First things first: A hardcover version of Summer Rain is now available from lulu.com. It’s the same size and same text as the second edition book I published with Lulu, but instead of perfectbound paperback, it’s bound in navy blue linen with gold foil spine printing and a full color jacket. It costs more ($25.99) and it will cost more to ship because it weighs more, but it’s a real hardcover book, and I’m very excited about that. Go to lulu.com/jkonrath to purchase it or any of my other books on Lulu. I don’t expect anyone to actually buy this, but I had the option, and I wanted one for my bookcase.
Speaking of which, I have decided to publish a second book of journals. I know nobody bought the first one when it came out, and maybe nobody will buy this one either. But I don’t really write books to make money, and I really wanted a new book on the Konrath shelf of the home library. So I pulled together all of the HTML from the 2000-2005 journals, threw it into FrameMaker, and started down the hellish path of trying to edit things together.
Most of the initial problems involve stripping off HTML for scripts and tops and bottoms of pages, and turning headings in HTML into headings in Frame, and all of that garbage. FrameMaker doesn’t have a smooth way to import HTML, believe it or not, and that makes a lot of work. It also totally fucks things up, like making individual lines into paragraphs, which require monumental amounts of repetitive labor in stripping things down and applying the right styles.
Once I got the text into the book, I had about 1200 pages. That’s not really accurate, because I still had scripts and markup and junk, and pages weren’t flowing right, and paragraphs were all fucked up. While formatting, I dropped a few entries that were either short, or repeats, or pasted in stories that I didn’t want in the book, or whatever else. By 9:00 or so last night, I had it down to 676 pages. This is still with a third of it still jagged and fucked up, and without even a first pass on actually dropping or combining or editing down some of the entries.
The basic idea though is to keep the book about this long. I don’t intend to chop everything down into a 180-page “best of”. One of the things about my journal is that it’s been around a long time, and there’s a lot of old entries back there. I think there are about a half-million words from 1997 to present, and it’s not all a bunch of timely and now useless info, like memes and political garbage, which would now be completely outdated. One thing that digging through the old entries has made me realize is that a lot of it is still very readable, and very interesting. Well, maybe not everyone would enjoy it, but I still find it entertaining to go back to old entries. And that’s why I want to make the book.
So that’s the current project. It doesn’t have a name, and it needs a lot of editing work, but it’s keeping me busy.