Okay, my Facebook book

I didn't get seriously sick, as you might've surmised, but I've kept busy. I'm very much behind my schedule in the historical novelist reference book, but I managed to self-publish a small volume of my Facebook status updates.

What? you ask. What's the point? I hasten to add that my use of Facebook is strictly something else than promoting my latest book - which is something American and British authors like to do, to the point their so-called friends don't really know what they are about. (I once noticed an author mentioning his signing or some such event and one of his friends asked: "Hey, great! What kind of books do you write?")

My use of Facebook status updates is more akin to conceptual poetry, even though I'm known to have written also about something topical, comments on Finnish politics, media, literature etc. I've done lots of updates picking up random texts from other sources (I've taken a piece of writing from one reader of this blog, but I won't tell who it is) and using absurdly ephemeral texts the contexts of which no one knows but me. Put together, they are, I think, an interesting mix. (I'd like to compare it to a small book a Finnish poet Karri Kokko did recently: he listed all the people he met during a year and places he met them.)

And years later it will be valuable to see what has been in air, so to speak. I've been thinking I should do a similar volume each year, as long as I will be using Facebook, but actually the process is a bit difficult: the statuses (stati?) don't easily transfer into written text. And I've already lost many while sitting on them.

So, The Book of Updates: 11 Months in Facebook is available. At the moment it's pretty difficult to obtain to foreign countries, but I think it can be solved, just use the comment box or e-mail (or Facebook!). For the Finnish readers, it's 3 euros plus postage. The book is bilingual - some of the comments are in Finnish and some of them are in English. I'd say the percentage is fifty-fifty. (I've been thinking about doing a wholly English version of the book and put it up on Lulu.com or some such, but I don't know whether I'll have the time for that.)

I'll be posting the foreword to one of my other blogs later, but not now (it will be in Finnish). The latest version is only on the other computer we have and I don't have access to it at the moment.