I am Never Sure Where it Is

I'm kind of spazzing out today because my editor just told me the caveman book is being moved up to October. The GEICO caveman show will be airing in November, and they want the book and show to be available at roughly the same time. This is a big change, because they originally intended to release it in June of next year.

This is a big deal, because it means that this time, my publisher actually cares if the book succeeds, and they'll make some effort to publicize it. But it also means they want everything pretty much done by next week. And I'm still 4,000 words short, and the illustrations don't exist.

The big victim here is Chris Muir, who I have been trying to con into doing art for the book. I can draw, but I have come to realize that I hate it, and Chris would do great work.

We were trying to whine him into doing maybe 45 illustrations in a month, which is ridiculous. Then it changed to 25 in three weeks, which wasn't quite as bad. Then today, right after I told him about the three weeks, I heard the book was being moved up, so we were looking at ten days or so.

I look like an idiot when this kind of thing happens, because I say one thing, and then my editor immediately tells me something has changed, because something unforeseeable has happened in New York, and then I have to go back and straighten things out with Chris. But he says he can do one illustration per chapter in the time we have, so I guess we're okay.

Truthfully, I am not totally pumped about this book. It's going to be funny, and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to publish ANYTHING, but the original concept came from marketing people, so it won't be as close to my heart as the spam book or the cookbooks.

Optimally, when you write, you come up with an exciting idea and sell it to an editor, and then the book writes itself. It's very different when the idea comes from people who don't write and don't have any way of judging whether a concept has legs. I could write cookbooks until the turn of the next millennium and never run out of material, but cavemen...that is a topic you can cover exhaustively in a hundred pages. You really have to work to stretch it out.

And they wanted a lot of stuff on "getting in touch with your inner caveman." That probably sounds great at a marketing meeting, and it has potential, but once you sit down to write about it, you realize you're lucky if it comes out to 2,000 words.

So it has been a bit of a job.

I want to give them exactly what they ask for, and I'm trying. The last thing I want is to be a pain in the ass when someone is paying me money.

What we're looking at now is a short book--about 30,000 words--with maybe 30 illustrations, 12 or so provided by Chris. It would be great if he could do more, but it looks like there just isn't enough time. If I'm asked to do a sequel, I'm going to have to look into hallucinogenic drugs.

I don't know if this will have any effect on the cookbook or not. It would sure be nice if it did, because otherwise there will be a big long dead space between the cookbook and this book.

The big up side here is the promotion the publisher intends to do for the book. They didn't really do anything last time. I did all the promotion myself, which is why the campaign was so lame.

Crap. I have to start doing PR for this thing NOW. I just realized that.

I hope you like it when it's finally done, and I look forward to having time to work on other things again.