Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Author’s note

In the Renaissance blue was an expensive pigment; a patron commissioning a painting would specify how much blue the painter was to use. Fiction today has its own prohibitively expensive pigments. Edward Tufte took out a second mortgage on his house to self-publish his spectacularly handsome first book; this meant he could marshal a crack production team. The writer who lacks his resources has a couple of options: 1, try to persuade skeptical agents to find a publisher who will provide technical support; 2, spend hundreds of hours coding, hundreds more grappling with Adobe Illustrator, and so on. “Long and winding road” and “Faint but pursuing” are my two most common e-mail subject lines. “Dear Paul, THANK you for your help with ArabTeX!” is typical content.

Over the years visitors to my blog (paperpools.blogspot.de) have generously helped me live to fight another day. While The Last Samurai was out of print buyers of secondhand copies would send donations to the beleaguered author. More recently two dedicated readers have been thinking of ways to approach the challenge in a less haphazard manner; anyone who would like to be involved should contact me at helen.dewitt@gmx.net to be put in touch. Readers who would like to sustain an author wandering the labyrinth of Stack Overflow can buy me a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/dewitt.