I put my 6-pound, 14-ounce baby in the mail two days ago.

I’m talking about the manuscript of my book, What’s So Great About Adoption. It’s due at my publisher’s today, so on Monday at 4:55 p.m., I dragged my bleary-eyed, unshowered body (yeech) to the post office to pop that baby in the mail so it would arrive at its destination by today.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you probably assume I fell off the face of the planet during the past month. I did, kind of. Every waking hour was spent caring for my baby, scrutinizing every paragraph, sentence, and word in that manuscript.

For those who care to know, here are my baby’s vital statistics:

Weight: 6 pounds, 14 ounces (that includes two hard copies, a CD, a cover letter and the Priority Mail box).

Length: 63,044 words, 266 pages (which will translate to approximately 270 pages when it’s in “book” form).

Number of people whose stories appear in the book: 44

Most of the people I interviewed are adoptive parents; several are birth/first parents; several are adopted people; and five are adoption professionals who also happen to be adoptive parents and/or adoptees. Their stories are funny, sad, moving, and informative.

How I found those people:
Some are friends or friends of friends; others are people I’ve met at writers’ conferences; still others are people I’ve ‘met’ via my blogs. The interviewees represent 14 states and two Canadian provinces, with the following states represented most often: Washington (where I live), California, Missouri, Texas, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

Publication date: August 1, 2007

Publisher: Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon

I’ll be telling you more about the book during the coming months (a summary and chapter title preview are at my website, www.laurachristianson.com).


What happens with the book during the next nine months?
I have already ‘birthed’ the words in the book, but during the next nine months, I’ll wait for the ‘adoption’ to be finalized. The manuscript will probably sit on my editor’s desk for about six weeks, until he or she finds time to edit it. The editing process will take a couple of weeks, after which the manuscript will be typeset. Then I’ll receive the “galley” – the typeset version of my book. I’ll have one week to read the galley and make corrections. During that week, a couple of proofreaders at my publishing house will also be reading the galley.

My editor will merge all three versions of the galley into a final version. Meanwhile, people at my publishing house will tweak the book’s title or generate a new one and will design the cover. Somewhere along the line I’ll have a conference call with the marketing department, and we’ll brainstorm ways to market the book.

I plan to attend the International Christian Retail Show (ICRS) in Atlanta next July to promote it and another book I’m writing, and after that, I’ll wait anxiously for my book to appear on the shelf of a bookstore near you!

In the meantime, I plan to return to blogging more regularly and to finish up projects for several of my clients who have been waiting patiently.

Writing a book (this was my first book) has definitely been challenging. Fun, invigorating, uplifting—definitely. But also excruciatingly slow and difficult at times. Metamorphosing from a 300-words-per-post blogger and a 1,500-word-per-article magazine writer requires some mental adjustment. But I’ve loved it and would do it again in a heartbeat.