Rule Number One for Book Number Two

Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | Posted by: Eddie Wright

So you wrote your first book. It’s an experimental little number about a fella who’s addicted to seeds of inspiration. The first person story is told through a bunch of stream of consciousness, crazy talk, mumbo jumbo and large chunks of it consist of a screenplay that the main character is writing. The formatting was a bitch and you wanted total control so you decided to self-publish. You decided to make a teeny, tiny, pocket-sized cutie so folks could carry the masterpiece everywhere.

Cool.

Then you figured you should get yourself some distro on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other joints like that. Now, you learn that you can’t distribute if you’ve got a pocket-sized because…well, you’re not really too sure about that…so you sucked it up, reformatted, and made it bigger. 6×9. It was a total bitch once again. It’s tough to get the script passages looking the way they looked in your Final Draft software so you have to go through, line by line and delete and backspace and tab and all that. It sucks. You fuck up a lot. Your computer acts like a dick. You get angry. You lose your patience. You regret everything but you force through and you finish and get yourself nice looking and hopefully interesting novella that’s fun and weird and effective and worth the trouble.

But now you want yourself a piece of that Kindle thing that the futuristic, robot kids are carrying around. But guess what? You have to reformat…again! When you save your word document as an HTML (which is required by the evil robot queen of the Amazon), the screenplay portions of your super interesting, experimental whatever get totally fucked. Oh boy oh boy.

Fun fun fun.

So…you don’t wanna do it. But you’re gonna do it. You built this baby word by word. You not only wrote it, you shaped it, you laid it out, you designed the cover, you learned Photoshop (which you hated and will continue to hate forever), you learned about ISBN’s and UPC’s and all that crap. You did it yourself. You’re getting sick of doing it yourself but you’re still doing it. You’re doing it because you have to. Because you care. You’re not sure why you care as much as you care but you do. You care. You love this. You’re a total idiot but you love it. You’re a sick bastard. You’re a twisted moron. You’re a glutton for punishment. You’re abused, neglected and disrespected, but you’re the one that’s behind it all. You’re a fool, but this is what you want to do. You love making people laugh. You love making people think. You love making people angry. You love confusing people. You love entertaining. You love being the remedy for boredom and all the frustration and anger and doubt and depression and everything, no matter what, it’s worth it. You have to keep reminding yourself…but it’s worth it. It is. Cuz this is what you do. This is what you’re meant to do. This is what you chose to do. This is it. It better be worth it. Cuz this is all you want. And this is what you have to do.

At least that’s what you think.

Just remember one thing…no matter what happens…rule number one for book number two…NO SCREENPLAY SHIT!