Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair!

This blook, Crazy Aunt Purl’s Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-life Misadventures of a Slightly Neurotic 30-something Who Learned to Knit After He Split by Laurie Perry, comes to us via the Montgomery County Public Libraries (Md.). It's described by the author as "a book in its own weird category, True-Life Fictionish Self-Help Divorce Knitting, With Recipes."

For the curious, Crazy Aunt Purl devoted a whole post devoted to blook stuff. From it I gleaned Perry's kind words for her publisher, HCI:

"My cool publisher, HCI, is the same company who does the 'Chicken Soup For The Soul' books. They are some really amazing folks and they encouraged me all the way, kept at me even when I was so scared of failure I would try to hide. I wrote the first draft of this book in four months and about fell over whole from trying to do it plus work full-time, herd the felines and still look cute."

You can pick up the flavor of Perry's relationship with her editor, Allison, as well as her writing from this:

... I called up my editor Allison after having not slept for eight days and worked on cutting 100 pages from the final draft ... and I was working full-time and writing this website and generally going stark raving mad. I had been working on the book for months and I was officially sick of it. So after some wine and maybe crying, I left Allison a voice message that said, "Allison, I don't want to do this book anymore. I don't want to be Drunk, Divorced and Covered in Cat Hair! I am tired of being that person! I want to be Drunk, On Vacation, and Covered In Raoul The Pool Boy!! Help me. Oh, this is Laurie by the way. Bye."

Perry created a fictional exchange to talk about her upcoming blook:

Question: Is it just the blog but put in a book?

Oh, no. No siree bob. I am a very frugal minded person, you see, and I thought it would be a crying shame to pay some outrageous amount for a book you could just print up your own damn self. So you will get to read the stuff I never, ever publish on this here website. ... There is definitely content from the website in the book. But it's all kind of novel-ish, so it even seems different to me and I wrote the thing. I would say it is 30% blog, 70% new.

Question: So, are you going to quit your job? Are you RICH now??

I know some first-time authors probably get giant advances and huge amounts of money and just spend all day rolling nekkid in cash. But that is not the norm. Since I began working on this thing, I have made a sum total of Not Very Much. If you divide it up by the time I spent on it over the past ten months, I've made about thirty cents an hour.

Question: Do you have an agent?

Nope. Me = "Flying By Seat Of Pants." Scary!!!

This is the first blook in a while that I've researched that has had tremendous response to the announcement of the blook:

"Laurie, I didn't comment yesterday because when I first saw your huge exciting news, there were already 293 comments. Now I see there are almost 750. 750 comments!"

I'd love to see this one entered into the Blooker Prize competition.