A warning: There be reporters lurking

July 24th, 2008 | By Kelsey | No Comments »

I’ve been warned that I should watch what I write because the media is starting to lurk in these parts.

This is a good thing, but as I watch the number of visitors grow each month a bit of me longs for the day when most of the hits to my blog were me. And since I knew how stupid I could be already, there was no real concern about writing something stupid or posting, say, this photo.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t said anything that stupid or offensive the three years I’ve been blogging. Most of the credit for this should go to Annie who has silently lurked on my blogs from Day One, making sure that I don’t say anything that embarrasses her.

Thankfully she has enough shame for both of us.

I’m sure that in the future (unless the internet implodes) my seventy-year-old self will stumble upon Where am I Wearing? and perhaps even the good ol’ days of Touron Talk and think, “What the hell?”

A kind of preview…

June 22nd, 2008 | By Kelsey | 2 Comments »

I pasted the Prologue and Chapter 1 of Where am I Wearing? into Wordle and here’s the cloud it produced.

See the larger version HERE.

Wordle in its own words:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I learned about Wordle on John Scalzi’s Whatever.

13 fellas

June 12th, 2008 | By Kelsey | 16 Comments »

I officially turned in my manuscript to Wiley yesterday. Woohoo! One of my editors, Tiffany, laid out the remaining path to publication.

First it’s off to production where someone will read over the manuscript looking for excessive vulgarity or endorsements of Hitler. Once it passes that it heads to a copyeditor who will edit punctuation, grammar, and style.

It was in her explanation of copyediting that Tiffany paid me the best compliment I’ve had as a writer, “We’ll send notes to the copyeditor telling them to preserve your style. We’ll tell him to keep all the fellas.”

There are two reasons why this was such a big compliment:

1) I’m honored to have a style that someone feels is worth preserving.

2) I’m really happy the fellas won’t be going anywhere because fella just might be my favorite word. In fact, at the most recent writer’s conference I attended, a fellow attendee wanted to talk craft. They went into great detail about their influences and their genius of melding styles – somehow managing to take all of the good stuff from the greatest writers of our time and none of the bad. They went on for about 10 minutes. When they felt they had sufficiently hashed out the depth of their style’s glory they asked me about mine. My response: “I like to use the word fella.” After their craptastic craft spiel, I couldn’t muster up anything else.

Out of my manuscripts 68,792 words I use 13 fellas. Allow me to introduce you:

1) more of a Warner Bros. fella
2) A fella sat on the maroon couch
3) A new fella has taken a seat
4) this poor fella lost his business
5) a short Kiwi fella
6) this fella vigorously scribbles
7) pretty jovial fellas
8) one fella is in shorts
9) a fella named Brice
10) a muscular fella with grey stubble
11) two fellas that couldn’t be more different
12) a fella obsessively moving at random from rack to rack checking out women’s clothes
13) the fella who watched the demolition

I’m 4 of the 13 fellas. Any guesses as to which 4? An Advanced Reader Copy of the book to anyone that gets them first try.

Galley Cat

May 28th, 2008 | By Kelsey | 2 Comments »

Oreo modeling one of the galleys I received in the mail from Wiley yesterday.

A galley is an uncorrected proof of a book that’s sent to people for endorsements and other stuff. I’m not sure what the other stuff is. I’m new to all of this. I’ll let you know when I find out.

This particular galley has a first chapter that’s probably going to get chopped to hell and a few facts that were a bit off, including one that was about $160 billion off (oops!).

Is it bad when you can’t remember the title of your own book?

May 24th, 2008 | By Kelsey | No Comments »

Really, should I be seeking help?

I can remember the whole Where am I Wearing? part, but it’s the subtitle that always gets me. Let me look it up…

Oh, there it is…A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make our Clothes

The problem I’m having is that we’ve (editor, editor’s assistant, Marketing gurus, Me) considered many different subtitles. The one I originally submitted was: A Global Quest to Meet the People who Made my Clothes. They thought Quest was a little too esoteric so we tried several others. Here’s just a few of the many, many variation of subtitles that were tossed around of the lists I submitted:

A Factory Tour to the Countries that Make America’s Clothes

A Global Quest to Meet the People that Make America’s Clothes

A Journey to the Countries that Make America’s Clothes

A Search for the People that Make America’s Clothes

A Search for the Factories & People that Make America’s Clothes.

Quest became Journey. Journey became Search. Search became Tour.

My Clothes became America’s Clothes, America’s Clothes became Our Clothes.

So, this is why I can’t remember the name of the book I’ve written. I suppose it still isn’t a very good excuse.

Look Ma! WAIW? is on Amazon!!

May 22nd, 2008 | By Kelsey | 5 Comments »

I did a little dance when THIS popped up in my Google update for “Where am I Wearing?”. I tried to leave an “I love it” five-star rating, but it doesn’t show up. I suppose that Amazon won’t let you rate a book before it’s been published. Currently, I’m the only one that knows it’s worthy of an “I love it”. Hopefully, my editor is too. I talk to him soon.

Does blogging build a writing career?

April 21st, 2008 | By Kelsey | No Comments »

Abha from Writtenroad.com asks several travel writers HERE, “How important is blogging in building your career as a travel-writer? Has blogging ever got you any work with print publications?” She included part of my answer, here’s the rest:

As far as advancing my career as a writer, blogging has been every bit as important as dumb luck.

It was dumb luck when Literary Agent A stumbled upon my blog, www.whereamiwearing.com and asked me if I had considered writing a book about the subject. This was before I had even left on the trip the blog was about.

When I returned from the trip I went to a writer’s conference in Muncie, Indiana, (not exactly a hotspot for meeting agents) and asked Agent B about pre-contract etiquette dealing with Agent A. Agent B asked about my book and was darn near more enthusiastic about it than me. Agent B, Caren, became my agent and a few months later sold my first book, which shares a name with my blog.

In the year I’ve kept the blog, I’ve spent over 72,000 minutes (50 days) writing it, but never considered myself a blogger until the Publisher’s Marketplace listing of the sale was released:

Non-fiction Narrative: www.whereamiwearing.com blogger Kelsey Timmerman’s WHERE AM I WEARING?, in which the author learns about the garment industry by following the Made In China/Bangladesh/Honduras tags of a complete outfit and goes to the countries to visit the factories that made his clothes and talk to its workers…

I started as a blogger and, with a little dumb luck, I became an author.

As for print publications…

I rarely direct editors of newspapers and magazines to my blog, for the simple fact that they might visit on a day I write about shaving my tongue or farting on airplanes. However, I have adapted blog posts that eventually ran in print publications or aired as essays on NPR. In this way, blogging is more of a personal writing tool for me than an eye-catcher for editors.

In the hands of a higher power

April 15th, 2008 | By Kelsey | 2 Comments »

I finished editing the book yesterday. Now it’s in the hands of a higher power – Richard, my editor.

I’m happy with how it all went and I enjoy reading it, which is really saying something because I wrote it and I’ve read each word a bazillion times. I should be sick of it.

Back in December when I signed the contract for the book, I was somewhat worried with how soon Wiley wanted it. I had never written anything over a few thousand words and wasn’t sure if three months would be enough time to pump out a book that I would be happy with. As it turns out I wrote at least 25% more book than I was contractually obligated to write. I’ve cut some of the words, but I’m still about 15% over. In the next couple weeks, I’ll have a new challenge – unwriting.

For now I’m happy with the book, but this is subject to change depending on what the Higher Power thinks.

Excuse me while I sacrifice a goat.

I’m guest blogging today

March 14th, 2008 | By Kelsey | 1 Comment »

Today, I’m guest blogging on my agent’s website. Since I have both a website and a blog Caren wanted me to give the pro’s and con’s of each from an author’s perspective (not that I feel like an author yet, because I don’t).

So, I guess I feel like I’ve kinda met my blogging quota for the day.

If you’re bored – which you are because what else would you be doing here – check out my new site www.kelseytimmerman.com. I just started working on it last week. I welcome any suggestions you may have about how to improve it.

Introducing the “Where Am I Wearing?” cover

March 12th, 2008 | By Kelsey | 9 Comments »

What do you think? Check out my guns! Actually, that dude is not me, but you’re welcome to imagine that it is. I’m neither that buff nor tan.

A big thanks to Paul McCarthy, the fella who designed the cover, and all of the other folks at Wiley who helped with it.