Goals For The Weekend...

This weekend is going to be pretty straight forward.

1. Wake up early tomorrow and kick the soccer ball around with my son.
2. Go to a Fraternity luncheon.
3. Work out on the life cycle.

Starting tonight, it's a race to the finish line for Yardies. By this Tuesday, I want to be at either 105-110 pages. That will finish it. After that, I'll spend time cleaning it up, filling in some of the plot holes, before turning it in to Dave. I'll do a rewrite later this summer.

Time to turn in the Sloan script, Men Of Their Times. I think we get some notes from the science mentors in July, rewrite, and then it's done. After that, it's a race to $10K

Still no word on the NBC Fellowship. I need to know if I got it because that will determine how many lectures I will do. Last year, I didn't lecture that often, and I took a financial hit. I don't think I'll do that next year. I'm going to go back to lecturing around twenty to thirty times during the year, including Black History Month. School will just have to fit around it.

Received my advance check for non-fiction Money Shot...thank you very much Manie Barron and Thunder's Mouth.

Which reminds me: I STILL need to finish filling out my author's questionaire. I swear,I will finish it this weekend.

One of the things I need to do is fill out my "team" on the book side. I need an expert publicist, not someone who thinks they can do it, but has no track record. I need a publicist who can get me on national television, position me as an "expert" on various topics, yada, yada, yada. I have a great accountant. I have a great attorney. I have a great agent. I need a great publicist.

Weight: 213lbs. I've slipped in terms of my daily food regimen. A bit too many In & Out 4by4s and I'm feeling a bit lumpy. So, it's back to six good meals a day, and four times a week on the lifecycle, and then to the goal weight of 205lbs. For the past couple of weeks, I've been using two 20lb dumb bells, and that's going well. The addition of racquetball on Mondays (and possibly more times during the week) will help drop my last eight pounds. Softball has been fun, but I'm not sure from week to week if I get to play. I do know that my joints are bumpin' after the games.

In a couple of weeks, my little side biz will be up and running. It's a t-shirt shop called HoodieTees, and I think it's going to be a hit. I wore one of the t-shirts on campus on Wednesday, and a sister immediately said she loved the shirt and wanted one. Brilliant! Some of the cash from HoodieTees is going to fund my first new media business. Peter Guber has really got me going with this whole new media/mobile phone content/internet thang.

You have to remember, or maybe you didn't know, that in 1995 I started the first black owned ISP on the West Coast. It was called RBG Online, and my partner and I were profiled in the LA Times and Black Enterprise. Our 28.8 modems were state of the art! We had about two hundred of them, and we watched as the black community (our customer base) pretty much yawned. We were a bit ahead of our time. At the time, the prevalent Internet model was an AOL type community. We'd come from the BBS messaging board community, and so we decided to use a buggy, yet beautifully attractive GUI system called Galacticomm as our operating system. We had to send out thousands of disks for folks to sign on. Little did we know that the BBS was rapidly becoming obsolete as soon as we opened the packages. We should have figured something was wrong when the Galaticomm owner committed suicide. C'est La Vie.

But my attitude is that failure is another term for case study. And I use RBG Online as a case study as to what not to do, and what to do. My new media businesses will use that knowledge to be more successful. I'll be a media mogul yet!