A Blog about Booking

A Happy or profound Winter Solstice to one and all.*

[* Alas, the Solstice Schooner is powered by magic voles, and they can't carry much in the way of payload, so not a lot of Solstice gifts will be riding with Chronos the Happy Solsticeman again this year -- which undoubtedly explains CtheHS's relative obscurity in the popular media. According to the U.S. Naval Observatory: Solstice  Dec   21 @ 12:04 UT (GMT)  7:04 AM ET  4:04 AM PT]

Amazon writes in a monthly newsletter for authors:

1. Blog, blog and blog some more! Building a presence on the internet has never been easier with the many free tools available to authors, and writing a weblog, or blog, can help you develop a built-in sales team to talk about your book. Post frequently to your blog with topics that appeal to a niche audience to target the specific group of people who might take interest in your title. Additionally, using tags or keywords associated with your post can improve the searchability of your blog and increase the chances that new readers will find your site. Once you’ve established a following of readers, take the opportunity to share your book with them and encourage readers to share your book with others. [emphasis added]

Yeah.

Or something like that. Perhaps a book about blogging? Oh, wait, the Huffington Post just did that one. A book, I mean.

Rule #7: Write Short

We live in an ADD culture. Though you can write as much as you want on the web, we know from experience that unless the reader can see the end of your post eight hundred words in, a good portion of them will stop scrolling down. Even eight hundred words is an intimidating block of text. Break it up with a picture or pull quote, and definitely with some links. If you find that you don’t do justice to your point in eight hundred to a thousand words, consider breaking the thought up into two or more posts. David Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale and HuffPost blogger says: “A good post is a single thought or observation or anecdote, clearly expressed and directly conveyed. An essay may cover several topics; a post easily grows tiresome if it aims for more than one.”

We could go on about this, but you get our point. Readers will too if you keep it short.

[The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, p.91]

Got it: Tiresome, me.

I am tempted to write a (typically long) post about how I’ve stoopidly (and, evidently, tiresomely) tried to blog to an audience that was interested in MORE than mere superficiality (and lord knows, THAT demographic is super-saturated  by tissue-thin blogging that regurgitates already streamlined and moronified news stories by excerpting them still further and adding a trite comment of some sort that does nothing to advance the dialog).

But, temptation gives way to a recall that I never have had much use for English professors and teachers. (With two notable exceptions, a plague on their tense houses. Tiresome, am I? To paraphrase John Paul Jones, I have not yet begun to get tedious, sir! En garde: Ennui!)

I always believed that somewhere out there, there were people who were interested in something more nutritious than the cotton candy for the head that everyone exhorts us to write: KEEP IT SHORT. KEEP IT SIMPLE. KEEP IT SUPERFICIAL.

Guilty as charged. I find that I am constitutionally incapable of short, simple and superficial. (Not like there is any global shortage, of course.)

So, instead, I’m going to take a moment and tell you about my book’s process. (See December 13’s “Impediments to Blogging” for details.)

(Ahem).

The book in question has been complete for some time. A little editing had been necessary, but that’s no big deal.

No, the issues here are technical ones that are somewhat amusing — if you don’t happen to be me — and form the backbone of our tale.

In 1977, I got my first “writing” job, which didn’t turn out to be a writing job at all. I worked for Phonograph Record Magazine, which was in the old Max Factor building across the street from the old Mann’s Chinese Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard.

I was only 22 years old, and fresh out of university (a degree that I didn’t finish). I’d moved to Hollywood with the stated intention of becoming a writer, although the only things I’d had in print to that point were some letters to the school newspaper, the TCU Daily Skiff.

In its own mysterious way, my job hunt paid off, at that point and, still not exactly a ‘touch’ typist (I’d only started typing when I decided in the late fall of 1975 to be a writer, ergo, I better learn to type — I handed in all my term papers, etc. in college hand printed on legal paper.)

Anyway, the Publisher/Editor said that he needed someone who could work nights, and be on call, and I fit the bill. He handed me an X-acto knife, and, instead of writing about rock and roll, I learned to set headlines, to cut in screens, to paste up typeset columns and run a stat camera for illustrations.

I was pretty good in what they used to force all boys to take in high school, a thing called “mechanical drawing” and so, waxing and lining up type using a t-square was pretty easy.

At the time, they were typesetting using the old Compugraphic 2600, which used a belt of rapidly spinning typeface on photographic plastic, and a strobe flashed on each individual letter at the end of a “line” making a sound sort of like a coke can being delivered from the innards of a vending machine. A series of clunks, and then you set the next line of type using a 72 character, red LED display, and flashing lights to let you know you were in the “justification zone” and other now impossibly retro “high tech” gizmos and sound effects.

They even had a “storage” system, which consisted (I kid you not) of a cassette recorder that recorded the machine-fed bleeps and bloops that, fed back into the machine, reproduced long blocs of text.

I did some “overflow” typesetting, basic hunt and peck, fast, and didn’t ever get to do any actual writing.

And I set headlines using the weird old Phototypositor, where you exposed, letter by letter, your headline, which was DEVELOPED letter by letter. It was extremely tedious.

Not any writing at all.

I did, however, get to see my first “professional” manuscripts, and some of the mystery of “writing” and “publishing” began to peel away. There was one writer — whom I will never forget — who must have loved his typewriter AND been cheap, because the “e” key on his (manual) typewriter didn’t work, and so, at Phonograph Record, everybody knew that his manuscript was decoded by remembering that he used “x” where “e” was supposed to go.

Sample (a typographic re-enactment):

Thx blistxring guitar licks of thx hxavy mxtal gods xchoxd through thx Grxxk Thxatxr and across thx slumbxring hills, splashxd off thx walls of thx Griffith Park Obsxrvatory, and I likx to think that old Jamxs Dxan’s ghost was jammin’ to thx slammin’ of thx mxga-riffs that thx Norwxgian six-string God of Guitar, “Fast-Fingxr” Fjorn Blxxnston was dropping likx atom bombs on thx Hiroshima xardrums of thx xnrapturxd fans.

Which translates to:

The blistering guitar licks of the heavy metal gods echoed through the Greek Theater and across the slumbering hills, splashed off the walls of the Griffith Park Observatory, and I like to think that old James Dean’s ghost was jammin’ to the slammin’ of the mega-riffs that the Norwegian six-string God of Guitar, “Fast-Finger” Fjorn Bleenston was dropping like atom bombs on the Hiroshima eardrums of the enraptured fans.

(The writing was actually worse, generally. Sometimes, you realized, that when you can’t even make it as a sportswriter  — as in the old newsroom joke, “What do you call somebody who likes to hang out with newspapermen?” “A sportswriter” — there’s always music “journalism.”)

But, I went on to my first editing gig, which required me to write stories, edit press releases, do layout and pasteup, and, at the end, typeset on the “CompuWriter Jr.” version of the old Compugraphic 2600.

I followed the series after that, through the 4000 series (4810) to the 7000 series and, finally, to the 8600, and DAWN, and, finally, to PCs. For some reason, I just kept getting jobs typesetting, and typesetting everything, from business cards and Lee Nails® boxes, to graduation and wedding announcements, NCR Traffic ticket forms, Spanish supermarket flyers, books, record album covers, etc. etc. etc. (and was trained in each new generation at some point).

Originally, we used great stone floppy disks to “boot” our steam-powered computer typesetting machines. OK, kidding. But at Beacon Press in Whittier, California in 1987, I had to boot the computer using 14 10-inch floppy disks. It took about half-an-hour and was RIDICULOUS.

I worked on a dozen systems (learning their individual commands, which I learned to forget as soon as I’d left that job) on both major typesetting systems, Compugraphic (out of  Massachusetts, sold to AGFA in Germany in 1988) and AM Varityper, who went bankrupt in the late ’80s or early ’90s.

I worked on EXACTLY this machine in 1981 & 82

And thence to DAWN, and Quark and PageMaker and InDesign. And Adobe PhotoShop and CorelDraw (which I’ve been with since  Version 3.0).  And, I even typeset using the old GEM PC interface with Adobe fonts, on an old Intel 286 system. If it used a computer to set type, I probably played with it.

And, as both companies slipped into sale and bankruptcy, I noticed over the years that as personal computers got smaller and smaller, typesetting computers got bigger and BIGGER. (They profoundly missed the zeitgeist.)

Every time I master a new typesetting system, it becomes obsolete, a dinosaur, and does nothing to cheer me on the subject of mortality and getting long in the tooth.

And so, I have been patiently waiting to typeset my own stuff — and have been patiently waiting for technology to mature.

For me to have the option to typeset EXACTLY the book I want in the format that I want it in. There have been various options, but nearly all are geared to the amateur, the self-published author, and assume that you have no idea what you’re actually doing.

I understand it. I’ve had more than one job where I made a living at $12 an hour FIXING $250 an hour graphic artist’s mistakes. The ability of the human mind to perfectly foresee all printing exigencies is still in our far-flung evolutionary future, and, well, something ALWAYS comes up.

If you have experience in print, graphic arts, type design, etc. then you solve the problems as they arise. Finally, I can have the hands-on precision that I want.

To my mind, the greatest gift of the New Digital Age is the ability to flush the old gatekeepers, the publishers, the music companies, the art gallery owners, who took too much, gave too little, and arrogated the right to control artistic output nine times in ten.

If you’ve spent a lifetime doing things that are not easily pigeonholed, or “different,” or even “unique,” you learn that the gatekeepers don’t want your KIND, boy. Move along.

(Well, the feeling’s mutual.)

And I learned, by taking a variety of jobs at all levels in the art, music, film and publishing industries that the gatekeepers retain their power by compartmentalizing the process.

Back in the day  when one of those typesetting machines cost $50,000 or $60,000, and movie cameras, tape recorders, etc. cost in like kind, those with the cash could control the process, because they owned the expensive MACHINES.

But they hedged their bets by breaking the processes into discrete steps and not allowing anyone to follow the process through more than a couple of those steps. (Sort of like how the IBM PC was reverse-engineered.)

I took the time to follow each of those processes, step by step, until I understood each process, start to finish.

Hardly any of my contemporaries did.

The Overseers no longer control the means of production (expensive machinery), but the Underdogs don’t seem to have noticed. And so it goes.

I learned the PROCESSES, start to finish, biding my time as the technology inexorably advanced. Meantime, I made my writing living (supplemented with typesetting and working as a “Kelly Girl” temporary secretary) with a typewriter.

I was not a Luddite — like many of my peers  –  so I actually used an ELECTRIC typewriter. (And not yellow legal pads — nor, for that matter,  a quill pen.)

The Smith-Corona Electra 220 - my preferred axe

But I kept my technological eye on the technological ball, and honed my process skills set.  I did so for such a time as has arrived, and for such a technology and such a project. A book, I mean.

Which was probably a good idea, since publishing has melted down, and remained in meltdown mode since the 1990s. Every time I think I’m exaggerating, I read new horror stories.

But I’m no longer beholden to an industry that hasn’t fundamentally changed its mindset since the days of Charles Dickens, and which seems totally devoted to driving our remaining authors to suicide, even as they push non-writers who can get booked on talk shows as a way of keeping soulless ghost-writers churning out celebrity (and political) crapbooks, and moronographs [both sic].

But I have some technical issues to deal with.

The “technical issues” involved in this book are NOT the niceties of kerning, justification, white space, leading, margins, fonts or supershift characters.

No: my technical issues are literally with the machine I’ll be using.

Now, I have all of the professional programs that I’ll need for the job. I bought them and have kept them upgraded since around 2000.

But I don’t have a computer that will accept the load I’m going to put on  it.

Or, I don’t have a working computer that will handle the job.

I have a currently disabled computer that I can rebuild, though, swapping out the old fried EIDE “C” drive for a SATA drive, and that’s what I think I’ll do.

Reload the OS, reload the software. Re-register, reinstall sound and graphics cards, etc. etc. etc.

That was what I had to do when I made my movie in the late 90’s and early 00’s: nobody ’round these parts was any more “expert” in building the kind of computer I needed,l so I bought a manual and built it myself.

Appropriately enough, THAT computer is named FRANKENSTEIN, and, even though it’s a Pentium III, it worked fine and STILL works fine.

And those are the technical issues involved.

I figure if I can build a multimedia video-editing computer from scratch, I can probably deal with building a typesetting machine.

Pain in the butt, of course, but what ya gonna do? To typeset the book, I’ll have to rebuild an entirely new typesetting version of the old computer, debug it, and get it working after all the strange gremlin-type things that always happen when you undertake this kind of gearhead project.

But I’ll muddle through.

As per usual.

Courage.

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