ConvergeSouth: A Week Away...

With ConvergeSouth only a week away, it’s probably time to start thinking about the topic I’ll be tackling during my Saturday session. Problem is - I’m a photog. We don’t plan ahead; we race to calamity’s edge at the last possible second, push past the looky-loo’s and complain about why this thing is taking so damn long. It’s a great strategy for covering bake sales and house fires, but addressing the kind of hyper-smart folk that are attending ConvergeSouth … not so much. Thus, I’ve finally committed to a subject I feel qualified to speak on - which incidentally is what organizer Sue Polinsky suggested to me a year ago...

Blog to Book

No, I can’t pass out autographed hardback copies of ’Viewfinder Blues’ (not yet anyway), but I can share with others the resources, pitfalls and ecstasy of turning one’s cyber-ramblings into something worthy of a Barnes and Nobles discount bin. There are, of course, a variety of approaches; vanity press, book proposal, midnight runs to your neighborhood Kinko’s - all of which can place a reasonable facsimile of your life’s masterwork in your grubby little blogger paws. Me - I’m slingin' for the fences. If I wanted this (first) book to merely be a ‘Best of the Blog’, I’d buy some fancy paper for the printer and be done in about an hour. But alas, it can be so much more...

I really believe that - and I don’t believe in much of anything. But nearly three years of constant blogging has infused me with the kind of self-loathing confidence normally found only outside Methadone clinics. After all, if my late night diatribes were totally without merit, would tens - nay, dozens - of readers check it out every single day? I think not. Obviously, I’m destined for greatness - that special brands of renown that involves blazers with elbow patches and 46 hard copies roiling around the bed of my pick-up truck. Yep - I can see the BookTV segment now: I’ll puff on a pipe and drop pearls of blather as the C-Span photog wishes he were me. It’ll be, how do you say...

...fantasy. If I don’t get off my haunches and put in some serious re-write time, I’ll still be talkin’ this same smack next year - one more blogger spouting delusions of soon-to-be-published glory. Luckily, I got a couple of ringers in my corner. Who exactly I ain’t sayin’ - but they’re real learned types who’ve challenged me to put my best where the pixels never roam. I’m on it, ladies. For now, though allow me an hour to share with those who care what I’ve picked up along the way. After all, I can’t be the only blogger who dreams of forewords, acknowledgements and maybe even a bar code or two … can I? On second thought, don’t answer that. Just be at NC State A&T University next Saturday. Where else can you hear newspaper folk give tips on video while a TV news schlub laments the power of the written word.

You won’t find that on C-Span. Yet.