Arts & Entertainment

Inside Lori Duff's New Book, 'Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza'

The Loganville-Grayson Patch blogger's first book is a collection of the her humorous blogs on Patch.

By Sarah Bakhtiari

Blogging on Patch for one Loganville resident has definitely paid off: She's now written her first book. 

Lori Duff, who's been blogging on Patch since September 2012, has compiled many of her blogs that she's posted on Loganville-Grayson Patch into the novel "Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza." When it was released Dec. 13, the eBook reached the No. 2 spot on Amazon's "Hot New Releases" chart in the humor and entertainment essays category.

The 19-year lawyer and mother of two sat down with Patch this week to talk about the new milestone in her life. 

Patch: Congratulations on your first book! Is it only available for the Amazon Kindle?

Lori Duff: For now. I'm working on the print edition. Hopefully it'll be out in mid January. After 90 days, I can put it up on Nook and other eBook formats. 

Patch: The book is basically a compilation of all the columns you wrote on Patch and put it in a book, right?

Duff: 
It is. It's not word-for-word the columns; when I went back and read them all, there were some that had similar topics, so I combined them. I rearranged them so that they flowed better. I added some stuff, took out some stuff. Re-edited.

Patch: What are some of your most popular topics in the book? 

Duff: I am usually the last person to tell you because the ones that I like the best are usually the least popular. The Halloween one ["Halloweenies"] did very well [on Patch this year], and the post was a reprint from last year. It still makes me mad that people drive house-to-house to trick-or-treat.

Patch: How did you go about getting the book started?

Duff: I did it all myself. From Thanksgiving to New Year's, I took a leave of absence [as a lawyer], and doing the book was one of the things I wanted to put together. I spent some pretty intensive days putting it together. I have friends who've self-published books on Amazon before, so I talked to them about the process. Honestly, I thought it would take longer. I thought there would be a lot of 'Is this OK?' but there wasn't. I uploaded it, and in two-and-a-half hours, there it was.

Patch: How long did it take to edit it?

Duff: I had most of the meat already written, so it was a lot of copying and pasting, but the editing process took a while. That took me probably about a month, but there were a couple of days where I did nothing but that. I really started when the blog post "Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza" [went online]. As soon as I wrote that, I was like, "That's it, that's the title," because I couldn't think of what to call it. I said, "OK. Now I don't have any reason not to do it."

Patch: How long have you been writing? 

Duff: Forever. When I was little, I wanted to be a writer. And all throughout school and college I took creative writing classes. But I ended up in law school. It puts the kibosh in most fun things.

Patch: It seems the documentation part of lawyering seems, for a lack of better word, boring, and could kill one's creative habit. But that doesn't seem to be the case for you. 

Duff: It's therapy. I mean, I can show you some boring stuff I've written that will just put you out. I have to write 30-page briefs for the Supreme Court about very heavy, intense things with technical language. I said in the beginning of the blog and then in the beginning of the book that, at 42, this is the time in my life that I would have a midlife crisis. So what do I do? Do I streak across Turner Field, or do I just buy the front page of the [newspaper] and title it "Things Lori Duff Wants You to Know"and just put all the things I can't stand, or do I do something more productive?

So this was just kind of a steam vent, a place not be a lawyer. I go out of my way not to write about serious topics. Every once in a while I will write about something that might have a point to it, and my screening committee freaks out and says, "No, you can't write about this! You have to stay funny!" So it kind of keeps me focused on looking for that. Plus, I don't want to be controversial. I really don't want anyone to have a debate at the bottom of my page about anything. There are enough things that divide people. There are enough reasons for people to fight with each other. That's what I do all day; I fight for a living, I argue with people. I'm bringing so much disharmony, I feel like I have to balance some karma in the universe by doing something a little more uniting. 

Patch: Where do you find your creativity?

Duff: In anything. The more I blog, the more people bring [ideas] to me. I had written one not long ago on dying my hair. So I put that on Facebook and a college friend of mine said, "Do one on facial hair," so I did. 

At first, I kind of had to look for it, but now that I know what to look for, I don't have to search that hard. I've got a backlog. I'm never, ever going to run out material. My kids are always saying, "You should write a blog post about that!" And I'm surprised, because I thought they would be more embarrassed by it. I would have been embarrassed if I was them and my mom had written those things about me.

Patch: Do they read all your stuff?

Duff: They do. That's how I know it's PG. I think of them often as my audience. I ask, "Would I let my 9-year-old daughter read this?" There might be things that she can't relate to, like the women's facial hair, but there's nothing inappropriate about that. 

Is there anything you want to add?

Duff: It's been a fun ride. The most fun part to me is being on the [Amazon Hot New Releases] list and being next to someone that I've heard of before. I have like a hundred screenshots. I'm like, this will never happen again!

-------

"Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza" by Lori Duff is available on Amazon Kindle for $2.99. Click here to purchase it.



Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Oconee