Funding Week: Monday

I traditionally extort money from my readers in May, and this is the week.  If you would like to support my research and writing costs (and provide me with chocolate, one of the necessary nutrients), you can click on the PayPal Donate-button in the left column.  The lump-sum donations give me a better net yield, but the monthly donations might be gentler with you.  As always, do not feel that you have to give if you are poor.  My sincere thanks go to all of you who read this blog and to all of you who help me run it.

About the book project*, because you deserve to know: 

I finished the first draft of the book two years ago.  Then I sat on it.  Well, not the book but the project, largely because life and several family deaths and illnesses intervened, but also because I was very very stupid and simply assumed that the rules for non-fiction books are the same as for fiction books, i.e., write the book first and then flog it. 

It turns out that this is not the case, that I should pretend I haven't yet written anything but a proposal. 

This proposal, together with about 10,000 pages of other stuff (how wonderful I am, how many readers I could provide with the flick of my fingers, why this particular book would beat all other books in a wild boxing match, why any thinking reader would ever wish to pay to read it,  what my great-great-grandmother's favorite dish was and so on and so on), should be sent to various university-linked** publishers, but only to one at a time.

The selected publisher would then sit on the package from several months to a year.  Should that publisher not like the proposal, it could be sent to a different publisher, only the different publisher wants a different set of those 10,000 pages (perhaps something about the great-uncle Ilmari's second name being Donatus and how often I floss my fangs), but the same several-months-to-a-year of musing time.  And so it goes.

Because this particular book will never provide me with retirement income and because I already have read it, the incentives to work on all that self-marketing just weren't there***.  But now I have printed out the first draft chapters and might update and polish them and perhaps make them available to those who are interested in the topic.

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* The topic is how psychological, sociological and some medical research about women, in particular,  and gender, in general,  is popularized, what biases are visible in those popularizations and how they affect what gets dragged out into the limelight and what gets hidden, as well as what we ultimately "learn." 

**  I began this search by looking for an agent (those individualized 10,000 page-long packages were required for that, too), and I was told by two of them that although they liked my proposal it would be better suited to a university press than the commercial marketplace.  Which was a lovely way of rejecting the proposal.

***  And also because I am weird.