…offering us space to place new steps of change.

My book proposal is done. After four attempts over the last 15 months, I’ve finally moved passed the developmental editing stage. I completed line edits last night. I guess this means that the next step is getting my manuscript on the desks of acquisition editors. This is pretty exciting — and the timing is particularly good with Dre and I house hunting right now. An advance from a publisher would definitely help with our down payment. Thanks to all of you who’ve pitched in with ideas, support, and suggestions over the last year. I’m sure I’ll be asking for more as things move forward.

Fair readers, I need your help with another book-related issue.

My book has as a title (”And the Bride Wore a Hula Hoop”) but no subtitle. Some of my ideas included “The Electrolicious guide to weird weddings” or “The Electrolicious guide to the wedding you want,” but none of these quite nailed it. Do any of you have any ideas?

I’ve been trying to stay very task focused lately, further efforts at maintaining some sort of momentum during this season of hibernation and generalized malaise. But I move in circles, looping around the apartment not getting much done at all. My goal yesterday was to finish up my book proposal. I got it all prepped and ready to finish — but didn’t actually finish it. It also took me three hours to sweep the bedroom and take out the trash, because I’m so distractable that on my way to fetch the broom I find myself making a pot of tea and shuffling piles of stuff around in the living room.

I try to give myself permission to have days like this (”It’s ok to spend three hours burning two CDs”), but I still get frustrated with myself. How many times can I check my email before realizing that oh look: I still haven’t taken out the trash? Nor do I have any new email.

I have a near constant internal dialog going with myself about what I should be doing at any given moment. I’m really good at figuring out what needs to be done — not so good at the execution. I guess this makes me a natural manager. But it mostly just makes me feel distracted, ineffectual, and incompetent.

This, my friends, is why I don’t have a television. It’s hard enough for me to get anything done with my computer screen around. Adding another screen to the house would probably result in me forgetting how to urinate or tie my shoes.

This time of year, it’s crucial to keep the momentum going. I’ve found that I do best if I take a running start at the depths of winter. I know I’ll slow down eventually (February in Seattle is a study in hermitage), and hopefully I can keep as much oomph going as possible on the various projects I’m working on.

I’ve made some major progress on my book proposal, although I’m disappointed to find that I do my best writing in a slightly intoxicated state. I suppose I am not the first writer to discover this about themselves, and I don’t plan to pull a Hunter S. Thompson anytime soon (…and now, for my next trick, I will continue typing while ingesting peyote buttons and GHB, while taking a percocet suppository!), and at this point I’ll take whatever help I can get to get this book proposal moving forward. Goal: to have it in the hands of the agency by the new year. Swear to god I can do this.

In terms of my glacial progress at writing a book: in a strange twist of CPC fate, it looks like I’m developing a full proposal for this book. Any chapters you’d like to see written on the subject?

Tomorrow morning we will wake at 4:30am. We will drive from Apt to Marseille where we will check in for our flight. Then we will fly from Marseille to Frankfurt to Washington DC to Seattle. I’m excited to be going home, although I woke up before dawn this morning grinding over my most troublesome project, the one that awaits me at home like a bombed out living room: my fucking book. Damnit. I used the wedding and then the honeymoon as excuses not to work on the proposal, and once I return it’ll be “no more excuses” time. I’ve got to finish that book proposal.

So, it’s summer, which means that the kids are back at it at The Columbia Publishing Course. When I retured from Phoenix Fest, I had several emails from a couple CPC students who are in the throws of CPC’s book workshop, wherein students create faux publishing houses and crank out book proposals. Remember when I did that in 2001? The weird thing is, my faux book idea was almost picked up, so while the whole process is very faux, there’s some possibilities lurking around the edges.

Anyway, it appears that I’ve been recommended to one of the faux publishing houses as an author for one of their faux books, and they were even so kind as to write a faux pitch for the faux book I could write for the faux publishing house! In some ways, this faux pitch is better than the real one I’m working on. Take a look…

Columbia Publishing Course
Editorial Description Sheet

Publishing House: BoldFace Books

Title: The Bride Wore a Hula Hoop
Subtitle/Sell Line: Reflections on Life, Love, and Modern American Culture
Author: Ariel Meadow Stallings

Hook: A countercultural goddess explores marriage and personal identity in this fresh, humorous memoir.

Description: Ariel Meadow Stallings would be the average twenty-something woman planning her upcoming nuptials: picking up a marriage license, choosing rings with her fiancé, arranging a reception…if the average twenty-something woman was determined to wear a bustier and lime-green skirt for her wedding gown, that is.

A self-described “word mercenary” who is fascinated by pop culture even as she gravitates towards the underground, Stallings examines the lead-up to her wedding and, in turn, what it means to be young in America today. With her trademark zesty and tart sense of humor, she scrutinizes the struggles faced by many young women. Stallings is hard at work forging her own individual future while trying to balance the demands of the present: “Unable (or unwilling) to escape my parents’ worldview, I approach each community with both idealism and cynicism, ultimately finding pieces of myself and my family hidden throughout the contemporary Left Coast landscape.” From the vegan cookbooks on her Amazon.com wedding registry to questioning what is means to be a “bride,” Stallings deftly combines valuable thoughts for relevant issues for young women with a sharp eye for the humorous details in this crazy countercultural life.

Smart, funny, and sexy, tapped into the immediacy of our culture but wrestling with the past, Stallings offers a fresh view of modern life in America. Part wedding diary, part cultural memoir, The Bride Wore a Hula Hoop will have you laughing and groaning at the same time, but is irresistible either way.

Author bio: Ariel Meadow Stallings is an award-winning copywriter for The Seattle Times, a columnist for Hatch Magazine, and a freelance writer. Stallings is also the co-founder and editor of hooping.org, a website devoted to the sport of hula-hooping, and runs her popular blog, electrolicious.com. She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: 13.95
Trim size: 5 x 8 Illustrations: None
Pages: 256 pp.
Other Special Features: None
Category: Memoir/General Interest

Royalty Advance: $10,000 [ha! that'd be nice]
First Print Run: 5000
Royalty Rates: Standard paperback (7.5%)

I’m at the hard part of my book proposal. The part where I have first drafts of all six sample chapters, and now I have to revise them. Extensively. Imagine two glaciers colliding, and that’s about the sound and speed of this part of the process for me. Lots of grinding and crunching and the squeals of rock hard ice compressing. And that’s just to get to the place where I feel like I can sit down and do anything!

At times I think inebriation would help (certainly it’s a time-honored practice of writers everywhere, and one I’ve used with marked success in the past), but that only works for the composition component. The editing part needs coherency and cohesion and clarity.

Sometimes I think I’m not supposed to do this right now, but if not now, then when? Boulders of insecurity roll around in my head, and I find wonderful ways to distract myself from the noise.