On August 11, 2003, ex-Ninja Pete and I put up our first test posts on the (then HTML-based) Bookninja site. The site has gone through some changes for better and worse since then, but I can generally say I’m happy with it. We’ve been lauded, ignored, and attacked by critics, myriad book people, and assorted nutbars (and any of those v’s and n’s can be interchanged to form a variety of reader reactions) but have stuck pretty close to the original formula of providing book news with an emphasis on calling out spin and bullshit when we see it.

Bookninja’s not a newspaper or magazine, but not quite a blog or webzine, either. Something more like a combination between a newslog, a barroom table, and a stand-up comedy act. I want you to get your news in a choppy format, your articles with depth, and the occasional chuckle here or there. In pursuit of this, I try to be funny, facetious, snarky, earnest, cynical, confessional, skeptical, gullible, etc. etc. as required. Pete and I chose the name “Bookninja” because ninjas are stealthy, deadly, but also, in terms of pop culture’s cultural tourism and worship of ultraviolence, also pretty silly. The name allows a certain range of flexibility. We might be ready to kill you five time, or just throwing some sick choppy-chop moves into the air for shits and giggles. You’ll never know until you wake up and find yourself dead or alive. We live every day with the burden of this power.

So, I go in for the joke over the serious criticism, and a turn of the screw over fluffy acceptance of the status quo.  Yet, the personality I wear here (like a clown nose) isn’t necessarily the me of real life. I’m not nearly so hard-to-please, gossipy, or funny. IRL, I basically try to be a nice guy, though I often fail. At least sometimes I fail spectacularly, which is better than failing quietly.

Sad news time: back in the spring as she was preparing to launch her new book Perfecting, ‘Ninja K (aka Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer), who has headed The Magazine element of the website for the last couple years, let me know she couldn’t continue. Apparently she wants a life. Pfft. That said, It must be frustrating working with me, because I’m behind on everything, and often she’d get me an article and I’d sit on it for weeks at a time before she finally had to fire some shuriken into my ass cheeks to get me going. So, for the record, any mistakes or tardiness or late payment were my fault and never hers. She’s an impeccable editor with a mind able to generate a seemingly endless supply of interesting ideas. I wish I could have taken advantage of them all! Kathryn goes back to being a mere mortal with her departure from Bookninja, but will remain, as did Ninja Pete, on the masthead as editor emeritus, as a constant reminder to her of what could have been….

Saying that, help me wish her well and goodbye, though I expect we’ll still see her around here as a writer, if I ever get it together enough to get the Magazine revived without her help. Now go buy her book. It’s a great read, as I said a couple months back.

So, here’s to me: The Last Ninja standing after the battle of attrition. (Fucking can’t rely on novelists, man. They’re just so flighty and needy. Oooh! I need my TIME to create my ART. Boo-fucking-hoo. Can’t you just be like me and sacrifice everything you ever cared about so strangers can get their news?)

And for the record, read everything I write with “:)” and my tongue firmly in your cheek. Ew.