Table Of Contents For Students And Mentors Binders: Fill & Download for Free

When working as an undergrad research assistant, how should I structure and input information into my lab notebook?A2A. I’m going to presume that your lab uses paper notebooks—either ones that are similar to the photo below, or three-ring binders. If your lab is like mine and uses an electronic lab notebook (ELN) some of these tips won’t apply.Ideally your research mentor would have given a thorough tutorial about proper notebook keeping on the first day of your research experience, but that isn’t common. Often, a new researcher is given the task of figuring it out through trial-and-error or by asking labmates who may or may not have a great system themselves.The suggestions I give next might not be compatible with the notebook culture in your lab, in which case do what your mentor wants once you know what that is.Basics for a paper lab notebookWhen you start a new notebook, leave the first ~ 10 pages blank to create a Table of Contents (TOC). As you get more involved in your project, you’ll add to the TOC and use it as a reference. Plus, when your research mentor needs to find something and you’re not in the lab, they will be grateful that you took the time to create it.Use Post-it flags to mark frequently used sections, and give each flag a short, descriptive label. Some labels might be similar to the TOC, but others will be sections that you refer to on a regular basis.Only write with a pen. If gel ink pens smear, purchase something else. Sharpies are a bad choice as they bleed through and eventually make a halo around the letters, and pencils aren’t permanent.Do your best to take notes as you do an experiment. Perhaps you’ve heard the proverb, “The weakest ink is better than the strongest memory.” If you can’t take notes as you go, then set aside time at the end of each research day to get it done before leaving. Yes, this might mean less time at the bench, but in the end your efforts will worthless to the lab if your notes aren’t accurate. And as I’m fond of saying, although it’s not as eloquent as the proverb above, “Memory is crap. Write it down.”Record the date at the start of every lab day. If you start an experiment on 9-1, but continue the experiment on 9-2, both dates should appear in your notebook. It only takes a few sections, and dates should also be included on the reagents you make and the samples you store each research period.Add page numbers if they aren’t preprinted in the notebook. As your research story grows, you might be surprised how often you’ll refer to a previous experiment or result because it connects with your current work. You’ll find what you need much faster with page numbers. Pus, in addition to the date, best research practices include adding page numbers to the outsides of storage boxes, tubes, and samples that you store.Resist the urge to use paper towels, Post-it notes, and random pieces of paper for your research notes. There will be times when you’ll just want to take a quick note but for whatever reason won’t feel like getting your notebook. But if something belongs in your notebook, write it in your notebook. Rewriting notes wastes time and leads to more mistakes. Some research mentors are okay if you want to use paper scraps for doing math but I recommend that you make a section in your notebook to show your work if you aren’t using a calculator. If an experiment fails, you might be able to track it down to a mathematical error if you recorded the calculation in your notebook.Recording informationGet ready to write. I tell my new undergrads that during the first half of the semester, ~ 50% of their time will be spent taking notes. This includes notes on their research project, and important details such as where the ice machine is, how to properly operate equipment, and tips directly related to their project. Think of your notebook from the first half of the term as your textbook for the second.Bullet points are your friend. You need to record the strategy of what you’re going to do, what you did, the outcome, the results, and your analysis of an experiment or procedure. Many new researchers get hung up on trying to make their notes sound interesting or worry that their research mentor won’t think that they are smart if they don’t write long paragraphs. Your mentor wants clear details. Incubation times. Amount of enzyme added. Observations made during the experiment and anything notable—such as mistakes made or what changes you made to the protocol. But they aren’t looking for prose. Bullet points will do just fine.Record all mistakes, failures, hiccups, and anything that simply doesn’t seem right. Your research notes are part of your experiment’s permanent record. Some students are tempted to erase mistakes or rewrite sections because they are embarrassed, or fear that their mentor will be disappointed in them. But a good mentor will understand when mistakes happen. They will also offer tips so you can avoid making the same mistake again, which frees you up to make all new mistakes. (Because there are a lot of mistakes in the beginning of a research project!) Plus, as a mentor I assure you, it’s so much easier to troubleshoot someone’s experiment when the notes are an accurate reflection of what happened during the procedure. And, it’s unethical to withhold or put inaccurate details in your notebook on purpose— and if you do these it will eventually be discovered and hurt your credibly. Finally, a mistake or an unexpected result can be the key to a great discovery. Write it all down!OrganizationStore protocols in a separate notebook. Although you could reserve a section in your research notebook for protocols, I suggest using a three-ring binder unless your lab’s protocols are digital or your mentor wants each protocol written in your primary research notebook. Put every protocol in a page protector so they are easy to store in the binder, and easy to hang up while you’re working at the bench. You don’t want to flip back and forth between writing your experimental notes and viewing a protocol. (A sure-fire way to have a frustrating day at the bench.) Keeping your protocols in a separate notebook also will give you the flexibility to write helpful notes and tips from labmates while you’re learning how to do a procedure. It’s difficult to estimate how much room to leave in a research notebook for these notes.If you use the three-ring binder system for your primary notebook, purchase inserts that hold miscellaneous items such as paper protocols, journal articles, and those random post-it-notes or napkins that you shouldn’t use to take notes, but probably will now and again.Miscellaneous but importantMany students are surprised to learn that they don’t own “their” notebook. It is actually property of your college, university and/or PI (that’s an abbreviation for principal investigator for new researchers reading this).A few weeks into the semester, ask your research mentor to glance through your notebook. Ask them specifically, “Are my notes detailed enough?” and “Should I be doing anything differently?” and “Do you have any tips?” If your research supervisor is also the PI, this is a way to make an additional professional connection. Showing the PI early on that you care about your project is important for myriad reasons including scholarship opportunities, recommendation letters, research travel awards, and (hopefully) an independent research project.Most PIs don’t want notebooks to leave the lab. This is so they can look through it if you’re not in the lab to answer questions, and to prevent something tragic happening to it. Such as total destruction. Although accidents can happen in the lab, the chances of tragedy increases greatly by taking a notebook out of the lab.Which brings me to the last point:For the love of all that is science, please make a backup of your notebook at the end of each semester. If your research supervisor and PI are different people, ask your PI about which backup method they prefer.

Yes, innumerable profits to handwriting as much of your work as possible.Firstly, you become a writer. You become someone who sits down, carves time out of their existence, with pen and paper and begins weaving a magical world of banality or fantastical ideas or an outlining of your learned thoughts to pass on.I hand write all of my work—-books—fiction and non-fiction, about 80% of the time. The form I experiment most and simply type creative things are in blogs. Blogs are my free form/thought typing exercise. I wanted to strengthen my ability to simply write extemporaneously from thought to typing so I chose blogging, essays, articles. I’ve done about 4500+ over the years and they are about an average of 1000–2500 words a piece, on 4–5 different online platforms. You’re right now reading my play, my writing gym workout is this sentence.But when I write….?Whoooo, baby, I get certain kinds of pens, I’m partial to 8 x 11 or even sometimes when I’m really going to screw around, 8 x 14 legal pads..And I write.I write in cursive—-I didn’t know it was a “thing” until I got compliments on the subway as I sat writing But sometimes I sail, like a speedy yacht through reams and reams and reams of paper. I will tell you that I have a storage room, and entire half of it lined top to bottom—-9 boxes high by 10 deep of books and manuscripts and pads, pads, pads and notebooks.You know what I do during Back to School sales? I sneak in all parental and adult-like and I go to where they’re say are on sale for 4 for $1. I choose maybe 25 Black covers, 25 red, 10 purple, 10 orange, 10 blue, 20 green=100 notebooks in total—-and I take a full box, a full case, up to the cashier with a pack of pens. Grinning.Ok, ok, ok, I’m letting you in on the pleasure of shooting up the heroin, the purchase. Let’s backtrack.In my first university, undergraduate sojourn, I’d already written several screenplays, directed 1 of them to a film; written a dozen 300 page manuscripts and written about 1000 comic book scripts/short stories. Then I got to college.There, I was working for and being mentored by the greats: Raymond Federman and Carlene Hitcher Polite and other, so I was like I have to change the overall process of what I do. I could dance but I needed new “music”. In Federman's class we read Raymond Carver (one of my top three favorites with Morrison and Sophocles) and I loved the brevity of his work. I wanted brevity with intensity and power in my work.I felt like a nuclear explosion, a blast of sun light worked talent—-could I hone that to a laser?So I looked at my hand dandy pads—-then I was new into my addiction, a child with his first tools of ARt addiction—-about 75% of my work had been handwritten into notebooks but a 70+ page notebook promised I could ramble on.What if I took a pad?OK, got the pad.What if a pad were 50 pages…?OK.What if I structured/timed myself that I had to write a complete story (we had to turn in short stories as assignments throughout the semester so I was on the hook for at least 6–10 short stories every 6 months)——OK, 10 pages?Let’s try 10 pages.10 pages—-pen to paper—a title—-and then just start writing and not stop writing until I was on the 10th page.I wrote about 50+ short stories this way in a year or so, eventually expanding and contracting the parameters to say 20 pages handwritten, then 50 pages handwritten then 100 pages handwritten. They were good, I passed classes, got raves, published them in magazines, chapbooks, etc..Then Federman told me to compile my best presented short stories, to forward them on to the late great Ronald Sukenick,a colleague, a professor in Boulder, Colorado, where I was to go eventually, writer and publisher extraordinaire, to be published as a book. Then Sukenick said: “20+ of these are great, we’d love to publish them, send them out to magazines but this long novella? It’s really a novel. Develop it.”I’d written the novella, The World Today (it would become Hush) in high school—-75 pages handwritten. 125 pages cleaned up and typed. Next iteration 300 pages. Carrying around a notebook—-purple, 150 pages—-handwriting then infused to the manuscript—-400+ pages. Then back and forth with an editor. More handwriting infusions—-another 50 pages then more typed in as I took up the Federman challenge to experiment with how it looked on the book page….Hush, published last year. 600+ pages. 80% of it handwritten, the pad pages three hole punched in binders and then notebooks—-all in one of those banker boxes—-each book should just be one banker box but some of them end up being two or three—-one of the handwriting and research, another for iterations of editing—-I do 12 Drafts of all of my novels—-and I print out each draft and go at it with pens and sticky notes and vicious colored pens, another box or two—-I have several typed, binded manuscripts of Hush and then distilled to book form Proof copies—-Cover A, Cover B, Cover C——all the covers being different but also the content being different, being edited, being changed—-thousands, upon thousands of notes in the marginalia.Marginalia!I have sometimes written whole new scenes, paragraphs, conversations, changes into the marginalia that goes on for pages and pages alongside the typed Draft. I do 12 Drafts of every manuscript, which I outline/answer below because it’s the overall construct but not direct to the above question of handwriting.I have personal mandates when ripping through my own work to slow down, to write clearly and concisely—-so that I can both read and understand this deep thought I had in the middle of the beach or lunch or on an airplane, two months ago.Kyle Phoenix's answer to How many drafts did you write of your first book?Writing By Hand and SexWriting by hand is the seduction, not just basic fucking.Typing is direct fucking. In out, left right, symbolism, boom boom done. Click click pound pound.Pen to paper?Well, first you have to decide what kind of pen is right for your fingers—-(Carlene Hatcher Polite, showed me proudly her finger nub, from decades of writing by hand first—-I’m starting to develop one, when I noticed it, I cried at the simpatico with a mentor)—— and at the same time you’re going to need several of them so you want them to be sturdy, not too costly but you have to decide how the ink will look (and eventually fade or smudge) on the page.You have to think about what pen suits you.Like your favorite meal, activity—-dancing, good clothing.Have you ever been seduced?Not someone wanted to simply physically, lustfully fuck you or you fuck them, but have someone get dressed to please your eye? Compliment you on how you looked? Take you somewhere special that delighted you? Been surrounded by staff/waiters/attendants that your seducer had designed or even paid to cater to you both?And you knew the person across the table from you was going to royally turn you out like a brown paper bag?But they were taking their time?Have you ever had someone take their time to relax you, move you and your body and your mind, to an agreed upon destination?The sensuality of the paper, the pen, the time, the comfort and position of your body as you write down your own or a character’s intimate thoughts. I have often looked up on train, missed a stop or two, because I had entered flow so deeply, had become enraptured so deeply that my moving body, the moving conveyance I was on, the reality of thousands of people around me, the sounds, the music in my ear, had all melted away and all that was primary were these characters telling me what happened, what they said, what they felt.I have cried at tables, in public; on the subway, caught myself exposed and psychically naked in front of hundreds of unsuspecting people as some event they would never know of, unfolded in my lap.And in my lap? I have been titillated and surprised and turned on and startled by the nuance, the remembrances of times and things past, the suggestions, the novelty of passion and carnality and eroticism that has spurted from my pen tip, in my lap, onto the 8x11 lined canvas. I have shifted my weight, crossed my legs, licked my lips, smiled too hard at the caliber, content and daring of my own imagination.White pad? Yellow pad? Choices, choices. Look at those thick blue lines! The sure red line of the marginalia! I never write on the back page of pad paper but I do of notebook pages. Then that means a notebook has to be sturdier.Do you have any idea besides Mead and low end knock offs, how many kinds and qualities of notebooks there are out there?I have 25+ handwritten journals—-200–500 pages a piece in a chest across from the banker boxes to prove the variety, the choices—-like choosing lingerie or better yet a fine suit—-for a man—-have you ever been fitted at a good haberdashery where part of what you’re paying for is the fact that this little old man who is pretzeling himself down your back, between your legs, measuring you, imagining your body, has done this for countless men for decades? The expertise? The skill? The keen eye to knowing your body and its’ parameters better than you know it yourself, to fit you in the finest silks and wools, to cast a spectacular presentation?Have you ever been someone’s walking Art?“GIVE ME FREE!!!!!!”Then the freedom of the pen to paper. I can write anywhere, no electricity, no table top, nothing needed but two tools and my lap or the top of my book bag.I started a learning institute in the hinterlands of Brooklyn (I will point out as an observational aside that street lamps are fewer and farther between so the streets/avenues are dimmer—-I thought I was going night blind!) but as I have for well over a decade now, I lived in Manhattan. Which meant I had to take the 1 train to transfer to the 2 or 3. To get the school building open and all the adults assembled, the classes were 6pm to 930pm, several evenings a week, as my teaching in Manhattan/Columbia allowed. The trip was a good 1 hour in total each way.I would get on the train early, uptown Manhattan, prior to rush hour so I had a nice two seater and write my way out to Brooklyn on a pad, on my lap. (Which is how I’ve gotten so many compliments from lookey loos over me about my cursive handwriting.)A whole hour to write!!! Coming and going! Two hours to write! Two whole hours—-sometimes three times a week in just that form/time for about a year or so. Imagine!What Is The Substantive Difference, Having Handwritten And Typed, In The Work Itself?Imagine suggesting to Picasso—-”Yo, Pablo, you could get a lot more done, a lot more art created if you just used a digital camera. Here. Click. Snap. Yeah, that’s kind of a portrait. Cubist? Blue period? Well, you could put a blue screen over the lens….”It boggles the mind to consider such, no?I read blogs/posts questions and answers about writing and you know what I never hear—-The ART of writing. The sublime, classical music, Prince funk rendition, horizon broadening ART of writing.I read lots of mechanical questions: ”If the Girl Who Saw The Murder is on a train and she is an avid Harry Potter fan but has been bitten by a vampire, how do I write her transsexual friend convincingly?”I never hear the ART.Here’s what I mean—-I hand wrote Stay With Me, 100 pages then typed it up to 125 pages then put it in a box, shelved, because I didn’t have the story of it entirely. Some spirits won’t, can’t, don’t speak to you until you’ve evolved, until YOUR ears are bigger. Okay, so 2016/2017 I’m arranging and muddling through the boxes, organizing and publishing other stuff and I’m like I want to write a novel that incorporates multiple sexualities—-that’s really the big inspiration.Hmm, what about that Stay piece? Cause you know I named it after one of my favorite songs by Bette Midler from The Rose—the ballad Stay With Me—-so I’m always listening to the song, since I was in my teens, and started the piece. But now I’ve lived and loved and fornicated and sauntered and seduced and been seduced and betrayed and lied and been cheated on and stolen and laughed—-I’ve got some new bullets in my six shooters to take shots at this piece now——so I estimate how long I might need for this—-from my original 10 pages on a pad—-so I have a good eye for how many typed pages pad/notebook pages can become. I like free form-ness of pads—-10, no 12 pads—-600 handwritten pages.“Your marble block delivery is here, Mr. Michelangelo.”12 pads, I had a jump off point with these typed pages so I scan and have students type it into a Word file. (I type about 40–65 words a minute; I have paid typists—-two kindly old women in midtown to type up my work when I don’t feel like it; I have alternatively assigned students who need reasons to justify work study and get computer experience typing duties—-but that has only happened about 20% of the time).I know at least 3 of the characters in the love triangle, man, man, woman. I know I want to span some time at least 10+ years from when this boondoggle starts in college but at the same time I know there are at least two, if not three, strong back stories in their respective upbringings that get them to such a messy triangle.I assign 1 50 page pad to each character.(I generally don’t carry all 12 pads with me—-I have now graduated to wandering office supply stores for folders—-plastic, with clasps and ties. There was an office closeout where I got like 50 of these plastic folders—-holds about a dozen pads PLUS 6x9 or 8x11 proof/book copies neatly inside of a banker’s box! Ecstasy. Don’t judge!)But the folders allow me to neatly carry and expand as I complete more and more. And the versatility of pads to characters and then to scenes and then to future points allows me to jump around and as I think up something for a decade later—-yeah, that’s pad #9. Children? Pad #6. Conflicts and clashing? Pad #2.Sometimes the pads don’t have numerical numbers just names, time frames, sometimes types of scenes.Pad # 5 is just sex—-gay, straight, bi, omni, SGL, pan, trans—-sex. 50 pages of delightful, delicious, erotic smut.Now I’m considering how this finishes or closes, who lives, who dies, why, what is the result of actions and consequences. I might write something definitive—-I know how such and such dies in Pad # 11.To alleviate the burden of so much work, I start typing this into a Word file, lay out in a book form and now I have TWO meta-designs occurring, three technically:PadsWord documentMental designThen I add a forth, later, Index cards of scenes but that’s generally after I have filled all 12 pads. I then tab all of the pads by character, scene, chapter with post it notes and then that’s how I can index them to Index cards.The index card system, above for Stay With Me, came about in the complexity presented by The World Today-Hush being in both handwritten form, outlines, timelines, multiple short stories being incorporated and then bringing that to a unified whole. I generally give a short scene outline to the Index card—-Eissa and Kirk argue abut money—-and then tape it to a page (so that it can be rearranged later) and then over-design the binder to the manuscript itself. The index card system acts as an organizer and template to allow rearranging so that I can have 100 index cards of scenes, 100 hundred typed scenes and one hundred written scenes and all three are malleable and accountable to a unified fourth Final Draft (maybe Final # 4 or 5—-this Final Draft is to the story itself, not the book itself as a lay out construct)The benefit of having handwritten instead of typed it (though in later iterations—-Draft #4 on) I have Word file versions—-1,2,3 1a, 1 in 6x9, 2 in 8x11—-in the handwritten form I have an origin marker for how and what—-in the idea form—-something got to be the way it is.Kyle Phoenix's answer to Does the process of publishing your own book generally get easier as you do it more and more times?I would also say that I know and therefore express the characters better because we’ve spent more intimate time together, more personal time together. I have been able to consider them much deeper, watch them more closely, truly feel them because they are a physical thing—-not simply bleeps and flashes and bobs and clicks and then printed out. They have transcended the stark printed page, stark as the tax returns and budgets and lists and curriculum that I print out—-they are something else.They are a missive.I do something else that I didn’t know was a forgotten element of Art. I send people handwritten cards—-holidays, birthdays, special occasions, with gifts, for no reason at all.I go to stationery stores and I choose good card stock Thank You note cards to send, with thick envelopes. I send people letters, pages and pages—-because I take time—-I take the only resource I have to do something physical, psyche to construct, and send it out. In a broader, bigger way, that’s what my writing is.People are often startled to receive such from me. (I send up to 100+ XMas cards with hand written notes and a candy cane to friends, family, business contacts) because an elegant Art is not practiced for the expediency of typing, the electronic.Cash Money …for the HandwrittenLastly, Carlene Hatcher Polite (above), a mentor, a tenured professor I TAed for, talked to me about the work, the Art and eventually the Legacy of Art, of one’s writing.Universities and institutes pay for your banker’s boxes.If you look critically and objectively at all the questions about writing, form, process, commitment—-what everyone is trying to do is get an insight to a writer’s mind, to the artist’s mind.When you hand write—-people can see into your mind, as you reveal, your process, your thoughts, and then to the final form, how and why you changed something. People can actively see what an editor does. Typed page to the next version to the typed page, you can of course see changes but can you see meaning, the elements of the person, the artist and their idiosyncratic thoughts and delights and frustrations? In a saved document version? Look up at those pages and Proofs with notes in the marginalia—-you know exactly how that scene got to be the way it is in the final sale copy.I would offer so many online questions are from the lack of being able to explore the substance, the physical stuff, the smell and feel of the paper of people's work.Yes, my dear, it is WORK. Art is WORK. There is no shortcuts to it. But if you practice it, develop systems, get it nice and polished—-your end product is superior to just the “made” product of efficiency/expediency.12 Drafts—-12 separate, advanced, elevating drafts, several handwritten, dissected, analyzed, carried, lived with, loved, of your/my work—-it is noticeably, marketability, artistically better.In America, we have a paper, preserved, guarded, entombed copy of The Constitution, right? I mean we could have typed it up at least a couple of hundred years ago and just tacked it onto government walls. But to have the handwritten document shows the time and effort (and cursive!) and artistic work.Maybe, maybe, maybe, the handwritten is the difference between Art and Product?I, of course, having published hundreds of things know the necessity and space of turning one’s Art into a salable form, Product, but look over there—-on the subway, or in that university cafeteria in the corner or at that handsome fellow on the park bench who stared at you a moment then went back to scrubbing in his lap. That was me. I captured the way you walk, the tint to your hair, the outfit you’re wearing, the color that you chose to wear and the way you laughed with a friend.I, spontaneously, captured a bit, a fleck of you, I immortalized you in a text you may never read. Did you see me do that? I took you from reality, absorbed you into my mind and transmitted you through a delicious pen and cursive drew on a page in symbols something beautiful or shocking or laughable or sensual about you.You.Little ol’ you.lol#KylePhoenix#TheKylePhoenixShow

Professor Raymond Federman, who I TAed for and was one of my handful of intense mentors (for years, I went to/stayed in Buffalo to work with him and others) recommended that my novels were not novels until I had done 12 drafts. I loved Federman even as I was slightly intimidated by him. He was a little shorter than me but he had a booming voice, a thick, impossibly thick French accent that he’d cultivated over decades—-though he’d been in america for more than 50 years. He was operating at such a high level, a friend and devotee of Samuel Beckett that I’m amazed that I stood out to him, was able to work with him, caught his interest.His high school classmate Carlene Hatcher Polite, the first Black woman nominated for a fiction Pulitzer (coincidentally live din France during that time and died a month after he did) had writing classes herself, Prose focused. His were experimental writing focused. I’d dragged a duffel bag of years of typed manuscripts—-at least 6 feet long to her class—-I was a Freshman but only Sophomores got in, one had to audition. I did, got in and became her second TA in 25 years. She recommended me to Federman.While Federman was alive, I was working on what would eventually become Escapades I: A Collection of Stories. Initially it was about 20 short stories that I created and work-shopped in his classes while I was his TA/student. There was also a 125 page long story/novella, The World Today that became the novel Hush. He had me send it to a publisher, Professor Ronald Sukenick in Boulder who ran a publishing concern and he said the novella should be broken out into a novel and printed the short stories. I then came back to the 125 pages and it’s now blossomed into 600 pages, in it’s 11th Draft.(Digital and Paperback covers)For years I would simply pick from the Escapades bunch of short stories—20+ and send them off to small magazines and chapbooks around the USA and then the world. I had a regimen of 10–20 manila envelops a week I was on a budget as a college student but they were the sanctioned stories so out they went. The Escapades collection got slated for 3 books and the first came out in 2013, the second in 2017 I believe and the third will probably be post 2020.I finished Hush and Stay, a novella I had in my hands at 125 pages, after years of working through the below process in late 2019 and they’ve been published in EBook (first in 2019) and paperback (in the first weeks of 2020) and are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.I use the below when I teach writing classes and I try to bring in the physical pages as I do a lot of longhand work, typing, printing then corrections before they are sent to the printer and Proofs are created.Do all of my books go through this? Fiction and non-fiction? No, not in number but in process yes. I would say that book length, complexity, amount of characters, themes to be addressed and experimentation (which Hush and Stay have intentionally in form and text) demand time.Federman’s classes, 3 times a week, 2–3 hours—-I became his TA for years and taught his classes for 2 weeks straight while he was off in Europe accepting an award, plus Carlene’s classes—and my oath to both of them to do my best work. They affirmed that I had talent and that I could burn through doing Harlequin romances or Patterson thriller novels but to stick to real work, aiming for literature, for depth, for complexity, for my work not to be easy to write (or mayhap to read! lol) I have adhered to as a solemn oath in respect to the immense time and effort they spent on me.I suggest, it’s all I can do, that you not look at the below as overkill but instead as symbolic of that oath and more importantly as one’s commitment to the art of writing. I don’t aim first to sell books (though I have and made a fair penny at it), nor do I seek acclaim and fame (though yes, I’d done scores of paid and mainly unpaid readings—-the pinnacle for me so far a one man show at the Nuyorican Cafe (Pinero!)) I can tell you that there have been dark days, twenty years ago through the day before this writing of heartbreak, deaths, loss. But the fact that I’ve had some sort of work in this process has kept me alive. The Art of Writing has liberated me and saved me. I don’t want to be hyperbolic or dramatic but my writing has kept me alive.And following their intertwined processes has made my writing better than it was before them, during their mentorship and yes, progressively, after them.12 Drafts/Stages to Completion1st Draft. In its’ first incarnation Hush was just an ensemble love story. I was really excited to try my hand at a gay love story with a large cast. I wanted to create a story where lots of people live in this building and are interconnected. That was initially about 75 pages—handwritten. I hand write everything about 80% of the time. The exceptions so far have been Tranny (published 2014), Mbube Mbube (in process) and Court of Conscience (due to the length of a trilogy, typed, and currently being edited)2nd Draft. Typed up with edits, Hush (originally titled The World Today) grows to 125 pages. A novella. A story, yes, with characters and a structure/plot of sorts. It was kind of about childhood and sexuality and abuse and closetedness. Kinda. Sorta. There was also a murderer theme. I wanted to incorporate that there were all kinds of people in this building—-good, bad, mystical, etc.. Typed up to about 75+ pages. The additions were done after being read/mentored/critiqued by Debbie Freeman, a sensational teacher and Denise Donnelly, another sensational teacher—-both in my last years of high school.3rd Draft. Then I had to clean it up,a couple of years later, though it was completed, because I had to submit it with these other short stories as part of Escapades to Ronald Sukenick, a colleague of Federman’s, in Boulder, Colorado, who ran both a magazine and a publishing arm of the university.Closetedness in the main character of Steven was an interesting point. Shift the focus to the closeted character. I wanted him to be confronted with love in this building he’s forced to stay in. A Love Triangle and a Class struggle about a man having to deal with working and existing beyond how money has allowed him to hide and play.There was also a spiritual angle at play, a suggestion that Steven, the lead character had a pre-destination to be there, to help stop the murderer. That connective tissue gave the varying characters reasons to interact and more importantly allowed me to build to a denouement, a crescendo of character interaction and conflict. Still 125 pages in the printed manuscript or 300 pages of the overall Escapades manuscript.4th Draft. The rejection of the entirety of the Hush portion of the manuscript and then the manuscript was subdivided and Sukenick’s suggestion that the typed 125 pages of Hush were “more”—-how do I expand that into a full novel? Several of the other stories in the entirety of the manuscript were published so it was both encouragement and go back to the drawing board criticism, split down the middle of my 300 page baby.This was the difficult part, where I think it could’ve died on the vine. Sukenick had essentially tasked me to make The World Today-Hush a full novel.Now at that time I had:125 pages of Stay;5 or 6 fully typed up manuscripts of Court of Conscience at about 300 pages each and short stories from 2–25 pages. COC is a massive court thriller thing that wasn’t in the exact wheel house of the work I was doing, it’s not deep literature. There’s chases and gun battles and all the schlock that had no place in my more serious work.Some pages of what would become S: A NovelAnd the 20+ Escapade storiesI was still in the process of learning how to write/control a full novel.The way I got to expand Hush was that I went in, it had been divided into four seasons, ending with Fall, so I simply expanded season by season.Expansion happens by turning to each character and encouraging them that this is their solo moment, that you want to hear more of their story.How does this woman, a large obese woman named Hestia, come to be the nurse maid to this older woman Mother Moon, in the building?How does this teenage mother who is living under her dead sister’s identity with a baby go through her day to day? Then connective tissue of Hestia and Mother Moon would notice and help her.If Steven was placed here, owns the building, who gave it to him? His parents? What were they like? What was it like that they were an interracial couple? How is that taboo attached to the taboo of his sexuality?Those threads answered give me another 100 pages typed up, into the manuscript.Print it out.5th Draft. There was a spiritual element, a 4th element to the tale itself, so I wrote this meta-fiction piece in the middle. I had started to think about all of the intricate reality pieces and magic and such that brought all of these people together and I thought, what if I just wrote a magical, conscious, magical-spiritual reality? By this point it’s about 300 pages as I’m teasing out a fuller, deeper story.The beauty of sometimes taking and TAing three to four writing classes a week each college semester and refusing to replicate, duplicate or exchange work between classes for assignments, was that I was constantly producing new pieces and getting them immediately critiqued by the class of 20+ (we read aloud and critiqued each others work), the professors and I was building a warehouse of work to send out. Or to incorporate into larger works.Once I’d committed to a magical surrealistic theme throughout Hush I was able to look at several of my longer Escapade short stories (12–15 pages typed) and incorporate them into the Hush novel. Like an organ transplant I had these strong tangential pieces that I could sew in. It was slightly magical.If you don’t have these pieces set up I suggest taking a character and writing a short story about them. For Escapades I made initial rules—-legal pad, 10 pages, less than an hour, just write it out, type it up and that was my class assignment submission. It comes out to about 3 typed pages—-which is perfect for most submissions to magazines. But then Carlene and Federman and eventually Irving Feldman, another fantastic mentor wanted more, more, more, deeper, more complex but short stories.A short story under say 5 pages is like a snapshot but a 10 page typed short story will show it’s creaks and structural failures much clearer. The brevity of the first allows for the reader to fill in more, to get to the centrality of the idea fast. But 10+ pages gives you the writer space to screw up, to show your weaknesses and yet it’s an excellent length to insert as a chapter into a larger work.I had 3 longer short stories that had been through class and published:Fatal Lovesick Journey-an erotic surrealistic tale of a young woman searching for her identity who stumbles into a magical battle with the Klan. It was an excellent tie in to the older woman in the building, the magic of the tale and give Steven a deeper back story of having had this magical grandmother. It is also one of my favorite stories that I’ve written—-I used to an experimental jump off with music and this one comes from Joi’s work by the exact name. The interplay of Joi and a deep male voice about the politics of sex and love, the manners, the faults and intricacies, I had to capture that on the page in Calys, a woman who a moves through male and female lovers, and suddenly all that movement reveals her to be a cauldron for this magical battle in Hush by bringing Mother Moon into FLJ, knowing Calys—-who is Steven’s grandmother.I Imagine (Or) I Imagine My Father- this was a tale ripped straight form my family, of my parents marriage, and disintegration and how their social and political activism pushed them together and then apart. Feldman and I got into an hour long argument about this story, eventually the class left us, whether it was about family destruction or Black Rage. But I knew it was good because it was raw, honest, and had a wrenching ending——which lead right into how this woman, a drug addict and her son moved into my building, Pinnacle Apts. in Hush.Chimaera- this tale came from the fact of reading and contemplating science fiction and thinking to myself that history was so problematic for a Black man. where could I time travel to and what would I encounter if I did. Octavia Butler set the gold standard with Kindred but I didn’t want to be hampered by race in time travel. But I wanted race in time travel. What if this man, Walker (great name!) could time travel his consciousness to descendants/ancestors? Not all of them would be men, Black or women but he would still be a Black male consciousness and therefore would try to do things, things that betrayed his true consciousness. Boom. Story.Okay, how to get it into Hush?Walker lives in the building (Pinnacle Apartments).What does he do?I made him a drug dealer because I needed an anti-thesis to Steven, a rich, omnisexual spoiled scion. I needed another kind of Black man. I also needed an element of danger in the building itself, a representation of some of the problems. Steven needed an adversary and at the same time Cassie, the drug addict mother found a lover, a partner. And at the same time her son Johnny, who is telling the story I Imagine—-twenty years after the end of Hush—-both presents I Imagine in a unique, first person way and at the same time gives the reader a third vision of Black maleness in this teenager whose mother is an addict but is in a relationship with her dealer.Now look at all of the reverberating conflicts and motivations I have to play out, clean up, interconnect and resolve.This might seem like a lot of ingredients for a novel gumbo but what happened with all of this work was that the book, the novel itself got smarter because it had really, fleshed out characters. And the caricatures—-a gay guy and a prostitute—-that I knew were solid suddenly had other, substantial characters to play off of and therefore they became more solid.I had a population of solid characters, which became a problem when it was submitted to a publisher and it went to their Marketing Editor.Black/Blue pen is additions into the story, a paragraph, a sentence, a line even an idea.Red is a typo, misspelling, grammar issue, cut scene.Green is general formatting issues. is this the right page number font, the Headers need to be a different font and a slightly larger than text but not overwhelming font size. Could I tighten or expand my margins which then effects how many pages the overall book is? Are all of the title/chapters set to the right hand side of the page (this part will have you throw a Proof copy at an innocent bystanders head if you get a proof and the chapters are wonky).6th Draft. Now I have Distinct Realities and an end point. An ending. I ended it. I knew where I wanted to end it. Who dies, why. Still 300+ pages. Here’s where I split my attention into two separate novels Hush and Stay then began writing and revising them simultaneously.For Hush I was just cleaning it up, tightening it up here, sewing it together. making sure the connections and interconnections happened and popped off and were good and useful.This step is important when you do major incorporations and revisions, you just can’t plop them in, there has to be two to three actions—-the inclusions, the interconnecting and then the revision and editing of the new inclusions. It’s new vegetables into an old soup as Reshma, one of Walker’s past lives realizes upon his consciousness incursion.If this stage, where you really revise it—-like the whole band comes in for a studio session to play, is where books fall apart. You have so many new pieces that you literally, and I did, have to follow each thread through, thread by thread.If Calys is Steven’s grandmother, which one of her children is his parent?If Johnny’s father was a drug addict which lead to his mother Cassandra’s drug addiction then that’s a natural, dysfunctional pragmatic fit with Walker the drug dealer? But here’s what’s interesting. If Cassandra is such a strong writer, political activist, even Black liberation freedom fighter—-what crumples her to drug addiction and even in her final relationship with Walker, could a man and drugs subjugate that?If walker is time traveling is that real? Is he just tripping on LSD? What thread runs through this all? what about Mother Moon, the old woman downstairs? I thought about how drugs are so out of whack in world society because hundreds of years ago one had a guide. What if Mother Moon is his guide in these visions? In this time travel? To what purpose?Sewing, sewing, sewing.Which is why there has to be a selah—-it’s a break from the Bible—-a space for breath.You have to Selah and if you know you’re at Draft 6, you can do so.Go to another work. Which is why I do so many things simultaneously. I can let a work simmer, percolate over there so that it gets better. I don’t want to rush through the complex works because they must be able to stand. The faster you go on a complex work, the less able it is to stand. I would offer that this is why so many people get writer dependent on trilogies and such because they’re trying to stretch out something so that it will stand. But like taffy, stretched can sag. Unless you keep working on the first lump of taffy to even it out like pizza dough so that’s it’s string, resilient through and through.Then you can slowly, methodically spread it out, incorporate more, spread it out, evenly.By this point though, I’m also playing with Book Covers, which can run into a full binder of printed pages, color corrections, editing of the cover, cover design.What are the elements that make a book cover stand out and sell?Fusing Stay from it’s a 125 page 1st draft to New IdeasStay, Chapter 1 (<<yet another free sample of the work!)7th Draft.I initially wrote a gay romance with both having deep family dysfunction. Then I thought it was too soggy so I thought about how in my experience not every man is at the same level of being out as the man he’s with. Hmmm. What if one of them had a girlfriend and this was a secret affair? Hmm. How would the secret gay lover react?Like Walker from Hush, I don’t want a simple caricature by what they are or do so I thought about what if these affairs not only go on but overlap and interconnect? Why are these three people in this kind of affair? That really hit a bell because I was teaching sex/sexuality relationship workshops by this time and understood that love and sex aren’t so clear as hetero, bi, homo, omni, yes, no, good, bad, and more importantly we’re not always in relationships of the present—-sometimes we’re playing out stuff from the past.Having let this gumbo percolate, simmer, I got to more with it and could turn to it to play out some of the emotional drama that would be too much exposition in Hush.In Stay, the female, Christina, the woman that a closeted guy has a relationship with, is slapped by the man he has an affair with. That was sort of her “identity” besides being the first one cheated on, the second, is later his wife, who as a nod to Federman I did a fun thing with. Her name is always printed as <Marie>. I wanted to experimentally incorporate the negation of her even as she existed, was talked to and about and I wanted to give her a unique identity within the text itself. There comes a point where she simply becomes Marie and the reader sees and knows this monumental shift.In math, it <> moves to symbolize less than, not equal to and in Excel it denotes Not Equal. I wanted the reader, who might understand, to see a character as the husband sees her, as she is to him, as she is to her depression issues. I didn’t want to go into how her husband regards her as less than this girl he cheated on or his male lover but I wanted to make her intentionally vague.I made Christina aware of the affair slowly on one level and then completely within the spiritual-magical portion. The spiritual-magical portion gave me access to her anger and vengeance.The other story form, the other reality, gave me access to Christina’s anger and awareness. And then I started applying Dr. Harville Hendrix’s Imago theory (that essentially our parents/caregivers teach us how to love; so we “look” for those traits in romantic partners; it’s unconscious and we’re as adults trying to adjust our behavior to meet people with those attractive traits but not react to them as we did to our parents/caregivers.)The Imago Theory opened a good can of characterization worms for Woman# 1, Man # 2 and Woman # 2 (Man 1’s wife) because it gave me an in to their personalities being similar to be attractive to Man# 1. Man # 1’s suicidal-dead mother and overbearing, grief stricken father. That gave me an in to depression, sexual abuse, identities of his girlfriend, male lover and wife which opened up dimensions to the characters.Stay forced me to remain within a very narrow context of characters. 3 Main ones that everyone else comes from, while Hush gave me a large cast of characters to play with and learn how to maneuver, which has it’s own challenges.7th Draft of Hush.I had my complete novel and send it back to the publisher and the Marketing Editor does a full work up on it. He points out that several areas need enhancing, one in particular, with such a large and broad cast, he can’t tell who the protagonist is. We understand who the protagonist should be (Steven) but in the reading it’s not clear to a basic reader.I then have to go back to Hush and incorporate a hundred handwritten pages about Steven the protagonist to make him the “star”. I write the 100 pages in a purple notebook, longhand first, then type it up.Of course these means I have to work on connections and other characters to support this infusion. Which means 100 handwritten pages about Steven and his back story and forward story but now I’d ripped a trench through Hush so I have to write another 100 pages in the purple notebook to type up of connectors to Steven, but not full fledged explorations of the connectors’300+ pages becomes 450+8th Draft of Stay.I had a paragraph, a sort of poem that I’d written and won an award for years ago that listed a woman going from child to an older woman and the victories and disappointments. It’s 32 lines and her sections of reality 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1—-Christina’s arc—-I divided the lines up to 8 lines and then just riffed paragraphs off the line, some are a few lines, a few paragraphs but the lines themselves gave me entrance into her, Woman 1, her life, her reality. I was worried about not capturing the woman fully in this love triangle.Sometimes I’ll rummage through old pieces, pieces that were strong for a character—-a woman—-and incorporate them. These poem lines give me jump off points for good paragraphs about the woman and the jump offs give me fuller, juicier chapters and more importantly insights into this character. I originally had Christina as this object that her boyfriend was either the victim of or lying about. Then she was a victim of this lovers spat/vengeance. Then she was this mystical virago.But why? I realized I was writing yes, distinct realities in differing chapters but that all of the pieces had to make sense to the reader. You read her in 4–5 realities and should be able to agree that she’s the same person, slightly different choices, but still the same person.That means that within the context of multi-dimensionality, Christina being multi-dimensional in approach——Stay is multidimensional.Woah.Woah.Excited woah! I now know it’s theme, thrust, identity.This generally comes Draft 6/7—-you know what the book is about—-you then turn to it and say—-”You are a triangle! Now everyone, quickly, form of a triangle!”A good writer, a good book, complies.A bad writer turns and screams “Form!” and the book, the characters look at you and wiggle in their seats, step once or twice, sit down, stand up. But because each character isn’t defined, isn’t realized, each theme and scene are for shits and giggles and not forward motion and revelation to the theme—-the Book itself doesn’t know how to respond to your order.This is the line between writing and The Art of Writing.8th Draft of Hush. Steven is clearly my protagonist and I’ve infused his shady past with some more clarity. Why is he mixed races and how does he feel about that? What were his parents like? Why does he only have this building to his name? What happened? Why is he such a mess? Then I bounce other characters off of these answers.9th Draft of Stay. I know now that there are maybe another 10–20 pages where I have a few more scenes of Man # 1 and Man # 2 and then the last 50 pages needs to be a little more in-depth, there’s some elements of what occurs when everything is good and healthy and the person has lived a dysfunctional life, had dysfunctional parents and suddenly everything is good and normal. I wanted to pierce that.9th Draft of Hush. Luckily I’ve always had the construct, from beginning to end of the whole thing, like a container. That makes it easier to inflate characters and scenes because I know where the whole thing is going, it’s ultimate parameters.In Draft 9–10 I’ve generally broken the entire novel down onto index cards and I tape them to pages in a separate binder and divide that by chapters. Though I’m making changes, the Index cards survive and often allow me to rework the book itself in chunks, fast. They also allow me to see the exact spaces where the cohesion (the Xmas lights fail). Without such a detailed breakdown AWAY from the computer, you get lost in the sauce.10th Draft. Stay & Hush. Hovering between 550/650 pages as my last, Final Drafts, then I’ll be able to go through and cut entire scenes, pages. Generally I have my first Proof copies with cover drafts and I go through with two different colored pens. One for layout issues—-widows and orphans, bad fonts, overlaps, etc.. And another for typos and content adjustments—-if such and such was in the kitchen at the beginning of the scene, where were they at the end?Continuity. Content. Clarification.I’ve talked before about making outline Index cards scene by scene—-I did both for Stay & Hush, which make them unique, I haven’t done that for shorter novels (S, Tranny, Puzzle, Sanction, etc.) Possibly because they were shorter, under 400 pages each, I didn’t need to control so many moving parts. But it’s a great exercise because it allows you, as the writer, to dissect the book in a new way. Each section/scene is generally its own card.Okay, I’m going to throw out a controversial idea—-ready?Draft 11 is your FIRST draft of your novel.Yup, that’s right all of the above is to get here.10 stack-able versions—-I print them out at Staples/FedEx and have them plastic covered and bound so that I can carry them with me and do these colored pens notes and editing. 300–600 pages x 8–10 drafts, a Proof or two, index cards, a notebook of additions and I generally use a plastic file holder that seals for the written, original draft—-this all equals a full bankers box. A completed novel is generally 2 bankers boxes.This is the Art of Writing. You just can’t you know carve some good lines out of marble or stone and shrug—-ehh, they'll understand that this is the glorious David. No, you have to sand and polish and clip and smooth and reconsider a dozen times because your goal isn’t to be simply shitting your collected thought into someone else’s head. It’s like throwing a dinner party for a stranger, each and every reader.“Hi. Welcome to Hush. I’m Kyle the writer and your host. May I take your coat? Comfortable? Okay, this first page is a set up—-”If time were an ocean you would swim through everything all at once.”Remember that. Want to think about it for a second. That’s right it sets up that this book will be a lot of everything happening at once. What I’ve done though is made it distinct by character or distinctly in their voices or even better I’ve played with the visual look of a page so you will know instantly that this is happening inside of a reality outside of a reality and what is the dominant reality it. It will also show you, in an experimental fashion, to sometimes just look at a page, look at the words, read the ones you can and take an impression from it—-not a direct literal meaning or assumption.Yes, it’s big. Take your time, no rush. I’ve even designed it so that there are a few stories in here, you can read them in pieces, fragments of the whole, without losing track of the whole.Please have a seat here at the table and let’s turn the page now. At your leisure. The whole meal is prepared and ready for you and new courses will come out at your behest. It is a book.The only warning I will give is the admonishment from Toni Morrison when asked if her writing work was work: “ That, my dear, is called reading. Read it again. Read it patiently. Reading is work.” Did I mention Toni was Carlene Hatcher Polite’s cousin. Yes, I met her several times, have a few autographed books.“Onto my work though. Take your time, be patient. It is as Federman would say a glorious attempt, success or failure at the Art of Writing, the Great American Novel.”11th Draft. Stay There’s a section about a Man# 2 as a child and he meets another child on the beach. Perhaps it’s Man # 1 or Man # 3 but only he has the memory of this little boy. I have a few pages of this inner mystery. And I have some thoughts about a few other interactions between adults and their family so that I create distinct both identities and realities in the chapters. I want the reader to be able to go from one reality to another but still recognize the people. I also felt that the mystical/sci-fi element of the book was too starkly separated by the chapter delineation. I realized I was being too subtle, that instead I needed the book itself to open up for the reader about things the characters might not be able to readily connect.That mean there are very specific Chapter designs because you have to create a map for your reader. The signal for the reader to know they’re in scifi/mystical land where Christina is casting spells is that those chapters are titled, listed 0.0 1, 0.0 2, 0.0 3, 0.0 4——so the reader can clearly see—-okay this is outside of even normal numbering suggesting then that this is outside of the norm.This then means that as a writer I’m making a dense, complicated work, easier, I’m giving a map to this multidimensionality. A writer must think at this stage—-can a reader understand me? If they can’t, no matter how smart you and your grandmother think you are, as Federman would say: You have written another Great American failure.”But I would argue that if you have done your work, 10 prior drafts, by the time you get here you’re literally better at your own work so it’s with less confusion that you’re cementing it together.11th Draft. Hush. Ironically I finished it at my godmother’s house, who was Professor Carlene Hatcher Polite’s godmother. She was another professor I TAed for years prior and had read 2 iterations of Hush and pointedly liked the character Mother Moon. In her liking, I got the inspiration to cross contaminate my own work by a few dollops of Mother Moon into Stay, though Hush is really where she’s grounded. I did this because I had this mystical element running through and I wanted to keep it normal to my own little multiverse.She may or may not briefly appear in S: A Novel and definitely does so in Myriad, a 12 book series I’m working on. But when I hooked in Mother Moon to Stay from Hush and S, she re-hooks back into Myriad and more importantly, a couple of characters from Stay and Myriad meet and I work out why this cross contamination of aware characters is occurring.Which was nice, and also why I merged discussing the Drafts of Hush & Stay.Between Drafts 11 and 12 are generally several iterations—-I do about 4 separate runs to include layout changes, cover choices, I then have people go over it, tell me what they like and not, get feedback. There will always be an error, an imperfection, no matter how many editors and edits it goes through. Always. It’s the universe. It’s the printer. It’s the ink. It’s the store. It’s me. It’s the editor. There’s always a small mistake. But going through 4 iterations of Draft 11 means that you not only narrow it down to sometimes just 1 or 2 but that the reader generally can’t find it.This is generally about 2–4 printed Proof copies where I have to see how it physically looks as a book, how the text comes together, if I should change overall fonts, headers, footers, margins. I’m going through with my 3 colored pens but I can honestly discern that one Proof copy is for each color—-Black/Blue, Red, Green, sometimes I then have to reintegrate three Proofs’ corrections into a fourth Proof to go to overall edit.12th Draft. Overall editing. There generally comes a point in a novel where it is a completed story/idea. And that Drafts becomes what gets copy edited, what goes through consistency edit, marketing edit, etc..This is the last piece, the final product. The Cover is generally the final choice, the back cover synopsis works, the author picture is good, the copy logo (more publishing insanity—-in order to be sold in major book retailers an ISBN has to appear on the back cover AND a company logo on the back cover AND a company logo on the lower bottom spine AND a company logo/stamp on the top of the spine. The spine has to be a certain amount of space so that it can be read on a shelf—-this is generally about 140 pages plus covers, soft or hard.)Draft 12 is often about all of those things. I’ve gone back and forth on Proofs half a dozen times because a cover pic smudges or is out of focus or isn’t over the bleed.Or the table of contents! Another bastard and a half. When you edit it might shift a page, a page shift means the whole bowl of jelly might shift.Both Stay & Hush I had to re paginate in the TOC for Stay and in the Chapter Headers for Hush. also in Hush there are several forms of writing that occur from different historical points as well as different points in time—-so I experimented with color and black & white in trying to achieve some special effects.I hold about 6–8 Final Drafts as they go through all of the work listed under Draft 12. It’s a process.How Long Does This All Take?It varies by book and by complexity of the book, cohesiveness of the idea from the start, the physical/experimental layout I might be trying to achieve, the limits I’ve discovered in MS Word (I used to teach it to Certification level so I know how to do about 99% of the functionality to a professional level.But it does come to a limit. I’ve designed both templates and about 100+ books through Word. Then I shifted to MS Publisher which is wonky because there’s a mentality shift and learning curve. I only used it for about a month because it simply wasn’t versatile enough. I then have started migrating my work to InDesign. I’m certified in Pagemaker and Quark but InDesign is of course compatible with Photoshop and I use Premiere to edit my TV show.Project Times and ROI/Invoicing Hours(Paperback and Digital Covers)Hush took years because it was assembled/written in high school, college and post grad and published in pieces along that time frame, finally coalescing into a full novel. I don’t count the amount of years but if I were to sit down detail out each hour (I do due to publisher Invoicing/billing—-so I bill at $150 an hour for my writing work), I would calculate it at 1000 hours over several years.The fragmentation of assembly, publishing around the country/world though sort of puts it into a category of it’s own against my normal publishing ROI. My godmother called it my opus at 650-700 pages! lolStay had a start and hibernation period of those first 125 pages then picked up years later where I did a massive restructuring and basically fused it to another story using characters, points, names etc. In long time picking it up again to final copy available for sale in stores was a conservative year and a half. I would call it maybe 500–1000 hours.The breadth of discrepancy is that I’d published several books beforehand and during so I was hand writing it, typing it, and then doing the back and forth editing thing. But the more books you write, the faster you become at the process itself and then you can juggle projects. It generally works when one is pretty much finished (Hush) and you’re cleaning up another Stay—-I use alternating as a reprieve when one drives me too batty.I, at its’ height, do about 20–30 hours on a singular project a week. At a low rate 5 to 10. Some times I intentionally slow down to measure my filter and rewriting so that I don’t upset the overall structure. Which is why it fluctuates from 500 to 1000 hours over a 18 month period.Escapades was unique in that it was an assigned foray into short story writing. One of my favorites Raymond Carver, inspired me to have my experimentation in Federman’s class to be in brevity. To control a story down to the word, sentence, paragraph.There are about 50 Escapades stories with half of them 3 pages, the rest up to 30+ typed ages, all initially hand written but not all published yet. About 40% have been published in Escapades, Volume 1 and Escapades Volume II, we’re in all whole decision making thought about how to make Volume III. To make it a full omnibus of the Escapades tales, throw them all in plus I was tasked some years with writing the behind the scenes to each tale—-about a page and a half for 25 of the most published. Volume 3 could then run about 700–800 pages with all of that inside.I don’t write as many of these short stories anymore, not from lack of interest but the other projects often demand more attention. I maybe write an average of two or three new Escapades stories a year but they’re generally longer, nearly novellas or at least long short stories (over 10 pages that weren’t enough to become a full novel):Don’t ExplainWhere Are The Birds?The Dressare all available through the above links. Enjoy!(Paperback and Digital Covers)*A Note about why covers for Paperbacks and Digital copies might differ. The simple answer is that any reasonably good image can be a digital cover, however there’s a whole lot of editing, color correction, etc that goes into a paperback/hardcover. Also the PB cover generally stands first on Amazon and Barnes & Noble so you try to make that the most professionally designed. A new issue that’s coming up is that Barnes & Noble can in store print books on demand (at least here in NYC) so you want it to be a good cover.Another note about revisions is that there are generally about 6–8 cover choices/drafts before Final Print. I sometimes use my second choice as the digital copy. I also think about future editions of a book (generally released in 18 months to 2 years—-that’s where your second and third choice covers can go. I literally have a binder full of color full page print outs of book covers front and back and notations about why or why not. The banker boxes for holding manuscripts—-yup, there are Proof copies with cover choices and no goes.This answers your question as to why I have a private storage room (kind of like Beyonce’s….well, not exactly—-she’s housing EVERY image of her—-no, I’m not kidding. But both of our storage spaces are in Manhattan! lol)The ultimate point though is that a book is also about these image/cover issues and that is a draft stage, computer colder, binder and box unto itself.Banker Boxes Breakdown for storage of your work: Do you ever read your own books, stories or poems after they have been published? If so, how does it make you feel? What do you think of them?Tranny (<<link to 1st Chapter for freebies!) was a unique project in that it overlapped with my professional work—-transgenderism/transsexuality and race—-as I was a coordinator and teacher in multiple LGBTSGL programs here in NYC.The first line…”I paid $500 to have my balls cut off.” was actually said in front of me by a friend of a friend while we were sitting in her spartan (except for a closet full of designer clothing that would make Mariah Carey nod in approval) full of expensive clothing.When Valencia said that, I was like there’s a book in what I’m observing. I mulled it over for years then I started my professional work for years then I moved on to Columbia then I went on a sort of sabbatical to be by my terminal mother. And I had nothing to do in Charlotte. So I typed.Federman, Polite, Feldman taught me, encouraged me to always find a new way, another way into a story, a book. I went first person and decided to just type Tranny straight out. I set my gauntlet structural challenge—-10 chapters—-stay in the first person and be harshly graphic the way my friends and clients were in describing their lives (hence the slightly offensive title.) It’s a hard, almost “street” novel about a life, a lifestyle, a sexuality that is confusing, upsetting, dangerous and sad at the same time.I wrote it hard, intentionally. I wanted the reader to go through it, shocked, aghast, surprised at the same time that they liked and disliked a character at the same time that the central question of are so many Black and Latino young men claiming trans because it’s easier in this society to be an Other but female-ish rather than a Black/Latino gay man?That had been something my clients were presenting, wrestling with as so many of them dressed up, claimed certain things but never did legal therapy or medical intervention. Was that just resources or another level of dysmorphia? I know many people who live as female, who have had illegal injections, buy illegal hormones and live as women—-some pass, some don’t.I had it done in about a month. Then it took about another 2–3 months to go through the 12 drafts—-as digital files and then print outs and then Proofs—-the day my mother died at 8am, I was hammering away at it at midnight. It saved me in some ways so that I could take grief in servings rather than as a wave.I caught the idea, the name, the character, the situation, all of it. I caught in that book. I even got to be experimental at the end in the last chapter, with an echoing idea from the very first chapter.It’s 200+ pages but the economy of it is just right. I finished it and thought that’s all have to say, all I have to channel about the lead character Nicky k—-that I’d been a medium to this person, and truly conveyed someone’s full range of identity/humanity.The one play I did on it is that the closeted male character from Stay has a brief sexual/drug fling with Nicky in Stay, in a paragraph, because Nicky was such a complete person that it was easier to transfer in then create a new one wholesale to just fit a scene. When we do the new edition of the book I might put in the Stay scene or reference it in the afterword.S: A Novel is formula occurred as a sort of a hybrid of the Stay format and the Tranny execution. I’d handwritten it then typed it up as a series of brief chapters about 7 sisters, about 40+ pages total typed. Then I shelved it though I knew I always wanted to return to it. I really liked the idea of S as a title, the sisters all being named with an S and their last name simply being S. A play on the Nation of Islam/Black radicalistic taking of X back from it’s illiteracy origins and instead using it as a demarcation of both uniformity and mockery back at a governmental naming system.It had a science fiction bent to it and I thought I have to think about this. I already had Chimaera with Walker and time travel but I wanted to explore it again, from a different perspective. I also wanted to explore magic and sorcery and mesh all three. I also wanted to have a book where there were no White people, no White voices—-there’s a slight one—-I wanted to have an inter-racial/gender conflict because I often think too much of Black writing is Black vs. White people/White Gaze centralistic. I wanted to create a dynamic conflict, good and evil that didn’t involve White people, that instead spotlighted Black people as good and bad humans.After Tranny I was in a writing fighting mode but Hush was too big a mountain to dive into again so I flipped through the tales on the shelf and pulled out S. Yeah, i was ready to write it. That took longer because I had to expand those 40 pages to 200 but I also wanted it to be a brief book, slim, it was almost a long novella in Escapades I or II, but it grew bigger. Overall it took about 6 months to do a typing draft after draft after draft after draft, maybe 300 hours but the structure was already there and I purposefully wanted it to be sparse.Once I had my time travelling “catch”, my magic “catch”, my biggest infusion was how religion, ultimately a cult, permeates everyone’s lives in this book, how it’s followed them since Reconstruction, literally. And then I also wanted to show the seduction of the Black Church for men and to women.There are about 10 drafts of this simply because it was already in a #2 Draft stage by the time I picked it up to work on a couple of years ago.The End Is The BeginningThe above examples I examine here because it gives me an insight into my work and yes, I use this as a teaching template in my classrooms. But more importantly I’m trying to condense some of the examples that Federman and Polite taught me. They didn’t write books on their writing insights but I did learn more than I think I’ll ever be able to convey.One of my biggest challenges now that I didn’t consider when I first started writing in my teens is massive amounts of content. The work that they require for completion and publishing and more importantly to cross the Art threshold is something within the process it’s hard to plan for. But it’s worth it, it’s worth it to take your time in how to display your work. And most importantly throughout either a singular project, after you do one or several, you can see your development as a writer. Or you can also see the diversity of your ideas/novels.When I look at the work above plus all of the work, four times as much that I haven’t mentioned, I can see the artistic diversity that I am traversing.See, writing for me, be published, it selling well, isn’t how I start my work. I start it from the way you start all true Art—-to create something new to yourself. To play. I’m playing when I’m writing and then deeper I’m pressing myself to explore and engage the other side, where my writing stretches from my imagination to something else. Something that infuses pieces of writing and makes them not only transcendent but honestly, unrecognizable to even me. I open my work sometimes and I don’t know who wrote a passage, pages, a line. It’s amazing and divine and sublime. That’s what all this drafting work returns to you.And it generates better writing. When I read blogs and posts about writing, so many people who want to write want to get it done with, want to race through it. They don’t understand, which I think only a mentor and maybe direct classes can convey, is the path to good, better, great writing, is in the revisions, the ever increasing drafts. I read a post about a writer doing one quick review of his work, essentially spell checking, so I went to check out his books. In checking them out, reading the reviews, some pages, I saw and read that others noticed too the lack of polishing.I was watching an interview of Toni Morrison by Fran Leibowitz and she answered a question with reminding her friend that she’d given her a copy of Proof copy of A Mercy to read, critique before it was published. Fran read it and then Toni said she went in and did another revision to it and gave that to Fran. Fran said it was hilarious because of what Toni told her later was the difference. Fran couldn’t find anything different. Toni said it was 17 words in a 200+ page novel, she’d changed but she said it like she’d changed so much.A writer’s end result is for the reader, it’s almost a byproduct, but the underlying intent is to get as close to perfection as you can. That takes many revisions, an incisive and complete Drafting Process.Why do some people think they can be an artist or a writer without even trying to learn the craft?Why would anyone want to write a novel?How many drafts did you write of your first book?#KylePhoenix#TheKylePhoenix