The honeymoon period: I've written the book, but no one has read it yet

I keep reminding myself that these few short days are the honeymoon period for my book.

The book is in print, the publicity effort has been launched, the order button on various websites has been enabled. The book exists.

And yet, and yet, no one yet has the book in hand. The earliest the printer could promise it, via the fastest shipping available – which I have no reason to think anyone but me opted to pay for – was later this week. No electronic version of my book exists publicly. Both draft copies are in my possession.

So what that means is that my book is completed but there’s no one in the world with a copy of it in hand right now. No one is actually reading it at this moment. Most likely no one will read it tomorrow either. Not until the end of the week…and that’s only if someone were to read it the moment it arrived in the mail, which not only modesty but reality forces me to admit is highly unlikely.

Hence, the honeymoon period. Right now, I get to float along on the victorious sense that my book is done – after more than three years of work, it’s done – and everyone who knows me seems happy for my success. My success in completing my book, that is. No one is congratulating me on my success in having written a good or readable or worthwhile book, because no one has read it yet.

So I’m fully immersing myself in this lull, this brief time before I have to get down to the serious anxiety about what people think of it. Soon enough – within a matter of days – there will be people actually reading my book. Even if they don’t rip it open the minute the mail carrier drops it on their doorstep or in their mailbox, within a few days they’ll be scanning the opening pages, flipping through, checking out the back cover or the acknowledgments. Right now is the only time I get to bask in the pride of having finally finished this long-struggling project, without having to confront any actual criticism.

Because the fact is, there will be criticism. It’s a provocative book on a controversial topic: how I challenged my 9-year-old to run a mile or more with me every day for a year. On the most basic level, that plan was controversial from the outset, as I explain in the book: when I went to an online discussion group for runners, expecting to find other parent/child combinations attempting to maintain a long running streak, I found no endorsements at all, only anonymous posters saying they thought my idea was an awful one.

But that’s the easy part of the controversy, the part about whether or not it’s okay to encourage a nine-year-old to run a daily mile. What’s harder is that the thoughts about parenting I’ve so candidly shared in the book are themselves divisive in some ways. I had about eight friends and family members read the manuscript during the revision process; most liked it, but one or two warned me that it was simply too harsh; that by being so judgmental in some ways and downright negative in others, I was creating in myself an unsympathetic character, a mother who was far too critical of her own child.

So the revision process, for me, was mostly an effort of toning it all down, stage after stage. I removed one adjective after another, finding ways to be ever less caustic in my parental observations. Too much, some of the readers had warned. Too much negativity, too much anxiety, too many questions about what constitutes good parenting.

In other words, I’ve already had a taste of the mixed reactions my book provokes. And that was among just eight readers. In another few days, ten times that many people might be reading it and judging me.

But after three years of work to get this book completed, I honestly believe I’m ready. I understand that some people will be taken aback by the raw honesty with which I depict the less joyful aspects of parenting and family life. Just as people asked us how a mother could submit her son to the physical rigors of a daily mile while we were doing the streak, people have asked me how I can be so candid about both the positive and negative aspects of my life.

My children have seen this book. They know what I write about and how I write. My parents and my husband do too. They accept it for what it is: my best attempts to give literary expression to my most authentic feelings. I know that some readers of my book won’t really like it all that much. Others, I hope, will like it a lot. But of course, I don’t know. And in the end, all I can really hope for is that everyone who reads it respects the fact that I took the time to write it.

Time will tell. But right now, I’m just enjoying the lull between publication and availability. I’ll never have these few days again, when the congrats-on-publishing are pouring in but there aren’t any how-could-you-say-all-of-this to balance it out. The time will come, but for right now, I’m happy to be in this buffer zone, this post-publication, pre-printing cone of serenity.

Files off to the self-publishing house

It was three years and three months ago – August of 2007 – that I started thinking about a book I wanted to write. I’d written a Boston Globe story the year before about people who run every single day without ever taking a day off – “streak runners,” not to be confused with streakers – and I thought the topic merited far more than an 800-word newspaper feature. Plus my 8-year-old son and I had started our own running competition, challenging each other to see how many consecutive days we could do together. Tracking our “streak” might make a good appendix to my book about these men and women who run thirty or forty years daily without a day off, I thought.

Three years, three months. Yesterday morning I made my last edit (catching yet another critical typo; they seem to be never-ending when I don’t have the Boston Globe’s copy desk watching my back), converted the 250-page word file to a PDF, and sent it off to a self-publishing house. Final production stages are now under way.

Self-publishing was not my initial hope. I wanted my first finished full-length book to get into print the traditional way, through a commercial publisher. And I did come close. I did my due diligence, identifying literary agents who might be interested in this project, sending off proposals and sample chapters. And plenty of them responded positively, asking to take a closer look at the manuscript. It wasn’t long before I found one who seemed like the perfect match for this project: she liked the concept, she liked my writing, and she definitely had the professional acumen to give my book its best shot at publication.

Still, it didn’t quite work out. Signing a contract with an agent was a thrill, but once I’d done that, I realized that the many unpublished writers who see getting an agent as the Holy Grail are missing the bigger picture. She tried really hard, but we just couldn’t quite get there with a commercial publishing house. By this time, what I thought would be a book about runners had evolved into a memoir about parenting, and how I tried to strengthen my relationship with my growing son through undertaking a running streak. What I thought would be an appendix had turned into the crux of the piece; now the other runners were mere footnotes. “I’m just not sure there’s a big enough market to carry this book” was what most editors told my agent.

And the thing is, I couldn’t disagree with them. A commercial publisher wants to feel assured that a book will sell well into the five figures. Twenty thousand copies. Fifty thousand copies. It depends who you ask. And it’s one thing to say “Yes, I believe in this project of mine; I wrote it to the best of my abilities and I firmly believe it has a market,” but I know enough about the reading public to not be certain at all that there are twenty thousand individuals out there who would part with $24.95 for the privilege of reading my memoir. I’m sure there are inspirational speakers who would say “If you don’t believe in your project one thousand percent, you’ll never succeed with it,” and maybe they’re right. I believed in the value and strength of my project; I just didn’t believe it had twenty thousand potential readers.

On the other hand, if it never saw the light of day, it would have accrued all of five readers, the five friends I specifically asked to give feedback on my work in progress. And that didn’t seem like the right way for this project to end either.

Hence, the decision to self-publish. I’m not out to make money off of this; I’m out to validate a creative endeavor on which I spent three years by finding people who consider it worth reading. Not twenty thousand people. Two hundred. Maybe even five hundred. Five hundred sounds great to me.

I worked on this for three years, and in another couple of weeks it will be in print. Not everyone who reads it will like it; confessional memoirs about parenting, whether or not they take place against the backdrop of recreational running, are not everyone’s cup of tea. But maybe two-thirds of my readers will consider it a really worthwhile read. In my opinion, that would validate my efforts. It’s not the glory of a traditionally published work, but it’s the joy of having something I labored over be read. And at least this time around, I’ve decided that’s good enough.

A writer minds her adverbs

My agent sent me six pages of editorial suggestions earlier this week, and today I cleared my schedule to spend the entire work day contemplating her edits and revising my manuscript.

What a luxury: to be able to spend the day working on my own writing. Well, it wasn’t actually the whole day. I sat down to my desk just before 9 AM, with the contentment that comes from knowing the kids are at school, the livestock is grazing, the dog has had enough early-morning activity that she’ll doze for a few hours, the dishwasher is running and the kitchen floor is swept. A swept floor is, for me, the mint on the pillow, the symbol that I’ve made it through my morning clean-up list and am done with that part of the day. Even my husband was out at a series of work-related appointments. I was alone in the house with my manuscript and my revisions.

But first I had to do a couple of hours of consulting. Billable hours, you know -- never a good idea to neglect those. The municipal management consultant I work for has a community development plan due in just a few weeks, and I owed her a significant rewrite on the public water and sewer section. So I did that, and when I was done, the dog was staring at me anxiously. “I get paid to write, not to go running with you,” I told her. She stared some more. “We’ll go by noon,” I promised. At 11:45, dog-owner guilt won out over billable hours. Dogs can’t even tell time, I grumbled as I changed into my running clothes, but it’s the dog owner’s code of honor that when you tell your pup you’ll do something by noon, you stick to it.

After a short run, I pulled up my agent’s list of suggestions and opened my manuscript file. And as I read through the pages, I kept thinking, “Wow, do I use a lot of words. Words after words. Words piled on words. Words entangled with words.”

I don’t even use that many different words. My vocabulary is an embarrassment to me. It’s not that I misuse words – it’s that for a journalist, I don’t know very many. On various writing projects this week, I’ve found myself struggling for synonyms for the simplest words: “appealing.” “Wonderful.” “Thrill.” “Delighted.” All positive words, I now notice. Interesting that I seem to have plenty of ways to express negative reactions, but get stuck using the same words over and over again for the good stuff.

As a writer, I believe my greatest editorial flaw is using adverbs. Only recently did I start making myself methodically cross out adverbs. Oops, there’s another one. As I combed through my manuscript today, I was alarmed to note how many adverbs modified every verb and adjective. A business decision was described as “extremely problematic.” A plan was “perfectly reasonable.” A challenge was “enormously frustrating.” Modifiers modifying modifiers.

Finally I stopped deleting and took a moment to think about what the role of adverbs is. To further elucidate, I decided. To clarify the way in which something was done, or was perceived.

And sometimes that’s useful; but more often, it’s superfluous. My husband has a famous expression. Famous within our family, anyway. Once he grew exasperated listening to me give him information and said, “Stop explaining things!” “That’s our problem, isn’t it?” my father later commented. “We’re all such explainers.”

Adverbs explain things, and as Rick suggested, a lot of times those things don’t require further explanation. Familiar as I am with the “show don’t tell” max im, it’s true that I still feel the need to qualify, to use adverbs to further delineate the degree to which a certain description pertains. “extremely.” “Particularly.” “Severely.” “Barely.” “Somewhat.” “Very.””Absurdly.”

Just tell the story, I reminded myself. Show don’t tell. Or, as Strunk and White succinctly say – I mean, as Strunk and White say – “Use nouns and verbs.” Let the things and the actions carry the story along without trying to direct the reader’s interpretation.

If I could do that, and build my vocabulary with some new adjectives, I think I’d find myself to be a much more skilled writer in very little time. I mean, in little time.

So, a writer’s rsolution for today: fewer adverbs. Use nouns and verbs. Ultimately, Rick was right. Oops, I mean, Rick was right. It’s simply a matter of being straightforward. Oops again. It’s a matter of being straightforward. Stop explaining things.