I have been at home mak­ing notes on my foolscap writ­ing pad this evening. And I have spent much of the night lament­ing the fact that foolscap is no longer the paper size of choice. Poor foolscap. And so I have writ­ten a short pop num­ber about foolscap. Though I think it’s just the cho­ruses. Maybe I’ll get Lil Wayne or The Game to come up with some rhymes for in between.

It’s foolscap!
Skinny by the sides
Longer down the spine
Few many more lines

It’s foolscap!
Alter­nate dimen­sions
With­out any ques­tion
Sta­tionery legend

It’s foolscap!
From the mid­dle ages
To its cur­rent sta­tus
God­fa­ther of pages

Who sched­uled the long week­end dur­ing Blog Every Day April? Blerg. Any­way, today I’m offer­ing up a piece of my per­sonal diary from Good Fri­day 16 years ago. I was ten years old. Colsore!

When I tell peo­ple that I have a pile of books at home that I’m reading/about to read, I really mean a pile. Not a stack, or a tower. A pile. Spread out. Chaotic. Piled.

See.

Mmm. Today is a good day because I get to share these sam­ple chap­ters from The Great­est Blog­ger in the World (out in July) with you. Think of the chap­ters as cheese, the pdf as the tooth­pick and me as the old woman giv­ing out sam­ples next to the deli.

One week into BEDA and I’m find­ing blog­ging every day to be eas­ier than I thought it would be. It cer­tainly helps when I’m sent arti­cles like this one about my name­sake Andrew McDon­ald the Shoe­maker from Sydney.

That’s a photo of Andrew above, taken from the inter­view in today’s small busi­ness sec­tion of the Age. I already have to com­pete with Andrew McDon­ald the Vic­to­rian crick­eter now I have to com­pete with Andrew McDon­ald the Shoe­maker get­ting all this media atten­tion too.

To try to coun­ter­act all the atten­tion Shoe-Andrew is get­ting I have taken the Q&A he did with the Age, removed his answers and inserted my own answers:

The Age: How is bespoke retail­ing far­ing right at the moment? Are you find­ing cus­tomers are being more economical?

Me: I would say that bespoke retail­ing is most likely doing less busi­ness than usual at the moment. I say this because I have cer­tainly not pur­chased any bespoke or custom-made items in the past year or so. Exclud­ing that suit I got in Vietnam.

What changes have you had to make to the way you run your busi­ness to accom­mo­date the cur­rent eco­nomic climate?

I wouldn’t exactly call being a writer a busi­ness. But if I did run a busi­ness I would prob­a­bly cut back on all mar­ket­ing, fire most of my staff and spend my week­ends just gen­er­ally panicking.

How has the down­turn impacted on your busi­ness plans for the next 12 months?

It means that I can no longer afford to pay my busi­ness plan­ner Joseph to plan my busi­ness. Although I think he was work­ing on a five-year plan not a 12-month plan.

What things would you never com­pro­mise on and what things are ok to scale back on?

Writ­ers should try scal­ing back on com­pound verbs — they take up too much space and as money gets tighter, books are going to have fewer pages.

Is lux­ury retail­ing fac­ing the need to re-invent itself? Oro­ton mar­kets itself as ‘afford­able lux­ury’. Can this work for others?

Afford­able lux­ury is when you break into a rich person’s back­yard and swim in their pool. Or when you attend a wed­ding with the inside of your jacket lined with plas­tic bags to put caviar into. I’m not sure that Oro­ton counts.

If you had a crys­tal ball, what would you pic­ture for the next 12 months?

I don’t think this ques­tion makes gram­mat­i­cal sense. I mean, are you ask­ing what do I pic­ture hap­pen­ing in the forth­com­ing 12 months or what would I see if I stared at a crys­tal ball for 12 months in a row? The answer to that last ques­tion is…crystal ball. I would prob­a­bly just see a whole lot of crys­tal ball.