7 posts tagged “book”
for the penguin's spring/summer catalog! woo hoo!
maybe book jacket too... i like it! geoff took it and (thankfully) airbrushed all my lines and wrinkles from writing a book away. some people say it's too serious....but i'm a very serious author! my friend megan had the best comment, "I'm imagining this is what people see when you realize they have something to tell you and they're stalling." ha! that's actually a far meaner face!
thoughts?
so this weekend i have been like the Tasmanian devil whipping around the house. Everything is C L E A N. super clean. i even mopped the porch. how silly is that?? geoff and i also tore into the downstairs room (aka my office) taking out more boxes of junk. We even re-arranged furniture-- we moved a love seat into the living room and moved some chairs that had been in its place down to my office on the first floor. Sadly, our once charming "orange room" looks desolate, but it's all according to plan because we're going to buy a day bed (or just second bed) once Penguin sends me another check. anyone reading this who has ever stayed with us is rejoicing right now. YES! you will have a REAL bed to sleep on!! making the offer all the more attractive, it's the one room in the house the cats never go into. despite being in our 30s and having a three bedroom house -- we have forced guests to pick between couch or air mattress for the five-plus years we've lived here.
i've also managed to work out for at least an hour both days this weekend, and do at least a few hours work. geoff asked if i had a sudden, secret meth habit. (he doesn't see me during the week, when i'm similarly manic) i think it's a weird form of nesting. this week is MAJOR. i am sending the first pass at my entire manuscript to my editor on friday and i wanted a clean house and clear head going into the week.
It's hard not to feel this week is somehow momentus (although months more work will be done on the book). my dream, for my 10-year journalism career, has been to write a book. i rarely spoke about this, just quietly plowed away at my own little checklist of accomplishments that might make this possible-- one day. you know? maybe when i was 60? the few times i mentioned it to co-workers i was mocked. It's after all, almost every journalists' dream. very few of the ones who get it enjoy the luxury of taking a year off to do it. i have been well aware of my good fortune everyday of the last 9 months or so i've plowed away at this.
The whole thing has almost been too insane to focus on-- it's a lot of pressure after all. i may very well never get another shot. so month-after-month, i've just thought about the task at hand. This chapter, getting this research done, etc. but it's hard not to get carried away now. i have a few more chapters to plow through and brighten up, then it's, well, done. At least the first pass. (loads of editing, legal, copyediting, fact checking etc in store until the real due date in oct)
still, come friday, i will be looking at some 80,000 words that i wasn't sure this time last year i could even write. thank god, it's not that "time of the month." i'd be a nostalgic sobbing mess!
apologies to my loyal readers (all two of you!) because i haven't voxed in forever. busy times. although my manuscript is officially due oct. 15, i'm trying to get the full version 1.0 to my editor by the end of the month. that isn't happening. still, aiming for Aug 2 or so. so it's been crunch time in the lacy house. between trying to keep my house/office/jail cell from devolving into a sty, work out, keep up with the web scene and- oh yeah- WRITE, my day seems to go by in the blink of an eye. i have started to wonder if there's simply a finite limit to the number of words you can write in a year and if maybe i've exceeded it.
anyway, i have had two fantastic writing days and am feeling good so i figured a quick post was in order. i have mostly tamed the horrible beast that was ch.s 4 and 5, and have gotten the all important ch. 6 under control. ch. 7 should be mostly hammered out today. that leaves ch. 8 and 9, which to be honest are out of control and will take days and days or work. still-- having just two trainwrecks left to make sense of is a nice feeling.
i am increasingly going crazy. i have worn the same denim cut offs all week. and today i am wearing the same shirt too and listening to the same i-pod playlist. i had such a good writing day yesterday i just wanted to re-create it. i may smell bad, but it has worked.
ok. back to work. just wanted to let you know i was alive. if today continues to go well, i'll see you tomorrow (probably in the same outfit)
Show us what you hold in your hands the most every day.
Submitted by lezlee.
unfortunately the real answer is this:
the thing i wish i could hold more is this:
i'm having such a nice saturday morning. geoff is out running errands (read: getting me an anniversary present? our eight year dating- not marriage- anniversary is mid-week. we are going to a fancy dinner at le colonial. i could probably tell you what i got him and it wouldn't matter because he never reads this unprompted but i won't. at any rate i had asked for this. i think it's edgy and romatic at once and i LOVE it. but i think the fact that he's mysteriously running errands means i won't get it. there's no way he'd get me this AND something else.)
anyway. i was in recovery mode most of yesterday after a long week with too many parties. so i didn't do a lot of work. so i'm doing some writing this morning. CHAPTER SIX! i'm a bit behind in my 50-pages-a-month count but it's not because i've been slacking. i keep going back and tightening up the first five chapters and as a result 200 pages i'd written has whittled down to about 170. and i've spent so much time doing that and doing that freelance article for fortune, that i haven't been writing as much new stuff. so i'm hoping when i go to memphis next week i can churn out about 40 pages and catch up. if i do 60 pages this month and 60 pages next i'll be back on track.
another thing that's slowing it down is these last chapters are harder. they're less fleshed out and more about present time and -gasp- predicting the future a bit.
i've discovered finally what my two favorite parts of writing a chapter are. i like the very first part. coming up with a cool lead and seeing if it works, then sketching out what the chapter will look like. it's fun because it's totally creative and unrestrained-- my FAVORITE thing about writing a book, versus a magazine article where you start with a tight word limit, one very specific thing you're trying to get across and a pretty distinct formula you have to follow. i can do whatever i want in a chapter though. and the most liberating thing? i've already defined all the basic things like "what is venture capital?" etc in early chapters so i can just write.
my other favorite part is the end. reading back over it and fine tuning. it takes forever and is somewhat tedius, but there's a great sense of pride. you can see a BOOK coming together. it's very exciting.
unfortunately, there's that part in the middle where you essentially wrestle with the chapter trying to figure out how the hell to fix everything that doesn't work.
anyway. as i'm writing i'm also sipping some yummy coffee from ritual coffee roasters (the portland of SF) and watching my favorite guilty pleasure since rosie joined the view: PAULA DEAN'S HOMECOOKING. i love everything about it. except the recipes. i've never actually made anything from the show- so much butter! ugh! but paula has the best, most soothing accent and the most southern turns of phrases. it's funny because normally i am such a stickler about how memphis is different from the rest of the south etc. and it's not like my mom is anything like paula. but it makes me feel very at home.
isn't it weird how you can become more southern once you leave some place? it's like you want to cling to it, so it becomes far more pronounced than it ever was in your life. i see that with people from the east coast too. i swear california new yorkers are SO much more new yorky and the same with california bostonians. by that i mean "obnoxious." (haha)
i haven't voxed in a while and i woke up not feeling completely overwhelmed for the first time in a few weeks so here's a long boring post about my life.
last week was rough. i got in town monday morning with a budding cold and a big week ahead. i had to file a freelance story (first in MONTHS) and i'd promised my Penguin editor i'd send another batch of book pages. there were issues with both, as always seems to be the case. the freelance story has been a logistical nightmare of rooting through fact, fiction and getting people to talk to me etc. i also picked this ambitious structure for it, that may or may not work. I'd thought the book pages were in good shape mostly, but when i read back through the last two chapters seemed a bit lacking. so i kept toggling back and forth between both tasks, irritated i couldn't devote all my efforts to either one.
add to this i had a lot of meetings and schmoozing to do last week. my cold just got worse and worse, culminating in my completely losing my voice by the end of thursday night. so i kept waking up feeling very torn between wanting to just sleep and do all this work.
FINALLY- sunday night i finished the freelance story. it's about 1000 words longer than promised so the editor in question might shoot me. but i feel good about it. usually i have all this angst when i file something to an editor i have never worked with before. big time. secret: i'm not really a great writer. especially magazine style writing. i always somehow feel like i've tricked people into thinking i am, and when i deliver my story i worry they'll feel cheated.
but this time, it was different. maybe it's the swagger of book writing (which it turns out i'm far better at, making me feel not totally incompetent in the writing dept). but, also, i just feel like i did my best. if it's got problems, i'm competent enough to fix them. if they never want me to freelance again, then i probably shouldn't anyway because that was a pretty fair indication of my skill level as a magazine writer.
so now: i'm momentarily back to the book pages, which is more fun anyway. and i have a very small amount of schmoozing this week and the cold is FINALLY abating. FINALLY. once i devote a few hours to getting this rat trap of a house clean i'll feel even better i think.
suddenly all seems right with the world.
why did i decide to come to memphis a whole week ahead of him? and the question of the day (who do you want to kiss under the mistletoe) isn't helping :(
slightly improving my sadness is the fact that i am my brother's "plus one" (a concept i newly explained to my dad) to his company's christmas party tonight. his selling point of free beer didn't work-- but free karaoke machine DID! i am thinking about doing something by my non-relative Justin Timberlake.
also slightly improving my moon is my general mounting excitement about how well my book is going. i feel like with every conversation it is coalescing more in my mind and coming together beautifully. i actually think it'll be incredibly fun to write. (and hopefully to read) interestingly, people totally outside the valley who don't even know what venture capital is seem to get more excited about the premise and some of the descriptions of it. i guess people in the valley just live it too much...
on another random note-- i am 450 pages into "disney war" which may be one of the best narrative non-fiction books i've read and believe me- i've been reading a lot of them lately. there are so many things that stewart has done so well but one of my rare gripes is how the action has slowed for the last 100 pages or so. OUST EISNER ALREADY!
