Written by Me Because it’s Self-Publishing. Who else is Going to do it? Mom’s busy.
Below is the working draft of my self-publishing story. Apologies in advance. It is in its zygote stage (or since I’m the sole parent of this story maybe it’s better to say it’s in its binary fission stage).
More asexual reproduction jokes to come (they are less risqué).
I provide this in its binary fission stage so authors can appreciate the messiness of the creative process firsthand and in real-time. Plus, if I waited until I had it really humming, I wouldn’t finish before the sun exploded.
To be fair, this book resides within David O’Boyle’s Universe. And in David O’Boyle’s Universe, I am at the center, which makes this website a geocentric (thanks, Ptolemy) rather than heliocentric (sorry, Copernicus). Armed with a little more about solar system theory, let’s work to correct the earlier metaphor about the sun exploding. What I really meant was that the comet in my logo would vaporize my planetary initials long before I had this book in desired form.
Here’s a depiction of what that may look like, at least according to PolloAI:
While this book is and will remain raw, I didn’t pull it fresh out of the ocean and start eating it. Even if it doesn’t look like it, I do my best to shave off the cowlicks and neckbeard of the current version so it presents a little better than a college kid at their 9 am Friday morning class.1 For instance, I wrestled with that Copernicus and Ptolemy line for a while. Even now it still doesn’t quite fit. In a geocentric world where my logo wouldn’t eventually explode I would go back and rephrase the referenced paragraph. But I’m leaving it for now, especially because now it looks like I meant to do it.
If I missed a spot beyond the metaphorical confusions, feel free to tell me. Writing isn’t like when I went to the barber and he cut my hair so bad that when a piece landed on the floor he picked it up and tried to place it back on my head (true story). Free editing is welcome. It makes Chat (I call ChatGPT “Chat”) jealous. When that happens he comes back with better responses.
Yes I called Chat a ‘he’. I will do my best to switch pronouns back and forth for Chat throughout the book. However, I can’t promise I’ll fully abide by that though because all that pronoun switching gets confusing. What I can promise is that we have reached the end of this forward to forward. Let’s keep it moving. The quicker I write this and you read this, the quicker we can all get back to writing our own fiction.
- That reference makes me nostalgic for when I wrote “Bound for the Baptism.” Check that Transient Visitors Short story out if you want to relive your glory days. ↩︎