The story of the story,
or how our tumblrs led to a book deal
In April 2008, I started a tumblr.
It’s perfect for you, Alex said. Lazy, but present.
Alex is a cross between Valmont, Svengali and the Wizard of Oz. Craft of Valmont, babes of Svengali and paradoxical powers of the Wizard. He promised I’d achieve enormous personal growth if I wrote publicly and explicitly about my life.
I didn’t do that.
Instead, I collected links to essays I’d written for ThisRecording and Big Think and Bright Wall Dark Room. I spied on celebrities, taught exchange students, impersonated Stella Adler and took an awful lot of pictures of my dogs.
I made friends.
Melanyouth reblogged an image from the extraordinary Benjamin Hilts. Ben, who is an illustrator and a painter, commented on my posts. I appreciated that he appreciated my appreciation for Cher. We swapped work.
I split my tumblr in two. The second half is floating in the ether like a rogue satellite.
Elvira visited from Italy, and I hosted a meetup. Afterwards, we passed Terry Richardson taking his mutt to poop on the Bowery. He slipped into his building before we could say hello.
I didn’t sleep. A lot. It was both kinds of insomnia: trouble falling asleep and trouble staying asleep. In my hours of introspecting, I realized I’m descended from a rest-challenged family. My three older brothers don’t sleep, nor does our father who is older than all of us. I was doomed.
Nighttime is a privilege when you’re little. It’s something you covet and squirrel away for stories, read and spoken, and adventures, while your parents believe you are resting. So I wrote a story to remind myself of all the good things that happen at night: nocturnal animals and plants and jobs and hobbies.
Elvira read the tale and loved it.
Ben read the story, and it resonated: he had created a series of insomnia paintings from the febrile perspective of long hours of wakefulness. We were a sub-species, I understood, a group of sleep-challenged people who found something enjoyable about the dark.
Ben and his phenomenally gifted younger brother Sean surprised me with some sketches. They created Mr. Insomniac exactly as he should be, a hand drawn patriarch with one foot in fairy tales and another in postmodernity. Nightly Insomniac is a benevolent, encouraging, untraditional dad — a version of the Hiltses’ father (and coincidentally, of mine, too).
We decided to collect the text and sketches and make a book. While Ben and Sean collaborated on a dummy, we started a children’s books blog and a secret Insomniacs tumblr, collecting places and sounds we linked with the characters.
Jen Yoga showed the sketches to Jen Books, an editor, who liked them. Jen Books found us an agent.
If all this sounds like it happened overnight – it didn’t. The Brothers Hilts were charged with imagining an entire world in 32 pages. And I had to split the over-long story in two. I grumbled through revisions. Every day for three weeks, I was consumed by crankiness, which was really anxiety.
As Nick Cave sings, Some things we plan. We sit and we invent and we plot and cook up. Others are works of inspiration, of poetry. The Insomniacs’ story had arrived in my imagination as unbidden as a spaceship; revising it was like dismantling and rebuilding a brand new alien craft. I quailed, then managed in the fourth week.
When we were finished, we were lucky to find a group of people who loved the story of a nocturnal family as much as the Brothers Hilts and I do. The agent found us a book deal with Penguin Putnam Books.
Now, you probably know that old school publishing moves less fleetly than its digital counterpart. Our little book has been added to the queue of texts being readied to print and launch. So, sometime, either next year or by 2012 (literally, not Doomsday-metaphorically), our picture book The Insomniacs will arrive in bookstores.
Tumblr is this book’s breeding ground and its community, so we’re excited to tell you and keep you posted!
Meanwhile, for a closer look, check out the Brothers Hilts’ site.
We’re over the moon :) A book!
Karina x
