It's done

Only a year later than I expected, I have completed the manuscript for "I'm Feeling Lucky: The confessions of Google employee number 59." It's scheduled for publication on July 12, 2011. If I had known how much work it was to write a book, I would have stuck with blogging.

The hardest part was "killing my darlings," the wonderfully irrelevant anecdotes, strained puns and obscure references that I found so trenchant, but that did little to advance the narrative. That's where this blog comes in handy. I'm going to dig out some of the material that didn't fit and post it here. That's right, for no cost whatsoever, you can read stories that were too weak to make it into in a book that's already a hundred pages too long. That's got to be pretty enticing.

For example, the "Parable of the Pompon" that Larry Page imparted to me. The saga of the spellchecker. The story of the "sexy butt" spam attack. And the rollicking "Five Reasons You Never Ask an Engineer to Answer Email."

Of course, being a marketing guy, it does occur to me that if you like what you read, you might actually buy the premium edition in its full ink-stained, dead-tree glory. And if you hate what you read, you might still buy it, assuming that it contains the good stuff you couldn't find here. So. Win-win. For me, anyway.

I'm in no rush to post stuff. I've already written 500 pages about Google, and have read them over a dozen times. I'm kind of tired of thinking about that period of my life. So, when the spirit moves me, or events dictate, new stuff will appear. In the meantime, check out the posts of my friend Steve Schimmel, Googler number 13, on his blog. He has a great story to tell.

I'm going back for my final read now, checking the multitudinous changes made by my copy editor, America's last strict constructionist grammarian. Her command of punctuation and sentence structure humbles me. I hear her comma corrections calling.

I can't wait to put this baby to bed.