Wraptease

My dear readers,

I am anticipating with much excitement my 2007 Year-End Wrap, to be posted fairly soon. I have at least one or two friends who have mentioned that they, too, look forward to these epic compilations of mine at the beginning of the year, and I fantasize that there are legions of readers waiting with bated breath for the unveiling of my annual installment. Check out the last four right here:

2006
2005
2004
2003

I must say that I absolutely love creating these entries, and feel pretty proud that this will be my fifth consecutive! Recently, I was explaining the process of writing these things to one of my friends, and it reminded me of how anal I actually have to be to pull it off. So to promote the 2007 edition, I thought I'd indulge the anality and give you an idea of what goes into creating Bree's annual year-in-review. I think I will do this in a faux Q & A, as if I were being interviewed by Entertainment Weekly or something.

Entertainment Weekly Bree, who are you wearing right now?
Bree Oh, these old rags? My navy slacks are Dickies workwear, $23.00 from Siegel's in the Mission, and my vee-neck merino wool sweater is Mervyn's house brand.
EW And what about those retro suede sneakers?
B The Adidas are from Merv's, too – on sale at 40 clams.
EW You do your blog on a budget as well, right?
B I ain't made a profit yet.
EW So tell us about the production process for your Year-End Wraps.
B Well, the first step is the info-gathering phase. As soon as a new year rolls around (while still in "post-production" on the previous year's wrap) I start up a new Word document and usually put down a few general categories for significant events, films and TV, books I read, shows I go to, etc. And then every time something happens that I want to list in the wrap, I type it in there. As soon as I can after seeing a movie, for instance, I'll type at least the name of the movie and give it a rating.
EW Wait a minute. You mean you plot every movie you see onto your list throughout the whole year?
B I might forget to write down a couple, but yeah, basically I record every movie, TV show, book, concert, and most significant things that happen in my life.
EW That's pretty anal!
B Yes, it truly is.
EW Then what?
B Well, at various times throughout the year, usually when I'm dragging my feet on some other more important project (i.e. my thesis) I'll open up the Wrap draft and begin to fill in content, like reviews, preambly section headers, and flush out the list of stuff that has been happening during the year. I also start adding in the html tags to format the document, and search for images and links to make the wrap more colorful, interactive, educational, yadda yadda.
EW So this is really a year-long project.
B Yeah, I'd say it takes me about a 40-hour week to produce it, but that's spread out over thirteen, fourteen months.
EW Well, shit howdy!
B That is one of my favorite expressions of all time!
EW Yeah, somehow I just honed in on it.
B This conversation is getting kinda autochthonous.
EW Huh? OK, so, after you've got all the content in there, how do you wrap up the Wrap?
B When the content is as good as I can get it, all the entries are complete, and the images and links are there, I run a spellcheck, and then I go through the whole thing line by line and edit to make sure all the links actually work, and ensure that all the formatting and grammar is as consistent as possible, and then I'm finally ready to hit "post," ideally in January or February, sometimes later. I think I even dragged one Wrap on til April, but I'm certainly not gonna do that this year.
EW Why's that?
B I've got a thesis to avoid!
EW Thanks a bunch Bree.
B Thank you, EW!