More News from My Transparent Psyche

I dreamt last night that my grad advisor had read the recent review of my book. She came to me, looking sorrowful.

"It was pretty good, right?" I said. "I mean, I know that she has some criticisms, but it was good on the whole."

"It was very...polite," she replied. "But if we had caught the errors that it points out in time, you never would have passed your defense."

I was devastated. I tried to rally myself to point out that the reviewer had really liked my chapter on ---, but the skepticism on Advisor's face checked me. And I woke up, wondering whether those little criticisms outweighed all the praise, and why in the world the reviewer would have contacted me if she didn't like the book.

Polite!

Could I have a more literal dream-life??

Fan Mail

In the last few months, I've received some (slight) correspondence about my book. So far, this correspondence has come from the following places:

• a prison
  
• a Bulgarian monastery.

I am pleased to have appealed to such a diversity of audiences.

***********************************

In other news, Spring Break is here, and I am trying to get all my homework done early in the week. The week after break promises to be absolute madness, what with: my regular evening seminar; campus interviews for a new departmental hire; a meeting to decide on candidates for a different search committee; a board meeting of the homeless shelter on whose board I serve as Vice President, our first with our new director; a big-deal public lecture delivered by TM; a faculty meeting that is destined to be of epic length--such things will take up Monday-Thursday. On Friday, the English faculty depart for a conference in City to the North with about 15 students, returning Saturday night. And the week afterward, the search committee that I'm actually on will be holding campus interviews. Thus, I am trying to prep all of my classes for next week, and read ahead for the week following, so that I will not simply DIE.

My plan, originally, was to start drafting an article this week. That would be nice. But...um. I might just need to not die of work. That might be the best of plans.

An Impossibility

Reading a review of one's own work.

I think I'll just let it sit on my desk for a couple of days.

First Review

I'm filled with JOY this afternoon. And it's only partly because we're having at least 1.5 snow days (starting this afternoon and possibly lasting through Thursday--Wednesday is definitely off). This is the third actual blizzard I'll have witnessed this year--bringing my Grand Lifetime Total up to 4. Ironically, the blizzard is requiring the cancellation of a climate change denier's speech. Heh. Earth doesn't like him.

Anyway. The main reason for my JOY is an email that I've received from one of my Medievalist Heroes. Actually, she is probably my One True Medievalist Hero. Truly a fabulous and awesome scholar. I love her work--it's erudite, compelling, and an actual pleasure to read.

She emailed me because she's reviewing my book...and she likes it! In fact, she's sending me a couple of her own off-prints in the hopes that I'll find them interesting! (By the way, isn't that just a nice thing to do? I'll have to remember it for when I'm big & fancy.)

First of all, it's honestly thrilling for me to have anyone who's a medievalist (i.e. not my mom--whose first words about the book, by the way, were, "I don't mean to be critical, but there were a lot of typos," so maybe she's not the best counterpoint here) actually think that my work is legitimately good. But to have such a medievalist say so--well! I might just need to dance around the living room to "Come on Eileen." Too ra loo ra loo indeed!

Today

Las Vegas airport (5).

I held my very own, first published book in my hands.

I smelled it.

And it was good.




(And I think that I'm now done with the Vegas pictures, which is also good.)

(OH! And as we speak, TM is being addressed by two young missionaries out in the driveway. Hee hee! I shall hide indoors, watch through the window with the cat, and anticipate his account of it. A good day all around.)

OK DONE.

I've spent the last three days checking each one of my index entries. Yes. Each one. Looking it up and making sure that it's correct. This was simple enough for the names and big obvious words, but things like "epistemology" are not exactly easy to spot on a quick look-over.

Talk about double-plus un-fun.

Was it necessary? Good question. On the one hand, I did find some errors, inconsistencies, and weird items, and some pagination changes from the first to the second proofs had to be dealt with. On the other, the vast majority of the listings were correct and it was not particularly likely that anyone would ever find the mistakes.

Whatever. It's done. I am not rereading the second proofs, though. I've checked to make sure that everything I marked in the first proofs was fixed (not all of it was), and I am calling it a motherfucking day.

So I'm...done with the book? Well, I do need to make some corrections in the index document, but that'll take like an hour.

...Oddly, the hell of indexing has made me almost not particularly care. Whither excitement? Oh, I know: I now have an Amazon listing and a gorgeous cover--which is, unfortunately, not yet viewable on Amazon. Oh well! I know that it's gorgeous (and it'll turn up soon enough). Whee!

Hey People With Books, I Have a Question

Is it possible that my book will not need any permissions? I have no illustrations or photographs, no epigraphs or any other gratuitous quoting, and all of my quotes and references are for the purpose of commentary and analysis. That's fair use, right? Is there anything I'm possibly overlooking?

(My editor referred me to several sites to figure this out, and the conclusion I came to is that it's all fair use--but I want some good old-fashioned anecdotal internet evidence to back up my reasoning. Help me, people!)

Indexing: Unbelievably Tedious

Shocker, right?

(Twenty pages in 90 minutes.... So I should be able to finish up in the two weeks allotted to me, barring, well, you know, GRADING or anything like that!)

Proof

For indexing purposes, my editor emailed me the proofs of my book today (the hard copy is on its way).

While I know that indexing will be not tons of fun, I'm glowing. I mean. Wow. It. The book. It has beautiful fonts and big fancy initial letters and and....

It's just so pretty.

I want to kiss it.

In Absentia

If you haven't heard from me much lately (and I'm well aware that you haven't), it's because I've been reading my manuscript. Again. And again. I've had it in my possession for two weeks and I need to send it back on Monday; I'm about halfway through my second reading. Since I have approximately six million chapters, this means that I'm reading a chapter or two a day. It is akin to torture, not least because I'm confronted with all of my failings. How did I let it go out with so many awkward sentences and inconsistently formatted footnotes, anyway?? And there are all kinds of errors in my Latin and Middle English!

(Yes, it's been copy-edited, but the copy editor evidently didn't see fit to perfect my prose style. Hmph!) (I'm kidding. I mean, he didn't perfect my prose style, but obviously that (a) is not his job and (b) would have really annoyed me if he had. That's my job. Or at least, it's my job to approximate perfection. But on this second read-through, I think that I'm getting a little squirrelly and starting to actually believe that I need to perfect every sentence--and that that's, like, possible.) (Oh, and it's kind of funny that the copy editor did correct my "inquiry"/"enquiry" mistakes--that's something that I'm always correcting in other people's work, but apparently didn't even notice in my own. The shame!)

So I now have a theory, though, that the purpose of forcing an author to do several rounds of edits in the final/close-to-final production stages is so that the author will never, ever want to read one word of the blasted thing ever, ever again, and thus will not lose her shit over the various imperfections that will inevitably find their way into the final book.

Because OH MY GOD I do not want to read these chapters EVER, EVER AGAIN. EVER. Not even the good bits.

(As a side note, it is interesting to me to see how my writing matured in the actual drafting of the dissertation/MS; the later chapters are written in a much livelier and more interesting style than the first ones. I've revised the hell out of the first chapter that I wrote, in particular, to try to make it less boring, but I'm not sure that I've totally succeeded. Oh Well.)

Things, Glorious Things

• After a very poky Monday and a "stern" (= kind and smiley, for I am seldom stern) lecture about participation on Wednesday, Brit Lit has become much livelier and more fun. We had a very good discussion on Wednesday, and today I organized them into four teams to stage two debates onByron (we just finished DJ Canto 1) and some of the other texts we've read. The debates were, in brief, the following: Byron vs. Wordsworth ("The Death Match") on the purpose of poetry, and Dona Julia vs. Elizabeth Bennet ("Head to Head") on sexual morality and the role of women. To tell the truth, I was really nervous about this activity, because it unlike anything I had ever tried before and I was afraid that they wouldn't be willing to be a bit silly and get into it. But lo, get into it they did, and we had a fabulous time that actually yielded some very interesting insights.
• Insight: Willingness to be a shameless ham is helpful when one wants one's students to get into the silly activities that one has planned.
  
• I have to spend all day on campus tomorrow for a big recruiting event. We start at 8 am. Why in God's name do we start at 8 am? Why in God's name do people in the Midwest do everything (like get up, eat dinner, EVERYTHING) so damn early???
• My copy-edited manuscript came in the mail yesterday; I have less than three weeks to turn it around. I am reading it, but oh, it is not a fast process. No it is not. When do I get to retire these dusty old paragraphs?
• I ought to be grading. It would be very very good of me to grade four seminar papers this evening. Yes. I would be very sage (in the French sense of the word) if I were to grade these four papers. Perhaps I shall dwell on that for a while.
  
• The cats have been reasonably well behaved lately, although Priscilla meowed at the door at 3:45 this morning and Pertelote vomited up her breakfast in a particularly disgusting fashion on Wednesday.
• Priscilla has a new nickname. Medievalists, rejoice: Henceforth, the talkative and MOST melodramatic cat in our house shall be called Constant Mews.
• I laugh every time I think about it. Constant Mews!
• Ha ha ha ha!
  

It was fate--it had to be

I just got to see the approved promotional copy for my book. There are two quotes: one by a scholar whom I highly esteem and who was one of the manuscript's readers, and another by a very accomplished scholar...who somehow only came onto my radar last week, when I read hir excellent study of [topic related to my current project]. Truly--one of those books that's deeply researched AND a sheer pleasure to read--fascinating and convincing.

I'm peculiarly pleased that I read hir book before seeing the quote, if only because it means that now I have two very generous statements from people whom I (already know to) look up to!

The Laziest Blogger

I've been planning a post called "The Laziest Scholar Writes a Conference Paper," but given my utter slacker-ness on this here blog, I think I'm going to have to continue to put that off and just give you a Lazy Blogger update. Actually, in other areas of my life, I have not been lazy in the least, so my apologies for bad blogging aren't going to be too deeply heartfelt.

Three good bits of news today:

1) My "heart condition" appears to be pretty much what I thought it was--not at all serious, easily treatable with beta-blockers, exactly what my mom has. I still have to wear a monitor for 30 days, but that will wait until I get back from Europe.

1a) I will be allowed to remove the monitor for my wedding day.

2) So far, at least, my co-payment for the various EKGs and whatnot has been $80, not the $2500 that I feared. I will not be surprised if I get a whopping big bill from the insurance chumps in a month or so, but for the moment, I'm happy.

3) I have a book contract. I have a book contract!!! Or I will, once the editor gets the latest version (it's in the mail) and gets the contract itself together. But there are no more potential obstacles: The Board has approved it!

Oddly enough, I feel less ecstatic about this than I expected. Maybe because I've been waiting and almost sure that it would go through for so long? Maybe it hasn't sunk in? I don't know. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy, and I'm not unhappy with my low-key response. I do think it's pretty awesome. But I'm not having a powerfully affective reaction at the moment. Perhaps that will come later. Getting engaged has been sort of a similar emotional ride.

I would like to note, however, how great this press/editor has been all along. He responded immediately to my proposal, and the turnaround at every stage of the process has been terrific. Through both review periods the reader(s) got through the MS in two or three months and provided excellent, constructive feedback. I really feel like it's a better book--and only a year ago I was sending out proposals! (Just under a year ago, actually. I see from my blog records that July 14 2008 was the day that the editor first contacted me, which means that I'd sent the proposal out about a week earlier.)

So yeah, that's that. And the other reason that I am not going to write a post about conference papers right now is that we leave for 5+ weeks tomorrow: first a 16-hour drive to Momland, where we'll spend a week; then we have a few days with TM's parents; then we leave for 27 days in France. Ta da! And we've had lots to do to get our house ready for our ex-student house/cat/plant/lawnsitter. At some point, we have to get ourselves ready, too.... Packing, for example?

OK, whew! More when I'm stationary. Maybe.

You know, this has been a GOOD year.

I just got an email from Editor at Quite Respectable Press. And ze's going to recommend that the board approve my MS for publication at their next meeting, in May. And, although publication is up to the board, ze thinks that it'll be an "easy sell."

I haven't read the attached reviewer's comments (I need to wait until I've settled down and braced myself for them), but ze says that they're "very positive."

My heart is beating. When I finished reading the email I let out a yell that was quite loud and entirely out of character. I was immediately embarrassed (the window is open) and had to run into the bedroom, a reaction which now seems a little strange.

But who cares?? Assuming that all goes well in May, I'm publishing a book!!!!!

Accidental InAdWriMo (& a Recipe)

Okay, I don't really know what the acronym is, and I'm too lazy/busy/distracted/hungry to go look it up.

But here goes. I need to write a concluding chapter-esque-type-thing to my book this month. I'm thinking 20 pages (for this part, the part that has been stressing me out and keeping me from sleep lately), so we're looking at about 5000 words, plus footnotes. I'm starting today, and I plan to have a draft by the 16th (2 weeks) and to have revised it by the end of the month. Because, you know, my revised MS is due in 6 weeks. (I think. I can't really remember what I told the publisher; I may actually have 10 weeks. But from mid-December to mid-January I will have no time, so those last four weeks wouldn't count anyway.)

I've written 895 mediocre words today, and I plan on hitting 1000 very soon. Of course, I don't really have my scholarship lined up yet, so I have a lot of other stuff to get done, like, now. I think the reason that this really rather brief piece of writing is keeping me up nights is that it's feeling so incredibly half-assed, which is really not the way that I want it to be. This is a good thing to add to my book; I want to do it right. But I have no time. And I'm rather terrified.

Anyway! More cheerfully, here's the Special Pasta Recipe mentioned in the previous post. I don't think I've posted it before. Yes, the jam sounds funny, but it's quite delicious.

Measurements are inexact: I just made this up one day and re-invent it every time.

Ingredients
-About half a good-sized onion, chopped
-An apple (I usually use Golden Delicious, but whatever you've got should be fine), chopped
-A bunch of blue cheese (to taste; I like a lot of it)
-A goodly dollop of raspberry jam (Bonne Maman is the best)
-About half a pound of pasta (shells work best; spaghetti is not so good)
-A tablespoon or so of olive oil
-A tablespoon or so of brown sugar

Directions
-Commence the boiling of the pasta.
-Whilst the pasta boils, heat the olive oil and add the sugar in a skillet. Toss in the onions and caramelize them a bit.
-Once the onions start to soften, add the apple. Stir it around a little, then cover the skillet and let it cook until the apples are soft. Once everything is sufficiently cooked (I usually start the onions when I put the pasta in the boiling water and the apples are generally soft by the time the pasta is done), turn off the heat.
-Drain the pasta. Drizzle a very small amount of olive oil over it to keep it from sticking together.
-Put the pasta into a bowl or back in its boiling-pot.
-Toss with the apples and onions.
-Mix in as much blue cheese as you want. Stir it all around so that it gets gooey. Here's where shells are great--they catch and hold the blue cheese and apples. Yummmm.
-Add the raspberry jam and mix it all around.
-Taste to determine whether you'd like more jam or cheese. If you've somehow overdone it with either one of these ingredients, well, you're out of luck--although it's worth noting that I've never found this dish to have too much jam or cheese.
-Eat!
-C'est magnifique!

New Plan

A few posts ago, I wrote something about how I was going to read for my revisions for the next 6 weeks and then write feverishly through November and edit for the first two weeks of December. I have decided that that was stupid. That it was a stupid, terrible idea. The Path to Anxiety is Paved with Exactly That Plan. It would've been way too much to keep in my head with way too little to show for my work on a week-by-week basis.

Therefore, the actual revising revising begins today. I have two major points that I want to start to address. They're kind of complicated, but they're both pretty much in the introduction, so I think that it'll be manageable. (Manageable to address by mid-December, I mean. Not manageable to address them entirely today.)

Luckily I have NO grading and NO class-related reading to do this weekend. How on earth did that happen? Magnifique! Also, in a whirlwind of domestic activity, I cleaned my whole house, made bread, and did the laundry yesterday afternoon. I'll probably have to set up a batch of yogurt tomorrow, but that's nothing.

(I'm trying not to think about next weekend, though. 31 comp papers + 9 senior midterm papers + 11 seminar journals + 23 survey midterms, dear God!)

In the Interest of Accuracy, and a Question

I have now actually read through all of the reviewers' comments, and I have some real work to do. There wasn't much in there that surprised me; the readers seemed to pick up pretty well on the weaknesses that I already knew I had (and that I was hoping could just slide on by under the radar. Alas, the radars are more powerful than I had given them credit for being).

So I've made a long list of things to do, with some ideas for how to tackle all of the problems. I hope to finish it this semester. We shall see. For I teach 5 classes, remember. (One of which is only 50 minutes a week, but still.)

My question is this: How do I now list the MS on my CV? It was "under review by [press]," but that's not truly accurate anymore. However, I don't want to just take it off the CV, since it received a very positive review and the editor added remarks to the effect of, "We look forward to being able to publish this book" and "It's clear that this is a book that we should publish." So what's the protocol here? Is it "in revision for [press]"? Is that even a thing? What's the language? Help me, internets! For the job app due dates loom in the not-too-distant future, and I really want this sucker on my vita.

Cure

Two things that made me feel better this afternoon:

1) Listening to Regina Spektor's "Apres Moi," loudly, on my ipod as I walked back to campus after lunch.

2) A message from the editor at Press No. 1, saying that the reader reports indicate the necessity for some revisions but that on the whole this is a book that they'd really like to publish!!! (If I adequately address the revisions, that is.)

2b) A glance at the reports (which I only just got) indicates that a very big person was one of the reviewers. Which is alarming. And yet, s/he says some positive things! (Along with some quite legitimate criticism, of course.)

A quick look at the many single-spaced pages of comments tells me that I have a lot of work to do, but this is incredibly exciting, and definitely the best news that I could have hoped for. I had no illusions about having written a ready-to-go MS, so this is pretty cool.

Revising and Proposing: An Uninformed View (II): The Proposal

I know that I was going to write this like a week ago, but I've been working on this new article (check out my word counter!! --Even though it's a bit of a lie, because I'm going to be losing quite a bit in the extensive revisions that the thing will require). But the waiting is over, friends! You can now read my undoubtedly dull post about What I Put Into My Book Proposal.

(Book proposal update, by the way: The editor at Press 1 received my MS, looked it over, liked it, and has found readers. I should hear back within a few months. Now, if it gets accepted, that will be far too fortuitous to really happen in the world of nonfiction, so I'm not getting my hopes up. Just so you know. Really. No hopes! I swear!)

Anyway, here goes--with the usual caveat about my lack of publisher, this being what just one person did, not having seen any other finished proposals (although Medieval Woman's prospectus helped me to get mine on track), etc.

Each publisher has somewhat different requirements for submission, but I quickly found that the same basic set of documents covered most of my bases. Those documents included:

1. a cover letter
2. a proposal/prospectus
3. a table of contents
   
4. a CV
5. a sample chapter or two.

I'll only talk about the first two, since the others are pretty self-explanatory.

The cover letter.

My proposal cover was somewhat shorter than a job app letter--just a little over one page. Paragraph 1 was very short but gave the title of the work, a word count, and mentioned the fact that the manuscript was complete. Paragraph 2 was more challenging: Here's where I gave them a quick, readable, and hopefully engaging description of the book's project. The important thing here, I think, is to keep the writing free from overly specialized jargon and technical detail. The editor might not know all the ins and outs of your field, and even if she does, you want to show that your prose is comprehensible. But at the same time, you don't want to sound like you don't know the language of your field. When I wrote mine, I tried to think about why my research is exciting, and to highlight that, as though I were writing it to someone in a related but not identical field (a Victorianist, perhaps). So this isn't quite a dissertation abstract, but rather a brief statement of why someone should read your book.

The rest of the letter was easier. In paragraph 3, I gave my credentials (title, where my degree is from, statement of what parts of the book were being published as articles and where); paragraph 4 summed up the awards and fellowships I'd received to work on the project; and paragraph 5 told the editor what I was including with the letter (much as you would end a job letter) and mentioned that I would be happy to send the full MS upon request. Easy enough.

The proposal/prospectus.

I wrote two proposals. The first one is in the garbage. (Metaphorically--in fact it's still on my hard drive, but I haven't looked at it in a really long time.) That was because it was long: I wrote a whole extensive multi-page narrative of what the book is trying to do, what it does in each chapter, and on and on and on. Then I read Medieval Woman's prospectus and completely redid mine, trying to keep the thing to two pages (single-spaced). My advisor read both and without question voted for Attempt No. 2, the short one. So brevity might be something here.

It was not easy to get that two-page summary written. In fact, it has since expanded somewhat--to about 2.3 pages, single-spaced (and I 1.5-spaced it when I submitted it)--but it's still pretty concise.

It starts off with yet another one-paragraph summary of the book, this one a little more "technical"--more along the lines of an abstract--but that also focuses on the problem that the book is trying to deal with, with a quick indication of my answer to that problem. Then I have a one-paragraph summary of each chapter. Since I have eight chapters, that's a lot of little paragraphs; I expect that it'll be easier to keep the document short if you have, say, four chapters. But I think that doing your utmost to keep these short is a good thing, ultimately, as it forces you to think about what's really important in each one. You don't need to tell your reader all about everything that each chapter is doing; the one really key thing is enough. Write many drafts. Revise a lot. Cut, cut, and condense.

But the prospectus isn't over when you've managed to boil the book down to two pages. Most of the publishers that I looked at also want a comparison to existing literature. I got away (or I decided that I could get away) with only comparing my work to four other books; I have no idea whether that's adequate or subnormal, but there you have it. All four were published within the last five years and deal with issues related to mine, but what you're trying to do in this section (and I labeled each section with a little header, by the way) is to show how your book is different from each of the others--what gap in the literature your book fills. So show that you have at least some idea of what's in these other books, but you don't need an extensive summary. I wrote one or two sentences on what each of the books was doing and what it's merits were, followed by a very definite and assertive statement of what my book does differently. Use strong declarative language here--that's the major piece of advice that my advisor gave me on this, and it's important. Show no doubt that your book is unique and significant.

Then you'll need a description of the proposed audience. This doesn't have to be long or detailed, I don't think; "[Title] will be of interest to specialists in X, Y, and Z" is probably adequate. --Although I, incapable of leaving well enough alone, also had a second sentence that explained that it might also be interesting to people in Q, L, and C, even though it seemed a little pretentious to imagine that I have anything to do with some of these disciplines. Whatever. Of course everyone will want to read my book! What could be more obvious?

I think that that's it for the prospectus. I didn't particularly enjoy writing it; it was hard. But I'm happy with what I've got, and with luck I won't need to completely revamp it anymore.

Formatting-wise, I single-spaced my letter and, as I said, 1.5-spaced my prospectus. (It looked better than double- and was more readable than single-.) I also did something that I do on all of my job application materials: I included a footer with my name, the name of the document, and the pages (e.g. "Heu Mihi -- CV -- page 2 of 4"). If a page of your prospectus gets separated from the rest--say, during photocopying--you want it to be as easy as possible for the editor to figure out what it is, right?

Okay, that's that. I hope that this is helpful, if only to provide another set of ideas for how to organize a proposal; I'm certain that this isn't the only way to do it, and I don't know that it's the best way, either. But it is a way. Good luck!

Revising and Proposing: An Uninformed View (I)

Because a couple of people asked about the process of revamping my dissertation and sending out a book proposal in the comments to the last post, I thought I'd just do a proper post on what I did to revise my dissertation and write up the proposal. Now, I do not in any way pretend that this is an expert view. For those of you who haven't been following my scintillating career, here are the caveats: I have not published a book. I have not had a book accepted for publication. I defended my dissertation a year and 3.5 months ago. I have only ever seen one or two proposals other than my own. The only "credential" I have is that two publishers have deemed my proposal to be interesting--or, at least, acceptable--enough to ask for the complete manuscript. So this is not intended as a definitive guide to moving from dissertation to book or to writing a book proposal, but rather just a run-down of what one person who's in the midst of the process has been doing.

First, revising.

I like to think of myself as The Laziest Scholar, so, in truth, I did not do extensive rewriting as a part of my revision process. Or if I did, it's only because I tricked myself into doing it by working on just a few sentences at a time, here and there, and then occasionally banging out a new transition paragraph (usually in the space of about 15 minutes). The revision process will, of course, differ vastly from dissertation to dissertation; Germano's From Dissertation to Book is helpful in giving you a sense of what the scope of your revisions might be, although I confess that I found the book to be frustratingly general at times. (Which is not really a failure of the book--I mean, he's trying to address a very wide, multidisciplinary audience--but I wanted a little more in the way of concrete advice. Perhaps because I wanted someone else to do my revisions for me?)

Anyway. Here's what my dissertation needed; perhaps some of it will be applicable to others:

1. Better titles. Seriously, my titles were clunky messes of nonsense. Well, no, they weren't that bad. But I'd tried really hard to make each chapter title parallel, so each one fit into the following formula: "Pithy Phrase: Something and Something in Text [or Author]." I have eight chapters, so this got a little old after a while. In the revision process, I grappled mightily with my chapters and decided to jettison the parallelism, so now I have some chapter titles without colons. Yes, you read me right! No colons! In some of them! I also tried to make the titles a little more engaging. Titles aren't my strong suit, so this caused me some stress; in coming up with a new title for the book itself (a vital move, as it shows that you really have revised the dissertation) I generated at least a page and a half (typed, single-spaced) of possibilities before settling on the one that seemed to best represent the content of my work. By the time I finished the dissertation, see, the title I'd chosen Lo Those Many Years Ago wasn't very accurate, and boy did it sound stale to my ears.
2. Subheadings. I added subheadings to each chapter. This not only made it feel more organized, but it's probably what forced me to do the most substantial revisions in each chapter, because it made me really think about what I was arguing and the order in which I was arguing it, and how each section built (or failed to build) upon the others. I know that not everyone likes subheadings, but they seemed to work for me. Also, the two chapters I'd spun off into articles both had subheadings--in one case the reviewer recommended/ordered me to add them, and in the other the editor simply inserted them into the final piece. And once I saw them there, I liked 'em.
3. Actual restructuring. But no, not all of my revisions were cosmetic! Indeed! Upon meeting with my advisor post-defense to discuss what I should do to vamp the thing up into book form, she recommended taking a chapter from the middle and integrating it into my introduction. Providing more detail on this point probably wouldn't be helpful, as it's rather particular to my project, but I wound up following her advice and it made a big difference, I think, in terms of setting up the substance of my argument. What I basically ended up doing was merging two chapters and then splitting them apart in a different way and using them as a kind of two-chapter introduction to the rest of the project. To extrapolate from this to more general advice, I guess what you might do is to think about how your project would best be introduced now that you've seen it through to completion--trying to disregard how you actually did introduce it and conceptualize it more abstractly. I was lucky in that I had my advisor basically do this for me and point out the flaw in where I'd originally put the material from those two chapters, but I suppose it's something that a diligent scholar might be able to do for herself, too.
4. A new introduction. I wrote--from scratch--a 12-page introduction to the book in which I did my best to make it sound really exciting and to keep my approach fairly broad. I wrote the first draft of this intro (which was only about 6 pages long) in maybe forty-five minutes; I'm a fast writer of drafts in general, but in this case the speed was deliberate. See, I knew that if I took too long with the intro, I'd start getting too specific and worried about the details: what I tried to do instead was to provide a rapid-fire overview of what's really important and why it's important to study it. I revised this like crazy, of course, and added a lot of text later, but that first quick run-down was extremely helpful in getting me to write something that wasn't hopelessly technical and (most likely) rather dry.
5. Subordinated scholarship. I didn't have a literature review per se in my diss, but I did, of course, demonstrate that I'd read about 80,000 articles in the process of writing it. As I revised, one of the main things that I did was to simply delete references to other scholarship that didn't actually advance my argument (but that, most often, just talked around it) and to put most of the rest of my secondary research into footnotes. Hence, I have a lot of long footnotes, but the chapters themselves seem much cleaner and I found it a lot easier to keep my argument on track when I wasn't pausing every half-page to point out that three or four other people might be said to agree with me.
6. A highlighted narrative. You all know this one: Find the "story" that you're telling in the dissertation and make sure that everyone can follow it, using nice clear introductions to each chapter and conclusions that lead the reader on to the chapters that follow. I wrote a lot of these transitional conclusions from scratch as I revised, because I really couldn't be bothered to produce them while I was working on the dissertation. They were sort of fun to write, though, actually, because I could just talk in my writing about what's interesting in my project without worrying about developing the scholarship itself.
7. Stronger assertions. None of this "it could be argued" or "it might be possible" bullshit. Nope: I'm right, my argument is important, and you'd all best agree with me. If you know what's good for you. I mean it.
   

Just an additional point on the process: I thought that I was doing all of these things back when I was writing the dissertation itself (except for no. 3, of course). But when I went back and reread it a few months after the defense, it looked less bookish and more dissertationy than I'd imagined. But that's probably because this was the first book-length piece of scholarship I'd written; it's only natural that it would take a bit of revising to get it into a truly readable state. I don't think that there's a natural distinction between "dissertation" and "book"--at least, not in literary studies--but rather that a dissertationy book is just a book that hasn't quite moved towards a more general scholarly audience.

Now, I don't know how good my manuscript is or anything, and it's possible that I'll need to do a lot more to it to get it published. When I defended last April, my committee really pushed me to send out proposals as quickly as possible (and I took more than a year to do so; they evidently didn't push hard enough--but I'm glad that I took the time, as I'm confident that the work is in better shape than it was). I don't think that this was because I'm a natural genius with an instantly publishable dissertation, but rather because my diss was on a semi-"hot" topic in medieval studies that's getting more attention lately, and if I waited too long, the moment might pass. So, just to reiterate my caveats, because I'm sort of embarrassed about presuming to give advice on book-writing: I may not know what I'm talking about, at all, but it can be useful to read about what someone else did, no?

OK, this post has grown much longer than I expected it to. So stay tuned for Revising and Proposing: An Uniformed View (II): The Proposal!