If you’ve ever been curious how a book is made—not written or illustrated, but physically put together—this feature from the New York Times does a great job of explaining the whole process. I learned a lot!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/19/books/how-a-book-is-made.html
I’ll be giving an artist lecture about how picture books work next Tuesday, Nov. 10, at the Opalka Gallery at Sage College of Albany. The event will be free and open to the public, and we’ll be selling books afterward. Hope to see you there!
The good people over at Geek Dad have just posted a really nice interview with me and Larry about Benjamin Franklinstein Meets the Fright Brothers.
Working on the Benjamin Franklinstein books with Larry over the past year or so, inventors have been on my mind a lot. That’s why it was so interesting to come across these samples of letterhead from two of history’s greatest, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The two were not great friends, and it’s interesting to see how their personalities came across in the way they chose to correspond with the public. (I know which one I’d rather receive a letter from.)
A deckle edge is when the pages of a book are cut in a ragged way so that they seem to be trimmed by hand. Turns out the tradition of creating those edges is pretty interesting:
The deckle edge dates back to a time when you used to need a knife to read a book. Those rough edges simulate the look of pages that have been sliced open by the reader. The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds.
There’s a great article on this tradition at:
If a writer wants to use a gender-neutral pronoun to write a sentence, what should he/she/they use? Despite its many virtues, the English language doesn’t have a good solution to this problem.
It’s complicated, but maybe it doesn’t need to be. The New York Times On Language column tackled this recently, and the story behind why we traditionally use he might surprise you…
The British newspaper, The Guardian, recently asked a number of well known authors a fairly simple simple question: do you enjoy writing? More than a few do not, but they keep doing it anyway.
I get this. Winston Churchill’s once said that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Substitute writing for democracy and way to make a living for form of government and I think you’ll describe how most writers feel about their jobs.
As an author, I am extremely interested in the idea of e-books and their impact on the future of publishing. Mandy Brown, a writer and designer, takes an interesting perspective on the issue: as long as we’re calling it an e-book, we’re kind of missing the point.
It’s a short, but very insightful essay on the history and future of the book as we know it.
Here’s a great essay by Kurt Vonnegut on writing with style. He breaks it down into seven simple steps. My favorite is number seven: “Pity the readers”. Lord, how I pity my readers.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote a story in six words, and claimed it was the best thing he ever wrote. None of the words was more that two syllables long.
If you’d like to write like Hemmingway, try “Thsrs”. It’s a thesaurus that only returns shorter, simpler words.
For all the readers out there who either 1) are working in the field as writers or illustrators, or 2) aspire to do so some day, here are a few helpful links aimed at the professional side of things.
17 Tips for Freelancers:
http://megillustrations.typepad.com/…
Chris Garret: “My Top 5 Biggest Freelancing Mistakes”:
http://freelancefolder.com/my-top-5…
How to disarm 10 difficult client observations/requests:
I had a little bit of an epiphany today – nothing big, but helpful nonetheless. I’ve had Merlin Mann’s article on “Hacking Your Way Out of Writer’s Block” in my favorites for a long time, and I’ve been meaning to post a link. Merlin runs a great site called 43 Folders dedicated to making your work more efficient and getting things done.
Lester Dent was a hugely prolific writer of mystery, western, and pulp fiction novels, the most famous being the Doc Savage series in the 1940’s-50’s. In this essay, he lays out the basic rules for constructing a rip-roaring, knockdown adventure story that will leave the reader reeling.
The ideas in the essay are great, but the best part is Dent’s prose; his teaching style is straight out of one of his novels. Here’s an excerpt, where he talks about building suspense and moving the plot along:
“Hero should accomplish something with his tearing around, if only to rescue Eloise, and surprise! Eloise is a ring-tailed monkey. The hero counts the rings on Eloise’s tail, if nothing better comes to mind. They’re not real. The rings are painted there. Why?”
Why indeed? Dynamite stuff!
This short article by Scott Berkun does a really good job of cutting through the mystique of what it means to be an author. Want to write a book? Read this first.
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