Book Out Tomorrow!

Throughout the process of writing the book, drawing the pictures, and getting it published, it always seemed too good to be true. I kept thinking that at some point Wiley would change their minds, and I would be starting all over again. But here it is! The book is out tomorrow, and I can't even wrap my mind around it. If you get a chance, please stop by your local bookstore and ask them for a copy of the book. Thank you thank you to all of your support and your encouragement, tough questions, and thoughtful comments. You helped make this possible.

New Improved Cover Is Out

I just got the newest version of the cover...the version that I think is going to be the actual, real live cover! It looks pretty similar to the old one, but just a bit more polished, and you can see more detail in my hair. I'm so excited!

I know I haven't been posting nearly as often as I'd like to...but I have been working on the site behind the scenes to add several new pages, as well as beefing up the answer bank with lots more fresh new answers. I do appreciate all the wonderful support I've had through this process! Thank you so much for reading. I truly am humbled.

The book is available for pre-ordering!

I know it's been a long time coming, but I still can't believe I'm writing these words: Curly Like Me: How to Grow Your Hair Healthy, Long, and Strong is available for pre-order!

Here's a bit about the book:

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (May 2010)

ISBN: 978-0470536421

WHERE TO PRE-ORDER:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Borders
• Indie Bound
• Wiley
• Coming soon: Books-A-Million

The simple secrets to growing healthy, long, naturally curly hair!

Do you spend countless hours— and untold dollars—on weaves, perms, salon visits, and products that promise to “cure,” change, heal, or make your hair more manageable, only to end up even more frustrated? Do you wrestle daily with hair you can’t get a brush through? Do you struggle to keep from hurting your child when you comb through their tight curls? Would you like to learn how to grow your tightly curly hair long and make it happy?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, this is the book for you. It gives the information and techniques you need to take charge of very curly hair. You will learn how not only to care for your curls, but also to cherish them, all the while saving time, effort, and money.

Curly Like Me is a complete beginner’s guide to tightly curly hair care.

Within it you’ll learn:

• Simple, easy-to-follow instructions with over 250 original photographs and illustrations
• Proper care, the best products, tools, and ingredients for curls
• Pain-free techniques on how to comb and style your curls, or your child's curls
• Over 30 easy curl-enhancing hairstyle ideas, tips for growing out your perm, and more

Say goodbye to broken, frizzy, damaged hair and begin your journey to naturally curly hair free from breakage and damage. Applying the ideas and information in this book will end the damage, frustration, and heartache of the past so you can love your hair the way it really is. Curly Like Me empowers you to take back the care of your own hair. It gives you the secrets to growing healthy, long, natural hair without costly treatments, products, marketing misinformation, or styles.

The book has a publication date!!

I am so excited to be able to write these words: Curly Like Me is set to come out early May of 2010!!

I haven't seen the cover yet—Wiley is still working on it—but I can't wait to see what it will look like!

(The above picture was one of the covers I was thinking about when I was originally going to print the book myself)

Monster in a Box

When I took this picture last night of (most of the drafts) of my book as I've worked on it over theses past couple years, that was what popped into my head: Monster in a Box. This was actually the title of a movie by the late Spalding Grey, where he talked about writing a book that just got bigger and bigger, but he couldn't seem to find an end to it.

Though I have an ending for mine, I keep adding to it, so it grows and grows. But now it's time to stop adding, and prepare it. When I first started the book, I was planning on self-publishing it. I figured that since I was unknown, my time would be best spent learning typesetting, and print it myself. Through an amazingly happy turn of events, my book will be published by an actual publisher (Wiley). I just got the contract in the mail yesterday to prove it.

I know I am stunned, and absolutely happy. I've been writing books since at least the age of four. And soon I will have a real live book. The only thing is that it's due at the end of this month (ack!). I'm going to have to focus over the next week on getting it in the right format, so I don't horrify Wiley by turning in a mess. So I guess for the next week and a half, if you don't hear much from me, it's because I'm grooming my monster to not be so scary in the light of day, finally out of the box.

Fire and the Infinite Loop

You'd think that correcting a document and fixing dinner would be simple things to do in an evening. I thought the same thing, until Thursday night, when I not only created infinity, but I almost burned down our apartment complex, too. This is what happened:

I just got back my book proposal from my agent, with the changes she felt it needed. Luckily nothing major, and every suggestion she had, once she said it, made perfect sense. So I worked on making the changes all day on Thursday. I got to the last changes, which is incorporating two sets of photos appearing at the beginning and the end of the chapter together in one place instead of two. Seemed simple enough. Unless you are me.

So I start happily rearranging the photos. There are text boxes accompanying the photos, so I copy and paste them with their appropriate pictures from one copy of the document to another . Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something weird is happening to the little blue scroll button thing to the right. It's moving up. My document begins repaginating. I don't pay it much mind for a while; I'm focused. Then I notice my page count is going CRAZ-EE. It's moving like a digital stopwatch counting down nanoseconds to the end of the year or something. It turns out my document has inexplicably begun creating an infinite number of pages. At first I think maybe I can get to the end and delete whatever is down there causing the ruckus. But at the depth of about 31,000 pages, it crashes. There is no end. I have a bottomless document. Then I make it worse. It's just another talent I have.

Just as I realize I have created a form of infinity, Jon (my guy) comes home from work. It's time to fix dinner (I try and make myself useful when I can). But I'm weirded out, distressed and frustrated by my ever-expanding document. So here's what I do: I start dinner.
I decide to let things warm up on the stove for just a minute while I check one more thing...

The next thing I hear is Jon make a sound I've never heard him make before. I get up reluctantly, pained to have to step away from my document (that's still wildly creating pages), and upon approaching the kitchen, I notice an orange glow on the walls.

Yup. The pan I had put on the burner to warm up had caught fire, and tall flames were coming straight out of the pan. Quick thinking, Jon turns off the burner, and runs to get the fire extinguisher from outside our door. My survival instincts are sluggish, and actually, not that interested. I debated just putting the lid on the pan. That's supposed to work, I thought detachedly as the smoke alarms began going off. But what if I reach over the flames, and my sleeve catches on fire? I wouldn't like that much. I move the bag of pancake mix out of the way of the flames. By now Jon is back with the extinguisher, but his earlier move of turning off the burner has caused the flames to die down. We watch the flames go out. All that's left of them is the blackened pan.

Apart from feeling stupid, I was actually way more upset about my infinite document doing who-knows-what in the other room. Of course I apologize all over the place to him (I still am). Luckily, nothing was hurt. Even the pan is fine. A little soot, and a very smoky apartment. No big thing. I began to fix dinner (in a different pan and I don't leave the dinner this time).

The document wasn't savable. Jon tried everything. He copied it, saved it as a docx, sent it to his computer, opened it. It looked fine. Then he'd send it back to the mac, and when he opened it, it was still infinite. Basically, I ended up doing my work over again using the original version my agent sent back to me. Apparently, it's a huge bug with text boxes. When I'd copied and pasted a bunch of those text boxes, I guess there was no longer an anchor for them to call home. Orphaned, the little text boxes searched and searched for their anchors, and finding none, the program started creating more and more pages looking for those anchors. Since there were none in that document (all the anchors were still in the document I'd copied the text boxes from), the document became infinite. And I created fresh new text boxes, complete with anchors for each of them to call home. And as of today, I haven't started any new fires. Well...it is time to start fixing dinner.

...and behind door number two...

Just like my dark curls and my chai-colored skin, writing, illustrating and putting books together has been a major part of me. As far back as I can remember (and even before then, since I possess the books from when I was less than five) I wrote, illustrated in crayon, cut and stapled papers into booklets. Before first grade I was gluing my illustrations onto cardboard, laminating them with contact paper, and binding with glue. One book I even cut out a round medallion, colored it gold, and stuck it onto the top right corner of a book I'd made because I'd noticed several of my books had the same medallion on them. It seemed important.

Throughout all of junior high and high school I perfected the art of walking and writing (Plus side: You can write and get your exercise at the same time. Down side: Running into telephone poles.) At this time I was working on my epic horse story Datashen (this is what I'm working on in the photo, taken when I was thirteen. The feet to the side belong to my brother). The number of pages stuffed binder after binder. When I'd finish it, I'd start over again, rewriting it. At the beginning of the story, because it would take several years to write by hand and illustrate, I would have totally different handwriting by the end of it. The start of the story sported large, balloon-like lettering. By the end of the story, my writing got smaller and sharper as I got older. As I flip through the hundreds of pages of these volumes, I watch my handwriting morph, as if on a radical diet, from plump to gaunt strokes, becoming closer to the sharp and scratchy handwriting I have today.

In twelfth grade, when I wasn't doing much talking anymore, I wrote copiously on this book, and in my journals. One day that year, I finished the horse book, and started over one more time. There it changed from the horse story to another story all together. By the time I entered college, the new version didn't have a single horse in sight.

In my early 20s I set about printing this newer book myself. I hand-lettered the drop caps for every chapter. I did the color illustrations. I tried to learn Pagemaker (my computer kept crashing, wiping everything out). I even got to the point where, not able to afford having the pages bound, I decided to bind them myself. The paper stock for the cover had turned out too flimsy—they couldn't get thick paper through the copy-shop color printer—so I laminated each cover with clear contact paper. (At this time there was a stray cat, Ernie, living in the apartment, and with him came a rampant outbreak of fleas. Often I'd laminate a bunch of book covers, only to find fleas caught between the covers and the contact paper covering them.) I roughed up the sides of the pages with a wood rasp and hot glued the covers over the books. Then I'd carry them, ten at a time, down to get their rough edges trimmed away.

So I guess all this is to say, I love making books. It's as if a book doesn't feel finished until I've designed it and bound it myself (much like my beadwork doesn't feel done until every possible surface is covered with beads).

And so it seemed natural that my newest manuscript for taking care of tightly coiled, mixed-race hair would be done the same way. After putting up the website (my mission is to see no more people go through with their hair what I did with mine), I set about learning the typesetting program InDesign, Photoshop, and reading books on how to design the pages and cover. How amazing would it be to hold a book in my hands that I had done entirely myself? Well, if it's a beautiful book, there would be lots to be proud of. If not, I guess the drawback is I wouldn't have the luxury of being able to blame anyone else.

Then something unexpected happened. A real live book agent took an interest in my book. I'd read stories of people having agents. Previously, I felt having one was akin to stumbling upon a unicorn in the woods. Magical if it were to happen, but you might not want to stake all your hopes on finding one. But nevertheless, I have an agent (thanks in a huge part to my editor). And she seems really nice, too. And I feel if the universe is kind enough to give me an amazing opportunity, along the lines of sighting a unicorn, I will honor the universe.

So now I will do my absolute best to put my all into whatever path I end up taking. Whether I create the book myself, or it's done by a publishing company, it will be exciting, and I know I will grow from either. The great thing is that I will be beside myself happy when I finally hold my published book in my hands. Hopefully minus the fleas.

Introvert to Extrovert

Looking back, it's almost as if I were a flower opening in reverse from childhood to adolescence. That by the time I stumbled, dazed, out of adolescence, it was as if all my petals had folded in on themselves.

And now I am trying to reverse the journey, to reconnect with my childhood chutzpah. Not to say I was always a well-behaved kid. Honestly, I was known to border on downright obnoxiousness. So maybe not going so far as to be a wild child, but enough to jump into the middle of the stream and be okay watching the current I create. To participate instead of lurking and watching voicelessly.

I've been trying to think what it was about turning twelve that made me change into an opposite person from what I started out as. Well, I know a big part of it was the hair. It was about that age that it got cut off, leaving me mushroom-headed. At the same time I went from an environment of few rules to one of many. I went from a place where things were easy to where they were hard. And I went from one where I was closer to society's ideal of beauty, to where I was planets away from the beauty ideal compared to those around me. Plus that whole puberty thing. Man, was I awkward! Braces, big 80's glasses, bad skin, no clue about clothes, and broken, frizzy hair.

And boys. Lots of energy went into trying to catch one of those (no success in highschool, which is just as well. Just like a dog chasing a car, I don't know what I would have done had I actually caught one).

Teenage years are the years that you try on different yous, like dresses, and see which one fits, and which one the world around you responds to in a way that you feel comfortable with. I spent many of those years trying on conforming outfits. Trying to not be odd. Trying out the combination lock to the door of normalcy. Sometime around sixteen or seventeen I gave that up, and got quiet instead. By eighteen, I wrote much more than I spoke.

Then over the years, another change happened. I figured out my hair, and now have the long mermaid hair I'd dreamed of. My curly security blanket. And I've made peace with so many of the things that kept me quiet all those years. And I'm surrounded by wonderful people.

And with the site has come new lessons. Lessons that it's time to have a voice again. To learn the lessons that come with communicating, with having opinions (and actually saying them out loud). Having started the Biracial Hair site has been like finally stepping out into the stream and watching the currents I myself create. Because I have stepped into the water, and put up the site, I have met so many wonderful people, been exposed to many great ideas and voices, and found new friends from all over the world.

I have discovered that the more I've thrown myself to the universe, the more it has given back to me.