10,000 Pots: How I Went From Writing Papers To This Book

I normally don't punt here, but I also don't like repeating myself. To work around my fiction project issues, I'm putting out a non-fiction book first. Go read that post at my main blog for context. Below I start talking details.

It's going to be structured something like this:

• Introduction
• Papers Are Teh Suck
• Forums, Flamewars, and Fuckwittery
• Wait, You Can Go To School For That?
• What Is This Livejournal Thing?
• Blogging? Hey Mikey, He Likes It!
• Whadda Mean "Indie Publishing" Is a Thing Now?
• Puppies at the Gates
• No Perfects (Or How I Embraced Teh Suck)
• I Can Haz Booky-Book (And So Can You)
• Epilogue

I'm telling stories here, and by telling my stories I'm showing you readers how I went from sucking diseased donkey balls at writing to becoming competent at it, enough that I can reasonably sit there with professional writers and talk shop like I know what I'm talking about. (And I have- hi Scott, Brian, and Oliver!) The order above is not a strict chronology; that shit overlaps like the lattice on an apple pie. What you're going to get, if I do my part, is show you that you can get where you want to go without realizing it. In short, you can goof your way to success.

But there's another reason, which I mention in the Epilogue, as to why I'm doing this book now. I need Momentum. Getting that first hit in, and then following it up, matters. It's how I got into this daily blogging habit; I just did it, one hit and then other and another and another. I did not worry about being perfect, just in doing it. I cared only about getting good, and staying good, by doing it on the regular.

What I didn't realize, by doing this as a hobby, is that by not caring about making it perfect and so on I actually got good merely by keeping up the momentum. The doing was the process. The habit was the means. That's why I'm calling this book "10,000 Pots", because I've made thousands of posts and written hundreds of papers and wrote millions of words across multiple media in multiple genres without ever realizing what the fuck I've done.

So, once that popped into my head, a book ceased to be any form of anxiety. It was just a matter of putting in the time at the keyboard before I fuck with formatting and other make-it-pretty adjustments (like a cover). This book, therefore is the start of a book-publishing habit.

Now you see where I'm going with this. From daily blogging (regular writing and publishing, short form) to (interval To Be Determined, but no less than a year and likely less) book publishing. Nevermind awards; awards worry gets you out of No Perfect mindset (Thanks Cernovich for making that a thing.) and wrecking your momentum. I want to write, and I want to eat. Publishing books, in addition to blogging, does that; again, thanks to Cernovich for showing me that this can be done- I just have to do it my way (what he calls "establishing a brand").