First Step in the Books Department

You’ve identified top priorities for our efforts. My take… I agree. Saving content and an opportunity for some needed revenue. 

High on the list in terms of results is turning existing content into books, probably at Kindle or Amazon (print) or both. Even though I haven’t been able to surmount the PDF formatting requirements with my own geriatric hardware and software, it has long been my practice to establish markers for myself with book covers with the understood caption TBD. Doing the cover is usually more than a graphic indulgence. It’s a discipline for envisioning what pieces I have in mind to put together for the given title.

Thought I’d show you the covers I’ve got saved so far, though I haven’t yet added the explanatory notes and hyperlinks to files that are accessible to me to date.

Just the covers and some captions here today. I know there’s some overlap, but that’s unavoidable. One may wind up bumping another, but there is differentiating content for all of them. I can ad specific content links after I get your feedback on what to start with. In all cases there will be some tricky, annoying edits to deal with the lack of video support. In some cases, it will be disqualifying, but in other cases necessary nonetheless. When color graphics are indispensable, the only near-term alternative is Kindle. I can live with that.

My complete series of ‘End of Year’ posts for the past 8 years. From 3 different blogs.

A lot of content from all the Instapunk sites. 

An overview of what the ‘Brand’ encompasses (present and future), more like a guide or user manual than a book, although there will be discursive content included, explaining why’s and wherefore’s by genre.

Definitely a Kindle project. A great deal of this has been done, some of it still tricky to access. Very color graphic intensive. The Pangloss angle is perfect.

Hard part is choosing the content from so much. Should be the kind of ‘Best of’ omnibus that includes every kind of topic and writing genre from cartoons to heavyweight sermons. Best approach I guess is picking a page count and filling it in.

There will be exceptions, of course, but most of this content will come from the Afterpunk 19 site I’ve  never promoted and darker stuff from Instapunk Returns.

The serious side of the AI topic including my own unique qualifications to comment and the many technical and physical issues involved.

What you might call the lighter side of the AI topic (Turing Test!), including for example the early detection of censorship even in the popular freeware AI graphics apps.

A ‘nice to have’ entry. Quite a parade of dogs and cats since the first book, much written, much more in the form of photographic reminiscences for dog and cat fanciers.

This is more autobiographical than the Dementia Tour, not quite as dark but deeper on the discussion of racial and ethnic context than seemed important at the time. A very important part of this is the transcription of multiple extemporaneous voice recordings by me from YouTube, including for example my series work on country stores, the Francis Hine world, 

and travel and auto adventures in my youth.

The value of a cover doodle. Didn’t realize at the time that this is the perfect way of presenting the materials retrieved from the South Street Mystery site. Max Lute has a history all his own. (His dad wrote one of the many books about the ‘Hollow Earth’ claims following Richard Byrd’s overflight at the North Pole. I have a pic of the battered surviving cover of that book.) Great and easy way to collect/present existing stuff from his own site and the subsequent contribution of the South Street Irregulars, extending even into the Last Chance Garage site and the mystery of Johnny Dodge’s missing foster-daughter. Work to be done but easy to do. Max is no Frelinger hung up on ‘evidence’. He’s a web hacker.

This is important as part of the historical provenance of Shuteye Town 1999. Done years ago by the 3rd party video gamer Victor Drago, it’s been languishing because it tries to solve the problem of the missing text files before the problem was solved. Ergo, includes wrong stuff needing replacement. Equally important, I also wrote a response (not terribly long but necessary) by the South Street Irregulars that had its own cover and was meant to be a trick printing job. You could read his book first, flip it upside down and read the Response version, which leads to the upside down Drago dissing of ST99. That MS went missing when my iPad went suddenly tits up on me and a bunch of Word documents were lost with it. Still have their cover though. To wit:

Manuscript in progress. Mark is the son of Frank, whose book about the Cream King Trove is excerpted in Punk City. The son inherited the father’s obsession and he believes he has uncovered the grand conspiracy behind the reality of Punk City, which he accepts absolutely. He’s the one who found the real company names behind the Punk City fiction. He believes R. F. Laird was part of a coverup designed to hide the punk writers in plain sight by fictionalizing them. But Laird is now dead, murdered by either the intelligence community still obsessed with recovering punk technology — or done in by a new mystery player who calls himself The Rifleman and has been generating Laird content himself since c, 2014. Mark has evidence, but the reality is he’s one more confusion factor and his many‘exhibits’ of Cream Trove photos and videos are automatically suspect. His MS needn’t be long. He’s a cut above Victor Dragoman and Max Lute, but he’s more conspiracy theorist than academic researcher./journalist.

The existential purgatory of Daniel Pangloss. Having lost his memory to the drugs used on him during his detainment by the feds (still seeking punks, technology, and Laird) in the 2020s, he is contacted in prison by someone purporting to be Laird, who informs him he began his existence as a fictional character in Shuteye Town, wrote extensively for that work and Shuteye Nation, and was shuttled to an alternate universe after all of human consciousness split in two after Y2K ended human civilization. He is alive now, and he needs ‘Laird’s help in restoring his memory. For what reason, no one will tell him. He escapes custody by mysterious inter-dimensional assistance and is now deep into the quantum world himself… he has never laid eyes on Laird, but he has recorded his not very friendly dialogues with him…

More about the design, order, and purposes of The Boomer Bible…

Designed to illustrate the very wide range of Laird writings in the IP sites, 

including both iterations of the Instapunk Times.

My own intellectual and professional background and experience, 

as explicitly documented and commented upon by me.

The book version of the content in Death of the Republic and subsequent 

developments in U.S. and world politics and culture.

A chronological collection of my development as a cultural pessimist 

playing the long game for future generations.

My orphan project… still dying on the vine.

P.S. A couple of notes I probably shouldn’t mention. Two toothache-type holes I keep wanting to fill. Punk City’s print version needs repagination in a serious way. We’d been working on an overhaul that would have increased the type size and fixed some other errors when my wife stopped being able to deal with the formatting process. It pains me to open the copy I have, so I rarely do. Also: The Naked Woman has never been ported to Kindle. The print version is beautiful, but it’s in full color and is therefore the most expensive of my print books. Imthinkmit’s might be time, if it were affordable, for some tired old men to find this book and laugh for a change… oh well. Other priorities, right? At least they’re both still alive.