Writing a Book

I wrote about 22 book pages in just the last week! Hooray!

Writing the profiles is a pretty intense process – I am literally steeped in someone else’s world for a few days, which I have to admit is kinda cool. I start off by reading through the interview transcript with a highlighter, and then I mentally marinate everything overnight. My goal is to wake up with a catchy opening line in my head, and once I write it down, it’s like being shot out of a cannon and the rest of the piece comes together quickly. Part of me feels like a documentary producer – I get to sift through each interview and use my judgement to cut…

Category: Writing a Book

By the time I sink my teeth into whatever Chef Kreuther is making for dinner at The Modern tonight, we will have interviewed seven more people since my last post. (In the spirit of full disclosure, one interview was with two people at once, and another was actually a follow-up with someone we had spoken to a few weeks before. But still.) A lot of asking and a lot of listening to some pretty amazing stuff. I realized during one interview that the guy we were talking to was the third “third brother” we had interviewed – meaning he had two older brothers, as had two previous guys we interviewed. We know we have at least one more…

Category: Writing a Book

I would say that I wrote my ass off last week, but alas, I look behind myself and see that my fat tuchus is still part of my being. So let’s just say that I managed to buckle down and write profiles from our first three interviews. I’m pretty pleased with the way they turned out, and it was awesome to have had the third interview transcribed. Made things exponentially easier.

This week is a little slower – I’m awaiting the transcript from another fantastic interview we conducted over the weekend, so I don’t have much writing to work on at the moment. We were supposed to do another interview this morning, but the person has been battling bronchitis, so…

Category: Writing a Book

Last week I had the privilege of speaking to 100 eighth-graders about the process of writing a book. They had great questions about vetting quotes and sources, working with an editor, tackling revisions – and the most well-timed question: “What do you do when you’re stuck?” Last week, I myself was helplessly stuck…not about what to write, but rather where to write. Very affected by my environs (okay, let’s call it what it is: high maintenance), I found myself moving all over the house with my laptop trying to locate comfortable space that would inspire me over the next few months. The cavernous third-floor space (the so-called Imaginarium) had been ideal for brainstorming, but with three tiny, high dormer…

Category: Writing a Book

Hooray! At long last, I started writing.

Ironically, the part I wrote is the part I usually skip as a reader: the preface. (“Who cares what the author has to say, just get me into the action!” BAD reader!) And in the process, I learned the difference between a preface, a prologue and a foreword. A prologue is a part of the story that occurred before the real start of the story, often a flashback. A foreword is typically written by someone else, usually someone famous or recognizable, to lend credibility to the book. And a preface, which is what I wrote, is written directly to the reader to talk about the origin or scope or purpose of the book….

Category: Writing a Book

I swear I’m going to start writing this week. Seriously. I singlehandedly paved that infamous, fabled road to hell last week but one thing or another sidetracked me, the most fun of which was unintentionally playing hooky for literally an entire morning at Starbucks with Miss Jennifer while the Big Bad Wolf continually texted me to come home and hit the keyboard. But she and I honestly solved all the world’s problems over coffee, so I consider that to be time exceedingly well spent.

For the balance of the week, I transcribed our first two interviews. You truly have no idea just how ridonculously fabulous life can be until you’ve transcribed two hour-long interviews. We used that amazing recording pen…

Category: Writing a Book

Tip o’the cap to my vigilant friends who humorously chided me this week when they found me doing anything unrelated to the book project…thank you for helping me keep my nose to the grindstone!

We were recently asked by one of the boy’s teachers to sit on a panel of parent authors who will discuss the process of writing, and I’ve been staying conscious of our process so I can provide useful info to these middle schoolers later this month. What struck me this past week was the importance of being aware of everything that you experience as you develop and write, and thinking about seemingly unrelated information in relation to the topic you’re writing about. It won’t always take…

Category: Writing a Book

The ink isn’t even dry yet, but after negotiating a couple of details over the holidays we signed the contract this afternoon and it’s on its way back to the publisher at this hour. Now I officially have no business meeting for coffee and gossip or trolling for red-soled shoes or playing PathWords on Facebook. It’s like we’ve just been given a big honkin’ chunk of clay and we have four months to create the next Venus de Milo. Holy shit!

We spent some time over the break developing interview questions, and plunged in yesterday setting up our first few interview meetings and we even did our first very rough – almost “practice” – interview last night over the phone….

Category: Writing a Book

Well, you’ve been through the process of building a house with us…you share in our triumphant and disastrous culinary adventures…so we thought you might want to join us on our exciting journey to publication. Because I probably won't be blogging regularly about other stuff, I'll keep you in the loop through these blog posts which will be titled, "AN OPEN BOOK."

Buckle up: the story begins with a brief trip in the way-back machine.

A million years ago—ok, maybe more like 11 or 12 years ago—I suggested to Dave that he write a personal finance book based on the interesting stories of many of his clients. Now if you know Dave, you know that (ahem) he has never been—nor will he…

Category: Writing a Book