Patience

Back when I was a wee lad, my father took a couple pictures of me with his printing stuff. I’ve got what I can only guess are third or forth generation copies of these pictures. They’re framed and hand on the ratty walls of my garage clutter print shop.
     Either ’cause I wasn't paying attention or maybe because I was, after Dad died, I ended up bit by the printing bug. I admit easily that I let myself be bit. His death took a huge pile out of me. Having the printery in my house or garage was a way by which I kept Dad alive and present in my paws on a regular basis. And even all these 25-odd years later, I still feel that way about the shop.
     It's my animita to my father, a man whom I called Sarge more often in the last decades of his life than I called Dad.
     And I admit straight up that the printery is also my own egoboo, a place where I can show off what I think of my untested and pretty much unnecessary talent.
     I get to write stuff, most of it ad lib & “in the stick” (and back when I had the Intertype caster, I even wrote stuff out beforehand to set & then print). So there’s that.
     I also get to play with type and color and paper, hedging myself against the possibility that I might have somehow gained enough insight into graphic design to make what I do end up printing at least pleasing to the eye.
     And then I have to add that my attempt at getting an advanced degree in English comp so that I could teach added to this printery thing. After all: I was the son of a journalist & writer, of a school teacher who set me & my sister up to read before I got to kindergarten.

At which point the old man gets a CreateSpace account, which is where all this type and press and writing gets ugly.

First off, let me place no blame on CreateSpace. My experience with them, at this point, has been easy and quick. I had no problems with file upload or getting proofs or any of that stuff.
     What I got back from them in the order of proof was excellent. If the eventually approved for sale book – about which I will squeak later – is anything like the proofs, I will be able to say that my book looks like a book that I’d be proud to have said came from my garage only better.
     So what’s the case here?
     Well, it’s like everything I ever told any student who suffered from my goofy pseudo-intellectualism and drawn out metaphors has come back to haunt me. All that. Like a long sentence at the beginning. Or a long one in the middle. Who cares?
     I have learned by paying for my proofs that there is never a time when any work is finished, at least if you’re like me. Scatterbrained. Short-term-memory depraved. Loony. All that.
     
And impatient.
     
The book of which I squawk came to me as an afternoon on the can meditation about a long-time story that’s been floating in and out of my head for the past sixty years at least. It’s got time travel, aliens, genetic engineering, mind control, a blessed savior, godlessness and jihad all rolled up in a Burroughs-esque story line that jumps time tracks and reality with impunity.
     And that’s William S. Burroughs, Jr Burroughs-esque, by the way.
     Ain’t no Martian Chronicles here, yo.
     As for the writing I spent a couple couple months on it at least. Started back somewhere in the end of last summer, cruising through tons of disk space in the process, and accumulating various versions of the same bits that eventually got tossed or used.
     Truthfully, it was the craziest thing I have ever done, other ’n having childrens.
     In the end I had a couple hundred pages of drool and slobber in words that I then turned into a book document, which subsequently got converted to a PDF and it was uphill from there.
     I say that ’cause I have a horrible fault that leads me in circles of despair. It’s a simple lack of patience.
     See, once you think you’ve written the next supernovel or whatever, you have to do something that I’ve told people for years: At the end of the book or paper or whatever, go back over the sunnabitch like you’ve never seen it before. Treat it as a cold turd on your porch. Give it the big time hairy eyeball over and over again. Don’t let it out of your sight.
     Read it aloud if necessary.
     But for Frank’s sakes, read the goddamn thing!
     And then . . . Read it again!
     Then go back and fix all the stuff you thought didn’t work, all the stuff you found with the hairy eyeball and all that. Fix that stuff and then go back and read it again.
     And again.
     Why should you do this?
     Because every damn letter on the page or on the screen is important. Because every damn letter that’s in the wrong place or is part of a word that is in the wrong place or doesn’t belong there at all, even giving yourself a break of ponderous self-absorbed intellectualism, every one of those letters can make you look like a goddamn fool!
     So read it again, fool!

And why am I excoriating you over this reading thing? Because I’m being rhetorical, that’s why!

Now it took me two proofs to find this basic law of writing dynamics, this kernal point in the universe of trying to write or having finished writing. And the sad fact is, the proof that is just now on its way to me, it’s got errors aglory. Like misspelled words, fer Frank’s sakes. And this is the second proof I’ve ordered, which means that once I get the proof on its way to me, I have to look for all the errors that I know are there ’cause I read the copy I uploaded last time and found ’em. The errors.
     So even before the proof gets here, I know that I have corrections to upload and then another proof to peruse. Each of them at about $12 a whack, shipping costs figured in for kicks. And, I am sure that once that proof is proofed and the uploaded revisions are proofed that there will be errors a billion for me to deal with again and again.

Kinda like the old engineer’s design hassle: the engineer sets to designing a circuit, which he does successfully. But each time he gets back to the board, he thinks of an improvement or a change could make to produce a more economical product, which keeps getting held up for sale ’cause the engineer is full of new design ideas every morning before he brushes his teeth.
     Which drives the marketing guys nuts ’cause they need to sell a product that has been in design forever.
     Which costs the company money.
     So eventually the marketing guys walk into the engineer’s office and tell him they’re taking over the project so they can market it. If the engineer is gonna design a better version of whateve mouse trap is driving marketing nuts, they suggest the engineer do that design as an advanced, upgraded or whatever product.
     Just give us what you have now, monkey, and we’ll sell it!

Thus I am at this point: If I leave the proof on its way to me as the copy going up for sale, the worst case scenario is folks will read the story and wonder why I couldn’t spell embarrassed right. Or I had things like “that what happens in Dallas stays in Kansas,” when “that which . . .” is the correct form.
     At least prescriptively.
     ’Cause I could easy up say that “that what happens is that what happens and that’s just the way I talk, see?”
     Which, out of meanness and lack of any more patience, I might just do.

All this means, of course, that my attempt at breaking through the popcorn ceiling of self-published print-on-demand fame will probably suffer for a while from the circuit being sold with the improved (as in: correctly spelled &c) model will come out a little while later.
     Thus, in the mean time, I would like to suggest that you get yer paws on my novel, Rising from Karuk, which will soon be available for sale from my CreateSpace eStore or from Amazon.com eventually.
     After all, I have to make up for the money and time I’ve put into making a space novel about a guy’s afraid of turtles and loves cats. Even if the typography is gorgeous and the cover is beautiful in its simplicity.