There’s a new excerpt of the book up on DivineCaroline. The chapter excerpted is called “Location, location, location: Picking the Where and When of the Wedding.”

An excerpt from the book recently ran on Elle Canada’s website. Granted, it was pretty sanitized (I curse a lot in the book — I guess Elle readers aren’t as foul-mouthed as I am), but you can check it out over here: The ring with the bling: Who needs an engagement ring?

Getting married? Having a bridentity crisis?

Offbeat Bride will pat your head and tell you it’s ok

Snag your copy
of Offbeat Bride today!

A wedding memoir crossed with a tipster handbook, Offbeat Bride offers inspiration, encouragement, advice, and a celebration of aisles less traveled. Seattle writer Ariel Meadow Stallings humorously recounts planning her 2004 “freakfest” wedding, and shares anecdotes and advice from dozens of nontraditional brides from across the United States.

Presented in 47 quick chapters, ranging from “The Pressure and the Proposal” all the way to “A Rose by Any Other (Last) Name,” Offbeat Bride is filled with sanity-saving tips, advice, and stories to reassure even the most out-there, nontraditional bride that she’s downright normal.

The brides have spoken…

“Since we’re not planning a traditional wedding, most magazines and books don’t really give the advice I’m looking for. Offbeat Bride is awesome because it gives a lot of great tips for unconventional couples and, while reading it, I felt relieved because the book confirmed for me that I’m not a freak just because I didn’t want a diamond engagement ring.” —The (mis)Adventures of a Rockabilly Bride

“Ariel is a very funny and gutsy writer. This book is part memoir, part wedding planning guide. Her own wedding story is great and I felt at last that I could somehow RELATE. Also, the suggestions in it are just filled with common sense and good ideas. I read her book and felt relieved and excited.” —Summer Pierre

“Here is the thing, I hate weddings. HATE THEM. Yet sometime in the near future I’ll be getting married. So how does one reconcile her independent bad-ass self with the nightmare that is the Wedding Industrial Complex? Stallings interviews many ‘offbeat brides’ and shares the details about her own non-traditional wedding to help you plan your own. I definitely recommend this book to anyone with a wedding in their future, and I especially recommend reading it *before* you immerse yourself in bridal magazines and weddingchannel.com.” —Mia of Four Letter Word

Offbeat excerpt

Here’s the introduction of the book to give you a taste of what you’re getting yourself into.

… For me, the scariest part of getting engaged was feeling as if I were suddenly buying into an identity that wasn’t my own.

I was having a bridentity crisis.

Suddenly I was supposed to care about floral arrangements and classical quartets. Suddenly I was supposed to like poufy white dresses and showing off jewelry. Suddenly I was supposed to buy five-hundred-page glossy magazines and take a strong interest in decorative bows for the backs of rented chairs.

I was a bride, but I wasn’t that kind of bride. I didn’t care about any of these things. I just loved my partner, Andreas, and I wanted to have a big party to share that love with our family and friends.

Most of us freaks, feminists, and free-thinkers want our weddings to be a unique reflection of ourselves — and yet somehow, once we start planning a wedding, that concept seems to fall by the wayside. Tradition has this eerie way of creeping in and taking over. And while the traditional wedding is a superb choice for traditional folks, I’m always amazed by how many nontraditional types find themselves getting married at a wedding that looks like it belongs to someone else.

That’s what this book aims to do for a larger circle of offbeat brides: provide encouragement and ideas on bucking tradition.

We made an effort to start from the ground up. We tried to consciously choose the elements of our wedding, trying hard not to default to standards. We worked our asses off to ensure that our wedding was actually ours. We failed in some regards (Who can escape cake? It’s tasty!), but we got our wish in some ways we didn’t expect: Who else can say that the night before the wedding, their guests were privy to a poetic ode from the mother of the bride about something called humanure? (And yes, humanure is just what it sounds like.)

Once I realized that we could craft the wedding that we wanted (and not what others expected), the whole process got a lot easier. There was no need to read the glossy magazines for ideas — I already knew what I cared about. The issue was just figuring out how to share that with my friends and family in a way that everyone could enjoy.

This isn’t to say that we planned our wedding in a bubble — we had lots of outside advice, encouragement, and brainstorming with friends, family, and many strangers over the Internet. What was the most helpful to us in planning, however, wasn’t stealing other people’s ideas. Mostly, I just needed to know that there were others who’d shaped their own offbeat weddings; others who had faced the same frustrations — regardless of whether we made the same decisions that they did. That’s what this book aims to do for a larger circle of offbeat brides: provide encouragement and ideas on bucking tradition.

Offbeat Bride isn’t a how-to book or a step-by-step wedding planner. Although I offer tips in each chapter, I certainly don’t expect that each one will apply to every wedding. Your wedding should be shaped around your opinions, not mine. This book is just a story of two people who did it a certain way and learned a few lessons. How (or whether) you apply those lessons to your own offbeat wedding plans are up to you. And although I share the story of our freakfest nuptials, I can’t imagine you’d want a wedding exactly like ours . . . unless you’re exactly like us, in which case we really should meet and be friends.

In the interest of fairness and diversity, however, I collected tips and anecdotes from other nontraditional brides (and a couple of grooms). All of these amazing people have their own remarkable stories and weddings, and each of them offers one more example of how it’s possible to rage against tradition and craft (sometimes literally) exactly the wedding you want.