There Will Be Blog?

The reason this book is titled There Will Be Blog is because all the essays you're about to read made their first appearance on my blog. The lark of parodying the title of a terrific P.T. Anderson flick played a part in the naming of this book as well. It seems counter-productive to this capitalistic venture to inform you of the web-site where you can read all of this shit for free, so I will refrain from doing that. But here's a vague clue: Uninformed people tend to assume the blog is somehow associated with one of MTV's many strongholds of decadent idiocy, Jersey Shore.

You should know that this book is being distributed through a publication that is known, derisively to some, as a vanity press. I'm a bit confused by this designation. Stephen King is the one selling a conservative estimate of nine zillion books worldwide through Simon and Schuster, guest-starring as himself in the crowd at nationally televised Red Sox home games, blasting AC/DC tunes at ear-splitting volume from the stereo of his Bentley while cruising the streets of Bangor, Maine, and yet I'm the who is vain for providing some laughs and insight for fewer than a thousand people while they sit on the toilet. The implication is that the wealthy are humble and the poor are vain. Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I haven't been able to afford a new pair of Chuck Taylors in two years and now I'm supposed to chide myself for being conceited? That's weak.

Early on in the search for a publisher, I went for a long stroll around the neighborhood and chatted with the representative of a (pricey) rival company of Xlibris on my cell phone. The man's sales pitch was convincing enough and he seemed like a knowledgeable fellow, but he lost me when I asked him if his company printed many humor books. He laughed and informed me that their two most successful books in the freakish literary genre that I have chosen were actually quite similar. One was titled Everything Men Know about Women and the other was called Everything Men Love More Than Breasts. Both books, when opened, revealed nothing but 200 or so blank pages.

So, from what I gathered, my contemporaries in the field of self-published comedy books tend to include one joke per project, and they generally believe words just get in the way of the yuks. There Will Be Blog includes ____ words. Clearly, I am putting far too much needless effort into the creative process. Scoff. To my mind, it is beyond obvious and hardly worth the mention that while I do love tits I really don't know much about women. I was chagrined by the realization that I've been trying too hard all this time and decided to pursue options more (affordable and) appropriate for comedy.

Hey, what do you know? Maybe I am a vain self-publisher after all! Wow. Unproven writers really do suck in every way imaginable. I retract the trash I typed about Stephen King.


This book is intended to be a tad more meaningful and emotionally resonant than an average episode of Seinfeld. If all goes well for you, reader, you will be greatly entertained and slightly enlightened by the proceedings. The subjects I cover are quite diverse. I write about pizza, the Apocalypse, ass-kicking, ventriloquism, Greyhound bus rides, Facebook, facial hair, leg hair, pubes, Pluto, plastic robots, partying, fainting, The Beatles, Radiohead, jam bands not worth naming here, Herman's Hermits, mental illness, masked crusaders, an aging gunslinger, the Chicago Cubs, The Simpsons, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Adolf Hitler, Burt Reynolds, and scientists. The unifying focus, if this even qualifies, is that I'll write about anything that somehow intrigues me.

If you've ever complained to your friends that characters and plots are so overrated, There Will Be Blog is poised to knock your socks silly.

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To read the rest of this introductory essay, you'll have to order a copy of the book of the same name (sans the question mark). I'm typing about "There Will be Blog," people.

www.xlibris.com/NickOlig.html