Writing a book.

[adams house cat]

hat with all your kind comments about my little vignettes I have decide to collect them, in expanded form, in book form. It will take a little while, of course, but in the meantime I will continue to post some of my experiences on here. This means that if my book reaches publication none of you will need to buy it as you will already have them. But I enjoy reliving them, writing them and posting them.

[Moonlight Shadow]

Excellent idea, good luck with that!

[hobbes]

I'll still buy it. Good luck with it mate. They're lovely stories.

[Kevin S]

Great news!

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Great, I've just discovered your stories ahc, they're a joy to read. I, too, would buy your book.

[Cal Alamein]

Excellent!

[Hot Pepsi]

Maybe OTF should start its own imprint.

[Femme Folle]

I would buy one. I enjoy reading your stories, but I also like to support writers I know.

[tee rex]

Well, we've already been the lab rats for a cartoonist and a writer (Wingco, Big Dave's Gusset).

Just remember to come back and visit when you're living on red carpets and talk shows.

[Patrick Thistle]

I'd buy one. Also I think it would be the great basis for a dramacomedy on Netflix.

[hobbes]

There's a few more authors here and passim than that. Not least imp who has done a few books.

[tee rex]

Imp's agent has asked me to point out that he was a hack - er, celebrity author - before OTF. He owes us nothing.

[San Bernardhinault]

If they don't coalesce into book form, these would also make a brilliant weekly column in the New Bern Gazette or Washington Post.

[Nefertiti2]

Better the other way round. Column first, then book.

[ad hoc]

Realised when I read this sentence just now, I instantly thought of ahc

Daniel Lurvey, an attorney who represented Sayoc in some of his criminal cases

(from this
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...y_to_clipboard

[G-Man]

It's so much easier to publish a book now than it was just a decade ago. And so much more difficult to sell, even as marketing and distribution opportunities have expanded.

But if one wants to publish a book with no concern for sales, it's pretty easy to produce. There's even software which novices can use. Though I'd recommend having somebody who knows the job to do the typesetting. If WOM has already nabbed the editing gig for ahc's book, I offer my typesetting services.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Actually, thanks Hobbes and tee rex for reminding us about Imp's book, I've put it on my Christmas list.

There's a few more authors here and passim than that. Not least imp who has done a few books.

I’m currently writing a book, been at it since 2004 in a very on-off way (I mean, I have a job, and pretty full time before - when I taught and ran a department - less so now), it's a French/English dictionary of football terms & phrases, lots of research and work involved. The comprehensive preliminary work alone (compiling the words and phrases) took me years as I had to read 1000s of match reports/articles in both languages + listen to a wide range of football radio/TV programmes in order to source the material as nobody’s done that before in French/English so I had to start from scratch (a few short glossaries on the Net but many of poor quality). Variety of material is very important, I really wanted to source my material from everywhere, including the terraces, pubs etc. I could have chosen to do a much shorter version (it’d be finished by now) but I wanted it to be as exhaustive as possible, so it’s slow.

Then you have to sort all the material out, organise it, find translations or equivalents (not always easy), plenty of examples, have to check and recheck, phone people etc. then input the work in the dictionary you’re writing. The list of terms is more or less finished now (I haven’t counted but probably about 25,000 different terms & phrases in both languages + 1000s of examples which I’ve tried to make amusing. It’s over 1,100 A4 pages at the moment but I’m trimming it a bit as I go along, especially the examples, some are too long etc. and I'm reasoning that a publishing house might not want to have a 3-line long example about an obscure word. I’m currently at the “mirror” checking stage (while still continuously adding the odd word and phrase) which is very slow, everything takes a long time when you create a big dictionary from scratch. The next and hopefully final stage will be the final overall check. This mirror checking stage is very time-consuming as you have to make sure that every term in one part (say, the English part) is also in the other, with the same or similar examples + make sure your cross-referencing of phrases is tip top and the same in both languages. Creating a dictionary on yr own is not just very slow but more complex than it looks.

Lots of technical organisation to do for each translation, especially the polysemic terms. Some terms are 2 or 3 A4 pages long with the examples and compound words, such as “tackle”. I’ve listed well over 100 different types of tackles, and they obviously all need a French translation, and vice-versa so it takes a long time. Ditto the 100+ different ways of hitting a ball, which don’t always have a neat French translation – a French equivalent or a short periphrasis is therefore needed then, which you have to create – as English is a more descriptive language than French. There are also plenty of French football terms with no direct trans in English, you have to constantly work around that. I could have not included these terms, would have made my life easier but nah, even if they are used only by some fans in Normandy or Picardy, they need to be in that dictionary. So the whole thing needs to be highly organised, just like in a normal bilingual dictionary.

I have contacts in the publishing industry, mainly in France, they’re interested but while it’s very much a labour of love and I don’t particularly need the money, I certainly don’t intend to get ripped off either so I’ll see, maybe I’ll self-publish but I’m not too worried at this stage, the damn thing needs finishing first and then I’ll worry about the rest.

Could take me another 3-4 yrs to finish, I’m slow with it, I see it as a very relaxing hobby and as I like to do many different things in life and try my hand at new things too I only put in a few hours a week, more during holidays. I’d hate to feel enslaved by one big project so I’m taking my time over it. Sometimes I get the urge to crack on with it and put in a real shift, 12-15 hrs on it solid till my eyes hurt. Sometimes I don’t touch the thing for a fortnight. Some people keep urging me to work and work on it as they want to see the end result but nope, I will not let that thing take over my life, even if I do wish I was closer to the end than I currently am.

You do get some funny people in that publishing business. Circa 2011, I got matey with the bloke who has/had the French translation rights to Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid. I’ve never met that guy but we spent many hours on the phone talking about football, publishing, his projects etc. (I’ve helped him a bit with one of the books he’s written, Le Football pour les Nuls – Football for Dummies – he was nice enough to reference me, not everybody does, plagiarising is fucking rife). He knew I was then translating into French a monthly When Saturday Comes article for Les Cahiers du Football website (now a website-mag) on top of writing for Les Cahiers on English football (as a hobby), and he knew I was writing this bilingual football dictionary (plenty of technical terms obvs. in Inverting the Pyramid, it's very specific so it really needs to go to a specialised translator/s.o very knowledgeable on these terms) and one day he goes:

“I’ve got the trans rights for Inverting the Pyramid, would you fancy translating it?”

I was working as a teacher at the time, and while I did allow myself a sabbatical and part-time for a while round that time to do other things (eg volunteering and writing) than go to work everyday and put in 70 hrs a week to be shat on from a great height by the quatuor from hell (the Tories, Ofsted, Gove & Wilshaw), I obviously knew that it would require me to work full time on the translation for 10 months at the very least. It’s a fairly thick book as you know, 350+ pages, about 200,000 words I'd say, very well written, with hundreds of technical terms/turns of phrases so you have to spend serious time on it to do it justice and produce a faithful translation. That’s my way of working; I did a bit of pedagogical translation in the early 2000s for one of the education quangos run by the gvt at the time (a well connected French friend of mine, then a Head of Dpt and now an Ofsted inspector, got me the work, it was easy and extremely well-paid as translation work goes but he didn't have time to do it himself, he would take a good cut though, fair enough as he'd get me the gigs - he was too busy working 3 days a week in his school and pocketing £350 a day the rest of the time working on the National Curriculum for MFL in Birmingham or somewhere Midlandish) and I’m very thorough, I hate rushing things. Also I would have had to liaise with Jonathan Wilson and possibly meet him as he lives in my area, not a chore obvs. as I’m sure he is a very interesting bloke but it would have taken even more time etc. And I would have had to put my dictionary work on the back burner for a long time too and I’ve got very attached to the bastard over the years. So, while I was excited at the prospect of translating such a masterpiece, I was also aware that it would take probably 3,000-4,000 hrs to give birth to a good translation. What came out of our discussion (in summary as it’s confidential, we talked money of course, I was never going to do sthg like that for peanuts), is, well, that I wouldn’t do it, the offer was frankly laughable (AFAIK, it's never been translated into French).

Up to recently, I was in touch with big French sports publishing houses about publishing a book on English football, they’ve followed what I wrote on English football for 5 years in Les Cahiers du Football, I’ve also sent them copies of what I’ve written, they liked it, we’ve talked about it etc. I came up with the idea of writing a dictionary of English football, or starting a series on English football modelled on the very popular Que sais-je? collection and some are keen to publish some of the stuff I’ve written (not necessarily as it of course, it would need plenty of work but the raw material is there). The interest from them is also due to the fact that several big French sports publishers have been keen since the late 2000s to produce more “intelligent” football books (they have a bit of a complex vis-à-vis the rich British football literature). I’m fine with it, it’s not a question of money at all but I’m doing other things at the minute, and I do feel less motivated about writing on football TBH as I did between 2010 and 2015 for Les Cahiers du Football, I also have other things to focus about (work, possibly moving country, my in-laws’ heath etc.) and I really want to finish this dictionary before I commit myself to other big projects.

[adams house cat]

Fascinating PF and good luck. I will be interested to read that. I have other things that I have to be doing which is why I will continue to post little stories on here. Thanks for the encouragement everyone.

[ursus arctos]

I would enthusiastically pre-order and promote each of the works mentioned here.

PF, I have a marginally-Cahiers related query for you that I will put on the French Football thread.

[Nefertiti2]

There's already enough for a publisher to see what they'd be getting. I'd also think about radio/podcasting. What's your microphone voice like?

[adams house cat]

Still lot of work to do before I can think of presenting it to anyone. Microphone voice OK. I guess.

[WOM]

If anyone feels like looking for it, I once had a thread going on books published by otf’ers. Likely in Books, but may also have been in World.

[WOM]

And indeed, I’d be more than honoured to proof/edit/second-set-of-eyes if wanted.

[adams house cat]

Probably be in touch WOM.

[ursus arctos]

WOM's thread