Cover Story

Back in the '90s, after I finally got my voluntary redundancy from the very large company I was working for at the time, I took a year off . Didn't do very much with it, other than rest, relax and have a pleasant time until the money ran and I had to find another job. Hey, it was the nineties, okay? You've all seen Slacker, right? If not, you should. Someone put it up on YouTube in 2017 and it's still there so if you want to go watch it now, I can wait.

Anyway... way to derail my own post, right?  So, the point is I had all this time off and one of the things I was going to do with it was write a novel. Only it turns out I don't have a novel in me. How about that? Everyone but me, huh?

What I did have in me, it turned out, was a whole freakin' mess of characters, their never-ending soap-opera-drama, and some kind of ramshackle, rambling narrative that wasn't going anywhere or at least not anywhere I could follow. I just used to sit down at the PC I'd bought specially to write the thing and go into what I can only describe as some kind of trance and come out of it two or three hours later with a few thousand words that, when I read them back, seemed to be nothing to do with me. I had no idea how I'd done it. I still don't.

I'm not saying it was like automatic writing in the days of Conan Doyle but it was freaky as hell and it really took it out of me. It took me about a week to recover so the whole thing moved quite slowly. Still, after a year I had something tens of  thousands words in two unconnected "stories". There was some kind of shape to both of them but if either had an actual plot, I couldn't have told you what it was.

And then I had to get another job and I started to use the PC to play video games, discovered EverQuest, and that was that for a quarter of a century. All of which I believe I've covered here before, not that I fool myself anyone is likely to remember.

While I was writing them, though, those stories, if that's what we're going to call them, didn't just sit on a floppy disk on a shelf. They did do that but they also came out in bimonthly installments in the apazine to which I belonged, meaning they were nominally public, with a theoretical readership of thirty people, assuming everyone bothered to read them. Again, something I've written about before and not the point of this post so let's move on.

What is the point of this post? You may well ask. It's this: I still have all that stuff, both the writing and its physical manifestation in photocopied zines. Of course I do. I still have freakin' everything I've ever done, going back to my exercise books from primary school (They're in the loft.). I never throw anything away.

I mentioned in a recent post that I'd been mining a couple of fragments I wrote around the same time for lyrics to turn into songs to feed into the all-devouring AI maw. That turned out really well. I mean really well. I spun those two short pieces up into a seven song cycle and I'm about as happy with it as I could be, which, since tend I love my own stuff to a positively nauseating degree to begin with, is irritatingly predictable. 

If you want to judge for yourself, I made a playlist. I think they're all pretty good. Your opinion may differ. I'd still like to hear it though.

After the seventh song, even I could tell the well was pretty much dry. Which was when I had my next big idea. Basically, the same big idea but who's telling this? If I'd been able to get seven songs out of a couple of short fragments, how many could I get out of two short novels?

I don't know yet but I've done four so far and once again I'm very pleased with what I've got. Given I'm finding the process addictive as hell and the results astonishingly satisfying, there could be a lot more. There will be a lot more. 

And we're still not at the final point of this post, the lede of which I've buried all the way down here as a reward for the patient, the stubborn and the determined. Here it is: blogging is great and all and I love it but I'm not sure it's as aesthetically satisfying as what came before.

Here's why. 

And that's just the covers. All nine issues of The Final Line, as they originally appeared. Or rather, bleached-out scans that don't do any kind of justice to the grain and texture of the originals, let alone their tactility and feel. Even so, though...

 

I put a good deal of work into making this blog look as good as I think I can get it and I'm mostly happy with the results but I very much doubt any of the images I've used is going to have the lasting impact on me of any of those covers and I'm not even talking about their ability to trigger memories. (Except the last one. That's not good. I think I knew I was done by then and was already moving on.)

 

My point, getting to it at last, is that I'm not quite sure why blogs in general are so much less visually and aesthetically satisfying than those old photocopied zines. They are, though. It's a topic I might return to for Blaugust, an event which the observant reader will notice has been on my mind for months now. 

 

I'll tell you how all those covers were made. I spent hours going through photographs I'd taken, flyers I'd picked up, cinema programs, magazines, bits of paper I picked up in the street... anything. Then I blew them up on a photocopier, cut them up with scissors and knives, pasted them with glue and generally hacked them about until I had something that looked good to me.

 

Is there anything stopping me doing that now? Of course not. I could follow the exact same process or a version of it and at the end, when I'd finished, I could either take a photo of it with my phone or scan it and use it on the blog. But I don't. And why? Because it's easier to take a screenshot and use that. Or, worse, get an AI to fake something up for me. Digitization has made everything orders of magnitude more convenient but at a cost.

The closest I get to that old creativity here, I think, are all the degraded, fucked-about-with images I use at the top of music posts. Making those engages much the same parts of my imagination as those covers did. I'm more likely to look back at those with satisfaction than any other visual images on the blog and yet I pretty much only do it for music posts. Until now, I've never asked myself why. Why not do the same to screenshots or found images or generative AI?

 

I'll have to go away and think about that. What I also wanted to say is that the whole AI music thing seems to have fired up a creative part of my mind that's been dormant for a long time. I have more creative projects going on now than I can handle, which is unusual for me. Mostly I start something and keep to it until I'm done before I move on to something else, although being "done" should not be mistaken for being finished. 

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that there's likely to more of this sort of thing here for a while, since that's what I'm spending most of my free time on just now. Fair warning. Also, I guess, there's a chance some of the usual stuff might start to look a bit different, although honestly I'd be surprised if that happens. Inertia's a bitch.

 

Also if anyone knows why it's now impossible to center images in Blogger, I'd love to hear about it.