nakedpicturesofyourdad:

My copy of Coming & Crying arrived in the mail today, and Oh Boy!  To celebrate, here’s a still of the video that my story revolves around.

melissa:

Came up from the C train at 34th Street. 9am. Meeting Meaghan on the steps here to bow down before USPS and wish for bulk mail glory. Until then, sunbathing on marble slabs listening to Angels of Light and somehow we got to this part in one piece. I think they’re going to hook us up with those little corrugated plastic sorting bins.

We have spent every night this past wk working on getting these books to you and although I did my laundry last Sunday I still haven’t put my sheets back on the bed. A trail of clothes and towels are spilling out into the kitchen and I sort of kick them back into my bedroom in the morning and pretend it doesn’t matter on my way out the door.

I’ve started to make a list of things to do once we finish—get a haircut, go to the Y, go rescue my bike from where it’s been locked up for about two years now (okay, I am never going to do that), and I can’t wait to have sheets on my bed and go see Eat, Pray, Love with only a minor sense of irony (we always joked that you can’t masturbate ironically, but I’m guessing you can’t sob ironically either)(stay tuned to find out!), but also oh, then it will be over.

This weekend we had a few friends over and we drank wine and put the books in envelopes and talked about how we were almost finished and then remembered that we were almost started; that this isn’t even out in the world yet and believe me we sorted these goddamn things by zip code tonight, all of them, in an hour, because I want you all to have them so badly. I wish I could snap 3 times (okay, I always want to be snapping three times) and you could have them, and not just because I DO NOT WANT TO DRIVE 600 BOOKS TO THE POST OFFICE, but also you need them you need them you need them!

This fulfillment part—this supposed-to-be-hellish part—has been one of my favorite parts (I say that truly every week with every new thing, I know, I know). Maybe because we are closing in on it being out there or maybe because it is so tactile and there is a right or wrong answer (um, is the book in the envelope? Good job!), maybe because we can sing and laugh and call every thing and person we deal with a bro and yell and drop kick boxes of envelopes and make great friends with this woman at the post office named Dora who had a Dora The Explorer poster in her cubicle and I swear she is a United States Postal Worker Who is Helpful, that is she is a rarity, a diamond in the rough of bulk mailing, a lady I called today just to chat. [okay: LIE, I did have a question, but seriously, thank you Dora the Mail Explora’], but MAINLY, MAINLY, MAINLY it is so fun because you are all real human people, and we recognize all of your names by now, and we have our favorite strangers with funny names or weird, surreal-sounding addresses, and we squeak when we come across you, and when we see your name come out of the label printer—oh! we yell, an old college roommate! oh! a kid i went to elementary school,with! Oh, this is the guy who was in the tinychat and said that funny thing about etc!—and I’m thinking, Um, can we write everyone a note? Can we hand-deliver each of these? Can I drive a bookmobile all over the country and/or world and like, go hang out at the laundromat while you read it and then get coffee with you after and be like, I KNOW, RIGHT?

And so the books are all packed and sorted and I just need to take a day off this wk and reserve a zipcar and drive your bitches to the damn bulk mail sorting place in these huge postal SACKS [turns out now we know our most popular zip codes: manhattan, brooklyn, san francisco, los angeles, mpls, chicago, and seattle] [cool, right?] and then we move this show over to our shiny new to-be-launched tumblr blog, designed by the one and only Peter Vidani. In the meantime, the writers have their books and we’ve been getting these emails and texts and posts that buoy us, that get us through another trip to the post office or another god forsaken hilarious attempt at mail merge and we think, oh, it is so soon and so real and I think the first time I cried (in a good way) (major distinction!) was when I saw our Goodreads page:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8540473-coming-crying

Shut up, I can’t help it.

MISS YOU GUYS. IT’S COMING. I’M CRYING. WE’RE ALL LOL-ING OUR WAY THROUGH THIS. <3

ladypartsnyc:

love this. melissa showing me the first page of the coming & crying galleys. there’s a handwritten list of sex acts performed, with talley-marks for each time they’re mentioned. haaa!

ladypartsnyc:

these shots from lady parts.001 are great! here, melissa works on laying out a ‘zine which will accompany the edition of coming & crying pre-ordered by backers of their tremendous kickstarter project.

(via winnieau)

meaghano:

an early, ambitious tagline.

Thank you for also being our photoblog.

(And for your changes of address. As we unload boxes and match book-to-you, we’ll make sure we get everyone’s current info before anything goes out in the mail. You can message us w/ updates and clarifications and we’ll let you know if we need to know more.)

No sleep ‘til,

x
mgg

ps: the white splotches are not jism, just a little privacy screen re: me.

melissa:

Come DHL with me.

Our advance copies departed from Oddi today. They arrive tomorrow. (You know I’m gonna:) (!) (!) (!)

This is how your Coming & Crying gets made, more-or-less live from the Oddi plant.

melissa:

Uncorrected proof.

I made Meaghan mussels marnière and we smoked a cigarette each on my fire escape for the first time. (Whittling away at my sympathetic Gauloises stuck in a drawer after the volcano, and some cloves I’ve probably had since we shot our project pitch video.) “It’s like joint custody,” she said, passing me the uncorrected proof back.

Every time I read my story it gets less autobiographical. It could prove that Hélène Cixous maxim, “‘Author’ is a psuedonym that fools no one.” She wrote memoirs that read like literary criticism. I ate up The Book of Promethea at nineteen. I loved women and didn’t trust my feelings and wanted to know what people meant by post-structuralism. I had all these confessions but the ones about words were harder to own up to. A graduate student who taught Duras and Trinh T. Minh-Ha invited me over to watch “The Lover” with her and her partner after I missed an in-class screening. (I had been supporting a building occupation in protest of racist campus policy changes by liasing with the press. The AP ran a photo of me huddled in a blanket on the steps of the administrative offices. My grandmother told me I looked like a refugee.) I never went to her house. It was too intimate, even for me with my no-boundaries. And just too much, to consider sleeping with a teacher of Francophone postcolonial feminisms.

“You’re producing evidence,” this observant boy said after Meaghan’s party, us trailing behind the rest. This page I can hold. (This proof that costs more than a book will!) We can’t change a word now. I can’t (I did at the last minute, one or two).

We told the writers, give us a real story, as true as it can be for your ethical understanding of truth. I am pretty sure I wrote the right story for this book, but the wrong story for myself. I trust myself now. I couldn’t until I’d followed this thing through to the end (the affair, the book — which cannot be the same thing, I need to accept that the book came first, that I grafted one to the other as a way to propel myself through the production, that a book is not a person, that me the author knows everything there is to know about a story but the story is not my life).

I’d like to love something else now, in addition to this.