Milestone

Yesterday, I officially finished the first draft of Juvenilia. I had planned to finish the first draft last summer. What’s been holding me up? A chapter that I’ve...

Milestone

Leah: The Movie

I had an interesting dream last night. Apparently a movie adaptation of Leah had been made. It wasn’t a Hollywood blockbuster; from the looks of it, it seemed...

Leah: The Movie

Where’s Walt-o?

So in the previous post, I hoped that I’d stop writing about the book cover posters that I’ve been creating, even though I have continued to work...

Where's Walt-o?

Day Four

Here’s a fourth set of book cover posters that I’m creating for fun. This may be my last blog post on this subject. I don’t want my new favorite hobby...

Day Four

. . . And Day Three

I think the Miss Lonelyhearts poster is absolutely beautiful. It’s the images that make the posters; I have very little to do with it.

. . . And Day Three

Milestone

Yesterday, I officially finished the first draft of Juvenilia.

I had planned to finish the first draft last summer. What’s been holding me up? A chapter that I’ve called “Chapter Back to School.” The problem was that while I had written a great first half of the chapter, I got stuck and didn’t know how to finish it. The chapter is set in a shopping mall; readers of mine might remember that an important chapter from Leah is also set in the mall. I didn’t want to just rewrite the same scene from that novel; I wanted to do something new, something different. But what? I didn’t know, and for many months I didn’t know.

But a few weeks back, I experienced another inspiration avalanche. As I was driving to work one morning, the solution to the second half of “Chapter Back to School” came to me all at once. It was like my imagination said to me, “OK, you’ve suffered enough. Here’s how the rest of chapter is going to go: first this happens, then this, then this, then this, and then you’re done. You’re welcome.” It was an extraordinary moment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish writing the chapter until the winter break between semesters, when I’d have some free time.

“Chapter Back to School” was the last hurdle preventing me from moving on to the revising stage of my writing process, so yesterday, I took the first step into the revising stage: I combined all of the chapters that I’ve written into a single word processor file. Up til now, all of the chapters and stories have been sitting in separate files, mostly because I was writing them out of order and I wasn’t completely sure what order I wanted them to go. I’m still not completely sure that the order I’ve put them in now will be the final order.

It sounds like such a little thing, putting the chapters together into one document, but it makes a huge difference. Actually seeing them together, being able to scroll through the document and see how they interact in context is very powerful. It’s like a brand new story now. I feel like I’ve received a belated Christmas present, and all I want to do is play with it.

So what’s the first step in the revising process? I think I’ll repeat the same first step I took when I was revising Leah. I’ll read through the entire text with the word processor’s highlighter tool activated and highlight any sentences and passages that need work or that are incomplete. There will be a lot to highlight, I’m sure. Then, I’ll go through the text and start making corrections and revisions.

I’d like to say that I’ll be able to get to work on this immediately, but school starts again on Monday. My job tends to dominate everything else in my life when school is in session, so, being realistic, I may not have much time to work on it — at least not until spring break. But I will try. It would be a great thing to have those highlighted problems fixed by the time summer vacation starts, when I can devote two or three months to revising Juvenilia in earnest.

Leah: The Movie

Flickr: CrazyFast

I had an interesting dream last night. Apparently a movie adaptation of Leah had been made. It wasn’t a Hollywood blockbuster; from the looks of it, it seemed more like a low-budget indie movie, but there it was.

It was an interesting dream because just as a filmmaker might do, my dream-imagination took some liberties with the text. The young “actress” playing Leah Nells wasn’t quite what my waking-imagination pictures (she looked a couple years older than Leah’s 14), but it wasn’t inconsistent either. The actress had a gawky look about her which fit the character.

The first scene of the “movie” took place outside — at school perhaps. Leah was being picked on by a couple of girls (was Heather one of them? I don’t know). Interestingly, Leah tried to defend herself by trying to fire back an insult or two of her own, but her words fell flat and made her look even more foolish.

The second scene took place at her home, and here the “movie” set more closely resembled the set of stage play. The rooms in the house were small and cramped and bare. The kitchen was in the foreground of the scene while Leah’s bedroom was directly behind it (thus, the viewer could see both rooms simultaneously). Later, when I awoke, it occurred to me that if Leah were to be made into a play, it might make sense to build a two-story set, with Leah’s bedroom directly above the kitchen. Thus, Leah could remain hidden in her room where she could listen to other characters carry on conversations directly below her.

Leah’s parents were not in the second scene, but a brand new character, a younger male sibling of Leah’s, was. There was some dialogue between them, and again, Leah’s replies were awkward and forced.

I’ve never given too much thought about how Leah might be adapted into a movie, because I’ve never believed that it could be done — not unless some brave filmmaker wants to revive the lost art of the silent movie. But last night’s dream seemed to offer a solution to the lack of dialogue: give Leah weird and awkward lines to emphasize her social ineptness.

It’s rare that I dream about my stories and characters, so last night’s dream was a nice, unexpected treat.

Where’s Walt-o?

So in the previous post, I hoped that I’d stop writing about the book cover posters that I’ve been creating, even though I have continued to work on them, churning out about three a day. I wanted to write about one poster that I’ve been working on because it is representative of where I’m at with all of them.

Yesterday I worked on a poster for Leaves of Grass, and it wasn’t easy work. I’m at the point now where I’ve done all of the “easy” books–that is, books that are easy for me to imagine the kind of image that I want for the cover. Several books that I want to create a poster for, like Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, or anything by James Joyce, have so far defied my attempts to capture their essence in a single image. Whitman’s collection of poetry had been in that category too. Yesterday, I decided to try to tackle Whitman’s book, though, and so I spent the morning searching for images.

With most of the posters I’ve created, I’ve tried to find images that evoke characters or themes or the general mood of the piece of literature. In the case of Leaves of Grass, my first instinct was to take the title literally and search for pictures of grass. As I quickly discovered, though, pictures of grass aren’t very artsy, so I tried combining that search with one for the American flag, evoking Whitman’s patriotism. That search produced better results, but nothing that really grabbed me. I’ve found that when the “right” image comes along, there isn’t any doubt about it for me. In fact, during my many hours of browsing this past several days, I’ve even collected pictures that I still haven’t decided what book or author I want to use them for: I just know that they are outstanding pictures that I have to hold on to.

So I tried narrowing my search for just the American flag. This produced a lot of good images, of course, and I even tried to create a poster using one of them. That poster turned out OK, but it wasn’t great so I went back to thinking about other themes. I remembered that Whitman isn’t just patriotic, he’s a believer in democracy, and his poems envision a world bustling with people, and he celebrates as many of them as possible, as in this catalog from “Song of Myself”:

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its
  wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at
  the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's
  bed-room;)
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case . . .
[and so on]

So I decided to make a collage of images instead of only one image, which is what I usually do for most of these posters.  After searching the keyword “democracy” which pulled up hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of people giving speeches, I decided just to search for portraits of individuals from the 19th century. Initially, I only wanted four images, but I found so many great portraits that the four turned into almost 30. I squeezed as many of those portraits as I could into the poster (playfully, I even tossed in a portrait of Whitman himself), and there it is! It isn’t quite finished; I’m still tweaking it, but I like it so far, and I think Whitman would have liked it too.

As I create more and more of these posters, and as I take on titles that are more and more difficult, I’ve had to experiment more; and the more I experiment, the more ambitious I get. I even downloaded a new imaging program to help me out (I use about four different programs to capture, manipulate, and insert images into the posters). It’s no longer just a matter of image + title + author = poster, although I do still try to keep things simple.

Day Four

Here’s a fourth set of book cover posters that I’m creating for fun. This may be my last blog post on this subject. I don’t want my new favorite hobby to hijack this blog. :)

The image that I used for One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those images which is absolutely perfect for the story I’ve attached it to. It captures beautifully the “magical realism” of the novel. And I love the color.

Die-hard Plath fans may take exception at my cover for The Bell Jar. What I had in mind here was Esther’s starting point. At the beginning of the novel she’s orbiting the high-fashion world of New York, surrounded by young women who hope to make a career working in the fashion industry. So this image, as well as the symbolic sunglasses, seemed to fit, but I know not everyone will agree.

I actually have an idea for future book cover posters that involves matching the titles of works of 19th century female writers (like Austen and the Brontes) with images that are clearly from the 21st century, images showing fully liberated women in modern contexts. That’s a project for the future, though.

The Dickinson cover evokes the familiar legend: that Dickinson was a reclusive poet creating her great works of beauty and art in secret (that’s not exactly true). The title of this fictitious book, Fascicles, is a sort of literary fantasy for me. When Dickinson was alive and writing, she would collect some of her poems together and construct little chapbooks, or fascicles. Each fascicle contained roughly 20 poems, and she produced about 40 fascicles. The fascicles were Dickinson’s way of organizing and making sense of her vast collection of poems. Poems within a fascicle were often connected by theme or motif, and they commented upon each other. Unfortunately, her earliest editors ignored, and even destroyed the fascicles. Even though Dickinson scholars have been able to piece them back together again, the commercial editions of Dickinson’s collected poems still completely ignore the existence of the fascicles and still use the arbitrary numbering system that Thomas Johnson uses in his famous collection. Although I own a copy of Johnson’s edition, what I really want is my own copy of Fascicles, complete with the alternative words and lines that Dickinson playfully included. I have half a mind to just make my own collection of Dickinson’s fascicles and publish them myself. (Dickinson’s poems are public domain, aren’t they?) But that would be an enormous project, equivalent to writing a novel, requiring long hours in university libraries. Maybe someday, if nobody else is willing to do this important work.

Lastly, I made the Naked Lunch cover  a couple of days ago. Nothing much to say about it; it is what it is. Nice minimal design. I’ve found that I feel like I can get away with sans-serif fonts when I use them on books from the mid and late twentieth century. Anything before that, it seems, needs to use a serif font.

The other day, I placed a trial order for the three Dante posters I created. Hopefully the posters will arrive soon, and if they look good, then I will begin ordering more posters as I complete them. Although I’m tempted to go into business and start selling some of these posters, that would just get me into legal trouble, so for now, these posters are just for me.

. . . And Day Three

I think the Miss Lonelyhearts poster is absolutely beautiful. It’s the images that make the posters; I have very little to do with it.

Next Day Same As the Last Day

I’ve been working more book cover posters today. Here’s the best of today’s batch:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I Did Today

This summer, the walls of my apartment have been decorated with book cover posters that had been hung on the walls of my classroom. I didn’t want to leave them up in a hot classroom over the summer, so I brought them home with me when school ended. I’ve given them new frames, and they make for a nice decoration for my otherwise empty walls.

But in less than a couple of weeks, I’ll be taking the posters and frames back to school for the new year. I’m not eager to face the empty white walls of my apartment again, so I’ve been thinking about how I might replace the posters. The posters that I have now I bought online last summer. I’d buy more, but the selection of book cover posters is surprisingly limited. I’m proof that there’s a market for such things; what English major or writer wouldn’t want some poster-sized images of classic book covers?

So today, I decided to try to design some of my own. This is pretty much how I’ve spent my entire day — whenever I get involved in a creative project involving visual imagery, I just get obsessed with it and can do nothing else. All day long, I’ve been searching for the best images, testing font styles, tweaking the placement of the text and cropping the images dozens of times until I get it just right. So far, I’ve completed five would-be covers, and it’s taken me about nine hours to make them. But I’ve had a lot of fun doing it, too.

Ever since I designed the covers for Leah and The Spring, I’ve been a fan of book cover design. One of my favorite sites for inspiration is The Book Cover Archive. I like the minimalist approach that many of the covers featured on that site take. A single image, the name of the author, and the title of the book. That’s all you need, really, especially when the image arrests the viewer’s attention. In the covers that I made today, I’ve tried to take an ultra-minimalist approach. Nothing is superfluous. I’ve even left off the first names of some of the authors.

My original idea was to include a passage from each story, something that kind of summed up what each book was all about. After a couple of hours, I scrapped that idea, though, and chose to make posters that looked like they could be the cover illustrations of the books I chose.

The first one that I completed was a cover poster for Kafka’s The Castle. It’s my favorite Kafka story; there’s such a dreamlike quality to it, and the protagonist is impossible to figure out: is he the hero or the villain? In the poster, I’m not exactly sure what the image is of, but as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to use it for The Castle. It fits Kafka’s description perfectly: the castle isn’t a fortress or a mansion, but a collection of old buildings clustered together on top of a hill. The image here is perfect: it’s both representational (looking like a collection of anonymous, windowless buildings) and abstract.

Abstraction has proven to be a theme for me today. I like abstract art much more than obviously representational art, and that preference is seen in the covers that I’ve designed today. The next one that I’ve posted is for Melville’s Moby-Dick. No abstraction here. It’s quite obviously an illustration inspired by the novel. In fact, I performed a search of Amazon’s catalogue to make sure that this image hasn’t already been used before. It doesn’t seem that it has, though. You’ll also notice that I’ve titled this book cover, The Whale instead of Moby-Dick. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I think The Whale is a much more accurate title for Melville’s strange book.

My favorite creation of the day is the cover for Pale Fire. I wasn’t quite sure what image I wanted at first, but I knew I wanted something to do with birds, since the opening lines of the fictitious poem in the novel are, “I was the shadow of a waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.” So I did searches for waxwings and birds in flight and reflections of birds, and finally I found this image, which I have severely cropped. It’s supposed to be an image of birds in a tree, but even the original picture had this abstract, otherworldly quality to it. I love it. Also, at first I tried to use a sans-serif font for this cover, but it looked too amateurish. I realized that most books use serif fonts on their covers. There’s something about a serif font, I guess, that gives a book cover a certain gravitas.

Even though The Divine Comedy fits neatly into a single volume, publishers often break the three sections into separate books (profit!!), so I did the same with Inferno. This is the most abstract cover of the today’s five. I wanted an image that evoked not only the torment of the Inferno, but the circles of hell that Dante describes and the epic journey that Dante and Virgil take, and this image does all of that splendidly. It took me a long time to get this image set up just right. I had to start over from scratch five times before I rotated and cropped it just right. I may create posters for Purgatory and Paradise as companion pieces to this one. I have some ideas for Paradise, but I don’t know what to do yet for Purgatory.

Finally, we have the Iliad. I’d like to do a poster for the Odyssey, too, but I have yet to think of and find a single, iconic image that can encompass a story like that. For the Iliad, I had in mind the walls of Troy, and after considering a few different images of ancient walls, I settled on this stack of what I believe are blocks of stone from some ancient Chinese ruin. No matter. It does the trick.

So there you have it. That’s what I spent this summer day working on. I had fun, and I know I’ll be making some more of these. The big concern that’s on my mind now is when I do go about printing these, how big should the prints be? The posters on my wall right now are full sized 32″x21″ (more or less). I’m afraid that blowing some of these new images up that big may result in some ugly pixellation. I may end up going with a smaller 20″ x 15″ size. It costs money to make these things, but I guess I’m just gonna have to try a couple and see.

Update – Still On Track

I am still working. In fact, I’m still on track to have a rough draft finished by mid-August, when my attention will have to turn, once more, to teaching.

What I’ve been doing is to read through each chapter that I’ve written and make sure it is “complete”–that is to say, it has a clear beginning, middle, and end with no gaps in the narrative. Some of my chapters are already complete. Others have little gaps that shouldn’t be too hard to fill in (“Chapter Fourth of July” comes to mind as an example) while a couple are still incomplete (“Chapter Back to School”) and I’m not sure how I’m going to complete them.

Another thing which has been bothering me has been the story arcs. Rosemary has a clearly defined story arc, as I suspected that she would. Her character steals every scene that she’s in, and it’s all I can do to prevent her from taking over the story as the lead protagonist and forcing Mark out completely. Mark’s story arc has been less clear, but I’ve been giving it a lot of thought this summer, and I think I’ve solved that problem in such a way as to keep it in line with Rosemary’s story arc.

There’s a third story arc, too, which isn’t specifically associated with either of my main characters (they both contribute to it). I guess it’s the main plot line of the story. That story arc is also clear.

The episodic nature of my chapters, I think, is giving me trouble with the story arcs. Unlike Leah and The Spring, which had very tight plot lines, Juvenilia‘s plot isn’t quite so tight, which worries a me a little, but it might also be unavoidable because of the nature of the book I’m trying to create with its multiple voices and texts.

After reviewing a chapter this morning, I started playing around with the list of chapters and texts that I plan to combine, next month, to form the first draft. I don’t have a definite order for all of those texts yet–indeed, I’m not even sure I know which texts will make the cut and which will be left out. Many of the stories and poems that Mark and Rosemary have contributed to this blog will make it into the first draft, but not all of them, and of course, not every story and poem that will be in the book has been posted here.

This is without a doubt the most difficult and most ambitious writing project I’ve ever undertaken. My first draft, when it is assembled next month, is going to be a mess, but that’s what the revising stage of the writing process is for!

Chalk It Up

yelling
once, and then the bottom of my gray blanket

another day slides clumsily down, far from the moon,
another problem that distance cannot solve

graffiti from years past
holds all the words i need

forget tomorrow hate tomorrow
just empty pages with that new textbook smell

if i turned my hair into a multicolored tapestry
if i let my pomp hang from my wrist
like a toothless smile
would you scold me
complain about my many wasted female talents

everyone can see the truth
all the eyes are on me

try
try again
try try again
and nothing ever happens

another day slides clumsily down

Inspiration Avalanche

Flickr: Pictoscribe

So last night I was reading for an hour before bed (I finished Melville the other day and I’m now working on Dostoevsky). As I was reading, my mind started to wander, and I began thinking about the story I plan to write once I finish Juvenilia. I already had a fairly good idea of the plot of that story, but one of the questions I’ve had is more related to setting. I wasn’t sure where and under what circumstances my main character is going to live.

So all of a sudden, the question of the setting was solved. In one of those moments of inspiration I had my answer. I could see her home clearly, and not only that, I could see her family members — her father and mother and her siblings. I could see them all, I could see how they lived, and I could see how my protagonist’s home life would influence the rest of the story.

But that one instant of inspiration didn’t end there. For the next several minutes, one perfect idea after another flowed from my imagination, and what I think will be the first scene of the story played out clearly, as if I were watching a movie. Everything was so vivid and felt so right.

This morning when I woke up, I still had those ideas in my head, so I sat down at my computer and wrote the first scene of the story, as I imagined it last night. I only wrote about 300 words — enough to get the basics down, and I made some notes about the other ideas that occurred to me last night.

Suddenly, I’m eager about the next story. If I didn’t already have a novel to work on, I think I’d jump headlong into it, but I have to put it off for now.