Fish books, fish books, roly-poly fish books / fish books, fish books, read them up, yuck

Well, if there's nothing else to say about this year, I received the eighteenth book I've published in the last decade.  The last thirteen books are from the last four years.

Many covers were created specifically for their book, Life and Polonia, Revolutions, President Present, New Fun, 11, Big Fish and Uncivil War.  The rest are all just Microsoft Paint images I had made earlier, usually much earlier.  Out of Context and What I Learned were just a merger of older images and The World Turned Right-Side Up is the original image, I just had to add a background to make it fit the cover.  With Samizdat, I just didn't have a copy of the original image that could be used so I had to remake it from scratch.  Insecure Public Server was unusual in that I had only made the image a few months earlier, the rest were either many years old or had been made specifically for a book.

Revolutions literally took several days to make, if I had been doing a 40-hour week on that, I would have gotten overtime.  I was so sick of the effort it took that I immediately knocked out President Present afterwards in about 20 minutes.  Then I went back to the extra work for New Fun and that's probably why I started staying with pre-existing images after that.  I literally hadn't planned 11, I had finished the previous book and discovered that I had another one ready to go which is why I went with the most-obvious and simple title and cover.

I do say that, at one level, this is all one book and I just break it up for convenience.  But in another sense, the books are obviously designed to be their own piece of work.  I'm still amused by the fact that Life and Polonia was the only book I intended to do at all.  It was a stand-alone novel, I just thought it was a neat idea to add a B-side of other material.  The problem was deciding what material to use because I had so much written.  I finally decided to limit it (mostly) to stuff I'd written in the same seven weeks it had taken to write the novel's first draft.  That did keep bothering me because just before and just after, I was writing neat stuff about comics or the Rolling Stones and kept asking myself why I shouldn't add that.

So I decided to add two more books.  I had a lot of my fiction available and there was all the stuff I'd written on this blog and Facebook, why not just do one book about pop culture, another about history/the War on Terror and include fiction in both?  This was where I decided to use the actual terms "A-side" and "B-side" so in 2011, when I finally finished editing the novel, I could get started.  But I ran into problems very quickly.

There was just too much stuff.  I wanted to keep the same format as the first book so I had to cut out a lot of pages, mostly comics and music, ideally keeping the best of "pop culture" in general.  The editing went well-into 2012 and given the current events I had written about, I basically had as much material left when I finished it as I'd had when I started.  This was where I had to start realizing what I was actually trying to do and Double is where I basically came up with the conscious format decisions that carried on from Life and Polonia.  Then I started Revolutions and ran into the same problem, too much stuff.

At that point I was realizing that I wasn't going to just limit the books.  I don't remember specifically when and how I came up with the decision, but it wasn't too long into the editing.  I edited all the material at once but did realize that if I figured out specifically how to split the books and one was ready, I'd just finish that.  That didn't happen until I'd finished the third draft, some time in early 2014, but that helped me finish the third book and quickly bang-out the fourth.  If I wasn't doing a book a year, at least I was averaging it.

So by that point, I was realizing that I would just keep doing this.  I started putting the fifth book together.  My intention was to pick up all the stuff about comics for Side A and use the rest of what I had on pop-culture for Side B, but there just didn't seem to be enough non-comics material.  There was a lot of music stuff but that would be too many pages for one book.  Double had already showed me the page limits so I decided to just just make New Fun as a book that's mostly about comics with other pop-culture essays here and there.  I was actually close to finishing the book in early 2015 but some things came up like an Army deployment where I worked on other projects.  It was November before I actually had a finished copy.

The following year I left the Army and had to find a job/place to live so I didn't get any books done.  But I did write a lot and edit what I had so the sixth book ready by early-2017.  I was able to go through all the material and pick the most appropriate so I knew wasn't even limited to the stuff on music for Side-B of Invasions, it was all pop-culture again.  The music was used for the B-side of Leading From Behind where I was able to pick the most appropriate current events for the A-side.  Then I followed up with Samizdat which was just current events on both sides, just as President Present had been after I finished Revolutions.  It seemed like a nice 'cleanse' to just use material that I hadn't found any other use for.

By this point, since I had a job and apartment, I was able to start accessing a lot more of what I'd written.  To be honest, by this point I was just moving through each book so much that I don't really have any memories or comments about them.  Pop Cultural Stew was put together so fast, I hadn't even finished editing the proof copy of Samizdat which is how I made the deliberate decision to stop editing it.  The material was all building up to the 2016 election and we'd already known who'd won so there was that, but it also made the book feel like 'underground publishing' where I had to just call it done or else the authorities would catch me.

Soon it was 2018 and I had finally gotten through enough material to reach 2017.  I had the idea for Big Fish around that time, stringing together conspiracy theories, so a lot of the next few books were just cutting out material that didn't fit.  The World Turned Right-Side Up was focusing on the 2016 election, 11 was right there from the best of the available material, the next two books were finished so quickly that once again I had two proof copies that needed to be edited.  This time I forced myself to go through both and not just cut one short.  Don't worry, there's still plenty of typos in both.

Finally it was 2019 and it took a long time to finish Big Fish.  I still don't think I really filled out the conspiracy theories but it was the best I could do.  I was the first time the A-side was shorter than the B-side because I just couldn't justify swapping them.  I even removed the dates on each essay to make them seem more in-line with each other, whether or not that worked.  It was the end of May before the final copy was printed.

After that, there's not much to say.  I did continue writing, except for a few months after the brain problem.  I had What I Learned mostly done by that point and since I'd already finished a book that year and eight books the previous two years, I wasn't in a big hurry.  After finally coming home from the hospital, I finished the book because, well, what else did I have to do?  Then 2020 was back to turning out every book I could.

I don't expect to finish a book in 2021.  I know I said that repeatedly last year but this time I mean it.  Hopefully I'll change my mind at some point but for now I expect to just write enough material for one or more books and work on a few other projects.  My goal is to do at least one book a year and hopefully use minimal "averaging" in the process.  Averaging means either I've done a book-per-year through 2028 or else 2004 through 2021.

The goal is to do at least one book a year as much as possible for as long as I can.  If I miss a year, make it up the following year but if I do more than one book a year, yay, I still have to do one next year.  Near as I can tell, that's what I'm here to do, observe, analyze and record what's going on along with whatever else I happen to be thinking about.