Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The following words are arranged in order of importance.
Firstly, take a moment to donate to the flooding in the Philippines.
I get asked every day if I Wrote This For You is going to be available over there and the least I can do, considering the kindness that’s been shown to me, is draw some attention to the recent flooding.
My publisher is giving away 50 free ebook copies of I Wrote This For You for review purposes to bloggers. All you have to do is tweet a request to her at @ireadiwrite (include the url of your blog.)
Today, after writing the first sentence in a spiral-bound notebook by the side of my bed in 2006 (and the first sentence on the blog on the 5th of July, 2007), I Wrote This For You is officially being released as a book, although you’ve been able to pre-order it for a few days now and some people have even managed to get some advanced copies.
Here are several questions that I haven’t answered over the years that have been emailed to me, asked in the comments section or simply questions that I believe should be asked.
Who are you?
Who I am isn’t as important as the story I want to tell. I write the blog semi-anonymously and anyone with 5 minutes to spare on google could easily find out everything they’d ever want to know about the project or me. The rule is, I don’t have a name here. The name gets in the way of the story.
Trent Reznor gets to be Nine Inch Nails when he’s on stage or recording an album. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta gets to be Lady Gaga. I get to be pleasefindthis or ‘Me’ here.
Is the blog real?
You’re here aren’t you?
How do people react to the blog or you when they find out you write it?
It’s mostly positive. I try not to be too much of a let down in real life. It’s very strange for me as I’m quite a closed person. I enjoy my privacy, which is a strange thing to say I guess considering I’ve spent the last few years publishing the most intimate details of my thought process online.
There are people who have a kind of cynical “Ewww, gross! Emotions! Where’s your sense of detached irony?!” view on things but I feel sorry for those people more than anything.
There’s a generation that have reached or are reaching adulthood right now that have been raised in an entirely different way to any other generation before it - and they look upon those of us who insist on viewing the world with that detached sense of irony or cynicism like we’re crazy. There’s a generation of people who aren’t ashamed of how they feel or expressing how they feel, is what I mean. I think that’s beautiful.
Why has it taken so long to turn the blog into a book?
Because it’s complicated. It’s not a story about vampires or wizards or a spy thriller. It’s hardly even a story at times as much as it is an experience. Myself and Jon, the photographer, do what we enjoy first. We were pleasantly surprised when we discovered that people liked it and then mortified at the skepticism and confusion of the traditional publishing industry when we showed it to them. We had more followers/readers than all the authors in some publishing houses combined, and we still got form rejection letters from them. One of the few that did express interest asked if we could give it a slightly more ‘religious spin’.
I’m not comfortable with pretending I’m writing on behalf of some deity. In fact, I published my real name next to the work for a while because people started treating me like a guru or Buddha figure. I am not that. I am human.
Michelle at ireadiwrite, our publisher, is wonderful, the press is small and allows us a lot of creative control. We’re important to them, they’re important to us, and that’s a wonderful dynamic to have in a relationship.
However, next time I’d like to do something simple. Do you have any idea how hard it is just to describe what I Wrote This For You is to someone who’s never heard of it?
Why should anyone bother buying the book when everything’s available on the blog for free?
The book is divided up into four sections; Sun, Moon, Stars, Rain – which is a tribute to Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town by E.E. Cummings as it’s my favourite work of literature that revolves around pro-nouns.
Those four different sections collect the posts into four distinct phases that describe, hopefully, the human condition. Sun is about looking for love or the potential for love. Moon is about the act of being in love. Stars is the loss of that love. Rain is about rediscovering hope in life, at the end of that cycle.
The blog, on the other hand, jumps around. I can’t, for obvious reasons, write very often about the way I currently am or feel or it’d be like treating everyone in my life like they were on a reality TV program.
So I write about events and relationships at random quite often, and jump around, referencing old love letters, things I said or that were said to me and so on. The book makes sense of this randomness and hopefully, puts it in some kind of order.
There’s also several entries that only appear in the book, including an ending. I wrote the final entry, several minutes after I wrote the first one in 2006. You can’t write your first sentence, really, until you’ve written your last.
Does that mean I Wrote This For You is over?
No. But I will be taking a short break over Christmas and New Years just to recharge my batteries. I’d like to do more, such as a spoken word album or live readings where my readers are, doing that however all depends on the success of the book.
In saying that, I think people forget that I have to do this over and above a very demanding day job, which right now, pays all the bills. We, like postsecret, don’t advertise on the blog, don’t do giveaways or run competitions on behalf of other people or sell text links or do product reviews, which seems to be the preferred way to make money from a blog these days.
That’s because I, and I think I can speak for Jon here too, don’t want to succeed on anyone else’s terms but our own.
Put it this way, I’d rather be dirt poor on my own terms than rich on someone else’s.
Is the book available at a store near me?
Probably not unless you ask them to order it for you, which I encourage you to do. I live on the tip of Africa, the photographer lives in Germany, our publisher is in Canada, our main readership resides either in the continental United States or Malaysia. Organising a global, store-front release that’d make everyone happy would be impossible so we’re focusing our energies online.
If you can’t, I feel your pain. iBooks isn’t even available in my country and Amazon delivers here with only varying degrees of success. We’re doing our best and working with our publisher to make sure it’s as widely available as possible. Hang in there.
If you could spread the word about the book, paste the image below on your blog or tumblr, it would be sincerely appreciated. Our budget for all of this is exactly $0 and whatever money we do spend comes straight out of our own pockets at this point.
You can catch an interview with me in Cosmopolitan (South Africa) in January and with Jon in Heso Magazine (Japan) in the next month or so. Any other journalists are welcome to contact us on pleasefindthis at gmail dot com.
I’ll be answering any questions anyone has in the comments section below for at least the next 24 hours.
Finally, thank you for reading. You have no idea how well-timed, anonymous or otherwise comments here have turned everything around completely at times. I occasionally find myself in dark places (shocking, I know) and you, yes you, just by choosing to spend time with my words have been the light that’s drawn me out of those places.
I love you and can never fully repay you for that.
Written by Me at 1:05 AM