Time to Fill You In

All right, peeps. Here's the scoop. I've written and sent out my book proposal via Secret Agent Man, who it turns out took me up on THIS OFFER. A few people said no, but a few are interested. Because I was writing a kind of hybrid book: one company is interested in one half of the book, and another is interested in the another half of the book.  Why not do two books? I asked. But my agents says that's not contractually kosher. So we are where we are.    
     I have written another version of the book proposal in these weeks, which would lean more heavily on memoir. That would be swell with me, but I do still think memoir+information will make for a bigger book on the topic. So, we'll see. There are a few other editors who are getting second and third reads of the proposals inside their publishing houses, so more may be forthcoming.
     Publishing is much slower and more considered than it was back in the day when people pounced and bought. But I'm happy to be in this position at long last.  Remember the days when I banged my head against the wall trying to get my wonderful literary novel published?  Remember how close I came at Grove and Ballantine with fiction, only to be dashed at the last minute? Ah, those were the bloody days.This seems more civilized, though I am not without the thought that hope-dashing could still happen.  So, stand by, and we shall see.  
      Feel free to write in with thoughts on the process, or to tell me that I should stick to my guns about what kind of book I'm writing, though frankly either one is fine by me. There's more than one way to skin the cat.
     By the way, those of you who read the article, my one major family's response was that there were not THAT many guns in the house when we grew up. (!) Seriously? On a visit home, I once had to remove several rifles from the bed I was going to sleep in and step over a pile of other rifles in boxes stacked in the room.  Hmmm? That seems like a lot of guns to me. But this is why I write, right?  Because my family does not offer comments like, "Oh, that must have been painful." Or "You write well." Or....I don't know, say, anything other than a comment about how many guns we had in the house, which by the way, was a lot.
     Oh well. It makes a good blog post even if I have said "we shall see" too many times. (But we shall.)