The Fractured Mirror is Going to Be Even LONGER and Even More Crazily Time and Labor-Intensive For Me! Why Do I Do This To Myself?

One of my many dazzlingly effective recipes for failure and self-sabotage involves taking on projects so vast and ambitious that it’s nearly impossible to realize them. 

That’s The Fractured Mirror. When I decided to turn my column about movies about the film industry into my ninth book I had only a fuzzy idea of how much time and work it would involve. I just knew that it would be a LOT. 

I was, after all, covering an entire century of movies about the film industry. Hollywood is endlessly fascinated by itself and its eccentricities. It never stops making movies about itself that I must then write about for my book, no matter how egregiously awful or minor.

Some of the films in the book are incredibly obscure and ragingly non-essential. For example I just wrote about a movie called Fast & Serious that combines dire sketch comedy with a through line involving six writers trying to come up a plot for the next The Fast and the Furious sequel. 

As I wrote in my blurb for the film, it’s hard to convincingly parody blockbusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars when you have a budget of several hundred dollars. 

I’ve also written up both entries in National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie series, a pair of rancid sex comedies about sleazy filmmakers who want to make a movie that’s nothing but street jokes. 

I initially thought that I could successfully cover more or less the whole of American movies about the film industry with three hundred entries on three hundred films. 

Three hundred is a LOT. A great deal, even! It takes a lot of time and energy to watch that many movies and write about them.

I was, and remain, happy with the pace that I am going in regards to the book. I’m cranking out one of these bad boys pretty much every day. 

Unfortunately I figured out somewhere around movie 260 that 300 wouldn’t be anywhere near enough. So I moved the goalpost to 365 movies. 

Directed by who now?

That number was at once meaningful and completely arbitrary. Covering 365 movies would mean a movie every day for an entire year, not counting leap years. 

Alas, I have now written up 344 movies for the book. As of this writing the book is five hundred and fifty-eight pages and 119, 919 words. And that’s before my illustrator Felipe Sobreiro’s artwork is factored into the equation. And it’s nowhere near done! I’ve got a lot more work to do for it. 

That’s a LOT! If you like large amounts and big-ass books then you will love The Fractured Mirror because it is a big ass book with large amounts of words and pages and ideas and illustrations. I even threw in some wisecracks and japes for variety!

Incidentally I began writing The Fractured Mirror as a TCM Backlot column in 2015, which means that I have technically been working on this book for eight years, or two presidential terms. I really want to do a good job!

I have decided to move the goalposts again and make my job and life harder and more time and labor-intensive by covering 400 movies for The Fractured Mirror. 

To help me realize this big new goal I am going to take next week off as a “book break.” Instead of writing pieces for the site I’ll try to write as many blurbs for the book as I can. Moving to a new home with my family last week put me in a real hole work-wise so I’m eager to get back to grinding.

Will that be enough? Or will I find myself at 380 thinking, “Shit, I’ve got at least fifty more movies left to go?”

That is, unfortunately, a very real possibility. I will need to finish The Fractured Mirror, hopefully some time early in October, so that it can be a book people can buy for the 2023 Christmas season. 

That’s always my goals for books and I’m gonna be upfront with you: I fail a lot. Most of the time I fail. I wanted to get The Weird Accordion to Al on Amazon by Christmas 2019. 

It was published instead on January 24th, 2020. It was a success anyway, due largely to the extremely loyal and devoted nature of “Weird Al” Yankovic fans and Al’s kind words and encouragement. 

With The Joy of Trash I failed to meet my publishing deadline twice. I failed to make the book available for purchase until the middle of December, 2021, when the world was on holiday and no one was thinking about new books. 

I wanted to put out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition in time for the 2022 Christmas season and ended up publishing it on February 25th of this year. 

So there is an unfortunate precedent for me aiming to release a book in time for Christmas and missing by the proverbial country mile. 

Why do I do this to myself? Why can’t I take the less exhausting and demanding route? I suppose it’s because my books are important to me and I want The Fractured Mirror to be exhaustive, comprehensive and as complete as possible. I want people to be able to read it fifty years from now and get something special out of it. I’m writing this book both to come out at the end of the year, when it can still benefit from the miracle known as the Christmas shopping season but I’m also writing it for posterity.

When I do finally finish The Fractured Mirror I will confront a perpetually gnawing fear: will anybody care? Will anybody notice?

I can’t let myself get distracted by those questions and that anxiety because I need to finish the book in time and that will require ferocious momentum, focus and dedication. 

Yes, The Fractured Mirror is going to be even bigger, even longer and even more exhaustive than before. That’s good news for you, the reader, but not so much for a man who already has WAY too many demands on his time and energy.  

Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 2: The New Batch” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!

I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here:  https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop 

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that? 

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