Publish, or...

... well, not perish. Not even "Publish or Bust". More like ...AND bust. It's not like I have a positive cashflow from self-publishing. Not even close, in fact.

But cost notwithstanding, it's an internal drive that I need to satisfy. (Getting "the word" out, I mean. That is, out of my head and into the heads of others.) This blog certainly takes the edge off that drive, but now and then an idea is well enough received among friends & family (and maybe more), that I feel a need to get the idea into a more tangible form than is possible in the virtual world.

So after winning a local poetry slam competition a while back, I decided that now was the time to put that idea in print, too. It's a children's book (Dr. Suess style) about the geriatric set, lovingly illustrated by J1, who was the audience for a lot of my silliness when she was growing up. She had been working on the artwork for a while, but the poetry contest pushed me over the top with the project. Tomorrow I head for the printer to talk about setup of text and images, paper style, etc.

This will be book number three for me. The first (another "children's" book) was not for sale, and this one won't be either - it's just for gifts. The middle one (a poetry collection), published on Amazon Kindle, has actually sold some copies. Amazing. And if anyone ever found a hard copy of that one floating around, it would either be a forgery... or ha - priceless. ;)

Maybe someday I'll do what columnists do: publish a book derived from their columns. In this space right here, I certainly have enough material. And I suppose just about as many people will want to read that, too.