Since I’m still reeling from Mandisa’s premature departure from American Idol, the only thing I’ve got energy for today is a meme, courtesy of Orac.
Where was I one year ago?
This is one of the reasons I keep a blog. Apparently last year about this time I was working on revising my memoir to send on another round of agent submissions. Since then I’ve been revising it back to the way it was before that round of submissions — I think it’s really much more effective in its original format. I do sometimes wonder whether it’s worth it to keep flogging this same old book, but I haven’t been nearly as aggressive at selling it as some of the stories you read, and I’ve gotten pretty decent feedback about it. It’s just that I also want to keep writing — I don’t want to just spend time selling books, so I’m not as aggressive as I need to be to get this thing published.
Where was I five years ago?
Five years ago I was a partner in a book design / web design firm called The Davidson Group. My half of the company designed and edited college textbooks, and the other half did web design. Six months later I would sell my half of the business, head back to grad school, and begin the chain of events that led me to become a full-time writer. But at that point I was mired in the daily grind of running a company with five employees.
Where was I ten years ago?
That’s a tougher question. In April of 1996, I believe I was running a book design and editing company on my own, called Digital Text Construction. I may have had one or two employees, I don’t really recall. Even the Internet Wayback Machine shows no vestiges of our website, dtcbooks.com. Which brings up an interesting point: I can remember looking up dtcbooks.com on the Wayback Machine a few years ago and finding that web site. Does the Internet Archive periodically purge its archive? Then what’s the point of calling it an archive?
edit: Oops! My “five years ago” statement was actually six years ago. Five years ago I had already sold the business and was working on an early, satire-only version of Word Munger. It still exists, here.