A kind of preview…

I pasted the Prologue and Chapter 1 of Where am I Wearing? into Wordle and here’s the cloud it produced.

See the larger version HERE.

Wordle in its own words:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I learned about Wordle on John Scalzi’s Whatever.

Is my ARC showing?

An Advanced Reader’s Copy (ARC) is a pre-publication paperback edition of a book meant to be used for early promotion and soliciting endorsements.

My ARC is a little more “advanced” than most, I think. I found Michael Chabon’s ARC for Summerland in a used book store (btw - it’s illegal to sell them) and it was darn near spit-shined. My ARC is far from it. I still have notes to myself in it and have made hours and hours of changes since it was published.

Seeing my ARC is kinda like seeing me with my pants down; it’s a little embarrassing. My manuscript was converted into an ARC earlier than normal because Wiley wanted to take WAIW? to BookExpo America in LA the first week of June and I still had a rough draft in May. They gave away 200 copies (is my face turning red). One “advanced reader” had this to say:

“I was given an advanced copy of your book and I Love it. I am also obsessed with reading the labels on my clothing. Now I’m wondering about the little piece of paper in the pocket of my jeans that says, Inspected by # 34.”

Ah, shucks.

Anyhow, I’ve got several ARC’s left and will probably have another pre-publication contest in the near future to win one.

If you win it keep this in mind: Just as some people are growers, not showers, others are re-writers not first-drafters.

13 fellas

I officially turned in my manuscript to Wiley yesterday. Woohoo! One of my editors, Tiffany, laid out the remaining path to publication.

First it’s off to production where someone will read over the manuscript looking for excessive vulgarity or endorsements of Hitler. Once it passes that it heads to a copyeditor who will edit punctuation, grammar, and style.

It was in her explanation of copyediting that Tiffany paid me the best compliment I’ve had as a writer, “We’ll send notes to the copyeditor telling them to preserve your style. We’ll tell him to keep all the fellas.”

There are two reasons why this was such a big compliment:

1) I’m honored to have a style that someone feels is worth preserving.

2) I’m really happy the fellas won’t be going anywhere because fella just might be my favorite word. In fact, at the most recent writer’s conference I attended, a fellow attendee wanted to talk craft. They went into great detail about their influences and their genius of melding styles – somehow managing to take all of the good stuff from the greatest writers of our time and none of the bad. They went on for about 10 minutes. When they felt they had sufficiently hashed out the depth of their style’s glory they asked me about mine. My response: “I like to use the word fella.” After their craptastic craft spiel, I couldn’t muster up anything else.

Out of my manuscripts 68,792 words I use 13 fellas. Allow me to introduce you:

1) more of a Warner Bros. fella
2) A fella sat on the maroon couch
3) A new fella has taken a seat
4) this poor fella lost his business
5) a short Kiwi fella
6) this fella vigorously scribbles
7) pretty jovial fellas
8) one fella is in shorts
9) a fella named Brice
10) a muscular fella with grey stubble
11) two fellas that couldn’t be more different
12) a fella obsessively moving at random from rack to rack checking out women’s clothes
13) the fella who watched the demolition

I’m 4 of the 13 fellas. Any guesses as to which 4? An Advanced Reader Copy of the book to anyone that gets them first try.

Putting on the finishing touches

I’m wrapping up another edit of my manuscript and am hoping to solicit some help with the passage below. I’ve never been the happiest with “a little girl’s opportunity”, but I’m not sure what else to write. Any suggestions?

The context of this is that I’m at the dump where kids pick through trash. The kids would be lucky to be garment workers.

At the dump one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And in Cambodia, one man’s sweatshop is a little girl’s opportunity.

Grammatically speaking, my wife rocks

I’m the dumb one. I’m the one who types “their” instead of “there”, “to” instead of “too”.

Annie is the smart one. She catches my elementary mistakes and secretly wonders how it is I can write an entire book and not have complete command of the English language. I wonder right along with her.

She hasn’t proofread the entire manuscript, but what she has she expertly edited for grammar, and more importantly to see if there was anywhere that I could possibly embarrass and/or shame her.

Her read (correction: I meant “Red”. There I go again.) pen is compassionate. She read:

Students might not care about the janitor and how big of a mess they leave for him in their dorm’s corridors, but they care about where and under what conditions his uniform was made.

She felt sorry for this fictional janitor toiling away unappreciated and suggested I change it to:

Students might not care about how big of a mess they leave for the janitor in their dorm’s corridors, but they care about where and under what conditions his uniform was made. Concerned tax and tuition payers are being heard.

Not caring about a mess is okay, but not caring about a janitor isn’t.

Her compassion and her grammar are two of the many reasons I’m a lucky fella to have her.

Oreo, the GalleyCat, exploited?

I’m Oreo’s writer. She is not my cat. The possession doesn’t flow that direction, unfortunately.

I scoop her poop. I pick her eye boogers. I put ice in her water. I stop working when she tells me to. When she demands it, I make room for her on my chair.

Media Bistro’s blog GalleyCat has accused me of exploiting Oreo for marketing purposes. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If anything, Oreo is exploiting me to spread Her Preciousness across the web.

GalleyCat, the website, reworked, GalleyCat, the photo:

Oreo is pleased with the photo appearing on another website, but she is offended by the LOLcat spelling. If she – being the supreme sentient being she is – chose to bless us with her words, spoken or written, they would be of perfect grammar and biting wit.

She will most certainly punish me for the way this has unfolded.

Me exploit her? I wish!

Galley Cat

Oreo modeling one of the galleys I received in the mail from Wiley yesterday.

A galley is an uncorrected proof of a book that’s sent to people for endorsements and other stuff. I’m not sure what the other stuff is. I’m new to all of this. I’ll let you know when I find out.

This particular galley has a first chapter that’s probably going to get chopped to hell and a few facts that were a bit off, including one that was about $160 billion off (oops!).

Is it bad when you can’t remember the title of your own book?

Really, should I be seeking help?

I can remember the whole Where am I Wearing? part, but it’s the subtitle that always gets me. Let me look it up…

Oh, there it is…A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make our Clothes

The problem I’m having is that we’ve (editor, editor’s assistant, Marketing gurus, Me) considered many different subtitles. The one I originally submitted was: A Global Quest to Meet the People who Made my Clothes. They thought Quest was a little too esoteric so we tried several others. Here’s just a few of the many, many variation of subtitles that were tossed around of the lists I submitted:

A Factory Tour to the Countries that Make America’s Clothes

A Global Quest to Meet the People that Make America’s Clothes

A Journey to the Countries that Make America’s Clothes

A Search for the People that Make America’s Clothes

A Search for the Factories & People that Make America’s Clothes.

Quest became Journey. Journey became Search. Search became Tour.

My Clothes became America’s Clothes, America’s Clothes became Our Clothes.

So, this is why I can’t remember the name of the book I’ve written. I suppose it still isn’t a very good excuse.

Look Ma! WAIW? is on Amazon!!

I did a little dance when THIS popped up in my Google update for “Where am I Wearing?”. I tried to leave an “I love it” five-star rating, but it doesn’t show up. I suppose that Amazon won’t let you rate a book before it’s been published. Currently, I’m the only one that knows it’s worthy of an “I love it”. Hopefully, my editor is too. I talk to him soon.

Pay per hour to live and write a book

After expenses, time, pain, suffering, and writing, I’ve made a whopping $7 per hour (so far) writing my book. To all those aspiring authors stocking the shelves at your local book store: it is possible to do what you love, work more, and earn less.

Living the dream!