Blog
Booking It
Writing
I’ve been blogging since November, 2001. I have a love-hate relationship with my blogs, with my archives. Sometimes I wish they weren’t so… boring. Other times, I’m glad I document such mundane occurrences in my life.
If I can take on the huge task of converting my archives into book format, I might self-publish so that I’ll have a volume. I can’t use blurb.com because the archives aren’t up to slurp. This is going to involve lots of cutting and pasting and formatting. I need a copy of MS Word.
So, 2001 and 2002. I’m averaging 40 or so thousand words blogged each year. That’s crazy! This doesn’t take into account any paper journaling, NaNoWriMo’ing, or anything else I do. And here I thought I wasn’t writing enough. I’m curious as to how the trend fares in later years.
If I’m writing that much, though? A book copy of my archives is going to be as big as War and Peace - and probably not as interesting. So, after I compile it, I’m going to have to prune in. That’s a big undertaking. If you don’t hear from me for several weeks, you might want to send in the guards.
I know I am a writer. I want to be a good writer. And while my blog doesn’t make me any money (because I haven’t tried to make any) or bring me fame (harder since I went “incognito”, yes?), it’s been this account of the majority of my twenties. That kind of boggles my mind.
Discussion
7 comments for “Booking It”
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I’ve been blogging for a while too. I don’t think I’ve got as much writing in as you though since I’ve got so many breaks in time where I’ve stopped blogging and just dropped from the face of the earth.
But wow, can you imagine making a book from your archives? that would be amazing.
You don’t need MS-Word, you need OpenOffice, it’s even free, so if you’re tight on a budget, you now have no excuse.
Maybe I’m not understanding it all but I think you might could create a MySQL query to display just the stuff you want, maybe 10 per page or so and then the copy/paste job might be a little easier? Or some kind of easy export then… yeah… hmmm…
I have a copy of the new office programs. I can mail them to you. Just mail it back. ; )
Ps. Isn’t it weird we’re almost 30?
Currently the stuff I have written online is a little over 100,000 words. If I add the stuff I have in the works and the notes I have taken for future posts it should be a lot more. It should be somewhere along the 150,000 word count.
I have been looking at blurb.com myself but I don’t want to just publish my existing blog posts. I am in the process of putting something together (which I have been pausing and then getting back to because life gets in the way) but I don’t want to say too much about it because it keeps changing and I suspect it will be nothing like what I had originally planned when it finishes. To be honest I don’t want to publish it myself but I don’t see it being picked up by any book publishing company.
As for the software you could use there are a lot fairly cheap programs out there. If you are using a Mac I highly recommend Swift Publisher. It’s $50 if you buy just that instead of the bundle. Otherwise you could always use OpenOffice which is free and very powerful.
@yoshi - Amazingly boring, more like it. I’m up to 700 trade paperback-sized pages now! ;)
@Whome - Sir, yes Sir! I’ve downloaded it. Hope it works if I use lulu.com to publish.
@valerie - The problem is that I don’t have the archives backed up from WordPress. I have to cut and paste them from the Internet Wayback Machine.
@Jennifer - No, I cannot believe we’re almost 30. It’s crazy! And if OpenOffice doesn’t work, I’ll take you up on that offer :-D
@Colin - If I thought I’d be picked up by a publishing company, I wouldn’t think of self-publishing. But me? Doubtful. Not for a blog anyway.
I downloaded OO. Not on a Mac - bad me!