The Geographic Cure is coming

Yeah, I got super bummed out by the short story collections, didn't I? And since nobody is gasping for them, I am working on the blog-to-book pipeline. 

Oh my giddy aunt. 

Problem one: It's ENORMOUS. I knew it was enormous but I didn't really know. Like it's 106K words and I'm about to start my first temp job, I think? That's like January to April of 2006. Just in a physical sense this is an unwieldy quantity of words that is difficult to divide up into logical volumes. I have to figure that out. 

Problem two: Actually problem two resolved itself. The problem was that it made me heartbroken to read about my excited hopeful trip to L.A. to become a tv writer, which you may have noticed I'm not and never have been, whoops. Well, I didn't know that then. I had hope! 

Hope in retrospect, oh no. Except, no, hope is the whole point of it. You have to have that excitement and hope and believe in the possibility of things and keep on getting up when you get knocked down. What are you going to do, just lie there in the dirt?

I always think I have been doing that, but no! I have not! I wrote a huge pile of books. I wrote a stack of short stories. I published things. I do all sorts of things constantly. Go go go! Work work work! 

Perception is a crazy thing, for real. 

Also if you're on the Titanic, it's going to sink no matter what you do, so you might as well have a good time. Just be aware of the lifeboat locations is all.

I'm editing as I go. Once I figure out how to make all the quotation marks curly instead of straight, and figure out how to break the thing into manageable volumes, I'll go ahead and put that out. I mean it's been out since 2006. But wouldn't it be nice to have a book in your hands? Or an ebook, where the entries are in the right order instead of backwards? I know!

Maybe year divisions are the way to go, come to think of it.

Anyway that's a good breakthrough in the retrospective sadness eradication department. It was so much fun being there. I was terrified and broke the whole time. But I kept on climbing mountains and doing bonkers jobs and going cool places and meeting amazing people. 

I just got accepted to the Bangor Authors' something or other in December. How cool is that? I already own a folding table. (They probably provide them.) I can have all these things out by then if I work like mad every hour of the day from now until then.

Seriously. 1.3 million words or whatever it was, that is just an unmanageable quantity of excitable prose. But it's delightful to read, truly, even if I say so myself. I mean I'm probably a harsher critic than anyone. At least I hope so.