A shift in the wind...

Up until this morning, the first third of December had netted me an average of about $3 a day in billings, and I was prepared for the worst, when the morning's email brought some work that just may push the month's billable total out of that crack in the gutter where the surface of the street meets the concrete of the curb.

In other news, I shared a marginally scatological cartoon with Feht via email, which caused him to declare my sense of humor to be "Rabelaisian," which is a word that's easily enough defined ("of, relating to, or suggesting François Rabelais, whose work is characterized by broad, coarse humor and keen satire"), but not easily grokked (at least, not by me). More research is required, methinks.

The memoir is at 65,000 words, after adding a couple of stories and stumbling through a couple of stories that needed to be combined. Having started with the "autobiographical" posts made to LJ Idol, I am finding that there is a lot of other untapped material in my journal posts that fills in some of the holes of the former items, as well as posts that have nothing to do with LJ Idol, yet which seem (to me) worthy of inclusion in a memoir.

This leads me to reconsider a line written completely in jest in my author's introduction, regarding the possibility of there being a volume 2 of my memoir, but... I really don't know.

On the one hand, just over six months from now, this online journal of mine (which I started on LiveJournal in 2000 in an account I still cross-post to) will turn 18. To date, I've written nearly 9,000 posts and the last time I calculated a word count, my tappings weighed in at between 5 and 6 million words (it was a rough word count). If Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") holds, that would leave about a half million words that might be suitable for publication. So if my current plan is to publish once I hit 80,000–90,000 words, do I have a potential second volume in the wings?

I would venture to say almost certainly, but it's going to take a lot of work to (a) find the material and (b) massage it into a manuscript. (Indeed, the latter point is the major obstacle facing me with the current effort, as my habit of keeping stories to under 2,000 words results in a kind of choppy presentation—or maybe that's just my imagination.)

All that said (and apologies for sounding a bit egotistical), I must say I'm not going to sweat it. Nothing I publish is going to hit the best-seller list in any event, so I should let myself be guided by the following lines, from the poem The Fence That Me and Shorty Built, by Red Steagall:

But one thing that I always got
From every job I’ve done,
Is do the best I can each day
And try to make it fun.

I can certainly do that.

Cheers...