Robert Shea with a stack of pages from a novel manuscript. Photo provided by Mike Shea.
The Record North Shore, a Chicago area news site that covers the city's suburbs, has published a well written article on the new Robert Shea anthology, Every Day is a GOOD Day, put out by Hilaritas Press.
While I knew some of the information in the article written by Samuel Lisec, there were also some scoops. The photo, above, was one I hadn't seen before. And the article opens with an anecdote new to me:
One of Mike Shea’s favorite memories of his late father came from watching him write.
Robert Shea — the co-author of the popular series with a cult-following “Illuminatus!” and author of historical novels like “Shike” and “All Things Are Light” — drafted his works on typewriters before he purchased an early Apple IIe computer and backed up all his chapters on floppy disks, Mike recalled.
Once he completed a book, Shea would hand feed each page into a letter-quality printer over the course of two weeks to eventually produce a 10-inch stack of papers he could package and mail from his family’s home in Glencoe to his editor in New York.
“I asked him, ‘God, isn’t this killing you?’” Mike said of his father’s printing process. “He said ‘No, this is the best part. This is the part where I take all of this stuff that’s been sitting in a computer, that doesn’t exist anywhere, and now I’m making it real, I’m physically making it real.’”'
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