Michael Craig's Journal

Chris Ferguson and I are working on revising his chapters for the Full Tilt book. Yes, the deadline has passed; it’s a long story.

We’re working now on Chapter 3, How to Bet. When I mentioned to him how deep we were in the editing process, he asked, “Did the editor notice how weak Chapter 3 was?”

I laughed. My editor, Dan Ambrosio, plays poker and understands poker, but neither he nor any other editor at Warner Books (which I think is going to be called Hachette Books any day now, as Hachette Book Group bought Warner Book Group early in 2006) is going to find fault with any poker strategy that Chris Ferguson has, in good faith, put on a piece of paper.

But he was serious.

Ferguson has incredibly high standards. Even if there are few people who could judge between the quality of the chapter as it was last week and its quality now that we’re finished, it matters TO HIM. I appreciate that and identify with it. I like to think that I, too, have very high standards, though I am the one whining about meeting the deadline and I got all my degrees (B.A. and J.D.) in the standard amounts of time.

Today, we finished Chapter 3. At one point, I held things up - we’re generally going slow because at least one of us is playing on Full Tilt at all time [writer's note: Chris is up to $208 in his Zero to Hero experiment and was playing a $1 MTT Turbo, in which he got eliminated just before the money; I was playing a $50+ $5 MTT HORSE, which I'm still in, with 15 to go]  - to debate, with myself, out loud, whether a particular word should read “opponent’s” or “opponents’.” It was all about where to put the apostrophe because ….

Welll, let’s just say it looked wrong and I was thinking out loud about which would be correct.

Chris said, “Michael, you’re probably the only person in the world who will notice the difference.”

“Well,” I reminded him, “You’re the one who was worried that the editor read the 520-page manuscript and thought your chapter looked weak.”

“I WAS worried about that.”

“So how is this different?” I said. ”We’re working at the margins of the world here, Chris. I thought you’d be used to that by now.”

“Fair enough, fair enough.”

When we finished, he asked me to e-mail him the chapter “to give it one more pass.” That means we will never be done.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 8:16 pm and is filed under My favourites:.