Nath Jones's Blog, page 3

Acquainted with Squalor is finished, except for all the stuff to do

On Friday I bought a shiny little necklace and got a mani/pedi downtown to celebrate the book being finished. I wandered around for four hours, shaking with adrenaline. It was a purely physical reaction to eight years of work. Yesterday, the Tuesday after having completed the thing, I was buffeted by the collection's emotional jet-wash. And now? We move into production.

I don't know, guys. Books are a lot of work. I couldn't possibly recommend writing to anyone who wants to do anything else with their time and attention. Especially not in this era of new publishing. It would be nice to have the physical and emotional release synced up with the actual release of the actual book. At this point, I really do not want to transition into several months of manufacturing.

But I will. It's not a big deal. It will be very nice if the publishing industry does not make any more major shifts in the next year or so. That would help me greatly.

Anyway. You want the list? Here is what needs to be done:

1) I'm reading the book out loud in my apartment, making sure each word is there, is right, is good, is the one I want. I'm smoothing out all the wrinkles. Hopefully I won't introduce any new grammatical errors.

2) Gin (a friend who is good with technical work and stays home with her son) will convert the manuscript to a Smashwords document before she has her second baby.

3) She'll also make a PDF to match the other PDFs for the series. We don't think we'll need a PDF anymore, but we're still making one.

4) I'm submitting the individual stories to literary journals because I was raised on the premise that such things matter.

5) I need to submit the collection to Kirkus Reviews. I had no idea such things matter but they absolutely do. So. Write the check and move on.

6) Chris Foresman will finish the covers for the print edition. We're doing all five books at once.

7) David McNamara will deal with the interior layout of all five books.

8) We're hoping IngramSpark is not impossible to deal with.

9) We're going to release THE WAR IS LANGUAGE, 2000 DECIDUOUS TREES, and LOVE & DARTS in print on IngramSpark. We just want a product that brick and mortar bookstores can shelve, if they so choose.

10) Pull the plug on the CreateSpace editions of those titles on Amazon.

11) Update the author site with the new covers and the one new title.

12) Give review copies of Acquainted with Squalor to people and say, "Can you please put a review of this online when the book gets released?"

13) Okay. Audio. It would be nice to get the audio versions produced so that the Acquainted with Squalor audio book can be available at the time of the release. Mike and Ryan are working on Love & Darts. I'll get them the manuscript for Acquainted with Squalor when Love & Darts is finished.

14) See if any of the literary journals want any of the short stories.

15) THEN, pick a release date for Acquainted with Squalor

16) Set it up for release on IngramSpark

17) Set it up for release on Kindle

18) Set it up for release on Smashwords.

19) Decide whether it may be best to just use Smashwords and skip the direct-to-KDP option. The Smashwords sales summaries really are nicer.

20) Feiyr? Bother with it? Maybe.

21) Send the collection out to other pre-release reviewers. Book bloggers and all that.

22) Do a pre-release giveaway on Goodreads.

23) Do a pre-release giveaway on LibraryThing

24) Take a few long-shots.

25) Allow three months to pass without wigging out.

26) Release~!!!

27--- This blog post sucks. I'm over it.

Progress with the real print edition

Last night I got home from sitting around a fire with some friends and discovered the most satisfying email thread I've had in quite some time.

I've been glad to accept the realities of the digital disruption. I've learned about text markup, reflowable content, and audiobooks. I'm okay with Amazon's bizarre market controls. I don't understand why things are as they are. Yet if this is the game, I'll play it.

But my God. Print is still, I mean--come on. We all want real books.

To that end David McNamara of CloudyOutside has done a beautiful job with the interior layout of a print edition for the On Impulse series.

The covers have been tough. The job has proved a challenge for three or four graphic designers. Finally my friend Chris Foresman was like, "This!" and gave us a kick ass cover for Acquainted with Squalor.

Especially with short story collections we want to flip around, browse. ePubs make that possible to a certain extent. But snooping around in a book on Kindle is a little harder.

Now. Do we have print? Technically yes. A couple Christmases ago, my friend Joe "Call Me Big Joe" Gembala said he needed print copies to give as gifts. Fine. So. Yes, Gin and I put together a PDF. We were able to upload it to CreateSpace for review copies. Yes, I made covers and was able to do some giveaways on here with that edition. But it never felt like a real print book. Partly because readers couldn't order the books from their local bookstores.

Now? I don't know. We're not there, but we're close. Fairly soon we should have a lovely print edition of all the books in this series. We're going to use IngramSpark so that there will be books people can order on Amazon but also buy from local brick & mortar bookstores.

Anyway, so I got home last night and after years of false starts, of foiled attempts, there was this simple exchange, real progress. Chris's email started with, "I'm using Futura Medium for the cover and spine." Later David replied with, "It looks like we're using Gill Sans Condensed and Fairfield in the interior."

I could still smell the fire.

Decisions

Art is the decision you don't want to make.

Title-wise, things have solidified for this fourth collection. Acquainted with Squalor has lingered longer than the rest, which is enough of a determinate for me.

So now it's about the epigraph. There's:

  The snowplow is an avenging angel. 

 Sarah Strange Harding’s Facebook Status, for a moment on 2/21/2011

But then there's this Salinger passage:

I told her that I'd never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.

She nodded. "Make it extremely squalid and moving," she suggested. "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I'd do my best to come up to her specifications.

The collection of stories isn't as angry as it was when Sarah's Facebook status seemed so perfect as a lead-in to the book. But I still love the transience of writing online, how a moment gets captured.

This whole collection--and series, really--has been intimately entwined with Facebook. I love the image Sarah creates. Still, avenging angels aren't quite what I've got as the women in this book. These characters are less convicted, less capable.

Plus, angel is so loaded.

So this thing about squalor, about stories for others, and about why I'm doing any of this in the first place--I don't know.

It becomes a matter of where to cut the Salinger quote.

"Make it extremely squalid and moving," she suggested. "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

is quite different from:

"Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time.

or just simply:

"Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

which is what I'm leaning toward.

Curation

Titling this fourth short story collection is becoming a bit of an issue. There are several people involved in the project and their opinions are various:

Sally likes How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken but didn't for a while.

JT does not like How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken (and really neither do I.)

A case can be made for leaving the title as How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken since 40,000 flyers have gone out with a mention of its forthcoming status. Except, I think we can all agree that the cover isn't going to do much to sell this collection to any reader who has millions of options.

David likes Acquainted with Squalor

Chris likes Acquainted with Squalor

I like Acquainted with Squalor in contrast to the formality of the woman's dress on that cover Chris designed.

But that's undermined by the fact that Mom HATES Acquainted with Squalor

I liked Shoot the Diamond

Chris does not at all like Shoot the Diamond

Nate says maybe Roast Beef & Havarti and Other Stories, which sure but why?

Several other people had several other suggestions to which I should have been more receptive because I can't recall any of them at this moment.

Similarly, I had a bevvy of other ideas which are all now mainly forgotten.

Everyone LOVES Blessed Rat Bastards, which will not work to help garner either self-respect or literary credibility. (Plus, my grandmother would roll over in her grave.)

Just now in the shower I thought, "Maybe it should be The Damnation of Certainty." Except I'm not really sure about it, which points more to the damnation of uncertainty.

Celebration of National Poetry Month — at Chicago Public Library- Back of the Yards

Today at noon a few of us gathered to share some poems we've written and read.

It was an intimate gathering. We kept the door open to the rest of the library where lots of children were reading, learning, taking in all sorts of information, and enjoying the computers on a lovely spring day.

Poetry? In the middle of the day on a Saturday? Yes, oh yes. A woman named Rosa read some Neruda in Spanish and in English. Virginia Rice Smith read several of her own poems from her new collection When I Wake It Will Be Forever. Her husband Phil read at least one of hers, too.

Lucas Sifuentes, who organized the event, read several poems, as did I. It turned out there were a few buried in 2000 Deciduous Trees.

We read at the podium, from our chairs, passed anthologies around, found new pieces and ones we've long loved. We heard works by several poets including Mark Strand, Sandra Cisneros, and Wallace Stevens.

Here are a few pictures from our time together.

Nope. No title.

Well. Mom came for Easter and said, "Absolutely not!" to the title Acquainted with Squalor.

She then laughed uproariously adding, "That will send 'em running to the shelves!" Meaning, actually, no, no one will buy the book.

I said, "It's Salinger."

She said, "You're you. Pick a line from your own book."

Mother's always had quite a bit of sway, as most Freudians and dutiful daughters can appreciate. So. Mom's rather strong opinion coupled to the fact that the literary editor now suggests going back to How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken has left the collection a bit without form.

With all the eureka phenomenon for which anyone could ever hope, I woke up on the twenty-second thinking Shoot the Diamond would definitely be the answer.

I'd been reading about Annie Oakley, how she could (according to Wikipedia), "repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, while using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet (27 m)."

I'm enough of a piss-poor marksman to know that's amazing.

Isn't it?

So I woke up with that title seared across the landscape of my mind wondering what exactly would happen if you shoot a diamond.

There are no YouTube videos showing what does. What do you think? Would the diamond shatter and scatter, become pulverized glitter reflecting light? Or do you think the bullet glances off, gets deflected, and ricochets?

I have no idea what happens. I certainly don't have the sharpshooter skills to find out. I still love the image and think it's a much better course of action to shoot the diamond than to be at all aggressive with the man who may have offered such an item. Frankly, I thought Shoot the Diamond was a rather anti-materialist, peace-keeping concept.

However. My friend Chris Foresman says absolutely not. No way. No. No. He hates it. Says both How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken AND Acquainted with Squalor are better, though he likes neither.

Title Change for How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken

The fourth collection of stories in the On Impulse series has been renamed Acquainted with Squalor. It will still be a while before it's released. Most of the stories have been submitted to literary journals. Several months are required for those publications to make their determinations.

But we'll have a book soon enough.

The title debate became quite raucous, really. I had loads of fun and three days of laughs with several friends. How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken is just a little off-putting, a little depressing. One friend who's read the collection and who is a writer also said that the original title literally repelled him. (Not good.)

More importantly he said the stories in this fourth collection don't quite inspire grief. He found more anger than sadness in the book.

So. Several of us tossed lots of options around: Home Wreck Makers, Blossoms in One Short Hour, Trust the Sweetest Frame, and the popular favorite Blessed Rat Bastards.

Now granted Blessed Rat Bastards would probably sell very well. (Even very, very well.) If it suited the collection a little better, I'd probably run with it. But it doesn't. It's too bombastic and this book really is supposed to be about craft, be my best stab at Litracher.

Home Wreck Makers was a real contender. I like it. The literary editor liked it. But ultimately most of the characters don't end their stories in wreckage.

There was a similar issue with Trust the Sweetest Frame. I love that title. It nods to the great old hymns and to home-building, which occupies many of the individuals in the book. Still, it's a little too religious and a few people quibbled over the fact that, really, you're not supposed to trust the sweetest frame, only God.

So what to do? If we're not going for raucous provocation, for word play, or for a time-honored religious allusion, what are we going for?

We're going for a good collection of literary short stories.

Salinger's Nine Stories is one of the best. This fourth collection of mine has nine stories in it as a sort of nod to his example. So. I went back, picked up his lovely wonder, re-read much of it, and in so doing found, "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

Oh, yes. There it was: the new title.

The line is in "For Esme -- With Love and Squalor".

Personally, I am a bit acquainted with squalor. I think that's why the phrase caught me, called to me, asked me to stop reading right there.

I conferred with the characters in my collection to the extent possible, and it seems they're each acquainted with squalor, too. It is a truth, quiet and undeniable.

Reading on the 26th

Maggie Clemons at the Back of the Yards branch of the Chicago Public Library was kind enough to invite me to participate in a poetry reading.

There are poems in The War is Language, 2000 Deciduous Trees, and maybe one or two in Love & Darts. I forget. I'll have to look.

I did a little open mic event at Transistor a month or so ago, part of their new Echo series. But. Seriously. It's really not my thing to get up and have a bunch of people staring at me, even if it's a fairly informal situation.

So readings are pretty last-frontier though they're a well-proven way to introduce readers to the work.

I don't know. My friend David was all, "Get a bunch of people to go~! Get the word out!!" But I was like, "No." He said, "Why?" I thought it was obvious. "I don't want a bunch of people I know to be there." Which is probably something I need to overcome.

Anyway. The point is, I'm going to do it.

I passed the info along to a friend from Northwestern, Virginia Smith Rice. So. She'll be there too. She is going to read from her new collection When I Wake It Will Be Forever.

Should be fun. If you guys are in the area, come on out and join us.

The facility really is beautiful. This particular branchof the CPL is in a high school. It really offers kids in the neighborhood a safe space.

I don't think the building was built in direct response to that movie about the high schools--what was that? You know, the charter school thing, Waiting for Superman? The Back of the Yards school was planned well before that film came out but the space reminds me of that concept that a good school can bring a neighborhood up.

Drafting a Kickstarter Campaign for On Impulse in Print

This whole thing about print is a little tough to do well as an indie author. I'm enjoying the challenge but would so much rather succeed with ease.

Everything's coming along in fits and starts. How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken is in its final phase of revisions. I'm looking forward to having the manuscript complete but there's no reason to rush the literary editor. She has a lot on her plate.

I feel good about what we've produced so far in terms of e-books and audiobooks. But for the print reader, the CreateSpace editions of the series leave a bit to be desired. They have been great for giveaway and review copies. I think, novices that we were, we did a decent job with the layout and design. But this edition is not 100% professionally done. And I know it.

You know it too. And you deserve better. So. Toward that end, I'm putting together a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of a really nice matched set of all five titles of the On Impulse series.

It Happened in a Strip Mall at Wellington & Clark

I don't know when exactly it was that I first thought maybe we should do audio versions of these books. A few years back? Likely.

There were some false starts with the idea. I micromanaged at least one budding actor. A friend gave the recording a shot but editing proved daunting. A few proposals were left to the dust.

Anyway. So. I think it was during Read an Ebook Week 2012. I was at the UPS store, talking with the guys there. They're a great crew. There's this guy Travis, with curly hair. A tall guy named Mike (who's since moved on.) And Ryan, officious, effective, competent.

So. Travis and I were chatting about Read an Ebook Week because he's been with me through the entirety of this endeavor. He's sent most of the submissions to literary journals, weighed out the contest entries, and has made promotional materials.

We're friends, really. Because when I'm at my most vulnerable, handing the work over to the world, he takes it--offers a little assurance.

So. I brought up the idea of audio-books. He has some training in broadcasting, which was a surprise to me. More than that, Mike--who was standing right there, if I recall--is an audio engineer who's recorded such people as Bela Fleck.

Well. Okay. Now we're talking.

I got Mike's card, contacted him, read his thing on LinkedIN, and floated the idea to him--that we might really pursue it. Showed him the ACX website, where producers, narrators, and publishers put audiobooks together. And. That was it. We were off~!

I gave him a budget (completely arbitrary, having no idea what such a thing might cost) and he asked whether a man or a woman should do the voicework.

Well. I don't know. You know? Who knows? There's the case to be made for a female voice. And. There's the contrarian view as well.

Basically, he knew a guy who would do it.

That guy?

Was Ryan.

So. There you go. Thank God for store #0857.

When the work was done, I asked Mike if I should drop a check off for him at the store. Well. Guess what? He's been doing so well with the freelance audio work that he left the UPS store, has his own business now.

I remember hearing Kurt Vonnegut speak once. He said you should get out and go to the post office, buy your own stamps, talk to people.

He was right.

Here's what we came up with. The War is Language audiobook: http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/The...