Sunday Feature 22

1. You never know when the Blogger people are gonna say, "Screw this, we've been hosting blogs for a decade and we haven't made a dime; let's shut it down and open a restaurant." That's one reason I've collected the funniest stuff on this blog into five books and a DVD.

2. Last year in the Brenda Novak auction I won, for a paltry seven dollars, the right to use my choice of dozens of paintings by a certain artist on a book cover. Turned out none of her paintings included Evil Editor, but this one looks kind of like Evil Editor holding court before his minions . . . err, minnows.

3. Like most of you, my favorite author to read when I need a pick-me-up is Evil Editor. Turns out the majority of my writing in recent years has been the writing exercises on this blog, but trying to read my writing exercises is a pain, as they're scattered throughout four+ years of blog posts. The solution, I decided, is to put together a book containing my favorites. But after gathering them together I discovered I had only about 60 I wanted to use, and I'd rather have a nice round 100. So I'll be adding some of your exercises. But it turns out reading all of your exercises in search of those worthy of being included is an even bigger pain.

4. On the other hand, writing exercises are a good topic to go with a painting of a school of fish. Get it? School of fish?

5. Another pain is deciding whether to produce a few copies of the book for myself (and to give to Evilette and Evil Jr. as birthday presents instead of cars and Xboxes), which would be expensive per-copy-wise, or whether this is a product that a school of you would want, in which case it would cost the same as the other Evil Editor books.

6. So, if you are someone who submitted writing exercises, and you are also someone who would want a copy of this book only if one of your writing exercises were in it because you suspect it will be the most impressive item on your resume, let me know. I'm perfectly willing to bloggoogle your name and find your best work and include it just to make an extra sale, even if I have to edit your piece to the point where it becomes unrecognizable as your work. And if I can't salvage any of your exercises, I'll let you know so you can spend your $10 on something else, perhaps a copy of Why You Don't Get Published.