Traditional Publishing vs. ebooks
“In a bookstore in Nicaragua to buy souvenirs for friends back in the states, I stumbled across copies of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, and Death on the Installment Plan.” Thus starts off the first line of the poem Souvenirs in my book I Sing the Body Poetic. And this illustrates the big difference between ebooks and traditional books – you can’t stumble across a used ebook in an old bookstore. (Maybe someday that might be possible, but it’s not possible n
Many years ago, while working as an editor/proofreader for a large publishing house, I learned two very useful editing tricks: (1) to catch spelling errors, read the text backwards, and (2) to revise, read the text out loud.
When I was a child, I read a story in Ripley’s Believe it or Not that Descartes could only write if he held a cold dinner plate to the back of his head. So, the story goes, servants would spend all day transporting cold dinner plates from the chilly basement up to Descartes’ writing room when he was writing. I don’t know if the story is true or not, but it does illustrate the lengths that writers will go in order to be in ‘the writing zone” – to be creative.
One could say that there are two “zones” in writing: an inner and an outer zone. The inner zone is where the words come from, that well where we draw the water of life. It’s a space that is totally personal, solipsistic, dreamlike, irrational, undependable, moody, creative, volatile, immoral, temperamental, and unpredictable.