Welcome! (... and so what's here?)

Writing is the easy part.

I've always liked to write. I think this was probably a result of my avoidant personality organization. I wasn't good at thinking quickly, because during conversations or debates my mind's first priority was the sensing of self-esteem issues and the deployment of ego defenses. Since it was so easy for others to get the best of me in those situations, I developed the habit of keeping my mouth shut. I became known as a quiet person - a man of few words.

(This is just conversation. If you don't care to
read all this, the table of contents is on the right.)
Of course, I wasn't quiet at all. I had a lot to say, but chose to write it, rather than utter it. I was big on letters and memos, which often consisted of several pages.

The nice thing about writing is that you get to take as much time as you wish to think about what you want to say. As long as there's nobody looking over your shoulder, there's nothing threatening about it, so your mind can concentrate on the subject at hand. That usually prevents your jumping to conclusions or talking out your [expletive deleted], as it were. But even when not, you avoid the embarrassment of having that brought to your attention, since there's nobody there to challenge what you're saying. And usually the better side of you will see to it that those passages get fixed or expunged prior to publication.

That brings up another nice thing; you don't have to worry about saying stupid things that you can't take back. What goes out of your mouth stays out there forever. You can't ever really take it back or eat your words. But you can always highlight something you've written and touch the Delete key; then those words magically vanish as if they'd never been written, never to be seen or heard by anyone.

Because of all this, I had lots of experience writing things. Eventually, people began to tell me I was a pretty good writer; even one of my best friends, who has a Ph.D. in English Literature and teaches writing at USC in Los Angeles. He once told me that he admired the way I so often and so successfully married profundity and profanity, or virtuosity and vulgarity, in the same short sentence. I took that as a compliment.

Since I enjoyed writing and thought a little supplemental income would be nice, I decided to write a book. I had only the vaguest notions about its prospective market and how it might get published. In my naïveté I assumed that the writing of the manuscript was the important thing; that if it was good enough, the rest would all somehow come out in the wash.

Silly me!

I soon discovered I had a lot to learn. What was worse; the learning curve seemed rather steep. Although there are hundreds of websites and books of advice for wannabe authors, self-publishing authors and print-on-demand publishing, a lot of what I wanted to know was very difficult to find out. The information either couldn't be found at all, else became available in little pieces; a bit from here, and a bit from there. Pretty soon I had so many of those little pieces strewn all over my computer that I was having a hard time retrieving what I'd previously had such a hard time finding out in the first place!

Obviously, I needed to sort, organize and properly archive.

So what you'll find here are some notes to myself; my treasured hard-to-find stuff about self-publishing. I hope you and lots of others find it useful. Part of that is altruism. The other part is blatant exploitation, of course. I understand that search engines rank sites according to how much useful or interesting information they evidently provide, so if you've landed here by clicking through from a search engine, thank you for helping! I hope you'll find what you're looking for, and if not, feel free to leave a comment saying so. (Psst - a link would also be really nice.)

In trying to get attention, it doesn't hurt to stir up a little controversy now and then. I audit the news on NPR, PBS, BBC and sometimes ABC. I know it's actually infotainment, but sometimes I still get agitated. That's also a nice thing about having a blog. Alternatively, I could go downtown and rant on a soapbox on the corner of Washington and Fifth, but that would be called disturbing the peace, and maybe even get me on a watch list. Since I'm three-score and seven now, my views are now based mostly on practical experience and common sense. So, in these days of rampant intellectualism and political correctness, that pretty much guarantees that they'll be unconventional and controversial. Feel free to disagree; comments are invited. Who knows, you might even be able to convince me to change my mind.

Sometimes I just write other stuff, which is neither useful nor controversial. I wrote a pretty good poem once, and when I get around to it, I'm going to post it on here. The first time I saw the movie Billy Madison, I thought the only good part was when all the boys [expletive deleted] their pants. There was also this great line:

"What you have just said, is the most insanely idiotic thing I have ever heard. At no point, in your rambling incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul."

Enjoy the blog.

[-=glw=-]