The Future of Publishing

A bit of random musing. It's all inconsequential. I'm bloody useless.


I would like to live in a world where when you buy a book you actually buy the book; the text, however it is presented, is yours. Ebooks could exist as the travel copy and you could have the actual paper thing to read in the bath where you don't want to ruin your $100 (if you're lucky) ereader. Unfortunately, it seems like that time is a ways off if it will actually exist at all. Sigh.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about presentation. Reading a lot of comics in the past week or so has gotten me to thinking more and more about doing something with language, with just writing, that is somehow comic-like, somehow something I could make a "comic book" out of in the sense of it being about a thirty page book saddle stitched. I've remembered a recording of a story I did once that I'm going to go dig through an old laptop to find and thinking about it I've grown enamored to the audio book, the only one of which I've actually listened is Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms, a fact loyal readers might or might not know, I don't remember if I mentioned it. However, at a recent really crazy sale at a library in Ohio, I picked up a few more, some abridged James Ellroy, one read by the author, which'll be my introduction to him, a Stephen King, and Maggie Gyllenhaal reading Plath's The Bell Jar. It's odd to consider the works I've already finished in some way. The idea that this story has been recorded for a few years now, that I recorded it in a house I don't even live in any more...It's all very odd to consider. My initial bursts of writing, my first major "concept" of my writing, is long dead now, I'd say, but I still think about it. One story hooking into it is published in my book (sorry about the plug), another is this recorded thing I've been mentioning and considering doing something with, and well, you get the whole mind working on things and it comes up with improbable ideas, so I think of another being published in some really low key magazine somewhere probably for free. And when I think about that, well, I'll give you a little bit in on this "concept": it has to do with four writers, and we'd then have three of them out in the world somewhere. The fourth could actually be the sort of poetry comic I started this paragraph with when I come to think about it.

Which is all silly really, because the "concept" I had is history for a reason. I sort of think it's lame. I sort of think I've outgrown it. First off, I don't even think about myself as a prose writer anymore, so there's that. But what of it all, really? I'm not going to lie, I thought I had "outgrown" comics too, and lately that's been what I've been reading. (With a new perspective, I will add, but yeah, I never saw me reading this many of them in so short a time. And getting this "into" them. My dad calls it the "collecting bug." My scores of all kinds of cards from various CCGs goes a long way to proving that.) What I've begun to consider, not to be all bullshit-profound or anything, but what I've begun to consider is how you make a life. So it actually pleases me to think that I'm maybe going to find a place for these ideas I once had. That these stories might be out there somewhere like I always dreamed they would. Not that they'll get read, but that they can be. (Or heard...) It's sort of the feeling I assume Grant Morrison might have had in writing Secret Origins #46 about the past of the headquarters he was using for his run on Doom Patrol [exit geekery], the sort of feeling, well I've just finished listening to a live version of "Everything in its Right Place," so maybe that's why I'm phrasing it so, but a feeling of everything falling into its right place. (Catch the echo of "Jigsaw Falling into Place" as well.)

I'm going off for my last year of college (as an undergrad...still uncertain if there'll be more but a clear leaning to "yes"), I remember being ashamed of my age on the internet when I first got to it. I guess things have changed. On twitter and here on the blog I used to shy away from personal addresses to things that have to deal with my existence as (I think...) a teenager back when I created both. I'm not really able to get back into that mind again, just as I'm not able to get back into the mind of the kid who was, well, "obsessed" would be a strong word, but "into" all the Ultimate comics, regardless of who was making them. I so despise the kind of person I used to be once that really actually consider that conviction makes it itself look stupid. Like, you can't hate on something you used to be can you? But I mean I do think plenty of the people who are like that are double what my age was then... Sigh, let's stop with the brutality. No one cares what you think. I don't even care. Blah. Hands keep typing words in my head and I'm not stopping. Need to. K.

New paragraph, new train of thought that I've just missed pulling out of the station. So that's what I've been thinking about lately. I think it's "autopsy" that's making me think about it. Putting a lot of stories up on the web. There's a bit of tension at times, but eventually I just realize that there's nothing I'm going to do with them. It's fun to think that they'll be out there, the ghost of my idea which'll never see the full light of day (for a good reason) lying out in various publications and the internet as in essence my childhood, haunting the world I move through as I get older.