My First Contribution to the Bella and Sloan Book Projects

Sloan has been plugging along dutifully with the humor memoir project. I have slacked until today - here is my first essay.

It's a whopper, about 3000 words, so I decided to post it on a new separate blog. (If I knew how to do expandable posts, I would just post them here, but that's too much code for me to wrestle with at the moment.)

What's the first essay about? My first computer. The infancy of the nerdery that you enjoy on a regular basis. Enjoy, and please leave comments. As you may recall, the point of this project is to get reader response on early drafts of stuff well before it reaches the point of being published. I want to know what's good, what's interesting, what's not working, what's what.

Sloan's First Draft

Sloan has posted her first effort toward this parallel book project I mentioned. It's about her adventures in apartment living, take one. It's especially apt since right now she's apartment hunting for the first time in over five years. This time she's savvy enough to look at place after place before making a decision. The first time around? Not so much.

"...no, I would find the most pest infested, overpriced, code-violating pile of bricks within city limits. Well, to be honest, I didn’t set out with such lofty goals in mind, but had I known this was to be the plan all along, I could have saved myself a lot of runaround."

She called me from work yesterday to breathlessly tell me that, after sending out a blanket e-mail to family and friends announcing the first installment of the project, she managed to snag over 1300 visitors to her website. A rather amazing start to a project I'm excited to see take shape.

Also, last night, she gathered some accommodating friends from work, borrowed a friend's home, and shot her first horror short. She had read about twelve new books about film and technique before plotting this one out, including David Mamet's "On Directing Film," which gave her a ton of new ideas about montage and subtlety (not the tomato-throwing montage subtlety she's already mastered), so I'm thrilled to see how this one turns out.

Hard Copy: Project Book

Now she's done it! Here's yet another new project Sloan and I are attacking, in a parallel and mutually encouraging sort of way.

While we had lots of fun and sunny lazy time in Boca, we also got a lot of good creative work done. We read a lot, and did a lot of various writing, and wrote and shot two comedy shorts. At some point, Sloan came to me with another part to our plan for artistic world domination. "I'm going to use my blog as a first draft for a book I want to write," she said. "I think you should do it, too."

Partially inspired by the delightful Bill Bryson (whose book we feature in one of the shorts we shot poolside in Boca), we talked about this idea more and realized that yes, if we shifted our blogging habits just a bit, we really could have a very full book of humor essays within a few months.

We flopped down on a pair of chaise lounges in the warm Florida sunshine and got to scribbling in our notebooks. Before long we'd each come up with over one hundred possible short essay topics. Funny personal stories, vacation tales, family tattle-tailing, a great range of things.

One hundred essays, two or three pages each? That's a book.

So we're going to hold each other to the commitment of writing at least one full-on essay per week, and posting it on each of our blogs. Once we get to a certain number, we're going to start putting out book proposals (a project in and of itself).

Until then, I'll be sharing first drafts of these essays here on Bella Rossa, and will be very happy to hear your thoughts and opinions on this project as it takes shape. Deal?