The Joy of Trash and the Privilege of Getting It Right

Lorne Michaels once said something that really struck with me. He said that Saturday Night Live doesn’t air when its cast and crew are ready but rather when they’ve run out of time. 

A similar dynamic is at play here at the Happy Place. I don’t have the time to polish my writing to a blinding sheen on this site. This was particularly true before TCM Backlot gave me permission to re-publish all the pieces I wrote for them here. 

Like the Not Ready for Prime Time Players I have to be pragmatic. I do not have the luxury of getting everything right before I share my work with the world; it just has to be good enough. 

I like to think that messiness is part of the site’s scruffy, homemade charm and not something you’re all grudgingly tolerating. 

That’s one of the reasons that I use this site as an incubator for book projects. With books like The Weird Accordion to Al and my upcoming best-of collection The Joy of Trash I’m finally able to do what I would love to be able to do a daily basis on this site but cannot: get everything exactly how I want it to be, so that it is the truest and strongest reflection of this website’s strengths as humanly possible. 

When you’re a freelance writer you need money and work, obviously, but you also need time. I have such an exhausting schedule that it’s hard to work ahead at all, let alone get articles to a place where I’m completely happy with them. 

Thankfully that’s not true of the Happy Place-derived books I’ve written or am in the process of writing. I finally have the opportunity to get things exactly the way I want them. 

True, there were a couple of tweaks I made post-publication to both The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al, most of which involved removing embarrassing typos and/or references to Donald Trump but I am otherwise 98 percent happy with both of those books. 

I just finished my fourth draft of The Joy of Trash. I’m obviously biased but I am overjoyed with how it’s coming along. 

The articles and blog posts that I write for this site are designed to be consumed in the moment. That’s the essence of blogging: it’s a low-pressure, low-intensity way to communicate ideas to your audience without worrying too much about polish or professionalism. 

I want my books to stand the test of time. I want people to be able to read and enjoy them ten years from now, or twenty years from now, or long after I’m dead and buried. 

The stakes and the expectations are so much higher with books than online. That’s why it's important that The Joy of Trash be a real book that holds together and is more than the sum of its parts rather than something hastily thrown together at the last minute. 

It is a beautiful, rare gift to be able to get things perfect and I feel profoundly blessed to be able to do things as an author I can’t do as a harried, perpetually overworked freelancer/website proprietor.

Buy a copy of The Weird Al-Coloring to Al, the brand spanking new “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book I collaborated on with Felipe Sobreiro directly from me, signed, here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from Amazon here

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Buy a signed copy of You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, which Rolling Stone gave four stars and named one of the 20 best music books of 2013 here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

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