Tony Brasunas

The journey is long and sweet to that day when a beautiful copy of Double Happiness is in your hands. Two quick updates on where it is, and how you can help…

Facebook

I’ve upgraded the Double Happiness facebook page. Check it out. If you like the way the page looks, or if you like travel books about China, or if you like Double Happiness itself, or if you like me, or if you feel like clicking a button, click to LIKE the page.

Share the page with anyone else you know who might like these things — anyone who is interested in travel, China, teaching or living abroad, backpacking, or a young man’s coming of age in a foreign land.

Let’s get to 100 likes by the end of the week!

www.facebook.com/DoubleHappy

And if you don’t like the page, tell me why, leave a comment.

Kickstarter

To raise the funds to bring Double Happiness into the world, I’ll be using Kickstarter.com, which, if you haven’t heard of it, is like a superhero that enables the universe of interested souls to be the modern independent artist’s patron saint. Everyone interested in an artistic project pitches in, instead of just one publisher, label, or company. You can be a Patron of the Arts, a modern Maecenas, for as little as $1!

For the Kickstarter page I’m going to create a video. I want to share with the world the original inspiration and current vision for Double Happiness. Do you know of any great video creators or filmmakers who could possibly help me here, even if for just an hour one afternoon or evening? I would be eternally grateful (and able to offer a small amount of money). Someone with either interview skills, videography skills, or video editing skills — or all three! — would be perfect. Let me know! Write your suggestions in a comment below, or email me directly.

Thank you. I’m humbled by your support. Towards Double Happiness for all!

I talked to two book designers this week. It’s exciting and quite the roller coaster ride going this route — independently publishing my book.

Wait, who did I talk to? Book designers? Am I looking for someone to select the colors of my book’s cover?

Well, yes. But that’s not the job of the book designer.

Book Design is the art and science of laying out the interior of the book, from the title page to the index, and everything in between. A book designer will design the Table of Contents and the Glossary, and, if talented, make the first page of each chapter visually interesting and beautiful. Book designers not only know typography and font pairing, but also typesetting and making the pages look and feel like a book. When you’re in a bookstore and you open to a random page in a book, and the font is appealing and there’s a “running head” telling you the chapter you’re in, and you notice that both the left and right page have the same number of lines, you’re probably looking at a book designer’s work. These things don’t happen by accident.

Double Happiness is going to be a beautiful book, both in print and in e-book formats. That’s been my vision since the first step of this journey. I am a web designer by day, but I’m not going to teach myself book design and risk making a bunch of novice’s mistakes.

What are your favorite visual elements of the books you love? What would you like to see for Double Happiness?

The manuscript is done, and so many other necessary preliminary steps are complete. It’s time to publish Double Happiness!

I will now be regularly updating this space, asking and answering questions, and detailing the road that takes me from a meticulously edited manuscript to a beautiful book in your hands or attractive file on your kindle. I will be hiring a cover designer, book designer, and an illustrator en route to independently publishing.

This labor of love, this journey so long and sweet, is now moving into its final phase. There is still much to do. Follow along with me here if you’re interested in independent publishing or in travel through Asia or in teaching abroad or in China or in simply reading a young man’s tale of fear, delight, and discovery.

A tale of a young American’s coming of age in a faraway land, the book will be titled Double Happiness: One Man’s Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China.

I would like to take this moment to thank my agent, Susan Lee Cohen of Riverside Literary Agency, for all her hard work, smart ideas, and wise counsel.

I would also like to thank Intuition, that great universal deity that plays such a vital role in Double Happiness, and that has played already a powerful part in this journey to publication.

Thank You!

It’s ironic that this blog began by calling the process of writing and publishing my book a journey, a march of 10,000 miles.

Certainly everything about my time in China, and about writing this book, now does seem to comprise a trek. But it’s been a strange, even cyclical one. I started the journey a decade ago, and now I’ve seemingly had another detour, or I’ve started over, or I’ve done the whole thing in reverse. I’ve literally relearned to walk.

I’m back on my feet after my November knee surgery, and how sweet it is. To be mobile again, to be up on my hind legs once again, like a homo sapiens. It’s difficult to describe. We take our bodily health, our mobility, our evolution, for granted at our mental and emotional peril.

Happily, I resume the journey where I left off, or perhaps even a few steps ahead. Things continue apace toward the publication of Double Happiness. I completed some revisions to the manuscript and the book proposal, and both items are now in the capable hands of my agent. She is now approaching publishers, carrying our shared dream of placing the book at a major house.

She’s at the helm, and I’m not needed in the process as much anymore, which has brought another interesting cocktail of feelings: a delightful relief that I’m part of a team working towards the birth of this book, mixed with a puzzling sensation of absence akin to what parents must feel when their children are with a babysitter. Wait, where’s my book?

Yes, I have less news to report to you these days, since I’m now less involved in the nitty gritty of the publication process. What would you like to know about writing and publishing a book? Or about traveling and living in China?

One exciting bit of news I do have to report is that I participated in the I Live Here: SF project. For my contribution, I wrote about my experiences coming to San Francisco and falling in love with the city. The creative mind and literate photographer behind the project, Julie Michelle, took a bunch of pictures of me so she could choose one to include in her gallery opening, which featured the writings and photographs of some two hundred San Francisco residents from all walks of life.

And voila, I have a collection of professional photos from which to choose the ideal author portrait! What do you think? The photos are here. How do you like the one I’ve tentatively selected for the inset? And what about the one on the author page? Are they better than the ones you voted on before in the portrait poll? I feel an almost guilty sense of vanity in asking you to look at all these pictures of me. But hey, I need an author photo for the book proposal and the cover of the book. So thank you. Click to “Leave a Comment” below. I’m not that vain. Right?

Or perhaps vanity is a temporary phase that occurs in any journey, somewhere around the 9,000th mile, somewhere between learning to walk and learning to run.

Exciting and tragic news to report. First, my apologies for the hiatus in my presence here. Things have taken unexpected turns, and who am I to argue with the fates?

If you thought “Re-entry was an Itch,” this takes it to another level.

First, the agency who contacted me prior to Burningman, who showed delightfully gratifying enthusiasm for Double Happiness, and who listened when I informed them I wasn’t open to making major revisions to the manuscript, only “minor changes” — did offer to represent me.

That was great, exciting news. But another agency contacted me in the interim, while the first agency was contemplating, and this second agency had a similarly high level of enthusiasm for my writing and seemed to get the entirety of Double Happiness — exactly as it was, on all the levels it is intended to work on. She instantly saw it as not only the story of a young man teaching and traveling abroad for the first time, nor only as a rugged first hand account from inside a changing China; she responded to the underlying, universal story of inner transformation and spiritual awakening that form the book’s essence and make the story relevant to people young and old and from all backgrounds.

She also was more timely and professional in getting back to me. After several good discussions by phone, we exchanged two-page legal documents by mail, and I signed with her!

That was a major step forward.

She had some suggestions for minor changes, and as I looked through the manuscript and considered her insights, I agreed with her suggestions. I began making the changes, and as I did I realized I wanted to complete a full additional polish of the entire manuscript.

And now that’s done too. That was a second major step forward.

Another night, intent on a different goal, out on a beloved local soccer field, I ran onto a fine pass from a Salvadoran lad on the right wing, touched the ball, and headed in for goal. I cut left to evade the goalkeeper, but my shoe stuck in the turf pointed right while my knee went left. The next thing I knew I was in the air, then flat on my back, howling in pain.

After several agonizing days and doctor’s visits, I learned I’d torn both the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and the medial meniscus in my right knee. Days turned to weeks, and I underwent surgery November 11. Now I’m largely immobile except for my visits to physical therapy, which will be many and challenging. It will be a long road of rehabilitation — another journey in this kaleidoscope of journeys called life.

That was a gigantic hobble backward.

Perhaps now all I need is patience. Perhaps in but a few weeks I will be walking again. Perhaps in but a few more weeks my new agent will place Double Happiness at a publisher. Perhaps.

Patience has never been easy for me.

But I discovered it in Songpan, deep in Sichuan Province, waiting for a bus that never came, listening to a whisper of intuition that came from deep inside me.

Hopefully I’ll find it again now, here in San Francisco. Any suggestions?

I’m back from the magical land of Burning Man. After wandering in that scintillating world for a week, I found it difficult to jump right back into my work on Double Happiness. But jump right back in I now have.

Two pieces of good news have lifted my spirits.

First, maps! The book is now map-ful, map-happy, map-alicious, with a large hand-drawn map of China ready for the frontmatter and sixteen smaller maps ready for the beginnings of eventful chapters. Working with an illustrator was a delight; the maps she created are sprinkled with illustrations that highlight events, people, places, and things in the story. A sneak peak at one map, just for you dear readers, is at right. (Click it to enlarge it.)

Second bit of news: An agency in New York has called several times and shown sustained interest and enthusiasm for both my writing in general and for Double Happiness in particular. Before I left for Burning Man, I discussed with them their interest. They were thrilled with my “beautiful style” and “phenomenal writing,” and they also envisioned some changes to the manuscript. After much thought and contemplation while wandering through the sculpture-laden, laser-festooned desert, while watching a number of splendid works of art burn, I reached clarity about Double Happiness: In its current shape, it is the book I was driven, inspired, possessed to write, it’s the story I needed to tell. In fact, it’s better — it’s more it than I even knew I could write when I began this marathon labor-of-love. And so upon my return I took a deep breath and shared this with them, that I’m done, that at least insofar as major rewrites go, I’m finished with this particular story. Minor changes are fine, of course. The question was then whether they were still interested in representing me and Double Happiness. And they are, they said. They are. Or… they may be. They asked to read the manuscript in its latest form to ensure they are “200 percent behind me.” So we’ll see. If they choose not to take me on, I will either approach other agencies or, more likely, proceed directly into the brave new world of Indie publishing.

As an aside, Indie publishing offers authors an increasing number of benefits, but going the traditional, conventional route — signing with an agent and selling the manuscript to a major house — still offers substantial advantages, including not having to deal with intellectual property issues that arise from the use of quotations. Double Happiness features small quotations called epigraphs opening many of its chapters; some of these are from ancient sources, such as the Tao Te Ching, but others are from more recent authors, like T.S. Eliot and Pearl S. Buck, and the use of these authors’ works is often in a dubious, weakly-defined area of the law called “Fair Use.” When one doesn’t explicitly have permission from an author to use his or her work, one is liable to be sued for copyright infringement. Not a lot of fun. Some of the authors I’ve approached have been very forthcoming in acceding that quoting a few dozen words from their work constitutes “Fair Use.” The people at Houghton Mifflin who control copyright to T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, informed me it would run $365 to use four lines of a 225-line poem.

Let’s call that an update. Double Happiness continues apace, on its hopeful way to your door. Click below to leave a comment.

PS: Yes, my Burning Man project, the Threshold of Heat and Light, lived in the desert and died peacefully in tongues of flame. It conjured into my life and the lives of those around me a wealth of unforeseen delights and challenges. I have photos; let me know if you’re interested; they richly feature a flamethrower.