By far, the most votes went to:

Mike Young: Moves in Contemporary Poetry

In fact, it was the only post that received multiple votes!

And here are the rest, presented alphabetically:

A D Jameson:

A Dozen Dominants: The Current State of US Indy Lit

Amy McDaniel:

Some Notes on Affect

Blake Butler:

All pigshit is writing.

HTMLGIANT’s 400 Under 1

Shit I Don’t Like About Writers & Writing

The Myth of the Human w/r/t David Foster Wallace’s ‘Mister Squishy’

22 Things I Learned from Submitting Writing

25 Important Books of the 00s

Chelsea Martin:

Wigger Chick

Christopher Higgs:

Against Answers: A Conversation with Kyle Minor

What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions with Miranda Mellis}

Impossible Mike:

An Issue of Desire in its Relation to the Textual Subject/Object

Expanded Literature Part 1: Internet Literature

THE ZERO-DEGREE NOISELESSNESS OF DEATH: LECTIO I-IV

THE ZERO DEGREE NOISELESSNESS OF DEATH: LECTIO V-VIII

TOP TEN INDIE-LIT DICKS WE’D RATHER SEE THAN JORDAN CASTRO’S

Jimmy Chen:

Expired Domain Girl

hitlertmlgiant

Justin Taylor:

Tables of Contents for The Quarterly, issue 1 – 25

J Wang:

Lineage: justifiable matricide vs. I mothered you hoes

On hand jobs, AWP, the internet, truck drivers, and embodied living

Ken Baumann:

The Beginner’s Guide to Deleuze

Michael Kimball:

Guest Lecture Series (1): Openings

Guest Lecture #2: Keeping Going

Guest Lecture #3: The Rough Parts

Guest Lecture #4: Story and Plot

Guest Lecture #5: Language and Sentences

Mike Young:

Magazine Databases-Magazine Debasers

There was also an impassioned plea for the Boobs Friday archive, which you can find by searching the site for “boobs.”

Finally, for added value (as well as comparison’s sake), here are the 50 most popular posts in HTMLGIANT history (i.e., the ones that have received the most page views):

1. J Wang: The expurgation of the clitoris in the diary of Anne Frank
2. Jimmy Chen: Expired Domain Girl
3. Amy McDaniel: Found-ish Poetry: The Sorted Books Project
4. Amy McDaniel: Grammar Challenge!
5. Jimmy Chen: The Painter
6. Amy McDaniel: Grammar Challenge: Answers and Explanations
7. Blake Butler: Visceral Readings: The Sluts
8. Jimmy Chen: Sartre publishes ‘The Wall’ on his facebook wall
9. Jimmy Chen: Raskolnikov’s inbox
10. Jimmy Chen: Boob Friday Halloween Special Haiku Contest
11. Michael Schaub: Power Quote: W. S. Merwin
12. Roxane Gay: Another Random List of Things
13. Blake Butler: Mike Tyson on Writing
14. Blake Butler: The Myth of the Human w/r/t David Foster Wallace’s ‘Mister Squishy’
15. Jimmy Chen: Author venn diagram
16. Blake Butler: 22 Things I Learned from Submitting Writing
17. Mike Young: Moves in Contemporary Poetry
18. Blake Butler: 25 Important Books of the 00s
19. Brian Foley: 25 Important Books of Poetry of the 00s
20. pr: ‘Parker’s Back’ by Flannery O’Connor
21. Blake Butler: HTMLGIANT’s 400 Under 1
22. Lily Hoang: pla(y)giarism versus plagiarism
23. Blake Butler: Boobs Friday: Noy Holland
24. Reynard Seifert: Tentacles Are Hair You Wear On Your Spleen, Ideally
25. pr: You want ice cream and bags of chips and chocolate and blood and guts and drugs and sex and cigarettes
26. Jimmy Chen: A Book Lover’s Guide to IKEA seating
27. Blake Butler: Gucci Mane vs. Young Jeezy
28. Justin Taylor: Hey, want to be in a book? … Get in the chair.
29. Brandon Scott Gorrell, Ryan Call, & Gene Morgan: A Review of Reviews of Shoplifting From American Apparel
30. Roxane Gay: The Price of Revelation
31. Blake Butler: DFW Praise Compendium
32. Jordan Castro: Some Thoughts Re Muumuu House
33. Blake Butler: James Joyce does not exist
34. Blake Butler: HTMLGIANT’s Tournament of Bookshit
35. Roxane Gay: A Profound Sense of Absence
36. Christopher Higgs: BlazeVOX Goes Vanity Press?
37. Justin Taylor: A Million Little Top 3′s: The 2009 List of Lists
38. Michael Schaub: The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature: Let’s Bet Cash Money on This
39. Nick Antosca: REASONS YOU SHOULD NOT DATE WRITERS (IF YOU ARE A WRITER)
40. Blake Butler: BOOBS FRIDAY; Kendra is going as full erections across America
41. Blake Butler: 12 New Tao Lin
42. Blake Butler: Famous Authors ‘Nude’
43. Christopher Higgs: Art, Crime, Beauty, Murder
44. pr: Sonnets for Saturday
45. Christopher Higgs: BlazeVOX Update
46. Roxane Gay: Seriously, Though… Some Thoughts on Writers Who Take Themselves Seriously
47. Matthew Simmons: Tin House
48. Roxane Gay: Taking No For An Answer: Some New Thoughts on Self-Publishing
49. Jimmy Chen: God damn it
50. Blake Butler: Everything I Submitted from 2006-2008 & What Happened To It

… That’s out of the roughly 7000 posts that have been published since 26 September 2008, 11:38am. (If you want the actual numbers, you’ll have to buy me something.)

Enjoy!

I started a micropress, Tiny Hardcore Press, and it has been an awesome but very challenging adventure. The best part is getting to work with writers I respect to publish awesome books that practically fit in the palm of your hand. There is no worst part but every single day I learn something new. Most of these lessons have risen from my own ignorance. Who just decides to start a press? A press is a small business. I should have done more research. I had put out two books already via PANK, but that’s not really research. My first mistake was diving into the deep end when I should have been in the kiddie pool with my floaties. I offer these observations in no particular order.

1. No matter how much money you think it’s going to cost, running a press will cost more, like, at least twice as much more and then a little more on top of that. Sure, you can run a press on the cheap, but it is pretty hard to avoid spending a lot of money.

2. ISBNs are a total racket but go ahead and buy that batch of ten for $250. You’re going to need them and buying them individually is insane. One costs $125. Also, the Bowker website is not good and by not good, I mean it is absolutely terrible. The site runs slowly and seems to use some kind of satanic Java script. I’ve almost lost it dealing with that website on several occasions.

3. Many people do not want to pay more than $10 a book. This has been really frustrating, just keeping it real. If a book costs me $8.50 to print, I cannot sell it to you for $10. People love to talk about paying the writer but don’t seem to understand that in order for writers to get paid, customers have to be willing to pay for the book. Where do you think the writer’s money is going to come from?

3a. People do not want to pay for shipping. I charge for shipping anyway. The reason Amazon can offer free shipping is because they are willing to lose money. They are willing to lose a whole lot of money.  Micropress publishers are not Amazon. Just pay the $2.50 or the $4.00 or whatever. That cost is postage + supplies. The bigger the book, the more the shipping will cost. There’s no secret profit in shipping fees.

4. What really breaks your spirit is shipping. I have learned about shipping the hardest way possible. If there is a shipping related fuck up, I have done it. The first envelopes I bought were some paper envelopes at Staples. That was a huge mistake and I paid for it dearly. I don’t rightly know what I was thinking at the time other than, “Fancy envelopes are so expensive! I’ma go with these generic envelopes.” I also got envelopes that don’t self seal, so, yeah, that sucked.

About three and four weeks after my first mailing of Normally Special, I started getting these curious scraps in the mail, often in larger envelopes, from the USPS. Sometimes, I would see an address or a partial address.  I had to CSI the envelopes to figure out who did not get their book and then send out a new copy. USPS also included with these curious scraps, a totally asinine note about how sometimes things happen and things get lost or damaged. I have a drawer full of this sadness and their pointless claims forms I don’t have the patience to fill out to get my postage back.

I have decided that what the USPS does with mail is take your envelope into some sadistic room of destruction where postal workers gleefully jump up and down on your envelopes with their muddy workboots. When they’ve exhausted themselves, they put those beat to hell envelopes in a burlap sack on the back of a donkey who then slams into a wall about a hundred times burlap sack first. When the donkey tires of this, a postal carrier then delivers your mail by kicking and otherwise abusing it, thoroughly. It looks something like this.

I respect the USPS and the work they do at the price they do it at but they are also the worst. They are hell on mail.

Still, this was my fault. I used the wrong envelope. The second envelope I tried was a Tyrek envelope. These envelopes are very durable but they offer no protection at all, so while the USPS won’t “lose” the contents of your package, the book will probably arrive looking worse for the wear. Finally, last week, I broke down and bought these poly bubble envelopes–strong and there’s great protection. If you ordered Steal Me For Your Stories or Shut Up/Look Pretty (shipping Tuesday), you will get your book cozily nestled in these awesome envelopes. I’m sorry it took me so long to get my envelope game correct.

If I had just paid the money up front for the good envelopes, I wouldn’t have lost, literally, hundreds of dollars being a cheap ass. My point is, just buy the goddamned fancy envelopes up front. You can’t game the system. You’re welcome.

5. The guy at the post office hates me and I live in a really small town so there aren’t other options. When he sees me coming with my neatly addressed and sorted envelopes, he just glares. One time he pointed at me and said, “No. Absolutely not.” To be fair, it was like ten til but I have a job and sometimes late afternoon is the only time I can get to the post office. He freaks me out. When I’m really scared, I drive 50 miles and ship from Champaign. I’m looking into printing my own postage but it feels more expensive than I can cope with right now. I have clearly learned little from Item 4.

6.  Mailing labels are your friends. Just buy them already. Your handwriting sucks anyway. I’ve finally settled on Avery 8163–one sticker and done. Mailing labels are SO EXPENSIVE. Everything feels expensive these days but doing things right takes money, and slowly but surely, I am trying to get to a place where I do things right.

7. People will lie about buying the books you publish as if you don’t have access to your own sales records. This fascinates me and sometimes I just want to ask–why did you pretend to buy this book?

8. Get a big stack of those Customs Declaration forms from the USPS. They are free and you’re going to need them. Fill them out before you go to the post office and attach them to the envelopes so the scary man won’t growl and send you to the back of the line. You need one for every international package, including mail sent to Canada.

8a. International shipping is ghastly. It’s probably best to have two tiers of shipping rates–Canada, Europe, and the UK, and then the other side of the world. Shipping to New Zealand and Australia can cost up to $15 or more. Whenever I have a stack of international envelopes, I close my eyes and go to my happy place while the postal clerk rings them up.

9. My overall mantra is, “What would Adam Robinson do?” I try to channel him a lot. I don’t know how well I succeed with that but if you’re looking for a model of how to run a small press, he is a good spirit animal.

10. Writers will submit even when you are closed to submissions. Sometimes, this is absolutely wonderful. I just accepted two manuscripts this week from such submissions. Mostly though, it’s not great. I do not know when, if ever, THP will open to submissions again. I have projects through 2013 and after that, I cannot say but I am a writer first and I know I will not be a small publisher forever.

11. Writers don’t often realize what it means to work with a micropress. I think it was Peter Cole who said, maybe on Facebook, that there’s nothing he can do for you as a publisher that you cannot do for yourself. When it comes with working with a micropress that’s mostly true. What you get with a micropress is, hopefully a personal experience, an editor who cares, and you get to put your book out into the world without the (unfortunate) stigma of self-publishing, without the cash outlay of self publishing, and hopefully, you will also get someone who will put some time and effort into making your book look good. You’re also going to get someone who isn’t publishing books as a full time job, so they are stretched and they will sometimes be terse in emails because e-mail requires triage–critical patients first.

You have to be prepared to hustle. You have to be willing to promote your book, and do readings, and plan your own events because there’s no support staff at the micropress to do it for you.

These days, you have to do this kind of hustle when working with a major publisher so as you can well imagine, when working with a micropress, there’s even more responsibility on the writer’s shoulders.

So far, I’ve published books by extraordinary hustlers. Brian Oliu made his own book trailer. Then he made another one with Brandi Wells. Roll Tide.

12. Writers are generous enough to gracefully, patiently work with a micropress. They are generous enough to let you publish their work for little or no money up front. These presses would not be possible without writers being great. I’ve heard horror stories about writers but have not experienced any yet. I hope to never be a horror story as a publisher.

13. I am terrible with the bookkeeping and business end of things. Math is the worst. Thankfully, PayPal can generate various reports so I can figure out what I’ve sold to pay royalties, if applicable. I need to be better about this by a factor of at least 100. I had absolutely no plan in this regard and I needed a plan. How are you going to track sales? How are you going to track various price points if you offered sales or other discount offers? How are you going to track direct e-book sales? Are you going to charge tax? If not, how are you going to pay The Man in April? How are you going to generate royalty statements? What information do you need to include? How are you going to track order fulfillment? The questions are endless and you need to be able to answer them, or you can, like me, just learn the answers the really hard way as you go–your choice.

13a. I kind of hate PayPal as much as I appreciate PayPal. The website is slow and their evil just lurks waiting to bite you. The information hierarchy is also counterintuitive. I don’t know who helped them with their information design but they are not good. They also take a cut of every sale. Everyone has their hand out, man.

13b. I do appreciate the ease with which you can handle transactions on PayPal. If you need to issue a refund, it only requires the click of a button.

13c. In terms of sales, Normally Special is in it’s 5th printing, So You Know It’s Me is in it’s 4th printing, and Please Don’t Be Upset is in its 2nd printing. We are not talking print runs of 10,000 or anything, you know, manage those expectations, but it’s great that these books are staying in demand. One of my goals for the summer, is to really get my books in order so I can share exact sales figures with a breakdown of sales versus comps etc.. I have gotten things in better shape so I can share info with the writers but there’s a lot of room for improvement here.

14. However much time you think it’s going to take, running a press will require several times as much. If you do not truly have the time, do not bother. I do not have as much time as I would like to devote to the press. I get everything done, but I’d like a couple more hours a week to focus solely on THP. In addition to overseeing the production process, doing the interior design, working with designers if you so choose,  and all that, you also have to do absolutely mundane things like stuff the envelopes. That’s one of the main reasons I’m not open to submissions. I could not possibly read unsolicited manuscripts right now. Before starting this post, I stuffed 127 envelopes which was actually the most relaxing thing I did for the day. I made neat little piles and tore off adhesive strips and it was really rather pleasant. I also spent a couple hours creating the labels (mail merge can bite me). Then my goddamned printer broke trying to print the labels. That POS HP printer, one of those awful All In One printers, is now an expensive brick that should work but doesn’t. The printer thinks it has a paper jam but it does not. I was all up in that printer with a flashlight. Dr. Google told me this is a known problem, but HP doesn’t care so, yeah, I’ll be printing those labels at work tomorrow, trying not to think about how much a new printer might cost. I went back to stuffing envelopes to cool my rage which was significant.

15. If you want to start a press, and need some pointers on who to work with, you should get to know the following people (and feel free to add other suggestions in the comments):

David McNamara at Sunnyoutside/Cloudyoutside is your man for printing. He also does design and such, if you need those services. He is helpful and a good and fast communicator. I have never had a single printing problem and I’ve done four books through him. He is, in fact, the only printer who has never sent me a flawed product. He quality checks the book at every stage. If something looks jankity, he gets in touch and explains his concerns an offers options for fixing the problem. Spend the money on printing! The customer service is worth it and his prices are very reasonable. You can order in quantities as low as 25 which makes it easy and affordable to keep books in print. I’m not a big fan of POD because I like more flexibility in terms of trim size and other printing options (like a color inside cover) but I understand why people use that option, and there are good POD choices out there.

Alban Fischer will help you with all your design needs.  I had him design the cover for two projects and will be working with him again. He is creative, a good communicator, works fast, and offers multiple design options. His rates are also reasonable. He can do both covers and interiors. It’s worth the money. If you’re going to publish a book with a crappy cover, like Mike Meginnis discussed in his post, and with an interior that looks like it was done in Microsoft Word, then why bother? Are you respecting the work? Are you really bringing something into the world that needs to be in the world if you’re not willing to invest (either the time, if you have design skills or money, if you don’t) in presentation? It’s something to think about. I designed the first two covers myself, and then realized, I cannot do everything and I am not a cover designer! I am not a Swiss Army Knife! I do, however, design the interiors. I know how to do document and book design and also, keeping it real, I can’t afford to pay someone to design the interiors.

Steven Seighman also does great cover design and is worth looking up. He designed the cover for Shut Up/Look Pretty and I love it so much.

Alicia Kennedy is a great copy editor. I’ve worked with her since Normally Special. She has reasonable rates, can work in PDF, Word, or InDesign, and is very thorough. Yes, you do need a copy editor. A “friend” who is an “amazing proofreader” is probably not going to do as good a job as a professional. Everyone thinks they’re a good proofreader or copyeditor. No one catches everything, not even a professional, but when you work with a copy editor, they will catch most of what needs catching and that, again, is showing some respect for the work and for the customer who buys your book. When I get a book back from the printer, it is pretty stressful and I kind of read it with my eyes covered, praying I don’t see anything glaring. So far, so good!

Other publishers and editors will answer your questions an offer you tips. Indie people are great.

16. Invest in Adobe Creative Suite if you can or, you know, acquire it via other channels liberated from the clutches of capitalism. The educational discount makes the shocking price a little more palatable and most people know someone who is affiliated with a university who can hook them up. I bought the suite for like $300 when I was a graduate student and it was the best investment I’ve ever made in software. It will save you money in the long run. To build anything, including a press, you need tools and it is beneficial to invest in good tools. Also, I repeat: invest in good envelopes. I can’t say this enough.

17. Having an e-book is pretty important. Creating e-books is the circle closest to the hottest part of hell. Vaughan Simons created the e-books for Normally Special, So You Know It’s Me, and Please Don’t Be Upset. He also turned me on to Jutoh, the program I use to create e-books, which I have now taught myself to do because it needed to be done. I hate creating e-books. And for the record, InDesign supposedly has an ebook export function. That is an outrageous lie. The only thing that “function” does is shit the bed. Once you accept that, find something else to get the job done. I don’t enjoy coding or anything along those lines. I am not naturally suited to e-book creation but I also can’t afford to outsource it so I create the ebooks, and simply hate everything about it. That said, it’s awesome when the e-book is done and it actually works the way it is supposed to. Amazon makes it really easy to upload the ebooks and I also sell direct from the website.

18. Publisher’s Weekly is not kidding about the three to four month advance time. They are really quite nice and will take your books if you send only a month or two before the release date, but the books won’t get reviewed. This lead time makes it very difficult for micropress books to make it into Publisher’s Weekly. Hopefully, they’ll be able to accomodate e-galleys at some point so they can feature books from smaller presses who lack the resources for physical galleys and sending copies three to four months in advance.

18a. I definitely need to create a publication schedule. Thus far, I have basically done a book every three months but it’s not that regimented beyond that and it needs to be so I can get books reviewed in places requiring a lot of lead time. I have ten books in the queue and that should take me right through 2013. This spring/early summer books from Tadd Adcox and Frank Hinton will be released, as well as a surprise book coming out very soon! Then I’ll just let things breathe a bit and have a firm schedule for the remaining books.

I’m going to shamelessly show you the covers for the surprise book, The Fullness of Everything (Cover by Alban Fischer), Frank’s book, Action, Figure (Photo by Mariel Clayton, cover by Alban Fischer), and Tadd’s book, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge (Cover by Alban Fischer).

I’ll share one more neat thing, I can’t resist. The table of contents for Tadd’s book (designed by Jeffrey Calway, who did the cover for Please Don’t Be Upset, and is looking for design work to build his portfolio) is going to look like this (spread across a couple pages so it can fit the trim size):

18b. This is the really fun part–working with great artists and pulling wonderful creative ideas together so that a manuscript becomes a book. Sometimes, I caress the books when no one’s around. They’re awful cute…I mean, hardcore.

19. There are people out there who will support your press unconditionally. It’s amazing. That kind of support makes me extra committed to publishing books that are beautifully written, look good, are well edited.

20. I don’t like giving physical books away for free. This is a press not a library. If I could print and ship books for free, I would happily give books away for free. If you can’t afford a book, though, and really want to read a THP title, I will likely give you the e-book for free because great writing deserves to be read and a lack of money shouldn’t get in the way of that.

21. At first, I thought I could give advances (see: no plan). That only lasted for the first book, which totally earned out  and then some and then some (as I knew it would).  I was glad to be able to pay a writer for their writing, which is as it should be, but offering an advance was not sustainable. I changed my model. I havent abandoned the advance idea forever, though. I would like to figure out how to pay an advance to every writer while also meeting my own obligations like, you know, rent, student loans, gas, coffee, whatever. My current thinking is to have a model where the advance is a percentage of pre-sales but I have to think it through more. Once production costs are recouped, I do pay royalties, though. And writers get lots of copies of their book they can then sell to make more money.

22. I do best when I can sell books to people in person. I love the books I publish so I love talking about them and my favorite parts and introducing people to new writers. I absolutely got into doing this because of Christopher Newgent and his Vouched Books. Whenever I take books to events, I sell out. There’s a lot to be said for personal, face to face interaction when it comes to bookselling. A webpage can be informative but it is also pretty cold and impersonal. It’s also a great way to meet people. At the Mission Creek Festival last year, I represented PANK at the bookfair. The woman next to me was from Black Clock. She saw my little stack of Normally Special, and we started talking about it. I evangelized. She bought a copy, started reading it right there, and ended up loving the book. The festival ended and we went our separate ways, didn’t even exchange contact information. A couple months later, that same woman reviewed the book for Bookslut which was a wonderful surprise and it all happened because we had a great conversation about the book in Iowa City.

23. The first website I created was serviceable but not good. It was mostly a generic WordPress template, which was the best I could do at the time. I am not a web designer! (See also: not a Swiss Army Knife) I quickly realized that I needed to have a real designer (Steven Seighman) design a real website to best showcase the books. I’m really glad I did that. I totally used part of my tax return for this. Thanks, Mr. President!

23. Things I would like to do in the future: get set up with SPD, sell physical copies via Amazon, improve on publicity and getting the books reviewed in more places, book launch parties (?), do something with the website’s blog which is mostly dormant, and just, be better about everything.

Today at Slate, Farhad Manjoo does editors and designers everywhere the service of insisting on the plain and simple truth: putting two spaces after a period (or a colon, or a question mark, or an exclamation point, or etc.) is not just unnecessary, it is wrong, and furthermore a pain in the ass for everyone who has to handle your work when you’re done with it. It wasn’t long ago that it didn’t really matter how many spaces you used in a manuscript. The typesetter would have to retype the entire thing character by character, and it was very easy for them to remember not to key two spaces simply because the manuscript contained them. However, things have changed. We no longer re-type anything. We insert documents into other documents. We copy and paste. While it has become increasingly common for writers to work with an awareness of what typesetters do (because they are more and more often themselves doing this work, though perhaps more often in a WordPress “Add New” page or a Dreamweaver window than InDesign or Quark Xpress), I am still frequently amazed and disheartened by the ways in which they choose to format their manuscripts. Let’s talk about these things a little.

First, we need to define the problem more clearly. Basically, our goal should be to create the cleanest, most format-neutral manuscripts possible, with clear indications of the work’s intended appearance. What you create is not what will be published, but a source document. The goal is therefore not to simulate a published page, but to make a useable document that serves that purpose. There are four areas where writers most frequently get things wrong: the aforementioned spaces between sentences, indenting paragraphs, paragraphing generally, and page breaks.

Spaces between sentences: Okay, seriously, there should never be more than one space between any two characters in your manuscript, unless you’re doing something that screws with form, in which case you should still probably be aware that the space character is probably the least reliable way of communicating your intent. I’m not interested in arguing this anymore. No rational human being is interested in arguing this anymore. It’s a plain fact that there should not be two spaces between anything and anything else in your manuscript, and the fact that you find it more aesthetically pleasing or easy to read or that someone taught you to do it that way or that you think it’s actually correct or that you recognize it’s incorrect but do it out of habit is not relevant. I can feel some of you thinking about sharing these thoughts in the comments right now and I forbid it. Don’t do it! Seriously. Don’t make that comment, and don’t use two spaces between sentences.

If you ignore me and do it anyway, here’s what’s going to happen: the person who has to design your book’s interior is going to sigh heavily, mentally classify you as slightly less intelligent than he or she previously believed, and do a CTRL + F to automatically replace all of your hideous double spaces with single spaces. If this person has sufficient experience with your bad habit, he or she is then going to run the same find/replace function, because you didn’t get it right — inevitably, you used three or even four spaces several times in the manuscript, all of which will have become, as a result of the first find/replace function, two spaces. This, in case you were wondering, is not awesome. It’s not that hard to deal with — in fact, it has to be done to “clean” documents once, just to make sure nothing slips past — but it makes you look like you don’t think about other people when you write quite as much as you should.

Indenting paragraphs: There are a couple of acceptable solutions here, depending on how nice you feel like being to the people who see your manuscript when you’re through with it. You can indent every new paragraph with the tab button. If you do this in Microsoft Word, it’s going to figure out what you’re up to and start setting the indent for each new paragraph to that level automatically. This is kind of annoying for people working with the text down the line, because now some of your paragraphs have the invisible “tab” character at their beginning, which needs to be removed, and some don’t. But we’re used to this, the solutions are pretty easy, and we understand how it happens, so we won’t hold it against you. It would be better to use the styles feature in Microsoft Word (or its equivalent in your preferred word processor, if possible) to define how much indentation you want in your paragraphs, using different styles for different types if you have them. This will make it easier to import your text into print- and web-oriented layout software, because now the text is clean: there aren’t any invisible characters in the paragraphs, which means they don’t need to be deleted (note: no competent designer will ever use your tabs), which makes it that much easier to get right to the work of laying out your text.

What you’re never ever going to do from this day forward is to use spaces to indent your paragraphs. I see this way more often than I’d like and while I can’t imagine what causes people to do it, I do know that it is the bane of my existence. Here’s the thing: you’re not going to hit the space button the exact same number of times at the beginning of each paragraph. Some of the paragraphs will have six spaces, some will have four, and some will have five. What this means is that there is no reliable find/replace function that will solve the problem. Say I do a find/replace that removes every instance where there are five spaces in a document. Sounds good, but what just happened to instances of six or seven spaces? Well, they just became instances of one or two spaces. Unless I can successfully identify the most spaces you ever use in a document, and carefully find/replace my way back from that to the point where I remove sets of two spaces, I am going to miss something. This is awful.

Paragraphing: The spread of online publishing has created innovative new problems in this field, and I see these new problems from even the most experienced writers, so you need to pay attention here. It is more and more common for writers to submit stories with an empty line between every paragraph. Not empty space, but an empty line – what happens when you hit “return” twice at the end of a paragraph. I am begging you all to stop doing this as soon as possible. I understand why you’re doing it! I appreciate your attempt at thoughtfulness, even. You’ve seen that online journals like The Collagist, in deference to both convention and common sense, do not indent the first lines of their paragraphs in order to differentiate them from each other. Instead, they have an empty line between each paragraph. But let’s try something together: check out this randomly selected story from the latest Collagist. Now, using your mouse, try to highlight that empty line between any two paragraphs without highlighting the text above or below. Go ahead.

You can’t! Because your eyes are lying to you: there is no empty line. There’s empty space, but not an empty line. What’s happening here is that the paragraphs are defined by the <p> tag: one before the text of the paragraph and one closing tag after. The <p> tag is designed, unless someone uses CSS to define it otherwise, to put about one line’s worth of empty space between any two paragraphs. A good designer will often use CSS to define the <p> tag such that there are more or fewer empty pixels between each paragraph. (I don’t personally think an empty line is the ideal amount of space in most cases: it looks kind of big and clumsy, and draws attention to the under-designed, blog-like appearance of many online publications.) So, in other words, even if your story is being published online, putting an empty line between each paragraph only creates new work for your publisher: now they have to remove all of those hard returns. And if they decide to publish your story in print, they still have to remove those characters and you’ve introduced a potential ambiguity into the situation:

Because sometimes you put those hard returns there between paragraphs not because you think you’re helping your publisher but because you think the piece looks and works better that way. Sometimes I can tell this just from reading the piece, and sometimes I really can’t. Whenever your work is going to be published, if you want it to look a certain way and you’re not sure that will be clear to the publisher, make sure to say something. In any case, if you choose to put space between your paragraphs rather than indent their first lines, ideally, you should simply define paragraphs in your document such that they automatically insert that much empty space after each hard return: in Word, this is what the “after” box is for in your spacing menu, and in recent versions of Word it’s actually necessary to actively set this to 0 if you don’t want the space between paragraphs. If you use paragraph styles correctly, your potential publishers will see your work the way you want them to see it, and they won’t have to manually remove all those hard returns (which can’t be easily managed with a find/replace function).

There’s also the related issue of section breaks. In fiction, you usually indicate a scene change by inserting an empty line, then beginning a new, un-indented paragraph. This is what happens to every paragraph in online publications, so obviously it’s not going to work there, but actually you don’t want to do this in manuscripts intended for print publications, either — it leads to ambiguities. Every computer will render your manuscript a little differently, and your pagination will shift dramatically as you revise your document. Sometimes one of those empty lines ends up in a potentially confusing place, at the end of one page or the beginning of another. Or sometimes it’s just not clear if you meant for a section break for other reasons. So here’s what you do: use an asterisk, centered, on its own line. That’s an unambiguous signal for the typesetter, but it’s easily found (and therefore removed).

Page breaks: When you want to go down to the next page, for any reason, do not — do not – use hard returns to get there. The pagination will shift, things will get screwed up, your publisher will hate you. Insert page breaks! Sweet, beloved page breaks. If you don’t do this, I will find you in your sleep.

Maybe we’ll talk more about this later. That’s enough for now.

“ULYSSES GRAMOPHONE: Hear say yes in Joyce”

Speaking of Joyce. Some the best writing on reading I maybe ever. Don’t worry if you ain’t Ulyssesed. No soft spots on the grindstone.

Reading this rid me the image of Derrida as Oompa Loompa that somehow seared my mind.

If you have a copy, anytime’s a good time to finger that shit from your shelf, give its gentle heft some reconsideration. Or O yeah it’s free. Pry wherever, really.

Her response:

When I’m sitting down to write every morning, I make sure the sun’s casting a photoshopped glow through the sheer blinds and that all implements of the trade are just so. I’m particularly interested in books being at the right angle for photographing. The above picture is apparently Faulkner’s writing room, and I’m 100% certain that it looked just like that when he was writing in it. He was a meticulous man. No errant papers, no spilled coffee. I’m equally certain that Faulkner only wrote in the perfect light, likely magic hour. Only ever magic hour. He wrote As I Lay Dying during that first and last hour of light because people only die when the light’s just right. You wouldn’t want to die in the wrong light, would you? I mean, what would people think? Writing and dying. Dying and writing. But when you think about it, you also shouldn’t eat in the wrong light or make love in the wrong light. Jesus, what if your lover sees that scar on your left knee?

My dog died last night as I held her in my arms. I tried for magic hour, but the vet was running late. I lit candles instead. She died there in my arms, injected first with anesthesia then with kill-you formula. Her eyes stayed wide open and twitched. She let out a dying breath that smelled like violence. We buried her in a deep hole. My office overlooks her grave. It’s magic hour, this hour, this hour between sleep and waking. I’m writing at my messy desk. The light’s really nice.

R.I.P. Nut.

So, I’m teaching my first MFA fiction workshop this spring, which is exciting and pretty cool. I’ve decided to play with the traditional workshop model, which is two submitted stories per term. Here’s the syllabus.

ENGL 574 Syllabus

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This will be an intensive graduate workshop. I am working with a different model, one that emphasizes both generative practices and revision. You will be required to write three new stories very quickly (during the first nine weeks of class), which we will workshop, then we’ll spend the last five weeks of class workshopping one revision. It doesn’t take a mathematician to realize that we will be “flying” through the stories in the first part in order to focus our time on the revision.

COURSE GOALS: Part of the challenge of being a successful writer is writing under deadline. As you gain recognition as a writer, journals will begin soliciting your work. Editors and agents will require that you work efficiently. This class is modeled on your future success. As such, you will generate three new stories: one every three weeks, which will be workshopped very quickly.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of being a successful writer is knowing how and when and what to revise. The last third of the semester, we will workshop a revision of one of the stories submitted. For the revision, I will not accept line edits alone. I would like structural changes. Especially because you are generating these stories at perhaps a more rapid pace than you would otherwise write, I understand that they will not be the “cleanest” stories. Hence, the revision workshop.

Because this class is so writing intensive, I am not requiring any additional readings for class, but writing is about much more than just writing in a vacuum. You have to participate in a larger conversation. For your final portfolio, you are required to write three book reviews, responses to eight literary journals, and four community activities. (More on this later.)

FINAL PORTFOLIO: Rather than have you write or revise even more, your final portfolio will reflect your involvement in the writing world. Your portfolio will contain: three book reviews, responses to eight literary journals, and responses to four cultural activities, two of which should not occur on campus.

Book Reviews: as a rough template, please see the attachment for The Review of Contemporary Fiction’s book review guidelines. Every review venue has different requirements. If you would like to submit your review for publication at another venue, please use that journal’s guidelines and in your portfolio, give me a copy of what they want. The books you review must have been published no earlier than 2010.

Literary Journals: This can be print or online, but the point is that you start becoming conversant in what journals are publishing right now! Responses can be brief, but I want to know what you think about what you read, what the journal’s aesthetic is, etc. You should see this as an opportunity to gain knowledge about future publication options.

Cultural Activities: This can be readings, art openings, indie films, etc. Most of you know I am pretty lax about what constitutes a cultural activity.

GRADE BREAKDOWN: No one here needs to worry about grades, unless you don’t come to class, don’t do your work, or don’t talk. But here it is anyway:

Participation    50%

Final Portfolio 50%

Participation includes attendance and an active engagement with the workshop. It also includes the work you submit, both stories and notes to other workshop members. Don’t be late.

COOKIE POLICY: If your cell phone rings or buzzes, you will bring cookies in for everyone. If I catch you texting, the same.

CALENDAR BREAKDOWN: Because this is a workshop and we’re not reading anything, I’m not giving you a silly blank sheet of paper with empty slots. Here’s the way we’re running it:

Weeks 1-9: We will workshop five stories per week. You will need to write a new story every three weeks. You will submit your story to us electronically one week before it is to be workshopped.

Week 10 (4/2): Conferences

Weeks 11-15: Revision workshops, three per class. Again, you will submit your story electronically one week before it is to be workshopped.

ENDNOTES: Given the brisk nature of our workshops this semester, I don’t want to kill you with endnote work. So, this is what I expect on manuscripts: detailed and smart line edits and marginalia. I want very concise endnotes, more of an outline of what works and what doesn’t. (At the bare minimum, I expect three things that work and five suggestions, on a macro-level, for the revision process.) I will not accept banal comments like:

I like your characters, or

Your pacing is off, or

Nice descriptions, etc.

These are things that can go in your marginalia. I want macro-level comments and suggestions in your endnotes. This is a graduate workshop. If you don’t know what this means, I suggest you go buy a book on fiction.

CLASSROOM ETIQUETTE: I will not tolerate impolite behavior in the classroom or on the manuscript. Period. If I find your behavior inappropriate, I will ask you to withdraw from the class. This classroom will be a safe space for people to write whatever they want. The stories submitted may or may not fit your aesthetic. Get over it. I expect endnotes and comments to reflect what the writer wants from her story, not what you would do if you were the author.

OFFICE HOURS: Come.

First Day Discussion
excerpts from WORDS by Andy Devine

Opening Gambit
Roland Barthes – “Death of the Author”
Susan Sontag – “Against Interpretation”
Gertrude Stein – “Composition as Explanation”
John Cage – “Lecture on Nothing”

Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons (1914)
+ “Towards a Theory of Non-Genre Literature” by Jonathan Culler

Alain Robbe-Grillet – Jealousy (1957)
+ “Twelve Digressions Toward a Study of Composition” by Ronald Sukenick
+ excerpts from Space and Place: the perspective of experience by Yi-Fu Tuan

Samuel Beckett – How It Is (1961)
+ “White Elephant Art. vs. Termite Art” by Manny Farber
+ “How It Is: With Beckett’s Fiction” by Raymond Federman

Kenneth Goldsmith – Fidget (2000)
+ “The Pineal Eye” by Georges Bataille
+ “On the Balinese Theatre” by Antonin Artaud

David Markson – This is Not a Novel (2001)
+ “The Plot” from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel
+ “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not” by Carole Maso

Vanessa Place – Dies: A Sentence (2005)
+ excerpts from The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry
+ “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” by Gary Lutz

Bhanu Kapil – Schizophrene (2011)
+ Hélène Cixous – “Laugh of the Medusa”