[Mastering-perl] 'Mastering Perl" approved!

[brian d foy]

Greetings all,

O'Reilly has approved "Mastering Perl". Don't get too excited yet, though.

Allison Randal snuck off with my proposal and showed it to the
Proposals Group at O'Reilly. Those are the people who figure out if
the book is a good idea, if the author can deliver the goods, and most
importantly, can they sell the book. They liked it despite my list of
changes that I wanted to make this weekend. Everyone had excellent
comments that either made me include new topics, or really think about
why I had others. The proposal is just the basic plan though, and even
though I want to stick to it, things can still change.

The next stage is the contract. I'm not too worried about that because
I've been a part of three O'Reilly contracts already and they are
pretty much the same. Still, nothing is definite until the ink marks
the paper. My wife the opera singer knows this all too well from all
the promises that never turn into contracts. It's a big part of our
life to not get excited until the check clears, but at least she gets
paid after the first act [1] whereas I have to wait to 90 days after
the end of the quarter of the publication date. There is a long chain
of money between a shopper in Borders and my bank account.

I've actually want to write this book for a long time, and my excuse
was always that I didn't want to be poor. However, when I had the
opportunity to update the Llama and the Alpaca, and doing it as part
of my duties as a salaried Stonehenge employee, I got the chance to
subsidize Mastering Perl with the royalty checks that should start
rolling in. Since both the Llama and Alpaca are good sellers, I won't
be exactly poor this next year as I ignore some of my usual activities
in favor of writing a completely new book.

Well, I'd better get cracking. I've been working on the chapter on
tied variables, and I want to give that public viewing in the next
couple of days.

[1] Although it varies by house and management, in AGMA (American
Guild of Musiclal Artists == singer union) houses the soloists get
their check once they make it through the first act. If they have to
bow out then (for illness, injury, or whatever), their cover
(understudy) goes on for the rest of the performance but the soloist
keeps her money.

--
brian d foy <brian.d.foy at gmail.com>
http://www.pair.com/~comdog/