“WE HAVE EVERYTHING THAT A CIRCUS MUST HAVE" -- Marvin Spindler

“WE HAVE EVERYTHING THAT A CIRCUS MUST HAVE" -- Marvin Spindler
Horses, Camels, Ponies, Donkeys and Dogs Coming to 18 American Cities ...

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

The INDEX is DONE, and I'm Feeling High on the Price of My New Book --

What's worse in a book than no index? An index with names but no page numbers! ... I nearly brought this off, minutes before the final version of my Inside the Changing Circus: A Critic's Guide (due out Jan.) was on its way to a print vendor (the soul, I think, who recruits the best press offer, something like that). Doing an index is torturous enough without trying to proof the damn thing. Which I forgot to do. Horror of horrors! Gerard Souls back there, but all by himself, without a page number. And a spec "Old Vienna" and four guys named Dominguez, whose first names were so confusing, I nearly went crazy trying to figure out how to list them (seems three of them hail from the famed family Quiros) ...

Only a primer, that up there, on how comatose indexing can make me feel and act -- and review, read on, though I fully respects its critical usefulness to a book. Much more so than the damned annotation numbers I've been chained to in the last too many books. Not, thank God, on Inside the Changing Circus! I HATE text littered with numbers. Here, I have listed key sources in an informal section back of the book. That I value.

Another thing I love about BearManor Media, whose young publisher, Ben Ohmart, currently hangs out in Japan (he married a Japanese lady a few years back, not indexed) , is this: My book, in paperback at nearly 300 pages, is priced at only $19.95! Good going, BearManor! I've been embarrassed in some recent publishing episodes with books of mine that were priced sky high; might that be why the editors insisted on annotating? To foster a more scholarly image, thus justifying the extreme price? ... Sure, this means I will get less royalties, but so be it. I'd rather write books that people who might want to give them a chance can afford to. ...

Blame it on the index: That review down there about Cirque du Soleil was composed -- or decomposed -- during the final stages of my indexing obligations. I think it managed to be even more a bore than the show -- Tote Tote Totem, Good Bye! -- that it purports to review. So, I've chopped it down to the humdrum essentials, something like I wish Cirque would do.

I might continue this latter. Lots of big top bits backed up in e-mail. Blame it on cyber courier Don Covington for failing to send footnotes.

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