Perhaps a bit in the name-dropping linking department Wil’s latest book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives has gone into a formal launch on our old friend Monolith Press.
The last few weeks have reminded us of a different time when we first launched Monolith Press–the world was a lot scarier, times were tighter, and we were working hard at creating something, trying to not flame out in failure and prove that we could make this thing happen. I was working a craptacular little gig waaaaaaay the heck up north in the lovely little area called Uptown in Chicago. I had to ride the train to the city, walk several city blocks to the Red Line, transfer to the Purple Line, get off the El and walk the block to the little boutique with the owner who robbed Peter to pay Paul and was famous for bouncing paychecks. I was, for the most part, customer service, and the guy who took his first foray into building a PHP website, per Wil’s Open Source request demand.
When we were updating the site with the new project, it was the first time either one of us had really taken a dive into that little space since shortly after the Awesome Deal cluster frack with O’Reilly. To be honest, I’d forgotten just how well I had built it–sure, there were a couple of minor database issues since we’d moved servers a couple of times and naturally, as we were making some of those minor changes, a couple of people just happened to stumble across it and send Wil emails (it ALWAYS happens that way!), but in the end, creating the new project, adding the press release and updating the bio really only took about 5 minutes of our collective time.
Figuring out some of that other crap took longer just in trying to sort things out.
But, it was pretty much… straight forward. All in all, updating the order page took the longest. That, and some light strategizing and some lessons-learned recapping as to the approach to purchases and how to handle certain customer requests, took the most amount of time.
We both were sort of feeling it: When’s the other shoe drop? What have we forgotten? Holy shit, did we really end up with something that stood the test of time? Have we really been through the ringer so much that the experience kind of added up in the right direction?
Pretty much… Yes.
Wil’s the book-man. He’s the real author here; he’s got that knack of really making you feel like, even as a blogger, he’s your friend. I know it’s true–y’all think you truly know him, what’s going on in his life, etc. His voice is Warm Like Home, to quote a great Freddy Jones Band song. He’s one of the reasons you decided that you, too, could be a blogger.
Me, I’m just the friend who knows some of this web stuff and who gets to play like I’m his “people” from time to time. It’s a little fun and we work well together. It makes me wish we could come up with The Next Big Thing(tm) to do together and get rich off off weak-ass websites and good writing skills.
Or that I could be a voice over actor, too.
Or better looking.
Or funnier.
You get the general theme of where I’m going here.
Regardless, the big lesson here is that with a lot of will, determination and even some Wil (and Russ), you can achieve just about anything. We’ve got a small little publishing company that we (okay, by “we”, I mean “Wil”) can run–we’re out of the 100% guessing phase of things and now it’s a bit more educated guesses and calculated risks.
And it’s cool.
And that made us happy.
Go buy a book–it’s good stuff!
