Teri and the Book Propsal

It's no secret that I'm a ferocious avoider. I can out-avoid anyone. I have been known to walk a mile or more to go to a different store if I feel I've managed to embarrass myself at a store a few block away. I've had letters and phone messages I wasn't sure about sit, undealt with, on my machine or counter for weeks or months. I actually had my contact lens prescription for my left eye expire before I was able to pick them up because I felt a bit weird that I only had the money to buy the right eye at the time. I once even climbed out of a bathroom window in high school just to avoid a person—who didn't even know me.

When I was originally writing my manuscript, I knew that in order to present it to publishers, I had to produce a book proposal. A book proposal is basically a long sales document describing your book, audience size and composition, and how (well) it might sell. I began to write mine early on, caught up in the spirit of getting things done, and trying to go against another part of my nature...to procrastinate (I come from a proud line of procrastinators, just ask my dad). A deadly combination when mixed with avoiding, let me tell you. But I decided to face the beast, and write the document.

I wrote and wrote. And one day, when still facing the bulk of it yet to go, I decided, true to my avoiding nature, that maybe doing the book myself might be the way to go after all. So I got to work on designing the book and getting it edited to print it on my own. In part to avoid writing the scary book proposal.

And then the universe gave me a huge gift, one too amazing to avoid...I got an agent. Who then needed a book proposal to give to the publishing companies she was approaching.

I have heard that the universe gives you lessons, and it will keep giving you a lesson over and over until you learn it. Thus it seemed to be with the book proposal.

I wrestled with myself for weeks, but prevailed, and finally finished the proposal. Thinking it was now out of my life for good, I gave it to my agent. I was so relieved to hand it over! It was almost like I felt the more I touched it, the more potential there was that I might mess it up. Like my proposal was a new baby bird and I had puffy mitten-hands. I was almost afraid to look directly at it (in my defense, this was the document that went haywire in Fire and the Infinite Loop, so I'm not completely a wackadoo about that one).

Late last week the proposal came back to me once again for a few more adjustments. I have a feeling this will be a lesson the universe may have to give me a few dozen more times (or more). Maybe one day I'll finally learn to face things head on the first time, instead of going around the block to avoid it, only to find it waiting for me there around the corner.

Tragedy Stories

I'm terrible with ages, but sometime around when I was six or seven, I discovered that not all stories have to have a happy ending. This was a huge revelation to me as a child. Up until then, all the stories I'd been reading, all the television shows I'd been watching, and all the movies I'd seen all ended well for the main characters. I guess I thought it was a requirement that things had to be wrapped up positively in order for a story to be considered valid. I was thrilled to hear this didn't have to be! That at the end of the story, something bad could happen; a character could even...die. Imagine all the new possibilities! I was so excited.

Immediately I began work on a new series of stories called Tragedy Stories. A typical Tragedy Story of mine would go something like this: A baby alligator (I loved alligators, so I often wrote about them) got lost from it's home. He had to walk 100000000 miles (I'd usually just add a bunch of zeroes to the end of the number to make it look really impressive) to find his way back to his family. Just as he was about find them, he got hit by a car. The end. Or: A butterfly flew 9800000000 miles (another number that I thought would make an impression on grown-ups), and just as he reached home, he lost a wing and could not fly. The end.

At this time my mom had a reunion at Hampton University, and she took me and my four year old brother with her. I only remember two things about that visit. The first was that I got hit in my eye area with a toy car (my brother and I were throwing it back and forth to each other up and down a flight of stairs. I was at the bottom). I remember crying determinedly for a really long time in hopes I would get taken home, but no such luck. At some point I got tired of crying and moved on to something else.

The second thing I remember was that I was seated for dinner next to a hapless Alum of my mom's. I turned to him and began to explain with gusto and intensity my Tragedy Stories. I think I told him every single one I'd written, and to show off, threw in some bonus ones I made up on the spot. I remember him having an uncomfortable deer-in-the-headlights sort of expression. At the time I figured that was just how he wore his face.

My grandmother was horrified when I told her about the Stories. She begged me repeatedly to change the tragic endings to happy ones, after I read some of the stories to her. But I wouldn't budge. Changing the endings would defeat the whole purpose of the so-named Tragedy Stories. That logic didn't appease her in the least.

I have noticed, in more recent years as I've gone through my old stories, that these particular tales are mysteriously missing.

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.