Kickstarter

I haven't written here in a while, and there is a reason for that: Cadence & Slang is almost ready to print. I have spent the past several months keeping my head down and working on it as much as time allows.

The manuscript is entirely finished, but it is not done with being edited, and the illustrations are still forthcoming. Because you're morbidly curious, here is how the book is being written and edited:

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2. I write a chapter.
3. 
   
4. I go through two passes of editing by myself.
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6. My loving grammar nazi girlfriend rips it apart.
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8. I send it to some really smart friends. They rip it apart, and send back feedback.
9. 
   
10. I type the feedback up and make sure everything looks consistent and nice.
11. 
    
12. One more edit pass on my part.
13. 
    

As publishing goes, this is pretty unorthodox. My colleagues' edits basically function as suggestions. As it's gone so far, I incorporate about 80% of my edits unchanged, tweak another 15%, and discard the last 5%. Ultimately this process eliminates the chance of fighting with people that may not have the same ideas as I do for how the book will turn out, and it brings more of the "self-" to "self-publishing." Hopefully it won't turn out like crap, because then everybody wins.

So here's where we are: five of the seven chapters are up to #5. The other two are up to #3, but they are the shortest chapters, and they'll likely hit #5 by this Friday. I'm going to work on #6 all this week; I'm spending the next nine days working exclusively on the book. I hope to send it off to the printer by Labor Day, but that may slip by a couple of weeks. All of this means we're still on track to have it finished and ready by the end of 2010.

The idea of saying "it'll be out in three months" rather than "it'll be out at the end of 2010" is freaking me out a little, and the idea of saying "I'm almost done with Cadence & Slang" is freaking me out a lot. I've worked on this, exclusively and nonstop, for almost two years, and I have no idea what I'll be doing afterward. (Well, other than celebrating.) There's a certain imminence to it that I don't quite know how to reconcile with the fact that I still have to work on it. I'm pretty sure the finished product is going to be ridiculously cathartic.

Once it's out, I want to have a release party for Cadence & Slang somewhere in Chicago, which means you should keep the entire months of November and December open until further notice. Thanks.

Finally, some random administrivia:

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• I'm going to be in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend. I hear there are, like, five or six tech companies there, so maybe a backer lives in the area. Maybe. Want to meet up? Let me know.
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• I'm going to be in DC on October 07 and 08. You can meet me anywhere you'd like, as long as it's Churchkey.
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• If you're interested in starting a Kickstarter project yourself, or if you're curious about how the process went for another self-publisher, fellow Kickstarterer Craig Mod has written a pretty fantastic post about the process. Makes for nice bedtime reading.
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