I guess I sort of buried myself in my book over the past week. I should have been doing homework. Now I’m a bit behind in school, but at least I finished the book!

I can’t believe it. It took me 9 years to write my first book—though we’re talkin’ apples and monkeys here—so I understand why there was such a huge time difference. Huge is an understatement.

For one thing, my memoir was 370-something pages. This new one is a fraction of that (200 pages maximum), and it’s about building an art career, not about my sad, disturbing life.

The final title, I believe, is: What Matters: A Path for Beginning and Emerging Artists, unless I think of a better subtitle before I publish it. Maybe it should be “guide” instead of “path?” I guess I’m still thinking about it. I’m open to ideas.

With my memoir, I spent a good year trying to find a publisher. It was a somewhat horrible experience: the research, the temporary interest, the rejection, and the dashed hopes. I really don’t want to go through all that again, especially since I thought it was very relevant at the time and wouldn’t have too hard a time getting it professionally published. Well, I thought wrong. I mean, it was still all very professional (for all intents and purposes). I just had to build my own publishing company to do it. That wasn’t easy, and it was very costly, too, but I had to protect myself because of the cult.

Now that I’ve finished writing this one, I still have several things to do. It needs a little polishing, editing, and a lot of formatting. I’ll need to create an e-book version, and I really want to make it into an audiobook, too. With that, I’d rather not record my nasal-mouse voice, but since I don’t like to buy audiobooks read by anyone other than the author, I guess I need to start setting up the recording gear and do it. And that might take some time. And I don’t even know what the cover will look like yet. I seriously have no idea. Art? Graphics? A detail of a painting? Not sure there either.

This morning I thought I could start the formatting process, but I’d definitely be jumping the gun. It needs a professional editing job, even if it’s just copyediting. So, I have to look into who I want to pay for that. Hannah could easily do this for me, but I’d like to pay her if she agrees. If not, I have a couple of people in mind. I can do everything else (all the formatting, ebook, book layout, etc.). I don’t know whether I’m using my artist’s book press name (Desolate Press) or the Desert Dog Books imprint. But that’s easy enough to figure out.

I’m obviously not prepared to just throw it together and stick it up on Amazon. I wish it were that easy; however, it’s pretty close to that easy! I’m really not complaining. I’m just excited. When I get excited, I get impatient, like a kid.

Now I have to get my ass back in gear to do my schoolwork, which has suffered over the last week. I might be staying up “late” tonight to play catch-up. Ha ha. Late for me is 8 pm!