Revising Hawk Season!

"Who now curates what culture is worth keeping, where does it live, and how do we find it amongst the spume of half-realised ideas and half-baked opinions? This process has traditionally been facilitated by editors and mentors, who can help a new generation polish their ideas until they produce something extraordinary. But in the age of self-publishing, that expertise and experience is often bypassed.

~ Molly Flatt

I have been re-working a bunch of comics from 2010 lately. To be specific, I have been cleaning up and putting uniform measurements to the comics that appear in my first collection of Donnie Rocket Toaster-Face comics, I Hate Hawk Season! 

The book came out a few months back, and as it is a POD endeavor, for some reason the finished version has blank pages (pages 37 and 40 to be exact). The preview copy has comics on those pages, but the final published version does not. I haven't pin-pointed the problem with these pages yet. It has something to do with being the middle pages in the book and the print-on-demand process CreateSpace uses. 

My plan is to release a 2nd edition of the book. An updated, better version. The process is giving me a chance to go back and re-edit and revise. And figure out what the deal is with the blank pages.

The fact I am doing this by myself, for myself, does not escape me as a very contemporary way of creating art products.

I came across an article called "The Cult of Creativity" by Molly Flatt. The process I am engaged in - revising my own work because I'm working without an editor or publisher - is touched on in the article. Flatt quotes James C. Kaufman, Professor of Psychology at California State University and co-author of The Creativity Conundrum...

  

"If you were a writer twenty years ago and you wanted to have your poem read by hundreds of people it would mean publishing it, which is hard,” Kaufman explains. “You’d get these gatekeepers who make sure that poem or that scientific paper is at a certain level before it’s published. But now we can circumnavigate the gatekeepers and publish as an ebook on Amazon or make a movie on your iPhone. On the one hand great, I’m not an elitist and I love this idea of democratic production; conversely gatekeepers do have a role. It forces the creator to revise, keep thinking, keep building on it without sending it off into the world prematurely. And it allows the consumer to have a certain level of trust.