New Book: Book
Your humble blogger has a new book, Book. It's hard to describe but it's a book that plays with our relationship with books. In some ways it's more like an art project, or a piece of theatre that you hold in your hands. If you're at all intrigued, I'd be delighted if you'd give it a chance here.
Book was a very fun thing to create because, at least to my knowledge, there's nothing out there like it. For the whole time I was working on it I lived in fear that sooner or later someone would tell me "oh, that sounds just like X," and it would turn out someone else had made the same thing already. But while various people along the way said "that sounds like X," those x's all turned out to be pretty different. So while it generally feels impossible to do anything new in this oversaturated world of ours, I currently still have hope that Book has found a tiny nook of newness in the gargantuan human library.
At the very least, making Book was one of the few times in my life when I've worked on something without the mental constraints of a pre-existing category. Whenever I hit a decision point, instead of being implicitly hemmed in by accreted expectations, I could basically shrug and say "well, the answer can be whatever I want it to be." And without wanting to sound corny, this was so immensely liberating that it felt like waking up in a huge meadow and only then realising that you'd previously lived your whole life in a cafe. [Obviously this was meant to say "cage", but since I typoed "cafe", I'm going to leave it in: I also feel like I've spent my whole life in a cafe, so distracted by pleasant noise + social interests that I never actually concentrate].
Like a lot of things in life, there's something special about approaching Book with no idea what you're in for, which is why I'm saying so little about what's actually in it. If you'd like to take a $10 gamble, please pick up a copy here.