I’ve already told you about my plans for the Secret Schramm Project, and I also am pretty sure I told you I wanted to have it done by July. Obviously, that didn’t work out, given everything else I’ve done (I got on an improv team! I went to Comic-Con! I got my brother all married! I spent a week away from the Internet in Wisconsin!), but work continues nevertheless. I’m proud to say that after a lot of editing and tweaking and re-typing, I have finally gotten all of the stories I’ll be including in the book into an actual epub file using an actual epub editor (I’m using Sigil), so the content is more or less locked at this point. That’s a pretty big deal — if I wanted to sell the book, with no bells or whistles on it, I could do it today.

But let’s be honest, bells and whistles are the fun part. So now my goal is to add all of that stuff I told you about — some art to go in between the chapters, some extra pieces by people who aren’t named Mike Schramm, and some other fun things I love about books and have always wanted to create for one of mine.

Art is the first concern; I had a talk with an actual, for-real artist who didn’t know me well enough to be offended the other week, and asked about just how much money she expected to make for a commissioned drawing. Unfortunately, the figure she quoted me was way higher than I expected, and given that I was planning to ask some artists that I really admire to make work for me for much cheaper (and don’t want to offend them), the bottom line is that I just can’t afford to commission all of the artwork I’d need. So my new plan is to find some art that fits my pieces, and then ask nicely if I can use it for the book. The issue, of course, is that this is a book for sale, so obviously I don’t want to just Google some work and stick it in without compensation. But hopefully I will find some things that fit, and then maybe ask an artist I know well (very nicely) to do an original cover for me, and then hopefully the book will be a little more than just text.

I’m going to ask a few people to write things, and those should be pretty easy to slot in. I have a few ideas, as I said before, for more “book-y” things to include, so I will work on those and they should be pretty fun.

And of course I have settled on a title: “The Shape of Teeth.” Originally I was aiming to use a title of one of the stories (so I could do the traditional “… And Other Stories by Mike Schramm,” which I really like), but as I was going through them and editing them, I found this phrase which I not only liked the sound of, but which I think really fits the wacky theme that threads through all of this work. I like the idea of not teeth themselves (which would mean real danger), but the shape of teeth — something that hints at actual physical danger, but might end up being all in your mind anyway. Noone but me will probably ever get all of that out of the title, even after reading through the whole book, but just like everything else in this project, I put it in there just for me anyway.

I hope this all sounds interesting enough to you all that you’re excited to buy the book when it comes out. At this point, I’m probably aiming for mid to late September, but if it bleeds into October, that’s fine anyway. Fall is my favorite time of year, and it seems like a great time for magic, for stories, for huddling around a campfire in the dark woods and sharing some crazy, funny, or touching things you’ve heard lately. That’s what I hope this ends up being — I’d love to have been able to make a real book, something I could sell in a leather-bound edition that smells like creamy paper, with a built-in ribbon bookmark and an embossed title page. But instead, I’m crafting this ebook file for you, and my goal is to make it the most hand-crafted and pored-over digital document you’ve ever had the pleasure of paying a few bucks for. So stay tuned; more news soon.