Well, dear readers, I am sitting here like so much bleary-eyed fish after a day and evening working on this little project I’ve wanted to do forever. But first, may I just mention that this is the final day of May and tomorrow will be June, which will be busting out all over – and it is my fervent hope and prayer that June will be a month filled with health, wealth, happiness, creativity, and all things bright and beautiful. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming. I mentioned it in a post the other day, but here are more details. When I wrote Benjamin Kritzer back in 2001, a very, very tumultuous year, in which, as you know, something very, very bad happened that would impact me for the next couple of years. But it was also a year in which, after threatening to do so for thirty years, I sat down to write my first novel in late February. It was also the year of my Darling Daughter getting married. Writing the book got me through the bad stuff. I loved writing it, loved fictionally revisiting my childhood, and Muse Margaret was always there for me – loving the book and occasionally making a good comment, that all had to do with more details about clothing, and places, and such. When I got to the last two chapters and I knew what was coming, I knew I would be a basket case. I couldn’t make one thing work no matter how hard I tried. So, I went for a three-mile jog and five minutes into it it all came to me, fully formed. I ran those three miles super-fast so I wouldn’t forget anything. And I wrote that section and was indeed a complete basket case. From there, it was only ten pages or so to the finish line and the night that I finished, around midnight, I just burst out crying for so many reasons, but mostly how moved I was to have not only finished a novel but to have told this particular story. Then began the arduous proofing of it, with the late Susan Gordon doing the heavy lifting in that department. That lasted a few weeks. I gave it to the literary agent at William Morris in New York, and her reaction to it was wonderful – but the BUT was that she didn’t think she could sell it. Too soft, she said. Of course, I disagreed completely – there were plenty of best-selling books that were “soft.” And none of them were as funny as mine. One other agent was recommended to me and she said I was to send her the first three chapters and she’d decide based on those. Well, the book is unconventionally structured (as are all the Kritzer books) in that part one is all anecdotes and history and part two is the actual story. I got fed up at that point and told her she had to read the entire book. She demurred and that was that. She’d also told me that even if she loved it, I’d have to be ready for it to take two to three years before it would see the light of day IF anyone wanted to publish.
At that point, I was quite dejected. Then someone recommended to me a print on demand publisher – that was just becoming a real thing at that point – still somewhat looked down on by agents and publishers, but that would soon change and today, of course, there have been major best-sellers that bypassed traditional publishers. The company was called 1st Books. I called, liked the fellow I spoke to very much (he’s still with the company), and we made the deal to publish Benjamin Kritzer. Best of all, it wouldn’t take very long until it was out in the world. I was, needless to say, thrilled. I sent them the manuscript. About three weeks later, I got a galley in the mail. And it was, in a word, horrifying. Not only did it not resemble a book, it had weird fonts, was jammed together and ran about seventy pages because they’d left out the final eighty pages of the book. I got my guy on the phone and ranted and he was very apologetic and turned me over to a wonderful lady (also still at the company), and thus began a frustrating series of six galleys, none of which were very good. We finally got the seventh and by that time I was ready to go with anything that even resembled a book. There were problems – type was too small for my taste, lines were almost double-spaced, and it was just amateurish. But I approved it, got the books, people bought them (a LOT of people because I went on Classmates.com and found my grammar school and junior high school and told them it was all about our neighborhood back in the day. I think we must have sold over three hundred books to just those people. People read it and thankfully loved it – I hired a publicist, did lots of radio shows and signings, and no one really mentioned the problems with the book. And the next book, Kritzerland, and then Kritzer World were much better and looked like normal books.
For years, I’d open Benjamin Kritzer and just hate the way it looked. I thought about redoing it and making it right but didn’t know how hard it would be. Well, yesterday was the day. I found the manuscript called publish, and I don’t think we made any changes to that during the galley process, although I will doublecheck all my notes to make sure. And so, I began going through it – I hadn’t actually read any of it in almost two decades. While the major work would be conforming it to look exactly like Kritzer World, design-wise, I knew there were things in the manuscript that needed some fixing. I wasn’t going to change any text – just a bunch of punctuation things, because I fought every comma, colon, and semi-colon like it was my mortal enemy. I acquiesced to some but not enough. I came to understand that the punctuation helped the clarity, so the second two Kritzer books didn’t have those issues, nor did any of my subsequent books. None of my proofers back then pointed out to me that song titles aren’t in italics – they’re within quote marks. And there are a LOT of song titles in the book. So, those all got fixed. I added a bunch of commas for clarity, and just cleaned up some sloppy stuff – again, no actual content or words were changed. It also had some of the longest paragraphs in history, some going on for over two pages. I haven’t decided what to do about those – I may just leave that, since that’s how I wrote it. Then again, I may break up the most egregious of them, as it just makes it easier to read, frankly. I’m very excited to finally have this look right. Reading it after all these years was so interesting and there’s not a word I would change. With this distance, I’m basically just a reader and I laughed, I cried, and, for me, it’s still a fairly unique book. I won’t be doing any work on it today, but I’ll be checking my little punctuation fixes on Saturday before sending it to the designer. And that, folks, with the exception of a morning meeting, was my day and evening. The morning meeting was fun, and I had eggs Benedict that were very good.
Today, I’ll be up by ten at the latest, then I have to shave and shower and get ready for what I’m sure will be a roller coaster of a day and evening. I’m actually dreading the day part and I know the evening part will be fine. I’ll leave her around noon-fifteen, and I probably won’t be back until eight. I’m guessing you’ve already figured out what’s what, but today is the funeral for Richard Sherman, followed by a get-together at his house. I hate funerals but this is one I simply cannot miss. I’m sure I’ll be a wreck by the time I get back home.
Tomorrow will be a final go-through the book and I’ll probably send it off on Monday morning. Then I’m meeting someone for dinner and we’re seeing a play afterwards. Sunday will be a ME day, for sure, and then I have to finish casting and choosing songs for the Kritzerland show.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, attend a funeral, attend a get-together, and then come home. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s Friday – what is currently in your CD player and your DVD/Blu and Ray/streaming player? I’ll start – nothing. Your turn. Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy that my first novel will finally look like a proper book.