I've Foolishly Decided to Make Finishing My Next Book WAY Harder and More Time and Labor-Intensive!
I have spent the last eight years writing an exhaustive history of American movies about the filmmaking industry entitled The Fractured Mirror. In a curious turn of events, I had no idea that I was writing such a book for the first six or seven years I worked on it.
From 2015 to 2021, The Fractured Mirror was a column that I wrote for TCM Backlot before it closed and then for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place after the TCM offshoot went out of business and Yacov Freedman, my lovely editor, was kind enough to give me every last word and article I wrote for TCM Backlot back to run on my website.
It was then that I realized that The Fractured Mirror could and should be a book. I had as my model Leonard Maltin’s old film guides but also Teen Movie Hell, an exhaustive guide to teen sex comedies by my late friend Mike McPadden.
I suppose I also modeled The Fractured Mirror after my own The Weird Accordion to Al. It was another reference book whose value comes largely from its comprehensiveness, and also my wonderful writing.
I wrote up every song on every “Weird Al” Yankovic album for the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al and added UHF, The Compleat Al, The “Weird Al” Show, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, his 2018 tour and Al’s season of Comedy Bang! Bang! for later editions.
In a similar spirit, I initially set out to write about every American movie about American movies for the book but learned early on that wouldn’t be possible. For starters a LOT of American movies about the movie biz are not available in any form, particularly silent movies and early talkies.
Furthermore, it can be hard to delineate just what makes a movie appropriate for the book. Mumblecore movies, for example, are overwhelmingly autobiographical and consequently about people who make mumblecore movies.
I’ve already written up a fair number of notable mumblecore movies for the book but I can’t write about ALL of them. Joe Swanberg alone wrote and directed 46 movies in 2016. There’s no way I’m going to be able to cover all of those.
I’m also covering documentaries about the film industry for the book and there are a LOT of those that are boring as fuck and unimportant and wouldn’t add anything to the book but there are also a lot of great, weird, important documentaries about the biz that will definitely enrich The Fractured Mirror.
I initially set out to write about 300 movies for The Fractured Mirror. It’s a fairly random, arbitrary number that I more or less pulled out of my ass.
My working methods tend to be intuitive and spontaneous. For example I have an exceedingly rough mental list of movies that I will have to cover for the book, or that I have already covered, but I don’t have a cold, hard list of stuff to write up.
It sure feels like every day I find a new movie perfect for the book that I am then obligated to see and write about. As of this writing, I have written up two hundred and thirty seven movies for The Fractured Mirror.
That’s a lot! Considering how much else I have going on in my life and my career, and the fact that I’m mostly a house husband and father these days on account of my wife making so much more money than I do, it’s borderline miraculous that I’ve managed to get so much done without The Fractured Mirror ever being anything close to my main focus.
If I were still intent on covering 300 movies for the book I’d be relatively close to the finish line.
Unfortunately for me but fortunately for people who buy the book I have decided to take something that was already difficult, exhausting and time and labor intensive, not to mention not particularly commercial, and make it even more difficult, even more exhausting, and even more time and labor-intensive, albeit not in a way that will make it even an iota more attractive to book buyers.
I’ve decided to write about 365 movies for The Fractured Mirror. That will make the book more exhaustive and complete but it also means WAY more work for me. Thankfully I love the work I’m doing on the book.
Honestly if I could take five months off to finish the book I would do so in a heartbeat. Unfortunately only about 20 percent of my career is devoted to writing the book, and that’s not the part that makes it possible for me to make anywhere from fifty to sixty percent of what I need to just barely get by.
I was hoping to put out the book in July or August but I’m bumping that back to October. I’m extremely happy with the rate at which I’m writing the book.
As patrons of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place are well aware, I’ve been churning out five to seven new pieces for The Fractured Mirror a week that I post to my site’s Patreon but even at that speed it’ll still take me two or three months to write up sixty-five additional movies.
You can follow my progress, and read ALL of the new pieces I’m churning out at a furious clip by pledging even a dollar to my site’s Patreon. It would mean the world to me and will give you a front row view at the making of what I think will be a wonderful and useful book.
It’s gonna be great, y’all! I promise that it will be worth the wait but you don’t have to wait at all if you do the right thing and pledge to the Patreon account that makes this site and all of its spin-offs, just barely possible.
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