13 January, 2014

If you know writers who are unhappily single, be sure to pass this advice along to them. Don’t be blatant about it – you don’t want to embarrass them. Slip it under their door when you know they’re not home. Use someone else’s printer for anonymity.

They don’t fail because they reek of bad coffee and French cigarettes, nor because the angle of their berets isn’t rakish. Not even that they offend potential mates with luscious verbiage that is driven by lust.

It’s because they go about dating all wrong. And here’s the story:

My brilliant rising historian of race and gender was approached by the foremost historian in her field to show him one of her articles. (Among historians, it’s not etchings, I guess.) He’s a guy she admires supremely – made more attractive with the name Pierre. She was thrilled of course, and sent a piece which she had submitted to a journal.

He responded with an extended critique – a small amount was a challenge to her methodology and factual information, but he noted a lot of problems with typos.

She was mortified. Worse than smiling with bits of coarse ground pepper and arugula on your teeth.

Here was her mistake: the WAY she went about dating.

She sent him not the final copy that she had submitted to the journal (with all typos corrected), but an earlier draft. She failed to notice this because she dated her files the way most American writers do: MM-DD-YY. The same way they date their checks (if they have a day job to support their writing habit).

Putting the year first in the YY-MM-DD format eliminates any chance that 12 means December rather than 2012.

It also means that if you worked on a file during several Decembers (as many novelists do), they will still appear in your Finder or Windows Explorer in chronological order. In the confusing way of dating, 12-07-13 (Dec. 7, 2013 in MM-DD-TT format) will appear before 12-09-12 (Dec. 09, 2012), though it is actually later. Using 12-12-09 and 13-12-07 in YY-MM-DD leaves no room for that confusion.

This way, when you’re looking for your file, each successive version appears in chronological order, so it’s not possible to send someone the wrong version – it’s obvious at a glance which is the most recent one. You’ll never miss the chance for a second date again. (I must clarify that Mr. Big Guy was only expressing professional interest in my client, but that was enough to excite her.)

Before I sign off I want to mention how exciting the last four weeks have been. I’ve received in the mail physical copies of four books I’ve proudly worked on:

Maintaining Your Weight Loss: A Mindfulness-Based Guide to the Adventure of a Lifetime by Dr. David Levenson. (I also supervised the interior, cover and website design – all inviting and appropriate for the audience.)

The Rummy Club by Anoop Ahuja Judge – a novel about four Indian school girls who meet up years later in California. On the surface it’s a light read, but it invokes the immigrant experience that transcends roots, with the distinctive flavors of India. Not for sale yet, she has been sending out copies for review and will launch officially April 16 at a gallery in San Francisco. (She is much more patient about birthing her baby than any client I’ve worked with.) I enjoy Anoop’s erratic blog.

Opening the Aloha Mind: Healing Self, Healing the World with Ho‘oponopono by Jim Nourse, PhD, L.Ac. Jim designed the book before it was edited, which made it particularly appealing to work on because he had chosen stunning photos and overlaid quotes from various healers and traditions. He also inserted blank pages at the end of each chapter as a way of inviting the reader to turn inwards before jumping into the next concept, a way of inviting them into Aloha Mind. He chose to publish with Balboa Press, the “vanity press” arm of Hay House. He thought the association with Louise Hay might help his marketing (though he seems to doubt this now). He said everyone on staff but one was excellent to work with. But it cost a lot money and they haven’t shown off what they will do for marketing yet. I hope they do a LOT more than other “subsidy publishers” like Author House, iUniverse, and Author Solutions.

The Midnight Stranglers: Obamacare, The Tea Party, and a Sleep Apneac’s Fight Against the U.S. Healthcare System by Aiden Hill is available as I write in Kindle only, but by the time this is posted, the paperback should be available as well. Drawing on (mostly horror) film storylines in a very funny way, Aiden details his struggle with treatment for sleep apnea (which has a high correlation with stroke if not dealt with) in the pre-Obamacare medical system – which was his motivation for working with Covered California before the new system went into effect. He hoped to prevent some of the problems that have arisen, and he writes about how the environment he worked in was a sampling of the disasters that are in the news. And he analyzes why the Tea Party has raised such a ruckus about the Affordable Care Act.

Yup, I’m proud of the work I’ve done and delighted with the friendships I’ve established in the process and the great designers I’ve met in the process.

Until next time, delight in the process.

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Read PDF Version: Why Writers Fail at the Dating Game.