I've spent most of the past ten months researching my new book and now, finally finally finally, I've started writing it. Well, okay, I've started writing the first chapter.

I've plunged into what I call my Quiet Zone. Or maybe I should call it my Shutting Out the World Zone.

I'm concentrating my mental energy on this book. Shaping the narrative. Working and re-working the prose. And, most important and most difficult, trying to figure out what the research adds up to. What do all those facts MEAN? What's the connection between this fact, that idea, and this event?

I know it will all come together; it always does. But only if I shut out the rest of the world.

So if there aren't many or any new blog entries, that's why: Book in process. Writer at work.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other day, I received a copy of the dust jacket for the beer book. It’s gorgeous! Engaging design; rich, lively colors -- far more exciting than what shows up onscreen at my websites. (Only downside is my photo: I look like I just won the Messiest Hair in the Universe award.)

But even as I admired the jacket and the talent that created it, I experienced what has become common in my life as a writer: That sense of distance and disconnect that comes with each new book. That jacket -- the physical object -- has nothing to do with my creation. Just as the book itself, when it finally arrives, will feel to me like someone I once knew, long, long ago but who I now barely remember.

What I remember about my books is this:

Hours and hours and hours spent sitting at a microfilm reader, or going through decades worth of indexes. Leafing through journals and old magazines. Days spent at archives and libraries, days filled, more often than not with frustration and panic. Plastic filing cubes stuffed with photocopies of documents.

Staring for still more hours and then days stretching into years at a computer monitor. Grabbing pages of text from my printer, filling them with penciled corrections and edits, desciphering those scribbles and arrows and circles as I type the changes into the computer.

That’s how my mind’s eye remembers my book.

Those other pages? The ones printed with a fine font and adorned with a page number, the book’s title across the top of every other page in yet another lovely font, all bound in a tidy package between two hard covers and decorated yet again with that eye-popping dust jacket?

That’s someone else’s work. Nothing to do with me. Lovely to look at; delightful to hold -- but, well, not something I would identify as mine in the Lost and Found.

And so it goes with my books: they leave my hands in one form, then reappear in another. Sure, I remember those thousands of hours spent creating the manuscript. But this finished product, the one I sometimes spot in a bookstore, is a stranger to me. A companion of days long past now vanished from my life and living its own.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s natural, I suppose, for people intimately involved with something to forget that the rest of the world is not as obsessed or knowledgeable as they are.

We’ve all experienced it: we ask some computer geek to show us how to do something. The geek executes 15 keystrokes in 2.5 seconds and says “There! See how easy that was.”

And of course, we’re still clueless because we have no idea what just transpired. And then the geek gets annoyed because we’re not catching on!

People in the publishing industry are like that: We’re an insular community with our own jargon and own ways of doing things. Anything we do and say looms large in our lives and minds and we assume that the rest of the world is as knowledgeable and obsessed as we are.

The truth is that the rest of the world doesn’t give a rat’s ass! They don’t understand how our particular “system” works, and we shouldn't assume that they do.

The other day I experienced a humbling reminder of those facts.

A woman I met recently wanted to read my first two books. So she went to the local public library and didn’t find either book there (one is a scholarly book unsuited for a public library and the other is a book about Florida and why would a library in the middle of Iowa have a book about Florida?)

So she emailed me and asked me if I had any copies she could borrow to read.

Now if I were a better self-promoter, I would have explained to her that, hey, do ya think I'm doin’ this for free? No! Go BUY the damn books.

But I’m a softie and a lousy self-promoter. So I rifled through my shelves and found a copy of the plumbing book to loan her and then I gave her a copy of the Key West book to keep (because I have about twenty copies of the paperback on hand).

She's a truly lovely person person and I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that I only earn money from writing when people BUY my books.

The encounter was a good reminder that the average person has no idea how publishing and writing work. And why should they? It’s not their business to know!

Yeah, it’s frustrating when people ask me to loan them copies of my books.

Yeah, it's frustrating when I have a new book come out and people ask me for free copies. They don’t realize that I only get a handful of free copies and that I must give those to give to people who assisted the venture in some way. (For example, I get twenty free copies of the beer book. But my list of people who contributed in some way contains 45 names! So I'll have to buy 25 extra copies just to give to them.)

Or people say to me, “Gee, are you ever going to finish that book? What’s taking you so long?” Or, “How hard can it be to write a book about beer? Just find some facts and write them down!”

They don’t understand (and again, why should they?), that researching the history of beer or Key West or whatever takes years. That once I finish the research, then I start an even more challenging (and time-consuming) project: taking hundreds of thousands of “facts” and weaving them into an interesting story.

I’m not complaining. I do what I do because I love to research and I love to write.

Nor am I being critical of the public at large. Most people aren't writers. There’s no REASON why they should understand how the system works.

I do wonder, however, if writers have themselves to blame.

Certainly I blame myself. Here I had a chance to educate someone, who might in turn educate others, and I blew it.

Writers could -- and SHOULD -- do a better job of explaining themselves to the rest of the world. Of making it clear to “outsiders” that we don’t work for free. That we only earn money when people buy the results of our labor.

(That, by the way, is why I’m such a fanatic about “stealing” music. I won’t download music for free, nor will I accept CDs of music copied from a disk owned by someone else. Musicians work hard for their money. When we steal their music, we’re stealing their income.)

So what’s the point? Well, there’s not one. Except that I hope that the next time someone asks to borrow one of my books, I’ll stiffen my spine, summon my courage, and explain how the “system” works.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 05:27 PM | Permalink

Anyone remember that song?

Yesterday I finally finished proofreading the manuscript. That means I finished reading aloud 412 pages of text -- backward.

My voice is shot and my brain is gone.

Proofreading provokes a particularly intense form of existential angst (hmmm....is that redundant??):

Sitting there slogging my way from one page to the next, listening to my droning, increasingly raspy voice; becoming alarmed and unnerved by the number of typos; wondering how many of the bastards I'm MISSING as I read .....

..... I wondered: Why the HELL am I doing this? I just spent five years of my life on this book. No one will care. No one reads anymore. People who do read don't want to plunk down actual cash for books (remember: writers earn zero dollars from borrowed and used books).

Down into the slough of despair I slid.

Yes, let's hear it for proofreading. Every writer's favorite activity! No wonder so many books are full of typos, misspelled words, dropped lines, and innaccuracies. Who in his or her right mind would knowingly subject him/herself to such torture??

Oh. Right. Because there's almost nothing as satisfying as writing a book; as exhilerating as creating something from nothing.

So I guess proofreading is the writer's equivalent of labor pains: women give suffer fifty kinds of torture giving birth, and then that sweet little face blows the memory of that pain right out of their minds.

Yes, you guessed it: I'm chomping at the bit to start a new project so that, three or four years hence, I can sit at my kitchen table again for seven straight days reading several hundred pages of text aloud backward. Chomping at the bit to fall in love with writing all over again.

What kind of FOOOLLLLL am I? Who [always falls] in love?

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The process of pushing the beer book through production continues.

Right now I'm wading through my least favorite part of the whole project: proofreading. That means I'm reading the ENTIRE, I repeat ENTIRE, manuscript aloud -- backward. It's the only way to catch typos, words that shouldn't be there, use of the same word twice in the same sentence....

It's also boring beyond belief. I'd rather do just about anything but.

It's also one of the most important and necessary tasks of making a book. 'Cause there ain't nuthin' more annoying than reading a book full of misspellings........ So that's how I'm spending the next few days.

This blog entry is a prime example of why I rather resent blogs ever having been invented. Once you have the word "BLOG" on your website, well, you're more or less obliged to post SOMETHING in said blog.

But what if the blogger doesn't have much to say? Well, heh heh, we all know the answer to that question, don't we??: blogs overflowing with the exquisitely boring minutiae of someone's life.

Kind of like this blog entry...........

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 03:06 PM | Permalink