Bryan Alvarez talks upcoming “100 Things” book for WWE fans

PC: I know you mentioned in the introduction that you were initially against the idea of writing another book. What finally convinced you that this was a book fans needed?

BA: This is gonna sound like a terrible analogy, but it’s kind of like when you experience tragedy in your life and enough time passes that you sort of forget about it. Not necessarily even tragedy either, but if you’ve ever had a child, the first three months of having a child—like this baby doesn’t sleep, you don’t sleep, often it’s actually a lot more than three months, because until the baby starts sleeping through the night, it’s very difficult.

With our first child, you know our first child did not sleep at all for months and months and months. During that period you don’t sleep, and you can’t function during the day, and it’s like “I cannot imagine ever having a child again, like this is so hard.” And then the baby’s two and a half, three years old, and as fun as can be, and sleeping through the night, and it’s like “hey, let’s have another one here.”

The memory of what had happened fades. I don’t wanna compare having a child to writing a book, but that first book, I’m telling you. That was so difficult, and it was so hard to write. It was so hard to do the edits for the second edition. It was so hard to do the audiobook. And a lot of that was my fault. I could have made it a lot easier on myself, but I was a perfectionist about it.

So when I finished that audiobook, I was like “dude, this it, I am never writing a book again, I for sure am never doing an audiobook again.” But then, you know, a couple of years passed and I was approached about the book, and it seemed easier than The Death of WCW. You know, pick a hundred things, write articles about them, and that’s it. I thought, I can do this. And it was not as easy as I thought, but I’d done this before, and so while it was hard, I survived.

And there is no audiobook in the works because a lot of people have asked about an audiobook and Triumph doesn’t do audiobooks. But they do know that the last audiobook, The Death of WCW audiobook, sold really well, and so they’re open to talking to Audible about doing one. I hope there’s gonna be one, and if there is, I will do the voiceovers. So, I’m over that pain.

PC: I definitely understand the analogy you’re making, though. I know from my writing, that’s how it feels. You get removed enough from it that you forget some of the struggles, then you’re like “yeah, I could do that again.” And then you get halfway through, and you’re like “why did I do this again?”

BA: Yuuuup. 

PC: But somewhere down the line you eventually are happy with what you did.

BA: Yeah, I’m happy with it now. I’ve got copies of the book here, and I’m still, I can look through the book now and I can see things where, aw man, I wish I could’ve fixed that. Or there’s a typo here. I mean I looked through it, they looked through it, nobody caught it. But that’s just what happens when you write something. There is a deadline. And then the book goes the printer. And then it’s printed, and that’s it. It’s done.

PC: Well and that’s one of the struggles of print versus publishing something digitally. If it were an article, you could go in and make a quick edit and fix it, but once it’s printed, it’s done. It’s not gonna change. Not that copy, at least. 

BA: And there are little things. Like, I was looking through, I think it was the Triple H entry. And this is one of those things that, it’s just the way things are with book publishing. You’ve got a publisher. You’ve got an editor. You’ve got a fact checker.

You’ve got a whole team of people that quite frankly I’ve never met in my life. And everybody’s working on this book together, and because it’s a professional wrestling book, I mean, you probably have a fact checker that doesn’t know anything about wrestling.

So I was looking through the Triple H section after the book had been published. His original wrestling name was Terra Ryzin, and whoever was the fact checker presumed, they must have presumed that was a typo, because they corrected it to Terror Rising. Like the actual real words.

I mean it’s not the end of the world, but I know that on Twitter I’m going to be lambasted for not knowing Triple H’s original wrestling name. When, I did know it, but I got a whole team of people that are trying to make sure there’s no mistakes in this book, and some of the mistakes weren’t actually mistakes because it’s wrestling.