Making Sense From Nonsense IV: The Awakening
Extensive update today! I have picked up a few new followers, so I’ll briefly summarize the background here first. If you don’t want the background, scroll down to the next section.
I’ve been on a bit of a journey these last few years, and I’ve ended up with a fairly unique product: a collection of nonsense poetry created with a special cut and paste technique and then combined with AI art, using Midjourney. I did print it here in China in a limited number, and when I went home to Winnipeg, Canada in summer 2023 (for the first time in 4 years), I wanted to get it on the shelves at a local bookstore that I have always loved, McNally Robinson. However, they only take self-published books that have gone through an editing process with the company Friesen Press, so that they can ensure a certain level of quality. I hummed and hawed over it for a few months but in the end I decided to go for it, and I’ve been detailing my experiences thus far, which have mostly been dealing with various forms, questionnaires, and uploading files (not PDFs!).
Latest Update
So the last time I updated, I mentioned that I was waiting to make contact with a publishing specialist from the company. Well, that day has arrived!
I was very excited to read a professional’s judgment on what I produced, and I’ll share a few samples of it below. I’ll caveat it a little bit just with two notes:
1) I am not letting this inflate my ego! I think it’s likely an important part of their job to make the writer feel good about their product so that they’ll engage more in the process and get the most out of the self-publishing experience. And I have to say that it worked! I feel much better about this whole thing now that I have read this report, and engaged in a conversation with the person who wrote it, which I’ll summarize below.
2) I’m a dumbass that uploaded the wrong file, so they were not able to judge the one thing that I really wanted a professional opinion on: the essay that comes at the end of the poetry book which explains the whole process I used to make the poems and the art. I didn’t include this in the original version that I printed here in China because I wanted to see the poems stand on their own two feet first without anyone knowing how they were made. But I have that essay in a version of the PDF that I produced…unfortunately it was not that one that I sent to them. When I get some feedback on that, I’ll make another post.
Positives
“To say I have never seen anything like it is an understatement! It’s an extraordinary book in many ways.”
This was something I really appreciated hearing. We all love to think we are unique little snowflakes, don’t we? And when we produce something creative, we like to think we’re producing something that hasn’t been done before, when in fact a lot of creativity is recycled versions of ideas that have come before. And I don’t think I’m any different by the way — the cut and paste technique for making texts has been around for a while and tried by many people; I just brought it into the 21st century by using technology. Still, the combination of the weirdness of my poems and the art does feel quite unique to me, and it was nice to hear a professional say it as well.
“It is stunning how the nonsense makes sense (is truth) and how powerful it often is…Below are two examples of many that took my breath away”
This was also great to hear, and the two quotes that she picked out are, I think, representative of some of the evocative language I’ve been able to come up with in these poems: “His quotes of love and sparkling horse heart diamonds designed by the oceans” and “Where the real dark face of her nightmares lights the sparkling paper butterflies on fire.” I have a weird brain that is good at finding patterns in things, and when I am making these poems, I often have a word list that is more than 200 words long to choose from. So I mash things together to create contrasts, make an image in the readers’ mind, make a joke, play with the language, make interesting sounds, and sometimes even to make meaning!
“The artwork is a phenomenal part of your experiment and is used to such good effect. The illustration to “The Screaming Bones,” for example, actually made me gasp.”
This was so good to hear. So many of the images I have produced show the other side of AI art that I don’t think most people know: it can be quite surreal and even alarming what comes out of it sometimes if you know how to play with the settings. If you just take a look through the posts on this Medium page from the past year or so, you’ll see a bunch of examples of it. It’s such an integral part of the book, and it felt good to get acknowledgement for it.
Areas of Improvement
Now, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, kids. There was a section on areas for improvement, and once again, I was very happy with what I read there because I could tell that this person actually read my book and had thought about it and cared about it. There were valid and thoughtful criticisms about the number of poems, the fonts, and the use of punctuation, in particular that really made me think.
The number of poems is not going to change — I produced around 130 of these poems in total, and I reduced that down to 84 in four distinct parts. There is some meaning in that number, and it’s a fun little part of the puzzle box that is this project, so I’m going to leave it at that number. But they were not wrong to point it out. It’s not the kind of book you would want to try to read in one sitting!
The fonts were a criticism that I have heard before. I used four distinct fonts for each of the four parts, and again I feel like those play an important part in the book. However, the criticism that, especially in the first part, the font is too illegible is a valid one. We’ll see how the design team feels about the other two odd fonts, but I’m open to changing that up according to what they think will be the most impactful.
And the punctuation! I have to admit that I let this slide a little more than I should have. The use of punctuation in poems is something that is a little tough to get a handle on, and I hadn’t realized how inconsistently I had been using it throughout the book, and that’s one reason that I am going to go for the full “complex content edit” and get this issue fixed, rather than just a “standard copy edit” that would focus more on the surface level things like spacing, etc. that would make it ready to be published.
And that brings us to my next big barrier. It looks like I am going to have to bite the bullet and make this into a .docx file after all. In order to do the complex copy edit properly, and in order to edit the fonts, it seems like having it in a PDF just isn’t going to work. Sigh. I had really hoped to avoid this, but it looks as if it is unavoidable. I have a week off the first week in April, so it seems like that is the best time to make this happen, if not before.
The Chat
Being in China and talking to someone back in Manitoba, Canada, means that we had to be creative with our scheduling. And so it was that Friday night, 10:30pm, became our online meeting time. The person I talked to (I won’t mention any details just in case they want to remain anonymous) was quite professional but also personable, and was lucky enough to be working from home. We went through all the steps that needed to happen, went through some of the questions I had about the paperwork, and reviewed next steps together as well. They also wanted to know some of my background and who I was, and how this project came together, since they hadn’t read the essay yet (not their fault — remember that I uploaded the wrong version at first, and then there was an issue with the uploading of the correct version that seemed to hide it from view).
All in all, it was a great and helpful chat, and I left the meeting feeling like I had made a friend, not just met an editor. This will definitely make the whole process easier to go through!
Overall Impressions
I just want to reiterate something I believe I’ve written in these posts before: I am in no way working for Friesen Press, and I am not getting any kind of discount or any other special treatment for saying positive things about them.
That being said, I am very happy with the service so far. The only complaint I have isn’t even their fault — the reasoning for wanting a .docx file and not a PDF is valid; and for most people who are self-publishing, it probably won’t be an issue. Just remember to create in Word and not Publisher, as even Publisher does not have the “track changes” feature that they need, and also seems unable to convert files into Word format.
Welly well well then! That’s enough for now. See you next update, which will likely come when I get feedback on the essay and have another meeting.