Abandoned Coast, Abandoned Project?

I have quit the east coast in favor of the west, and in doing so, have left my serial post-it story, which I'd been placing on post-its in books from the Brooklyn Public Library, hanging in the middle of its grandmother/granddaughter cross-country road trip.  I decided to move so quickly, that I did not even get a chance to do the installment in Specimen Days, the next book that I had planned to use as a base, leaving this note a lie:

So now my "To be continued" is left hanging, presumably forever.  I could pick up the story in a new library book, here on the west coast, and keep adding the installments to my blog until its finished, which would give the piece a sort of completion.  After all, the likelihood that anyone ever actually found a segment of the story and followed it from one book to another, much less that anyone found the first segment of the story and succeeded in following each "chapter" from one book to the next, through four books, seems incredibly unlikely.  But somehow, even though any real audience for the piece was always likeliest to be found online, now that I know that no one with be able to follow the story through the actual physical books, the impetus to finish it is gone.  I'm not sure why my interest is so bound up with whether someone will experience the piece as it was "meant" to be experienced, rather than viewing the the documentation of that piece.  And isn't it rather strange to be caught up in the loss of an audience of one?

Or maybe I'm just making excuses for writers block?

Serial in a Sequel: Chip Kidd Post-its

I'm about to return the fourth installment of my serial post-it note story to the library, nestled inside of Chip Kidd's The Learners.

 

I chose The Learners based simply on wanting to read it, but the fact that it features a recent college graduate dovetails nicely with the situation of my Maddie.  The novel is a sequel to Kidd's first book The Cheese Monkeys, which means that both his story and mine start off in the midst of the tale.

You can read a pdf of my post-it note additions to Chip Kidd's The Learners here.

More Parasitic Story: Carson McCullers

I've just finished the third segment of my book-jumping serial post-it project.  I've added a little slice of Phyllis narrative to Carson McCullers' slim but lovely The Member of the Wedding:

Since McCullers' story is one of youth grappling with being young, I thought an addition of the elderly grappling with being old created a nice symmetry.

 I'm still having difficulty with the task I assigned myself of creating a story that jumps from book to book, and so functions both in discrete clusters and also as an ongoing tale.  I've become convinced that no one who finds one segment of the work will put in the effort, and have the luck required, to find the next segment.  But part of me still likes that this is a theoretical possibility - that the piece could lead to a sort of cross-book scavenger hunt, however unlikely it is to actually unfold that way.

And meanwhile I'm becoming a Times-New-Roman-drawing machine.

Scans of my additions to Carson McCullers' book are available here, in three parts: one, two, three. It's been split up because I used a new scanning method, which resulted in a larger than usual file size.

It's Only Part Two? An Almost Perfect Moment

I feel like I've been working on my serial post-it note story about road-tripping grandma/granddaughter for ages, and yet I've only just returned to the library the second installment, secreted inside of Binnie Kirshenbaum's An Almost Perfect Moment.

I'm not sure why I'm having such a difficult time with this story. Perhaps the serial nature of it makes me feel locked in, like I can't do any other post-it books until I'm finished with this tale?  Or perhaps it is just that I don't have as much appropriate experience to draw from?  At any rate, you can read the Kirshenbaum borne part here, if you want to.

Charles Dickens and An Attempt at To Be Continued

I feel like I need a new graphic for my posts about my sticky-note stories. One image of text on a post-it in front of text looks much like another. I did like how this one was interloping below "Interlopers" though.

I've just returned my latest sticky-note story to the library, pressed between the pages of Bleak House, A sprawling coming-of-age-ish novel by Charles Dickens.

In the spirit of Dickens' novels, which generally appeared in newspapers in serial form, I decided that this story would be a serial one, spanning several library books. At the end of the book I made a "To be continued" sticky-note:

Which means that I'm committed to this story being at least a two-parter, even though I've had a rather difficult time even getting out part 1, which you can find here, should you be interested. Let me know - do you think it deserves much in the way of continuation?