I made this Valentine last night, too, but it’s much more old-fashioned then the others, so I didn’t include it below. However, by special request I am putting it up:

If you can help a poor lovesick boy get tapes of the third season of 24, please let him know. If you want to buy a funky fresh photocollage from my friend Phineas, then go here. If you are in NYC and are looking for a fine way to spend Friday the 13th you should see Doug’s spoken word thing. And if you are anywhere at all and you haven’t heard his song about the trust fund hippiechick neighbor upstairs, you need to listen right now.

That is all. For now, at least.

This week I’m finally starting to lose my shit a little about winter.

I guess I should be glad that it took me this long to get to this point. For most of January I actually enjoyed winter. I liked the snow; I liked looking out my window at the frozen park. I have had this picture on my desktop. All last month it felt like the world was holding still enough in the cold for me to catch up with it.

Now it’s just cold. And the snow is like–well, it’s like having a roommate who is kind of letting herself go lately, so she never picks up her stuff and you’re always having to step over it and walk around it and it keeps accumulating and getting dirtier, only it’s all outside. And you know how the sink gets when you have a roommate like that? My car feels like that.

Paris Hilton and I sold book proposals last week. It’s pretty weird to see news of both our books in the trade announcements.

I would like to take this opportunity to say in public that even though Paris’s book, like mine, is all about “hairdo’s,” and Chad Muska, and how sometimes you request vegetarian meals on flights but then they won’t be there and that is so annoying, because you hate the food, so then sometimes you bring McDonald’s on the plane, which totally pisses everyone off, I’m happy for her. I mean, despite these obvious similarities between our books, and regardless of the fact that she thinks she was the first person to ever dance topless on a bartop for Oscar De La Hoya (uh, think again, Miss P.), I really am truly happy for Ms. Hilton’s literary accomplishment and I wish her the very best.

I keep forgetting to mention that the Pound weblog has an xml feed now. No, I don’t really know what it is, either. And no, it’s not necessary for any of you to write me and explain what it is. All I know is that some of you out there require, er, feeding.

Gradually all the people I know are finding out about the book. It’s one thing to post an announcement here on the weblog; sharing the news with all the folks who either don’t know or are just vaguely aware that I have this site is another matter entirely. I mean I haven’t come up with a sufficiently pithy conversational answer for the inevitable question: so what’s the book about?

“Uh… body image?” I say. I try this answer on people to see if they nod. Today I saw my gyno and I believe this was a perfectly satisfactory explanation for her; she made that emphatic hmm! sound of profound understanding. I don’t think I need to tell her that it’s also sort of a personal story–since she’s been to my Cathedral and all that, she likely thinks that everything I tell her is of a personal nature anyway. Some people need further explanation: they might look confused or even a tad disappointed at my first answer, so I go on talking and usually I wind up blurting out the word “memoir.” When I say that, though, I worry that people are going to think I had a sexy and traumatic past filled with multiple personalities, strangled pets, and finding the courage to heal.

So then I say, “it’s sort of about my website,” and that’s when people smile politely and say well, they’ll be sure to just read the book when it comes out.

Maybe you’ve been wondering why it’s so quiet around here and why I haven’t posted any new essays to my journal in a couple of months. Well, maybe you haven’t been wondering; maybe you just wanted to know when I was putting up the sides of the Weight Watchers cards that have the actual recipes on them. I still can’t tell you if I’m ever going to do that.

But I can tell you this: I’m going to have a book.

I’ve been working to make it happen for awhile now, and I’m going to have to work on it for a few more months at least, but today I can tell you that Riverhead Books is going to publish it early next year. (Here’s another link to them.) The working title is I’m Not The New Me, and while it’s going to be based on stuff I’ve written about here at Pound, it’s going to be mostly new material that goes beyond the site. It’ll be like Pound: Special Edition or something. You will want to buy it. I promise.

All weekend I have been saying stuff like this and then I have to lay my head down on a nice cool solid surface. I’m very happy. I know some of you will probably have questions and I probably can’t answer them all. In case you’re wondering: yes, I did this through a literary agent (two, actually, working together); no, it’s not like I just printed out my blog and/or journal entries and showed them to a major publisher; yes, it’s been a lot of hard work. Getting to this point involved lots of drudgery and the compulsive chewing of many small plastic things. (Believe me, at another time in my life I would have smoked until my lungs curled up.) But none of this could have happened before now. Now is the right time to do this.

Thanks so much to all of you who have been reading me through the past three years and through all my sporadic updates. I’ll have a book for you in 2005. Holy shit, I will.