Thursday, November 11, 2004
 for the last two weeks ive been trying to compile a book. dont get your hopes up, but let me tell you the story.
theres good news and bad news to having fans. the good news is obvious: free pussy, buckets of money, daily praise and admiration, job offers up the ying yang.
bad news is people want you to do things. like write books. like read their blog posts. like give you advice. like bang their virgin sisters. like be their best friend.
dont think im complaining. the good stuff totally outweighs the bad stuff. and the bad stuff really isnt all that bad.
unless it involves me going back and re-reading my old shit.
i dont know what it is, but i have a Very hard time reading through my archives.
all i see when i go through there are mistakes. things i could have said different. words that came out awkward. embarrassing spelling and grammar mistakes.
sometimes i will laugh at a joke that i forgot about, but mostly i look at my past the same way that danielle looks at her present: with disgust.
she looks in the mirror and sees a fat chick.
i look in my archives and i see a hack blogger. not even a writer. a typer.
but i have fans like chad from chokey chicken who gave me $4 via paypal yesterday. who is on my ass to come out with a new book of old blog posts and i wish you people understood that i really hate going back in time.
which might explain why i can be so prolific in the present.
so over the last two weeks ive been going through the archives. i knew that i wanted to have something done by Veterans Day so i could send it out to whoever is going to publish it and have it available sorta near Thanksgiving so people could order it and hopefully have it around Christmas.
something happened the other day.
i started reading some old blog posts that i actually liked.
then i started reading more that i liked.
it added up to over 220 pages, and i hadnt even gotten any posts from 2004.
i was thrilled. but each day that i knew that i was supposed to go to the huge word doc full of posts i resisted. i procrastinated. i hesitated. what if i was just buzzed the day before and those posts werent really good enough to put on paper?
yesterday i was supposed to go to the xbi doctor. the doc fucked up and gave me the wrong appointment. so i had a whole day to go over the book.
it took 2 hours just to spell check the mother, cuz as you know, i dont do a lot of spell checking.
then i re-arranged posts and took a lot of dates out. then i chopped out any post that wasnt solid from top to bottom. i was looking for great beginings great middles and great endings. every post had to be hot.
before lunch the book was down to 140 pages. the goal was to make a good tight meaty book of 175 pages.
then the debate was should i have only 2002-2003 posts and make a new book next year of 2004 posts - or should i include the best of 2004 posts and chop out the weaker 2002-2003 posts?
i decided that even though the book will be called How To Blog inspired from a 2004 post, there would only be a few stories from this year.
it's nice to have a complete book pre-written and waiting in your archives.
so last night i put the title page and the dedication page and tonight i will go over it one last time and make a cover and tomorrow morning i will send it off to CafePress who do my tshirts and other crap and sent me a commission check in a timely manner which to me means that theyre legit.
and even though it irritating to have chokey on my ass, in the end it's good because it gets me moving and producing something. and maybe that something could be sold to a real publisher somewhere who is looking for a book about blogging written by someone who posts several times a day and could easilly produce two 250 page blooks if he needed to.
of course typing this and posting it will jinx it and we'll never see this new book, but whatev.
sk smith + layne + virginia
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