Me and Stephen King

I went to a meeting at the airport Monday to discuss the first round of edits on a book project I'm doing for one of the departments there.

I'm working with engineers and analysts (i.e. people who write technical papers, etc). That is one reason they hired me to jazz up the project. *rolling my eyes* So, I have to take very boring, dry subjects and try to make them reader friendly. Only, the analyst people felt I made this stuff "too entertaining." I wanted to tell them with the subject matter at hand, that is pert near impossible to do.

But, I bit my tongue. The best part was yet to come.

Analyst man in charge, who had that dry mouth snot-looking slobber thing that sticks on dry lips and stretches between them as he talked, looked at me and said:
This is a criticism, but I don't want you to take it personally. It is a criticism, though. We felt like the piece didn't flow very well and then it wrapped up very neatly like a Stephen King novel.

*crickets chirping*

I couldn't help but smile. If the worst criticism I have is that I managed to sum up the book neatly and as well as Stephen King would write, then I'm doing pretty darn good.

Turns out that breaking down all the subsets of text into modules didn't quite make sense to them without the artwork with it. I don't guess they understand that we'd like to have the text/content in place before we start laying out and designing with artwork. Additionally, they want the ending to focus on the future and not wrap up the book content neatly. I disagree with doing that when you're writing a book that will serve as a marketing tool, but if that is what they want, I will do it. They're paying me. If they choose to disgregard my advice, what can I do but give them what they want?

So, there you have it. I've been criticized by being compared with one of our most widely read contemporary authors. Not bad company to keep.