Gotta share this, its unique, astounding, and probably going to get underrated.

[Tiffany Dowell]

Ok, so, I'm actually pretty excited about this. Here I am getting stuck on the formatting of You, This Is Me...Over?, which I'm currently reading, and I realize, wow, I feel like an idiot now.

I realized what the book DESIGNER did. THIS is a new one, I promise. You are not going to see this coming, unless you also know enough about the art world (sculptures, paintings, etc., an example of people thinking that roman statues of people missing half their arms are are incomplete, etc.)

The first part of my review, because, well, I want to get out ahead of the same "mud" I got stuck in because there was NO WAY to see it coming.

Right away, in the Preface, the author tells us that he is taking you through his most inner thoughts and feelings without regard for how it will make him look, and/or affect his image. That's a direct quote, and it's a particularly important one for the reader to understand. Not because you are about to read a raw, unfiltered, laid bare, deep lens into the author's life, experiences, mind, heart, soul, and spirit. Yes, that is significant. But there's another reason that it's essential as well, a more technical one.

If you go to the copyright page, you'll see that Mr. Dooley authored the book in 2022, the images are by him, and something else. You'll see “Book design by Jana Rade.” This is going to be easy to miss, because this book is going to do something that you have probably never seen before.

Notice that that did not say edited by. It did not say formatted by. It very specifically said designed by. The book has not misspoken. Think about it. When have you ever heard of a book being designed. Cars are designed, clothes are designed. Not books. Not until now.

You are going to expect normal design. Numbered chapters. Page numbers. Part one and part two and so on and so forth. You are going to expect normal formatting. This is a mistake in thinking on your part, dear reader, not the authors, or the book designers, and here's why. Think of the content of this book, what the author writes, as the meat of the book. It is his most inner thoughts and feelings, raw, unfiltered, unedited, laid bare (no author publishes a rough pre-draft, right? We don't want those “laid bare”, that might be wrong or embarrassing), of his life, experiences, mind, heart, soul and spirit. In You, This Is Me… Over?, you need to think of the formatting as the bones of the book, the bones of the deeper meaning, designed that way so that even down to the formatting, the raw, unedited, unfiltered point is reinforced. This is not an editing error; it's not a mistake. It's a form of what we call style in writing, but for this book, it's not style, it's meaning.

I could be wrong, but here's the thing. When I was younger, I wrote, privately, hoarding my writing like a dragon over an egg, because it was too personal for me, never sharing it. The only difference between the author's book and the one book I have ever written, and have never shared, is this. My book is formatted the exact same way, only his book flips pages every time you switch a heading, and mine doesn't have pages at all, it's just one large, run on mess. The reason mine is a large run on mess is because I have no intention of sharing it, so it can be.

The reason his is a page flipping formatting mess to some people is because the formatting itself is reinforcing that this is going to be a messy read. I'm not talking about the technicalities here; I'm talking about the heart and soul of it. When it comes down to it, for this book, this “breaks the rules format” is actually cleaner, simpler, less confusing, more streamlined, and works better for this book that your fiction novel way of doing it is.

This is raw, just like the formatting is raw. This is not “according to the rules”, just like the content of his inner world is not according to the rules. Some literary professor Nazi somewhere is going to try to tell Clinton Beaudel Dooley that this is wrong, he needs to format his book, he needs to follow the rules. As a reviewer, I am going to say that in my opinion, that literary professor 'threw the baby out with the bathwater' and missed the most meaningful point.

Some of the most famous and renowned painters' works are considered a mess to the untrained eye. In all other forms of art, you cannot appreciate art without an appreciation of that messiness. As a matter of fact, if you think like that, you're in the out crowd, like the second-grader trying to tell the Yale graduate “how it's done” about things that the second-grader doesn't have the faintest understanding of. Some say that “messy art” can be a way to express life's messiness, and that learning to listen to and express that messiness can lead to harmony and wellbeing. Embracing messy art helps people learn to deal with mistakes and imperfection in a healthy way, and in turn leads to creativity and imagination. The point of art is not to convey a message, but to elicit emotion and “move” us in some way.

That is what I think happened here. Jana Rade designed the book, when books are not designed, but art is, not to convey a message, which is what books do, but to deepen that message into eliciting emotion and “move” the reader. In short, Jana metaphorically “painted” the book using the format. That's a very, very, very clever girl, and it gives you, dear reader, something completely new, beautiful, meaningful, and unique. So, in short, if you want to be the stuffy literature Nazi who misses the forest for the trees, feel free. If you want to take this work in like a sunset, the way that it was meant to be, DON'T! (The caps are there to make a point, they're not a typo or a mistake.) No, we can't expect the average, uncultured reader to be able to appreciate this, but in some circles, You, This Is Me... Over?, is perfect. Please don't throw the power of the book away for semantics, that would be a tragedy.

[Tiffany Dowell]

If this guy had picked any other book designer for this specific book, he would have lost something significant.

[Barar Zaki]

I'm well amazed. The writer opinion is highly semantics. Highly philosophical and some I feel practical. The point that went for me is:

Embracing messy art helps people learn to deal with mistakes and imperfection in a healthy way, and in turn leads to creativity and imagination. The point of art is not to convey a message, but to elicit emotion and “move” us in some way

. I believe that creativity has no boundaries, limitations and practicalities to it. And it flows of the sea of emotions and inspiration.

[Tiffany Dowell]

To clarify, I couldn't understand the format of the book so I went looking on how to touch on this in the review, and came up with how the art world thinks of sculpture and painting because once I realized what the book was doing, I needed a way to explain why what Jana did is releveant in the book. The book itself doesn't talk about art, I just realized what must have been the process here because it's the only thing that makes sense.

[Barar Zaki]

Just using your understanding to make an opinion to touch on the message you have about the book, is that so?