Seeing as the Covid lockdowns have opened up some free time, I thought it would be a good idea to dust off “The Write Stuff” and get back to some good old-fashioned literary citizenry. And to jump-start this dormant vehicle I decided to chat with Tony McMillen about the impending release of his graphic novel, Serious Creatures, which he both wrote and illustrated.

The graphic novel follows the life of Bobby Feckle, a teenage special FX wizard working through the golden era of practical FX: the ‘70s through the ‘90s. There’s still time to head over to his Kickstarter and get yourself a copy of Serious Creatures, which is available in several formats and bundles, one of which includes his other comic series, the early-Nintendo inspired Lumen.

With Halloween right around the corner, and with horror movie viewings increasing steadily as the day approaches, this seemed like an especially apt time to talk to Tony about his upcoming work inspired by many of those same films no doubt screened and re-screened in homes around the world. (You might even notice a few of them finding their way into novel!) In our talk, Tony dives into his creative process, the differing madness between creating prose versus comics, and the music that’s inspired his works. He also gives us a sneak peak at what he’s got in the pipeline—which, spoiler alert, is all very exciting!

1) Between writing novels, writing songs and writing/drawing comics, how do you best decide the right medium for your stories?

I learned the hard way not to try and force a square block into a cylindrical-shaped hole with my first novel Nefarious Twit. It took me 6 years to write and part of that was because in my heart of hearts I wanted it to be a screenplay and not a novel. And the results weren’t really singing. The final results are still mixed to me and that’s one of the reasons why it’s the only thing I’ve published that I might still rewrite entirely and put out in a different form at some point.

From that experiment I learned that you have to figure out what medium is the most exciting, intuitive or compelling way to tell each story and then play to the strengths of that chosen medium completely. Because I think when a creator is fully engaged in exploring a given medium is when you get work that stands above all else. 

2) What do you get out of writing and drawing comics that you don't get out of writing novels? And vice versa? 

The first thing that comes to mind is immediate feedback!

One of the most wonderful surprises about making comics was finding out how soon I would hear back from readers about what they liked or didn’t like. It makes total sense seeing as a comic takes such less time to read but I guess I never thought about it before. So when I published my first comic and then an hour later received feedback from someone online who bought it digitally and read the whole thing already I was a little flabbergasted.

I was getting used to writing novels over the course of years and then waiting a few weeks if not months for someone to tell me what they thought.

But to dig in a little deeper, both modes of storytelling are very different. I enjoy the act of drawing more than almost anything including the actual writing. While the act of writing might be more hard work, the results usually fill me with a deeper satisfaction than anything else. A completed work, comic or prose, both feel very satisfying and not much else rivals them. Except, of course, when the ideas come. When inspiration strikes and you’re dreaming it all up it’s like falling in love. It’s exciting, all you see are possibilities. Nothing can beat that feeling. It’s the most addictive drug ever concocted.

3) How does your process differ from writing novels to writing graphic novels? How did you acclimate yourself to the medium/process? What was most difficult about this new medium? Were there any aspects of creating comics that surprised you? 

What’s the same is I find developing healthy habits (writing or drawing as early after I wake up as possible; writing or drawing every day if I can) is key to getting better and to shaking off any anxiety about filling up a blank page. It’s partly a numbers game, I have less to be precious about because I know I’m going to create something new tomorrow so if today’s work sucked—that’s okay, tomorrow’s might be better. But it’s also mental exercise (and with drawing, physical exercise, too) it’s keeping those parts of yourself active and limber so even if you only create a little one day when the deluge hits, and inspiration or deadlines come cracking down from the sky you can answer that lightning handily.

What’s different with writing prose or doing a piece of journalism is I have only one tool at my disposal: the written word.

But of course it’s an incredible tool and the truth is it’s really more of a switchboard to access an even greater tool: my reader’s imagination.

The reader interprets my words and completes the final part of the spell I’m casting. My words are a map or a set of instructions but it’s up to them follow it to their own meaning.

Which leads back to the similarity of comics and prose, and all storytelling really: when it comes to creating, it’s all problem solving really.

So with comics, I have sequential pictures with words to help make my mental map for the reader. But unlike film, there is still a lot of room for the reader to fill in the blanks of the story. With prose, they have my authorial voice, descriptions and dialogue to help them conjure up the story in their heads, but now with comics I can provide the look to a lot of what they’re seeing. But it’s done with drawings, not motion picture so there’s an abstraction there, there’s symbolism there. In a film you can do that too but usually it’s literal; if you see a guy in a red shirt in a movie he usually looks like how a guy in a red shirt would look in real life. But with the different art styles in comics my guy in a red shirt might look so abstract it barely registers as human. So the reader has to assign the meaning to it. And they have to fill in the story between the panels.

Comics take key moments in time and turn those into panels. Your brain is what finds connections between those moments and turns them into a linear plot. Just like your brain might assign the sound of a voice on a character or detect a theme or subtext.

The challenge of approaching comics as a novelist was knowing what tools from the written word wouldn’t work with comics.

4) Time being a precious commodity for any artist, especially ones who have to balance several mediums--not to mention the addition of a day job and a family—how do you manage to your time? 

Short answer I have no social life. I’m glad I went out at night nearly every night in my late 20s because now I am a home body to the max. But luckily I’m old and boring now and mostly prefer it.

The trick for getting work done for me is realizing that there are more hours in your day than you might realize.

Yes, I go to work, I have a wife and a child, I still exercise, I still occasionally hang out with some friends and once in a while get a wild hair up my ass and actually leave the house to do something social-but there’s still usually time every day to get something creative done.

But it comes back to developing healthy creative habits; so instead of winding down at the end of the day and watching 4 hours of tv or spending 5 hours online; cut that in half or if you’re on a roll on a project cut it out completely.

Having become a father in the last year has definitely complicated matters (especially having to take care of the baby while working from home) but I still found time to make five issues of a comic book. Not because I’m a madman but because I approach my day with purpose. And when possible I try to get creative things done earlier in the day so if work or real life demands more attention I at least know I got a little creative stuff done already and I did it when I was at my freshest.

5) Any plans to merge these mediums you work in? Maybe something like an omnibus novel that includes prose, paneled illustrations and/or songs? 

That could be really cool to try, I guess I just have to find the right project that all this multi-medium stuff feels organic and not gimmicky. I’ve included illustrations from myself in my prose work and for some of my comics I’ve included some back matter essays; and I’ve recorded rock songs from the fictional bands in one of my novels but I still haven’t gone full on with merging all the different medias into the actual storytelling of a project. Could be awesome if pulled off right.

6) You put together a suggested soundtrack for your heavy-metal cosmic-horror novel, An Augmented Fourth. With Serious Creatures taking place in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I feel like it would be equally ripe for a suggested soundtrack. What songs would you pair with Serious Creatures? And do you have one for Lumen as well? 

I love gabbing about music! Serious Creatures begins in 1974 and so right away in the first few pages two of the characters are listening to Dark Side of the Moon on 8 -Track. Our main character Bobby is 14 years old in the scene and sings “And if your head explodes with dark forebodies too!” Instead of, “dark forebodings too!” and his older sister Laney chastises him for it but the term “dark forebodies” becomes the unofficial moniker for some masked creepy figures who appear throughout the story that only Bobby seems able to see.

Which means I gotta include some Floyd on the soundtrack. I think of The Kinks “Celluloid Heroes” as a sort of theme song for the whole story; I even put it in the trailer I made for the first issue. It really hits that bitterly triumphant note that runs throughout the story.

“Visions of Johanna”, Bob Dylan, “Sweet Virginia” by the Stones, “Frankenstein” by Edgar Winter Group, and the first Van Halen album all get mentions in the pages so I think they’d be great.

Lumen is trickier, it’s really inspired by early ‘80s Nintendo games like Metroid and Zelda as well as late ‘70s sci-fi like Alien so I’d do a synth drenched ominous score; like John Carpenter or Tangerine Dream inspired.

7) What else do you have in the pipeline? Either finished products, works in progress or ones you're dreaming of working on in the future? What are you most excited to work on next?

Thanks, I got a lot churning around lately. So, I’ve been sitting on a completed trilogy of novels called The Bleeding Tree Trilogy that I’ve described as reading like Mark Twain’s Dune. The main character is named Mal Leatherberry and she’s a heretic terrorist folksinger fighting a corrupt world church in a primitive future where they burn nonbelievers at the stake. The first book is called Higher Climbs the Fire and the entire series represents—to me—the best prose work I’ve made. Hoping to find a publisher or bite the bullet and put it out myself early next year.

Before that I’m working on an illustrated instructional manual for a video game that never existed entitled Attaboy. It’s going to be unlike any art book you’ve ever seen while still evoking fond memories of Megaman and other early NES artwork.

I’m also providing the interior, chapter break artwork for David James Keaton’s next novel She Was Found in a Guitar Case which is coming out from Perpetual Motion Machine.

And finally, after all that I’ll start on the second and final arc of Serious Creatures called Now Leaving the Golden State; which will complete the saga of Bobby Feckle teenage special FX wizard as he grows up and makes his masterpiece as well as his biggest mistake.

Tony McMillen makes comic books as well as some books without pictures too.

Even though those usually also contain a few pictures.

He can’t help himself.

He’s behind the heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth published by Word Horde, the sci-fi fantasy graphic novel Lumen and now Serious Creatures; his comic book series about a teenage special FX artist working in Hollywood, riding the wave of practical effects that carried the blockbuster movie industry of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.

He thinks Alien is a better xenomorph movie but Aliens is a better Ripley movie.

His go to karaoke song is “On the Dark Side” by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.

He has recently started to add cinnamon to his chocolate milk.

Part 2 of 2:

1.       I’m just going to put the title to this question right here: “On Becoming a Publisher and the Perils of Underground Writing (Or, How I Learned to Stop Abiding the Agency/MFA Model and Put Out the Work I, and People Like Me, Want to Read).”

I never really bought into the traditional model because it never really bought into me. It didn’t feel relevant to what I was doing. I was always writing across a broad spectrum, so I was as likely to be submitting to F&SF and Cemetery Dance as I was Zoetrope and Conjunctions. Smart folks I knew told me that I shouldn’t bother hunting for an agent until I had a full novel ready to sell, so I spent years focused on short stories and didn’t pay any mind to anything other than writing what I was compelled to and trying to find a good home for it.

Once Angel Dust Apocalypse broke out and found a readership I started to hear from folks in New York, but I’d cleared out my story bank for that collection and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. Then ADA was nominated for the Needle Awards—where an industry insider highlighted a batch of POD titles they thought were poised for commercial success—and I was contacted by 32 agents in one week. Most of them wanted me to start grinding out monster-centric horror paperbacks, but Mollie Glick, then with JVNLA, gave me a much more open “Let’s see what you can do next, and how I can help develop your career” kind of pitch and I was sold. It’s 12 years later and I still haven’t given her a commercial novel to justify all her efforts—she encouraged me to go indie with the notoriously insane Skullcrack City, and I think we were both pleasantly surprised that it blew up the way it did—but she’s been quietly integral in the path I’ve taken and I’m very thankful for her wisdom. If everything pans out with the next novel, especially given the publishers we have interested, then her investment in me will finally earn out and I’ll be wonderfully happy about that.

So, I took a very non-traditional path toward traditional publishing. I have definitely fumbled my way to wherever I am now. There’s never been any masterplan—I just haven’t quit.  Literally half my life has passed since I decided I cared about being published and sent out my first short story. And there’s a banking career and fatherhood and home ownership and long, terrible periods of procrastination in that stretch, too, so I try not to be too hard on myself about the state of my career at 39. Rather, I think I’ve been really lucky. Kind of Forrest Gump-ed my way into whatever successes I’ve had and managed to find the right weird readers who dig what I do.

Regarding MFA’s I have friends who went that route and a surprising amount of them aren’t even writing anymore. On the flipside of that I know a few guys who did the Iowa MFA program and both told me essentially the same thing: You go for the connections and then once you leave you stop writing pastiches to make the teachers happy and you teach yourself how to write in your own voice again. And both those guys have hugely successful careers now.

2.       What do you think are the biggest challenges of being an underground writer? (i.e. the income to keep the machine running, finding validation from the “mainstream,” getting blurbs, establishing a fan base, etc.?)

Biggest challenge used to be the stigma—that idea that your work has no merit since it didn’t pass through the industry gatekeepers—but these days I feel like there have been enough works which disproved that idea that an indie book isn’t instantly written off. And Amazon, for all of its Evil Empire shenanigans, has really revolutionized the independent writer’s capability for finding readers (so long as you play their very specific games).

Now I think the biggest challenge is finding a way to reach beyond the glut of available media. How do I convince someone with three portable devices and a Smart TV and a computer that they should spend their narrow stretch of leisure time engaging with the very specific art that I made? And how do I even make them aware that these books exist?

But I think that’s a problem that’s hitting both mainstream and underground publishing right now, and everybody is scrambling. It’s just that when you’re in the underground you don’t have those traditional connections or supporting funds or pre-set media methods for getting your work in front of people, so you’re forced to innovate and scrap it out. Only about 20% of my marketing efforts for Skullcrack City yielded anything, and doing that other 80% felt pretty disheartening and exhausting at times, but in the end it was worth it. It’s crazy how much effort you need to put in if you’re not marketing mainstream, high concept work or tie-in products. It’s like manually creating a glacier.

3.       And what do you think are the benefits of underground writing? (i.e. the whole underground community banding together to support one another?)

The community aspect is fun, and it keeps you going through the emotional horse latitudes when you feel like you’re not just invisible, but an invisible pile of horseshit.

Pooling resources can be great too, so long as the folks kicking in have some modicum of talent relating to what aspect of a book they’re working on.

The biggest benefit to working in the underground though, whether that’s self-publishing, or micro or small press publishing, is not having to make baby food. Knowing you can take risks because of the limited fiscal investment and limited expectations is very freeing.

A very wise woman once told me that New York Big 5 publishing sells squares, and the small press sells octagons. I’m very happy that there are adventurous presses doing the good, hard work of releasing those octagons into the world.

4.       For any author, but especially for underground authors, your fans are your biggest support tool. The Grassroots page on your website is really a fantastic call-to-action on how people can help support you. I think most authors take for granted that these acts aren’t just assumed, or that your friends and fans will start doing them automatically! What advice would you have to writers on interacting with fans? And do you think fans should expect from their authors?

I think it’s awesome to meet and interact with readers. I grew up in a small town without any kind of literary scene, so meeting people who read and dig the same kind of weird stuff as me has been a real blessing. And when they’re actually willing to lend support and time to push your art out into the world, that’s kind of amazing.

Best advice I have for writers is to remain earnest and engaged, even as the demands on your time grow, even as you get more and more jaded from all the parasitic circle jerk sociopathy endemic to any and all writing scenes. I corresponded with George Saunders briefly, and just a few weeks before he was about to launch into promotion for the biggest novel of his career, and he was just as cool and kind and generous as you could hope for. Chuck Palahniuk was the same way. How writers at that level of career find any time to give to anyone, I don’t know. And yet they do, they really seem to see the people beyond their status as “fans” or “book buyers” and it’s amazing to me. So I guess my main advice to writers would just be: stay human.

And make those interactions with readers fun, too. Go to town on a signed copy. Ask people about their lives beyond their relationship to you. Not saying you need to midwife your reader’s children and teach them pottery. Just stay human, when you can. Try to have fun.

With readers the only advice I’d give is to say, “Don’t stalk and kill writers. Do take a second to post a quick Amazon review of work you enjoyed.” Both of those pieces of advice are very important.

5.       You talk about having fans create promotional materials such as fliers and T-shirts—which are all fantastic ideas—and your fans have shown up in spades to help support Entropy in Bloom! What have been some of your favorite or most bizarre/creative/wild fan contributions? I’m guessing there have got to be a few tattoos out there.

I know there’s a tattoo of the Angel Dust Apocalypse cover art out there, which is awesome. I’ve received funny flipbooks, and comic adaptations of my stories, and custom stamps. I’ve been given some stunning illustrations inspired by my work. And I adore Tony McMillen’s alternate cover for Skullcrack City.

One reader shipped me a copy of Super Mario 3 on the cheap, which was a blessing. I think that was the day I really felt like this whole writing thing might just work out.

And I'd say things are working out just fine.

--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, “Eisenstein’s Monster,” here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can order it through your local bookstore or library.

With his new book, Entropy in Bloom, JRJ has amassed a greatest hits of his short stories into one awe-inspiring pantheon of his work, capstoned by the phenomenal novella “The Sleep of Judges." Published by Night Shade Books, EIB has been making the rounds of bookstores across America, satisfying the itches of old fans and latching onto new ones like a certain parasitic Susurrus.

JRJ was kind enough to take some time away from his busy to schedule to answer some questions about his writing process, literary labels, music, and, of course, tacos.  Here is...

Part 1 of 2:

1.       With what I’m sure is going to be a strong success with Entropy in Bloom, hopefully you won’t have to worry about this question any longer, but for those of us that still do: How do manage your time between your day job and your passion job?  And of that writing time, how do you manage creative writing as opposed to business writing (marketing, promoting, etc.)?

The key is take all of your neurosis and anxiety and coffee and channel those things into focused effort. Make daily lists on post-it notes and don’t sleep until those lists are clear. Wake up earlier than you want to everyday. Use Freedom to block social networking and get intermittent dopamine from self-control.

I try to do a blend of tasks each day in each of the fields I prioritize. So first I’m a dad, then I’m a husband, then I’m a physical being who needs to stay healthy-ish, and then after that I’m a writer. And if I do okay at all four of those things in a given day, I sleep okay at night (until 3am when I wake with torturous anxiety).

I allocate marketing/administrative writing career stuff to the morning hours, then write while my kid is at school. I’m trying to push the balance of effort toward actual production because otherwise I have a tendency to do the other, easier marketing and research stuff. That’s why it used to take me five years between books. My new goal is a book every year or two until I either give up the ghost or my compulsion to write, at long last, evaporates.

2.       Many of your fans are already familiar with your ties to music, such as your work with The Mars Volta's Bedlam in Goliath; what role does music play in your writing life? Does it have any influence in terms of themes, styles, tones?  Do you use it to get a certain mood a story may require? (I’m thinking of a point in my own life when I was listening to Amputechture a lot and found the phrase “Stuffed the voice inside of God, Mirror to the Animals” cycling through my head, which helped me find the voice of a particular character I was trying to crack.) Anything in particular stick out?

Music is integral to my writing, and I design playlists in advance of starting any project. I listen for music which matches the feelings I’m hoping to evoke, so it can change pretty radically with each project. Two books ago it was mostly Spark Master Tape. Last book it was Polish Witch House. Still trying to figure out what music works for the next thing…

3.       To me, good writing is good writing, good stories are good stories, regardless of the label.  As your writing has a foot in both worlds (literary and genre), why do you think it becomes so important for the lit world to try and categorize literary works (the perceived “high art”) from genre works (“pop art”)?  And what do we lose by drawing these boundaries?

The parasite of commerce has attached itself to art and flooded it with bad neurochemistry insisting it sell itself and concern itself with return on investment. It’s a persistent parasite, despite being bullshit at heart.

Genre comforts people and reflects their sense of themselves and their community, but it also definitely keeps people from experiencing art they’d dig. Always makes me think of what Andre 3000 said on OutKast’s “Humble Mumble”: I met a critic, I made her shit her drawers/she said she thought hip-hop was only guns and alcohol/I said "Oh hell naw!" But yet it's that too/You can't discrimi-hate cause you done read a book or two.

It takes courage to read widely because you have to acknowledge that you’re going to waste some time and encounter some shit you hate, but sticking to your little pocket of experience in anything is a fast way to get your brain and interest in existence to atrophy.

4.       I feel like most of the literary writers out there have forgotten that they didn’t start out reading Beckett and Faulkner, they started, like most of us, reading genre fiction. Why do you think it became popular for those writers to then revile “genre” fiction or any story whose climax isn’t just an epiphany? (Just a Lacanian castration? A mark of their maturation?) And, more importantly, do you think the tides are starting to change, especially as more conventional “literary writers” have dove into the genre game themselves à la Ben Percy or Brian Evenson?

I think it’s great that a lot of the traditional modes in publishing are kind of melting down or mutating, and that genre might be seen as less valuable than it used to. With most of the folks you’d associate with literary/genre crossover, I just see that as bright people embracing the art that makes them feel something, and using all the tools and influences at their disposal.

5.       You recently holed yourself up in a hotel room until you had finished a new story. (I believe you said you like to do that when you feel you have about 15,000 words left?) What does your path of creation typically look like? And what happens if that 15,000 turns into 30,000? I guess what I’m asking is at what point do we get worried and start to send in tacos, more red bull, and/or consider it a burgeoning Jack Torrance situation?

I start slow with any kind of story, finding the tone first and considering the plot elements second. So the first 15,000 words of a novel might take me two months. Then, when I obsess long enough that the path through the story sort of unfolds in front of me, I can write much faster. It helps hugely once I’m excited about the ending, because then I have a focal point I can look at and say, “How do I make that ending count? How do I make that land with as much emotional resonance as possible?”

I won’t do a hotel session until I know the ending and have a limited estimate for how many words it might take to get there. I once wrote 20,000 in three days, but then had to go back and cut 9,000 of that for the piece to work. That was painful.

As a general policy, always send more tacos/beer/red bull.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2. (Teaser: there are references to Forest Gump, manually creating glaciers, and octagons.)

--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, “Eisenstein’s Monster,” here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can order it through your local bookstore or library.

I was three years out of grad school, having completed the first draft of Eisenstein’s Monster, the author of seven short stories published in the US and UK...and flat broke. I had worked a handful of “band aid” jobs—small gigs painting, staining, landscaping, installing and patching dry wall, doing some small carpentry—before working the front desk at a gym that paid less than I’d made in my high school retail job, writing sections of my second novel on the backs of indoor rock climbing waivers and learning the sacred art of towel folding.

Each of those jobs had their own lessons to offer, but it was not satisfying, or consistent, work, and certainly not enough to move out of the proverbial basement. After enduring the last in a long line of degrading straws, I quit the gym, moved into a friend’s spare bedroom in the city, and began looking for a new job. Which is when a friend of mine asked if I’d ever considered SEO copywriting.

“Um, what?”

“Blog content designed to optimize a website’s search engine ranking. It’s huge right now.”

“I’m listening…”

He went on to explain the field of Search Engine Optimization, the kind of content that produces said optimization, and how I could go about getting paid to write that kind of content—which I found most optimal of all.

I spent the next year and a half as a freelance SEO copywriter, writing everything from DIY home projects to green pest-control remedies, from top motorcycle travel destinations for ex-pats to smoothie recipes in HTML5. I learned more about age-related macular degeneration than should reasonably be expected of a 25-year old. I learned a great many things, useful and not, while providing a little scratch to compose the first draft of my 900-page second novel.

I took on gigs writing metadata. Do you know what you learn after you’ve written 250 unique metadata tags for boom, scissor, and fork lifts? A lot! For instance, the reach and weight capacities of 250 different lifts. And while the merits of that knowledge are certainly self-evident (in the event that I go on a lift-exclusive episode of Jeopardy!), the real lesson learned was that I was capable of writing the same information in 250 non-plagiaristic ways, and in 160-characters or less.  

In short, what I learned, not just from the metadata copy but all the SEO copywriting, was this:

“YOUR WRITING IS NOT THE ORACULAR!”

Not everything that drips from your pen is glistening with the ore of pure, creative, black gold. And, more importantly, not everything has to. Some of your writing will suck. Some of it should suck. That’s okay. It’s all part of the process. The point is to realize the various stages of the writing process and how to effectively manage your time, learning when to walk away and when—and how—to best dig into your revisions.  After all, if I could write the same blog post twenty different ways, if I could find 250 different combinations of language on industrial tools, like a linguistic Rubik’s Cube, how could I not find at least five different ways to write a sentence, paragraph, or story of my own?  

TAPPING THE VEIN

I tend to think of writing—once you’ve gotten through the idea phase, the false starts, once you’ve started on the right path and the stones are laying themselves out in anticipation of your steps—as tapping into a deeper vein of hidden treasures: a gold deposit; an oil well whose riches are expelled by your pen or fingers working as perfunctory and automatically as the pumps; the ecstasy of harnessing another dimension and bringing it into the light of the visible world…

Whatever that treasure trove may be, it tends to fill the writer up with an unquenchable zeal. You become stricken, greedy, punch drunk on prose. This is why you write; this is why I write. This is our bug, our burden, our calling.

But, one of the dangers of writing—especially for new writers—is that you tend to believe the vein you’re tapping into is infallible, unadulturable, that you’ve used your pen as a vessel for the uncut word of God. (Let’s be clear, it is not!) Meaning, your beloved stories and lines can become precious, pushing the idea of revision into the vile territory of blasphemy. And that is far and away the worst thing you could do for your writing and yourself as a writer. Artistry, like anything else, is about growth, improvement, and adaptation; and almost all of those are predicated upon self-realization.

In many ways, writing SEO copy was one of the greatest things to happen to my fiction writing, principally because it helped kill my writerly ego—or at the very least somewhat deflated it. When you’ve written your 20th article on Green & Humane Home Pest Removal Hacks, your 12th entry on server software for quick and easy data discovery, or The Top 10 Cars from the Chicago Auto Show, you realize pretty quickly not everything you put down is in the lineage of Joyce and Woolf. You also learn that not everything has to be.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t put some care and craftsmanship into all of your work. I’m simply saying you need to develop:

PRIORITY & PERSPECTIVE

Weeks should not be spent drafting the perfect Tweet, nor months on the perfect Facebook status. Years should not be spent drafting a blog entry. For one thing, it would be a maddeningly tedious dedication for very, very little payout—while taking away time that would surely be better spent on other projects. For another, it would most certainly lose whatever topicality you’d been hoping for—which is sometimes the most important element in nonfiction platform building.

Gone are the days of compiling into a museum every stroke of the keyboard, every scrap of paper, every post-it a writer has ever besmirched with words into one all-encompassing tribute to stand at the end of the artist's life like their own personal pyramid. Partially because in today’s age it would also have to include every Tweet, text, or comment and it would simply be too much: terabytes of information that would take an entire lifetime to read, burning yours in the process. It would also be largely, grotesquely inane.

Don’t worry yourself too much about the legacy of your oeuvre to the point of dysfunction. Because your legacy will only matter if you’ve released enough meritorious work to warrant a legacy; and you’ll only create those works once you’ve gotten to the point where you can take an objective stance and toss your Precious into the flames of Mordor, so to speak.

No, that doesn’t mean you should just slop it out there. Do the best you can relative to the importance of the medium; but keep in mind no one is going to be compiling an anthology of your ghost-written blogs or looking to publish a collection of your best Tweets and Facebook updates. (Anyone that would should be banished from the publishing world for just so many reasons.)

What I’m speaking to is developing a hierarchy of the writing process, opening new paradigms, new styles, time management, and the simple fact that being a writer in today’s world means putting out a lot of content that is not dear to you. A LOT. Essentially, it’s about learning to let go and to breathe from time to time.

What writing SEO helped me do was be able to put some distance between my writing so I could view it as objectively as possible, so I could breathe. It helped develop in me different styles and attitudes for “business” writing as opposed to fiction writing, which has helped me draft pitches, queries, marketing content, the aforementioned social media posts, and, most obviously, this blog entry you’re reading now.

But how can you apply those concepts to your own work?

Of course, the best thing you could do would be to put yourself in a position where you’re producing a similarly abundant amount of content. But that is not always possible or practical in every writer’s life, and the goal of this post isn’t to push you into an SEO copywriting career. And further, what would be the point of me writing this entry if I couldn’t in some way pass on what I’d learned in a practical application? So I’ll try to do just that by providing a couple, hopefully worthwhile, exercises.

Exercise 1:

Write your best possible sentence—or take the best sentence you feel you’ve written—then step back and try to think of all the ways it could possibly, just maybe, be better. Ask yourself, How might someone else write that sentence? How might your favorite writer(s) compose that sentence?  

Instead of talking about it, do it.

Choose five writers whose styles are fairly differentiated from each other and rewrite your sentence as if each of those five writers had written it.  What do you see? What did you find out? 

Exercise 1A: BONUS ROUND

Now, if you really want to push yourself, choose five writers whose prose is stylistically very similar to each other and replicate the exercise. It’ll be a hard exercise; it will force you to look at the minutiae of each writer, scrutinizing the word choices and syntax that make up the literary genome of each writer. For example, you could try isolating the DNA of Pynchon, Wallace, or DeLillo; John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, or Ornette Coleman. (The exercise can be used for more than just writing.)

And of course, you can then reverse engineer your own writing to try and find your own genome, the raw essence of your voice. 

Exercise 2:

This is a similar exercise but with a twist.

Select a small paragraph; you’ll see the best results if you choose one that you’re really proud of. Now, instead of looking at how different writers might right that selection, see how you yourself can modify the paragraph by changing up some of the details.

• Change the POV of the paragraph.
• Change the tense of the selection.
• Change up your punctuation: if you’re using a colon try an m-dash; if you’re using a semi-colon, try a period; etc.
• Change the syntax of the selection.
• Change the sentence ordering of your paragraph.
• Find the lynchpin variable in your paragraph and change it (if the character does x, make him do y)

Hopefully you’ll find gems you never would have discovered, or an entirely new direction your story could take. But who knows, you might find that your original paragraph is best after all. At least you’ve tested it, explored new routes and variables, and seen the various incarnations of what your writing could look like. And, most importantly, hopefully you were able to take a few steps back and look at your writing more objectively.

THE TAKEAWAY

If you take away nothing else from this post let it be this: You are capable of more than you think. You are capable of viewing your work through the objective eyes of an editor or peer, and making the precipitant changes. You are capable of opening new portals and dimensions into your work with the mystical aptitude of Dr. Strange. You have the power, most of all, to be your own impetus of growth.  

And, of course, that the weight capacities of fork, scissor, and boom lifts are myriad. 

--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, Eisenstein’s Monster, here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or can be ordered by your local bookstore or library.

So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Change The Lens:

Hemingway famously said “The essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, bullshit detector;” he also famously said “Write drunk, edit sober.” What both of these get at is the need to develop a way to look at your work from a different vantage point. We talked about the need for paradigm shifts yesterday, but today we’re going to go into specific tips to do so.  

Here are three useful tips:

•         Time Management: Many writers have a writing schedule that they stick to; this is a good thing, as just getting yourself to write can sometimes be a herculean task. I believe I’d read somewhere that Stephen King does the bulk of his writing during the mornings and early afternoon, and reserves the evenings for editing. I generally do the inverse, taking advantage of the caffeine boost in the morning, and writing with a frosty libation in the evening. The important thing is to find a schedule that works for you. If you’re a morning person maybe you wake up early and write before heading into work. If you take the train, you can work on your manuscript during your commute, as Tim Wendel and Sergio De La Pava have done to complete their works.  Whatever works for your schedule, but treat it like a part-time job you do on the side until it can become something more.

(Keep in mind, writing is very much a job, one requiring hard, hard work to get better at; and, just like any other industry, no one is going to bump you up to a C-level position based off the piece of notebook paper you’ve sent them for a fresh idea when you’ve never put pen to paper before. This isn’t The Hudsucker Proxy [Coen, 1994]. And Limitless [Burger, 2011] lied to you—about a great number of things—but principally here in that you will never get paid an advance to write a novel that isn’t already written when you’ve never before been published. You have to put in the work. Then, eventually, you might be able to turn that part-time unpaid internship into a minimum-wage supplement, and then, if you’re lucky, make it your full-time career. You have to climb the ladder.)

•         Upset The Order: However well the above system works, sometimes you can become too ingrained in your habits and aren’t able to get the fresh eyes you need. You can try flipping your schedule for an easy change. Or you can try reading your story during the time when you’d normally be reading your leisure materials, whether that be in the evening, when you’re going to bed, or during your commute—hopefully not while driving. Try to surprise yourself or catch yourself off guard. Email it to yourself and read it as though it were a lengthy newsletter from one of the myriad lists you’re on, or as another of Johnson from Accounting’s weekly exegeses on teamsmanship and cultivating a positive workplace attitude—that loser.

•        POV is VIP: This is the trick I’ve been using the last couple years and it has drastically improved my writing. Imagine your story wasn’t written by you but was written by your enemy, your evil twin, and you’re reading the work with the intention of excoriating it. You’ve got a fresh, juicy red pen in hand and are salivating to rip it to pieces. What cracks can you find in the armor? Where can you slip in the knife?  

Or, better yet, imagine that person was reading your work. What might they say?  What parts might they take issue with?  Where do you see that red pen going? And, the real goal here, can you defend or refute that criticism?  If it’s just because your enemy is a philistine and wouldn’t know the difference between Matisse and Gen. Mattis, maybe pick a better enemy (thought that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong). If the whole story hinges on the fact that it’s a response to an obscure French novel from the 1700s, it’s very, VERY probable you need to rework that story.  

More likely what you’re going to find are questions like: Did you just put that in there to be controversial? To be gross? Are you using that particular word because you think it makes you sound smart? Does the sex scene really need to be 25-pages long and include illustrations? You know, that sort of thing.

This last trick is especially useful as that is how almost anyone else will read your story, asking those types of questions. Not necessarily with the same animosity as your enemy, but certainly looking for any weaknesses. If we’re going back to our structural metaphor, every reader—especially those of the publishers or agents who are reading your work—are examining the house of your story with the keen eye of an engineer or building inspector (one you can’t pay off). They’re looking for shoddy craftsmanship, places where you cut corners, places that might pose a danger to the tenants, testing for structural weakness. 

Remember, you’re going up against a plethora of other stories—a metropolis filled with other houses, condos, high rises, subdivisions—and every person who reads your story that is not your mom is looking for a reason to reject it or do anything else with their time. That might sound discouraging, but it’s true, and the sooner you realize that the better writer you’ll become. After all, you do the same thing yourself every time you peruse a book, journal, or article, every time you scroll down the news feed of Facebook or Twitter, looking for a reason to shut it down and move onto the next one. Or a cat video. 

It’s Not "Goodbye;" It’s Just "Not Now:"

Of course, parting with your work is never an easy thing to do. You might have a few lines that you just absolutely love but which do not belong in your story. In these cases, it can be useful to transition your work from your revision file to a discard pile before you’re ready to commit it to the recycle bin. These tips will help you do just that:

·         Temporary Housing: I’ll often either highlight a section that’s on the chopping block or else change the font to red. I’ll read through the passage again, skipping over the colored portion, and see if that omission made sense. If not, I can quickly change the color back without risking a loss of the data. Generally speaking, nine times out of ten, once you’ve decided something can go in the red, chances are it probably belonged there, and really shouldn’t get a reprieve and go back to the black.

But if you’re still not ready to let go try this next one.

·         Alternate Universes: Almost without fail, I will save the copy of my first draft of a story and work on my revisions in a separate file. That way I can make drastic changes and delete with confidence, knowing that, if I need to, I can go back to early drafts and reacquire the text if need be. Usually, I find I never need to—though I’m not immune to a few bad habits myself from time to time.  

·         Snippets: If you’re still not ready to say adieu, creating a separate document or repository for pieces you’ve deemed not germane to the work can be a good way to get rid of them without giving them a permanent funeral (my one and only beer AND metal reference for the day). This is especially useful when working on novels or longer works that may have pages and pages of cut material, sometimes entire chapters or characters.

Of course, this data is still there, and that presents a problem as well. D.T. Max’s New Yorker article, The Unfinished, about the late, great David Foster Wallace, highlights these dangers and a pivotal moment in Wallace’s maturation as a writer: “Eventually, he learned to erase passages that he liked from his hard drive, in order to keep himself from putting them back in.”

Really what it comes down to is a matter of comfort and discipline. You need to get comfortable with the idea of deleting; and you need to develop the discipline to stick to a method for making those cuts and/or not putting them back in. There’s no right or wrong way to get to that point, but hopefully these tools will be a good starting point for you to find a method that works best for you.  

Beta Test:

One of the most useful tricks I’ve found for editing—especially when getting closer to the final or penultimate round of proofing—is to read the story in a new format. Your 12pt, double-spaced, Times New Roman manuscript formatting is not how the story will actually appear once published.  You can become too accustomed—or fall in love—with how the story looks in manuscript form, only to find it clunky or awkward once you’ve seen the galleys.   

There’s also the fact that every writer develops blind spots on their own work after looking at it over and over and over again. Tweaking. And then over and over and over it again once more. And you cannot count on Spellcheck to find all those errors. Many of these come in the way of double articles or prepositions, which your grammar checking tools won’t catch. This is your “on the on the,” your “and but,” your “the an,” etc. They can slip past you 100 times in the same format, but once you see it in another they will jump out and you can correct them.

The best way to get past these blind spots and see your work in a fresh light is to read your story in the format you’ve most envisioned for it—perhaps in the magazine of your dreams or how it might be look in a bound paperback. This will also give you a great vantage to see how it stands up to the competition.

If, like with many of us writers, your dream is to find your story published in the pages of The New Yorker, consider putting your story into a 3-column format, changing the font to something closer to Georgia (so you’re not still in TNR), and making it single-spaced. If you really want, throw a block or two in for photos or ads—though that might be taking the fantasy a little far (especially when, as with most of us, the chances of that dream coming true are equivalent to winning the lottery; still, you can’t win if you don’t buy the ticket, right?). Read through your story in this new format, and then pick up a copy of the magazine and compare them side by side.

If you’re working on a book-length work, consider giving your novel a beta test of the interior design. There are several great websites out there, such as The Book Designer, that have a few open-source or low-cost options for interior book formatting. Even if you pay for one, $60 is a relatively small price to pay considering other costs and all that’s at stake. Read through your book in this format, either by printing it out as your own galleys, or save a small grove of trees and read and edit it on your tablet—which will give you an idea how it will look on there as well.   

Read It Aloud:

Of course, one of the best ways to test your story is to simply read it aloud. Put on your smoking jacket, prepare a brandy, and climb into your armchair near the fireplace and let those sultry tones bring your story to life. Okay, maybe you don’t need to do all of that—or any of that—but reading your story aloud does help bring it to life. After all, you wouldn’t write a symphony on sheet music and never have it played by actual instruments would you?  

You might notice: patterns you weren’t aware of, phonically or syntactically; or that there’s an unbearable amount of consonance or clunky adverbs; just a bit too much purple alliteration; or maybe some of those words were a bit erudite for the story. I’ve certainly found passages I’ve been embarrassed to utter, not for any thematic reasons (believe it or not), but because they just seemed a bit heavy-handed, pedantic, or maudlin for what I was trying to do. As uncomfortable as watching an all-children performance of a Eugene O’Neill play.  

Reading aloud is also a great way to test dialects and accents. If you’re trying to nail down a particular voice for a character, why not give that character a voice, a test drive. This is true not just for accents but for any narrative voice.  William Gaddis’ JR—told almost exclusively through dialogue, and with mostly just the characters’ particular syntax used to identify the speaker—is practically begging to be read aloud and I would pay good money (if I had any) to hear tapes of Gaddis lending his own voice to these characters (if it even exists).

Reading aloud is nothing new; it’s been championed before from plenty of other writers over the years, but that’s simply because it works.  

You vs You:

Again, there’s no one, correct, unimpeachable salve to editing. It’s whatever works for you. You yourself are your biggest impediment to the process: your closeness to the project, your inherent bias towards the work, the fact that you’ve been looking at it through only your eyes, etc. What these tools aim to do is allow you to break through the barrier of yourself, to splinter that bias, and help you get into the frame of mind necessary to see what a third party might see.  

Far and away the best tool I gained from my graduate writing program experience was the ability to see my own shortcomings, habits, and pitfalls; the ability to begin to be my own best editor (an ongoing process). Hopefully, these suggestions will help you get to that point as well.

--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, “Eisenstein’s Monster,” here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can order it through your local bookstore or library.

Every writer has their own “block” with respect to the previous facets: a writer’s block of editing, of marketing, budgeting, etc. While we’ll get into some of the business-side facets later—especially as I’m continuing to learn them myself—the focus for this series of posts is about the revision and editing process. Specifically, these entries will focus on the TOOLS OF REVISION you can use for any style of writing—fiction, non-fiction, blog, essay, or that four-part treatise you’re composing on the abject inhumanity of the traffic on the Eisenhower.   

Let’s begin… 

Measure Twice, Cut Once:

One of the best ways to edit is to make sure you’re building the story right in the first place. After all, you don’t typically drop the engine into a car after you’ve built everything else and fine-stitched the upholstery. 

For some reason I tend to think of the writing process in terms of woodworking (my inner Nick Offerman coming out, or, more likely, my native Minnesotan emerging). As such, every story is a wooden structure of some sorts: a whittled piece of flash-fiction; the rocking horse of a short, punchy essay; the smooth, hand-hewn canoe of a short story; the novelistic cabin; or the ornate hunting lodge of some massive tome that hosts all of the above.   

And just like carpentry, each project requires the right tools and a similar path to completion, working from the initial, conceptual stages towards the (hopefully) splinter-less, finished product.  

The initial writing phase is getting the rough idea of what you’re going to create; this is the time that you head out into the woods with the chainsaw, select which logs you want, making some rough cuts. After you’ve harnessed your inner Rocky and dragged the logs back to your mill and workshop, you can start assembling the materials and preparing the wood (drafting your ideas, writing a few initial paragraphs, some character sketches, maybe some false starts, etc.).

Eventually, you’ve got to just dive in and start putting her together, framing it, adding key structural components. It won’t be pretty, but that’s what the next step is for.  

Once the structure is complete, you can go ahead and remove the temporary struts and supports, those paragraphs or sentences used as placeholders or guiderails. You build the walls, the roof, the doorways. The door itself will serve as your introductory sentence or paragraph; in some cases, the door might be the first thing you design, and the reason for the house; in others, it might be the last, and one that usually will require several drafts.      

Only once the structure is erected do you start breaking out the circular saw and cutting off the errant pieces of wood, tightening the nuts and bolts with a wrench, taking out the power sander and going over it again and again, from a coarse grain of 60 down to a fine 400. Then, finally, you can buff her with a smooth cloth before applying the finish.  

The point is that the refuse of the project gets smaller and smaller. From the unnecessary branches in the beginning, to the circular slices in the middle, to the saw dust at the end. It is impractical and dangerous to work the other way around. If you were to sand and polish every piece of lumber before building, getting each one perfect and in place (as Updike claims to have done, perfecting one sentence before moving on to the next), either it would take way, wayyy too long to get the story done, or, more probably the case, the pieces of lumber will have become too darling and less likely to take to editing.

(I feel like part of the problem with perfecting one sentence before moving on to the next is that it hinders organic writing. Sure you can work on a sentence, its structure, its purpose, before moving on; because sometimes it’s necessary to find the voice, the tone of the piece, before it can even begin to take shape and grow on its own; but to get it to an inelastic, perfect position is a mistake. The majority of the most authentic, valid, and generally good writing I’ve done was just letting my fingers take a walk on the keyboard; not necessarily automatic writing or stream of consciousness, I just let the subconscious computer of my brain assemble the component pieces floating around in a cloud of data my conscious hands were just too graceless to capture.)  

So now you’ve built the house of your story, which included some editing along the way. So what do we do now? 

Pyramid Scheme:

As long as we’re on this building trope, let’s look at how one of the most ancient building practices can be used in your revision process, that of the pyramid.  

The hierarchy of cuts generally starts with larger omissions (big blocks of text) and ends with smaller, minute corrections (that final, tiny triangle on top): i.e. first removing whole chapters or paragraphs, then sentences, a word, then, finally, your punctuation. 

Take a step back and look at your story as a whole, keeping in mind the story’s block structure.  Is your story comprised of only large blocks of paragraphs? Is it a chain of smaller lines? A layer cake of big blocks connected by small lines of dialogue?  There’s no right or wrong way a story can or should be structured; for every task the right tool, for every story the right structure. It all depends on what’s right for the story. But taking a look at the structure will help give you an idea of the pace of the story, the symmetry of the story, the voice, and can be pretty useful in identifying some of the necessary larger omissions.   

For instance, if your story is all dialogue but for one ginormous, 2-page paragraph of exposition nestled about two-thirds of the way in, it might be a good idea to see if it’s really a necessary inclusion, or if you should shave that sucker down or see if maybe it can be reformed to better match the rest of the story.  

Once the big blocks are out of the way you can start getting a little closer to the medium-sized pieces, looking for superfluous sentences or sentences that could be consolidated, reshaped, shortened. Maybe you’ve got a clause or lengthy phrase tacked on to the end of the sentence that provides some colorful character but just doesn’t fit the flow or voice of the story. Maybe two of your sentences really amount to the same statement.

The next blocks, smaller than the last, are the actual words of your story. Look for words you might be overusing. Look for words whose sesquipedalian nature might be a bit heavy handed. Or, more positively, look for better words you could substitute. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—‘tis the difference between the lightning-but and the lightning.”

After that, you can dive into the nitty-gritty—and sometimes maddening—battle of punctuation revision. Does that semi-colon need to be there? Are your ellipses spaced correctly? Are you really going to drop your fourth colon in as many paragraphs? The latter being a personal habit of mine I’m trying to get away from.  

*Note: Do not be afraid to invert the pyramid from time to time. It may be that only once you’ve fully polished the story, got it almost ready to send out, applied some of the other tools to your revision, do you notice a section or chapter that just doesn’t belong in the story.

Riding the Bullet Train:

Remember—and this is an axiom that holds true for everything, from logistics to cab rides to dining—people will always reward you if you get them there faster. And this has become even more apt in our current era: the Age of Information and Amazon Prime 2-Day shipping; 3-D printing and Tweets in 140 characters or less.

Now, whether or not you want to reward your readers, or how often, is another matter entirely. Wallace, Bernhard, and plenty more of my favorite writers have deliberately withheld such rewards. Wallace and Bernhard both had works examining the role of entertainment and boredom, and thus a lack of reward fit into their artistic visions. However, that does not mean that their works were not efficient or that it can’t be applied to maximalist writing, it simply means eliminating redundancies and making whatever words you use efficient. A 10-word sentence or a 2000-word sentence can be equally effective, as long as it’s efficient the whole way through. 

A great example of this theory can be found in the movie “Genius” [Grandage, 2016] starring Jude Law and Colin Firth. The film follows Max Perkins’ editing of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and The River, which arrived to the editor’s office as 5,000 handwritten pages in several overflowing boxes. There’s one particular scene in which his editor, Max Perkins, is reading aloud the passage in which Eugene falls for a woman with blue eyes. The first draft had a long and lovely, if very purple, description of her eyes and how deep he is smitten. Afterwards Wolfe says, “You don’t like it?” “You know I do,” Perkins responds, “that’s not the point.”

After much work, they winnow it down to “Her eyes were blue.”

In another scene, Max wants a bit more on the doctor character…and Wolfe gives him 50 pages. Again, it isn’t that Perkins doesn’t like the prose, it’s just that it takes way too long to get to the point.

Gaining this level of self-awareness is by no means an easy task, but it is the hallmark of a writer maturing, and could likely mean the difference between a rejection and publication.  

Paradigm Shift:

These are, by and large, broad strokes of revision, more strategies than specific tools, more paradigms than a general panacea to editing.  We’ll get into those specific devices soon, but really, the most important thing when it comes to revision is your attitude. You have to be willing and open to the editing; you have to be able to let go of your darlings and, in some instances, take them out behind the proverbial shed. Thinking of your writing in terms of phases will help you to see the bigger picture of the whole process and, in turn, will help guide your hand through that much-needed strikethrough.    

That’s it for today. Check back tomorrow when we’ll get into the details of what should be inside your toolbox.

--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, Eisenstein’s Monster, here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or can be ordered by your local bookstore or library.