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progThe little audience lay across the board in representative flavors of humanity and its race/age/gender axes, which is always nice to see. The whole world is interested! Well, those parts of it who work along Rte. 128, anyway. I was, absurdly, worried that the crowd would solely comprise hardcore Perl hackers who would cut into us with knife-edge XML questions I wouldn't know how to answer, but it was actually the target audience of the book sitting right there: people who knew and liked Perl already, and wanted to know how it fit with XML, without necessarily too much familiarity with it. People who did know XML asked questions that we were able to use as segues into other topics, time and again.
We got lots of people excited about the book, or at least disappointed that it wasn't on shelves yet. The Softpro guy said the estimated ship date is April 22. For some reason, a December tech review draft was kicking around (with a cover stamped 'CONFIDENTIAL') so people got to peek at the TOC, and they could also see my comments interspersed throughout the text like "Insert sample output here" and "This is a terrible section title!" Oh well. At least they got a good look at the monkeys. Remember the monkeys. Monkey-maniacs in Circle S are buying the book just for the cover art. "The mama monkey's about to grab that ampersand and fling it at you!" observes Emma. Sonny is sad that their butts are cropped.
Erik tells me that, according to Ellie, this will be one of the rare books where the animal on the spine will reach outside of its little box. Those darn monkeys! We were talking about such things for awhile at the bookstore until the manager approached us. "Are you the authors? You sound like authors, to me."
The fellow who wrote us kind words yesterday, by the way, has agreed to translate the book into French! The thought of someone, especially someone as knowledgeable as this guy, translating my writing into another language makes me vaguely embarrassed, the same sort of embarrassment I feel about laundry people neatly folding my underwear, I guess. So be it. (Someone would have translated the book into French regardless, just as other someones will translate it into a bunch of other alien tongues. [Quick camera cut to Jar Jar Binks candy hanging on shelves.])
The point is: in case you can't tell, I'm feeling increasingly optimistic about this book's quality, and other pro$pect$.
Chuck was far more bummed than I to hear of my failure to get into MIT, and said cynical things, for this is his nature. He didn't offer any better Plan Cs than the one I came up with yesterday, so unless anyone gives me a better idea, I suppose I'm sticking to it.
I tell myself now: Sunday is the day I will visit the Apple Store and have a Genius look at my iBook. I can go without it for a coupla days if needs be, since I can hang out and write at O'Reilly. They continue to keep my old desk in pristine condition, as if they had "retired" it: the corkboard has the same stuff I stuck to it months ago, and the sliding doors have the same cynical cartoons (one of which is a Ted Rall thing about getting laid off, affixed before I got laid off). Hiring freezes are magic.