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!

Reasonable Writing Advice from Mark Twain

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what one was intended for.

I was lucky to start writing for pay from the beginning. However, I was not so lucky that for the first few years that pay was about half-a-penny per word. Twain’s advice hits especially close to home considering my day job is in the wood sawing field.

Does blogging build a writing career?

Abha from Writtenroad.com asks several travel writers HERE, “How important is blogging in building your career as a travel-writer? Has blogging ever got you any work with print publications?” She included part of my answer, here’s the rest:

As far as advancing my career as a writer, blogging has been every bit as important as dumb luck.

It was dumb luck when Literary Agent A stumbled upon my blog, www.whereamiwearing.com and asked me if I had considered writing a book about the subject. This was before I had even left on the trip the blog was about.

When I returned from the trip I went to a writer’s conference in Muncie, Indiana, (not exactly a hotspot for meeting agents) and asked Agent B about pre-contract etiquette dealing with Agent A. Agent B asked about my book and was darn near more enthusiastic about it than me. Agent B, Caren, became my agent and a few months later sold my first book, which shares a name with my blog.

In the year I’ve kept the blog, I’ve spent over 72,000 minutes (50 days) writing it, but never considered myself a blogger until the Publisher’s Marketplace listing of the sale was released:

Non-fiction Narrative: www.whereamiwearing.com blogger Kelsey Timmerman’s WHERE AM I WEARING?, in which the author learns about the garment industry by following the Made In China/Bangladesh/Honduras tags of a complete outfit and goes to the countries to visit the factories that made his clothes and talk to its workers…

I started as a blogger and, with a little dumb luck, I became an author.

As for print publications…

I rarely direct editors of newspapers and magazines to my blog, for the simple fact that they might visit on a day I write about shaving my tongue or farting on airplanes. However, I have adapted blog posts that eventually ran in print publications or aired as essays on NPR. In this way, blogging is more of a personal writing tool for me than an eye-catcher for editors.

In the hands of a higher power

I finished editing the book yesterday. Now it’s in the hands of a higher power – Richard, my editor.

I’m happy with how it all went and I enjoy reading it, which is really saying something because I wrote it and I’ve read each word a bazillion times. I should be sick of it.

Back in December when I signed the contract for the book, I was somewhat worried with how soon Wiley wanted it. I had never written anything over a few thousand words and wasn’t sure if three months would be enough time to pump out a book that I would be happy with. As it turns out I wrote at least 25% more book than I was contractually obligated to write. I’ve cut some of the words, but I’m still about 15% over. In the next couple weeks, I’ll have a new challenge – unwriting.

For now I’m happy with the book, but this is subject to change depending on what the Higher Power thinks.

Excuse me while I sacrifice a goat.

Today’s writing exercise: Rolphing

If only I would have discovered Rolphing before I finished my book. I’m sure it would have taken my creativity to whole other level. Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda of Chad Vader fame spoke at the conference this past weekend and introduced a room full of middle-aged women to rolphing. Some of the women may have thought it was funny. I thought it was hilarious.

Erma Bombeck writers’ conference

I’m not sure I’ve made it as a writer yet. Such things are like knowing whether or not a country is in a recession – only hindsight can tell. But I owe much of what success I have had to the Erma Bombeck conference in Dayton, Ohio.

It was there, in 2006, that I met an editor at the Christian Science Monitor who gave me my first big boy clip, which led to an editor at the World Vision Report radio program contacting me to record some essays for them. One thing led to another and by 2007 I had enough clips to be taken seriously by editors of books and magazines.

This year, the director of the conference mentioned me in his opening address. He mentioned my small victories, my underwear wall of fame (which I forgot I even had), and the fact that I spent a month in Bangladesh because that’s where my underwear were made. I was “the underwear guy” the rest of the weekend. Garrison Keillor even signed his latest book Pontoon, “For Kelsey, the underwear guy.”

Garrison Keillor’s speech was awesome. Connie Schultz, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist and author of And His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man, gave a hilarious and touching speech. She was a single mother and feminist that ended up marrying Sherrod Brown shortly before his campaign to become an Ohio Senator. I was lucky enough to meet both Keillor and Schultz and her husband.

I had never met a Senator before. I was excited to meet Senator Brown because I voted for him in 2006 and he has worked a lot on trade laws. He helped introduce the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act in 2007, known by some as the “Anti-sweatshop” bill, and even wrote a book on trade. I have a bazillion and one questions for the Senator. When I told him about my book he was very interested, promised to send me one his book, and told me that he would give me a call. I think he might even have mentioned the possibility of contributing a blurb. I’m not sure about this; I was a little busy trying not to look like a stuttering idiot. The strange part is that he was on my short list of people to ask for blurbs. So was Nicholas Kristof who I met a few months ago. I would have never dreamed I would be lucky enough to meet them both.

Of course the most exciting part is meeting other writers. I had the pleasure of celebrating literary victories and consoling one another in our literary defeats with Dave Fox, Bobby White, Seth Brown, Lizzy Miles, DC Stanfa, Jenn Dlugos, Danny Gallagher, Norm Cowie, and Joanne Brokaw.

All-in-all a pretty successful and enjoyable conference. I’m sure I’ll be at the next one.