I have it pared down to roughly 60 photographs and about 55,000 words. It is hard to cram that into a small, inexpensive book and still make it look like a nice beautiful art book. No matter how much you fiddle with fonts and margins and gutters it still wants to be a 300 page monster. I'm going to try to keep from getting hellishly drunk every night so I have some time left over to design this book. Making a book like this is really hard because I have to place all the photographs and they have to be at the right place in the text and it all has to flow properly even after I nudge a margin in. Plus, I want to put a lot of beautiful little individual flourishes in it like McSweeney's does.

I'm taking the first few entries from "November", when I first arrive in India, and dropping all the later stuff about Thailand and even the first part of the "IJLNBT" and making it all flow together. So I skip from my first day in India and can't figure out how to turn on a faucet, ahead to the next year when I'm getting dragged through the back door of the Taj Hotel into the Bombay Times Party. I'm leaving in all the Mom and Mystery Woman stuff. It's going to be gorgeous and unlike anything in any bookstore.

I'm working on my book. At this point, it's going to be 8x8 hardcover and half photographs. Not sure how many pages I can do but I'm hoping 250. Ok, that's my stupid dream. I'm looking at on-demand printers right now and selecting the images. I have been thinking that I have to trim down "November" and "It's Just Like Not Being There" and I hate to do it because I have this thing about not editing afterwards but I want to put a lot of photos in the book and the text alone is almost 300 pages at this point. I'm also trying to learn QuarkXpress because I'm going to design it myself. That's basically why I don't give a shit about this blog anymore.