Mike and I drove down to LA this weekend to go to the Fabulous Fiber Fest and admire my shawl (which won the Founder’s Award, as you may recall). It was fun–I took a class on boucle and other novelty yarns, and then spent some time walking around the festival with Mike. With my prize I bought two packets of brightly-colored yarn snippets for my AIDS Ride costumes next year, a Bosworth spindle for spinning sock yarns, and 7 ounces of 150’s merino (ultrafine merino) roving. I almost bought a table loom, but Mike helped rescue me from it. I also fell in love with the Baby Wolf loom sitting out at Custom Handweavers, but, not wanting to spend $1800 on a new toy that would only distract me from writing, I skipped it.
I’m pretty satisfied with my purchases. Costuming is of course de rigeur for the AIDS Ride (and I have gotten some very good ideas for costuming next year–the quilting section was most inspirational), and I’ve wanted a spindle for spinning sock yarns for some time. I don’t think it’ll be that distracting from writing, as it’s nothing new and exciting–it’s good, solid, plain-jane materials that I can work with when I’m feeling burned-out from writing.
I have also read through most of How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen. It’s intimidating. This is not about “how to write your book”, this is about how to write a business proposition to the editor of your book. It’s brilliant (I think) but also the kind of book to send me into complete despair over my lack of credentials, cover quotes from famous people, and other stuff the book suggests you include. It also means I have to do substantially more research, and what I call left-brain writing (as opposed to right-brain writing, which is the bulk of writing my book)–this is a business proposition, not a creative piece. I’m starting to wonder if I’m ever going to get this done.
On the other hand, plenty of people have published before, and I have the feeling that this particular book is on how to write the perfect book proposal–one that will really wow editors. So I’ll do my best to follow it, but if I don’t have every piece (e.g. fourteen years of expertise in the AIDS Ride, rave reviews for published portions, etc.) I won’t worry too much. I’ll talk to my writing coach about it, too.
It is clear to me, though, that writing a proposal will be substantially more work than I expected it to be.
Oh well.
