Archives for July, 2009

To spread out my ancient egypts, I chose a more homespun route. I’d promised friends I’d give them some, so most of my remaining copies are now on their shelves, or in their laps, maybe nestled in their covers? It’d be great if they were bathroom reading, too, but I’ve yet to check in on them.

The other place I took them is to the same cafe (ballou) that I placed my Next Six Hours chapbook at. I also took some copies of an older comic (cyber winter) there, too, just to liven people’s selections up a bit. Sadly, I haven’t pictures of either dropoffs, as I had many errands to run that day, then work to go to, and I didn’t leave the house with my camera! Soon, perhaps. I’ll probz drop in again, to see how they’re doing.

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to let you know what I’ve been up to. It seems (for the average public,) that I’ve been doing nothing. This is not the case!!! I’ve been in a class, actually, called “Self Publishing for Writers and Others“. In said class I have much work to do, and much work I’ve been doing. One of the tenets of the class is that I keep a blog of my progress.

So, you can keep up with me Here! Set your booooookmaaaaarks!

Cheers, ta!

The triangle: a perfect form. The pyramid: four triangles in unison, perched atop our fair planet.

Four perfect forms in one! In the year 4 billion, two things come to mind:

One, is there still an Earth? Are we still on it?

Two, if we are still on it, what are we still doing there? We should be to the next galaxy and beyond by then!

These are the questions that inform one to the mindset behind the writings in my new self-publication, “Ancient Egypt in the year 4 Billion“, a collection of selected writings!

The book contains three short pieces of pseudo-science fiction. The first, “The Four Infinities of June 12th, 2000 and 6,” is four tellings of the same situation, each one spreading out a little further from reality into the cosmos of the heart-and-soul. The second, “Ship of Bone,” is a longer piece detailing the daily activities of the last two people on an Earth completely swallowed in a sea of blood. The third, “An Excerpt from ‘The Dust-Dunes of Old Earth’” is a work-in-progress story detailing a mysterious explorers excavation of an ancient city with a deadly secret.

Also included in the book are assorted drawings of pyramids, and their mysterious nature:

Behold! A new avenue of creation. Just in time for the celebration of our first steps on another world…

And, here is a review of it from one of my classmates.

So! For my zine I’ve chosen to compile some science-fiction-y bits and pieces of writing I’ve done from a year back up until now. It’s a varied bunch, some of it more seriously written, some of it coming from classes, and some of it an attempt to write more intense sci-fi (which i’m treating very jokily here, choosing to define sci-fi writing as ’something that uses many compound words’). Science Fiction is great, I love it, my favorite things are generally related to it, I love Sliders, etc.

Speaking of Sliders, I will be using its font (Interdimensional) on the cover of my zine, which I have entitled “Ancient Egypt in the year 4 billion.” It is my most favorite of titles (at the now), as I think that the year four billion is a hilarious year. Also, if we are still on Earth in the year 4 billion, dude. No dice.

Anyways, I am treating the example copy I made in class with the copy-machine my mock-up, as, well, it is a mock-up of how I want it. The title page I used will most likely be replaced with the table of contents, and perhaps another drawing will go on the next page, as opposed to a blank one. The cover, too, I know will be on a thicker stock, and must have a sweet pyramid (or however many) on it.

Making that pre-copy let me know what order I wanted the frontal pages in. I’d already thought about what order I wanted the stories to be in beforehand, but if I had mixed feelings, it would be now that I switch them around. It would be easy, technically, to switch stories around, but I’m pretty safe with my choices.

So, here’s the mock-up:

Here are the originals, notice the wonky yet effective way I got my images on the page:

(if you can’t notice [which you can't], I cut the pictures out of my sketchbook and taped them to the originals)

Yes, writing! Cool beans. I suppose the last choice I make is if I want to trim it or not, but that decision really has to come after I’ve stapled them, I suppose. Or at least put them together with the covers on, as cutting covers with the rest of it is much easier than cutting them one by one. Right right, common sense.

phoo!

The first place I went to to distribute my chapbook was Quimby’s, as I’ve put my things in there before and thought I would feel the most comfortable starting off doing so.

It wasn’t going to be that easy, of course, as I’d walked in the hot sun a great distance (four billion miles, right? no, just from logan square. it’s not far, but it was hot, i swurr.) i also applied for a job right before walking into Quimby’s (sort of, it was like ‘hey, put your name on this card, maybe we’ll call you.’ uh, right?).

This is me nervous to walk in to Quimby’s and talk to people:

So as I walked in, I saw that the person at the counter was no one i’d ever dealt with there before. That’s fine, it is good to meet new people (i am shy and nervous, no it is not good to meet new people). So I gave him my chapbook by saying (mumbling) “hello i have a book i would like to sell here.” I then added, “I sell things here already,” to make clear that I wasn’t some ninny who hadn’t filled out his consignment form already. I learned that they file you by the first book you sell there, and also that they have one of my comics mislisted as “bob dylans 11th hat” instead of “bob dylans 115th hat.” That is fine.

So as I gave him the book and told him I was charging a dollar for it, he asked if I wanted to check up on the sales of the other comics I’ve sold. I have sold One copy of Life in the Cyber Winter…

…Zero copies of It Won’t Be Long…

…and…

…Zero copies of Bob Dylan’s 115h Hat.

So, we decided that I’d just wait, as having him open the register to give me a dollar is not really worth it.

Utterly demoralized, I thanked him, and looked around the store out of a sense of obligation. I did not buy anything.

I then left the store. This is a picture of me utterly demoralized:

However, I did walk into a store five minutes later and got a job. Apparently it is that easy.

*

Another way I distributed my chapbook was putting it into an envelope full of other work I was sending to a friend of mine. Here is a picture of that:

Look, it’s in there, right up front:

Now, potentially his friends could see it and think it’s fab-gear, and then go to my website and marvel at how messy I have made it. (A friend of mine built it, and he did a great job, but I am treating it poorly).

*

I also left it on a stack of terrible zines that are on a table in Cafe Ballou, an establishment my girlfriend works at. Here is a picture of said stack:

I suppose that picture is of a stack of books. The stack of poor zines is next to that book-stack. Perhaps I put it on the books out of a need to distance myself from moody pubescent typewriter zines.

*

So I have some left over. A few I am saving, at least one for me, one for my parents. That leaves around 7 ( ? did i do the math right? I will count the stack in a bit) left over. Some of these I plan to hide, and the rest I will be giving around to friends or whoever I run into who wants one (no one, they will stay in a box until I am 30 and then i will remember what i was like when i was young).

*

The way things were (a stack of all 15):

(This post was for the class I’m in right now, but I feel like it’s a good summation, so I’m putting it up in this section, as a primer fro stumblers [hello, stumblers!])

It is good to spread out, I feel.

What I mean by that is that it is nice to have many different areas of practice, so that if you’re blocked on one, you can focus on another for a while (naturally sometimes all of them are blocked, but that’s life. bear eats you).

So, of the things I do (and I am considering myself to do three things, Comics, Writing, Music), the thing I am the most focused on doing right now is making comics. It sometimes feels a thankless job, as the bristol piles up and your hands are, like, sooo dirty, but once you see it on the reduced-size page and can turn the page with ease, it’s infinitely rewarding. So making the book is the best part, for me. The finished product, when you make it by yourself, can be amazing, and you can be very proud of it. I mean, it seems obvious that you could be proud of something you made, but really, the sky (dollaz) is the limit.

I feel like I’m talking nonsense. It’s just exciting to read a book you made.

So, I’ve made four mini-comics (which, for those unaware of semantics [?] is what you refer to self-published comics as, they are not actually microscopic). Three of which I will now describe:

Good-Bye, The Pig:

This (click that link for examples) was the first I made, and as such I have mixed feelings about it. The cover, I feel, looks like a New Mexican Trail Guide, that pale orange is sooo pastel (or something), and I had much to learn about layout and how to more accurately maximize the space you fill up on a page. Copy machines are very tricky that way. However, this was the first time I discovered the “pamphlet” function on the copy machine, which is a magic button that does all the collating and layout and resizing by itself. It’s amazing and time saving, but slightly limited with it’s options. A finicky beast indeed.

Life in The Cyber Winter:

Life in The Cyber Winter (named after the last winter we had, which was so terrible it could only be purely digital in nature, and also best said in Tom Baker’s voice) was a comic I made for my Offset Productions class, and as such made Four Billion copies (150) of it. I will probably never run out of them. But, also, it meant I made a sweet glossy (see the glare?) cover with multiple colors. The inside, too, done on a nice cream stock, had much more options for doing full-bleed pages (which is when the image runs off the page). Here’s a spread:

Bob Dylan’s 115th Hat:

This is the most recent mini-comic of mine (I am currently working on a really long story. Like, really really long). It is a great little adventure involving a young girl, a hairless (mostly) dog, a poncho, Bob Dylan’s hat, and Mac Tonight. It’s notable because I made color covers with a magic secret free-xerox machine, and that I cropped it down so that there wasn’t a whole lot of space around the images. Here’s a spread:

So nice.

Writing:

I’ve done, every now and then, a few pieces of writing (i also, most of the time, keep a pretty fair journal). Most of the time, they stay confined to the class room that they are written for, like this story about two people, alone on the earth (now covered with a Sea of Blood), sailing on a Ship of Bone:

Ship Of Bone (word document)

I’m fairly fascinated by the idea of putting word documents up on a site for download. I suppose that .pdf’s are easier for a lot of people, but they strike me as irritating for a reason I can’t yet comprehend.

Anyways, that’s just what I did though with a piece of writing I did that dealt with my uncomfortable relationship with Philip Roth’s “Letting Go.” The blog “real normal” put it up on their site for .doc download, which I thought was a great idea, yes I did. I also did make two physical copies of this, but I have since given them all away. They looked great though, I swear.

Here’s the blog post about it.

The idea of advertising the work with a screenshot of Word is pleasing to me and my eye.

Music:

Of the things I do, Music, I suppose, is the oldest of them, and as such is close to me as holding some forgotten and (maybe maybe not) unattainable dream of fame and touring the universe playing off-kilter pop songs for billionz of people. Anyways, I have a band called Violet Mice, and I’ve made a few albums by that name. Occasionally, I make physical copies of my CDs for which to sell at shows (usually I give them away because nobody has no money anywhere).

O, Zeppelin!:

My second album, O, Zeppelin! I printed out Xeroxes of my color cover and glued them to a premade CD slipcover. It is probably the worst way to go about making a CD cover. Glue gets everywhere and it looks poor and sticky. But hey, I was young.

Girlz EP:

This is an EP I worked on from 2007-2008 (it’s a long time for four songs, but there was just so much gestation!). Earlier this year, I found a way, using a crafty and incredibly janky method of cutting, folding, and gluing, made little pockets to put the CD in (you can see the CD poking out. The CD is simply a white, blank CD-R, which I find great, because you can write directly on them (I generally use a little glyph that represents each album). I hear that you can also screenprint directly on these with no prob.

Here’s the back cover:

Honeybear:

Honeybear was my 4th (gosh so many) album, and for which I used the Offset Productions class at school to print a phat cover for.

The cover folds open twice, revealing a pocket for the CD. If you turn it around after it’s folded all the way, revealed is this:

It’s an image of a street in my hometown with a snappy Violet Mice logo on it. I’m pretty proud of how it came out. And since I did it offset, I got 200 copies of it. Now I only have to cut the shape out and glue them all! WOO! :D

So, there are examples of my main vocations. It’s tough sometimes, when making them, to continue to make them, when you are unsure if anyone will ever see them. I suppose it is an unfair train of thought to allow yourself to go through, but I feel like the possibility that your work will remain pressed back against a shelf or in a dumpster is one of the dangers (?thrills) of self-publishing.