If you clicked on stupidae.com thinking you’d get back to the index, you were wrong. Instead, click on home, to the upper left; or click on the big STUPIDAE image, up on the right; or, just click here: stupidae.com.

That established, here’s what this is about instead….

The intention, as of now, with this site is to write up something of a book throughout November 2010, largely in realtime. It’s not an entirely unprecedented idea, though I personally have never done anything quite like this before. As a lack of result, I can’t be entirely certain precisely how this will all work. And yet I’ve got a couple of basic predictions.

One is that, as the book is being written and posted, there’ll likely be typographical errors and disjointed bits threatening the overall flow of the thing; also, by writing the book in a linear ‘page’ by ‘page’ fashion, I won’t really be able to link ahead to anything not written to date—in the end, when the book is wrapped, I expect to go through and fix whatever little mistakes, and probably make things somewhat more nonlinear with your ability to click back and forth a bit as required.

Around that time, I should be able to copypaste the contents, including most of the hypertextual formatting, out of the CMS and into a basic WordPad file, simplify elements of the coding, and compile the results into a KindleBook which, I’d think, should become available around the end of the year. Somewhere in there, I’ll likely recode things yet again into a CameraReady PDF from which actual, printed books could be developed.

Having mentioned that, the question is then raised: if the book is online here for free, what’s the benefit going to be in buying a copy. And my honest answer is: I have no idea. My honest followup, incidentally, is: I also don’t particularly care. The intention in releasing the book for free online is, weirdly enough, to have people read it; as people read it, moving from page to page, or entry to entry, or however that’ll end up working, Page Impressions will accumulate per visitor [supposing You the Visitor bother to keep reading beyond the first few paragraphs; no pressure], raising the street value of the adverts shifted harmlessly [so far as I assume] off to the side, thusly throwing money at me, which I’m totally into. The adverts including and, as of this writing, being limited to stuff from AdSense, I can’t by google.com’s rules confirm or deny that clicking on them throws additional money at me, let alone encourage any sort of kinetic behaviour; I can mention, even now, that, ultimately, once the site has enough ‘quality content’ [you know: if ever], I’ll be able to add adverts from ProjectWonderful.com, which have no such rules against talking about adverts and who gets paid how much and why, which I can therefore mention are highly clickable, so knock yourselves out.

In the end, if all goes according to plan—you know: for once—there should be an entire book here, probably between fifty- and a hundred thousand words, for approximately the rest of time; additionally and alternatively, there should be versions for the Kindle and, if you can believe it, for paper out in the world, for those comfier with sitting back and reading things in either of those ways.

Based on tradition, the KindleBook will likely launch at something like a dollar, then slide up to—whatever—eight or ten bucks [cleverly disguised as US$X.99, of course]; the physical books would end up at whatever it costs throughout the future to print them and pay the people who do that for me, plus my evil anarchocapitalistic cut…call it Market Value, if that really means anything.

So, there it is. Gonna write a book. Starting next Monday, on the first; the book should by design be wrapped on or before the thirtieth; it’ll be here, free to you yet magically paying me, theoretically thereafter; it’ll be on the Kindle and likely on dead trees shortlyish after all that. And then you can choose your weapon, or collect all three.

See you on the other side of this thing, whatever it ends up being….

—Gremlin