I'm all for blogs, clearly.

But there is, when all is said and done, something about a book. You can bring a book on a train! You can read it in bed or on the couch or in the tub. You can love it up and pass it along. And while I'm delighted when people find my online presence, and even more delighted when they pass it along, it's just not the same. I can't, you know, sign it with a Sharpie or anything.

Besides, this is not some short-time romance. As a girl, I'd always imagined the books I'd write someday as my offspring. I could see them in my mind's eye far more clearly than I could some bucket of DNA with a pink or blue bib around its neck. So despite all the very smart things my pal, Michael Blowhard, has to say about the folly of book writing, I'm down with it. Or up for it. Or whatever it is the kids aren't saying these days.

I have no delusions about the wild fame or fortune that will be mine when I corral the genius that is communicatrix into a 6"x9" stack of dead tree guts. It's a foregone conclusion that I'll be self-publishing, via Lulu, perhaps, or, if I'm feeling particularly daring, ordering up a stack to keep in my garage. Which, since I don't have a real garage, would be my living room.

I spent my weekend among a small sample of the millions who believe they have a book, or two, or seven, in them. Sitting amongst them, I'm even more certain: both of the pointlessness of my writing a book and the absolute necessity of it...

xxx c

Image by Cade via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.