As many of you know, I’ve spent much of the fall and winter hard at work on a follow-up book to my first book (the one that was ever so creatively called A Practical Wedding). My first book is the book I dreamt of writing the moment I started the site, the one that offers an alternate view of wedding planning and tradition that isn’t… because I can’t think of a better term… batshit crazy. Sitting down to write that book three years ago was a little overwhelming (because I had to teach myself how to write a book) but on most days it was pretty easy and fun. I plopped myself in front of my computer and more or less downloaded the contents of my brain into a Word document. It was an encouraging book, a point-of-view book, a way to approach wedding planning book. I’ve felt beyond lucky to watch the book turn out to be so helpful to so many people.
But when I decided to write a follow-up book last year, the process was decidedly different. This time around I wanted to tackle the nuts and bolts of how to actually throw a wedding. Information that is weirdly unavailable, as the wedding industry seems to put a lot of effort into hiding the ball. (There seems to be an idea that if they confuse you enough, you’ll spend boatloads of money trying to bail yourself out of trouble.) Writing this book has been a giant research process (with two research assistants) where we set out to interview every sane wedding professional we could find, and then find a way to organize all the best information for you in one easy to thumb-through place.
The whole process has been eye opening. Like so many of you, when we were throwing our wedding, we couldn’t find a ton of helpful information out there, and we couldn’t afford to hire a planner, so we just stumbled around making the best decisions that we could. Because we’d both spent time in New York City running events together, planning our wedding was less of a shit show than it might have been, but it was still pretty stressful and confusing. It’s been fascinating, five years later, to realize what mistakes we made (Don’t refrigerate your DIY flowers you guys! Floral fridges are a different temperature and humidity, and food fridges kill flowers. That’s why our bouquets were so wilty the next day.) and where we sort of accidentally knocked it out of the park (we actually did everything right on our DIY DJ project).
This week, I’m finally nearing the end point of drafting this book. Hooray! And before I head into the final round of edits and additions, I wanted to pose the question to you:
What wedding planning problems are you (or did you) strugglING to try to solve? What information did you wish was easily accessible? If you were giving this wedding logistics book to your best friend, what would you hope was included?
Before I wrap this sucker up, I want to make sure that I’m providing all the helpful information I can possibly cram into its slightly oversized pages. (I’m trusting you can figure out what neckline you want on your wedding dress, without my instructing you on the various types… but you might want to know how to best handle rentals.) Throw me all your best puzzles, ask me all your best questions. And if I can’t answer them in the book, we’ll try to answer them on the site one of these days.
