A quick summary: a very cool recently opened used bookstore called The Last Bookstore, on 4th & Main in downtown Los Angeles (at the old Old Bank DVD spot), offered us some shelf space to curate with chapbooks from local writers. Well, as of today, Thursday 3/11/10, the shelf is open, just in time for this month’s Downtown Art Walk! So drop in, if not tonight, sometime soon.

The shelf will always hold chapbooks from 20 authors. Most often than not, there will be 3 copies of each book. We will regularly rotate the authors and books.

We will begin a monthly reading series, most likely in April.

It will all be a blast!

So, without further delay, here is the list of the 20 initial authors/books:

• Christina Kerr – Stumbling Out Loud
• Margie Goodspeed – Shovel and Pail
• Susan Vorhand – Pouring Ribbons
• Elya Braden – The Journey Home
• Barbara Greene Rusin – Free Range
• Justin Klippel – Squid Ink
• John M. FitzGerald – The Mind
• Pat Lucas – The Mistress
• Mary Thornton-Brown – The People in the Sky
• Bruce Arnold – Tide Pools in Lava
• Robert Carroll – B+
• Chiwan Choi – cancer
• Alejandro Escudé – Unknown Physics
• Paul Cummins – From the Shadows: Poems from 2009
• James Berry – Monk’s Room
• G. Murray Thomas – Songs of Inappropriate Desire
• Carrie Kirshman – Grey
• Veryle Rupp – Inside Snowfence
• Alice Hayward – Breathing in the Depths
• Hal Martin Bogotch – The Dance of Life

Also, a few local anthologies:

• Wednesday #1.2 “Alchemy”
• MO+TH #5
• Twelve Los Angeles Poets – an ONTHEBUS Series

Thank you writers who have sent me your books. They are beautiful in the bookstore.

I hope all of you will continue to support our local writers and places like The Last Bookstore that are too few and far between.

It’s a 5-day turnaround, so still good for the release party in honor of Aaron’s book, but just to make double sure, we put on a rush job order.

The postcards we ordered should be here by tomorrow (was hoping for today). Once I have those in my hands, I’ll be footing around downtown passing them out.

All in all, almost time to breathe. Almost. Need to see those boxes of books here. Then breathe.

Also, we got a Press Release written up and sent out. Hate writing those. I don’t know why. Something about it creeps me out. But part of the business.

SEE YOU AT THE PARTY!!

It appears in Rattle and Kim is very happy with the review.

I like this passage best:

I found one of the best poems of the collection to be “emergency room,” in which the daughter has to face her father’s aging and eventual death. This is a universal issue that we all have to deal with, yet the poem doesn’t veer into triteness at all. Calder demonstrates a remarkable ability to portray real grief – which I find refreshing in the midst of the many poems in this collection that seem to try to drown grief out.

Check it out!

But – wait we must.

We’d originally had the book scheduled (hoped) for a end of May release, but due to various circumstances, we’ve had to delay it.

Most of it has been me (Chiwan) dropping the ball, I think, since Judeth’s been extra busy at her new teaching job, preparing and directing a middle school/high school production of Babes in Arms.

My apologies.

But, on the other hand, we know that the extra time will do nothing more than give us the opportunity to make the book absolutely perfect. Perfect, I say!

So we’ll continue to keep you in the loop regarding You Already Know.

In the meantime, enjoy this video of Chet Baker performing “My Funny Valentine” from Babes in Arms.

But, we’re back with some news and updates:

+ Kim Calder will be doing her 3 final readings in Los Angeles before she leaves Los Angeles for the summer. She received a fellowship to study and write in Prague for the summer! And after that, she’ll be heading off to school for more education and writing.

Check out the events on the sidebar —->>>

+ We’re beginning proofreading Aaron Henne’s manuscript. He’s been really great to work with, devouring edit notes as a complete professional. Just awesome. And now that Judeth’s on spring break, she’ll be working on the layout.

We are scheduled to release the book at the end of May. We’re hoping to do it again at La Cita Bar in downtown, in addition to a few events at theaters around the city.

We’ll post some pictures from the design process in the following weeks and a few excerpts from Aaron’s book.

More updates to come!

Thank you all.

From the TED conference:

“Nobody ever asked my father, ‘Do you have chemical engineering block?’”

Via horsepigcow.

Fiction takes “10 to 30 years to finish … many authors will supplement their income with blogging, a far more lucrative field, considered by many to be a higher art form.”

Via Novelr.

We’ve been pretty much geeked like this with each next step in the process…with the exception of one: proofreading.

Originally, we had five people read through the manuscript. And we caught a few errors and corrected them right away, all of us happy at how clean the manuscript was to begin with. With each subsequent step, however, we got a bit more lax on it, until at the end, by the time we set up our digital files with the printer to order the proof, I was more obsessed with the poems, the flow of the book, the overall quality and vision of the collection, to focus entirely on the details.

Well, that carelessness has cost us a few dollars because we will have to reload the digital files with a couple of corrections. I can sit here and tell you that in the big scheme of things, the money (80 bucks) won’t be a big deal. But Writ Large Press isn’t Penguin Books and we need to be careful with every bit of resource, which means each dollar spent, each penny.

After the pure joy of having the proof wore off, I noticed an error inside and Kim caught a mistake on the cover. They were truly minor–an extra space on top of one page inside, a missing dash on one of the blurbs on the back cover–but they were mistakes that should have and could have been caught. I can chalk it up to being overextended as a two-person team or say that we’d all just looked at the book too much for too long and had become too close to the material.

But ultimately, what we’re calling it is a lesson, a tripped up baby-step. A reminder that Art, above all things, is not careless.

So other than the monetary loss, everything is go. The corrections are being made, with one last, last look through to check for errors, and we’ll be ready order our first shipment of books to have for the launch at La Cita.

And, after all that, it is truly a beautiful book.