Nonfiction

The Short Version

After giving the publishing company spoken of on my bio/info page about a year to respond to my query letter, I went looking for them and discovered that in the ensuing year they had acquired a website.

I e-mailed the company asking for confirmation that they did NOT want to look at my manuscript before withdrawing my offer and pursuing other channels. They e-mailed back saying that of course they were interested in seeing it.

I sent them one of the dummies of the completed project. Some 2–3 weeks later they responded, sounding interested, and said that they would get back to me.

In mid-April they did get back to me saying that they were only interested in half of the project, and what did I think about deleting the rest?

Well that took me aback somewhat. I responded honestly that I didn’t think much of it — but that I WOULD think more of it, get some advice, and get back to them with a definite answer.

Evidently this was not submissive enough. Three days later I received an e-mail stating that “perhaps I would prefer to find some other company.”

Given that despite our several written communications and their several weeks’ possession of my dummy manuscript they still could not be bothered to spell my name correctly, I reflected that they were probably right. No other avenues panned out any better, of course.

Upon the whole, I gather that my experience with the world of publishing houses counts as positively benign.

In any event, since I am well aware that getting this professionally published would neither make my fortune nor serve as a professional stepping-stone to anything, I have decided to go ahead and post it here.

Notice! This file is NOT under any circumstances to be commercially sold, nor to be distributed, in any form, from any source other than this website.

The format of this file (i.e. 17x11-inches) is a bit awkward for casual onscreen reading. Besides, anyone who wants to actually use the information will want to print out the sections needed, so I am posting only the compressed file for download here. I have posted a teaser chapter which can be viewed online for the lookie-loos.

Sample Chapter of Reinventing the Wheel for online reading (713 kb)

Download Reinventing the Wheel: Full Project (117.2 MB)

A special note on viewing this file: This is the oldest file on the site, built before the www was even a gleam in Al Gore and his associates’ eyes. It was not designed for web viewing, it was desined to be printed. And, when I built it, I was working in unfamiliar, and somewhat immature software. While the work was in progress, in order to avoid some troublesome text-wrap glitches from minor positioning adjustments I converted the text of all of the captions to paths. This affects screen display (blurry until you zoom in really close), but ONLY the screen display. It prints smoothly.

A special note on printing this file: This document was designed to be printed on 11 x 17-inch paper. (Your printer may call this Ledger or Tabloid.) The Acrobat Reader by default will resize pages to fit on whatever size is loaded in the paper tray. Please be advised that the diagrams used in these instructions may be too small to read clearly if those pages are resized to fit on letter-szed paper. It is strongly encouraged that you find a printer which will print on 11 x 17 paper before printing the pages you need.

Additional note: there are blank pages in this document.