Written in 2008

They say I need a blog, the women on the craft loop do. To help me sell books.

A blog. Sounds like something big and loggy or doggy, a giant, slimy green bog monster with fangs and rabbit breath. Dripping ooze and demanding cookies for dancing on its back paws. Panting hot, stinky blasts at the end of its leash. But if I drag one of those along to book fairs, won’t it grab all the women buyers and slurp on them? And leak all over my books?

Maybe blog is the blockier, baser form of bloke–a loggy hog with baggy pants. But I have two of those already. They slouch around with bad hair and acne, punching keyboard buttons and snickering at Internet jokes. Then they eat whole pizzas in a sitting and flash green braces when one belches. One stays up late, into the early morning hours, night after night, with homework until he gets sick. Then I get the cold, then I go to Jack Grapes’s class and meet Helen Hunt with a big, honkin’ gi-normous fever blister. If these are blogs, you can have mine.

Wait! Maybe blog is just a mispronunciation of another word by one of my Japanese students! That’s it. It’s really brog, some Scottish thing, like a shoe with fancy topstitching so I can kick sense into all the book-buyers in the country and of course, they’ll see the light and buy my book. When I have one.

Or could it be bwog, an Elmer Fudd invention? Does Fudd have an angle on selling fiction? Does he have the magic in with agents and editors? Could he get my book on Amazon and figure out a way to spread the buzz and get everyone to think they need to read my story? Has he gotten a rep in the publishing world? Oh, so I’ll need a referral even to employ him. You can’t even get a cartoon character to read your work without representation any more. And if I do get a referral, just my luck the coyote will drop an anvil on his head or something before he reads my work.

They say I need a blog. Is that some kind of book log? A journal of how I wrote my book? What could be more boring? The writing process is slow as molasses, no, worse. It’s like walking dogs all day long, picking up their poop, then feeding them and picking up more poop. It never ends. If I were my fairy godmother or muse, looking in from outside, I’d give up and go to Hawaii. And who would want to read about the hours I spend bringing life to these damned characters who haunt my dreams and talk too much? And the book’s not even published. Who’ll read my long, arduous journey on a blog if they don’t want to read the short form that sings in the book itself? My life between writing spurts is even less appealing as a marketing tool. In my free time, I really do walk dogs and clean up dog poop. And wipe countertops and correct pages and pages of bad Vietnamese English and if I’m lucky, I get someone to pummel my right arm so I can go and type again. Let’s face it. My platform sucks. I’m not Oprah, and I was never abused.

They say I need a blog on blogspot. Oh, God. Is that a disease, a precancerous thing on your face? “Yes, the doctor biopsied my blogspots and burned them off with liquid nitrogen. I may not live.” I look in the mirror and see a suspicious freckle on my nose. Ohmygod. There it is. My blogspot. Big as life and ugly as sin, right there on the tip of my nose. And I’ll probably meet Kevin Klein at Jack Grapes’s class today.