little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

1,000 pages of anything

On a completely unrelated topic, I saved my five years of weblog posts to my hard drive and did a massive copy and paste into a word processor, in an attempt to self-publish some sort of LYD book.

I have over 1,000 pages and around 300,000 words of material. Seriously. On one hand, it’s kinda nice to say that I’ve written 1,000 pages of anything; on the other, I’m reminded of one of those 60 Minutes segments about the OCD guy who has counted every breath he’s breathed since 1987. Hopefully, approximately 950 of those pages are spam comments for online home mortgages and Viagra, but just trimming some of this stuff down into manageable form is going to be a hassle, much less editing any of it into honest-to-god, readable material.

You know what? As far as personal side-projects go, I think I’m in over my head. Next time, I’ll take up pilates.

well, if it helps, you can definitely not include this post. it would probably be too “meta” for inclusion. glad to be of service.

Told ya. Meh heh.

it’ll be worth it when u appear on Oprah or Donohue or something.

Well, once LYD: The Book is complete you need to finish work on LYD: The Musical, LYD: The Bedsheets, and get General Mills to start cranking out LYD: The Cereal.

Or Dr. Phil….

Anyway, how about isolating the posts where your mother makes an appearance? There’s a book there; maybe not a big book, but that why Gutenberg invented margins.
Eric in Seattle
“Normal”

I see two options for you. 1) Convince a publisher that you have something (maybe via a seclection of posts) and they will give you an editor to help you make it readable. 2) Enlist your army of mindless drones… err dedicated readers to help you edit.

Well, at least it’s not 1000 pages of Lorem Ipso blather…

Oh man don’t reinvent the wheel - there’s an awesome blog to pdf creator out there… what was it called LJ book http://www.ljbook.com/ When my blog went down I just posted the old pdf rather than reimport the data http://www.piedcow.com/archives/2004/11/my_former_blog.html

Pilates is hard.

Just go hit the hookah again.

A LYD book is a great idea!

It’d be hilarious!

Ya know, inlisint slave labor … er, literate and dedicated readers … is not unknown. There is one organization that translates old books into electronic form by scanning the pages of said books and then having various hapless souls proof those pages for anything the software missed. You could dole it out a page at a time and accept the edited pages.

You know … you do know an editor. Or three.

Don’t forget you can self-publish your book on sites like Lulu and Blogbinder

hey, if you need help, I’m an editor!
(dig your site, love the blow by blow on your trip to India.)

Laura