Pretty Good Barnyard English

I thought I would have my book, Spreading Wing, out by now. The publishing process just seems to drag on and on, though. But Amazon is doing a great job. A goodly bit of the delays were in my court, I'll have to admit.

      I could have hired a professional to proof read and edit, and, as it turned out, I would have been time ahead. But the thought of an editor scares me. Bad.

      The first publisher, from another company that I considered, called and talked to me several times. After I had told her about my blog, she called me again a few days later, and we talked a long time that day. “You're not a trained writer, are you? Your work is a bit raw.” I had to admit, she had me pegged. “Nobody else writes like that. Others spend a lot of time slicking up their work.” We talked a long time after she said that, about my blog posts, and how I had made Barbara into my star, on and on. I began to realize, she had read them all, one hundred or so.

     I do not want a slick book. I'm not a slick person, forever a hillbilly and all that. And, I don't want anybody else editing and slicking my thoughts up until I totally lose my identity. I'm who I am, for better or worse. I want to tell my memories, preserved just like they came out of my mind, just like I talk. For good or bad. At the end of the day, I want to die knowing it is my book. My thoughts. My memories. Told just like I talk. Pure me. And, I love short sentences, and long paragraphs.

      My eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Apple, told me once I had pretty good barnyard English. That's about the closest I've ever come to a grammar award. She might not have been so complimentary, though, if I had not been so sweet on her daughter, Virginia, at the time.

      Barbara Knows what I'm trying to do with this book. I trust her to not start changing my thoughts all around. And, she's a word guru. She helped me a lot. But her back will just not hold up to endless hours of proof reading at the computer. So, most of the proof reading fell to me. And that's hard. What sounded good when it came out of my mind sounded perfectly good the next ten times I read it also. And, I tend to start re-living my stories, and forget my purpose. I tend to think, If it's very large or very important, it just must be capitalized. To try to keep my attention on my task, I read it through backwards once, word by word. Then backwards paragraph by paragraph. The paragraph thing didn't work. Since much of my book consists of one paragraph stories, hundreds of them that stand alone, I still started re-living my stories. 

      My dear friend Jane Quick, a retired English prof. At OBU, has read much of it. One thing she told me was to set a trash can beside my computer, and just dump most of those commas into the trash. But I like to herd those words around, with lots of commas, like I herded those cattle at Wing around with a stick. A world without commas is a bland, boring world, to my way of thinking. How could I ever write, just like I talk, without commas to guide the way?

     Jane's husband was a very funny guy. I wish I had known him. He was a teacher. He was famous for doing pratfalls in his classes, just to get a laugh. At his funeral, not long ago, two of his grand kids walked up to speak of him. They both fell flat on their faces! Barbara threw Jane a party on her 80^th birthday. Most all of her friends were over 80, so I worried that they might need help walking up our steep hill. So I stayed down at the bottom of the hill, in case anybody needed me. As it turned out, they all work out hard every day at the gym, just like Jane, regular gym rats. Any one of them could have thrown me over their shoulder and carried me up! At 80, Jane could lie down, grasp one of those huge workout balls between her feet, reach back, and lay it on the floor above her head. Barbara just loves visiting every Wednesday with Jane! Anybody would.

      Amazon first said, Barbara could not send my book to them, in the only form they would accept, without Word, which we don't have on our computer. But Barbara kept quizzing her until she googled it, then said, “Yes, it is possible, but-” That's all Barbara needed to know. She got it there. Like I've said, Barbara just will not let any task she starts defeat her. And, she's totally self taught on the computer. She sent my second batch of corrections of the two proofs in today, and it now looks like a pre-Christmas book is out of the question, time wise. But now, the hay is in the barn. The crop is laid by. I'll let you know here when it's available on amazon.com in America and Europe. I specified Europe also, because in talking to many of our European friends when we were there, (As you know, if you've been reading this blog, Barbara has thousands of European friends) I learned many, many Europeans have ancestors who just sold it all and moved to America when free homestead land became available in the 1800's, and Spreading Wing will tell my European readers much about how they lived when they got here. And, it's all true. I love all my foreign readers of this blog, currently from fifty one countries around the world. Who woulda' guessed!.

     I hope you read it, and like it. I did, every one of those four hundred fifty or so pages, the twenty or so times I've read it. Thanks for reading!

You responded so well to my five best stories of 2011, that I have decided to run the five most read stories of 2012, starting next post. Since The Summer of My Broken Heart still got the most reads, I may have to go fiction, and write a romance book next. It will have to be fiction, because my true love life is already pretty much an open book.:)