I just avoided a lot of work

My friend Diesel over at the always-entertaining Mattress Police blog wrote yesterday about a novel he's been working on (which sounds fascinating).

I suspect most of us who post to blogs regularly (okay, semi-regularly) (okay, at least occasionally) have dreams of becoming published authors -- or at least harbor the delusion that someone, somewhere, would be willing to pay us to write.

What intrigued me most about Diesel's post was not that he's already most of the way through actually writing this novel. He's a talented and creative writer, even if he spends much of his talent lamenting the fact that Huey Lewis doesn't get enough airplay any more. No, what caught my attention was the fact that he's already created a book cover for this novel that doesn't even have a publisher, using Photoshop and a graphic of a painting he found on the internet.

The cover, shown above, looks pretty cool -- but I couldn't help but think that Diesel made things too hard on himself. He spent hours upon hours writing a novel and then a few minutes creating a really sharp cover to help shop the novel around. Why not create the cover first, and then maybe get around to writing the book someday later???

With that in mind, here are some of my own upcoming books (publication details to be released later):
We'll start things easy, with a cookbook. I first searched for images of Chef Paul Prudhomme, since he and I are basically the same shape. But then I thought, if I'm already making up a book cover, why not make up a completely different physique? So that's my head on the body of the very fit Bobby Flay.

Of course I don't have to limit myself to books for adults...No, I'm not a noted child psychologist, and those degrees are fake. But hey, I haven't actually written the book, either.

This last one's going to be a little tougher for me to write, emotionally...You may notice that I'm wearing a skirt and hair bow. Don't worry, it'll all be explained in Chapter Four.