The editing session for Sand In My Bra & Other Misadventures was fairly productive even if we didn’t get as far as we’d hoped. A couple of things…
1) We’ve got 36 stories and I’d say they’re 96% nailed down. Only 6 of those are from books. This is great because I thought originally we were shooting for a book with only 25 stories. We might end up cutting one or two, but I’m liking the variety and the book is still right around 200 pages not including front and backmatter.
2) We’re having fillers. Or epilogues as we used to call them. These are the anecdotes at the end of the main stories. They’re longer than a sidebar which are the boxed quotes or anecdotes within the story. But back to the fillers. I’m happy to have a few of those in the book because there were lots of submissions that had funny parts to them, but the story as a whole just wasn’t going to work. Whether the rest was poorly written, didn’t fit our mix, or just wasn’t funny enough — now we get to include more contributors AND funny bits of travel.
I still have to find a bunch of sidebars and write more teasers. Not to mention starting on the PR, writing the acknowledgements, coming up with my photo montage, and more. But yes, we are getting closer. Did you know it took so long to make a book? It releases in April 2003.