In an Unstable Fashion
The unholy marriage of 21st century book publishing and 19th century time travel
I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. —H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Friends, I’m going to keep this short because I spent the last two weeks going over the proofs to Corporate Rock Sucks and the last three days reading every one of its 432 pages out loud. It’s been an adventure.
You know those sci-fi movies where the hero has to travel to another dimension and during the journey their bodies start to fray and disintegrate and recombine in odd configurations and at the end of the voyage they’re spat out onto the shore of an endless sea crawling with chittering crab creatures that could snap him in half with their claws but our hero is too exhausted to care?
That’s what reading proofs are like. You have to pore over every page, every paragraph, every sentence of your book, scrutinizing the combinations of words until they lose all meaning. Your mind plays tricks on you. Things you could have sworn you changed are unchanged and the things you did change need to be changed back to the way they were before. Confusion reigns. Doubt is the uniform of the day. You look things up on the internet in a cold panic as the most rudimentary facts of your knowledge slip away. You’re no longer sure if Henry Garfield is the fourth singer of Black Flag or the 20th President of the United States.
Right when you think you’ve done enough, when the most obsessive part of your brain starts to relax a little, you find something that makes you questions EVERYTHING.
It happened when I was 338 pages into reading the book aloud and I stumbled upon the word “conventual.” Technically, the word exists but has something to do with convents—and that’s all I care to know to be honest. In my brain I’d mashed up “conventional” and “eventual.” The inevitable drift of something shocking or strange becoming ordinary or unremarkable…
Anyway, that’s the kind of mistake you make when you’re writing your first draft at 1:30 in the morning and you’re falling asleep in your chair, but then the next day you catch it and fix it. Not me. Not this time. That slip-up made it through countless drafts, multiple outside readers, a professional proofreader, two rounds of copyedits, all the way into the proofs, and I didn’t catch it until practically the eleventh hour.
A normal person thinks, “Ah, ha! What a lucky thing!” But writers are not normal people. Being an obsessive I immediately started to wonder what else is lurking in my book, what other butchered bits of prose are slowly bleeding out on the page waiting for me to discover them when it’s far too late to do anything about it.
This is the torture that is reviewing proofs. The reward for this agony?
The mythical kingdom of done. Right now, the book is 99.5% done. I couldn’t change it if I wanted.
Well, that’s not true. If tonight I go to sleep and have a dream about the book and realize I’ve made an awful error that will bring shame to me, my family, my publisher, my publisher’s family, etc. I could probably lobby to get the book back so I can fix it. But barring some catastrophe, it’s out of my head and out of my hands and on its way to becoming a thing that exists in the world, which is pretty exciting when you think about it that way.
Did I say exciting? I meant terrifying.
Terriciting.
For now I’ve got to worry about those crab creatures, which is an image I lifted from chapter 11 of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab–like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.
Wells probably intended this to be scary, but crabs are my people and this makes perfect sense to me. We armor ourselves to protect our feelings and prefer to skitter from side to side rather than tackle a problem head on. Does any of this feel familiar, fellow cancers?
Actually, those crabs are a metaphor for everything I put off to take this terricitingly conventual journey. This weekend is my mother’s celebration of life event, and I’ve got a bunch of things to do to get ready for that, and then it’s the Thanksgiving holiday, and somehow it’s already November 17. This whole time thing is a real pain in the ass if you ask me.
So, if you don’t mind, a few announcements and then I’ll ooze back into primordial stew of things left undone…
Message from the Underworld will be on hiatus next week. It’s going to be an eventful few weeks, and I’ll have a lot to say about it when Message from the Underworld returns on December 1, but this feels like the right time to press pause.
Punk Rock Family TV: I neglected to mention last week that I was a guest on Punk Rock Family TV and talked about Do What You Want with the crew. I sat down with a great group of Bad Religion fans who had some interesting and insightful questions. Check it out.
Forbidden Beat: Perspectives on Punk Drumming has a new book trailer for your viewing pleasure. You can pre-order the book here.
Stay safe. Eat well. Sit properly in the saddle. There are people that will tell you that stuffing is trash, but those people are wrong.
