It's in four parts. I read and edited the first part once, then read and edited the second part twice and did the same for the third and fourth parts, then went through the whole book a final time. It's ~80,300 words now. My main method of editing for this novel has been to repeatedly go through it beginning to end. 
My editor thought the word...