(9-15-09) added original Table of Contents
(9-14-09) Since it is increasingly apparent that physical copies of Beauty from Afar are becoming more scarce, I’m commencing to put the text online. Like, starting now, really.
I do not yet have pretty e-books made up. I’m working from an ugly Acrobat document I managed to make out of the original Quark document of the book that I wheedled away from my publisher in 2006. I don’t even know how I managed to get that far, since neither version of Quark I have will open the publisher’s file now. InDesign won’t do it either. If someone with a Mac and Quark 6 or so wants to see if they can help me out with a conversion … well, I’d be grateful.
Meantime, I’m pulling the text out and pasting it to a text file that will eventually work great as a flat format e-book. And, as I go, I’ll post pages. Today, we have the original author’s note and the foreword.
That’s the cover of the book, at right. I didn’t pick it. And, in fact, I’m still a little embarrassed by it, for obvious reasons. I’ve been told by a lot of people I shouldn’t be and they’re probably right. “Sex sells.” What’s to be embarrassed by?
Still …
Here is the never-before-published cover sheet I did for the original book proposal. You can tell I had a different notion of what the book was about.
“Beauty from Afar” was always my first choice as main title. My publisher went along with it in the end, though they definitely wanted something rather more descriptive. They kept asking me for “something better.” I finally told them that “Beauty from Afar” was my best idea and I wasn’t going keep coming up with inferior substitutes for them.
We went around and around and around on the subtitle, trying to cram the descriptive stuff in. How do you describe in a title something that no one has heard of before? Definitely a problem. As I recall, Debora Yost, my wonderful and talented editor, came up with the final version … Though I’ll take the blame if she doesn’t want it.