What are your plans for the next 12 months?
We’re working on publicizing this book now, but we’re also laying the groundwork for another book to come. As I mentioned, this book took almost three years from idea to reality.
Do you have any writing tips you would like to share…some do’s and don’ts?
I’d strongly recommend to anyone doing a book of interviews that they make sure to hire the best transcribers they can right from the start. That will save you a great deal of time. I learned that the hard way early on, when I checked their work by listening back to the interviews.
I edited this book myself, which was a tremendous learning experience for me. As an attorney, I’m trained to be very careful and very precise with language, grammar, and punctuation. That’s a relatively straightforward task when it involves your own words. But to truly capture another person’s conversational inflections, and convey accurately whatever it is they’re emphasizing, required a great deal more thought than I ever imagined. So I’d also recommend a writer keep the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style close at hand!
How did you determine what to include in the book and what to leave out — or are all interviews included?
Once the project got under way, we kept getting so many responses from people who wanted to participate that we finally had to stop at 105 interviews. We could have had many more, but it would have significantly delayed our publishing date. And with the book at over 600 pages already, we thought even that might be too much to include. But each person’s experience and advice brought something unique to the book, so we included everything.
Thank you so much for your time; your book and life sound fascinating!
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