Libby Cudmore's Blog, page 4

How To Be a Real Writer

Pretty sure this is the only blog where you’ll find writing tips via ROADHOUSE references

If you really want to piss me off, you can say the following phrase.  “Oh, I’m a real writer.”  At the very least, I’ll text everyone I know about what a goon you are, or I might sub-tweet you.  Maybe I’ll laugh in your face, or maybe I’ll go completely Patrick Swayze and rip your throat out, leaving your corpse on the floor of the coffee shop as a warning to others.

“Real” writers.  I heard that phrase a LOT in grad school.  I went to a grad program with a commercial fiction as well as a literary fiction program, and there was occasional contention between the two.  “Oh, I would never write for the pulps” (Yes, she actually said “pulps.” What is this, 1932?  Dial down the gaudy patter, ya loopy dame.)  “Oh, I write real fiction, but maybe I’ll write a sci-fi novel sometime!” (like it’s so easy, anyone can just slum it).  And it’s not just lit fic people.  I heard the “real writer” bullshit from people in my own workshops, who thought they were better that everyone else there because of some arbitrary metric, a goal post only they could kick the ball through.

And I still hear it out in the regular world, this intense disagreement about what makes a writer “real.”  Are you a real writer because you’ve published something? Because you’re unpublished, so you haven’t “sold out?” Because you hate 50 Shades of Grey?  Because you use a Macbook, a Moleskein, handmade papyrus paper?  Is it about writing every day, like clockwork?  Are you a real writer because you sit in front of a typewriter with an empty page, chain smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking bourbon, pining for the muse over the tinny sound of your Captain Beefheart records?  Is it about lighting candles and waiting for inspiration to gently guide your hand?

But I think I figured out what it means to be a real writer.  Do you write?  Awesome, you’re a real writer.  It’s that easy.  You don’t need to have a best-seller or a fancy notebook or an MFA.  The minute you start writing, you’re a writer.  It’s not about the scene or the agent or the tote bag with the block print lettering.  It’s about the simple action of putting pen/mouse cursor/typewriter ribbon to paper/screen.  When you write something, you’re a writer, plain and simple.

So next time you feel the temptation to differentiate yourself when someone tells you that they’re a writer too, instead, try this.  Ask the other person to tell you about their story.  Then tell them about yours, without the labels and the bravado.  The world is tough enough on writers as it is.  Let’s not turn on our own.

Book Swag and Temptation

I love writer swag.  Notebooks, fancy pens, tote bags, stickers with book quotes on them.  I drool over The Writer‘s monthly Take Note column, listing all the things I could buy to make myself a better writer.  If I sling my typewriter tote bag over my shoulder, people will know that I labor over the craft each perfect sentence in my masterpiece.  If I wear my NaNoWriMo t-shirt, people will see that I am capable of writing a novel in 30 days.  They will see me with my expensive pen and my leather-bound notebook at the coffee shop and murmur, “Yes, there is a real writer, you can tell she is very serious because she has a a scarf with books on it.”

This is all bunk, of course.  I can’t buy my way into being a better writer.  A candle touted as smelling like “Inspiration” isn’t going to write my story for me.  All those notebooks are just going to clutter up my apartment.  A typewriter is a useless gadget in the digital age, and I’ve found my perfect pen already, thank you.

But oh, that temptation!  It’s easier to convince myself that buying something to proclaim myself a writer will announce me as one moreso than, say,  a real-life book with my name on it.   Writers spend so much time trying to convince others that they’re legit that there’s an industry built up around our insecurity, our need for bravado, for other people to notice us.  Writing is, by nature, a solitary pursuit, but it’s one that demands the attention of others — to read, to edit, to praise, to buy books.

Swag is nice to have (especially if it’s free swag from AWP) but before you buy that next t-shirt, ask yourself “what am I really trying to buy?”  Time? Inspiration? Camaraderie?  Will it really help you become a better writer or will it distract you with the momentary glee of shiny things? Ask yourself honestly and be brutally honest.  Chances are, it’ll do more damage to your bank account than repair to your word count.

And if you simply have to have that Great Gatsby tote bag, try this — for every page you finish, give yourself a dollar. Earn that treat, but in the end, you may find that you don’t really need it to feel like a writer.

Lament

In times of sickness and trauma, my first instinct is always to watch cop/detective shows.  I don’t know when this urge started, but there was this sense that no matter what evil or illness existed in the world, Jerry Orbach or Shane Vendrell or Elliot Stabler or Michael Westen would fix it.  Especially if I was home sick — if someone was robbed in the first few minutes of Law and Order, I knew that, even if I fell asleep, when I woke up, Sam Waterston would make it all okay.  After I broke up with Aaron, my boyfriend of six years, I watched SVU in my friend Jim & Ian’s room because Det. Benson was a comforting presence.  And three nights before my wedding, I was up at 2 a.m. watching The Shield because I was nervous and Dutch Wagenbach always makes me feel safe when things were stressful and scary.

But today’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, and last week’s at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, not to mention the near-constant stream of fatal shootings by police, generally against black men, it’s hard to watch cop shows — especially The Shield (sorry Shane, Dutch, Lem and Ronnie*) — and root for the Men With The Guns.

I don’t feel safe anymore.  How can I, how can anyone?  We’ve now had more mass shootings than days in the year.  People aren’t safe at the movies, at church, at malls.  Kids aren’t safe at their elementary schools.  And we wring our hands and we say “what can we do?”  There’s LOTS we can do, but no one has the balls to step up and do it because this nation lives in constant fear of the Drunk Uncles that yell and scream the loudest.

Three years ago, there was a shooting two days before Christmas in Cooperstown, America’s Perfect Village.  Not the first, but it was right down the street from my office. My boss told me to go downtown and cover it.  I refused.  I was scared.  A manhunt ensued,  and for the rest of the day, SWAT teams hung around our building.  But I didn’t feel any better.  If there was a shootout — no one knew that the gunman was already halfway to Virginia, where they caught him on Christmas Eve — those bullets were going to go right through my window.  Gun violence is gun violence, whether it’s the “good guys” or the “bad guys” firing.  Bullets don’t discriminate.

(My boss covered the story, because he is scared of nothing on this earth.)

So I turn to TV because TV numbs me in a way that music can’t.  But tonight maybe I’ll watch MST3K or Parks & Recreation, something that’s warm and safe.  Because I just can’t right now.  I just can’t.

 

 

*Not Vic Mackey though. I hate Vic Mackey, although I was watching The Shield on Crackle over the summer and they had a commercial for the new Fantastic Four movie and I felt genuinely sad because Michael Chiklis was not The Thing, a new guy was The Thing and he was interrupting Chiklis’ ten-year-old cop show.

In Defense of Canned Cranberry Sauce

My sister Laura is hosting her first-ever Thanksgiving dinner today, in her awesome new house, and we discussed what all we were to bring, I reminded her of the two most essential pieces of a Cudmore Family Thanksgiving: Brown & Serve rolls, and canned cranberry sauce.

My understanding and celebration of the Thanksgiving dinner is based entirely on how my grandmother, Cora Cudmore, made it for my sisters, my dad and I.  My parents were divorced, so we had an early dinner with my grandma and then went for a second, later dinner at my grandmother Rivkah’s house.  I was usually still full, so I just had dessert.

But oh, the classic American spread Grandma put forth!  It was like something out of a vintage Good Housekeeping.  We started with Chicken in Biskit crackers on a fancy silver tray, with port wine cheese spread and olives, which I never ate because olives are gross.  She pulled out her good dishes for the holidays, a brown and tan set that she got every piece of — including the gravy boat and pitcher — with grocery store stamps.  As a kid, I thought those dishes were ugly, but now I would give away every beautiful pot and pan and gadget in my kitchen to see them on the table again.

The cranberry sauce was sliced along the can rings.  The brown-and-serve rolls were in a basket with a tea towel and a warming stone.  And there was turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy in the matching gravy boat, of course, and a little salad each.  It wasn’t super-fancy, but it had that certain post-war Americana feel to it that has always been a sort of siren song to me.  She grew up poor, she left a no-good husband and raised my amazing and wonderful dad by herself.  Entertaining was important to her, to show that she had manners and class.  Even though we were just in her eat-in kitchen, she dressed up and expected the same of us.  It was a party, after all.

My grandmother died in 2008 and I miss her all the time.  I know how to make cranberry sauce and I know how to make rolls.  But these are the tastes that bring me back home.  I buy the organic canned cranberry sauce like some sort of apology to the Kitchen Gods.  I sent Laura a frantic and deliberately melodramatic series of texts saying I would JUST DIE if we didn’t have brown & serve rolls (she was one step ahead of me, of course — hard as I try, Laura is the heir to Grandma’s entertaining throne.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  Enjoy this time with your friends and family, whatever type of cranberry sauce you decide to serve.

You Don’t Control My Life, Buzzfeed

2 a.m. last night found me on my couch, eating fun-sized boxes of Milk Duds and playing Lunar: Silver Star Story on the PS2 Heather left for me after we filmed the book trailer for Amber Benson’s Witches of Echo Park.  I couldn’t sleep, partially because I come from a long line of insomniacs and partially because my husband has a cold, so he was snoring and carrying on.  I was strangely happy in this moment, wrapped up in a fuzzy blanket, having taken control of my insomnia rather than freaking out, like I normally do.

About a week ago, I decided, in my ongoing quest to become a super-productive human with an awesome house who writes a novel every single morning, I started doing Buzzfeed’s “Morning Person Challenge.”  Now I’m generally a pretty decent morning person; by 7 a.m. I have my coffee and am writing at my desk/kitchen table, but I occasionally get in these fits where I decide that my life could somehow be more awesome/pretty/productive and then throw everything into disarray and then break down crying.  There’s a Basic Bitch inside me trying to fight her way out, like a demon.

The first few nights of the challenge were GREAT.  I turned off screens two hours before bed.  I read George Saunders.  I put on the new comforter that my friend Tara bought us for our wedding, and I lit the candle Liz gave us when we went to visit her. I used the time I wasn’t wasting on Twitter to practice chess, listen to The Martian on audiobook and to try meditation.  I was calm and relaxed and felt very smart.

But as week two rolled around, I wasn’t sleeping well, which meant that I wasn’t as productive in the morning as I could be, which meant MY WHOLE LIFE IS CRAP AND I AM AN UGLY FAILURE WHO DOESN’T KNOW 22 LIFE HACKS ABOUT CONTOURING!!!!!

The Basic Bitch was out, screaming for infinity scarves and whimsical kitchen gadgets. I had to fight her back or I would wake up and everything in my apartment would be spray-painted gold and there would be scented candles EVERYWHERE.  I’ve already hung my hats (and necklaces!) on wall hooks.  LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME, BUZZFEED.

I quit the Buzzfeed challenge.  I felt bad about this, because I like to see things through and feel like a garbage human if I don’t.  But it was making me crazy.  I like my morning routine.  It works for me, and I AM productive.  I could be more productive, sure, and I’ll work on that, but no website that routinely boasts articles like “If Disney Princesses Were Condiments” can tell me how to live my life.

I kept up with the evening routine.  It worked, and it made me happy.  But last night, playing old RPGs at 2 a.m. while eating Halloween candy, was oddly comforting.  Yes, I know the blue light is bad for sleep.  Yes, I know that I could have been doing something productive.  But fuck that.  By doing something that I normally wouldn’t let myself do, by indulging in some under-indulged vices and shaking up my routine, I actually relaxed enough to fall asleep after an hour.

I’m tired of trying to hack my life to look like someone else’s Pinterest board.  I am no whimsical or #Inspiration, I do not have the time or the energy to bake gluten-free/dairy-free/soy-free/organic/nut-free/free-range granola bars or hand-stitch chair cushions that look like sushi.  Could I tidy up?  Yes.  Could I eat better, exercise more, brighten up my kitchen with a fun rug?  Sure, why not.

But I am also a grown-ass woman who can sleep and wake up and decorate her apartment for when and how and what suits her.   I am not defined by listacles or other people’s idea of what a productive life looks like.  It sounds so simple now, doesn’t it?  But it’s easy to get sucked in, to measure yourself by other people’s standards.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s 11 a.m., I should probably get dressed and actually get outside today.

 

 

On Writing “Rough Night in Little Toke”

You kids, with your fancy animes and your Crackles and your CrunchyRolls, you don’t know how hard the rest of us used to have it!  Back in my day, we had to get anime from a CATALOG.  Specifically, the Viz catalog, which arrived every so often (quarterly, perhaps?) at my house on Park Place.  It was a happy day when it arrived, filled with treats from far-off Japan, Ranma 1/2 and  Akira and manga, so much manga, plus a lot of filthy stuff that came with a big fat NOT FOR KIDS bar across it.

I devoured that catalog.  This was back when anime came in clamshell VHS cases, 2, maybe 3 episodes at a time.  And that shit was NOT cheap — I think I paid about $30 for All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku-Nuku, my first anime (purchased from Tower Records).  Years later, I would buy the entire series on DVD for $6.  Times have changed.

I lost interest in anime after college, but you can imagine what a THRILL it was to be asked by Nick Mamatas, who is one of my favorite people in the whole world, to contribute to HANZAI JAPAN, an anthology of Japanese-themed crime stories put out by Viz’s Haikasoru imprint.  A long-forgotten fragment of my life had come full-circle.

I AGONIZED over what to write.  Here was this great opportunity, one I could never have DREAMED of existing, let alone being asked to be a part of, and I had NO CLUE what to write.  I got thinking of idiots who get generic Kanji tattoos (“Goddess” “Princess” “Warrior” blah blah blah) and came up with the idea of an asshole who gets a possessed tattoo.  Good start.  Now what?

It was my friend Jason, who is really good at this sort of thing, to come up with the idea that the tattoo takes on the life of whoever touches it.  I was off and running, and a few weeks later, I had “Rough Night in Little Toke.” It’s a much different story than anything I had written previously.  It’s exceedingly vulgar.  The prose is sharp and dirty and ugly, forsaking much of the cool polish or the foreboding loneliness that is the general hallmark of my hard crime writing.  Little Toke itself is a hellish homage to when I used to buy my anime, at the Tower Records and Anime Crash — both long gone — near where my sister Shaun went to NYU.

After a few edits (Nick wanted the word count to come down a bit, so I stripped down some of my longer tangents) I was IN, and got my copy right around the same time I got my ARCs for The Big Rewind.  It was a good week.

On Missing Girls & Why I Can’t Listen to Eric Clapton

The Back to the Future soundtrack is the sound of happiness.  If you don’t love “The Power of Love” than you are an inhuman monster and we have nothing to talk about.

But on a weirder, darker note, I can’t listen to Eric Clapton’s “Heaven is One Step Away,” on the A-side.  It’s a halfway decent song (I’m not a huge Clapton fan anyways) but it’s linked in my brain, the way that music gets, with two tragedies.  The first, knowing about Clapton’s son Conor, who died in a fall from a window and was the inspiration for “Tears in Heaven,” a song that I feel bad for deeply hating.  The second is an incident that had a fundamental impact on my life, one that has stayed with me well into adulthood.

I was 10 when Sarah Ann Wood, 12, went missing in Frankfort, NY.  Her poster was everywhere; I can still see her photo as clear as though it’s in front of me.  A few months later, Polly Klaas, also 12, would be kidnapped from a slumber party in her mother’s house, her body was recovered months later.  Their kidnappers were eventually caught and sentenced to prison, but Sarah’s body was never recovered.

1993 was a big one for me.   I’d had my adenoids out and tubes put in my ears; a big surgery for a 10 year old (I was out of school for a week).  My mom had remarried and my baby sister Beth was due in September, and I would discover both The Nightmare Before Christmas and Star Wars, films that would define my adolescence.  The Back to the Future soundtrack was my favorite cassette tape, the soundtrack for my summer.  But Clapton’s “Heaven is One Step Away,” with lyrics like “We searched all through the night/I couldn’t find it/and I knew then something wasn’t right,” combined with the idea of Heaven being the place you go after you die, all linked in my brain with Conor, Sarah and Polly’s deaths.

10 is the age of beginning independence; when I was able to go to the movies or walk to the pool with my sister Hilary and our friends Trista and Paulina. But with those posters everywhere I went, as well as the ubiquitous warning to watch out for lurking white vans, instilled a certain sense that the world I had been brought up to believe was safe was, in reality, far from it.  I remember Trista and I trying to solve the case ourselves, applying Nancy Drew logic to what we heard on the news.

Those anxious memories inspired my short story “White Van Summer.”  It’s very possible that this was the inciting incident to what would become a life of crime writing.  But even as an adult, just thinking of “Heaven is One Step Away” (let alone hearing it; I almost always skip it) still gives me a hard, anxious pressure in my chest.  I know that it’s not about missing girls, but in my mind, it will always trigger memories of those posters.  Their faces and the knowledge that someone deliberately brutalized them has become a part of me, a ever-present anxiety that I have more or less overcome, but one that colored a good part of my childhood with fear that me, or my sisters or my friends, could suddenly become one of those girls on the poster, a body they pull battered from the ravine.  I was lucky that this was never the case.

It’s very easy to be afraid of everything.  To this day, I have intense and specific fears about my own violent death, inspired by stories on Gawker and the Huffington Post and the occasional crime under my own byline.   But I try not to let fear ever get in the way of my life.  It’s not always easy.  Crime writing, for me, is not about seizing control or even some sort of fetishy save-the-world bullshit.  It’s about exploring the complex nature of criminal acts, of the character’s reactions to them, whether the main character is the victim, the detective or the perpetrator.

These cases — and others since — have affected me deeply in ways I am still trying to understand.  They’re closed cases, for the most part, although cases against Sarah’s killer, Lewis Lent, are still being investigated even as recently as last May.  But I cannot untangle that summer, those posters, from my psyche.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s why I write crime, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t at least a small piece, the original inspiration.

 

A Think-Piece for Future Day

About a year ago, I had to admit to myself what I always secretly knew was true — that for as much as I loved Star Wars as a kid, Back to the Future was my pick for the Greatest Trilogy of All Time.  It wasn’t an easy thing to confess; much of my teens had been devoted to obsessive Star Wars fandom.  I fell in love with my first boyfriend because he too loved Star Wars, back before Force Day, back when you had to special order Star Wars Insider and hope to find old figures at a garage sale.

But that relationship ended and he got Star Wars in the breakup.  It seemed too childish to me, too goofy when I watched it and remembered the endless scenarios my sister Hilary & I would create in our backyard.  It was a part of my life I could remember fondly, but I just don’t care to continue fawning over the same way I don’t collect Pokemon toys or dress in goth clothes.  If I do see the new one, it’ll be because friends wanted to go, and it certainly won’t be opening night.  I’m just not that fan anymore.

But in rewatching Back to the Future with my friend Dave & Rachel and their kids, my heart still raced as Marty speeds towards the clock tour with seconds to spare.  I was still on the verge of tears (and being frantically clutched by their daughter) when Marty sees his dad’s tombstone and screams, “This can’t be happening!” And I’m not entirely convinced that Donald Trump isn’t just our version of Biff Tannen.

My crush on Doc Brown, (before I even knew what a crush was) laid part of the foundation for the men I would be attracted to throughout my life–smart, quirky, shy, warm and a touch sarcastic, grey hair a bonus.  For as sexy as Han Solo was, I knew even as a kid that he had none of the traits I would look for in an eventual boyfriend.  But Doc, with his chess games and his Jules Vern novels, was more in line with what I would seek in a mate.  Later, I would see those same fantastic traits in college professors and writers and actors and artists, men I would adore and daydream about.

And while my husband Ian isn’t a wild-eyed inventor, he is endlessly creative, constantly teaching himself new ways to make beautiful things.  When we got married in June, our recessional was “The Power of Love.”  Our intro music at our reception was Alan Silvestri’s majestic opening theme.  And this year, teaming up with a whole mess of our friends, we’re staging a Back to the Future group costume.  I’m going as Jennifer to my Dave’s Marty…and Ian is going as Doc.

 

The Night Belongs to Mona

As I mentioned in my last post, my crime writing notebook, Gail, is nearly full.  She had an interesting life; early character sketches became Stella and Miles in “Narc” (forthcoming in The Big Click) and “Rough Night in Little Toke” (featured in Hanzai Japan,) as well as the home for the starts of three possible novels.

Mona was an exercise in desperation and failed plans.  Initially I had planned to build her signatures out of grey-tone sketch paper, but with space running out in Gail and no time to get to a store that would have a selection of paper for me to feel and test, I went with the normal sketch paper I had on hand.  I had intended to use a French stitch, but the instructions I had in one of my books were vague at best, and by the time I had my paper punched, surprise, I realized I had to have five holes, not four as I had originally thought.  Coptic it is!

Mona, Endpapers

I’ve never used endpapers, but I bought some beautiful sugar skull paper in NYC that I’d been anxious to use and terrified to screw up.  Because I generally collage the covers, I didn’t want to waste it there, but the bold pattern made for a great inside cover/endpaper combo.  Keeping them inside almost makes the paper less likely to get damaged, as I’m pretty hard on a notebook.

Building Mona also gave me a chance to use two old patches from my high school collection; a pair of fuzzy dice that adorned a black sweater and brass knuckles that were on an old hoodie.  This is a very tactile notebook, which is something I’ve been intending to explore with my book arts.

Mona, Front Cover

Mona gets her name from several sources — the first, the character Ramona in Eric Powell’s The Goon (I had a real problem with Occasions of Revenge, both as a woman and a writer, because Powell’s narrative was cheap, relying on coincidences and cliches rather than building an actual story) but that’s her picture adorning the front cover.  The second is from Donald Fagen’s “The Night Belongs to Mona” off Morph the Cat.  It’s one of my musical obsessions at the moment (along with Chastity Belt’s “Joke“).  Also, because it’s a crime writing notebook, Warren Zevon’s “Bullet For Ramona” was a minor inspiration.

Mona, Back Cover

The back cover features a panel from The Big Fat Kill, because I had a papercrafting copy laying around, left over from a CD booklet I made Jason for his birthday.

So while yes, Mona is not what I planned or expected her to be, I’m pleased with the results. Every notebook I make teaches me something new and strengthens my skills.  One of the things I struggle with in making these notebooks is the line between design and function.  I’ve conceptualized books made in matchboxes and Altoids tins, but will they serve the purpose I need them to serve?  Doubtful.  But I don’t just want to write in boring, generic journals either.  They have to be sturdy but artistic, interesting but not distracting.  It’s an ongoing process, but luckily, I write enough where I will always need a new notebook!.

Steely Dan, New Notebooks, and Other Dark Sarcasm

Let me start by saying that I’m listening to a lot of Steely Dan as I write this, so if it comes off as rambling, dark and sarcastic, I apologize.  Every time I put on a Steely Dan record, I find myself thinking why am I not spending every minute of every day listening to Steely Dan?  Becker/Fagen are to my 30s as Morrissey/Marr were to my 20s, a constant, reassuring soundtrack.  Every time I listen to an album, I discover something new to love about a song I’ve heard a thousand times before. (How could I forget about “Caves of Altamira?”  Was “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” always this brilliant?).

Matthew & I saw our third Dan show at the Beacon on Wednesday; last time we saw them play Gaucho in full and when they played “Josie” I thought my heart would explode.  The first time we saw them, they busted out “The Second Arrangement.”  And I’ve seen Donald Fagen play with the Dukes of September Rhythm Review, as well as seeing fellow Dukes Boz Scaggs & Michael McDonald on their own tours.  (Also, I am kind of in love with Donald Fagen and wish he would write a charmingly sleazy song about me, more “Slinky Thing” than “Cousin Dupree.”)

But Wednesday night, they opened with “Black Cow” (one of my favorites) and played “FM,” which made me so insanely happy that I screamed.  They played “Josie” too, and “Peg,” and “Black Friday.”  If they had played “What a Shame About Me,” I might have died of happiness.

In addition to the show, Matthew and I took a few days to work on some writing.  The way I’ve been barreling through notebook pages, I’m on Dutch’s last signature, and he’ll only last another week, at most.  And Gail, hale and hearty as she is, is nearing the end of her line, with only a signature left before she’s retired to the bookshelf.

I keep a “Writing DIY” folder of funky writer crafts and workspace porn, and for awhile I’ve wanted to make a record notebook.  But I couldn’t bring myself to cut up a record or buy a record TO cut up.  But when my dentist, a smooth cat in his own right, gave me a copy of Steely Dan’s Greatest Hits, I discovered that not only was it missing the first record, it wasn’t in playable condition.  The best materials, I have discovered, reveal themselves in time.

So last night I put Pretzel Logic on the hi-fi and set down to construct the book.  Here’s my hint.  Don’t do this.

Melting the record in the oven was easy.  Punching the holes?  Not so much.  I burned my fingers about a hundred times because while the plastic melted fine, trying to punch through half-melted plastic like the instructions said I could do?  Fucking impossible.  The holes kept closing up.  Ian suggested that next time we drill them out, but there isn’t going to be a next time.

Fagen, Front

Also, the instructions failed to tell me that the record will shrink about 2 inches in the course of melting.  I should have known that, obviously, but also, instructions are supposed to remind you of these things.  So I had to trim down my paper, which allowed me to use the funky craft scissors I bought for wedding crafts.  I alternated soft white and a slicker brown sketch paper, with postcards in-between the signatures.  It took me a couple tries to figure out the stitching pattern on the postcards; because I was using Coptic Stitch on a single-page signature and generally, that’s for double-truck signatures.  But somewhere around the B-side of Gaucho, I got the groove down.

The back cover is the album’s track list, which also makes for a handy playlist builder, in case I forget that I haven’t heard “Black Friday” in awhile.

Fagen, Back

So the cover is a melted mess, the paper’s edges are ragged and the stitching’s a little wonky.  But I named the little monster Fagen anyways.  It isn’t smooth, it isn’t perfect, but it represents a stretch, a new direction for my work.  A New Frontier, if you will.