THE SHADOW SCRAPBOOK (1979)

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The latest addition to the collection, a first edition of Walter Gibson’s THE SHADOW SCRAPBOOK. Here’s the title page, signed by Gibson:

Gibson, on his writing days (which produced 282 +/- of the 325 SHADOW issues (plus comics) that Gibson, as Grant, penned):

I was turning out first drafts at a rate of four pages an hour, each page running over 250 words. That meant a little over thirty pages in an eight-hour day, or better than 8,000 words. At that rate, I could finish a 60,000-word story in less than eight days, but I never wrote one that mechanically. Usually I was slow in warming up or took a few too many breaks, so I felt lucky if I got beyond twenty pages on the first or second day. But once the story was rolling, & didn't care about the hours. With a few breaks, _ would work up to ten or even twelve hours a day, hitting as high as forty or even fifty pages.

I generally started around nine o'clock on the morning of the first day but seldom worked steadily until five or six o'clock. I might take the afternoon off and finish my stint in the evening; or go out in the evening and put in a few hours after I came in around midnight. In the latter case I wouldn't begin my second "day" until about noon, which would push the third "day" even further ahead. A few more hours of extra work would push the following "day" still further on, and there were times when I slept so late that I didn't start until early evening but kept going until the following dawn.

The whole book is available via The Internet Archive; stoked to have a physical edition –the signature makes it even more wonderful. Will add more from it as I peruse and read.

lowering the stakes

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A desire, over the next several months, perhaps the next year – or, hell, whatever remains of my creative life, to figure out how / force myself to write fiction faster – not in a Walter B. Gibson two-novels-a-month-for-nearly-20-years (285/326) sort of way – but in a way that's at least moderately quicker than my current and past.

(I'd be stoked with a longer short story / novellete per quarter.)

Key part: perpetual mental effort to lower the stakes, as Rick Rubin puts it in his excellent THE CREATIVE ACT (excellent – though an index wouldve been far more useful than blank ruled pages in the physical book) –

"We tend to think that what we're making is the most important thing in our lives and that it's going to define us for all eternity. Consider moving forward with the more accurate point of view that it's a small work, a beginning. The mission is to complete the project so you can move on to the next. The next one is a stepping-stone to the following work. And so it continues in productive rhythm for the entirety of your creative life."

– and relegate the belief that I was defined by a single work (ref: seven-year-paragraph) to the shitheap of my personal creative history.