First -- and overarching -- pice of business is to get the darn book published one way or another. I am currently reading A.J. Jacobs' The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment and I was struck by the chapter on outsourcing. If you don't know Jacobs, he is a writer who lives a Plympton-esque life of trying extreme baehaviors. For example, in The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, he read the entire Encycolpedia Britannica from A to Z, and chronicled the experience. In The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, he tried to adhere to the Old Testament's rules and principles. Both books are fascinating (and highly recommended).
Annnnnnnnywaaaaayyy... In the new book there is a chapter about how Jacobs outsourced his life to a pair of personal assistants stationed in India. They did everything, including reading his son a bedtime story over the phone, and arguing with Jacobs' (long suffering) wife in his place.
In a post script to that section, he says that a reader who was unemployed decided to outsource his job search. And it worked.
I wonder whether I can outsource my publishing attempts? Hmmmm...
One other thing I 'm doing right now is simplifying my email inbox by unsubscribing to everything that isn't sent from someone I know. How and why I got on these lists is long forgotten, but I haven't read any of the newsletters in ages. I was in the habit of just deleting the messages. Now, I hope, my in box will be cleaner and leaner. Unless, of course, the story I keep hearing about how unsubscribing just leads to getting your name on multiple other lists is true. We'll see.
