vituperation

March 29, 2004

My first official rights sale for the book went through over the weekend (although technically, the contract hasn’t been signed yet), so all zero of my readers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Nepal need to get ready. The fat phat man is coming.

The book will sell for four US dollars per copy in those countries. Of that four dollars, the royalty is twenty cents. Of that twenty cents, my agent gets five cents. After taxes on the remaining fifteen cents, I should keep roughly eleven cents per book.

Robyn and I can’t decide if we’d rather build the summer home in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard.

Robyn and I sat in our den Saturday night, watching last week’s episode of The Shield that we’d DVR’d. On the screen, Vic Mackey railed at some poor prostitute about her choices in life. Good stuff, but I was preoccupied.

The Stump and I were playing ‘mousy’, wherein I’d shake his rattly toy mouse at him while he stared at me with big dark eyes. Just when he couldn’t stand the teasing any more I’d throw the mouse and he’d haul ass after it, batting it around for a few seconds before looking back to me. Sometimes he’d bring it to me, but more often I had to get up and fetch the mouse myself.

Cats’re smart like that, you know.

I decided to throw the mouse into the Stump Cave, because Stanley loves to dive onto it and smoosh it flat. Generally, the cave then folds over on him and he enjoys laying there like a kitty taco.

Insert requisite bad joke using “pussy” and “taco” here, please.

“Bessie,” I said, “watch this!”

I winged the toy mouse across the room, putting some serious steam on it. Overcome by excitement, Stanley loosed a short bark and jumped forward to get it, his stumpy little tail wagging fiercely. Boy, did he get it.

With a hollow pop! much like the sound of a cork leaving a champagne bottle, the mouse beaned the Bean right between the eyes, and bounced straight up in the air two or three feet.

Robyn gasped.

Stanley blinked at me, wide-eyed and confused.

My own eyes widened, too, but in horror.

The mouse fell to the ground, forgotten.

Stanley blinked again, then sneezed about ten times in a row. I leapt from the couch and picked him up, terrified I’d given him (more) brain damage. He blinked at me a couple more times, then finally started purring.

Now we cackle like goons every time we think about it.

I have officially started teaching the spud how to drive.

It’s not as scary as I expected. Scary, yes, but not as scary.

Sadly, there are no funny stories to share from it. Yet.

An interesting factoid:

Recently, I asked a subset of readers to read something out-of-character I wrote and give me a one-word feedback on whether they’d want to read more, based on what was presented. Of the responses, roughly 89% were positive and 11% were negative.

I did some more work on the writing in question, expanding it, and started wondering why people answered the way they did, so I asked for more feedback. This is where it gets interesting. Less than 10% of the “yes” people responded to the second query, while almost 70% of the “no” people did. Interestingly, the “yes” people tended to offer a single sentence (or two at the most) explaining their reasoning, while the vast majority of the “no” respondents wrote near-dissertations on why they said no, often offering a line-by-line dissection of my writing.

I feel like there’s a conclusion to be drawn here, but I’m not sure what it is.

(Note to the “no” people: thank you very much — your detailed feedback was invaluable, and the writing in question is already stronger as a result. Also, just because I feel the need to explain this, that was a first draft.)

(Thanks also to the “yes” people, because I do like to know someone out there appreciates it.)

Oh, and if you’re curious, it’s sitting at 130 pages and growing. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

I have the mad photo-taking skillz.