POLYFACE DESIGNS 5

            It's Friday and time for another teaser on my book with former apprentice Chris Slattery  titled POLYFACE DESIGNS.

            With two co-authored books out this year (BEYOND LABELS with Sina McCullough launched a month ago) some people may be wondering if my sole authorship days are over.  If I stay mentally healthy, I have a whole cadre of titles bouncing around in my head.  So no, I have no intentions of leaving the solo writing role.

             But both of these collaborative projects have made me more deeply appreciate partnerships that pair extremely different people.  You get 1 + 1 = 3.  In both projects, what the reader does not see are the months of back-and-forth negotiations regarding content and format. What to include and not include is a huge issue.

             One of the biggest challenges facing any author is deciding when it's done.  Michael Pollan and I have had numerous conversations about this.  Any book project can be tweaked, refined, tweaked and refined again and again and again.  You can always find little things to improve.  "Oh, I should have said it this way" is a never ending option.

             It can drive you crazy.  Is it ready to be birthed, or does it need some more gestation time?  Creating the table of contents means initially deciding what you're going to put in and what you're going to leave out.  In POLYFACE DESIGNS we had to walk away from a few interesting things just because the page count got too long.  It's 568 pages as is and we're getting it specially bound so it will lay flat and take some abuse.

             Adding another 100 or 200 pages becomes logistically difficult.  You almost have to go to two volumes and then the price gets out of the question.  So you juggle the material between important and trivial, critical and just interesting.  Eventually, you have something that's acceptable.  It's never perfect and I'm sure someone will find things to change, but eventually you have to put it down and say "it's good enough." 

             At the end of the day, if we never publish because we keep haggling, none of the material ever gets out.  The amount of construction and engineering material in this book is staggering.  Tidbits about axles, wood versus metal, building jigs as patterns.  I've been enthralled with Chris' engineering for peasants and can't wait to get this in everybody's hands.  It's better than a college textbook.  Today I plan to choose the printer; all this week we've been back and forth on bids to make sure the numbers reflect apples to apples.  We're about a month out.  Stay tuned.  And Happy 4th weekend!