In my timeline of how to get a non-fiction book published, wherein I started writing the proposal in month one, I started writing the book in month thirteen.  Thank god I hadn’t started writing the book that I had proposed, since that’s not the book that the publisher wanted.

I had the following mandate for The Tattoo Encyclopedia:  1,000 entries, 70,000 words, 300 images, done in twelve months.  I was working full-time plus teaching a class at UCLA.  Tattoo artist Greg James had a waiting list of clients that was and is, literally, months long.  To say that we were stressed that year is just silly.  My panic button finger was starting to get gangrene.  I’m pretty sure that Greg stopped sleeping.

One constant source of support, though, aside from my husband, who is glorious, was my literary agent, Jane Dystel.  She called me every month.  We talked about my progress and how things were going, and she’d offer encouragement.  She was checking on me – I knew that.  But I always looked forward to these calls, partly because my finger was on the button and I really was making progress, and partly because she understood what Greg and I were trying to do.

However, I began to realize, as I filled my database with research and writing on 1,000 different tattoos, that each entry was going to have to be brief.  Really brief.  The book was also supposed to include an introduction (I was going to work prehistory and history into it somehow) and also summary sections at the end that grouped similar types of tattoos together (animal tattoos, Celtic tattoos, Japanese tattoos, etc.).  When the editor and I had talked about the book being a real reference, we had somewhat arbitrarily landed on the number of 1,000 entries.  I eventually came to realize that I had conflicting criteria.  I needed each entry to define the meaning (usually multiple meanings) for a tattoo, adequately enough for a reference.  In two thirds of these entries I also needed to describe the tattoo itself, since there would be no image.  But, in each entry, I’d only have an average of 60 words.  The paragraph you’re reading is already 165 words.

So, I decided to err on the side of writing entries that were too long, but that covered the essentials of a tattoo’s meaning for someone who was considering it as their tattoo.  When you’re making your tattoo choice, it’s impossible to have too much information.  It’s a tattoo for crying out loud.

Finally, though, twelve months after we began, Greg and I finished on time but my word count had ballooned to 100,000 words.  I was thinking that the publisher was getting some kind of deal, paying for 70,000 words but getting more.  I thought that would be a boon.  Boy was I wrong.

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