Friday, July 1, 2011

A little about the story you will soon read

Starting Tuesday I'll be sharing with you (hopefully) a story I wrote when I was in college called "Dreams." This may be the only story that I ever felt like I finished writing, and to punish myself I have been trying to illustrate it now for twelve years and failing.

When I first wrote it in a creative writing class in about 1999, the Internets were still the Wild Wild West and also I was 20 years old and didn't think about things like "copyrights" and "long term plans" and whatnot, so for my final project I took a mix of my own drawings, pictures I took and photos I downloaded from the few web pages that were not dedicated to porn back then and cut them up and literally pasted them onto pages. I then took these collages to Kinkos and paid $1 a color copy to make it into a book. I kept forgetting about putting them front to back and what order they should go in, but they also didn't have the copier cards back then, they just let you make your copies and then carry them up to the register to pay, so I probably made about $100 worth of copies but only paid about $35. Still, that was a lot of money for a college junior. I have since lost that copy. Has anyone seen it? Doesn't matter, it's completely unpublishable anyway.

I'm not a very good drawer, but when I focus I can do all right, and I figured out that Paint now lets you sort of cut and paste in a way that's like a collage, so I'm trying that out and not investing in any more glue sticks this time. I also have a scanner now, so hopefully I can do this without destroying any originals.

Another important thing about this story is that it's really too long to be a "short story" (about 13 pages without illustrations, maybe 3o pages with them), so you'll be getting it in sections. Also, that gives me a chance to actually draw them, since I only have about 10% finished right now. Here's hoping I stick with this, and if you like it or hate it or just are concerned for my sanity, please leave comments because I have a feeling my commitment will wane if you don't.

Okay, see you Tuesday!

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