Friday, August 04, 2006

Upside, downside

Upside: I've finally seen Sonic Youth live.

Downside: I haven't blogged in a week.

Unrelated? Yes. Also unrelated is the new Stephen Dixon interview at Failbetter that I'm going to you point you toward. Pass your time thither until I get my act together around here. Fascinatining stuff what I've read so far. The first question already answers a question of my own:

McSweeney’s Books published the first volume of the “I.” series, I: A Novel, back in 2002, and at the time, you spoke of two more to come, the last a three hundred-page novel. When and why did you decide to merge them into one, and publish it as End of I.? What happened to the pages you cut—will you integrate them into a new work?

I didn't merge the last two novels of the I. trio into one. The trio became a duo when McSweeney’s rejected the second voume of the work, then called 2. They rejected it, they said, because they were cutting back on their fiction. So I removed 2 from the trio, rewrote it in its entirety (something I've been doing a lot with my work the last few years), gave the I. character a name, and submitted the work, as Old Friends, to Melville House, which took it in a couple of weeks. Then McSweeney's wrote, saying they were starting a new fiction series and they'd like to see 2. I said 2 was now Old Friends and unavailable, would you like to see 3, which was now End of I. and also entirely rewritten from first page to last? They did and they took it.

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