A Fond Farewell (For Now) from "E's Boutique"

Dear Friends and Readers:

This is the last entry for E’s Boutique, at least for a time.

I don’t have much else to say about my novels Ring On Deli and Zodiac Pets, and we’re reaching the end of my efforts to promote the new one. Besides, I think the most important and authentic connection a fiction writer can make to readers is generally through the fiction itself, not through commentary on it. For this writer, at least, it’s the best that I can give.

That said, we are willing to scrape the bottom of the barrel for E’s Boutique loyalists who crave one more substantive entry before we part. In that spirit, below are some notes on the e-ink devices and tools I used to draft and edit Zodiac Pets. Based as this post is on images of e-ink screens, it is inherently kind of ugly. It’s also dispensable, so feel free to skip it (I deem it an “Appendix”: not a true part of the E’s Boutique corpus).

IfWhen I write another novel, I’ll be back. In the meantime, e-mail me (newsalembooks@gmail.com) if you want to stay in touch another way, and be good to one another while I’m gone.

Adieu, adieu, adieu,

Eric

My mighty hand destroyed five reMarkable 2 Pro styluses (pictured above) in under a year during the writing of Zodiac Pets. Then my warranty ran out, and I switched to the cheaper and cooler (as the E-Ink world measures such things) Lamy AL-star EMR with reMarkable 2 nibs—the ultimate combo.

My interest in reading books on E-Ink readers like the Kindle or the Nook was never great and has only waned over the years. You can’t fold pages or flip through or write on them them or develop a physical sense of what was where in a book and how it looked!

E-Ink notebooks (and tablets) are another matter. These new tools proved very useful during the writing of Zodiac Pets. At the end of a writing day, I’d send a PDF of what I had written to my reMarkable 2. That night, I’d scrawl all over it, then manually enter the corrections and send it back to the machine for further edits. Rinse and repeat, ten times or more, usually that same night, and you have something a lot closer to finished text—finished, that is, for first-draft purposes.

Here’s a page of very raw text with my first-cut edits and some other things I had fun making with the device.

Raw text with first-round edits.

Wendy Zhou grapples with whether the U.S. Constitution is binding on latter generations and with the originalism school of thought on interpreting that document. (She’s a college senior, not a lawyer, but she’s precocious and it’s implied that she took an undergrad law course of some sort.)

“In the end, it was not the control of wonder that made Disneyland so overwhelming to visitors. Like so much else in Walt Disney’s career, it was the wonder of control.” I considered using this as an epigraph, but it was thematically tangential, if also timely in a fashion.

An E’s Boutique exclusive: the table of contents for Zodiac Pets!

So long ago. Was it in a dream?