Aborted attempts no longer

I am writing a book. Indeed, it's almost finished. It's more-or-less a compilation of this blog and my previous blog, This is a Tree (which I'm tempted to use as a title), without the bits not concerned with Japan. See, I had been wanting to write some kind of a book about Japan, and figured, why write a bunch of stories I'd already written? So with the addition of some before and after stories, glossary of our Japlish slang, and copious footnotes, it'll be finished. I've also stuck stubbornly with the unedited blog entries, since I figure that makes for a better read than a version sanitised with the benefit of hindsight, or affected by the tinted view of retrospectovision.
I'm determined to make this the first of five attempts at writing that I will actually finish.
The first attempt was an ambitious attempt to create another trilogy of Star Wars novels with my Dad, when I was about twelve. All I remember was that we killed off Admiral Ackbar, Max Rebo (the blue elephant in Jabba the Hutt's band) was a central character, and the key villains were a frog-like race called the Qu'iunni'i (kee-oo-nee-eye, I think). Yeah, I can't imagine why that never got off the ground.
The second attempt was whilst at university. I wanted to write a fictional story about anthropological and cultural theory, but in a fantasy country of my own creation, to achieve an entirely un-ethnocentric tone. Remarkably, drugs were not involved.
The third attempt arose out of my first urge to document our collective adventures in Japan. Dani and I came up with the idea of dramatising the many adventures of a dozen or so of our dearest friends into a sort of soap opera, complete with fictional names. We never got further than thinking of witty fake names for ourselves.
The fourth attempt followed the third; I wanted to make a book about adventures in Japan by compiling the many hundreds of emails between my friends and I over the course of two years. I did compile and organise it all, but it proved to be mostly for my own amusement, and besides, publishing hundreds of personal emails may not have been the best thought-out idea I ever had.