Journal: 06/02/06

Still in my euphoric mood from yesterday and having caught up with my blog posts, I approached the day in good spirits. Rose wants me to work on her taxes and she may be able to give me a little cigarette money for the work. It beats offering to weed her garden on Monday. I started the process of combining this blog into one, readable piece as the first step in writing the new book (see below). This Friday turned out to be a slow day and I’ve had plenty of time to work on my own personal projects.

Assembling the Blog

It’s kind of like scrapbooking. Today I started assembling all of the individual blog entries into one document. This will become both my outline for my new book, and a repository of all About Dying blog entries in one readable presentation. Aside from using it as an outline (blogline), I’m not clear yet on what I’m going to do with the resulting collection. Maybe I’ll include annotations and clarifications to make it a more complete piece of work. That’s for some future inspiration though, in the meantime, I’ll have all of the blog in one spot.

I read these pieces as I assemble them into their chronological order. It is like taking a stroll through history, a history that I’ve lived and remember all to well. All of the details are there though; my increasing distance from Joann’s death and all that went on before it might have censored some of the uglier memories from daily thought, but reading through the blog entries brought it all back in Technicolor, all at once. Not that I don’t remember everything anyway, it’s just that my memory has become more selective in the slideshow it presents me with these days. I still flash back on obscure details, such as the suppositories, when something triggers the memory, but those events are coming less often.

When I write a blog entry, I write it as a dated, individual piece of writing. These are stored in their own folders relating to the blog itself. Keeping these posts separate makes it easier to transfer them from Microsoft Word into web pages. The rules for web pages are different from word-processing documents, but MS Front Page 2003 is quite intelligent about it. After saving the post as a web page, I then post them to the web itself. This process has proved useful because web-based tools for blogging have extreme limitations and I can better manipulate the way the posts look on the web by using web design software. However, it has left me with folders full of individual posts.

I got about halfway through the assembly process today and will continue over the next couple of days. It should be complete by Tuesday at which point I’ll start thinking in terms of the book itself. In their current collected form, I am careful to not edit the posts in the assemblage. I think it is important to preserve the posts as they are posted to the web. I don’t edit any web-posted piece in order to preserve the accuracy of the writing itself, including typos and grammatical errors, as those errors may reflect my emotional state that day.

One thing I have found is that most of these posts are really boring, just the day-to-day motions of a life in repair. When I start work on the book I’ll look at combining posts or dumping some of them that are just reports of an empty day. After all, I want the book to sell, not be a compendium of triviality.