Books that Won’t be Published

Tops on the list is a children’s book, created by my very own mother. Grandma, as my kids call her, made quite an impression on a recent visit, especially in the kitchen. First, there was the banana bread that flopped like a sunken soufflé seconds after coming out of the oven; then, chocolate chip cookies, made in a mysteriously chipped glass bowl and containing, what I believed to be, bite sized shards of the missing glass; and finally, an ice cream recipe cut out of the newspaper that would have been great fun to make, if only the last ingredient hadn’t been Vodka.

All this inspired the book my mother calls: Grandma Screws Up. 

“There’s so much pressure to be Martha Stewart” she told me over the phone a few weeks after she came up with the project. Actually, what she said was, “There’s so much pressure to be (expletive) Martha Stewart,” but, as with her original title for the book, I’ve edited out the profanity.

The next book is something a friend brought to my attention after noticing my Facebook status updates. Apparently, her granddaughter and my two year old have been reading the same thing this summer: How to Drive Your Mom Nuts By Not Napping. To be fair, my daughter didn’t actually read that book, although I suspect she wrote it.

In the Do-It-Yourself genre, my husband has a very exciting offering: Summer Projects: I Didn’t Actually Get Around to Doing. The book has wonderful color photographs, mostly of rooms we hope to someday improve, and of our garage, which has all the stuff he bought at Lowe's and hasn’t opened.

In the Health & Beauty category, I’ve got a few projects in the works, the first one inspired after the above-mentioned husband was carded for the fourth time: Help, My Husband Looks Like a College Freshman: Ten Ways to Make Him Look More Haggard. What’s interesting about this strategy is that although it’s very difficult to reverse the signs of aging, it’s remarkably easy to inflict them on a partner.

My second book is one I believe in very strongly: How to Find the Extra Minute: Every Parent’s Guide to 55 to 60 Seconds of Free Time a Week. The working title had been, How to Find the Extra Hour, but as you probably guessed, that’s actually a work of fiction.

Other books for parents include: Sibling Rivalry: Get Used to It (A very fast, easy read)  And,The Smart Mother’s Guide to Lead-Free Menu Planning-- bonus chapters on The Listeria-free Hoagie, Economical Benefits to E. coli, and a fast favorite—Don’t Eat the Puppy Chow, no really, don’t it eat, it’s got salmonella.

In the memoir section, there’s one about the car trips of my youth: How to be Bored.

And, finally, a follow-up to Put Down the Taffeta, We’re Going Hiking, the book I wrote after my five year old read too many Fancy Nancy books in one day, the much anticipated, No More Parfaits, It’s Time for a Cheese Stick: Finding Your Child's Inner Plain Jane.

The market for unpublished books is as competitive as ever, but if you’ve got a title you think might make the cut, by all means, let me know. I’d love to hear from you.