The Story of my Book Part 3: The Return of the Conclusion

by Stepto
No Comments

All along in the back of my mind I think I figured out that I was going to have to go my own way publishing.  The first most important step I took beyond an editor was to ask my friend Mark to design the cover. Mark has been my friend now for more than 20 years, and in my private adaptation of Scientology level classification that I secretly apply to all my friends he is ranked at L18 (Non-Thetan Positive Trans-Thetan Tom Cruise Crazy negative). 

That being said however, he is far more artistic than I could ever hope to be.  And quickly he came up with an idea I liked a lot for the cover, something whereby many images from the individual stories was represented on the cover, over or behind some type of image of me.  He chose as the image of me a pointillism style drawing of a picture he took of me.  The best part was that the day he took the picture I was wearing a fairly geometric and ornate flannel shirt.  Half way through his representation he began to bemoan his choice.  I pointed out that, he could use the picture for reference and didn’t have to actually replicate the pattern of the shirt I wore. 

But quickly it became a point of pride to him, and the final design to this day I am really really pleased with:

image002

We had to do some tweaking over various iterations to be mindful of copyright and trademarks, but in the end, I could not be happier with the front face of my first book.  I can imagine someone seeing this cover and saying “why is there a pig there?  And a dog?  And a tornado?  I MUST KNOW”. But seriously that drawing of me?  Point by laborious point people.

So I had a cover, I had a plan.  Lulu.com was always the backup to me, because I had purchased products from them and enjoyed the result.  Their softbacks were well produced, the paper was good quality, and I felt that above all, the books they made were worthy of keeping.  Not to mention the offered many options for e-publication or audio books and I would fully retain all rights.

So I dove in.  I purchased a formatting and publishing package that would master my document in .PDF, then make sure it reached all retail outlets.  The cost of the package was somewhere around $350 or so.  After some painful wrangling over formatting I ended up with a perfect .PDF master and softback edition, which was then propagated out to Amazon.com and Barnesandnobles.com and other retail outlets in addition to being available on Lulu.com.  My cover was easy to implement and looked great on the master proof copy I got via mail.

Suddenly, I had published a book. There it was.  After all that work and time, I held in my hands my proof copy.  I gave it to Rochelle, since the Outtro is dedicated to her plus you know, she’s my wife and all. Then I set about mastering a hardback copy from the same files. 

I had a vague sense of how I wanted to market the book, but it mostly relied on Twitter and my blog to get the word out.  To be honest, my sole gauge for success for the entire effort was simple: Could I recoup the costs of editing and publishing packages, and the fee I promised Mark for the cover.  All told, that meant the book had to clear $1200 in revenue. I also knew I wanted to make the book available in DRM free PDF, DRM Kindle, and DRM Nook (since with the latter two you really cant get a good royalty mix unless you DRM)  I felt that was a good balance because it gave people freedom.  If they hate DRM, there’s the free PDF, which is viewable among a bazillion devices that have a PDF reader and adheres to a relative standard.  For those who want the convenience of Kindle or Nook and don’t mind DRM, there’s that option.  And even for those platforms I would enable DRM friendly options like text to speech and loaning so that people could feel free to get the text to people that had not bought it.

Lastly, I wanted something special at the high end for those who would be willing to pay more: Hardbacks only available through me that contained a personalized message.  The idea was that people would paypal me the cost, tell me their favorite thing and the name they wanted it personalized to, and I would email them a free PDF, and personalize a hardback and send it to them.

I launched, and through Twitter from myself and friends like Paul and Storm and Major Nelson and e and Laura and others I got a good launch bump to make me feel good about the overall project.

Two things I drastically underestimated: demand for the personalized hardbacks and demand for a Kindle version.  By far those two have outsold any other avenue to get the book. Formatting to get into Kindle and Nook was a bitch, for although Lulu had mastered to PDF, that didn’t translate to e-format basically at all.  So After some work on my part I paid an additional $99 to Lulu to remaster into .epub format.  Once that was done, suddenly import into Kindle and Nook was perfect (with the exception I had to do some manual HTML editing to turn footnotes into endnotes.  I thought for a moment about adding ‘Epub formatting done using NOTEPAD.EXE’ to the copyright page, but then again, why brag.)

By week one however, with just the PDF and softback, I ended up recouping my costs just entering the project.  By the end of the hardback experiment I had sold 343 signed personalized hardbacks.  Kindle?  Off the charts.  Nook? probably on par with the softbacks.

The hardbacks were tough on me personally.  I actually ship, receive, personalize, then ship out 343 books from 12.15 to 2.6. It was actually far more of a drain than I intended.  But I loved every second of creating personalized messages for fans.  So many of them were fun and creative.  Some standouts were the person who ordered from Tucson when the Gabriel Giffords shooting happened so I scrawled all over the shipping package that we were stronger together.  Or the marine’s wife who wanted to get her husband his copy before he shipped out and I could thank him for his service.  Or the guy who said he liked dinosaurs and I wrote an entire mini story in his book about how my pet Deinonychus had gotten loose and I even drew bloodstains all over the interior of the book.

You can’t connect with people so directly any other way than the way I chose, because somewhere just behind you off to the side is someone tapping their fiscal watch or their editorial calendar or their list of things you owe them just for being their product. With this method it was just me, and people who wanted to read what I had written.

At the end of the day, I’ve not sold near as many books as I wanted, but I have sold so many more than I was afraid of. And at the end of this process, I’m happy with my work, my control, and the product that people are buying.

The highest compliment a writer can receive is for someone to say “I liked your book so much I was sad when it was over. I didn’t want it to end.”  I’ve gotten that a couple of times lately, and every time I read it I get something in my eyes.

I’ll do some things differently for my next book, which is in progress for release later this year in the winter.  But if you’re reading this, and you have a copy of my book, thanks for supporting a model that lets a person like me reach so far.

My next post will detail some FAQ’s, like how the hardback process works in addition to announcing some new offerings and finally providing a centralized link for all options (Lulu, Retail, Kindle, Nook, etc)

The Story of my Book Part 2: The Publishening

by Stepto
No Comments

So. I had what all writers actually covet, if they don’t know it until they actually have it and agree with it.  I had an edited manuscript. One where I agreed with every edit, and felt strongly the work was what I wanted to put forth for people to read. I can’t stress enough what a rarity this thing is to have before you actually seek a publisher.  In the traditional publishing model, you submit your heart and soul and have someone tell you it’s great then they submit it to their own editor who then proceeds like a woodchipper to shred words and ideas into the grist mill for commerce.

I know this, because I went down that road a ways, and was fortunate enough to BACK AWAY at high speed before it became too late.

After obtaining all the legal approval at work…well, I should briefly explain that.  You see, in fairness to Microsoft, I am a Microsoft employee, beholden to my employee agreement.  Which essentially means that anything I write about the company as an employee is, in fairness, the property of the company.  I’ve gotten a lot of shocked reactions at that, as if it’s unholy or something.  It makes perfect sense.  Microsoft has a vested interest in me, and I have a vested interest in Microsoft.  It only makes sense that anything I seek to further my own vested interest in me (that also involved Microsoft) get their review and ok.  Once that was achieved, it just fell down to the last, most difficult part: finding a publisher.

Luckily, through a connection at work I secured a well known publisher pretty quickly.  And thus began my long dark journey into realizing why publishing your first work in traditional media is probably dead.  I have no interest in embarrassing the publisher involved, suffice to say they were a well established voice in the geek/tech world and leave it at that.  I submitted my edited manuscript and they were extremely interested, I think mainly because it was edited already and there was little work on their part to focus towards publishing.  And so my manuscript was slotted into the hell I like to call, the “Editorial Calendar”

Every week for 12 weeks it was a different story.  “Oh we’re in the middle of an event, we’re meeting on your manuscript next week.  Don’t worry, everyone loves it!”  “Oh we just had a changeover of new incoming books.  We’re meeting on your book next week.”  “Oh, It got a good reception at the initial meeting, we’re now moving it to the next level.”  “Oh, the next level had to delay the meeting due to vacations.”

Every email started with “Oh,”.  Every conversation was couched in just how much they liked the manuscript and really thought it catered to the geek culture.  I began to despair around May when I was performing at W00tstock in Seattle and Portland, a big deal to me because I was giving up chances to market the book because I was in a holding pattern with the publisher.  I asked Wil his advice.  Without hesitation he said to drop everything and self publish.  And yet the cachet of being published by a well known name really appealed to me so I waited even more. 

Finally we got to the point of discussing royalties.  I forewent an advance which allowed me to push for the maximum amount of royalties: Somewhere between 9 and 12%.  On price points of 15.99 softback. Plus they owned a lot of rights relating to e-books and audio books.  My jaw dropped.  Not only was I being offered a pittance for the work, and sacrificing a lot of rights, but they also wanted to chain me to a promotion tour attending all their events and doing custom speeches and readings. This soured me deeply.  By self publishing I could garner north of 20% royalties and would retain full rights for everything.  I expressed to them the disparity and questioned why I would continue the conversation.  I was assured they were just a week away from the final meetings and agreements.  They wanted to make my manuscript a primary feature of their line up for the fall.

Four weeks went by.  When I finally investigated I discovered my rep who had been the advocate for my manuscript had up and left the company with no notice.  And now they wanted to start the process all over to evaluate my work against their other offers as if I had just submitted it.

This is where I seriously began to realize the last gasp of old media was essentially to tie someone up under the imprimatur of being published by a big name while never really intending to take the effort seriously.  For more than four months I had played the old media publishing game, trading paltry royalties for a badge of being “really” published.  I spent a long night after that email with a bottle of scotch re-reading my manuscript. 

It was a good book.  I knew that.  It wasn’t going to win awards, and at the end of the day if I earned enough to pay for the editing and publishing, I would be happy.  These were good stories.  Stories that I had now performed live and that audiences liked.

Mutually, the publisher and I kicked each other to the curb. After that I logged into Lulu.com and began the journey to self publishing.

Recipe File: No-Knead Cheddar/Olive/Sundried Tomato Bread

by Stepto
No Comments

I’ve been experimenting with no-knead bread recipes lately and can report HUGE SUCCESS in creating incredible fresh bread without a bread machine and with very little baking skill.  After honing my basics, I struck out on a mission to create the ultimate cheese olive loaf.  What I created can only be called a god among bread.

Ingredients:

3 cups bread flour (not All Purpose flour, bread flour.  AP flour doesn’t rise quite right)
1.75 cups warm water
1/4 tsp Fast Acting Yeast/Quick Rising Yeast
1 tsp Garlic Salt
2/3 cup finely diced large green olives
1/3 cup finely diced sun dried tomato
1 1/4 cup freshly shredded extra sharp aged white cheddar

This recipe is essentially just combining stuff then letting it rise, then baking it.  The real trick to this recipe is actually the cheese.  You will need a nice aged white cheddar.  I recommend at least a 6 year extra sharp from Wisconsin.  The power of the flavor of the cheese will counteract having to use a lot of it.  So the sharper, the more “in your face” the cheddar, the better off you are because you really don’t want to use more than a cup and a quarter for a loaf this small.

Combine the garlic salt and flour in a much-larger-than-you-need mixing bowl.  Remember we’re making bread dough so it’s going to need to rise.  Once combined, sprinkle in the olives, tomato and cheese.  Give it a rough mix with your hands just to get things integrated, but don’t spend too much time on it. Sprinkle it all over the top of the flour/salt mix and mix it with your hands for 30 seconds.

To the 1.75 cups warm water, add the 1/4 tsp of yeast and stir.  Let sit a moment, then grab a mixing spoon and pour the water/yeast mix into the ingredient mixture you have created, stirring like a mad man to get all the dry flour mixed in with the water.  After a few minutes you should end up with a *very* sticky and shardy mixture, both a bit wetter *and* a bit dryer than you would expect.  No worries.  Cover with saran wrap and let sit for 18 hours.

That’s right, I said 18 hours.  During this time it will rise in the bowl, which is why we wanted to make sure we had some room in there.  After 18 hours you should see tiny bubbles dotting the surface, and the dough might have doubled in volume.

Set aside a large sheet of wax paper.  Lightly dust it with corn meal or some more bread flour such that even if the dough is still wet, it won’t cling readily to the paper.  Gently scrap the dough out of the bowl onto the paper.  Covering your hands with bread flour so your fingers don’t stick to the dough, fold it once on itself with the floured side (from the dusted wax paper) facing out.  Lightly dust with more corn meal or flour, and cover with another sheet of wax paper.

Let the dough rise again for 1.5 hours.

At that point, preheat your oven to 450 degrees.  Take a 5.5 quart or larger ceramic crockpot liner or a pyrex bowl or container, and put it in the oven.  Let the dough rise for another 30 minutes while your baking pot preheats. You’ll know the dough is ready when it’s swelled in size another 25% or more, and when you poke it, it does not spring back. Don’t worry about the size though, if it doesn’t increase, still just use the poking trick.  This recipe is really tolerant of mistakes or other normal baking errors.

Ok now the only tricky part.  I really recommend a crockpot ceramic liner pot for this, because you want the loaf to rise enough for high (sandwich) slices.  But you don’t want to actually fold the dough on itself such that you get veins of flour or corn meal in the loaf itself. 

Take the baking pot out of the oven with mitts onto a safe surface.  In one swift motion take off the top wax paper, and grasping the bottom layer, lift the dough and dump it into the pot.  Shake the pot quickly to settle the dough using an oven mitt.  Two or three hard shakes should work.  Cover the pot with an oven-safe lid, or foil works fine too, and put it back in the 450 degree oven for 30 minutes.

During this time, the smell of BREAD AWESOMENESS will begin to fill your kitchen, especially with the shredded cheese melting into the baking loaf.  At the 30 minute mark, open the oven, remove the cover or foil, and bake for another 15 minutes to create a nice hard crust.

At 15 minutes, take the pot out of the oven, you should have a nice hard bowl shaped loaf.  Dump it upside down onto a cooling rack then quickly upright it.  Let the loaf cool for 30 minutes.  If you have done your job right, the loaf should crackle like a bowl of rice krispies as it cools. 

There is no better sound on earth I think.

Once cooled you have three options.  Slice off what you want to eat right away, then slice the rest and immediately freeze it.  Or, present the loaf within 4 hours of baking as part of a meal or larger spread.  Or, with enough people, just eat the whole loaf right there.

You should end up with a DELICIOUS heavy white loaf that is moist, slightly rubbery (in a good way) due to the cheddar, and that has strong notes of the sweetness of the tomato and the salt of the olives.

Enjoy!

 

 

The Story of My Book, Part 1

by Stepto
1 Comment

I’ve made it clear I wrote a book.  But a lot of people have asked me, how did you write it?  And how did you publish it? And where do you get your ideas from? And is the book good?  And is it for sale?  And where can I find it? And are you on Twitter?

So this is the story of my book.  On January 30th, 2010 I celebrated my 15th anniversary as a Microsoft employee.  A few months prior to that I had undertaken a server rebuild of the very blog you are reading right here and now. In doing so, my moving around the content database for the blog revealed in the past 8 or so years I had written a couple hundred thousand words.

That’s, like, more words than something that has a lot of words yet less than a couple hundred thousand.

I looked at the number and turned my head to the side and thought for a bit.  I’d basically been building all that content with three key purposes in mind.  The first, to amuse myself.  The second, to amuse anyone who might read it. Lastly, I had been putting off several book projects for lack of time to really create the content.  And here I was sitting upon a gigantic pile of words like a geek Smaug.  Other awesome people had turned their blog content into books. It just required collating it all, polishing it up, expanding it somewhat, and putting it out there.

The first part was finding a unifying thread to the content.  It’s not easy to take a bunch of disparate blog entries about “stuff” and make it compelling as an overall narrative, even if you are lucky enough that the individual stories or entries are good. So I had to set about finding my theme.  That turned out to be easy.  I was a 15 year Microsoft employee who had seen some pretty amazing things in the technology world, and who happened to have the freedom to write candidly about them.  So over the course of two months I pulled together all the posts on my blog dating back to 2002 that involved Microsoft. 

I ended up with some 40,000 words.  Good enough for a small book.  But of course I knew I wasn’t going to use all the stories, and would have to rewrite them.  I first identified the stories I knew would make up the core of the book, then another six or so stories that I would mix and match to see if they worked.  I began the process before Christmas of 2009, and got a working draft I felt was ready for an editor pass sometime around February.

As I mentioned, I already knew that I wanted to write a book.  The first most important relationship in writing is actually finding an objective editor who understands your voice.  I’d previously been made aware of Joanne Starer because of her friendship with Wil Wheaton, and he vouched for her editing abilities.  So I had already struck up a conversation with her about perhaps editing work I would product.  By February of 2010 I was ready with a 45,000 word manuscript. I submitted it to her that month and it was probably the best thing I could have done.

Because here’s the part where you shit yourself as a writer.  All along you’ve been writing for you.  And maybe some readers enjoyed it and provided positive feedback. But now some interloper, some person who just doesn’t *get you* is going to now make your work die in a fire. You send it off in fear, promising yourself you won’t check email for a few days.  Then you obsessively check email every five minutes waiting to see what shreds of your work return to you, along with a sarcastic note about not quitting your day job. And *then* she later emailed me back to suggest we meet at Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle to talk in person about the manuscript!  OH NO IT’S THAT BAD? I thought.

I exaggerate, somewhat, the angst.  Joanne was actually the perfect partner and we hit it off very well over my (real) burger and her (veggie) burger at Two Bells tavern downtown.  She had run the manuscript through both a critique and copy edit, meaning she went through correcting readability and grammar as well as critiquing the text.  She had made notes and in discussing the overall flow and tone it was easy to see that while the book could be better with some tweaking, I needn’t have feared her showing up with my book printed out and lashed to a cross upside-down with her poking a spear in it’s side over dinner.

After some tweaking, some removing of stories, combining of stories, and adding in new stories, the manuscript was finally done in an edited form. The final word count came to somewhere around that same 45,000 word mark. Now what remained was getting permission to publish it, and finding a publisher!

JoCoCruiseCrazy Log: Our Cruise Pretending Cuba Doesn’t Exist (Epilogue and Thanks)

by Stepto
No Comments

You know it’s done from the weight of the wallet now in your back pocket.  The jingle of keys you didn’t have to carry the past 6 days.  You stand slightly swaying, to the bemusement of those around you, but the ground is steady and firm and you are not drunk. All the friends old and new are with you, bleary eyed from the final night’s celebration.  At once sad and happy, shuffling lines are formed and last hugs are shared. Maybe happy isn’t quite the right word, because the sadness is pretty strong.  Perhaps “satisfied and thankful” strikes a more accurate note.  All I know after JoCoCruiseCrazy is this, the ramp down off the ship seems so much shorter than the ramp up to the ship a week ago.

I’m not a cruise person, at least I never imagined myself to be one. I’ve avoided Rochelle’s many requests for a cruise in the Caribbean for several reasons.  So I thought I would finish off this series with a quick recap of a pasty pudgy geek’s impression of boat life and what the individual details were that I was so against/worried about.

First of all I knew from many friends one thing: Do not skimp.  If you can spend money, do it. You will not regret it.  Take the amount of money you would feel comfortable spending on a crazy vacation and double it, just to be safe. The reason being is that once the ship departs, you’re on the ship. If you run out of money three days in, well that means meals and sodas are free, as is the view, but uh…not much else is.

All told, for airfare from Seattle to Florida round trip, one night hotel room before heading back, JoCoCruiseCrazy entertainment fee, the state room on the ship, excursions, and on the boat expenses, the cost per head came out to around $2700 or roughly $5400 for the both of us.  But in that we got 6 days at sea on an amazing boat in a large balcony room, tons of fruity rum drinks, nights at the best concerts we would want to go to (it being JoCoCruiseCrazy and all), swimming with dolphins and riding horses in the sea, awesome food, and trips to the spa and whatnot.

We did it up right.

I was worried about several things.  

The Sick that is the Sea.  Of sickness.  Also Nausea.  You get what I mean.

First off I was worried about sea sickness.  I’ve been on boats all my life, from lake/ski/cabin cruiser boats of my childhood on Texas lakes, to ferries and catamarans in the PacNW.  I’ve only ever been seasick one time.  And that was on a trip on a high speed catamaran out to see whales in Boston.  27 knots in choppy seas, and me stupidly downing three beers and a hot dog before we left. As anyone will tell you, once you are seasick once, you forever live in fear of being seasick again.  It’s been 9 years since that event and still I was petrified of being at sea for that long. We stocked up on Dramamine and acupuncture wrist bands, neither one of which we really wanted to use.  So we boarded the boat using the wrist bands since they weren’t reliant on pills. We took them off the night of the first day.

Yes, we could feel the boat moving.  Yes, it took getting used to.  Yes, occasionally during the week we felt the gentle roll of the boat unexpectedly. But I can honestly say even when I had enjoyed quite a bit to drink, even at the boat’s rolliest, I had no issues with sea sickness. In fact, for several days after the cruise, while I didn’t get land sickness, I had trouble falling asleep, so accustomed had I become to the gentle lulling to sleep of the side to side motion.  Rochelle and I never took any Dramamine nor used the wrist bands again the entire trip.  In fairness, the weather was smooth, and the roll of the ship never really did anything other than make you go “whoa!” once or twice during the trip.  But I was amazed at how at home and comforted I felt.

 

THE SUN.  IT BURNS. WE MUST COLLAPSE THE SUN.

 

My second fear was that I would broil like a lobster, screaming and whistling in the bright sunlight soup while some chef said just over me “Don’t worry, he can’t really feel anything.” Being 38, living in Seattle, and being just fine with my sun exposure per year (meaning zero) here I was about to go into the broiler pan of some tropical area where there’s sun and also hot and sun.

I packed diligently, several tubes of SPF 70.  Hats.  Breathable shirts.  I was all ready for my childhood expectations of 100 degree Texas summer days. By the end of the trip I sat on the deck, smoking a cigar, hatless and sunblockless in the partly sunny 80 degree weather wanting to go back in time and punch pudgy pale white me right in the cancer fear. Yes there was sun, yes sometimes I got hot, yes I had to be a little bit careful.  But in the end, I just wish I had relaxed a lot more. There’s a couple of moments in the harsh light of our star that I wish I had been less fearful: Riding a horse in the cold salt ocean, holding a dolphin’s fins as he swam me back to the edge, feeling the bright light wash over me as I sipped a cold Red Stripe and watched Rochelle run fast figure eights in the bay of Ocho Rios.

Next time I will leave behind a lot of safety clothes and just go with sunblock.

 

Sand.

 

Ok let’s just get this out of the way, FUCK SAND.  Fuck it right in the ear. I hate sand.  When I was four sand killed my best friend.  When I was eight, sand killed twelve more of them. Sand is my natural predator. My fear was that I would end up with sand all over me and everywhere.  I had bought sandals…SANDALS people.  This is like me saying I bought SHOULDER PADS and SHIN GUARDS for….sporty….purposes.  In fact I got screwed by sand on my first day by wearing my sandals and not taking them off on the beach, thereby shredding the skin on my feet.  But my key fear was that with all the sandy ports of call I would end up being the king of sand and singing like Sting about being so.  The reality was that after having my skin abraded by our initial port of call (turning the top of my feet a splotched red and white) as long as I remembered to take any shoes off when encountering sand everything was…well ok.  I felt embarrassed throughout the week that my initial mistake carried with me so long, but the damage was cosmetic and a little aloe worked it all out. And although sand, as I said, CAN SUCK IT, it wasn’t really a big deal beyond that.

 

Cruise life was incredible.  I love my friends, and I love everyone who was on board the boat.  But if they weren’t there, I can say we still would have had a great time. The experience for a non cruise person who is a hard core geek was life changing and incredible.  I would say to you reading this if it sounds like it’s outside your comfort zone, DO IT.  Especially do it if you can be with other people in the same mental place.  You will have support, you will have love, you will have that thing that makes us geeks: Awareness to expand our experiences.

 

THANKS

 

Jonathan Coulton: My thanks are in the inscription of your copy of my book.  In summary, thank you so much for the opportunity. 

 

Paul and Storm and families: You guys already know my thanks.  However being with your families was an amazing adventure and Rochelle and I are so thankful for being a part of it.

 

Paul F. Tompkins: HAHAHAHAH   AHAHAHAHAHAHA.  AHAHAHAHAH I GOT TO BE ON A BOAT AND YOU HAD TO GO WORK AHAHAHAHAHAHA. [Editor’s note to self, tone this down a bit and remember this dude is really funnier than you could hope to be]

 

Wil Wheaton and Family: Anne, I’m pretty sure you and Rochelle have some type of amazing snorkel adventure in your future, be sure to hit her up for it. Ryan and Nolan: Start giving Wil crap anytime he gets pissy with you by saying “Wil, I don’t know if you know, but we have now established ourselves as being really pretty good guys.” Wil, smoking cigars in view of Cuba over scotch was, in it’s own funny silly way, epic. Your writings inspired me to take the chance.

Mike Phirman: Seriously?  Dude just re-read the past six entries.  I made a mythos for you.  sheesh.  <g>  We still love listening to your tracks and just imagining your performing them.

 

Liz: Don’t tell Rochelle you are my secret love.  I SAID DON’T TELL ROCHELLE.

Molly Lewis and Chris: You guys make me smile no matter where we run into each other. If there’s any place I can be, any song I can sing, any uke I can carry to help you guys out I am there.

 

John Roderick: I am blessed in every way that you are local to me.  I was floored not only by you and getting to know you, but The Long Winters Music has really impacted me.

 

John Hodgman: If comedy can be said to be relentless, yours is the best kind.  As Leslie Neilson once was paraphrased, “I don’t get it, I say serious things in serious ways and people laugh” you have brought a level which makes someone actually laugh out loud when you say something like “I played scrabble as a child against William F. Buckley. I found his entries latitudinarian, and built off that for a triple word score.”

Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy: There’s not much I can say here.  From my appreciation of “The clock on the wall says ‘That’s all’ for the stridex medicated band hour” and you both recognizing that, to my also saying “It’s like getting hit over the head with a surfboard of flavor!” and you both recognizing that, you guys rock my world with Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater goodness and just being anywhere on an anything with you was a highlight of my life, not even taking into account your wonderful families and kids.

 

Lastly, to a person that I discovered via a w00tstock video months ago and got to play craps with, perform with, and in general stand next to his awesomeness.  Peter Sagal. Your delivery is perfect, your wit sublime.  Thank you so much for letting me watch you work.  Awesome stuff all around.

 

And I think that’s it.  Wait.  Something is digging into my pocket….ow, something sharp…

 

OMG its my JoCoCruiseCrazy pencil, sharpened by David Rees.

 

Now that guy.  He has a future.

SeaMonkeys: What can I say.  You came to see me as part of a larger troupe of folks.  Everyone one of you was amazing and fun and I still cannot believe you were there.  I cannot wait for our next encounter,  because it will start with "I was a sea monkey" and that means I will give you a hug.*

*Note: Hug may come with purell.