The original idea behind Just A Geek was to simply chronicle one year at WWdN. It was little more than a cut-n-paste job, intended to provide an “offline” version of this website. But the weblog entries looked weird on their own, so I wrote some “behind the scenes” narrative to tie them together, and and honest-to-goodness Journey emerged. Over the course of that year, I went from struggling actor, plagued by deamons of self-doubt to . . . well . . . Just A Geek, I guess. I’m up to page 70 on the current re-write (not bad for three days of work), and it’s going pretty well, so far. I removed some really awful passive-voice stuff from my narrative, and I cleaned up some sections that have bothered me for months. There’s still a long way for me to go, but I’ve cleared the first checkpoint.
The format of JAG is quite different from Dancing Barefoot. While Barefoot (heh. I LOVE calling it that!) is five short stories, Geek (double heh) is more of a documentary. While I’ve been working on JAG the past few days, I’ve given serious thought to re-writing the whole thing from the beginning, and making it less of a documentary, and more of a narrative. That would involve cutting up the weblog entries, though, and incorporating them into newly-written stuff . . . and would probably mean that the book wouldn’t be done for another several months.
I ran that idea past my editor, Andrew, and he thought that it was just a delaying tactic, because I’m so terrified about releasing this second book. I think he’s right, and for now I will leave the formatting alone, and focus on making it better.
I suffer from a tremendous lack of discipline, so if I’m ever going to finish this book, I have to give myself a very strict schedule and stick to it. I find that I can write for about three hours before I fall apart, so the schedule is currently: get up at 8, write until around 12, and spend two hours handling book orders and other administrative stuff for Monolith and WWdN. Then, before the kids get out of school, I “relax” by working on this apache server I’ve gotten to run on my desk over there. I even installed postnuke on it, and got it to work on the first try! I have no idea what I’ll do with it . . . but it’s there. Maybe I’ll get to work on qmail next.
Oh, some readers have pointed out to me that the formatting on this page is wonky at certain resolutions, and you have to side-scroll. Side-scrolling makes the baby Jesus cry, but I can’t figure out what I did to screw it up. If any of you htmlgods want to look at the source and point me to a solution, I’m sure a lot of people would thank you.
Update: I may have fixed it. Look at this. And in celebration of maybe fixxoring the stupid side-scrolling, I offer this.