I’ve been published! Sorta. 

Morgan and Beth made a hardcover book of my blog and gave it to me for my birthday. I had no idea that this was coming. 

When they gave me the gift, it was wrapped and obviously a hardcover book. As I tore off the wrapping paper I found hand-drawn pictures of Billy Mouse staring back at me  I thought that they must have printed that from my blog cover. Then I saw “memoirs of a mouse” and “by Stephen Squire” and I thought “Oh look! They made up a fake book cover over a book.”

I looked over the book and found my name on it again. I opened it at random and found a subtitle: “lost in Boston”. This is one of my blog posts. 

They told me that they’d copied and pasted all of my blog entries into a self publishing site. They then extracted my blog site cover graphic to make a book cover. 

It wasn’t quite that easy. I often use hyperlinks to point one post to another. Beth replaced each link with a page number. Morgan used photoshop or something to change my site’s banner to fit a book cover. 

Also, Beth had to manually correct the case of the post titles. When I started the blog, i “pretty much” used title-case. About a year ago I changed that. Now I also use only lower-case unless, and this is important, I don’t want to. 

On the inside of the front cover were faked favorable quotes from authors, such as:

“This is literally the best thing I’ve ever read. Literally.” – Douglas Adams 

On the back cover were the quotes from my site’s quote page – some are my own, more from other people:

“Onomatopoeia isn’t what it sounds like.” – Stephen Squire

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” – Douglas Adams  

On the inside of the back cover is the tag line for my site: “Billy Mouse is a really great guy”. 

They put all of this together and made a physical book out of it. 

The dedication reads:

My eternal gratitude to my sun and daughter-in-law who had the brilliant idea to print this book. Without them my life would have no meaning. Nor would it have this book. 

I like it.