Never Talk About Your Book.

The first rule of writing a book is to never talk about writing a book.  It's an artist version of fight club.  At night, when the rest of the world is asleep, we gather in dirty basements or in the small back rooms of Chinese restaurants and have story duel offs.  Instead of punches, we scream cleverly worded phrases at each other.  Then, when the Alpha writer gets in the middle of the circle, he will write that phrase on a piece of paper.  He will hold it high above his head and yell "Who wants a papercut!"

And of course, since the first rule of writers club is to never talk about writer's club, we talk about it all the time.  We talk about it to everyone.  "Hey, did you know I wrote a book?" we will say to the random stranger on the street.  And this is important because he probably doesn't even know that you wrote a book.  The nice stranger, someone who doesn't have clever phrases ping-ponging around in his head, will usually run away right when we are trying to tell him how the second act is just brilliant.

Our spouses, those that are lucky enough to have cleverly phrased someone into staying with us, have to sit in bed and constantly hear about our book.  We will tell them "Honey, you should really hear this lovely way I described centipedes crawling over the dead body in Chapter 2."  The spouse will try to turn away from us but it makes no difference, we will keep talking about our book and what's in there.  Sometimes we won't even talk about the book itself, but the craft.  But you can't say "craft" like a normal person, like someone who scrapbooks (not a real book) on the weekend.  You have to drag the word out and talk like you have an overabundance of air to go with your overinflated ego.  "Honey, the craaafffftttt (almost leaving spittle on the final T), is so amazing and I'm so good a the craaafffftttt".

They can't divorce you of course because your written response to her divorce papers will be so cleverly written that you will obviously win the judge's favor.  Your awesome twist at the end will just be too much for them to handle and the judge will declare you married forever.  And he will also hear about your book.

When your wife is faking being asleep and you can't find the random stranger on the street, then you will need to talk about your book to your children.  You will lightly tug on your soul patch while you talk about the soul of your book.  You will explain subtext to you children and spout off about situational irony.  At some point, your nine-year-old son will exclaim "Jesus fucking Christ, Dad!  We get it, you wrote a book!"  You won't' get mad at him for the swearing but tell him to use it only sparingly and only if it fits the character.  Don't want to be fucking gratuitous with those type of words, people tend to get turned off by it.  Shit, be careful with the wording you twats.

And maybe, if your phrases have been clever enough, maybe your 11-year-old daughter will say:

"Dad, you need a cover for your book."

"But I don't have a title, honey.  I barely have a manuscript."

"I got you fam," she will say because she loves all your fancy words and non-gratuitous cussing.

Three hours later you have a book cover.  This is great because now you can post that you have a book all over social media because that is what your tech-savvy daughter tells you.  She uses unfamiliar words like "Twitter" and "Instagram."  Since you are a writer, and horrible at self-promotion, you should probably just give your computer to your kid and let them do it while you cluster the words Twitter and Instagram for inspiration.

Now that you have a book cover you can also blog about it.  But it won't be about the book, no that's to direct for a writer, the craft demands subtlety.  So you will write a funny story about a pretentious writer, a cliche for sure, and throw in some f-bombs.  Now everyone, EVERYONE, should know that you have a book.  This is good because you are never supposed to talk about the book you have written because it makes you feel like you are whoring yourself out to the masses.

But you can certainly write about writing a book.  There are no rules about that.