Little Legacy Books
Because I existed once
Small project. For those of you who know, I own a teeny, tiny, itty, bitty publishing imprint Sharktooth Press (because my corporation is Rivershark… get it? 😀) ANYWAY, I’m experimenting with making a book from my Substack posts. And my Medium stories because sometimes I just publish stuff over there. And LinkedIn has some of my stuff.
Basically, every ten years, I like to gather 60-100 of my “best” work — not necessarily my most successful work in likes and comments — stuff that others can leaf through when I’m no longer in this tired, old meat sack I’ve been dragging myself around in these six-plus decades on this mortal coil, sigh deeply and think, “I had no idea. I sure wish I would have asked and he told me. Things are more confusing now that I know, but ironically, make more sense.”
I have one book already I put together in 2014 called Monkey with a Loaded Typewriter. I wanted to call it Green Jello and Yellow Boots because… well, that is a story of my greatest accomplishment; raising my two kids into adulthood, but my lawyer said I might not want to use a trademark name in a title, even if only three people on the entire plant will actually read it. That’s ok, though… it was written just for them.
This issue 2014-2024 is called A Million Pieces in a Thousand Places because the olds in the room know what I’m talking when I say life expands as your people make more people, more books are on shelves, pieces of you are in a thousand places and you can never keep anything tidy anymore because there is just so much.
But it is a physically tiny book because I wanted it to be. Tiny books are cute, non-threatening, safe and comforting1 So is tiny food which is why tiny Oreo cookies exist… but I digress. The trim size is 4.25×7”, 150 pages. It is easy to slip into a coat pocket, mail to a friend, hug close to your heart.
This thing has been out in print since December. I think everyone should have a legacy document — a book of prose, poetry, photos, postcards, letters — whatever it is that others who come after you can learn about who really really wanted to be if you had the courage to live your truth.
And maybe you did, like second-hand lions.
I lied.. this book is anything but comforting. There are some pretty raw essays contained within. You have been warned. Get it here at Bookshop.org
What I REALLY wanted to ask y'all is this: If there was a service that bundled up your best work every few years or decades into a legacy book you can hand to the generation of humans to come after you, would this interest you? I feel like a lot of folks just fling things onto digital spaces that get too large to manage and sorta assume they will live forever out there. But these digital spaces only last as long as you pay the bill to keep the servers running. Miss a payment and all that work is just ... gone. Books don't need batteries to live.