<This Book!>

My face is bearded, my lips are cracked and bleeding. Animals flee at my approach. This wouldn't be so bad, except that they are my animals.

Most authors get sick once during the completion of their book. I'm on my second illness. This book has more of everything.

It now appears that the brilliant Carlos Segura will be involved in the design of my book. He follows the briliant K10k. This book has been through more celebrity cast changes than a Kubrick film. I'm hoping we can get Cindy Sherman to take a pass at it.

This book. This book. This book is being written to serve a market that collapsed while I was writing this book.

In New Orleans, at Builder.com, I asked Michael Nolan, the self-effacing editor who first asked me to write this book, why this book could not be a large, colorful coffee table book with many pictures and few words.

"Because you have so much information to convey," Michael said quietly, proving that self-effacing editors can be brilliantly Machiavellian on demand.

This book has been through a network rewiring at my studio, two catastrophic computer failures, a six-week flu, and my girlfriend's pneumonia (which lasted from Thanksgiving to New Year's). Come to think of it, this book has been through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. Party? No thanks. I have to write this book.

This book hung 'round my neck during the demolition and resurrection of both The Web Standards Project and A List Apart—with subsequent low comedy by Network Solutions and Register.com, both of which should be dropped from the top of the Empire State Building, scraped from the pavement, poured into an obsolete missile, and rocketed to oblivion in the coldest, farthest reaches of Clarkeian deep space.

Midway through the writing of this book, my mother, a lifelong book-lover who had not been able to read in eight years nor speak for two, died. I honored her and kept writing this book. Which was another way of honoring her.

This book is nearly finished. Two days ago I wrote the last words of the final chapter. Angels wept. I wept. My associate editor wept. Well, she didn't exactly weep, but she returned my phone calls.

This being the unreality of large prose constructs, having finished Chapter 13, I am now writing Chapter 12.

I asked (famous author name deleted) how he managed to keep writing books without losing his health or destroying his marriage.

"I've quit writing books," he said.

This book. This cold and this book. This cold demands sleep, this book and its production schedule demand constant wakefulness. I look back nostalgically on the launching of major websites with impossible production schedules and insufficient production budgets. How leisurely those web launches now appear. Like the playing of cricket, or like the reading of books.

This book raises me from my bed an hour after it sends me to it. This book mocks showers, shaving, all the ablutions and conventions. A wreck, I terrify my girlfriend, who flees to the serenity of her studio and her own art demons. At this rate, she will soon have produced a Louvre's worth of new work.

Chapter 12. Chapter 12. Chapter 12 and then no more. Finish Chapter 12 and finish this book.

Except for the rewrites of this book. And the post-production of this book. And the hiring of at least a dozen additional supremely gifted designers to take passes at this book.

They will come, all of them will come. They will lay their work before my editors like a royal offering. They will collect their pay for their work on this book. And then they will flee from this book and the author of this book, a Wellesian specter covered in sores and moaning piteously to Heaven itself about this book, this book, this book!