After Long Fearful Procrastination My Book is Coming Together.

I wanted to tell you first.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Friends, I have had an epiphany! After months of dreading having to put my promised book together, I finally know what has stopped me. Took me a while, but here it is:

This was to be a book of previously published essays chronicling the downfall of this country, from Barack Obama’s unlikely rise to the presidency, to the Tea Party’s awful resistance, to the erosion of our rights and liberties by the Right, and finally to the capture of the White House by the dread Trump, who was already clearly loony and by all rights should have been in jail even then.

It was going to be a political book filled with justified rage. An “I told you so”; proof that I knew what I was talking about throughout those entire 15 years from Barack Obama’s first inauguration onward, when I was begging, warning, yelling, screaming, weeping, sighing. It would be a justification, a culmination of all my hard work that mainly went nowhere.

It was such a downer. Just reading that stuff put me in a funk for days. Why on earth would anyone else want to have to go back to that again? So I stopped looking at it.

Then just last week I was talking with my grandson, Mike, my sounding board, and we were going over why I was having so much trouble, and I realized I was rattled because the whole project was not just depressing but was just too overwhelming. I had hundreds of essays to choose from, and I really only wanted to show everyone how smart I was to pick out the warning signs and put them in writing. So I went back and started looking for a theme that made sense—and by golly, I found one!

Because as I began sifting through those years’ worth of essays, I began to laugh. Yes, laugh! And once I’d laughed I wanted to laugh some more, so I looked for the titles that hinted at “this could be funny”—and quite often it was.

So now it’s a book of political humor. I can’t tell you the title yet, though I love it and would love to. I want it to be a surprise. I will say it took me far too long to realize the title never did fit the theme of rage and anger. Now it fits perfectly and how could I have missed that?

I have a title, I have a theme, and I’ve selected at least 30 essays I truly love, all or any of which will become chapters. I’m writing an introduction and I’m busy removing hyperlinks and adding explanations when I need them because all of these essays started life on the internet and I want this to be that book I can hold in my hand and flip actual pages.

At long last it’s coming together. It’s been a long time coming and those of you who have heard me talk about this book before are probably thinking, “Here we go again”, but this time it’s real. I’m doing it.

Because now I know where I’m going.

And just like that, I’m at peace when I sit down at my desk, having actual fun reliving some of the most ridiculous events, remembering some of the most ridiculous people, finding I recorded some delicious little details that even now make me laugh out loud.

And yet there’s truth there, too. It all happened and I was there. (Well, close by, anyway, learning it along with everyone else.) Funny stuff about the Iowa Caucuses, about Sarah Palin, about Michelle Bachmann, about Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell, about Ammon Bundy and the Oregon standoff, about Ted Cruz and all those other strange congresspeople, about black helicopter paranoia, about Marabel Morgan, about Newt Gingrich, about a bunch of zany lesser-known candidates, and about how I would make a better president than Donald Trump.

It’s all in there, and more, and it’s taking shape. Now I have to decide what I’m going to do with this book. I would like pictures or illustrations, but how do I do that? I want a great cover that stands out, but not so much it’ll embarrass me one day. I want to make sure there are no glaring errors or omissions that might kill my OCD self after it’s published and I can’t do anything about them.

I’m going to need readers and an editor and maybe someone to help me with formatting, but I have no idea what any of that might cost. I’ll have to admit I can’t do it all, but where to look for the right people?

And when it’s ready, what’s the best route for me? Should I self-publish? (Leaning that way.) Where? Online? (Preferably not with Amazon) Locally at a print shop? Should I look for a liberal small press and hope they like it, too, and would be willing to publish it nearly as quickly as I would want them to?

Is it possible someone with savvy and clout will find me, like what they see, and beg me to let them help to get this thing published?

Nah.

Anything else?

I know some of you have gone this route. Can I ask you to weigh in? What was the hardest part? The easiest? What steps will I surely miss? What do I need? Can I really do this? (Remember, please, that I’m old as the hills and probably fading fast. I need this in my lifetime, by which I mean NOW.)

Tell me your stories. How did you do it? I promise I’ll listen. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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