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I have two teenage sons, one of whom is about to graduate from high school. He'll be leaving for college next fall and, frankly, I've started wondering how well I've prepared him to exist out in the world on his own. And how harshly the future women in his life may judge me.

The truth is that while my sons are fabulous human beings, there are a lot of things I'd hoped to teach them that they haven't quite grasped; things I wish my mother-in-law had managed to teach her son.

Like how to put dirty clothes IN the hamper, instead of on the floor in little piles right near it. How to put empty containers into the trash can, instead of back in the refrigerator or on the pantry shelf; how to load and unload the dishwasher, instead of leaving the dirty dishes in the sink; or how to replace the paper towels or toilet paper when the roll runs out.

And then there are the all-important skills of finding their belongings without immediately asking for help from the nearest female. And remembering to put the toilet seat down.  

I thought these things would be easy. They are, after all, so...basic. I figured that my mother-in-law, lovely though she is, simply hadn't tried hard enough.

But I'm running out of time and I may have to accept the fact that once the initial rosy glow has worn off there will be more than one young woman who will wonder what my sons' mother was thinking!

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One of the best parts of becoming a published author is getting to stalk your book.

I learned about book-stalking from the website of my friend Pamela Ribon, an excellent online diarist and novelist who also writes on Samantha Who? Several years ago, after publishing her first novel, Why Girls Are Weird, Pam wrote about visiting bookstores, finding copies of her book, and bringing them to a store employee so she could offer to sign them. I thought, "Man, when I get a book published, I'm totally going to do that." And then I did. In the meantime, of course, I had to settle for stalking Pam's book. Oddly, nobody ever seemed to want me to sign them.

So far I've visited a couple of Barnes & Nobles here in Minnesota and at The Grove in Los Angeles, as well as a couple of Borders in L.A. What surprises me is that nobody ever seems to doubt that I'm actually the author of this book. There isn't an author photo on the cover, but I haven't been asked once for identification (although there was an awkward moment in the store on Sunset and Vine when the cashier initially thought I had just brought the copies of my book from home and wanted to stick them on their shelves). Apparently I could have been doing this all along, picking out books at random from the shelves and claiming to have written them. It probably would have worked as long as the real author wasn't a celebrity, a woman, dead, or someone with a name that indicated an ethnicity clearly different from my own. In other words, if you've got a signed copy of Benazir Bhutto's book, you can rest assured I had nothing to do with it.

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The trouble with writing a book about TV is that it starts to become slightly more out of date by the time the next season begins. I became aware of this phenomenon during the writing process, when I began writing during the 2006-2007 season, finishing the first draft during the 2007 summer hiatus, and doing revisions and proofing during the 2007-2008 season for a book that we would be publishing and marketing in summer of 2008. And I can only blame myself for forgetting to ask the networks for screener DVDs of its pilots for the next few years.

Fortunately, after watching a few of this year's new shows (okay, lots of commercials for new shows) and scanning the Entertainment Weekly fall TV preview issue, I think I can glean a few lessons. Feel free to print this out and tape it into your copy of A TV Guide to Life. If you do not yet own a copy of A TV Guide to Life, please shut your computer off and go get one now to avoid a blue screen of death.

From the new Christian Slater series, My Own Worst Enemy, along with last season's Chuck, we can learn that it's possible to partition a human brain like a computer hard drive. And the results will be equally glitchy. For guys, it means allowing a seeming everyman to move in rarefied spy circles. For women, it just means a more complicated relationship with their past, a la Samantha Who? and this season's The Ex-List.

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Still, since there doesn't seem to be any other one reliable way to "become a writer" -- beyond simply by writing, that is -- people tend to ask writers how they managed it. The answer isn't always encouraging to the aspiring scribbler, as it generally includes the difficult-to-fake elements of years of hard work and frustration combined with one or two bucketfuls of luck. Alas, I am no exception. I spent years flailing around hopelessly, rarely earning anything for stringing sentences together, until one day I was invited over to Garrison Keillor's house. So in my case, it was more like a swimming pool of luck.

I'd been told I had a way with written words since grade school, but it wasn't until my early twenties that I started my first novel, largely at the encouragement of my wife. I worked on the book for several years and through a number of life changes, got it as good as I could get it, shopped it around to some agents, and finally landed one. Eventually that agency went under, and I gave up on the book for a while.

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In my early twenties, my plan for finding success in the publishing world was simple: write a book, get it published, go on all the talk shows, be hailed as a literary wunderkind, get rich and famous, quit my job. Unfortunately I ran into a little wrinkle after completing the first step, and even when I completed the second step years later, the tiny little online publishing site I ended up with didn't exactly have the pull to make any of the rest of the steps happen. Or even to ensure its own survival for the remainder of that fiscal year.

Looking back, it's probably just as well that my first time being published by a big house like Penguin didn't happen until I was in my thirties. I knew enough not to expect my first non-fiction book, A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know from Watching Television to make me instantly, fabulously, or even independently wealthy. And thus far, I have not been disappointed. And of course I haven't been on all the talk shows. So far I've only been on a few.

Two of my TV appearances have been on local network affiliates, on the kind of community-oriented show with a couple of genial hosts sitting on a living-room type set, chatting with folks like...well, me. Okay, one of the shows also had four kids ages two to five, a singing cowboy, and a guy dressed up like Teddy Roosevelt, but fortunately that show had a pretty big green room.

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Jeff Alexander is our guest blogger during the week of September 22nd. If you have any questions for Jeff Alexander, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television:

A couch potato’s book of wisdom— 100% commercial free!

Some say that entire generations of Americans are being raised by the television…like that’s a bad thing. Not so, says author Jeff Alexander, long-time television writer, advocate of education by television, and recapper for the popular website Television Without Pity. Here, he offers the ultimate in life lessons as seen on TV. Topics include:

• Saved by the Bell: School on TV

• Somebody Save Me: Super Powers and Magic Spells

• Tell Me Why I Love You Like I Do: Relationships on TV

• Making A Living: The Workplace

• And more