Monday, May 06, 2013

I Read Your LiveJournal, It Says You Quit Friendster

Who starts a blog in 2013? Good Lord. Maybe after you read this we can discuss it on my Delphi Forum, and you can add me as a friend on MySpace. While, I dunno, downloading a Korn album from Napster, or something, assuming you don’t lose your AOL dial-up connection. It’s a model that already seems quaint, is what I’m saying. Not as dead as print, perhaps — if it makes sense to talk about degrees of deadness — but surely not thriving.

Which is a pity, because it still seems to me a fantastically useful model, especially for talking about things that can’t be easily conveyed in 140 characters, or a status update, or a scene from Doctor Who rendered as an animated .GIF — in this case, the work process. How something arises out of nothing. How ideas become a product.

And the product, right now, oddly enough, is print.

Little Wonder is an experiment in print-on-demand self-publishing. It is a slender thing, a novella, or perhaps more properly a novelette, or maybe even a long short story, depending on how you count — 14,000 words or so, in any event. It is an extract from a projected longer work, but is complete unto itself.



And it is, in its printed form, a beautiful object, if stupidly overpriced. A slim paperback, with a spine but notionally almost a chapbook. Built for your hip pocket. I did the design work myself, sweating over typefaces and trim size and graphics; every drop cap, every page break, every inch of white space. It gives me immense satisfaction to pick it up, to flip through the pages. But then, it would.

The ebook version is far more affordable, if a less tactile pleasure, and looks great on an iPad, e-reader, or phone.

I’ll be using this space to talk about it, and other upcoming projects. And if you’d like to talk about it too, feel free. Leave a comment, send me a note, and well hash it out. Talking is good.

Walk right in. Sit right down. Honey, let your mind roll on.

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