meaghano:

I saw, or we saw, some mockups of Coming & Crying laid out today and it was very overwhelming. I don’t even write about this on the Internet because I am not sure where to begin? Also it means too much and I have no critical distance. I know. I didn’t even pay anyone to help me realize that; not in any traditional sense, anyway.

The book looks fucking good, I might add. Damn fucking good. Seeing my name laid out all book-like is new and surreal. I have never been in a book and you might say this one doesn’t count but to me it counts much more.

We printed out pages with different LEADING which is pronounced like LEAD like LEAD PAINT as Peter and Jacob were very excited to tell me about 3x each as I continued to mispronounce it and squint at the pages, trying to tell the difference between 14 and 14.5. 14 what, you might ask, but I couldn’t tell you except that 14.5 won. That means there will be more space between the lines for us to underline and circle and draw little hearts and OMGs, which is my favorite thing about books and why I don’t want them to ever end.

Seeing my story all laid out all book-like makes me instantly see every word that should be changed as if my brain is connected to the Platonic ideals of all sentences and all possible stories. I imagine I am taking some philosophical liberties here but in some superstitious, secret, stupid part of me I believe in that—that the perfect sentences are out there. I think fucking Katie Holmes said that to Michael Douglas in this movie tonight, even, which is beyond appropriate, excuse me while I jump out this window, et cetera. 

Anyway it is ALL WRONG, my story, but I am comforted by the fact that at least three different of ‘my’ writers said the same thing about their stories when I emailed them with a Final Pass (Melissa and I kind of split the book in half and have teams; hopefully one day we will compete against each other in a three-legged race or something else less entendre-y in some way I don’t even understand).

God damn I want to punch my story in the face. But it is still good; not perfect but good. You’ll like it I think.

When I was home for this wedding, I met one of my mom’s good friends and she said that my mom knew she wouldn’t like all of the book but that she was really excited to read it. I think that was when I realized my mom might read my story.

Maybe I will glue the last few pages of it together. Not in a WINNNK way. In a literal way.

My new apartment has a fake fireplace and exposed brick and the sink has a soap dispenser built into it. The camera on my phone is broken so you’ll just have to trust me that it is empty, but nice.

It has been awhile, hasn’t it?

Well the book is written. It has been edited many times over in parks and coffee shops and bedrooms all over New York. We have learned a lifetime’s worth about publishing, and reinvented half of it.

I just finished sending all of my writers the final drafts of their stories so we could get approval and send them to “design” (I like to say it like it’s a department and not an amazing human being we are so humbled to be working with).

We are definitely to The Fun Part now— dreaming up infographics, a mini book tour, a ‘ZINE, and The Best Book Party Ever™.

I’m not gonna lie to you guys, because you are my safe space: writing a story that is in a BOOK with your name on it, while managing the production of a book, while working fulltime and trying to find a place to live is A RECIPE FOR CRYING TO YOUR MOTHER.

There was a weekend where my prospective landlord was all, “You have bad credit,” and I still hadn’t found the time/mental space to sit down and finish my story, and we had a meeting with these totally amazing letterpress people (eeee!) and I was crashing at my friend’s apartment and- well, I kind of almost crapped my pants on the street. LITERALLY. Okay!

Then I found the nearest bathroom and stopped crying and got in a cab because I was late to this meeting and met Melissa then we walked in to this huge warehouse filled with ancient printing presses and the guy sat us down and gave us fizzy water and put Nina Simone on the record player and got so excited hearing about our project that i cried happy non-Mom-breakdown tears while “Ooh Child,” played in the background.

(Please don’t tell anyone about the near-pants shitting).

(Okay whatever, you can).

Then the next week we recorded our stories in this little recording studio for our first private event (and first debut of our stories!) that Melissa and Nikola Tamindzic dreamed up. Called C&C:ip (ip stands for in person) (guess IRL was too cheezy? :D), it was held in New York at Cindy Gallop’s otherworldly apartment, where 5 of us writers stood before an audience as our stories played and Nikola took our portaits. The media from the event should be, overwhelming.

The night of the recording I had finished about the 37th draft of my story the night before and had just run from another reading and ran into this random Williamsburg sort of communal loft thing to see Tao Lin coming out of the back room and to meet one of our dear writers, William Ball, for the very first time. When my turn came and I finished giggling and drank some water and read it aloud, all the way through, I realized it was finished. And I LIKED it. I liked it even more when the sound engineer walked us to the train and told us all about his screwy relationship— this practical stranger whose name I did not even know— opening up and relating it back to what I had just read, saying that if his ex-girlfriend read my story she would ‘bawl crying.’ That’s that thing that happens sometimes that reminds us that ‘the sex book is working.’

The event, C&C:ip (in person), was…the scariest thing I have ever done? New? Indescribable? We stood in front of 30 or so people who supported us— financially, emotionally, creatively (most all 3)- in no makeup, in some crazy muslin thing Melissa made us wear (ha!), under bright white light, while our stories rang out in a dark room in our own voices. What was so amazing- and challenging- was that we had recorded them beforehand, alone, just like how we wrote them. It wasn’t performing, it was listening, with the audience. There were no chances for little jokes and asides and self-deprecations. You just stood there and couldn’t take any of it back. I cried. Running theme, see. Afterward someone asked me if I could feel all the compassion everyone in the audience was sending us. I don’t think we could have ever done this if we didn’t know that was there.

One of our writers, Will, brought me his copy of The Wonder Boys to borrow. I am reading it now. I want to hang out with everyone and trade books and stories and be people together.

What will we do when this is over? (Do it again, most likely).

Last weekend we got the entire manuscript (That’s industryspeak for Word Doc That Crashes Your Computer) back from our copyeditor. Yes, we have a real live, professional copyeditor, and she is amazing. She edited out many of my commas- if you can believe it!!!- and just generally turned the book into something we know has all the right spacing and consistency. We established some house rules: for instance, blowjob and website are now one word across the board!

Having the book back meant one very specific, wonderful thing, and that is that while I was moving (I strongly advise anyone who is considering making a book and moving into an apartment at the same time to RECONSIDER), Melissa printed the whole thing out in a fancy Kinko’s way that costs more than an actual book. Which means that for the past 10 days or so I have been walking around town, hugging an actual physical object to my body, flipping through it, reading little pieces of it, and realizing just how goddamn good this thing we all decided to fucking go for really is.

There are 24 stories, and so it is about 24x more powerful than regular books (or so I like to think). 24 human beings pretty much spilled their guts (or various other bodily fluids) out onto the page for you and Jesus, I am in awe of it, as a reader. That is so wonderful to me.

I’ll never forget my first day with the thing— this Kinko’s thing!- getting out of the train, walking up the stairs to go home and realizing it was OUR BOOK that I was holding under my arm. I did not come, but I certainly cried (this joke will indubitably haunt us forever. “How’s it COMING along?” etc. To be honest, it never really gets old).

Right now our DESIGNER is working on it. I can’t wait to tell you guys who is doing it. I have been a major #1 fan of his for awhile now. Also, Peter, my coworker, is making our website, where we can keep up with all of you very soon. You can see all (most?) of this content over there now: comingandcrying.tumblr.com, but it will look really different soon.

We have really missed updating you guys— I know we have said little things on our own Tumblr and Twitter accounts— and we are looking forward to doing this more often again. We, and maybe you too, originally thought the book would have been in your hands by now, but early on we had this moment, I think it was over a shared beer with Tao Lin, where he looked at me and said, Make it good. Don’t rush it.” As antsy as we have been to get it to you, I think we did the right thing. It’s a fucking book. It takes a couple months.

SOON, THOUGH. SOON. Someone asked me what the “pub date” was last night at an Internet party. I was like, “Um? As soon as we finish it and get it back from the printer?” We should know soon, though. And you guys will be the first to know and the first to have it.

I can’t wait for you to hold it in your hands!

(straight from our designer, Jez. and yes.) (via melissa)

Our ace copyeditor, who just turned in the manuscript oh god (via melissa)

Coming & Crying has a typeface and it is NOT flaccid! (via meaghano)

melissa:

Meaghan and I have far more editing experience in a workshop environment, and so when we passed drafts back and forth a few times for comments before going back to authors with suggestions, it felt a little like a time-shifted workshop. We’ve been editing stories since mid-February (so that’s about two and a half months of editing about two dozen stories, while working full-time jobs), and to account for this being experimental, we’ve been adding new strategies to our process as we go. We’ve also been editing in public, and that’s challenging. Contributors can try to guess from our project updates when they think they should have heard back from us — and as we treated each story differently, and put each through multiple rounds of edits before we ever went back to the author — it took some stories more time to settle then others.

But back to the difference between what we did and what other anthology editors — especially erotica anthology editors (which we are not, not really) do — I’ve only participated, as a writer, in three anthologies, but each time, I got so few edits back I felt as if I was just being copyedited. (I am not perfect. And definitely not that perfect. And for this, we hired a copyeditor for C&C.) But it’s maybe a helpful distinction, between curation (where one edits only by placement, proximity, context) and editing (where the editor, well, edits). I took my editing cues in C&C not from my anthology experience, but from my experience being edited once an hour in the blog mines — where I had to learn to write fast and without attachment. It’s my editorial opinion (oh god) that this painful, ego-cutting-up process made me far less precious about my words. I trusted my editors to hold me to a goal my ego as an artist sometimes got in the way of (a lot of the time gets in the way of) — communication, speaking directly, reaching a reader in a relatable way. I mean, this is my editor — and if he can’t wade through what I want to say, and he’s getting paid to do so, there’s a problem with my work. We all have trusted First Readers, and those should probably be close friends who will tell us how painfully brilliant we are at the same time as they hold us accountable to whatever standards we tell them matter to us in our work. But an editor’s job is to hold the writer to their own standards and their own vision.

And last — we may not have had a sexual agenda going into this book (how could we?) but we certainly had an agenda as writers. We didn’t try to bring any story into alignment with an agenda of what it should be “about,” but we did push stories in directions we think are important and need pushing to happen — to be more raw, to be less needy, to be more human about sex. 

tylercoates:

I’m looking over the edits and comments from Meaghan and Melissa on my Coming & Crying story, and this a great way to start the week:

ha, I love a good Zima motif.

I’m glad that is such a UNIVERSAL SENTIMENT.

meaghano:

We were decorating our storyediting folders like 9th graders and trying to think of who we could ask to write our forward. “it’s on the tip of my tongue!” Melissa said from the couch. “me too!” I squealed and said I’d go look at my books for ideas and walked into my room.

“oh, Joan didion. That’s who I was thinking of,” she called after me. “oh yeah, ha me too.” “not gonna happen.” ” Oh. I was thinking of anais nin.” “ha. Dead.”

A quick bit of housekeeping:

- You keep writing us asking to pledge! This is ridiculously generous. Please know that we want to do this again, and it looks like you do, too? Meaghan and I are putting our (spinning) heads together on how to do this. One option worth revealing a little bit of now — if everyone who has told us they’ll get a story in by deadline actually does, we will have more stories than we could print in one book.

- Some textual snapshots of our party: Sasha Frere-Jones is not on Tumblr, Nic Rad posits that James Franco IS America, Chelsea Summers rocks a mean faux fur, two Katie West fans who met on an anti-XKCD (!) IRC channel met IRL for the first time in front of all of us, even in near pitch dark I sort of show up in Nikola’s Fauxlaroids, Halle Kiefer offered to stand in front of the first venue and usher folks on but we refused because we needed her HERE (hey-yo), Stephen Elliott came out in a puffy jacket and told a story about nosebleeds and also book tours, and I went home with Meaghan’s phone so when I checked into Foursquare this morning I Foursquared myself, and when Meaghan emailed to make a date to get the phone back she forwarded an email from one of our backers who told Dave Eggers about the book a few days ago, and god I should get back to work, and at this rate, Hendricks gin should be a project sponsor, too.

- Some of you seeking us out left voicemail for us on our secret party line, which I haven’t even listened to. But I have mp3s of them and I sort of want to post them. Speak now if that’s a terrible idea, you.

That’s more or less it. We’re delirious (this is Melissa) and still listening to George Michael and Patti Smith and other artists with two names that you might like so come into this chatroom and have a dance party with us. In just words.

http://tinychat.com/comingandcrying

edited to add: “No dicks.” (meaghan)