DIY stands for do it yourself. Michael Dean called a DVD about How To Survive as an Independent Artist--he called the non-copy-protected DVD I bought Burn This DVD--D. I. Y. or Die.

If they think you're going to be difficult about accepting their suggestions, they won't work with you. You'll get a reputation for being ornery, or unprofessional. You'll have to do it yourself.

I just made a virtue of necessity.

I wanted to write what I wrote, and not make any changes to it, and get it out to the reader, as-is, straight, no chaser, unmediated, and hear back what the reader said, and respond to the reader's comments, in the work, to have a conversation, or dialogue with the reader, a correspondence, and I wanted to do it over a long period of time, in my case 40 years, and so far, I am 35 years into it and still going.

I haven't made any money at it, but they didn't shut me up, and they didn't make me change it, I am working live, without a safety net, no going back in the studio and overdubbing, no airbrush, no censor, you get it typed straight into the composer, hot off the presses, so fresh it smokes, as Uncle Warren said of the turkey droppings.

And, you get a longitudinal slice, a long stretch, think of a person writing several thousand words a day about his reactions to the War on Terrorism, the Bush Administration, from 9-11 to the present, and posting it on the worldwide web, every day, think of him doing this, before the Internet, early in his marriage, when he was a student, an apprentice writer, a new parent, an older writer, a grandparent, becoming senile, Franz Boas sent a student up to the Northwest Coast to write down Kwakiutl salmon recipes, and, when he got back, said, "Well--did you get the whole language?"

Did you get a large enough sample.

A representative slice?

The book I'm writing now is called SQUIBS. TEAM WUPPIE DRIVE TO NEW ORLEANS. Team WUPPIE is me and Brenda. Wuppie stands for willfully underemployed professional. Think of Camille Paglia's essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders." When that happened to us, we opted out. We elected not to.

Still, as John Hartford says about the earthquakes in California, "We're still here."

I'm still here. Writing up a storm.

I look for writers like me.

I write books like I like to read, and readers who like to read books like I write find me.

The paratext provides clues.

It looks homemade. Self-published. Published on the worldwide web.

The text hasn't been interfered with.