"Between The Sheets" is coming. I’ll be including deleted material and additional material, things like excerpts from my actual proposals, emails where I quizzed my friends, asking them to name their fears and contents of their handbags. Here’s a quick excerpt from my book proposal for Straight Up and Dirty:
Each chapter chronicles the exploits of a pre-30 divorcee. Dating changes drastically once your winged arm has a thick stack of red flags under it. It’s no longer, “is he Jewish, wealthy, and good looking?” Now it’s, “is he a momma’s boy, workaholic, or people-pleaser?” Suddenly your list of musts and mustn’ts is rearranged, and the emphasis becomes what you don’t want. So, now you’re more cautious (read: gun-shy). “Well you aren’t marrying his parents, now are you?” is a pill you’ll hide under your tongue and spit out later. You’ve learned not to swallow advice from anyone who has never had a nightmare-in-law. But the “never-beens” in your life don’t know from any of this; they’re still looking for little boys to control. And that’s why I’m here, to hopefully help them steer clear of the same pitfalls I plummeted into. I try to clue them in every step of the way, as though they’re dwarfs, with reminders and tales of caution on how this Snow White finds and makes her own happiness in the face of poisoned apples, mirror obsessed witches, and a prince who didn’t know the first thing about honor.
It’s actually really strange, writing an overview of your book because it still needs to be in your voice, yet, you need to step outside yourself and figure out why anyone would want to read (and buy) your story. The best thing, though, about proposals are that they’re merely suggestions. You start with a plan, outlining where you hope to go, and then it all gets rewritten, and only part of it turns out to be what you’d originally planned. They’re basically like the shitty analogy about life being like a train, how you should enjoy the journey and forget about the destination because you may never get there.
It’s the same with the guy on bended knee, proposing marriage to a woman he loves, not really sure he’ll still love her in 30 years and 30 pounds, but he’s sure enough about who he is as a person, so he signs up and never looks back. I’ve come to believe (even if I need to remind myself of this from time to time) that all the stuff you hope never happens, eventually just might. So you can worry about it, or just kinda trust that in the end, after the suffering and the pain, after the loss, that really, you will have joy in your life and can, without a doubt, live the life you’d imagined at the start, even if the details and paragraphs of your life’s plot are rearranged, you walk away with the same spirit, your fists in the air, taking shit from no one.
