[Note on 4/13/10: I get a LOT of spammed faux comments here. I'm not computer savvy enough to filter them out automatically. I TRY to sift out the genuine feedback and dialogue from the mess but if I am slow to post yours or miss it altogether, I apologize in advance.]

The medium is the message, they told us in journalism school eons ago. I liked the alliteration but disagreed with the point. The human mind is flexible and independent, easily distinguishing between channels and what runs in them, I argued. And when a channel does not serve, we do not become its servant. We change it, I asserted.

I’m older now. What the human mind can do and tends to are not the same.

So I am anti-blog. The form is overused to the point of ubiquitous pointlessness.

I’m not universally anti-blog though. The concise, link-littered blog style, designed to be consumed in three bites like a fast food burger, is well-suited to many acts of communication. Short book reviews, news roundups, niche interests like gardening, investing, or fitness can all be intelligently and usefully blogged, their messages unharmed by fast-food burger-style consumption.

A blogger can also share an adventure or a challenge, say, a solo sailing trip or a year in the Green Zone in Baghdad or their life as a famous whatever. The immediacy of the form appeals to the voyeur in all of us. “What is it like to be me?” such a blogger seems to say. “Well, today it’s like this.” Gulp and go.

What the blog is antithetical to, in my experience, is deep, careful thinking, or the narration of a complex series of interlinked events or ideas, or any subject which requires the reader to absorb background before moving forward.

And yet a writer must have a website, a website must have a blog, and a blog must have a topic. And the topic I can most usefully write about is exactly this last kind of subject. In order to be useful I need to begin at the beginning, several years ago, and write until I reach a solution I haven’t yet created.

So this is an anti-blog. It is an anti-blog about why a skilled, moderately seasoned if not financially astute writer decided against advice to write a book guaranteed to be a hard sell to publishers; how I wrote and then tried to sell it and, to date, have failed as everyone but me expected. That will bring me to the present. Then I will write forward until I either sell the manuscript or with an aching in my heart, self-publish it. And I’ll let you know how it all works out.

I want to write this anti-blog for several reasons. One is that there are lessons for me in writing back through this journey.

Another is that computers have lent an ease to writing that brings out the hidden writer in unprecedented numbers of people who are, in my opinion, too often preyed upon by the faux-publishing industry and its “How To” hangers-on.

I want people toying with writing for publication to be able to follow me along this road and, in the end, be better able to decide if they want that road after all. Too many people who love to write subject themselves to the corrosive forces of the marketplace when their needs might be better met in a closed circle of admiring family and friends.

I also want unpublished writers who know their job will not be done until their work is purchased and read to have the benefit of my mistakes and missteps, especially if I decide to self-publish. It’s not fun to work hard at half your job and find yourself unable to accomplish the other half. So when I eventually succeed, I want them to know how it happened.

There are so many half-truths and anecdotes-turned-pronouncements in this industry. I’d like to share what I’ve learned about some of those.

So follow me if you wish. You’ll start by following me to the beginning, with an idea for what I wanted to be my second book. My trusted sounding boards didn’t swoon over it. I wrote it anyway. We’ll catch up to the present day in 500ish word increments, one or two a week. Once I reach the present, I will add segments only as developments occur.

Oh, and you should probably test-drive my assertion that I wrote a solid, well-crafted manuscript for what will one day be a neat little book. You can read the preface here. If you don’t find yourself reading to the end and wishing you could continue, you should probably not read this anti-blog either. : D