Posts Tagged ‘APW Book’

Feb 2011

Dear Team Practical,

So, last month I told you that I’d quit my job to go fulltime on writing APW. Well. There was this one other small thing that I failed to clue you in on: I sold a book.

More specifically, I sold the APW book and it will be published by Da Capo Press, and imprint of Perseus Books in December 2011. (It’s actually due to the publisher on June 1st. JUNE FIRST!! Which is soon. Soon!) Now that the contracts are signed, and to the publisher, and and and (publishing is a slow industry), I’m finally FINALLY able to tell you all about it. Eeep! So let me back up, and walk you through all this.

The Book

First, what is the book, exactly, you ask? Well, when I started looking into writing a book two years ago, I was really convinced that the book that I wanted to write had already been written. I mean, it was such an obvious, sensible book, that it had to have been written, right? Well. After lots of digging around on bookstore shelves (which involved some horror, puzzled looks, and lots of hilarious laughter), I realized it really didn’t exist. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are a handfull of really good wedding books out there, but not this book.

I wanted to write a wedding planning handbook for normal people. A book for those of us that don’t have six figures to throw at our wedding and you know, have jobs, and don’t have infinite time for crafting. And I didn’t want to write a ‘budget wedding’ book, because it makes me irate to think that those of us who have worked hard for our budget (or whose parents have worked hard for our budget) are condescended to by being told that our wedding is a ‘budget wedding.’ I didn’t want to write a memoir, I wanted to write the no-nonsense, dead useful, wedding planning guide that I couldn’t find.

So the book, working title, A Practical Wedding: Graceful Wedding Planning That Won’t End in the Poorhouse or the Madhouse, is a how-to book, that walks you through planning a wedding in a super sane way. Like, for example, when you tell your parents that you’re not getting married in a Catholic church because you and your partner have talked it through and don’t believe in God, expect to cry a little, but know this is normal and good setting of boundaries. And, here are all the ways you can get an beautiful wedding dress for under, um, a grand. And here are ways to build a day-of wedding planning spreadsheet, so you know your wedding is organized and you can relax. And NO, of course you don’t have to feel guilty about not having X, Y, and Z nonsense because none of this was traditional in the first place. In fact, lets talk about what is really traditional…

Plus, there will be lots of quotes from wedding graduates, of course, so expect me to get in touch with you guys on that.

The bottom line is that blogs are good for lots of things. They are good for inspiration, they are good for community, they are a good real-time way to recommend businesses that are helpful. But they are terrible for actually helping you plan in a step-by-step way, because that’s not the way they are structured. Plus, you can’t hand a blog to your mom to calm her down when she’s freaking out about “what the books say”, and you can’t give a blog to your girlfriend when she gets engaged.

I started APW because I was planning a wedding, and I’d worked as a non-profit event planner, so I knew how to tackle an enormous event, plan the sh*t out of it, and get it to come out well on a ridiculously tiny budget. The book is my way to pass on a lot of those event planning skills to you, plus all the information I’ve learned writing APW for three years, boiled down in a way that makes sense, and you can reference easily when you need it.

Oh, AND I’M GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR. So. Let’s talk about THAT.

How It Happened

{Valentine’s Day Weekend last year: Proposal writing begins}

I decided to tell you about the book on Valentine’s Day (happy Valentine’s Day!) because this is the one year anniversary of when I started, um, lying to you about what was going on. Continue reading Big News: The APW Book!!!

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Life, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts | 290 Comments »

Mar 2011

Working For Yourself: Month Two (Getting Focused)

{Me at work in my office, by Emily Takes Photos}

It seems baffling to me that I’m writing about month number two of working for myself (you can catch up on month one here), because, well, it feels like I’ve been working for myself for six months. Things have been a little intense around here, to say the least. So let’s chat about that.

The Happiness Factor

The New York Times wrote an article recently about who would be statistically the happiest person in America (male, tall, Asian, lived in Hawaii, observant Jew, worked for themselves), and then they went out and found this person. While the tall, Asian, Hawaiian, observant Jew, who was self employed, thought the phone call was a practical joke, he was, in fact, quite happy. While I’ve only got the last two of those things going for me, two months in, I can say without reservation that working for yourself is a boon to happiness, but maybe not for the reasons that you’d think.

{Happiness: A lunch meeting at a Taqueria, by (and with) Emily Takes Photos}

Myth #1: There is a common misperception that working for yourself involves very little actual work, which is flat out not true. I probably work about 50 hours a week these days, which sometimes makes me so exhausted that I look like I’ve been run over by a freight train, and sometimes looks a lot like me having a blast. It all depends, but either way, it is work, and I’m doing a lot of it.

Myth #2: There seems to be a feeling that people who work for themselves are happy because they hit on some lucky fluke, since the only proper jobs are working for other people. This is nonsense too. It takes a borderline-absurd level of believing-in-something-and-acting-to-make-it-true-while-very-few-others-believe-in-it to make working for yourself a reality, which is a nice way of saying, people who work for themselves are not recipients of some lucky fluke from the universe. In fact, they may be some of the most disciplined and willful people around (which is so much nicer than saying that those aiming for self employment are delusional, yes?).

{Happiness: Hanging out on my fire escape at the end of a long work day}

Truth: So why does working for yourself make you happy? Well, years ago, there were some studies (Which I have no links to. Grad students, do you have links?) that said that one of the main lifestyle issues leading to long term health was having control over your life. If you worked long hours, or had less money, you were ok, as long as you had a fair amount of control and autonomy. And that, fundamentally, is why working for yourself has made me generally happier. I may have a lot of work to do, but it’s my choice how late I work at night, or if I take a nap or go to the gym in the middle of the day when I’m not feeling productive. (Plus, I don’t have to take care of other people’s silly requests, but that’s another story.) This basic level of self-care and choice makes a huge difference in my life. A crazy, crazy, huge difference.

The Book

But really, let’s talk about what I’ve been doing, which is, in short, writing a book on a deadline, while running an active website. When I got a book deal, I did not have the brilliant idea that it would be really fun to write 60,000 words in five months, but that’s how it worked out. Wedding books hit the shelves at the beginning of the year, because that’s engagement season, so my options were to write a book in four months or to write a book in five months. I picked five. I like to sleep at night.

{What book writing was like this month. On the left, the stack of books I was plowing through for research. On the right the amazing Saipua flowers I sent my agent after I got the first book advance check}

The first month of working for myself felt like a crazy whirl of activity. Everything was new, and I was traveling a lot (because I could, without asking permission). At the end of month one I realized that A) This had to stop B) I had to get focused and C) I had a book due really soon. So I went into hyper-over-drive-focus. Even though I have an office, I basically didn’t leave the house for two weeks. I woke up, I wrote, and I wrote some more. And it worked. I finished some key chapter drafts, and I was really happy with them. I also realized that, over the long term, I probably should leave the house slightly more often…. Continue reading Working For Yourself: Month Two (Getting Focused)

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts | 99 Comments »

Apr 2011

Working For Yourself: Month Three (Letting Go)

I’ve been talking a lot about entrepreneurship and APW the last week, so I’m going to keep this month’s Working For Myself brief. But first, can I just say, Month THREE? When I went to write this post, I was sure I was supposed to title it Month Four, at least. Time has been flying by, and it’s been wonderful (if maybe a tiny bit stressful and crazed). So, what happened to me this month?

I finished writing the APW book, just about.

I’m saving writing the last chapter as my final act before I finish the book, but other than that, the words are on paper. I’m not done, mind you, I have some heavy editing and some serious deadlines ahead of me (May 1 for the first half, and June 1 for the second half), but hey, words on paper! For those of you keeping track, that means I wrote a 60,000 word book in 12 weeks. I’m not sure what I have to say about that, other than, you write a book by just showing up and doing the work… at least every other day.

David gave me a funny backhanded compliment the other day. We were talking about the editing process, and about how, unlike 99% of the known universe, my husband included, I actually kind of like when people edit my work (I actually hired a local friend to help me edit my book as I was writing it, so yes, I actually paid cash for extra editing). So David said, “Well, for some really strange reason, you don’t think of yourself as a wonderful writer, so you’re really enthusiastic about people helping to make your work better.” And I said, “Of course I don’t think of myself as a wonderful writer, why would I think of myself as a wonderful writer?” And he looked at me like I was the dullest person in the world, and said, “You write for a living. And not technical writing either.” Of course I started grinning, because my husband had just back-handedly called me a wonderful writer.

But he nailed it. That’s exactly what I think. Continue reading Working For Yourself: Month Three (Letting Go)

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts | 79 Comments »

May 2011

Working For Yourself: Month Four (Go, Go, Go)

{Me in my office, on half book deadline day}

This month, you get my working for myself post a tiny bit early. Why is that? Well, as those of you who follow me on Twitter know, on Friday I turned in half of my book manuscript. All 108 pages. Whoa. (The other half is due in a month.)

It was a strange sensation, handing in something you’d worked so hard on. The last hours were spent sitting next to my friend Kate, who has read and copy edited every single draft (that’s her computer sitting next to mine in the first picture), doing one last round of edits. It felt a little like giving birth, and a lot like letting go. David, who used to work in a literary agency back in our previous life in theatre, reminded me, “A book is never finished, it’s just abandoned.” Which is true. I got to the point where I was changing tiny things, and then changing them back, and then looking at the document blankly, and that’s when I knew I was done (which is good, since it was the deadline anyway).

It’s hard to have any perspective on your own work, other than the perspective that you put your all into it, and you’re proud it’s done. Book writing is like a marathon (one I’m not done with yet… I’ve got one more month to go), but it’s not magic. It’s just showing up and doing the work, over and over and over again.

So this month was finishing half of a book, and juggling a million business tasks, and going to New Orleans for a much needed two days at a conference, spending time with girlfriends. This month was crazy.

Kathleen, in her series on freelance work, has written a fair amount about her systems for time management. And this month I used all of those and none of those, while I scrambled to just get it done. I was juggling a book deadline, some changes in the APW ad program, continuing to adjust to managing a small staff, and managing the blog’s content. And most weeks, it seemed like everything needed to be done at once. So I wrote lists, and lists, and lists. Every day I tackled the thing that seemed the most urgent first, and then everything else next. I didn’t (and haven’t) finish my lists. I worked on Sundays (and sometimes Saturdays), I worked nights. I did what I had to do to get it done. And you know what? The big stuff got done. But you know what else? I need a nap. Continue reading Working For Yourself: Month Four (Go, Go, Go)

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts | 21 Comments »

May 2011

Reclaiming Wife: Unemployment, Employment, and Mexico

I was in Mexico last week.

I know.

Let me back up, because it’s a long story.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about David’s law school graduation. I said:

We both, in our own ways, worked our asses off for Friday. And in the past three (or really four) years, we both learned a lot, both about ourselves and about the world. And when the words, “I now confer on you a JD, with all the rights and privileges therein” were said on Friday, I cried. When we walked from party to party in North Beach on Friday, looking at the moon on the bay and Coit Tower by night, the air crackled with possibility – not just the possibilities of the future, but with the possibilities achieved.

It’s been a long year. David and his classmates graduated into the worst law market in a generation, and even for those with killer resumes, there were no jobs. David’s focus is criminal law and litigation, areas that have been severely impacted by state and federal budget crisis. It was so bad, that there would be months when only two or three jobs would open up in the state of California that he was qualified for. In the sate of California. How crazy is that? And of course, with the job market in such a horrific state, each of those job openings would have hundreds, or thousands, of applicants.

It was rough. It was hard on our marriage, it was hard on our psyches. For a while I was supporting both of us, doing a corporate job that I didn’t love, while working on APW on the side. I felt like I was having to defer my dreams, to martyr myself, to keep us both afloat. Let’s just say martyrdom is not my best look. Then, in January, after a lot of planning, I made the leap to working for myself full time, and writing a book, and supporting two people. Things looked better, but we still felt like we were slogging through, emotionally.

Through all this, David kept busy. He took the California bar. Because he’s married to an overachieving mad-woman who believes in the power of being busy, he then took the New York Bar (he passed both, for the record. Go David.) He had a fellowship, and he volunteered his time as an attorney. This spring, he hung out his shingle, and started doing piecemeal work on a variety of cases. But we both really wanted his legal career to really get started. Even though we pool all our money, we wanted him to feel like he was financially contributing to the household (though dear-God-in-heaven, the man cooks and cleans, and handles tons of domestic stuff that I’m terrible at, so he was contributing to the household in huge ways the whole time.)

Then, this spring, we hit what felt like rock bottom. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Unemployment, Employment, and Mexico

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 163 Comments »

Jun 2011

A Practical Wedding Book – Done!

I wrote a book, you guys. That’s it, in the picture above. That’s ALL OF IT, all 211 pages, all 63,858 words. That’s all of it, because IT’S DONE. I handed it into my publisher on Friday.

Emily of Emily Takes Photos came over to my house on Friday to take pictures, and this is how I was feeling:

I believe we call that BAM!

And for those of you who are thinking, “You’re finished with the book already? It seems like it didn’t take very long!” You are right, my friends, it was quick, and I am tired. I left my job in January, and wrote the book in slightly under five months so it could get published next January, right in time for a new crop of baby brides (as Alyssa would say). A good question to ask right now would be, “How do you write a book in five months, while running a website, without being an insane person?” and I’d have a hard time answering that… because clearly I am a slightly insane person. But in general? You give yourself a schedule. You never miss a deadline. You write (almost) every work day (some days are just not writing days, face it). You don’t worry too much about making it good, at first, you just worry about getting it on paper. Then you worry about making it good, but not in an obsessive way.

Oh, and you get help. I’m dyslexic, and also have been known to take on a little too much at one time (achem) and go on small crying jags. So I knew I needed help and discipline. I hired my friend Kate, first ever reader of this website (Literally. I gave her the link the first day), and copy editor extraordinaire, to keep me on task. She picked up a chapter of the book every week, like clockwork, and edited it. She gave me feedback when I needed it, and told me to stop asking for feedback and get back to writing when I didn’t need it. She let me buy us both ice cream quite a bit, to dial down my stress. And here is the nutty thing… thanks to Kate (and Lauren, and Alyssa), I wrote the book without having a single massive meltdown. Whoa.

I’ve been struggling to find something really eloquent to say on the subject, and it turns out it’s not a subject I’m eloquent about. Frankly, it’s a subject I’m having a really hard time wrapping my head around at all. I wrote a book. A book that’s going to look like this: