Tom Robbins called autumn the “springtime of death,” which I’ve always found to be a little curmudgeonly, to be honest. Au contraire, mon frère, autumn rocks!
(Well, usually it rocks. But more on that later.)
Up north, spring is the most wonderful time of the year.* After the bleak midwinter, after bundling up in 16 layers and two pairs of socks and Thinsulate-lined waterproof boots just to check the freaking mail, after wondering on a daily basis if that biting gray drizzle of February and March is ever going to end, the first truly warm day of spring is something miraculous. Even if “warm” is only 40 or 45 degrees, you throw off your jacket and your stocking cap, and you seriously consider skipping barefoot across the muddy, barely thawed lawn.
I just got an email from MoveOn.org. Citing this article, it points out that almost 2/3 of our fellow citizens favor health insurance reform with a public option. More people believe in UFOs than oppose the public option.
And here’s the thing that makes me go “hm”: if this is true, then why is everyone acting as if there’s some great controversy? Why are we pussy-footing around to accommodate a few noisy weirdos who thing that providing health care to everyone is somehow a path to totalitarianism? Why, in fact, did five Democrats in the Senate vote against the public option?*
People. People. Get with the program, please. This is what we want. It was for this that you progressive folk were put into office. Sheesh.
* Check out the photo that accompanies that HuffPo link; when I saw it, I thought, “facepalm indeed.”
If you’ve been following my progress on here, you know that I’ve spent the better part of the last couple of weeks going over the thing with a fine-toothed comb–or at any rate, a toothed comb–looking for typographic infelicities. I was careful not to get too bogged down in any serious rewriting. Fortunately, I only found a couple of sentences that needed tweaking. For the most part, I was looking for backward curly quotes, overset text,* widows and orphans, awkward hyphenation, and so on.
Yesterday I resolved to upload the final files, even if I had to bend space-time to make it happen. You may have noticed that space-time has not been disrupted, and yet I managed to upload, even though I first had to look over every page yet one more time for widows and orphans and awkward hyphenation and so on.
Still working my way through the final proofreading pass through the book. I’m going backward so that I don’t get bogged down or distracted, and I’m marking up a PDF so that I’m not tempted to tweak and twiddle. I’ve been knocking out about 100 pages a night, with 100 pages to go.
To unwind, I’ve been poking around on the internets. Oh, the crazy things you find.
Via PZ, via GOOD, via This Is Why You’re Fat, I’ve just tonight learned about the turbaconucken (a turducken wrapped in bacon, because everything’s better wrapped in bacon) and the Fool’s Gold Stack (pancakes layered with bacon and peanut butter). I think I’m gaining weight just looking at the pictures of these things.
Senator Graham, I’m afraid we need to have a little talk. I’m sad to say, I think it’s time we part ways. It’s been fun, but I really don’t think this relationship is working out for either of us.
Look. Let’s make a deal, shall we? I’ll stop clicking on online petitions, and you stop sending me form letters.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your attempt at constituent relations. I mean, you do give good boilerplate. And at least your letter didn’t mention “tyranny,” or–gasp!–”socialism.”
But really, I just don’t see the point in going on with this charade. If we’re honest with ourselves and each other–and let’s do be honest, shall we?–we have to admit that you’re never going to get my vote at the ballot box, and I’m never going to get your vote on the Senate floor. So let’s just call it quits.
Ah, but before we do, I would like to point out a couple of things.
This morning I went to another writers’ workshop at CCPL, again led by Jonathan Sanchez. We again worked on “naming names,” with filling our writing with “ordinary and unforgettable” detail.
Jonathan gave a great example of the mnemonic power of specificity. If I say, “I have a pet and I love him a lot,” within five minutes you’ll have forgotten I ever said it. If I say, “I have this terrific bald chihuahua with three legs, and I love him so much that I feed him raw liver after tearing it into bite-sized pieces with my bare hands,” you’re likely to think I’m out of my mind, yes, but you’re unlikely to forget what I said.
Even though my (fictional) three-legged chihuahua is unusual, and my (alleged) habit of feeding him raw liver is downright nasty, my bond with him is ordinary. Any animal lover can understand it, and the vividness and specificity of detail emphasize the commonness of the emotion that underlies it.
I’m trying very hard to pay a lot of attention to the final niggling details of book design. In particular, though I’ve spent many more hundreds of hours than I can even begin to count proofreading and editing The River in Winter, I’ve now got to go through it one more time and look for typographical infelicities–acronyms that should be in small caps, wonky nested quotes,* widows and orphans, and the dreaded rivers.
As a result, I’ve been spending my evenings with InDesign rather than WordPress.
But, hey, I don’t want to disappoint my readers (all three of you). In lieu of a proper post, here are some selections from my recent browser history.
I’m totally in love with this thing I just whipped up in 20 minutes in GarageBand.
I’ve been torturing myself trying to write a piece of music that captures the mood I want to create with my future book trailer, if there ever is one.
And now, after stringing together some helpfully labeled loops from the “Symphony Orchestra” Jam Pack, here it is, five minutes of book trailer mood music.
I suppose, now that I have a clearer idea of what the thing should sound like, I could go back and compose something similar from scratch. That’ll certainly be an exercise for a future date.
I’ve never done this sort of thing as a–what shall we call it?–exhibitor? I’ve attended home shows and technology expos and whatnot, but always as a collector of information, not as a disseminator of it.
