Binding services don’t just punch holes into pages, tie them together with cheap thread, and then hand them over to you with a pat on the back and a perfunctory “Good luck!”; you can make a book cover and even laminate it.  Want to make your very first book signing event memorable for all those attending?  Invitations can be made using high quality printing services.  Want to make your first editions noteworthy collectibles?  Have the covers embossed, stamped, and dyed.

You don’t have to wait to get your collection of poems/stories or novel published, skip the big name publishers and go to a book binding service today.

A novel is easier to write, although you still want the same precision and need for each word you do in a short story. But when writing back story in a novel, you have more space to do what you want; you can take more liberties than you can when you only have the space for pure action. Therefore, determining what to include in a short story from a character’s past is especially tricky.

Images of memories can help to convey this.  We remember in snatches, flickers. Think of the last time you stayed up late. An image of your friend’s face flashes before you, then the story unfolds in more images: you’re sitting at that table in candlelight; you’re outside smoking trying to tell what’s the smoke and what’s your breath; the clouds unfurled like ribbon in the high sky; and because you know the story, it coheres and takes shape through more and more specific memories.

Memories can help flesh out a character. Before going to book binding services, editing your character’s memories could be the final step.

I had wanted to write a story in which the protagonist is able to visit his memories without precision, by conflating and undermining his own memories to create a better story, and I wanted to show that in the writing. I wanted to jump around between past and present selves, to allow the protagonist to go through the inner discourses which we all know when attempting to decide what to wear or how to love.

So now I’m reworking the whole thing, tightening it and making it the way I originally wanted it to be. Part of that has to do with a non-linear chronology, and I’ll implement different temporal perspectives by switching the narrative tense and viewpoint. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but when it is, I know it’ll be that much readier to send to book binding services.

Editing allows your story to grow and develop as you do. Most of the time, when you leave a story alone for a few months, you will go back to it and feel completely different about it.  This is a good technique. When you return, look out for possible cliches in your writing, which can be eradicated through an addition of detail and look for a complete arc — does the story present a conflict immediately and resolve it ultimately? If not you may consider changing the format so that it instantly engages the reader. Then let an audience read it again. If they like it, you know it’s ready for binding services.

If you’re ready for binding books it means you have deep, complex characters in your book. Characters that aren’t stereotypes. Characters that aren’t weak pushovers, who succumb to your protagonists’ will, but who challenge him to overcome obstacles and understand himself and his relation to society. This is easier said than done. You can go through your book and look at each character to determine whether or not they help or harm your protagonist. If they do neither, think about re-evaluating their place in the story.

You want to give each of your characters a specific life. You don’t want characters without passion, who simply occupy space in a story — they will come off as mechanisms to move the plot along. Likable characters should be confident but not arrogant, passionate and sure of themselves, but able to come together and accede to a role that is above them. Those whose egos get in the way make for good antagonists, and can help teach the protagonist a lesson with regard to how to submit to a higher will. But most people are middling, and so most characters are too. Making your characters new and incorporating elements of people you like and dislike into them will make your characters readier for book binding services.

Garden, fruit and wine imagery abound. Comparisons are made throughout, that “I sat down under his shadow with great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” This prose is so simple, so elegant and so true, so concerned with loss and death and life and love that it is impossible for it to drift into the sentimental or the obscene. This short book summarizes the love of every relationship, from courtship to consummation, so that if I were to write about love with the gravity and ethos this book presents — if I were able to write one line in such a way, I would find people lining up to read it hot from the book binding services.

It just goes to show that the best examples are the most tried and true.

When you then come back to it you may think, Of course! I should’ve been content with less. I should’ve made it all simpler; I need to master my craft before I can start going crazy and experimenting with different styles, because how am I going to attract an audience with a more difficult style when I should really be tailoring my style to as many people as possible.

So, after you revisit your work, you can gauge whether you should submit it to book binding services. You want it to be the best possible. The best American writers, from Twain to Hemingway have advocated a simple style. Especially, if this is your first book, I suggest doing the same.

I’d write like Hemingway. I’d write short declarative sentences. I’d write by placing the subject early in the sentence and making it act on the object. I’d do it over and over until it seeped into my consciousness.

Then sometimes I’d write like Faulkner since he (Faulkner) is so different from Hemingway in his long sprawling prolix sentences that are  full of adjectives and descriptors that allow the reader to get into the character’s head to better understand his psychology and why he thinks that way due to his surrounding culture and ambient cultural nature, which had been bred in that character like the cotton that grows from the Mississippi delta, implacable ever-lasting and inescapable.

I’d try other writers like Fitzgerald, who uses associations that fluttered through my head like butterflies, and which were easy to grasp and hold and love.

That was very good practice for a while. But when all was said and done, I simply wrote in my own style. And that became clearer and clearer as I edited my book before submitting it to binding services. This book is mine. It’s a product of my environment and my reading and my practice. And now that it’s returned from book binding services it’s easy to see.

There’s no rush. James Joyce published Dubliners when he was 32. I know that when it’s finally done I can submit it to book binding services and sell it at my own pace. Until then I’m going to work on it and work at writing and editing it and adding scenes and reading it to people and taking their criticism.  And so when it’s finally done, even if I have to work on it until I’m 42, every word will be just right and I’ll be able to go through and re-read it and not want to change anything. I hope. Maybe that’s unrealistic, because I’ll always want to change it, but in any case, I’m not ready for binding books. Book binding services will have to wait a little longer.