I recently decided to put together a print book containing every story ever published on QNY. It started out as a whim, but after I spent the time cutting and pasting more than 50 pages of blog posts into a giant word document it started to pick up steam.
I gathered all the stories into one document (close to 1,000 pages in total) before I realized they were in the wrong order. A blog starts with the most recent post and goes back in time to the beginning. A book on the other hand should go the other way.
Undaunted I cut and paste each story in a Google doc, reversing the order. I made a separate document for each year starting in 2009 and ending in 2015. Once I had everything in the right order, all of the extraneous shit cut out (notes, tags, my signature, images, etc), I dropped the stories into Indesign.
I formatted each title, date, and story with the correct styles, set up the front matter, and designed a cover all in a matter of days. I still can’t decide if it will fit into one giant book (it’s 806 pages currently) or if I should split it in half.
For now, the proof from Createspace is on the way and I’ll soon have a physical representation of seven years of blog posts. It’s satisfying in a way I didn’t expect, and looking back through the stories I feel not only proud, but also grateful. It chronicles a very difficult period of time in my life, and yet thanks to my amazing readers, my dear friends, and very supportive partners, I managed to keep on writing.
Above is a screen shot from the interior. Once I get the proof, I’ll have a better idea of when it will be available. Hopefully it will be out sometime in the next three weeks though.