I just wrote a bad book review.
I really didn't want to write a bad book review, but honestly, the book was not good. Oh, no. I tried to be charitable, but it was hard.
Luckily it's highly unlikely that I'll ever run across the author in the course of my career. Still, I feel...unpleasant...and yet strangely powerful...yes, powerful...knowledgeable.... I can feel my own authority growing, seething beneath the surface.... Oh, but I feel bad for the poor author, because it really isn't a very nice review.
I'll reread it tomorrow and see whether I can't soften it up a bit.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Oh, Computer!
I'm getting little green lines here and there on my laptop's screen. This is troubling, is it not?
And they seem to be worse today than they were yesterday.
Ugh. The stupid thing is only two years old. What the hell?
I'd really rather not buy a new computer this year. My minimum computer lifespan is three years, which means that I'm replacing this sucker next August at the earliest.
Feh. Feh, I say! This is not helping me get through the tiresome and extensive revisions of my not-very-brilliant article draft.
Perhaps the worst part, though, is that the thought of getting a new computer gives me a bit of a thrill--so now I want to go looking for a new one, even though I seriously cannot afford it right now (MLA airfare is coming up all too soon). And, other than the raggedy monitor and the broken DVD player (my own fault, the latter is), my little Vaio is working just fine. I must relax. More important things are at hand--such as figuring out why there's such a dearth of secondary criticism in my essay. I mean, I know I'm writing about a pretty under-studied text, but I can't shake the feeling that there's a distinct lack of rigor here....
And they seem to be worse today than they were yesterday.
Ugh. The stupid thing is only two years old. What the hell?
I'd really rather not buy a new computer this year. My minimum computer lifespan is three years, which means that I'm replacing this sucker next August at the earliest.
Feh. Feh, I say! This is not helping me get through the tiresome and extensive revisions of my not-very-brilliant article draft.
Perhaps the worst part, though, is that the thought of getting a new computer gives me a bit of a thrill--so now I want to go looking for a new one, even though I seriously cannot afford it right now (MLA airfare is coming up all too soon). And, other than the raggedy monitor and the broken DVD player (my own fault, the latter is), my little Vaio is working just fine. I must relax. More important things are at hand--such as figuring out why there's such a dearth of secondary criticism in my essay. I mean, I know I'm writing about a pretty under-studied text, but I can't shake the feeling that there's a distinct lack of rigor here....
Friday, July 25, 2008
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:
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!
(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:
- a cover letter
- a proposal/prospectus
- a table of contents
- a CV
- a sample chapter or two.
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!
Monday, July 21, 2008
Making weak verbs strong again
I really want to conjugate "revise" as "revise/revose/revisen."
Does anyone else have this impulse, about this or other verbs? I know that there are a bunch more that I get in my head, but I can't think of them right now.
Does anyone else have this impulse, about this or other verbs? I know that there are a bunch more that I get in my head, but I can't think of them right now.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The Last Person in America
I got my economic stimulus check yesterday. The teller at the bank looked mildly surprised when I deposited it this morning.
That's what I get for having the last two digits of my SSN in the upper 90s. And for actually paying taxes this year instead of having a refund directly deposited.
Today I'm working--yes, actually working!--on the new article I've been meaning to get to all summer. Perhaps I'll even have a word count on that meter on the right by the end of the day (although word-counting is complicated by the fact that my writing process is basically to produce an outline, and then add increasing layers of detail to the outline, until I'm actually writing whole paragraphs into it. As the Laziest Scholar, I need to trick myself into producing words). But I'll get to my post about what I put into my book proposal soon--it shan't be particularly exciting, but given that I would have benefited from a few guidelines when I was first drafting the thing, perhaps it will be of some service.
That's what I get for having the last two digits of my SSN in the upper 90s. And for actually paying taxes this year instead of having a refund directly deposited.
Today I'm working--yes, actually working!--on the new article I've been meaning to get to all summer. Perhaps I'll even have a word count on that meter on the right by the end of the day (although word-counting is complicated by the fact that my writing process is basically to produce an outline, and then add increasing layers of detail to the outline, until I'm actually writing whole paragraphs into it. As the Laziest Scholar, I need to trick myself into producing words). But I'll get to my post about what I put into my book proposal soon--it shan't be particularly exciting, but given that I would have benefited from a few guidelines when I was first drafting the thing, perhaps it will be of some service.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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!
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Was it the new improved word count?
Received another expression of interest today: Press 2 wants to see the manuscript, as well. This came mere hours after I contacted Press 1 to let them know that I would happily send them the whole thing by the end of the week. Fortunately, I don't think that Press 2 is substantially better than Press 1 (I have no idea how to rank these things, but in my mind they're roughly equivalent--I would guess that my work was more suited to 1 than 2, but I could definitely be wrong. Press 2 seems slightly better to me only because it's from a U that's near where I grew up, so the name of the school is more emblazoned on my mind than is 1's; however, Press 1 sounds less "niche" than 2, but that might only be to my highly subjective ears. I will now quit all speculation in this vein).
So I guess that I need to tell 2 that the MS is out elsewhere, but I'd be happy to send it to them in a couple of months? Unless, of course, 1 decides within the week that my writing sucks and they hate me, in which case I'll be embarrassed.
Wow! I haven't felt this popular since that week when I was sixteen when four different boys gave me their phone numbers.
I went out with one of them for like three weeks, and that was the end of my brush with adolescent popularity.
Sigh.
I had pink hair back then, you know.
But to resume: I do feel, at least, confident now that Press 1 isn't just joking around. And at the very least this means that my proposal is actually in pretty good shape! I guess that full YEAR of working on it is paying off!
I hope, though, that it wasn't gauche of me to send out multiple proposals at once. I'm under the impression that that's totally legit, and that it's just the MS that needs to be monogamous. Here's the mnemonic, coined by me: Promiscuous Proposals /Monogamous Manuscripts. Remember it.
So I guess that I need to tell 2 that the MS is out elsewhere, but I'd be happy to send it to them in a couple of months? Unless, of course, 1 decides within the week that my writing sucks and they hate me, in which case I'll be embarrassed.
Wow! I haven't felt this popular since that week when I was sixteen when four different boys gave me their phone numbers.
I went out with one of them for like three weeks, and that was the end of my brush with adolescent popularity.
Sigh.
I had pink hair back then, you know.
But to resume: I do feel, at least, confident now that Press 1 isn't just joking around. And at the very least this means that my proposal is actually in pretty good shape! I guess that full YEAR of working on it is paying off!
I hope, though, that it wasn't gauche of me to send out multiple proposals at once. I'm under the impression that that's totally legit, and that it's just the MS that needs to be monogamous. Here's the mnemonic, coined by me: Promiscuous Proposals /Monogamous Manuscripts. Remember it.
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