Collaboration

Daniel Milnor, over at Shifter is always yelling at the world to collaborate more.

So I've pulled together a concept. If I wanted to collaborate with a specific someone, I'd just send email. It sounds more fun to introduce an element of the random here. Which incidentally flies in the face of many things I have said here. So it goes.

If you're interested in collaborating with me and some other readers here on a book, send me an email. The About/Contact page should give you enough information, or you can just comment here. But read the next bit before you send!.

What I want from you is a number between 1 and 7 inclusive. That represents the number of pages of content you are committing to provide. You will actually need to provide at least 2x that number, but no more than 3x that number. So if you say 4, I will insist on 8 to 12 pages from you. Normally, a page will be a picture, but if you wanted to submit some text or a drawing, I could live with that. No need to specify, just gimme a page count.

I will pull names out of a hat on Monday morning, west coast time in the USA, until I reach a total greater than 30 pages, assuming I get that many interested parties.

My number is 4. My name will be pulled out, for sure.

Then the selected victims will be asked to provide me with content, in short order. Let us set a theme: The East. Whatever that means to you. You may hurl your camera at the ground the appropriate number of times, or sift your throwaway folders, or send me your best pictures of cats. But I will insist that your provide your pages NO LATER THAN March 1, 2016.

I will then commit to pulling together a prototype book in a Blurb format and sharing it out, NO LATER THAN April 1, 2016. I will act, essentially, as the editor, and I will rule with an iron fist, and yet, I will listen to suggestions. I will also commit to creating my 4 pages to, as much as possible, act as glue. In all seriousness, I will have the final say in how the thing pulls together. You may, if you are ultimately unsatisfied, pull your content. You will retain your copyrights etc, and let us agree in a general way that you give to the collective of authors a license to use your content for this book, and only this book.

I will perform no modifications to your content.

The final book will be uploaded to blurb for print, NO LATER THAN May 1, 2016, probably as a trade book (a cheap format). Authors can (should be able to?) print as many copies as they like, at cost.

I don't intend this thing simply as a monograph of "greatest hits from this blog's readers" I'll try to make sense of the submissions and pull together a sequence (please click the link to see what that even means) that imbues it all with some sort of meaning. If necessary, my contributions can serve as a skeleton to hang the rest on, or connections from one thing to another, whatever that means. Which may mean some of my shitty calligraphy turns up.

If I can think of a way that makes sense, I would like to get a little crazy and make this a book designed to have holes drilled in it, to be cut up, to be scratched and drawn in and on. Anything but some awful monograph.