I'm no Perry White.

Hot dog!

The book I worked on late last year and well into the first part of this year has cleared at the publisher! I got a copy of the galley sheets yesterday to look for last minute corrections. I think it can or will go to print very soon! It is a book that looks at interesting blog entries by American bloggers from a cross section of locations and occupations. The intended purpose of the book is to teach Japanese readers everyday American English. My first job with it was to find those interesting bloggers.

Sounds easy. It wasn't. I looked at, and read, several thousand blogs to come up with those that will go in the book. I was reading blogs for hours every day and every night - luckily I didn't have anything else to fill my time then - and believe me ... there isn't that much going on in the blogosphere that is likely to be interesting to the Japanese reader, or useful in developing language skills.

After many hundreds of hours of tortuous reading I struck gold - human interest stories by real people. On having a eureka moment I'd write the author (many do not list a contact or access address) and then wait for a reply. There was another lesson in that exercise - not many people reply to an email that begins, "Request to use your ...". I figure several hundred requests got caught in spam filters, and several hundred more were smacked by the delete key. But, I had to persist. There was a publisher, a friend and my pride to satisfy!

In the end I got 27 replies from excellent writers and all the others were just exercises in persistence. The 27 that chose to answer me and approve my request were, and are, those I might have chosen if I had been given a list of people applying to be published! No regret for the time, effort, disappointments, frustration, anger, boredom ... but I do have one deep regret. I got 27 positive replies, and those all involved exchanges of email that was sometimes personal. My regret? The publisher filled the page count quota with 26 of "my" authors. One of my choices had to be omitted.

Thankfully, they did not leave that decision to me.

I'll let you know what the title is and where you can find it at Amazon.co.jp when it is in print!