How NOT to write an article

Having spent the whole of yesterday trying to "hurry up" with an article that was past its deadline, and tying myself up in knots in the process [that could easily have been left as "typing myself up in nots" ... are there freudian slips in typing?], here are some helpful hints for next time 

... if there IS a next time ...

1. Stick with Plan A - don't shift topics just before the deadline.

2. When finding photos on the web, make a note of all the details - title, year, materials, size - and make sure you have the URL.

2a. Write to the website owner immediately to ask for permission to use the photo. Do this at least a week before the deadline.

3. Start the research in plenty of time. (Maybe that should be part of point 1. Or go without saying.)

4. If the photos need resizing, indicate in the title that this has been done.

5. When making notes on an interview from a video, watch the video twice, preferably several days apart.

5a. Write down possible quotes exactly as said.

5b. Note the title and production details, eg year filmed.

6. If time is short and two interviews are available, it's likely the entire article can be written by stringing together quotes in some logical order, adding headings where helpful.

7. Go for the jugular - what's the main point of the article? Keep it in mind!

8. Be sparing with quotes, especially when artspeak is involved. 

9. Keep sentences short; and, for online articles, keep paragraphs short. 

10. Leave it for a day before giving it a final read-through, paying special attention to numbers.

(Have you been reading between the lines? Do you know how not to do it, now?)

Postal surprise

When you order several books online, it's a bit of a surprise when any one of them arrives - which will it be...?

When the postie rang the bell and needed me to sign for what was obviously a book, I couldn't for the life of me remember what I'd ordered recently. With the amount of forgetting I managed in the past week, this memory-failure didn't exactly come as a surprise.

But inside the package was this -

an advance copy of a book I'd had a small part in producing - the real work (photographs, design, layout) was done, in time freely given, by Hilary, Janet, and Jane.

The book, which will be available at Festival of Quilts next week, is the catalogue for the CQ@10 exhibition, and also gives an extensive photographic record of the challenges, exhibitions, and journal quilt projects in the group's first decade. Fully 139 of the book's pages are absolutely full of high-quality photos.

A heartfelt plea

If anyone from CQ is reading this and has ever considered volunteering to help with CQ projects, I urge you to do so. Most urgently, CQ needs people for several vacant committee posts - the term is three years, otherwise I'd have been happy to continue for longer. It's definitely good to have a change of personnel, though! We started "not knowing how" -- but this book is an example of what can be done when people decide to do something and Just.Get.On.With.It.

"Pulling people out of the ranks" to do the necessary jobs is always a problem for any membership organisation. Some members are too modest about their abilities, or imagine it will take over their free time. (These are unfounded worries, imho.) What these shy members forget, or perhaps have not yet experienced, is how much fun it can be to be involved, and to contribute - we're all in it together, but we do need folk to step forward!

Galley proofs

Erasure - and replacement - are very visible on galley proofs, something that has disappeared with electronic publishing. Here's an example of one of Philip Roth's galleys -

Roth was asked about the last phase of writing a novel being a “crisis” in which he turns against the material and hates the work. He said that there's always this crisis, with every book: 'Months of looking at the manuscript and saying, “This is wrong—but what’s wrong?” I ask myself, “If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what?” But when I’m asking this I’m also trying to believe in what I’ve written, to forget that it’s writing and to say, “This has taken place,” even if it hasn’t. The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.'

When you got to the galley proof stage, the book was almost out of your hands - the agony almost over. In the 'old days', after the manuscript went to the publisher, there would be a hiatus before the author got galley proofs - a time to step back from the MS a bit, and then a chance to make changes on the proof, perhaps at both galley and page proof stages. Nowadays, when the electronic MS is delivered, the author has pretty well seen the last of it.

Then and now, there comes a point when you just have to let go. Not so easy sometimes ... possibly harder than getting started?

But is it a ...

Is two CDs in a cover a book? If it comes with, or becomes, an art newspaper, does that change anything? This is King of Limbs (new to me!), seen here. Art is by Stanley Donwood, based on northern European fairy tales and their association with forests and woods.

Of the limited newspaper edition of the album, Donwood said: "What I like about newspaper is its ephemeral nature, I like the way the paper goes yellow and brittle when you leave it out in the sunlight. I wanted to do this thing like a really annoying Sunday paper, you know when you buy the paper and all this crap falls out? I wanted to do something really annoying with all these crappy bits of floppy, glossy paper."

To promote the CD and vinyl release of The King of Limbs, Radiohead distributed a free single-issue newspaper, The Universal Sigh, at record shops across the world on 28 March 2011. It is separate from the Newspaper Album version of The King of Limbs. This 12-page tabloid was printed using offset lithography on newsprint paper; it features artwork, poetry, lyrics, and short stories.