My book is done! Check it out here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/31228.

It is called Places I’ve Been: From Amsterdam to Alaska in Pictures. (Yeah, I know, lame title.) It’s a 10x8 book, hardcover or softcover, 94 pages, and it’s all color heavyweight coated stock. I threw in a lot of photos from Amsterdam and Alaska, plus Hawaii, Las Vegas, Berlin, New York, the deserts of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, and a few other odds and ends. There’s also a bit of text here and there under or next to photos, but nothing major. It’s extremely expensive at $29.99 softcover or $37.50 hardcover, but I don’t expect many people to buy this one. But check out the preview, and let me know what you think.

Creating the book on blurb.com was a lot of fun, although it ran slower than hell on my Mac Mini. The program has some fancy templates, and you drag in your stuff and make a book. It’s more advanced than what I do on lulu, but the same basic concept. I’m excited to see the final product, although it will probably get here after the holidays.

I was thinking of doing my big year-end, weird crap I read that you should check out list, maybe before the holiday so you can burn off those stray Amazon gift certificates that seem to collect over xmas. I will of course mention things out in 2007 you should preorder and things out now you might enjoy (oh wait, that one isn’t on Amazon.) Sort of a ghost of Christmas past/future thing. I’ll work on that when I have time to dig through the list of what I’ve read in 2006.

Oh, and I got some steaks from my mom yesterday via UPS, which meant dry ice. FUN!

I put Past Masters Vol 2 on shuffle yesterday and now I have “Hey Jude” stuck in my head. I also listened to the song “Rain” 58 times, and I am convinced that the Beatles were real, real, real, real high.

There is a good article about John Sheppard in Time Out Chicago. Go read it.

I was talking to Vijay Prozac the other night and he asked about what my current projects were. And it’s a hard question to answer, because I have like 20 things up on blocks and half assembled, like Trans Ams in a redneck’s front yard. So I thought it would be fun to make a list:

• Untitled photo book (Temporarily titled “Places I’ve Been”) - a maybe 100 page glossy coffeetable book that is tons of photos from various trips I’ve taken in the last six years. It has taken forever because a) the BookSmart software is painfully slow on my Mac and b) it’s very hard to look at a thousand photos and find the best six. This book will be publically available from blurb.com, but it will be like $40-$50 so I expect nobody to buy it. But if I owe you a birthday gift over the next year or two, this is what you might get.
• Book #3 (at one time titled “Zombie Fever!”) - This was an absurdist book about a zombie epidemic, written at a time when I thought it was funny to write a zombie book. The zombie thing has been so thoroughly driven into the ground in the last couple of years (spearheaded by that total piece of shit Romero film last year) that I took out all of the zombie stuff and started over. It’s now a very Apocalypse Now-oriented (which of my books isn’t) story about a guy trying to assassinate a Columbian drug kingpin in Las Vegas who is obsessed with Scarface and Carl’s Jr. and stockpiling plutonium, but meanwhile an alien invasion is about to happen, and a bunch of other stuff. There are one or two little pieces of The Device, a book that was part of Rumored to Exist, and there are some pieces of Rumored that didn’t make it into the final draft. I am almost a third done with it, but it’s going slow.
• Tenth Anniversary book of this journal - I’ve been thinking about it a lot. On 1/1/07 I will start throwing crap against a wall to see what sticks. Then I’ll start going through the journal and see what I want to keep. (The crap part is just a side hobby of mine.)
• Memoir Book - I have a bunch of notes on a memoir book I want to write. I bet David Sedaris is really shitting himself about now, right?
• Six Year Plan - I still have this pile of stories about Bloomington I want to somehow shore up into a readable book. It probably won’t happen anytime soon, even though I have 100,000 words invested into it.
• Air in the Paragraph Line #12 - Yes, that will happen sometime in 07.
• Fake self-help book - I have like two or three perfect chapters, and someday I will finish it. Maybe I will do a glossy color book in one of those odd pocket sizes with glossy pictures of business people shaking hands or whatever. I also have this vague idea to do one of those half-size books in calendar form, with 365 days of negative and pessimistic thoughts on it, i.e. “December 15 - Remember that for every project that you worked on that failed, the common denominator was that you were somehow involved.”
• Nonfiction book containing Larry Falli’s theories on earwax and clown makeup - Someday this masterwork will be completed.

Okay, my half-hour of UV light is done. Time to take a shower and go off to the slaughterhouse.

I’ve been sick since about Friday or so. It’s the usual December 0% humidity, everyone else is sick sort of thing that gets me every year. Vitamins have kept it semi-controllable, but I wish I could sleep 20 hours a night until it went away. And that doesn’t jive with getting any work done, or with my whole blue light/wake earlier plan, which is largely derailed now. (Although I’m trying to get a little artificial sun in as we speak.)

I did finish reading that Edward Bunker book Education of a Felon. I liked it a lot, aside from the fact that there’s an abrupt ending, and the two halves of the book are very lopsided. I was at the 50% mark, thinking the book was about over, and then the second half went by much faster. It’s one of those “why won’t he learn his lesson” things, and it’s not the typical two strikes and then a home run that you see in almost all formulaic writing. While the book started with this Bukowski-like description of old timey Los Angeles, he ended up in this fierce depiction of prison life and violence. And in the late 60s/early 70s, the shit really hit the fan as race relations became a full-on war within the walls of San Quentin and other big prisons. Part of this pissed me off, the whole black panthers/Angela Davis agenda, which was basically to kill whitey. Anyway, showing another point of view for that made it interesting.

And the weirdest coincidence was when he was on the lam and left California in an old car, intending to drive to New York and check out some jazz clubs or whatever. On his way in the freezing winter, his car died in… South Bend, Indiana. This is like in Kerouac’s On the Road there’s a reference in there somewhere that he was on a Greyhound bus and they stopped in South Bend. Every time I re-read that book (which is maybe once a year), I always stop and laugh at that point.

I’m reading Mikal Gilmore’s rock essay book Night Beat now. What’s weird is that I totally don’t remember buying it. I have an old copy (it may be out of print) and it has no jacket, so it anonymously hid on my shelves for maybe a year or so. Or maybe someone gave it to me, I don’t know. I was looking for another book the other day and flipped it open and read a page and thought it looked pretty damn cool, so I’m on that. And what’s weirder is that I didn’t realize until halfway through the introduction (and weirder still, I never read introductions, because after you write a few, you realize they are bullshit) I found out that his older brother was Gary Gilmore, aka the guy executed by firing squad in Utah in 1976. I guess he (Mikal) wrote a book about that (there’s also Norman Mailer’s hugely successful The Executioner’s Song) so I’ll have to check that out.

Reading a book of essays is a good warmup for thinking about taking ten years of journal and compressing it into a couple hundred pages of book. The first question: sequential, or by topic? Maybe I will read everything and the only topics will be “out of town” and “the weather today”. Maybe it’s better to have things date-ordered because of references and whatnot. The next obvious question: do you edit the entries? When I did the annotated Rumored to Exist, I did not remove a single typo - I just annotated the mistakes. A certain zine editor I know (think small fonts) was absolutely flabbergasted that I would not make the changes. But to me, that was the past, and I could make a second edition with the corrections, but the purpose was to annotate the first edition. The Dead Sea Scrolls have not been copyedited or spellchecked for the same reason. On the other hand, the second edition of Summer Rain did have mistakes fixed. I didn’t do much more than minor copyedit changes, because I was happy with the story and I was mostly just re-setting the book into a new format at a different printer.

What’s between the two? Gilmore took a bunch of old essays he wrote for Rolling Stone and a scad of other papers and magazines, and basically re-poured them, thinking about them more, adding strength, adding content that makes it more purposeful. It’s like restoring a ‘47 Chevy to look just like a ‘47 Chevy, but maybe it’s got an electronic ignition not invented until the 70s, and there’s resin glue or fiberglass or whatever in the structure that wasn’t around, either. This thought makes me want to cut apart all of the entries, try to take the ones that worked best or mattered the most to me, and then edit or extend them until they are great. And yeah, that isn’t a compilation, like a greatest hits album, so maybe it goes against the spirit, but it’s also a hell of a lot better of a product.

Or I won’t do shit and just fester about this for months. Who knows. I do know I have finished all of my xmas shopping except Sarah. I keep threatening to get her either a Fry Daddy or a Playstation 3, but in reality, I need to think of something better.

Okay, time to sudafed up and read this book.

Okay, I have decided (until I possibly flip-flop a month from now) that I will be doing a ten-year anniversary book for this journal. I’ll start on it after the new year. I don’t think I want to do it in a chronological order, though. I’m thinking about grouping things vaguely by topic or something. And I’ll add in a few “why I did this” essays to break up the monotony. It will be on lulu, and I will try to make it as cheap as possible, although I don’t forsee selling more than like five copies. Anyway, if you have any favorite entries from over the years, or have any other ideas on what I should include, let me know.

An excellent review of Air in the Paragraph Line is located at http://www.anus.com/zine/books/. Don’t worry about the URL, it is not a porn site or anything. The disclaimer I will add is that it was written by a contributor. But I agree with what he says, and I’ll take any publicity I can get.

Speaking of which, this journal anniversary reminded me that this year is the decade anniversary of Air in the Paragraph Line. I wish I would have thought of this earlier and somehow hyped this up. Most blogs and web sites are old geezers when they reach the one year mark, but I’ve been doing the zine since before a lot of people even knew there was an internet. Maybe I will send out a press release or something. And an email from John Sheppard had me thinking about the next themed issue. Maybe it will be another component of life, like death, love, hate, sex, food, something. I’m not sure at this point. I am also vaguely wishing I would have gone ISBN/Barcode/distro with this one. It’s a lot like wondering what you’re going to bet on the superbowl before the season begins.

The all-consuming thing for this week has been Blurb, a service where you can put together glossy color books. I guess lulu lets you do this too, but Blurb has a wizard program you download that has templates you stuff with photos to make very pro looking books. So I’m messing with a travel book. It will be prohibitively expensive, maybe $30-40 hardcover, but I plan on just printing one or two for myself, and then putting it out there in case anyone else wants one. I wish I would have thought of this a month ago; I would have used it to make xmas gifts.

Okay, time for lunch.

As of yesterday, issue #11 of Air in the Paragraph Line outsold issue #10. It’s also the best-selling of my lulu books, except for the annotated version of Rumored to Exist. I still wish I could find some scheme to move more copies. I’ve been hearing good things from the first copies that went to contributors, too. I’m still only about 25% on my way to breaking even, but I’m just glad it’s selling copies. (I also doubled the number of copies sold of The Necrokonicon, which isn’t that big of a deal, because it went from 2 to 4.)

I am still working on this getting up earlier thing, with this light box thing, but I’ve still been very out of sync. I have slept maybe two hours a night less, plus woke about an hour earlier, which normally would be pure chaos. With a half-hour of the light at 50%, it makes it somewhat bearable, but by the time I get home at night, I’m demolished. I think a lot of it has to do with breakfast, which I never eat. When I get to work at ten, it’s not hard to coast to lunch at noon. When I wake up six hours before lunch, it’s a catastrophe. So maybe I need to invest in some Count Chocula and a gallon of milk.

The other thing I’ve noticed sofar is that I can’t really focus on writing in the morning yet. It’s a good time to catch up on the web and my email, but I’ve been meaning to start writing journal entries in the morning, and I have been a total blank. I also have Christmas cards to send out, and I haven’t even started on that. Writing from 9 to midnight back in the day was much easier than writing from 6 to 9 in the morning.

And in slightly related news, I think my knee is fucked up again. I don’t know what I did, but it went out in the same way as last spring, starting maybe last night, and has been getting progressively worse. I’m not back on a cane yet, and I only briefly went back to my brace, but it keeps getting worse, so I think I might be full-on crippled by Monday. I bought one of those self-contained, gel-inside icepack things that velcro around your leg, so maybe that helps. Oh, and Tylenol-3 is always good. It’s extremely depressing to be back in this state, though. And putting on ice is much less pleasing when it’s 32 outside instead of 87.

Okay, I need to start on these fucking greeting cards.