gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

"crofting" as a metaphor for the new world of work?

Recently I wrote about "crofting", which has always had a big influence on my life.

My paternal grandfather was a Scottish Highland "crofter". He lived on a "croft" i.e. a very small holding of land, where he raised sheep and grew potatoes. I used to spend my summers there as a boy. We were very close.

Crofting is a good life, but not a very financially rewarding one. It's very self-sufficient, though. The interesting thing for me looking back, is that crofters never did "just one thing". Every day they had something else going on. One day it might be sheep. The next it might be a job working on the roads for the local council. I knew one crofter who drove the mail van. Another who ran the local post office. They would do their jobs, but after work they'd still have their sheep, cows and potatoes to attend to.

As my dad is fond of reminding me, I seem to have inherited the crofting mentality. I DON'T like waking up in the morning and doing the same thing every day. I LIKE having all these different balls in the air- cartooning, painting, consulting, writing, marketing, blogging etc. Sure, part of me would like nothing better than just "retiring to the desert and making paintings", but another part of me likes all the running around in different directions. And all this running around DOES get tiring, I can tell you that. Sometimes I LOVE the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. Other times I utterly despise it.

Since that post I've gotten more than a few emails, with people basically saying, "Thank you for coming up with a term that totally describes my life!"

The traditional Highland crofter is quickly becoming a thing of the past. As my uncle, a crofter like his father before him, recently quipped, "We just farm manila envelopes now" [Rural subsidies from the European bureaucrats tend to arrive in manila envelopes]. But as the BigCorp job-for-life also becomes more and more a thing of the past, expect to see more "Crofters" out there, even if like me, it's no longer sheep and potatoes we're selling. I think it's a sweet little term that conveys a lot, especially to those of us who seem to have a built-in aversion to salaried positions in other people's companies. You?

[Bonus Link: Probably the most well-known book on Scottish crofting. "The Crofter & The Laird" by John McPhee.]

choosing the book cartoons

[One of my all-time favorite cartoons, from The Hughtrain.]

As the book now stands, there will be about eighty or so cartoons in it. I don't have the exact number so far, a lot has to do with the actual design of the physical book- dimensions, page numbers, layout, cost of production etc. all factor into it.

Choosing the cartoons has probably been the hardest bit of the editing process so far. Besides the 1,800 or so cartoons on the blog, I've got- Wow- AT LEAST another 4,000 unpublished ones just sitting around in cardboard boxes.

I wanted the cartoons in the book to offer a pretty thorough overview of my work- who knows, this might be the only book I ever publish, or whatever. So I wanted to include cartoons from all my various stages in the last ten years. From the early days in New York, to publishing "How To Be Creative" and "The Hughtrain", to my recent work.

The other thing- I'm older. A lot of my best earlier work has a lot more f-bombs and sexual references than the cartoons I'm drawing today. But I wanted them in the book anyway, regardless of how it may misrepresent my more "mature", present-day self, or undermine the "corporate" side of the book market. Thank God my editor agreed with this approach. Whittle down the edges too much, of course, and eventually you have nothing left.

The good news is, whatever my petty concerns might be, the people at Penguin, both Editorial and Sales alike, seem very excited and gung-ho. I'm feeling that way a bit, myself. Rock on.

cardboard 444

[Click on image to enlarge etc.]

"Cardboard 444". Drew this earlier this morning. A little line drawing on cardboard. 2x3.5 inches i.e. business-card sized.

Since I got back from Austin on Friday I've been mostly working on DesertManahttan, and then goofing off the rest of the time.

Well, maybe "goofing off" is too strong a term. Just been doing a lot of thinking recently. A lot of new stuff is coming down the pike, and I'm just trying to re-calibrate my brain to handle it all.

"desertmanhattan": progress report

[Click on images to enlarge. Click to watch the video here.]

I started adding the acrylic last week. If you click on the top picture, you'll see I've just start applying the India Ink, towards the top. That was yesterday. If you click on the link above, I made a little 2-minute phonecam video explaining everything in greater detail.

This thing is going to take forever to finish. I'm not worried, there's no rush etc.

"tribes": ten questions for seth godin

10 Questions For Seth Godin

My friend and mentor, Seth Godin has a new book out, "Tribes". As has become a regular gapingvoid tradition, to celebrate the launch I e-mailed Seth 10 questions, which he kindly answered below. Rock on.

1. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers not yet familiar with your work [all 14 of them], let's get the main schpiel over and done with: From your perspective, what is "Tribes" about?

It explains why top-down, buzz-driven media is the past, not the future.

The world has always been organized into tribes, groups of people who want to (need to) connect with each other, with a leader and with a movement. The products, services and ideas that are gaining currency faster than ever are ones that are built on a tribe.

Barack Obama has one, John McCain tried to co-opt one. Arianna Huffington has built the most popular blog in the world around one. Harley Davidson and Apple are titanic brands for the very same reason. They sell a chance to join a group that matters.

The punchline is that the only way to lead a tribe is to lead it. And that means that marketing is now about leadership, about challenging the status quo and about connecting people who can actually make a difference. If you can't do that, don't launch your site, your product, your non-profit or your career.

I’d argue that you understand how to tap into this need, Hugh. Lots of people don’t like your work--screw them, we don’t like them anyway. The people who do like, who find that it resonates... it’s likely that we’ll like each other. You lead us to a place we want to go.

2. Your seminal bestseller from a few years ago, "Purple Cow", made the assertion that "Everyone is a Marketer". Though this would now be considered pretty standard doctrine for marketing geeks Everywhere, at the time I remember it seeming a pretty radical, new, challenging thought. In Tribes, it seems to me you've upped the ante by asserting that "Everyone is a Leader". Care to elaborate?

Sure. The idea that everyone is a marketer is still hard for a surprisingly large number of organizations. Non profits (most of them) don’t see the world that way. Neither do traditional factories or many other businesses. But it’s so clearly true, I don’t even have to outline here how the product is the marketing, how the service is the marketing, how every human being who touches something is doing marketing.

Well, if we go a giant step forward and realize that it is for and about the tribe, that tribes--connected, motivated groups of people--are the engines of growth, then it seems clear to me that what marketing means today is leadership. If you’re boring or staid, no one will follow you. Why would they?

3. Anyone who knows you would consider you a leader, in your own unique way. And the same could be said for a lot of the people you personally hang out with. But it seems to me that this book was not written for those type of folk, but for people who have yet to really consider themselves as leadership material. It seems to me that the main thrust of the book is about trying to get them to make the leap from "Follower" to "Leader". Is there any truth in that?

Everyone isn’t going to be a leader. But everyone isn’t going to be successful, either.

Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn’t mean they’re in charge, it doesn’t mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we’ve got.

So the challenge is: your choice.

4. As you well know, I'm fascinated with marketing, both for myself and for my clients. Looking over my work from the last couple of years, I increasingly see marketing [by that I mean, GOOD marketing] as a function of LANGUAGE and NARRATIVE. In other words, the art of marketing is figuring out a way to talk to people in the market in a manner they SIMPLY HAVE NOT been talked to before. And then when I'm reading your book, I keep thinking that, SO MUCH of being a leader is simply providing people with a good narrative to explain their actions. In other words, it's far easier to lead if [A] You've got a great story that's easy for you to share and [B], more importantly, you have a good story that is EASY for other people to share.

So much traditional marketing is built around the idea of "Merit" i.e. good quality, good prices etc. But the older I get, I keep asking myself, "What's the story here? What's the REAL story that people are GENUINELY going to want to tell other people?" Do you see Storytelling as a form of Leadership? How about vice versa?

In All Marketers Are Liars, my point was that people buy stories, not stuff, and it’s stories that spread, not stuff. An iPod made by Garmin wouldn’t be an iPod, would it? It’s the story and the affect and the whole aura that makes it worth $200.

I think you’ve hit the issue on the head. Leaders tell stories. Gandhi or King or Che or yes, Rush Limbaugh. They tell stories. The stories matter and the words matter. Of course OF COURSE the product has to live up to the story, the service has to be there, the story has to be true. But no story, not idea, no marketing.

5. We all have different things that motivate us, that gets us out of bed in the morning. Some people want money, some people want power, some people want fame and applause. You seem very driven "To Affect Change", both on an individual level, and collectively within companies. Where does that drive come from? Were you born with it, or has it just grown with you over the years? Is it something that is still constantly evolving? If so, how?

It used to be a curse, but now I’m getting used to it.

I’m pretty impatient with things that are as they are instead of as they could be. I’m impatient with people who grumble and settle and then get old and die. I’m energized by people who see things differently and make changes happen. We’re all so lucky, what a sin to waste it.

6. When I finished reading "Tribes" I was both stunned and delighted in equal measure to see my name cited in the Acknowledgements section as an influence in the creation of the book [Thanks!]:

"Years ago, Hugh MacLeod, the world's most popular inspirational business cartoonist (who knew you could do that for a living?), drew a cartoon (his most popular one ever) with the caption, 'The market for something to believe in is infinite'- as soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to write a book about that idea."

Well, I certainly have some ideas about what that cartoon means to me, though I'd be curious to hear your individual take on it. What it says to you, personally. Thoughts?

That was the second title I had in mind for the book. And I was going to include the image itself, but then it showed up all over the web and so...

The point imho is this: You can’t drink any more bottled water than you already do. Or buy more wine. Or more tea. You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes at a time. You can’t get two massages at once...

So, what grows? What do marketers sell that scales?

I’ll tell you what: Belief. Belonging. Mattering. Making a difference. Tribes. We have an unlimited need for this.

7. Your books and blog posts seem to have one thing in common, they seem to be getting shorter and shorter with every passing year. I have no problem with that; I think people genuinely prefer short reads, over long ones. For people aspiring to publish their own books one day, what advice would you give them re. deciding on a book's length?

Try to write a book or a blog post that can’t possibly be any shorter than it is.

8. I think aspiring writers have a lot of romantic illusions about "The life of an author", which have little to do with the actual hard-nose reality of the publishing business. What do you think are the hardest lessons for a first-time author to learn?

Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn’t spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail.

Book publishers don’t make authors successful (clarification: 175,000 new authors a year, 300 become successful because of publishers). Authors make themselves successful by earning the privilege of having a platform, by creating ideas that spread, and yes, by building a tribe. (Harry Potter anyone?)

9. You're a busy guy. Besides writing books, you have paid speaking gigs, your blog to keep up, and your various start-ups and businesses to manage. When do you find time to write the actual books? Do you have a regular set time for working on it [first thing in the morning, say], or do you just somehow find the time whenever?

I don’t set out to write books. I don’t make time for them. They just force themselves on me. If I resist, the idea makes me miserable until I write it down.

I can go three or six months or longer with nothing, and then an entire book just sort of appears. If I have to grind it out, I’m not going to write it. That’s not true for everyone, but that’s what works for me.

10. You've been publishing your books for about a decade now. Obviously, in that time period there's been a lot of changes in the world. But for the sake of simplicity, let's narrow the field down a bit, to the "Purple Cow", new-marketing world you've been happily residing in. What's the biggest change you've seen in this brave new world, since Purple Cow and IdeaVirus first hit the bookstores?

There’s no doubt that the biggest change is that most smart people now realize that the world has changed.

When I started, I was working in a status quo, static world, where the future was expected to be just like the past, but a little sleeker.

Now, chaos is the new normal. That makes it easier to sell an idea but a lot harder to sound like a crackpot.

debora smail

[Applying the pencil to DesertManhattan. Photos courtesy of Debora Smail, who was in town last week. Click on images to enlarge etc.]

Last week the photographer, Debora Smail was in town, working on a travel assignment for a magazine. We hung out a bit; first we cracked open a few beers at Harry's Tinaja, then I took her her over to my studio and showed her DesertManhattan. Besides it being a lovely afternoon, full of interesting conversation, she took a lot of pictures. Here are some of them. Hope you like etc. Thanks, Debora!

desertmanhattan update

[A rough idea of how I'm hoping "Desertmanhattan" will turn out, cannibalized from "Fred 44". 4x8 feet, pencil, acrylic and ink on canvas. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

Over the last week, I've been dividing my time between finishing the book manuscript and getting started on Desertmanhattan.

My head is all over the place at the moment; I thought I should write down some of my thoughts, just to gain some clarity for myself:

1. I'll be damn glad to have the book out of the way. It's been a long, four-year road. I feel a combination of gloriously happy and elated, and utterly burned out from the whole thing.

2. While I was working on Desertmanhattan, the feeling that "This is what I ought to be doing; this what I was born to be doing," kept swelling up inside me. And you know what? This totally terrified me. What if I gave up everything to do this, and suddenly nobody cared? Suddenly nobody wanted to buy my work, and I ended up penniless and ruined?

3. Paintings don't scale. Even if I could sell the paintings for huge amounts of money [It seems a distinct possibility, after some of the back-channel conversations I've had with potential patrons of the enterprise], it would still mean working my butt off and making no more than an average, second-tier attorney. It doesn't always seem to add up.

4. The artist doesn't determine the price of the work. The re-sale value of a price determines the price of the work. If the perception exists that the work will be significantly more valuable in five or ten years, paintings are easy to sell. Without this perception, it's damned hard to sell a painting, even if the potential customer falls in love with it.

5. An artist is about as good example of a "Global Microbrand" as you can get. I have a few artist friends out here in West Texas. On one hand, they totally get the idea. On the other hand, it's an idea that seems to totally terrify them. It always struck me as funny how people want to be artists, yet they don't want to be marketers. To me that's like wanting to be a pro football player, yet not wanting to keep in shape. Nice work if you can get it.

6. "I don't need a gallery; I have a blog." I've been approached by a few gallery owners over the last couple of months about doing a show. So far the conversations have gone nowhere. So far I've yet to meet a gallery who can sell a painting better than my blog can. Gallerists talk a lot; they're not quite so fond of putting down financial guarantees in writing.

7. The artist I admire the most, in terms of taking the internet-enabled "global microbrand" idea and running with it, is my good friend, John T. Unger. Four years of blogging later, and he can't make his "Great Bowls of Fire" fast enough. Though a lot of the ideas he uses he first got from reading my blog, unlike me, he actually applied them and took them to the frickin' sky. Well done, John.

We've been talking a lot over the last couple of months about this new art phase of mine. His advice has been invaluable.

8. Just as I was thinking about all this selling-art-online stuff, one of my Twitter followers, @corkymc turns me onto the blog of a very talented, young Australian artist, Hazel Dooney. Though she was already considered very successful for an artist under the age of 30, two years ago she decided to pack in the gallery system and just do her "dialogue" with her audience directly online. She's got some strong views on the subject, which I approve of:

Inevitably, this leads to another question, also always the same: what's the role of the gallery in this environment? And, as always, I argue that it doesn't have one. Or as I put it in Art Is Moving: "It deserves to die. It's an anachronism that's outlived it's usefulness. I think there is still a role for individual curators or even 'show producers' but they need to work in a more individualised, specialist way within a networked 'virtual' paradigm ..."

To be more precise, I still see value in public exhibitions and installations but not produced, promoted or managed in the way they are today – the same way they have been for a hundred and fifty years – by dithering, technologically inept, socially aspirational and unadventurous commercial 'bricks and mortar' gallerists.

I'll be watching what she has to say in the future with great interest, to be sure.

9. It took me a few years of blogging my cartoons, before I finally accepted the idea that my audience would always come mainly from reading my blog, and not from being published in the newspapers, magazines, books etc. Even though I have a book coming out in June, I still believe this is the case- just because I'm now an "author", doesn't mean the day-to-day reality has changed very much.

10. And now I'm realizing that if I want to sell paintings, I don't need a gallery, I can just do it all online. Nor do I need critical approval from the art establishment- the media, the curators and the critics. I can just do it all myself, if that's what I indeed do want. It's a great feeling, sure, but it's a new one. Taking its time to really sink in.

11. My paternal grandfather was a Scottish Highland "crofter". He lived on a "croft" i.e. a very small holding of land, where he raised sheep and grew potatoes. I used to spend my summers there as a boy. We were very close.

Crofting is a good life, but not a very financially rewarding one. It's very self-sufficient, though. The interesting thing for me looking back, is that crofters never did "just one thing". Every day they had something else going on. One day it might be sheep. The next it might be a job working on the roads for the local council. I knew one crofter who drove the mail van. Another who ran the local post office. They would do their jobs, but after work they'd still have their sheep, cows and potatoes to attend to.

As my dad is fond of reminding me, I seem to have inherited the crofting mentality. I DON'T like waking up in the morning and doing the same thing every day. I LIKE having all these different balls in the air- cartooning, painting, consulting, writing, marketing, blogging etc. Sure, part of me would like nothing better than just "retiring to the desert and making paintings", but another part of me likes all the running around in different directions. And all this running around DOES get tiring, I can tell you that. Sometimes I LOVE the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. Other times I utterly despise it.

12. Something in me is changing. I came out to live in the West Texas desert for a reason. I'm just beginning to find out what that reason may be. Sometimes I can clearly see what the reason is; other times it proves more elusive.

13. It's a good life. It really is.

studio update: desertmanhattan

[Click on image to enlarge etc.]

For the last couple of months, I've been talking about a return to large-format paintings.

Originally I was planning 6-by-6-foot canvases; I decided instead to opt for 4'x8'.

I finally have my studio set up, as pictured above. It's an outdoor studio, with cement floor, tin roof, and as shown here, canvas walls to keep the rain and dust out.

That's a 4x8' wooden board you see there, with two-by-fours framing it on the backside. I'm going to cover it with canvas and get painting on it, hopefully in the next couple of days, before I take off out of town on business at the end of the week.

In the foreground you see my acrylic painting materials- plus a ten-foot roll of canvas in the orange plastic bag.

[A rough idea of how I'm hoping it'll turn out, cannibalized from a photo of "Fred 44". Click on image to enlarge etc.]

It's going to be called "Desertmanhattan". "Fred 44" was a ink-on-paper study for it, so go here if you want to get an idea of what the final work will end up looking like.

It's called "Desertmanhattan", simply because I'm trying to create a piece that captures the vibe I get from both living out in the middle of nowhere, here in the West Texas desert, and the big-city vibe I get when I'm on my business travels. The desert is an extreme place; so is Manhattan; they both inform the work I'm doing now. My drawing style was formalized whilst I was living in Manhattan, so the title makes compete sense to me.

Yes, I intend to sell it when it's done. Yes, it'll be really expensive [I'm putting out feelers to potential buyers. If you're possibly thinking about becoming one of them, please feel free to drop me an email at desertmanhattan@gmail.com, and we'll start a conversation, Thanks.] .

If it goes well, I'm not going to suddenly quit everything else and start cranking out Desertmanhattan's like an assembly line. I don't foresee ever doing more than 4-6 of these pieces a year. I don't foresee spending more than one week per month on them, either. I've got plenty other projects keeping me busy; plus it looks like the amount of traveling I'll be doing in the next year is going to increase quite a bit.

As for the marketing, well, of course I'll be using this blog and my Twitter feed to do the heavy lifting. Though my target market is not set in stone, I have a feeling the buyers for the large pieces will come out the prosperous end of the tech/VC/Silicon Valley/Web 2.0 community. They know me, they know my work, they know my value. Besides, the New York financial guys [a favorite target of the traditional art galleries] all seem to be losing their jobs at the moment.

And of course, "The Tao of Undersupply" will be seriously informing the marketing:

The biggest problem in the Western world is oversupply.

For every mid-level managing job opening up, there's scores of people willing and able. For every company needing to hire an ad agency or design firm, there's dozens out there, willing and able. For every person wanting to buy a new car, there's tons of car makers and dealers out there. I could go on and on.

I could also go on about how many good people I know are caught in oversupplied markets, and how every day they wake up, feeling chilled to the bone with dread and unease. Advertising and media folk are classic examples.

So maybe the thing is to is get into "The Tao of Undersupply".

If only 100 people want to buy your widgets, then just make 90 widgets. If only 1000, make 900. If only 10 million, make 9 million. It isn't rocket science, but it takes discipline.

It also requires you to stop making the same stuff as other people. Doing that requires originality and invention.

Like it said in "How To Be Creative", don't try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether. Again, it isn't rocket science.

In other words, it's better to under-supply the market, than to over-supply it.

"Desert" represents one side of me. "Manhattan" represents the other. We'll see where this goes. Rock on.

[UPDATE] 24 hours later:


[Me applying to undercoat onto the stretched canvas. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

[UPDATE] 36 hours later:


[Four undercoats of gesso and acrylic applied, then I get busy with the pencil on the canvas. Easy. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

[Close-up. Note how the pencil shows up the texture of the canvas. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

the complexity war a.ka. "success is more complex than failure"

Rudyard Kipling once described Triumph and Disaster as "Imposters, both". The longer I stay in the working world, the more I start to get what he means.

It's funny how you can have two guys sitting next to each other in an office, both doing the same job. Both using the same computers and phones. Both with the same academic qualifications. Both with a similar IQ. Both working the same amount of hours. But why does one guy take home five times more sales commission than the other guy? What's going on? Is it luck? Skill? Justice? Injustice?

The question of what separates success from failure, is something I've always liked to ponder on. Suddenly this week, out of nowhere, the following line hit me:

"Success is more complex than Failure."

Think about it. Being a failure is a no-brainer. All you have to do is sleep till noon, get out of bed, scratch your balls, have your morning visit to the bathroom, turn on the Star Trek re-runs, help yourself to some breakfast [Leftover pizza and a bottle of Jack Daniels, Hurrah!], light up your first joint of they day, download some porn, and already you're well on your way. Sure, a few inconvenient variables may enter the picture here and there, to complicate an otherwise perfect day of FAIL, e.g. what you're going have to say to your brother in order to convince him to lend you that $300, so you can pay off the telephone bill, that kinda thing. But for the most part, the day-to-day modus operandi of your "Average Total Failure" is quite straightforward.

Being successful, however, is a whole different ball game. Breakfast meetings at 7.00am. Conference calls at midnight. Visiting twelve cities in five days. Fielding question from a swarm of hostile journalists. Dealing successfully with an enraged, multi-million dollar customer who's screaming bloody murder over something rather trivial in the grand scheme of things. Dealing successfully with an enraged, multi-million dollar investor who's screaming bloody murder over something rather trivial in the grand scheme of things. Making sure there's enough money in the account to meet the payroll of all your legions of highly-paid, highly-effective, highly-talented employees. All these hundreds of unrelenting issues to deal with, all day, every day. You get the picture.

And as always, what's invariably true of people is also invariably true for businesses. So when I see a small but insanely-successful business suddenly implode overnight [it seems to happen quite a lot in Silicon Valley], I'm guessing chances are it wasn't inability to manage growth per se that destroyed the business [a favorite reason cited by those writing business obituaries], but the inability for the business to manage complexity. Complexity increases exponentially with growth, most small companies can culturally only handle incremental increases in complexity. As I'm fond of saying, "Human beings don't scale".

Which is why walking around the hallways of large, successful companies can often seem so oppressive to somebody new to it. All that cultural regimentation is there for one reason only: To fight "The Complexity War". Sure, it might feel a bit ghastly to the more idealist and free-spirited among us, but until somebody can come up with a better way to win this Complexity War at a Fortune-500 level, I don't see it ever going away.

book edit almost done

1. Since I got back from the road trip I've basically been locked up in my office, putting the finishing touches on my final edit for the book. It has to be at the publisher's by Monday morning.

I'm pretty much done. Just going over it again and again and again, micro-tweaking the hell out of it.

2. I've been told that the official launch date is June 9th, 2009. Yes, for us Internet types used to immediate electronic gratification, that seems like a long way's away. But hey, this is books, not blogging. I'm told designing a book properly takes forever. Ditto with getting the sales team up to speed. Marketing, ditto. I'm told that if you want your book featured in a magazine article for one of the majors, say, Forbes or Businessweek, they need to see galleys at least four months prior to the launch.

3. And then there's the psychological pressure. You make a mistake on a blog post, it's easy to go back and fix it, or at least, try better next time. But once a book is in print, the mistake is there, in hardback, on paper, forever. If you make a mistake on a blog, well, it's your blog, so nobody really cares besides yourself. If you make a mistake with a book, suddenly there's a whole list of people you're letting down- editors, agents, sales people, retailers. As the deadline approaches, I feel this more and more acutely. It wasn't something I ever really thought too much about before, until it became real.

4. I remember a decade or two ago, Woody Allen telling a journalist that he never, ever watches his movies ever again, once the final edit is in the can. At the time I thought that was rather odd. What? Don't you want to occasionally visit your baby? Your masterpiece?

But having lived with this book in various manifestations for over four years, I can now totally relate to what Woody Allen was talking about. As my film director friend, Dave Mackenzie once told me, by the time you're done with a large project, you are so bloody sick of it- all the pressure, all the meetings, all the changes, all the keeping the thousands of balls up in the air- that you never want to see it again. Though writing this book wasn't nearly as much work as making a feature film, this feeling does permeate. This book is "me" four years ago. This book is not "me" now. I feel that in spades at the moment.

5. In one of the final chapters of the book, I tell how I never really set out to be a professional cartoonist. Nor did I set out to be an Internet consultant. They just kinda-sorta happened. I feel the same way about becoming an "author".

6. A few months back I tracked down a very dear friend of mine, Mark O'Donnell and sent him an e-mail, congratulating him. Mark is pretty much my oldest "creative hero", ever. I've known him since I was nine years old. Mark is the consumate, old school, New York humorist. He wrote for the Harvard Lampoon back in college. Later he wrote for The New Yorker. He wrote for Saturday Night Live. He wrote for Spy magazine. He published comic novels and wrote off-Broadway plays. He still lives in the same Upper West Side, rent-controlled apartment he moved into in 1976, the year he graduated from college.

Why was I congratulating him? Because after struggling away for all those decades- lots of highbrow, critical acclaim, but zero money- he FINALLY landed his first bit of massive worldly success. He wrote the words and lyrics to the Tony-Award winning musical [and later, the movie], "Hairspray". It was huge for him.

So I write him an e-mail, sending him big kudos. The guy's a genius, no one deserves a massive hit more than he. I just wanted to let him know that.

He wrote back: "And Hairspray is like only one per cent of what I'm proud of." A-ha! Bingo. That pretty much is how I feel about the book. Just one small step in a very long march.

[PS: Mark also wrote the lyrics to John Water's next musical, "Crybaby", based on the movie with Johnny Depp. Rock on.]

7. I'm not worried about book sales per se. Having a bestseller would be lovely, sure, but no-one has any control over these things, especially not a first-time author. I'm sure as hell not relying on it financially. What concerns me far more is how the book will affect the rest of what I'm up to. For the better? For the worse? Again, I feel a lot of that is well beyond my control.

8. I wonder what my second book is going to be about...

[UPDATE] Mark left a comment below: "I'm happy for the ancillary coverage. You know more about me than my agent. Congrats on the bouncing baby book! It is a challenge to enjoy it and to keep perspective at the same time. -- Mark O'Donnell"

[Note to Newbies: The book is based on a 10,000 word blog post I did back in 2004, called "How To Be Creative". So far it's been downloaded & read well over a million times etc.]