NEW LAMPS FOR OLD!

It's a funny old discipline this writing jobby. It's a fascinating thing. At present, as my regular readers will know, I'm busy dragging all of my first year's blog entires out of their current home so that I can publish them as a book with www.lulu.com. Having shuffled them all across to my own disk as html I am now draggng them one by one into a word processing package and re-ordering them in the process.

As they move, cutting and pasting, across I naturally get glimpses of these old entries. Sometimes it's a line or two of the body of the entry - often the opening or the ending of an entry. Every so often a phrase pops out from the middle of the text as it scrolls past and reminds me momentarily of the effort that goes into them. Of course, I see all of the titles and these make me smile - I spend a lot of time on allusive, cryptic titles for the entries and it is surprising how many of them still make me smirk at my own conceit and cleverness.

The images are not going into the book but they likewise remind me of just what a great photographer Gill has become over the past year or so. These lovely images snapshot whole days when they work well - they could stand alone as a chronicle of our time here. Now there's another idea.

Vanity publishing it used to be called. But isn't all publishing an act of vanity? Isn't blogging a vainglorious effort in and of itself? My hope for the book is that those who come to my blog later in its life - and many have found it only recently - can buy a copy to catch up on the very strange beast that has become The Lavender Way. I am an avid reader of traditional books - I love to read on the sofa, I love to read on the beach, I adore and am addicted to reading in bed and none of these is well suited to the base medium of the blog. Online reading is different. It discourages back reference and re-reading sections. It denies the reader some of the basic rights of traditional readers. It denies the reader the sensuality of reading: the smell and the feel and the satisfaction of the heft of a book.

We shal see whether it works out but heck I'm looking forward to being able to have and to hold a concrete copy of my work. Even if it does suck.