Pages

Thursday, July 10, 2008

The OS Library: What Do You Want To See Most?

With my discovery of this nifty new app that lets you turn your LiveJournal and Wordpress entries into PDFs you can print as books, I've decided to get my huge backlog of writing, art, etc. up on this format and out to the world.

Now, the proviso in all this is that a lot of this stuff, especially the more personal stuff, might be just completely self-indulgent. Which will not stop me from throwing it up there (with the necessary edits to protect the innocent and guilty), because God knows I've reveled in enough self-indulgent stuff from other people. There's a market for it. And maybe some of it would actually be good.

Here's what I have:

1. Memoirs -- now really, I ought to get this to a publisher. That said, I have a whole manuscript that's finished (actually, several versions that have to be stitched together). In theory, I could just plop it onto LiveJournal, PDF it, sell it through Lulu.com, and pay off some of my bills (see, I'm writing out this not just for you but so I can figure this all out and come up with bright ideas).

2. "The Road To Goodbye To Comics" visual diary -- I kept an art journal in the months leading up to Goodbye To Comics that, in retrospect, might be kind of interesting to look at. It's mostly collage art, mixed media. A lot of comic book mashups -- taking old comics and blending them into other photos and text. I forgot how many pages, but basically most of a full-size spiral art journal.

3. Poetry -- Good God. There is so much of this. It's all I did in my late teens/early twenties. It's like a mix between Beat Poetry and Sylvia Plath on lots of Frappacinos and Nyquil.

4. Vampire Novel -- same thing as my memoirs. Already have a first pass on edits from a friend of mine. Could dump it into LiveJournal and PDF it in time for Halloween.

5. Dream diaries -- I have no idea if anybody would want to sit down and peruse all of this, but we are talking more than 10,000 separate dream entries from 1992-present. And then it gets weird.

6. Prose -- old comic pitches from when I was 15, short stories, one-pagers, plays, etc.

7. Best Of OS -- best posts collection, a la Peter David (not saying I'm as good as Peter David)

8. Pop-Culture essays -- tons, mostly term papers for college and some early online columns. On comics, literature, horror films, and pop-culture in general.

9. Philosophical/metaphysical works -- Oy. But all I'm saying is -- it's there. If Grant Morrison can write and publish this shit, I don't see why I can't.

10. Tons more art -- Tons. Mostly pop-culture mashups.

11. Comic strips -- I actually have a small collection of comic strips I used to do. I really thought I was going to be a cartoonist, not a writer.

So that's the basic list of what I have that's finished and ready to be PDFed. I mean, some of it has to be typed in or scanned. But, it's just sitting there.

I think I should just go for it.

4 comments:

  1. The visual diary and comic strips sound interesting.

    I'd hold off on posting or selling POD the memoirs and/or vampire novel if you you still hope to publish them traditionally. My understanding is that for every author who sells a works to a publisher _because_ she or he threw it out there and made a big splash, a hundred more try the same approach and don't even create a ripple. YMMV.

    Alex.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1, 2, 7, 8, 10 and 11.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1:22 PM

    Oh thank you for that.

    You've saved me a ridiculous amount of work right there.

    I've been cutting and pasting stuff and reformatting it, and all this for weeks.

    Snf. So beautiful.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous8:51 AM

    id like to see the memoirs or the novel myself in whatever form...online or print

    ReplyDelete