And I’ve only read the title and the table of contents.

I just picked up 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published, & 14 Reasons Why It Just Might by Pat Walsh on the recommendation of, I think, Jenny Rappaport. Could have been The Rejecter, actually, because I was reading them both about the same time the other night. At any rate, the title struck me, as whoever’s recommendation of it as one of five books they recommend to writers. Given that I’m planning on giving a lot of advice to writers next month at LTUE, I figured it would be good to cram in a few good books by editors (Walsh is the founder of MacAdam/Cage) to help me better define what it is I want to say. Plus, like I said earlier about Dear Genius, it’s good inspiration for the everyday. 

I wish that one of those places online had a sample of even just the Table of Contents for people to browse, because it really does get into the top reasons that I or most editors I know reject something in the slush pile. Or, rather, that a book never even shows up in my slush pile. With sections such as “Talk is Cheap” and “The Cold Hard Truth,” I can tell this will be both an entertaining read for me and a highly informative one for anyone looking to get published.

I’ll have to give a full report of my impressions after reading, of course. I just picked it up from the library tonight, and it will be my bedtime reading. As it’s midnight (how? how? argh, Wednesdays especially go so fast), that might not be much reading, but it’ll be long enough to finish this lovely hot chocolate the cats have been eyeing.

Also, why is it that all children who come to my homework help night at the library want help with math? I left that behind so many years ago now. Oh, I’m good at it–up to about trig/precalc–but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather help a second grader with her spelling or reading assignment! Tonight, seriously, every single kid that came in, from 1st grade to a junior in high school, wanted help on their math. The poor junior–I couldn’t for the life of me help him with his probabilities. I was kind of hoping that the math genius–the very cute math genius, I might add–from Numb3rs would pop into the room and explain all the probabilities of Patience hitting a red light five days in a row when the light was set to be red 60% of the time. He, I could understand it from. The student’s book? Not so much. Just a lot of problems, no samples or explanations. It’s really, really hard to pull a memory of a fleeting moment in a math class fifteen years ago out of my brain!

One good thing coming out of this, is that I’m remember how good I am at regular stuff like algebra and geometry, and how much I really like it. I just happen to like words more.