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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/em>, made a beta appointment for “Household Lights,” wrangled with Microsoft Word in a preliminary attempt to make the manuscript of Ryswyck<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trying to compose an author bio made me recall the line in Murder Must Advertise<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n