I'm Still Alive

Wanted to touch base lest you fine people think I've fallen into a crevasse or something equally as mysterious. What in the world have I been doing?

REVISING myself silly.

I've had two brilliant beta readers work their beta'ly magic on my current YA. I threw myself back into my book to muck around a bit and make it stronger...better...closer to query ready. Thank you ladies. You know who you are.

But the main time-sucker-upper? I am in the THICK of official revisions with the math book I co-wrote. They are a wee bit mind-bending.

I'd like to tell you the story. No fretting, it's a good one...

Back when we were still coaching our teachers, Margie and I dreamed up a list of who we wanted to write the foreward to our book. We cooked up a list of THE BIGGEST and BEST heavy hitters in educational writing and mathematics. Our number one smarty pants is a man named Arthur Hyde. Click HERE to see how many books this dude has written in the field of mathematics instruction. I'll wait.

Brainy, eh?

Actually, he is one of Margie's heroes -- you should see her copy of one of his books -- it is FILLED with post-its and her notes. It looks like a Thanksgiving Turkey.

We quote the guy many times in our book, so when I hit send on the email asking if he'd do us the honor of writing the foreward to our book, I was pretty dang nervous. Margie and I called it our, "pipe dream" and both said it couldn't hurt to ask. We emailed our editor and told her who we just emailed and she said, "It would be incredible if Art wrote your forward!"

We waited a day.

On the second day his email came through and he, THE Arthur Hyde, genius extraordinaire, Margie's mathematical hero, said he wanted to have a phone conversation with us...and that he loved our voiced in the chapter we shared with him...and he wanted to read the whole thing. Yah, he really wrote that.

Cue jumping and much screaming. At work.

We set up a time and then huddled together around Margie's cell phone on speaker in my car. And we had a half hour conversation with Arthur Hyde. We kept stealing bewildered glances at each other and mouthing, "Wow!" repeatedly. He was so humble and kind. And he got our book on such a deep level.

He ended up telling a story that Ellin Keene (his equivalent in the Language Arts world and equally as brilliant and famous) agreed to write the foreward to his first book, and he was a complete unknown. And he wanted to do the same for us. How cool is this guy? He also asked us if we'd like him to give us his editorial notes on our manuscript. We mouthed another Wow and told him it would be an honor.

Margie and I have just completed seven straight days of revisions based on his editorial comments, and our book is even more cohesive. We sent our editor the revised version and her editorial comments came to us this morning.

You won't see me 'round these parts for a while. My head will be in Numeracy-land. Wish me well fine blog friends. Wish me well.

p.s. Check out the link above about my video parody word-spread contest.