Happy Birthday to Me

Sort of. My wife's friend passed from cancer last night. I tried to get a replacement for my lost driver's license and the DMV is closed Mondays. My wife had a sorority meeting she actually couldn't miss, so I was on bedtime patrol.

And sorry about last night's longwinded blog. I suffer these bouts of doubt and analysis paralysis with my book. The one comfort I have is that most authors of merit seem to suffer the same. The fact that I lack the talent to be an author of merit occasionally becomes evident.

The self-publishing thing is way ahead of the game for me, it's true. Being disenchanted with my book, it's natural to fixate on something else, like the publishing process and the heads-they-win/tails-I-lose scenarios of every option.

The main appeal to self publication for me is control over the jacket design and typesetting. It's not vanity, it's what I do for a living. Naturally, if I can keep control over things I know I can generally outdo the trade at, it's a temptation. Not that the faux cover I created for my last blog is indicative. It was something I tossed off for the blog.

Some of the bad advice I'd include in that book, if I wrote it, was including vulgar or scatalogical words in your title. I bought 'For Fucks Sake' out of curiousity, but I couldn't get past 20 pages of it. Carlton Mellick has made a business out of (apparently self-published) books with titles like 'The Baby Jesus Butt Plug: A Fairy Tale,' and 'Razor Wire Public Hair.' He comes out with several of these gems a year, and they are probably both self published and rough around the edges.

Remember punk rock? The Dead Kennedys did a good job, were basically a loud version of Tom Lehrer, but stand out mainly because their fellow punk bands were mostly garbage. So maybe I'm wrong about Mellick and he's the witty, satiric voice of the underground, but prove it.

Another item might be to have a few drinks and blog instead of working on your manuscript. I also envisioned chapters such as 'offering a downloadable PDF, don't do it,' and a subsequent chapter on 'the necessity of offering a downloadable PDF.' And of course part of the joke would be to show a POD vendor as the publisher of record in a book that warns against letting a POD vendor show as your publisher of record.

But someone else has probably told the joke better, and in any case, one of my chapters for the book I made that cover for would be 'Don't give the ideas away free on a blog,' which is what I'm doing right now.

I am periodically beset with a number of doubts and delusions about my novel. But I haven't given up, and the only Nike gear I'd be interested in might be a pair of 13D sneakers because I fouled my New Balances mowing in them, and it won't be sandal weather forever. But Nike tends to make such narrow shoes. I've owned a pair or two that worked out, but they've remained a little too-true to the days when you had to find a VW microbus at a track meat to get a pair.

Even if I dropped 100 lbs, as delighted as my cardiologist would be, my feet would still not fit a skinny running shoe. I think the last pair I was happy with was the Bruce Smith model that Dennis Hopper sniffed for money. Found a pair in my size at a discount store as a discontinued/end-lot thing.