Izzy's poetry book arrived in the mail today. Since she was one of the top 10, she had her own page! She was so excited. She ran right down to Gramoo's house to show her!
Izzy's poetry book arrived in the mail today. Since she was one of the top 10, she had her own page! She was so excited. She ran right down to Gramoo's house to show her!
Also, because it was cool, it wasn't buggy at all. I didn't even get one mosquito bite. Chewy did get stung on the ear, but he's so dumb, he probably just thought it was another one of those nasty burrs we had to chop out of his fur.
LuLu and Chewy stayed right around the cabin (except for the few times they stole away together for a dip in the river). Perfect.
No rain, which was perfect for us but bad for the farm (it's so dry there!).
We had just the right amount of food, and Remington brought a friend who was a human garbage can, so nothing went to waste. Perfect.
Gramoo and Grampoo got there Sunday afternoon, and we didn't have to leave until late Monday morning, so we got to visit with them. Perfect. And, gramoo made me fudge. How perfect is that.
About our book. I got an exciting email from one of my friends in Ann Arbor about an author's conference she thought sounded perfect for me. There's that word again, "perfect". At any rate, I checked out the website for the conference, and it just so happens that one of the workshop presenters is the chief editor of the publishing house Tom and I originally had tailored our manuscript for, and then found out their house wasn't accepting manuscripts, so, our manuscript has been altered somewhat. Anyway, I am going to take our original manuscript with me to the conference, as one of the sessions is "share time". Fingers crossed everyone. You know how lazy I am-I would much rather have a house take on the project than to do it all by myself.
Talked to Robert the other day. He said he's not on a job right now, so it would be a great time for him to illustrate our book. In other words, he wants us to "get the lead out!" Literally! Well, at least that will serve as additional motivation for us, because we really, really are dragging our heels on this. It just never really was high priority for us, just kind of a fun thing to do. And now we've got Robert involved, so we more or less have to do it!
We did a little bit of work on our book today. Tom's going to talk to Robert tomorrow-see how illustrations are coming along.
VBS got postponed this week, so our schedule has been lightened a bit. More book work planned for tomorrow!
Tom and Logan did great at the Allen Park street run yesterday. Logan had a pretty bad biff on his bike Friday night, so I wasn't sure if he was going to be up to running, but he sucked it up and did just fine. Tom had to follow suit of course, and wiped out on his bike out at Stony Creek this morning. It was hilarious, (only because he wasn't hurt of course-although he is complaining of a stiff neck this evening). Crazy man that sweetie of mine! What 46th birthday would be complete without making an ass of yourself anyway?
Izzy's getting excited for VBS (which starts tomorrow night). Tom made the banner and signs that are outside the church advertising for it, like he does every year (and the t-shirts too!).
Getting excited for Rem to be home! We went out for Tom's birthday tonight with Logan-we had steaks, which Rem would have loved much more than me or Logan. Izzy was at a party with friends, of whom are now here and sleeping over! Yikes, where's the mercy?
For one, Tom and Izzy have been busy training for a Triathalon-Tom's is a sprint Triathalon, which is a half mile swim, then 18 miles on the bike, then a 3.6 mile run. Izzy's is a mini triathalon which is 8 lengths of the pool, 5 miles on the bike, and a 2 mile run.
Unfortunately we recently found out that Izzy has a soccer tournament that same weekend, so she won't be able to compete. Tom's competition will be Sunday the 12th of August. It's in Windsor. If Izzy's finals (assuming they make it to the finals on Sunday) are late enough in the day, we'll shoot over to watch Tom. He's been working his butt off! He runs after work, then swims, then bikes. Every day! He makes my daily five mile run look like a stroll in the park! I'm just not that ambitious, but at least I can keep up with the boys.
So...as far as the book goes....whenever!
Well we HAVE been busy seeing Remington safely off to Japan, and I've been getting the Underdog website up and running.http://www.underdogwrestlingclub.com , and Tom and Izzy have been off with the Underdogs camping and attending a wrestling camp since Sunday, so Logan and I have just been total slugs. Laying around all day, playing with the dogs, playing board games, just chilling!
Book-wise, I received an email today from a publishing house I had queried a long, long time ago about our book. I had given up hearing from anyone, but this house was interested and wants to see our complete manuscript. I have to wait until Tom gets home to see what he thinks about that. He has his mind made up about self publishing. He likes to be the one in control. Whatever Tom wants to do is fine with me. I'm not sure what to make of it. I personally am in no rush. It's just a fun book idea, not the focus of our lives!
Tom and I touched base yesterday with Robert. We wanted to get his opinion on some ideas we were playing with for the book. We didn't do a lot of work on our manuscript this week. It's been so crazy, trying to get Rem ready for Japan, Izzy had conditioning camp this week in addition to her Indian Ed camp, and we've been trying to get our patio done before summer zips right by us!
So.. we really didn't write much. What we did do was sit down and put together a pretty gosh darn good marketing plan. But hey, marketing is a big part of writing a book. A biggie! We'll post again when we hear back from Robert and some of the other folks that are helping us with the book.!
Well, Tom and I are back into our groove, and we spent several hours today writing together. Sometimes our ideas clicked, sometimes we locked horns, but in the end, we got something done!
I must say, writing a book after you're committed to it is a lot harder than just plucking away at it for fun, that's for sure.
We should be able to send Robert a few pages of our manuscript pretty soon so he can get a feel for how to illustrate it.
The fact that he was so geeked about illustrating this for us is such a blessing. He truly is our savior!
This has been Tom's desire from the beginning, however I had wanted to go the old fashioned route and try to get a publishing house to print it. Tom, on the the other hand (and I do now believe he is right), feels we could sell way more books if we market it ourselves, which you can't very readily do with a publishing house. Additionally, Tom has an illustrator in mind who knows a lot about wrestling, and he seems to think he would be the ideal person to illustrate our book. Of course if we went the traditional publishing route we'd never be able to select who we want to illustrate our book for us. We really have been wrestling with these options for a while now.
Of course we could hire an agent (which would most likely get us published-that's their job-they find the right house for you, but then your agent gets a big chunk of your royalties), but then here again, Tom says, "Why pay someone a percentage of our royalties, just to get it published, when we can do that ourselves relatively inexpensively?". And, we still wouldn't be able to pick our illustrator, and when you take into consideration that royalties on "House", published books are fairly low, and couple that with having to pay an agent at least 10-15% royalties, well then, he has a good point!
The glitch with this route is we will need an illustrator. The illustrator that Tom wants for our book is Robert Lence. He's going to contact him to see if he'd be interested in illustrating our book. We also have several other artist friends, but Bobby would be our first choice, considering he is a former wrestler and would be able to "capture" the image better for us. We still have to finish our manuscript and send it out for him to look over.
I actually am pretty excited now that we've come to this mutual decision. It sure does eliminate the waiting game! Additionally, I really think we will be able to sell quite a few copies. Considering the fact that we go to several children's wrestling meets every weekend for about 5 months of the year, and wrestling camps go on throughout the summer, and wrestling practices run 7 months of the year, we will have lots of opportunities to sell. Heck, we have to be there anyway, might as well set up a book stand while we're there! Tom also said he has at least 20 different accounts with companies that sell wrestling books that will gladly add our book to their sale list, and he has quite a few wrestling magazine contacts who will advertise our book too. Sweet. And just because it is going to be self published doesn't mean it won't be on the bookshelves. It will still get all the same treatment, but we have a lot more control and get much more in royalties (possibly more than 50% per book).
I'm a happy camper right now. It's funny, one of the editors I spoke with at a conference was fascinated with the idea of a kids wrestling book (he said he wrestled in high school and college), and said he'd love to see one out there, but he didn't think it would be a very marketable "shelf" book. He must've been done with wrestling long before all these darn kids wrestling clubs cropped up everywhere! Tom said there are over 1,000 kids wrestling clubs in Michigan alone!
