Twelve Down, Fourteen To Go

This week: editing, editing, editing.

Also: I’m not-so-patiently waiting for Prototype 002 to arrive in the mail so I’ve been cranking out as much writing as I can in the time between looking for a new apartment and getting slammed into a pale thin dust by stress. But, after several coffees-worth of reviewing all this, I can see that we have 26 stories in total and a lot of them need a good amount of work.

These large red ❌s here remind me that a story needs my attention...

By my count that means 12 stories are in good shape but 14 need to either be completely rewritten from scratch or require a ton of editing to be put together properly in a way that can be read by another human person.

That’s a lot! Not only that though, but as I’m writing these chapters I realize that there needs to be some kind of order and structure to this book. Each story needs to click to the one before and after it in some way, either thematically or in tone. The beginning of the book is where I’m experimenting with that right now as I’m placing the stories that are type reviews right up next to the ones that are tales of my typographic exploits. And, honestly, it feels nice! These early chapters snap together in a satisfying puzzle-piece kind of way that I hope the whole book can aspire to by the end.

On this note, when I got Prototype 001 and my first physical copy of this book, I was surprised by how good those first chapters are. Just by changing the format—from a laptop screen to a real book—was enough to clarify that, yes, this is something now. All those early stories have a nugget of gold in them ready to be mined, a special something that I haven’t read elsewhere before even if there’s spelling mistakes and the typesetting is goofy and the paper stock is of questionable quality. Progress is progress! And I will take what I can get.

Anyway, by next week I’ll have made some serious writing progress and hopefully Prototype 002 will be back from the printers and safely in my hands.