When I signed a 30-year mortgage, at age 57, I gave myself a web site.

I had learned how to do it at work, for my job.

I had some ambivalence about doing it because I'd be putting my business in the street, letting my employer know, if he found out, not just what I thought about my job, and the company, but how much of my own work I was doing at work.

There was no way I could write as much as I was posting at home, at night, after work. It wasn't physically possible.

I must be writing it at work and uploading it at home.

Also, I was exposing Brenda to the scrutiny of her co-workers, who would use anything I said about her against her, in her petty little office-politics turf-wars.

At the time, people were writing the online journal (OLJ) and the weblog (blog). Forums on topics. Discussion threads.

Two of the concerns people writing an OLJ or a blog had were hurting loved ones, by breaking their anonymity, and jeopardizing their job, by writing frankly about their co-workers, their bossmen, and the goddamn company. In some cases, they might have signed or be bound otherwise by company nondisclosure/intellectual property agreements. Which they had to sign as a condition of employment and which could be used as a pretext for firing them.

But I figured what the fuck, I was probably going to be laid off anyway, I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

Being fired for what I wrote might even make me a cause célèbre, and get me some attention.

Not very many bloggers or OLJers hoped, then, to score a book contract from writing an OLJ, or a blog.

They were computer nerds. Techies. Not novelists who had been driven to the worldwide web by being shut out of publishing, their considerable body of work suppressed by publishers.

I didn't come in half-stepping.

I came in hooking.

I was serializing series of related novels, daily, as I wrote them, from the start.

I posted 18 novels at The Daily Bugle, 22 novels at roman-feuilleton.com, and 50 novels at The Daily Bulletin. So far.

I give an example of what I was writing in the next section, "Racist, Sexist, Homophone, Shirker: A Book a Month, Posted Online, Daily."

How did I get away with it?

All anyone had to do was look my name up in a search engine and I would have been discovered. Outed.

My only explanation is I did it under cover of daylight.

No one I worked with could conceive of me writing a book a month, online, and working at a full-time job, satisfactorily.

I was the first contractor hired, the first contractor taken on permanent, I received good performance appraisals, good raises, good bonuses.

I was a good employee. I was above-average. I was top-tier.

Where would I get the time to do something like that.

What gave me the audacity to put a good job like mine on the line?

Two things.

First, the job didn't have that much time left before the Bush recession hit, and second, I thought I'd sell a book, soon, and if I got fired for blogging, it would speed that process up.

Either way, I couldn't lose.

What is the mating call of the Southern Belle?

"I'm so drunk."

What is the mating call of the second-tier Southern Belle?

"I said, `I'm so drunk.'"

I got that from Doug Marlette, at booksALIVE, this weekend.

I was writing STOP ME, BEFORE I WRITE MORE, and nobody paid any attention.