I have a deadline. It is a mere week away, and I’m not done yet. That’s no biggie, you might think, but I’m editing this book you see, the manuscript for the fourth edition of Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog (and yeah, I guess I’m announcing that right here, right now), and I’m not done yet. I’d like to tell you that I’m not even close but that would scare my publishes and stop you from shelling out the $30 or whatever for a copy, and then I can’t pay my mortgage or support my drinking habits, so I won’t.

I will tell you this though: Second, Third, Fourth, Xth editions are hard work. You’d think it would be easy to keep a winning concept rolling, to fix the code and change the examples and then wham bam thank you money-sending lady at the publisher’s office.

It is not. I both loathe and love it, because every revision teaches me something new. At the same time, I keep wanting to redo the whole thing, press the MASTER DELETE button and just write the fucker from scratch. I want to scrap it, I want to kill it, I want a do-over, and I want a drink with that, thank you very much.

I won’t invent said MASTER DELETE button (maybe a regular one would work too?), because there really is no need, other than the urge to shake things up. It is like that feeling you get, you know, when you want to throw your living room chairs through the window, piss on the carpet and shit on the coffee table, paint an oversized penis on the wall and chew on all your vinyls?

You, and I, need a good cleansing every once and a while. Reboot, get it back online, oh fuck the world is something else now but I don’t mind because it was time to do this thing again, but in a different way.

Rock the casbah, you know.

I guess what I’m saying is you should pre-order the fourth edition of Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog as soon as you can. After all, it makes me want to shit on my semi-antique table and chew on Warren Zevon records. That has to count for something, right?

Oh, and Chris over at John Wiley & Sons, this counts as marketing, right? Please send the check to the usual address, along with next week’s bourbon, m’kay?