It snowed again this past week and honestly, I’m over it. Though I did make use of my fresh stock of Eagle Brand for snow ice cream, because if there’s enough snow, why wouldn’t you?
It’s been a week for project management, both at work and on the book production front. I have commissioned a design for the cover art for Ryswyck, made a beta appointment for “Household Lights,” wrangled with Microsoft Word in a preliminary attempt to make the manuscript of Ryswyck POD-compliant, put off with a shudder the attempt to make it e-book compliant, composed the front matter for the book, and today, made a stab at the back matter.
Trying to compose an author bio made me recall the line in Murder Must Advertise about how the best marketing copy was always written with the tongue firmly in the cheek, “a genuine conviction of the commodity’s worth producing — for some reason — poverty and flatness of style.” In any event there is simply no use attempting to be really earnest in writing one’s own bio blurb, so I wasn’t.
But even so I’m not sure I won’t scrap it and start over come tomorrow; a flippant joke about that time I stole V.S. Naipaul’s hat is all very well, but do I really want to give a notorious male chauvinist real estate in my bio? Maybe I’ll do the one about deciphering Rebecca West’s handwriting instead.
And despite the fact that I have a vast deal more compassion and self-worth regarding all the follies of my past than I ever did before, it’s a bit deflating to try and describe one’s career in slightly flippant but impressive terms. I could say I’m an ordinary working jane who wrote a book, but that’s not very impressive. And I could mention that I have two degrees in English Literature, but there’s no way to bring that out with the right note of flippancy. Anxiety of authorship, indeed.
Fortunately, at the end of a book that one has presumably just read, one does not need a CV of the author, just a sketch of the person who has just provided them with a (hopefully) meaningful immersive experience.
Anyway, I put the damn thing away and will read it again tomorrow, and the Acknowledgments as well, which I fear are too fucking fulsome, but never mind.
I did, by the way, discover that my original file of Ryswyck, composed in web style with line spaces for paragraph breaks, was almost exactly the same number of pages that the POD manuscript is, formatted in print style and a forgiving Garamond font. Which is to say, it’s about 525 pages. I’d come to fear it would be a massive tome just this side of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, since every time I mention the word count to people who know publishing, I get back a look like I just announced I had a terminal illness. But I don’t, and it’s not, and in fact this is shaping up to be a fabulous product.
I just have to find a way to say that with the tongue firmly in the cheek.