Me, Myself, and this blog

I’m in SF for a few days and a round of meetings. In the downtime here I’m playing around with a new theme for this site so please excuse any weirdness. I expect things to be a little bumpy while I sort through, but much better once I get it all set up.

Now that I’ve figured out how to do this publishing thing I’m moving full steam on an actual written to be published book. What I mean is the content for it isn’t recycled from blog posts. Not that there is anything wrong with that of course, but this stuff is being written with book in mind the whole time. I’m going to actually print this one as well. It’s a collection of non-fiction and autobiographical stories, which maybe is easy mode, but it’s getting me in the habit of writing longer form and I’m really digging it.

That said, while a paperback blog was easy to sort because it was just every worthwhile blogpost from one date to another, this is challenging me a little because it’s stories spanning my whole life. Some are about business, some about friends, some about music, some about travel, etc etc etc which leads me to the following confusion – how to sort them. Chronologically? Topical? This gets especially important if it ends up being too much for one book. I’m not trying to write my autobiography or anything, just recant some stories I think are worth telling. I’ve never been a fan of neat little boxes, and comps I put out while running Toybox were evident of that – screaming metal right next to poppy emo. But I did that for me because it was all stuff I liked, and I guess I’m not sure if I’m writing this for me or for whoever reads it? Well, I mean, I’m writing it for me, but am I also publishing it for me or for someone else. And if it’s for someone else would they prefer to read all the stories from highschool at once – be they nerdy, emo, or punk rock? Or should I stick anything and everything relating to music in one regardless of when it took place?

The other option, which I’m leaning towards and might be obvious is to scrap all organization and just put a collection of stories together until it’s enough for the book then publish it, and if there are more stories then do the same with another book. I kinda figure it’s about me, and all of these pieces which don’t always have to fit together nicely are there so why should I try to have some nice complete puzzle for the book. Is that dumb? I don’t know. I mean, I guess by doing that I eliminate the option for someone to pick it up because they are interested in that specific topic but maybe I don’t mind that. I dunno. What do you think?

I started writing things online occasionally in the late 90’s, and pretty regularly by the 2000’s or whatever we’re calling them. Especially after the Elian Gonzolaz thing. By 2003 I’d written a hell of a lot and I thought it would be a good idea to collect some of those individual blog posts into a book and publish it. I spent weeks digging through random archives from various publishing platforms and finally got a document together that I thought would be good to print. I titled it “A Paperback Blog” because I thought I was being so very clever. Then I started looking around at the options and the costs and got frustrated and gave up. I forgot all about it until a few weeks ago when I found that final collected file.

I thought about it for a while, about the advice I’d gotten from my friend Wil who whole heartedly recommended lulu.com and about this post by Seth Godin that Jason sent me. I thought about the feedback I’d gotten from this post where I contemplated writing a book. After rereading the archive file I decided what the hell, and went ahead and published it as an ebook.

Officially, as of mere minutes ago, you can download it for free from my lulu store. Yes, 6 years after the fact, “A Paperback Blog” is now available in digital only format. Har har har.

This should be exciting, but it’s more like embarrassing. Before you take that plunge I just want it to be perfectly clear this is a collection of things I wrote many years ago that hasn’t been touched since. For the 3 of your who have been reading my blog that whole time these will be familiar but for others they will be new. I haven’t messed with them so ideally the things I wrote back in 2001 still reflect how I thought ant felt back in 2001. No 2009 spin has been put on them so I sound very much like the annoying 20-something I was when I wrote them. Trust me, this is both a good and bad thing.

Mostly this is a test run, I wanted to see how easy it was to do this and the biggest problems I had were with Word. I’ve got a few other writing projects that I’m hoping will lead down this path as well and I’ll keep you posted as those progress. In the meantime, enjoy the old stuff.

Link once again: A Paperback Blog

Late night self analysis. Go!

I’ve never had a good response to the question “what do you do?” and have always felt that whatever I said would be either too modest and not actually explain anything, or too boastful and I’d feel like a douche. I’ve spent many years trying to brush off the question by saying simply “I’m a publisher” or “I’m a blogger” or if pushed a bit more will say “I do lots of things online with blogs and stuff.” But really that doesn’t describe anything and usually leaves people with more questions than answers. Part of the problem is I have a really hard time talking about myself, but another piece is I know people like neat little boxes with labels and I could never find one that worked for me. I even make a joke about this on the front page of my website even.

Another problem is that it changes, sometimes a lot. My profession is generally linked to my interests at any given time, and even when I try to avoid it I end up mashing them together some how. So as I get bored of one thing and interested in another I end up taking that with me back to whatever project(s) are on my plate at the time.

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about this and trying to be very honest with myself about what it is exactly that I do. I know what I’ve done, I know what I like doing and what I don’t like doing, and I know what I’d like to do more of. Those things all kind of shape what I’m doing at any given time, though they probably should shape it more than I allow them too. So I thought I’d try to break this out a little bit here and see what kind of shape I can make out of it. Maybe this will be interesting to you too.

As I mentioned in my earlier post today I’ve been writing a ton the last few days and making a decent dent into some projects I’ve just been day dreaming about for a while. One barrier I’ve been obsessing about but recently just decided to ignore and figure out later is how things fit together and what the overall message is.

I felt that I needed to know that before I got started.

I don’t know why that fool piece of advice was stuck in my head, because that’s actually the complete opposite of how I usually write. And by write I mean sort out what I’m thinking. Writing as always been my own form of self therapy and when something is on my mind the best way I’ve been able to sort it out and get my thoughts in order is to just start writing about it. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than 3-4 years you’ve seen that in action on countless occasions. But I look at those as one off rants even when they are just a piece of a bigger situation.

I think because these other writing projects are much larger I felt that I needed a clear roadmap so I’d know where to head but I think that was what was keeping me from getting started. I’ve tried to put that out of my head and just start writing and let it shape it self as it might. I had a stupid idea that I’d just write the whole thing and be done with it but in reality I’m going to write tons, write more, rewite a bunch, chop out a bunch and then see what is the common thread through it all.

That elusive common thread is what I always seem to be hunting for. I was talking to a friend tonight about “experience” in the context of the job market and when your experience is something specific, like doing a particular job for X years, that is easy to present to others. But when you “experience” is lots of “experience” in many areas it gets much harder to explain, but also more valuable to people who understand what that really means. With this writing I want it to be X years of a specific thing, but more likely it’s lots of loosely tied together things that are joined by a common thread that I just haven’t isolated yet.

Yeah, I’m sure that makes no sense to you at all. Sorry!