So you know how the backs of books sometimes have blurbs from esteemed authors saying why you should really buy THIS book, the one in your hands, because they have read it and they like it? I have some of those blurbs! It’s so exciting to have my book written about by women I so deeply respect. SQUEE!

“Offbeat Bride should be required reading for every couple struggling to create a wedding that uniquely reflects who they are. With wisdom and humor, Ariel Meadow Stallings reminds you that you need not buy into the wedding industrial complex in order to have a kick-ass celebration.”
—Lori Leibovich, founder and editor of Indiebride.com

“A wedding book that won’t make you puke. Whatever your idea of nontraditional may be, Offbeat Bride is here to tell you that it’s all gonna be okay.”

—Wendy McClure, columnist for BUST magazine and author of I’m Not the New Me

Finally, a wedding guide that doesn’t assume you’ve been waiting your whole life to act out tulle-swathed princess fantasies. Stallings deftly shows independent women how to embrace their inner bride without losing themselves in the process.”
—Hana Schank, author of A More Perfect Union: How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life

“Here’s one book the wedding industrial complex doesn’t want you to read! Offbeat brides aren’t just creative and thrifty (though they’re often both)—they’re taking weddings back and reinventing them in the ways that matter most.”
—Kamy Wicoff, author of I Do but I Don’t: Walking Down the Aisle without Losing Your Mind

Looks like the Brits have taken notice of Offbeat Bride. The book was mentioned in an article called And the bride wore hotpants.

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As part of the editing process, the copyeditor who’s working on my book put together a list of uncommon words that I used that she wanted to make sure she styled consistently. It cracks me up. What a window into the weirdness of my book! Want to see?

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Brooke Warner, my book’s editor, was recently interviewed by Mediabistro.com. You have to be a paying member to read the whole piece but here’s a tiny selection from it that mentions my book:

You’ve edited many memoirs, including Lea Aschkenas’s Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island and Sarah Katherine Lewis’s Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire. Some of them, like Spike Gillespie’s Pissed Off: On Women and Anger and Ariel Meadow Stallings’s Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides, use memoir as their starting point to explore larger cultural issues. What makes a given memoir right for Seal? Are any topics off-limits (such as ones you’ve already covered)?

Seal does a lot of hybrid memoirs. All of these books you list are memoirs, and yet Es Cuba is a travel book, Indecent is about sex work, Pissed Off is about anger, and Offbeat Bride is a nontraditional how-to book. You’re right on when you say that memoir is the launching point. It’s more than that, though, because it’s generally the thread that carries the entire book. The reason we have so many of these types of books is because we publish women’s issues and we are fans of sustained narrative (and believe that many women readers are, too). We do not do prescriptive books, so the hybrid genre is a way for us to provide something deeper — a lesson, insight, relating — to our readers without bullet points and ten-step strategies.

Cover of my first book, originally uploaded by .Ariel.

This is it! Evidently, my editor had a huge amount of back ‘n’ forth with the design department, but I didn’t see any of the rejected covers. I’m pretty pleased with this final result — she’s not me, but she’s got the pink hair.

Today is the day that Offbeat Bride is contractually due to my publisher, Seal Press. I FTPed the completed draft (all 60,000 words of it) last night. It was sort of anti-climactic. I had a few last minute tweaks to do before mailing it in, but they ended up taking all of about half an hour, and then I just sat there clicking around at various chapters trying to resist the urge to rewrite things. It’s fine, I kept reminding myself. It’s in good shape.

Still, after I sent it off I had a moment of standing in the living room and jumping up and down and waving my fists around and hollering “YAYAYAYAYAYAY!”

There were some questions after my last book post where I included a screenshot of the infamous Chapter Map about my process for how I wrote the book. If this kind of thing interests you, keep reading. If it makes your eyes roll back in your head, go look at some photos or something. I don’t mind.

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Poor Patrick. He didn’t know what he was getting into when he agreed to take a pass at my book:

****WHOA. UH. HMMM. I’M ALL FOR ASS-FUCKING REFERENCES, BUT THIS SORTA COMES OUT OF NOWHERE … ***

This made me laugh until I almost started crying. Trust me: the reference makes perfect sense in context, so I chose to STET the edit. Which means that yes, my book about weddings mentions ass-fucking at one point.

My friend Patrick (who was my copy chief during my time at Movies.com, and who therefore is intimately acqainted with all my writerly flaws) is doing an editing pass at my book, and his feedback is the best. Here’s an example from the chapter about rings:

As for Andreas and I me, we ultimately decided that we liked the symbolism of rings — I’m pretty dang agnostic, but what faith I have tends to revolve around cycles and circles. It’s the shape that planets move in****TECHNICALLY, PLANETS MOVE IN ELLIPTICAL ORBITS, NOT CIRCULAR ONES****, that rain droplets form, that our pupils are shaped have.