𝔭𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔦𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔞𝔯𝔶 𝔫𝔬𝔱𝔢𝔰.

 

The history of 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 is a slippery run down the slope indeed, having been incepted in late November of the year 2018. This was a most dark and troubled year in the wake of our beloved Greg's passing, little did we suspect what would soon loom ahead in the year of our pandemic.   

   Suffice it to be said, PP has put out five books so far, and having learned much about the revisionist policies of the ever developing software running on the internet, I'm happy to let typographical errors stand in the soon to be limited editions, with the most troubling recent thought, which is that I'm beginning to think putting an annual time-stamp on it (i.e, copyright "2020" etc.) may be a typographical error.  

   This is as good a place as any to insert this notion, that really, it doesn't make any sense to time-stamp a copyright for a particular year now, really. (We've slipped past the outmoded 20th century paradigm.) Not when you consider the product is made to be available in the everlasting right here and NOW--as commercial wholesale products such as comic books and paperbacks have been since the beginning of time.  Speaking of which, ain't ever running out, not on us nor on itself, it's we who suffer from an identity crisis and project our own perceptions out onto the world's canvas before us. 

    𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 understands that not only is the map not the terrain, but more to the point there is no terrain. There is only the map now, they blew the terrain to kingdom come, haven't you noticed? But there's some good news left after all. Nothing's real anymore excepting the virtual replicas we each interface with on a daily basis online. I mean to say framed in a relative way. In the Baudrillardian sense. We're living in the moment of a post-modern, slip-stream world. 

    I say that because we've got to admit by now that in fact yes, we're creating our own fundamental reality with the helpful and dangerously potent ballast of the momentous aggregate of mass and motion that represents our growing crowds today.  To shut out the madding crowd and becoming lost in a book. A pastime that seems to be fading away in the face of the bright CGI glare of our plasma screens beaming us the latest streaming adventure for our bemusement. 

   𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 wants to place its inherent trust in its audience of readers being out there in wave upon waves of demented avengers marching earnestly into the dream, which is to say the wide awake and lucid art of reading.  My strategies include separating paragraphs with a space, and if possible, keeping each paragraph to no more than four or five lines. If you reach six you're into epic territory and could leave a reader behind, straggling in the wilderwood to be eaten by the shadows of wolves. 

   The closer you focus in on the 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 dream, you begin to see it through its editor's eyes. Shaun (that's me, referring to myself with much-needed objectivity) has been faithfully keeping his blog of colorful images and enticing text running since the summer of 2009, which translated into current terms we can understand today, means he's been keeping it alive for twelve years. It's almost inconceivable to the majority of us left today how long that is, nevermind our long life's travails which have proven that amount of time to go by in the blink and flash of an eye.  

   Hewing closer to my Freezine roots, PP wishes to function in the same spirit as Street & Smith in NY did back in the thirties.  Very inexpensive serializations of pulpy superheroics and adventurous shenanigans.  In the case of PP, each book will feature either one or two illustrations (limited to being represented on the front or back cover).   Think of a comic book that came out once a month without illustrations, only text. That'll bring back reading. So I may end up settling on a larger font size, it's hard to tell at this stage (since page count accounts for the cost to print the books, affecting the distribution of profits).   

   Right now I've launched into a secondary stage turbine flight proto-promo campaign, suffice it to say having total control of the output is good and now I have to focus on how to market my mostly-unknown name and book titles. That's something percolating in the back of my mind as I continue to revise older PP books and then authorize them for global distribution. (Vincent Daemon, I'm looking at you.) The issue of translations (which I am considering the benefits of, or lack thereof, by using Google to print and edit them myself, for clear-cut distribution to Spanish readers, etc.) is being turned over in my mind. 

   I like poetry. I like prose. I like it when there's a fusion of those. I like stories about gargoyles and the grotesque. The trick becomes hooking your readers in so they keep on reading. Only the very best chosen words can do that. 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 isn't "bringing reading back," not really. It just knows its readers are out there, hungry for alluring tales of adventure and wickedness. If 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 becomes the supplier for these sorts of black lines of text, that makes me into an aspiring literary pusher, nothing more. 

    If there's even the remote possibility that people around us might be coming down off the effects of a lifelong addiction to reading stories, may the celestial spectrum forbid me from providing this sustenance as needed for I have discovered wellsprings of it which appear to be gushing out from the endlessly unknown depths. 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘 is proud to present the following five titles as the first sequence in its series of coronas to be enjoyed in print, eBook, and audiobook formats. 

   The Cosmic Egg & Other Hatchlings, by Shaun A. Lawton   [corona one]

   Waiting for the End by Vincent Daemon                                 [corona two] 

   Plasma Tales #1                                                                        [corona three]

   COSMOLOGOS: Shadows of Reflections on Time in Space  [corona four]

   Elixir of Thorns                                                                         [corona five]

   What's coming next from 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘? I don't even know. If I can whip the Plasma Tales #2 manuscript into decent shape, it will probably be that. But first I'm busy revising the first issue of this ambitious, if I do say so, prose-poetry serial. But like I said. I know my audience is out there. If I can trust in myself, I can trust in them. That's all I got for now on the progress of my 𝕻𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖒𝖆 𝕻𝖗𝖊𝖘𝖘.