BEAR MAZE!
TRIVIA
Aesthetics
The first time I published Bear Maze!, I didn’t care about how it looked. I was having some ideological delusions about how aesthetics weren’t important, and I certainly took that conviction to the limit—the page numbers were three different fonts and two different sizes, the paragraphs were left-justified, the text had no serifs (a sin), and there was at least three typos per page. I was mocking beauty, propriety, palatability, and all the other things that educated people seem to like so much. And I’ve changed my mind since then. I lost the wonderful ideal. I commissioned a new cover, and spent some serious time editing, which is a phrase that I’ve never used before. I replaced all the words that were only there to sound smart, and also the words that were only there to be intentionally confusing. I cut the average sentence length in half. I have to wonder, now, if it’s still the same book. It definitely lacks the bold effrontery it once had. And I don’t know what to think about it, really. But it’s done. All of the above is just to explain how the original cover came about. I asked my friend Forrest, who also wrote the aside at the beginning of Chapter 4, to draw me a cover with Microsoft Paint. I told him it was absolutely necessary to spend less than twenty minutes for the entire thing. I was imagining crayons, and childish figures. Something completely immature and unserious. He agreed to try it out. He finished it in fifteen. He also didn’t tell me, until afterword, that he’d broken his right arm. So not only did he meet the time constraint, but he also did it left-handed. And what did I say, in my sheer indifference? “Sure, let’s go with it.” Here it is, along with an alternate version that he was gracious enough to provide, free of charge.
When my daughter turns four or five, there’s a chance there will be a special edition of Bear Maze!, with some real crayon drawings for every chapter, done by her. Pictures of lepers at a bacchanalia, pictures of Apollo shooting innocent people with arrows, bears loving women, all in full color. I’m hoping I won’t have to explain the subject matter to her very thoroughly, to get the pictures I want. But that’s a worry best left to the future. Bear Maze! In Color! It’s not a promise, but I like the idea. Picture of a Maze
Like most amateur authors, I ended up with too many copies of my book. I ordered twenty when I started, because of course I could sell twenty books. I ordered ten more after I decided it really would best to add serifs to the text and have justified alignment, instead of left. I ordered another ten after the number of typos found officially crossed one hundred. And finally I ordered my last set of ten when I changed the description on the back, although by that point it was less about perceived quality and more about the fact that I wanted to reach fifty unsold copies. After amassing so many copies, I started to think about what I could do with them. I took pictures of them filling a bookshelf, like any overly proud parent would do. But then I got super creative, and made a maze out of them. Because the book’s called bear maze. I also happened to have a stuffed bear on hand, a sad remnant of my childhood. I put them together. And the resulting picture enjoyed moderate success, as far as pictures go. Years later, I wanted to recreate that success. I’d written five more books and had a child in the meantime—so I put them all together. A child is more complete than a remnant of my childhood, logically, and the prettier Bear Maze! seemed like it would be more photogenic. I also had too many copies of my books again, since I was preparing for my first sales event, at a booth at a local fair. And these are the pictures.
As you might expect, my daughter was better at the maze than the teddy bear was. Her solution was to roll. Walls of books are defenseless against rolling. |
