254. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Alternate Title Pages That Never Made Final Cut

Blogs are heavenly because you are able to post all the elements of a manuscript that never made the final cut, but are too good to be buried in the "creative exhaust" trashbin of your computer. Some work needs to see the light of day somehow!

Continuing with the conversation I had with Robin--mentioned in Blog Post #253--the images above represent the original title page I designed for the Question Reality manuscript. Ultimately symbolic in the visual representation of my own brain rewiring: hence, the title: "Question Reality: An Investigation of Self-Humans-Environment." Through Robin's suggestion, I tossed out this title page because Robin was thinking more of "what speaks to the world and the audience OUTSIDE my brain" rather than what makes sense to my own internal world. It took me a year for ME to figure out and connect the innerworkings of my own mind. Now the second round is to learn how to communicate with the world outside my own reality!

I was shocked during that night's discussion with Robin and it took a while for me to wrap around the idea that my original visual inspiration needed to be tossed to the side!

In the end, I was able to place a black-and-white version of the document as the first page of the interior of my manuscript.

I actually designed this title page before I started writing Question Reality. It's good to have a few drawings and poems to motivate you to piece together the parts into a much longer--and potentially drier--manuscript!

253. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Evolution of the Bird in a Cage Cartoon

I showed an image of this Bird in a Cage to my good friend, Robin, in Goleta, California, back in fall of 2005, and instead of placing pre-existing "holistic title page" of Question Reality in the front, Robin advised me to place this bird-in-the-cage in the front of the book. Robin stated that this would be more shocking and intriguing to people because it represents where most of society is at right now (or at least how society is overall operating). I consider the bird-in-a-cage to be like a visual koan: it automatically stimulates the mind into shock and encourages one to think. The dilemma, I found out later from my mentor, Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller, that this bird-cage image that she showed to class was not her own creation. Perhaps it came from The New York Times or the New Yorker, but she was not sure. So... I ended up needing to create my own bird-in-a-cage cartoon. Please see below!
The Old Bird in a Cage. From The New Yorker or The New York Times? I sent an email to The New Yorker, thanking them for the inspiration if the source of this image truly was from their magazine. I encountered this Bird in a Cage image twice as an undergrad: (1) it was in the hallway of the Ecology and Evolution Department, right in front of Dr. James Reichman's office (a cool vertebrate prof I never was able to meet or take a class from), and (2) Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller showed this image to her pioneering Shoreline Preservation course. Miriam showed a bunch of images and shared quite a few poems that stimulated students to think about things. Another image Miriam showed was something that looked like a mountain but ended up being the tip of a safety pin. Talk about being in a scale-funk! I suppose Miriam is in part practicing Chinese philosophy, and maybe she doesn't even know it!
The New Bird in a Cage cartoon. I added a little squirrel trying to get the bird out of the cage. For me, it represents the internal turmoil and synergism of my evolving self and this environment I am in. I seem to be the bird and the squirrel simultaneously. I am the bird, seemingly trapped in my own self-constructed trap, and then I am the squirrel who thought outside the box and is trying to get this trapped bird outside of her rut. The theme extrapolates to the entirety of society: trying to get the system to think outside the box in terms of human-environmental relations. And can a really tiny squirrel really get a very big bird outside it's self-induced prison? The image ended up being on the title page of my book.
Now with the help of new friends--returning to UC Santa Barbara, participating in the Blue Horizons program, meeting my friend Tariel--it is starting to seem a little bit more feasible to get this big bird out of the cage!

221. Title Page for "Question Reality: An Investigation of Self-Humans-Environment"

I had a very strange conversation over the phone last Saturday night that shook me to the very barebones of my existence. Like I had been entirely figured out. That there was no longer any mystery. That I found out I was not the only one who was Questioning Reality. And then I was over it. I looked at my manuscript I have been sitting on for so long and said "Fxck it. Get this off your chest, Vic. It's over. I have been figured out. Everyone's Questioning Reality nowadays. I just formalized it in this writing here."

The most difficult part about self-publishing is book-ending the manuscript. You have to create the title page, the back page, the spine, and then all the little doo-hicky things in the middle, like a copyright page, devotions, prefaces, prefaces to prefaces, appendices, and appendices to appendices. That is the only thing I haven't done. Book end the dxm manuscript. It's already out of date. It was in date 2004-2005. I have evolved greatly since then.

Above is the title page series. And the basic drawings I made a couple of years ago. It took me a frickin 3 hours to make this frickin' title page. I mean, shoot me to a wall. I'm at a Kinkos off of Patterson in Goleta, California. I was chilling with a local band that just completed their debut album, Tommy and the High Pilots. They have a very feel-good classic rock. Young and restless types. But very classic. Will be playing Velvet Jones on June 15. They will be touring for a while. So, that made my experience in design a little less painless.