My Books In Sexy Brief, Part Three, "Oh, Title!"

I forced myself to write 1,000 words a day for the duration of my 28th year of life. I could write anything I wanted—from diary-like entries to short stories to essays to poetry to whatever-the-fuck—as long as it came to a solid G of new words on white. Every single day.

I stopped writing the “Me, Amplified” novel because I didn’t think I could write 1,000 words a day for the same story, and I wanted to free up my creative mind for the 365,000-word task.

To be euphemistic, it ended up being quite a year, and although I came up short of my aim—315,000 words spread over 365 days—I also came up with an entire wild garden of writing that had grown from an awful lot of fertilizer.

If I ever become an internationally renowned, bestselling author, I plan on using the bulk of that document as a retirement account. I want to publish it as a sort of memoir, called 28, for it is essentially a yearlong howl of animalistic desperation by an almost utterly rudderless man.

By the end of my 28th year, I was unemployed, jaded, and on my way back home to Ohio—to start my own company.

I had a friend who’d approached me about our starting a publishing company together, and I’d shown him “Bears” and the first “Jibba” story**, and he thought they were both worth publishing, to get us started, so I brought my documents back to Cleveland, to live as cheaply as possible, to focus the light of my mind on taking these old, crappily-written books and editing them into publishing-worthy shape.

In my 29th year, I prepared the two books for indie publication, and in the process of editing the first “Jibba” story I remembered the “Me, Amplified” story and started reading it and realized what I had done: The first “Jibba” story had essentially been an unintentional version of “Me, Amplified,” and the new bastard I’d begun but never finished was essentially a sequel to, or at the very least in harmony with, the first Jibba story! Much like with “Bears,” I decided to sew them together.

And what still somewhat creeps me out to this day is that I had abandoned the “And Jibba” bastard while the main character was mid-flight on his way back to his hometown, and I ended up finishing the writing of the story, in preparation for publishing the now-conjoined stories, in my own hometown.

Anyway, as I ended 29 and turned 30, I finally finished both books and published them for the world to see and herald!

I consider them to be two well-reviewed worst-sellers.

In my 30th year, seeking to put out more content, I took my favorite stories and essays and poetry from The Year Of Writing and turned them into an eclectic, unique book called Oh, Title! (I didn’t include any of my completely insane, diary-like rants in OT!, and there were plenty of them, so I still consider 28 to be its own, retirement-plan thing, just in case anybody ever gives a fuck.)

(By the way, because it is certainly relevant at this juncture, I was once interviewed about Oh, Title! on a great show called "The Bookcast.")

And then after we published OT!, I began working on my third novel—a novel I had been outlining and writing in my head for nearly five years, a novel that would be the third of the three that I thought it would take to consider myself a truly Worthy writer.

**True Story: It had been nearly a decade since I’d written that “Jibba” novella, and in the process of multiple changes of computers I eventually lost the Jibba file entirely. Fortunately, my old friend Pat had kept his old printed-out copy, which he scanned and sent me as a PDF, and which I transcribed back into Word. Consequently, if that book had a dedication page (none of my books do), it would have read: “To Pat Dodson, for saving this book’s life.”