I'm Going on a Book Break, Which is Like Spring Break But Nerdier and More Bookish. Also, Fewer Wet Tee-Shirt Contests
Gone Fishin' (figuratively)
April is a big/weird month for me. It’s when The Dissolve laid me off, and The A.V. Club canceled My World of Flops. It’s also my birthday and this site’s birthday.
I’ve had a rough forty-seven years, so I’ve decided to give myself an obscenely generous gift for my forty-eighth birthday and the site’s seventh anniversary.
I’m giving myself what I need more than anything, with the possible exception of money and work: time. Time is valuable and important. There never seems to be enough of it.
I’m giving myself the gift of time. I’m going to be publishing reruns for the next two weeks at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, and Every Episode Ever so that I can work diligently on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies, as well as a mystery project that I’m working on with my older son and begin to build a backlog so that I am not perpetually behind on my three sites, multiple books and plan and record my podcasts (that’s right, plural; more on that to come).
When I look at it that way, it doesn’t seem terribly relaxing, does it? I guess it’s more of a busman’s holiday, as it were.
I wasn’t able to accomplish as much last week as I’d liked because my children and wife were off for Spring Break. I would like to have a break as well. Thankfully, since I’m my own boss, I can do that. That’s one of the advantages of being a small business/one-man band.
I recently learned that I am autistic, have ADHD, and am Bipolar. We call that the triple crown, baby! All three are inside one weird brain. Add a history of trauma, Depression, and Anxiety, and you’ve got a meaty stew of executive dysfunction.
When the psychiatrist was giving me the results of my neurological exam, I told him that I definitely had ADD, as I cannot focus for shit, have the attention span of a fruitfly, am perpetually distracted, and have a regrettable need for sweet, sweet dopamine hits. But I did not think I had the HD part of ADHD because, as a forty-seven-year-old house husband and father in the Atlanta suburbs, I do not have crazy bursts of energy.
He then told me that hyperactivity sometimes manifests itself in taking on more projects than one can handle and becoming irrationally excited about ideas and projects. Unfortunately, that was me.
I’ve learned that ADHD affects executive function, which involves the following:
planning and organization
concentrating and managing mental focus
analyzing and processing information
managing emotions and behavior
remembering details
managing time
multitasking
solving problems
Unfortunately, those are eight of my most significant shortcomings, particularly the part about solving problems.
Honestly, when you consider my history (which you can learn more about from my memoirs of mental illness, The Big Rewind, and You Don’t Know Me) and all of the things going on with my brain, it’s amazing that I can accomplish anything at all. There are certainly a lot of factors working against me, but I get up every morning and fight the righteous struggle of everyday life.
I have a tendency to fall in love with an idea and hyper-focus on it. Then, I have a crisis of faith. What if nobody likes my idea/book/project? What if it fails, like the thirteen ideas I’ve aggressively pursued? What will I do then? I better have a huge, irresistible idea in the on-deck circle.
It’s been this way since I started publishing books fifteen years ago. I was terrified that The Big Rewind would flop, so I ensured I had a contract for My Year of Flops before publishing it. The same was true of Weird Al: The Book, which I worked on simultaneously as You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.
I had a similar experience with The Fractured Mirror. As folks who preordered it via Kickstarter or pledge to my Patreon are well aware, I have been churning out entries for The Fractured Mirror for the past two years.
If you pledge a dollar to my Patreon, you get instant access to over three hundred pieces I’ve written for the book. I’m no math wizard, but that adds up to something like 1.3 cents per blurb. Is it worth it? I’m not an impartial observer, but I would say yes.
I had momentum, hyper-focus, and nearly 700 pages of intelligent, funny, and incisive commentary on a century of a particularly rich and fertile corner of American film.
Then I had another idea. I’d planned to write a book about Saturday Night Live’s forty worst, most embarrassing episodes. Then, I discovered that the show would turn fifty on October 11th, 2025. I became obsessed with watching episodes and writing between two to seven books about them, at least two of which would be published on October 11th, 2025.
Looking back, that was way too ambitious. It was the Bipolar/ADHD part of my brain making wild promises I could not possibly keep because it was convinced that if I didn’t, then people would stop paying attention to me, and my work and career would suffer terribly.
I worked really hard on the We’ve Got a Great Show For You Tonight/We’ve Got a Terrible Show For You Tonight Indiegogo campaign and Every Episode Ever Buttondown account for two solid months. Every night, I’d watch an episode of Saturday Night Live after my wife went to bed and wrote it up in the morning.
It was a fever, a frenzy. And then I self-sabotaged once again when I didn’t realize that my Indiegogo campaign was ending/had ended, so I didn’t make a final push that might have turned the campaign into a money-making success rather than a money-losing failure.
I’m still excited about Every Episode Ever and We’ve Got a TERRIBLE Show For You Tonight, but I’m going to pursue it in a way that’s less ambitious, time-consuming, and labor-intensive and more realistic and sustainable.
When Scribner published me, I would receive my final payment when I finished a book. As a crowd-funding independent, on the other hand, when I finish a book, I need to spend thousands of dollars printing the book, sending out the book, and buying my older books that patrons purchased as part of the campaign.
I’m overjoyed that anybody bought the book in the first place and deeply grateful to have readers as a total independent but I will concede that spending thousands of dollars instead of receiving a sizable chunk of money is not ideal.
I’m so close to finishing The Fractured Mirror. All that’s left, really, is Boogie Nights, My Week With Marilyn, Blonde, Lovelace and The Fabelmans, and a smattering of documentaries—some biggies, in other words.
What American documentaries about the movie business do you think are so essential that they should be in the book?
Then, I need to do a few editing passes (which takes time when a book is 700 pages long), and it will be ready to go into the production process. I’d also love to get someone of note to write an introduction, but that’s on the back burner.
I generally feel guilty about not working, but I see this break as much-needed self-care for someone running ragged, trying to realize all of his responsibilities.
Please do not forget about me during my break. Also, please do not withdraw your support.
I will return on the 22nd (two days before my birthday), hopefully, refreshed, relaxed, and ready to go.
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Enjoy your time off Rabin. We'll be here when you return.
I do hope you enjoy your time off.
Not sure if this documentary totally fits what you're going for, but I've always loved "The Celluloid Closet." It kind of feels like watching a secret history of Hollywood.