April 27th, 2008
Jen at Yet Another Weight Watchers Blog wrote an in-depth review of the book which she called, “Honest, gutsy, but playful.” Jen has a unique perspective because she not only read the blog and the book, but we met at the 2007 BlogHer conference. As she put it, “It’s interesting that you get a different perspective of the same person from a blog, a book, and in person.”
I also wanted to thank the anonymous Canadian who sent me a scan of The Globe and Mail article I was featured in. He or she didn’t include their name in the mailing, but I appreciate it. Thanks!
April 25th, 2008
I apologize to my lovely Louisville readers, but I’ve had to cancel my event there on May 10th due to a scheduling conflict. Hopefully I’ll be able to schedule something there later. If I do, I’ll post it on my events page. I grew up in Louisville and have a lot of friends there, so I’d love to do an event in town. You can still catch me at the Bluegrass Festival of Books in Lexington, KY on May 17th.
Morgan over at Morgan Gets Thin posted a review of my book. Morgan has read the entire PastaQueen.com blog archive and the book, so I was happy to hear she didn’t think the book was a cut and paste job. I did spend nine months writing the thing, and several more in the editing phase, which would be an awful long time to be hitting Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V over and over again. My keyboard would have up and died.
Also, big thanks to everyone who has been writing in to say they’ve gotten a copy of the book. I really appreciate that you not only bought a copy, but that you’ve taken the time to let my know how much you’ve enjoyed it. Blog readers are the best readers in the world!
April 19th, 2008
A couple weeks ago a reader of PastaQueen.com told me she’d seen my photo on the cover of the health section of The Eagle-Tribune, the paper for North Andover, Massachusetts. Correction, the Pulitzer Prize winning paper of North Anodover, Massachusetts, as is stated in their masthead – right next to my photo.
Holy crap! As if that weren’t shocking enough, I flipped to page 13 as the masthead instructed me and saw this:
Holy truckload of crap! I’m not just on the cover of the health section, I am the health section. It took three swipes of my flatbed scanner to scan this whole image. I’m glad I don’t live in North Andover or else I’d have been embarrassed to leave the house. It’s funny, because I was interviewed for the article, but nothing I said was used. One sentence from my book was included as a quote and my book was included in a list of weight-loss memoirs and that was it. Yet they used my picture. Why? Because that photo of me standing in my fat pants is awesome. I also sent them a very hi-res image, 2912×4368 pixels and 3.4mb, so they were actually able to print it at a large size without quality degradation. Let this be a lesson to upcoming authors: pay the money and get a good studio shot of yourself. I’ve gotten a lot of attention for my book simply because that photo is very striking. It was worth every penny. Thanks again to Stephen Hobley for taking the money shot!
Thanks to Wendy for sending me the paper. You rock!
April 18th, 2008
Read the other parts of this series:
A book is not a blog
I had lots of experience writing a blog, but I had never written a book. I’d read lots of books, but mostly for pleasure or to earn 3 credit hours. I’d never taken a hard look at how a book is constructed, just like I’ve never looked too hard under the hood of my car. I just enjoy the ride. As I started writing my own memoir, I realized I didn’t know all the details of how to assemble it even though I had an outline. It was like knowing that spark plugs ignite fuel that explodes to turn pistons to make my car run, but having no idea how to actually build an engine. Did I need to include dialogue? If I did, I would literally be putting words in people’s mouths. That made me a little uncomfortable. Should I tell lots of stories or was it okay to write essays reflecting on certain issues? Should I only include stuff relating to weight-loss or would people want to know more about my personal life? Had I even read a memoir before?
Thankfully, I had read some memoirs and I read three more in January that had nothing to do with weight loss to see how other people did it. I banned myself from reading any weight-loss books until my books was done so I didn’t unintentionally imitate anyone else. This helped a little, but the best way to learn something is by doing it. As I wrote I figured out what was working and what wasn’t.
Tone: Blogging is a conversation. A book is a soliloquy.
When I write blog entries, I can directly address my audience, ask them questions, and carry on like I am chatting to a friend. I’m like a newscaster speaking directly to the camera. Writing a book is like performing a soliloquy or acting in a television show. I know people are out there watching, but I’m not necessarily going to speak directly to them. If I ask them what Pilates DVDs they like, I’m not going to get an answer unless they mail me after the book is published months later. My personality and sense of humor come through in both the book and the blog, but the tone of each is slightly different because of the medium I’m using.
Pacing
My blog entries are short. If a post is over two pages long in Word, I worry that people will become bored and won’t read the whole thing. People tend to sneak blogs at work or skim several blogs at once. They’re usually not sitting down in front of their computers to read a long essay. The advantage to writing short pieces is that they only have to make sense within themselves.
A book is obviously much longer than a blog post. While this allowed me to go into much farther detail than I do in a blog entry, I had to keep in mind that each chapter was part of a much bigger work. If you watch a movie that has one action sequence right after the next without any downtime, it becomes exhausting. As I was writing, I didn’t want to drag down the pace of the book by including too much introspection all at once without splitting it up with some action. I didn’t want to get too serious for too long without including some humor. I didn’t want to talk for so long about one aspect of my life that the momentum of the whole story slowed down. I wanted each chapter to be interesting in itself, but I also needed to keep things moving forward while injecting variety to keep readers interested.
This was really fucking hard.
It also meant I had to reread what I’d written constantly. When I work on images in PhotoShop, I have to zoom in to closely manipulate the pixels of an image. Then I have to zoom out again to see how this makes the picture look at actual size. As I was writing the book, I would sometimes spend an hour picking apart and rewriting a paragraph. Then I’d have to go back and read the chapter or even the entire book as a whole to see how it looked put together. If I discovered something wasn’t working, I couldn’t just rip it out to make it work, just like I can’t erase a spot of an image that doesn’t look right without leaving a gaping hole. I constantly had to massage the text around any changes to make it work in the book as a whole. Most of this work is stuff the reader will never know about or see. It’s hard to make writing look natural and fluid. In a book, any change I made set off a reaction that affected everything else, like a domino chain. If you do that in a blog entry, you knock over 1 or 2 dominoes. When you do it in a book, you knock over dozens of them.
Duplication
Have you ever had someone tell you the same story twice? It’s because they’ve told it so many times they can’t remember who they’ve told it to. The same thing happened to me with the book. As I worked on it over the course of 9 months, I forget if I’d written about certain things yet. Sometimes I knew I’d written about a topic on the blog, but I wasn’t sure if I’d put it in the book. Other times I knew I’d made a specific note to write about something and I’d thought out the phrasing in my head as I was driving to work, but I wasn’t sure if I’d actually typed it in my document yet. As I was writing, I was rereading my book constantly, so even if I did read something that I thought I might have written about in another chapter, I wasn’t sure which chapter it was and there was no easy way to check my suspicions without reading the whole thing again. This is one of the reasons it’s good to have an editor or to show the manuscript to a friend. They caught things on their first read-through that I had become blind to.
It was also strange keeping a blog at the same time I was writing the book. Occasionally I would write a blog entry and think, “Hey, this should go in the book!” This presented a conundrum because I didn’t want my book to just be a rehash of my blog. But if every blog entry I wrote went into the book, I’d have nothing to blog about. Ultimately, I tried to include only the most necessary and entertaining blog entries in the book.
Cutting the chaff
After I finished a draft, I started going through all the notes I’d scribbled in notebooks or typed into my wiki trying to include things I’d left out. Some parts of the book provided easy openings for me to add a sentence in here and there. Other times, I could not find an opening. Ultimately, I had to accept that I was not going to be able to cram every cute story or deep thought I had about weight loss into the book. I could only include the best stories, the most necessary ideas, and I had to cut anything that did not move the book along. All the rest of that stuff? Well, that’s what the blog is for. It’s like the deleted scenes on a DVD.
This was hard, because I had to let go of stories or ideas that I liked which just didn’t fit into the narrative. A creative writing teacher of mine once said, “To be a writer, you have to be able to kill your children.” Just call me Medea.
Technical details
I ran into a lot of boring yet maddening technical problems while writing the book. For instance, I wanted to mention a woman who worked down the hall from me who gave me a compliment. The book takes place in the past tense, so I used the phrase, “The woman who worked down the hall from me.” When I reread that, it sounded like she no longer worked down the hall from me because I was using the past tense. If she still worked there, like she did, shouldn’t I use the present tense? Except, no, that would be weird to suddenly jump to the present tense when the rest of the book is in the past tense.
Here’s another problem. If you are writing about yourself in the past, but your past self is speculating about an event that will take place in her future, but is still in the past in relation to the reader, what tense do you use? What tense do you use, hot shot?! Questions like these drove me a little crazy. I was glad I’d decided to write the whole thing in the first person past tense and didn’t try to get tricky by using something unusual like second person omniscient from a dog’s perspective.
Most of my blog entries take place in the present or the near past, so I don’t usually run into these issues.
The importance of accuracy or why I included footnotes
The final major difference between my blog and my book is that my book includes footnotes. Yes, I wrote a memoir with footnotes. It’s weird, I know. I always try to be accurate on my blog, but since it is like a conversation and I don’t pretend to be a journalist, I don’t cite all my sources. I’ll link to an article if its convenient, but that’s about it. Similarly, if I were at the water cooler at work (although my work doesn’t actually have a water cooler) chatting to someone, I might say, “I heard that yo-yo dieting might have a bad rap.” I don’t say, “According to Karen Collins’ article in a July 8, 2007 on MSNBC.com, yo-yo dieting might have a bad rap.” If I started talking like that I’d have to check what they were putting in that water cooler. I mention a couple scientific studies in my book, so it occurred to me that people might actually want to know what study I was talking about. Since a book is more permanent than a blog, I decided I needed to back up the statements I made about health, fitness, and weight loss. Thus, I sat in front of the computer for several evenings compiling references to scholarly works.
Essentially, I get to be lazier as a blogger than I did as a book writer.
Continued in Blog to Book – Part 6: Revising and editing
Summary
- Writing a book made me take a closer look at how books are constructed
- My blog is like a conversation, whereas my book was like a soliloquy
- A book required attention to pacing that my blog has never required
- I sometimes couldn’t remember if I’d already written about material in my book, my blog, in both, or just in my head
- I had to cut things out of the book for the betterment of the work as a whole. These “deleted scenes” are the types of things I can cover in my blog.
- Book writing required more attention to detail, such as punctuation and backing up the accuracy of material
April 17th, 2008
I was interviewed for an article about how blogs help you achieve goals called Blogging to a Better You by Wency Leung for The Globe and Mail, which is the national newspaper for Canada. My book isn’t specifically mentioned, but this is another great article that takes a unique spin on the weight-loss topic, and also covers blogs from people overcoming debt and alcoholism. Blogs are great tools for achieving goals because of the accountability and support they provide.
And, woah, they put my progress photos on the cover of the Lifestyle section!
A man from the newspaper called me yesterday to confirm they could use them. Charmed by his cute Canadian accent, I agreed. And there they are. Still very weird to see. I never knew my photography was going to start appearing in international papers.
April 10th, 2008
My publisher e-mailed me yesterday to tell me the books had arrived at their offices. I should be getting my shipment sometime in the next week or two. The books exist! My thoughts are tangible and have solid form! Now I keep checking the front door of my apartment right as I pull into the parking lot after work, looking for the box. It’ll still be several weeks before they’re in stores, but soon people, soon…
I sent early galley copies to some randomly selected blog readers. JEMi at inMyHeels.com got one and has written a nice review. Thanks, JEMi!
“I didn’t want to put it down, laughed a good lot of the way, and felt inspired by [it] til the very end. It’s the true story of a fat girl gone thin.” Read the full review here.
April 8th, 2008
Today one of my co-workers told me he saw the article about me in the local paper’s weekly features magazine, indy.com. To which I replied, ‘”What article?” I knew they were going to do a review, but damn, that was fast. Indianapolis Star reporter Jenny Elig says my book is “super-engaging.” Read a scan of the article here.
Cressida at the web site fanpop says my book’s “a quick, absorbing read.” You can read all of the reviews so far on my reviews page.
I can also tell the publicity machine has started to kick into gear. My publisher sent me a box of postcards this week, which I can hand out to promote the book or to enter a lot of sweepstakes. (I think they’d prefer the former.)
This evening, I returned home to see a flattened cardboard box at my front door.
My first thought was that someone had opened up my nice present from the mail man and left the packaging to taunt me. When I took a closer look, I saw that the package was still sealed and that this was inside.
They bubble-wrapped my ass! I now have two signs to display at my book release party, book signings, or to just hang over my desk at work. That’s one way to redecorate.
April 5th, 2008
Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir has been named a Book Sense Notable Book for May 2008. Book Sense is a nationwide network of 1,200+ independent bookstores and is part of the American Booksellers Association. This recognition means a lot to me because all their notable titles come from nominations by independent booksellers. That means there is a bookseller at an independent shop somewhere in this country who liked my book enough to go to the trouble of nominating it. Thank you! I truly appreciate it.
I’ve also gotten several comments on my other blog, PastaQueen.com, from readers who have been surprised to open their newspapers and see my face smiling back at them. My image is haunting lifestyle sections across America! The AP article that mentions my book has been picked up by various papers across the country, and some of them have chosen to run the picture of me standing in one leg of my fat pants. It’s bizarre to think that my image has run through printing presses everywhere from San Diego, California to Lawrence, Massachusetts. The real thanks goes to Stephen Hobley, the photographer who took the fantastic photo, and to Lane Bryant for making pants that big in the first place.
