Of Popcorn and Paragraphs

Right now, I'm a little over halfway through my super-fast summer film class. Personally, I would prefer a slower-paced class spread out over the 10-week summer session that met in person and used a textbook, but we work with what we have.

I am often asked, "Film class? You mean, like movies? And you can get (pause to sneer) college credit for that?" The snark is thick.

Sigh. It's hard to be civil sometimes.

Yes, college credit. Yes, you watch movies. And you also write about them, Jack! By that, I don't mean the fanboy screeds that occasionally drive actors off Twitter, nor am I satisfied with plot summaries from imdb.com. I expect - even in this turbo-paced class - students to pick up a few basics of actual criticism. In fact, it's closer to the truth to think of my Intro to Film class as a literature class, only using celluloid instead of paper. (OK, OK, everything's actually digitized these days, The point remains.)

Students learn how to write an actual compare/contrast essay - which is harder than many students think it is. All too often, on the first assignment (which isn't worth that many points for this very reason) students basically structure their essay as "This happened in Film A. This happened in Film B" and then end it, sincerely thinking that they've created a compare/contrast.

It both is and isn't their fault. Writing is hard to teach and harder still to grade and nigh impossible to grade fast, so it isn't a skill covered on most standardized tests and in this world of high-stakes testing that has about one-third of high schoolers on some form of anxiety, mood stabilizing, and/or depression medication, if it ain't tested, we don't have time to teach it. Let the colleges worry about that!

I don't blame the high schools, either. Everyone is trying to do the best they can, but the inmates are running the educational asylums right now.

I haven't tried this pairing yet, but one day . . . 

At any rate, I deal with a LOT of students who are quite bright, but don't trust their own thoughts and ideas. They've been taught for years how to take a standardized test, but essay writing befuddles them and asking them to stake out their own opinions and support them is practically a foreign language (something else we wait years too long to begin teaching, but I digress). Movies are a less intimidating "in" to formalized writing for many of these students and most of them pick up the knack very quickly once they begin to trust that their ideas aren't going to be shot down as "wrong."

They also are exposed to different genres of film that they may not have ever experienced. They learn about the Bechdel Test, they have a chance to prove to me that they can pass the Turing Test (see, these are the kinds of "tests" I prefer to standard "bubble sheet" thingamabobs), and they learn to search for criticism as opposed to quick reviews.

Yes, I think it's a valid class. You ought to take it one day.

Third Age Thursday - BIG NEWS!

Okay, okay - so it's not Thursday. There was NO WAY I was going to wait!

For you see, I have exciting news that I cannot keep to myself - the manuscript draft for Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Guide to the Babylon 5 Universe is done! Done! DONE!!!! As in, the final bits were sent to our editor today! As in, so recently that my final Post-It notes and flags are still stuck to the edge of my desk where I put them as I finished with each portion they were marking in the final few days of drafting.

Whew.

Now, there's still work to be done that will take a minimum of several months. We've been sending each "chunk" to our editor as we finished it, so a good portion has already gone through the initial edits, but remember that Dreams Given Form is an ambitious piece of work that brings together everything that has been designated as canonical for Babylon 5 - the episodes, the movies, Crusade, the novels, the comics, and the short stories, as well as some "extras." (I drew the line at action figures . . .) That made for a crazy amount of work, even with wonderful materials such as The Lurker's Guide and Terry Jones' exhaustive chronology, which was so detailed it was adopted by the production company to keep timelines straight. (I swear, the implications of "War without End" on later works nearly drove me to tears a couple of times and Terry saved my bacon.)

Plus, this project came to a screeching halt when I was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (think "junior auxiliary breast cancer") until I completed radiation treatment and got my strength and energy levels back. (Imagine a disease in which voluntarily subjecting yourself to radiation sickness is the best scenario and you'll understand why research and writing fell low on the list.) So publication was delayed, but it's all in the editing stage now!

We weren't able to reach one goal - we wanted to get the rights to reprint the six canonical short stories since they've never been collected in one place, but Warner Brothers has no interest in that, which is their prerogative as the copyright holder. Still, we include summaries, analysis, and highlights from each of those in Dreams Given Form. Also, we still have a few interview requests out there and we have our fingers crossed, but those chips will fall where they may.

We'll start conversations with our publisher, ECW Press, about cover design and possible sites to promote the book, which will be available in 2017 - we'll announce specific details when we know more.

For now, though, I think Ensley and I have some serious celebrating to do, because right now, everybody's cute. And in purple, I'm stunning.

<*>

Walter White Wednesday 80

This is a post I've been waiting for nearly two years to write - the edited draft of Wanna Cook? (insert drumroll, please!) is done.  Done, do you hear me?  Episodes have been watched, notes have been taken, a first draft has been created, extras have been researched, extras have been drafted, all that's been reviewed and sent to Our Dear Editor (like North Korea's Dear Leader, but ours has both a far better haircut and sense of humor) who marked it up with line edits and sent it back to us.  Changes made, or not made and argued about, then sent back. When that hurdle was cleared, it was on to the copy-editing stage - smaller nits to pick, but very important ones were caught there.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  For 5 seasons, the last of which was split into two parts by a year.  Done.  There really should be cake at this juncture, but I'll settle for jazz hands.

Soon we'll get galley pages, which have been typeset, with graphics and so forth added in for our final pass and a proofreader is hunkering over things with a magnifying glass and a thick style manual to make sure we have been consistent throughout the book.  (Wait, wait - does "Hector" have an accent mark or not?)

Then Wanna Cook? goes to the translation folks, since the book is being released simultaneously in English ("the meth") and German ("die meth." Or maybe "das meth." Heck, it could be "der meth."  OK, that alone explains why someone else is translating the text.) I won't really consider the project "finished" until I can hold the bound book in my hands, but this is a point well worth celebrating.  And, as a reminder, Wanna Cook? is scheduled to hit bookstore shelves (and be ready for delivery from online booksellers) May 1. That day also happens to be my and Ensley's anniversary - not a traditional gift, to be sure, but what can you do?

So until we get the galley pages in a few weeks, there's a lull of quiet at the writing desk.  Well, at least for the Wanna Cook? project.  We both still have our day jobs to attend to. Also, on Nov. 15, we're presenting at a one-day conference at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC (here's the schedule) and our presentations need some fine-tuning for that.  (Mine's a longer version of an extra in Wanna Cook? that deals with negative fan reaction to Skyler, by the way.)

But we also plan to carve out some time to just savor reaching this point in a project that has mattered so very much to both of us.

Ahhhhhh.

I say it's time to dance!  So click and enjoy!  (I thought about just cutting this to the Bryan Cranston intro, but nah.  This is choice stuff all the way through and we all deserve four minutes to laugh!)

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I hear Whitman was quoted at the funeral.

Breaking Bad may have ended its run nearly a month ago, but fans aren't quite willing to let it go.  Walter Hartwell White had an obituary in an Albuquerque newspaper (where his death was stated to be the result of a "battle with lung cancer, and a gunshot wound."  Click the link for more details) and a funeral service was held for him recently.  (The "funeral" was a fundraiser for a charity, Albuquerque's Healthcare for the Homeless, but understandably a few people with actual loved ones laid to rest in the cemetery weren't too thrilled.)

Nearly any show these days sparks fan fiction, but Breaking Bad's has been taken to a whole new level with this piece, published on CNN.  Here, Samantha Highfill of Entertainment Weekly speculates on what life might be like for the surviving characters ten years out.  Not sure I agree, but fun to read.

On the Wanna Cook? front, we're in editing mode right now.  Cross-checking, trying to pare a few words here so we can add a few words there, that sort of thing.  It's exciting, actually.  And we're getting messages from ECW (our publisher) with details about things like "marketing plans" and the name of our publicist.  (We have a publicist!  Wow.  Soon, I'll be able to have my people call your people to set up a lunch date.  C'mon, baby, you know I love ya!)  Both Ensley and I have added author pages over at Amazon - here's his and here's mine - and we'd appreciate any help you can give us in spreading the word about Wanna Cook?.  Tweet the blog links, like our author pages, really - anything you can do to let folks know that the best and most complete guide to the fantastic show Breaking Bad is coming soon would be greatly appreciated!

There might even be a teenth in it for you!

(Rock candy, of course.  What were you thinking?  Wink.)

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Breaking Bad may be over (sniff, sniff, whimper) but the Wanna Cook? project is chugging along.  Ensley and I have gotten the final "chunks" off to our intrepid editor for the first pass of her not-so-dreaded red pen, which means a cautious celebration is in order!  Yep, the final episode guides have been drafted and the "long extras" (not quite full essay length, but considerably longer than the "extra ingredients" that are featured with each episode's write-up) have all been sent - and in some cases, edited and re-submitted.  What that means is that we're in the final stretch.  It can become very tempting at this point to rest on our laurels (okay, it's more like collapse on our laurels at this point - anyone who says writing isn't "real work" has never really written.  It's a different kind of effort from ditch digging, to be sure, but that doesn't mean there's no effort involved), but keeping our eyes on the finish line is crucial at this stage.  There's still plenty to get done and you just can't lose your focus on these details.  In about a month, everything should be at the final, ready-for-the-typesetter stage and that's when we're really relax and hey - that's the start of the holiday season, so it'll be especially sweet.

However, I think we can take a step back and marvel at what has been wrought.  Seriously - we've written a book-length examination of this incredible, amazing, groundbreaking show, and that's worth taking a moment or two to savor.

(takes moment)

Now back to the desk.

And here's the weekly gem - turns out Anthony Hopkins is a fan of the show and wanted to voice his appreciation.  Hmmm - so Hannibal Lecter has a favorable opinion of Walter White.

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. . . which is an update on the progress of the Wanna Cook? project.  Since the final episodes don't air until August (August!!  What is AMC trying to do to us?), our deadlines had to change a bit from the original dates we had estimated with our publisher.  And no, it doesn't give us more time; we just start on these final eight a month later than we figured, so from August until November will be a two-month crunch.  Knowing that, we wanted to have everything else squared away as much as possible.

Enter the world of the copyedit.

You'll remember that we spent part of spring in the Great 30-Day Crunch, which I can assure you, was incredibly productive but also punctuated with a lot of random stress-related hollering (on my part, and not directed at my co-author, whose blog you should also be reading).  The result of the Crunch and post-Crunch tidying up was that the bulk of the book was drafted and line edited - yep, all 4.5 seasons, "extra ingredients," and sidebar material had been turned in, looked over, and edited for length and clarity.

Copyedits are the more delicate revisions.  Ensley and I worked hard (and anyone who says writing isn't "real work" around me had better be able to to outrun me) to turn in a clean, solid draft to ECW and judging from the number of items we needed to fix in the copyedit process, we accomplished our goal.  But.

Aspiring writers out there, get this through your skull.  Your baby won't be perfect.  Weird things will slip through that, although you know you wrote them, you'd be willing to swear had been added by gremlins.  They tend to be little things - an extra space here, a bullet point out of line there, maybe a bad verb tense. The bizarre thing is that, by this time, at least three intelligent people have looked at the same writing - and missed the same thing.  Will itsy errors more than likely remain in the final shelf copy?  Sigh.  Hopefully not, but probably.  I know my first book has a couple of freckles.

That being said, the copyedits have been completed, which means the bulk of the book is good to go.  We may have alterations to make depending on the events of the final eight episodes (won't that be a Tilt-A-Whirl of fun?), but we'll cross that bridge this fall.  We have a few "long pieces" to complete and we're still crossing our fingers that we can work out a few interviews with Breaking Bad cast and crew members.

What all that means is that we're in - well, not exactly a "lull," but we're not in the Crunch, either.  I have summer school classes to teach beginning next week and Ensley and I both have responsibilities galore associated with the upcoming Joss in June conference.  Before all that gets into full swing, we're headed down to Birmingham, Alabama to be guest professionals (I so wish we'd been titled "professional guests" that I think I'm going to call us that) professional guests at the Alabama Phoenix Festival.  We're part of the "Whedon track" and I'm very much looking forward to spreading the Whedon love down in the Deep South - not to mention checking out some of the other presentations and guests!

Look for updates from Alabama - including how our new promotional business cards (at the top of the post) are received!

Walter White Wednesday 50

Wow!  50 posts about Breaking Bad!  I guess that means I'm right where everything started, with Walt's 50th birthday - and so much has changed from that point.

For this post, I want to both give you an update on the progress of Wanna Cook? and also talk about one of the sorrows of writing.  Word counts.  That leads to the second sorrow - having to cut.

To begin with, if you haven't read my co-author's blog post this week, go there now.  He writes about our intrepid, cheery, and horseshoe-tough editor who well deserves praise built up to the skies.  Really - authors write (and we write a lot!) and editors are the ones who look at the draft critically and kindly advise authors on how to trim, cut, hack, and slash to make the writing stronger, clearer, and more able to leap tall buildings in a single paragraph.  (The image that helps me with this is - as an author, I'm like that client who goes to the accountant with a shoebox full of receipts.  The editor is the accountant who sighs, patiently sorts through it all, separating the wheat from the chaff [what do you mean, I can't claim the dog as a dependent?], and voila! order is restored.)  You don't even realize the writing tics you have until someone else takes a sweep through it - for instance, it took an editor looking at some of my earlier work for me to realize that I am, indeed, the Queen of Semicolons.

At any rate, we all survived the Great 30 Day Publication Push and Seasons 1 - 4 are in the copy editing stage (wording is settled; now let's look at formatting and punctuation - hey, take out that bit in italics.  Should that be an em-dash? Why's there a comma over there? - that sort of thing) and Season 5A is in the line editing stage (we've turned in a solid (not rough) draft and are waiting for our editor's knives to fillet it into shape).  We also have a timetable for the rest - we have some extras (some short, some long) to sprinkle throughout the text and Season 5B doesn't air until summer, so we needed to figure out what needed to be turned in when so Wanna Cook? can be published - in both English and German - on schedule.  And those jokes about how Germans like schedules?  Not all that funny.  True, but not too ha-ha when you're looking at your calendar, muttering, "They want it when?"

All of which brings me to the downside.  Books have word counts.  Books that have their translation rights sold before they are written have very strict word counts.  So that means that sometimes, with fingers a-trembling and eyes a-misting, you have to cut.  You have to cut good stuff that you labored over and that you think is valuable because you need the space and other stuff is even better.  With us, that has usually meant cutting stuff that's neat, but is more of a side item instead of directly relating to the show.

Still, you hate to see it go.  Fortunately, I have this blog, so I get to resurrect things from time to time!  Remember the Season 5 episode "Dead Freight"?  Of course you do - it's the one that begins with the kid on the dirt-bike who stops to collect a tarantula in the desert.  Turns out tarantulas are quite interesting creatures, but we couldn't keep everything in that section.  So here's a bit on tarantulas and their hydraulic legs, which had to be cut for length, but which I still find to be pretty cool.

Tarantulas are masterpieces of engineering, relying on a sort of hydraulic system to move their legs. Tarantulas are arthropods and they have an exoskeleton to protect their delicate innards. They also have simplified muscle connections compared to humans. We humans rely on opposing sets of muscles to move our limbs – for example, in order to raise our arm, our biceps muscle contracts and our triceps relaxes, and to lower it, the biceps relaxes and the triceps contracts. Spiders have flexor muscles to pull their legs in, but don’t have opposing extensor muscles to push the legs back out. This is why a dead spider's legs curl up - there's nothing to push them out. So tarantulas extend their legs by a system that can be compared to a rudimentary hydraulic system.  Blood is forced into the legs to extend them, much like pumping hydraulic fluid into cylinders to lift the bed of a dump truck. Then the flexor muscles work to pull the legs back in.  It's a lot for a spider-brain to keep straight, yet they manage - at least until some kid with an empty mayonnaise jar comes along and scoops them up.   

This probably guarantees that the next time I see a tarantula in a zoo exhibit, I'll probably make mechanical leg-extending noises and then be asked to leave.

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The dreaded red pencil!

We're in the midst of multiple deadlines right now, so it seems like a good time to give you an update on the actual "nuts 'n' bolts" of co-writing a book on a deadline.  

Review:  First up, be careful with whom you choose to collaborate.  Technically, I'm an academic and Ensley's an academic in training.  Therefore, you'd expect us to work with an "academic publisher" and we both have.  Now, academic books have a different market - those publishing houses primarily aim at college/university libraries rather than mass-market booksellers.  Small publishing runs are the norm and money is not your chief objective (seriously - I've run the math on my first book and if you divide the royalties I've received by the amount of hours I spent bringing that book forth, I'd have made more cashy money by picking tomatoes.  Not kidding.).  Writing an academic book (or chapters in several edited collections) is an important feather in your cap if you're prepping for a tenure review, but neither of us are.  Wanna Cook? is far more mass-market, meaning that it is intended to reach a different audience and that it's written in a different, less jargon-y style.  We needed a publisher who would let us write the way we wanted to (after providing them with samples, of course!) and who also understood the market we're trying to reach as well as having the resources and contacts to get us there.  We're very happy with ECW on all of those scores.

Side note:  If you're co-writing (or co-anything), be careful!  We've both heard, if not outright horror stories, unpleasant stories of folks who can be quick to snip at students with late work but have a hard time making their own deadlines.  At multiple points in a project like this, you have to trust your co-author to get their stuff together.  Deadlines shift and we've had to sit down with calendars more than once in the last year and map out when we reasonably thought we could get chunks of this project completed - and it always takes longer than you think it will, but at no point have I fretted that Ensley would leave me high and dry.  Nor, I think, has he fretted that I would.

Speculation:  You write a book like this in chunks - each episode has its own entry and each entry has its own parts.  You watch, you annotate, you double-check, you draft, you read each other's parts, then you edit and repeat.  Then, when you have a season drafted, you send your baby off into the cold, cruel Canadian world.  Then you wait.  And sometimes you wait more.  But don't worry, when your editor wants you to kick it into a higher gear - you'll know!  We're in that weird place now of not having all of the seasons drafted, yet working on refining and polishing early season drafts after they've gone through the first round of edits, and not knowing how the show will actually conclude its run, so we may need to go back and point out little things that bubble back up in the final eight episodes.  You sometimes need to remind yourself of what day it is.  

You also worry that you haven't caught everything - rest assured, you haven't.  That's one reason a co-writer is a good idea - you get a new set of eyes.  Ensley picks up on things that ride right on by me and I do the same for him.  But you also have to accept that there's some readerfan in Peoria who is going to see something that you both either flat-out missed or that you saw, but had to cut for length.  Deal - in the case of "you missed it," well, that's what makes Breaking Bad such a good show - there's so much there.  In the case of "too long, cut it," well, it's a guide, not a scholarly treatise and your publisher is serious about the word count.  If you keep "A," "B" is probably going to have to go.

Underline:  Don't forget to have fun.  Yes, this is work and yes, there are deadlines and yes, people expect you to put the emphasis on the first syllable of that word "deadline."  But it should also be fun - writing a book (ANY book) takes a tremendous amount of time and that's time that you could be spending on anything else - so make sure it's worthwhile.

That's where we are today.  Season 4 needs some attention and we plan to have that drafted and off to our intrepid editor by the end of the month.  We've line-edited season 1 (and boy! Is it eye-opening to see how our approach has changed from that first short season!) and will probably get season 2 for the edits by the end of the week.  Busy, busy time.

Don't forget to check in here every Wednesday and also make a standing date to check out my co-author Ensley Guffey's "Meth Monday" posts!  This week features our first ever guest posting as physicist and Breaking Bad fan Shimon Lerner explains some of the deeper meaning behind Walt's non de meth, Heisenberg.  It goes in some very interesting directions!

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Pre Meth Walt - look, kids!
Chemistry is fun!  Like me!

Wanna Cook? is planned a quasi-commercial book. Or maybe it's a quasi-academic book. At any rate, it's a blend. While not as footnoted-and-polysyllabic as the genuine "television goes to the Ivory Tower" books are, Wanna Cook? is also designed to be far more than a recap guide. For me, this is a change. While the analysis of popular culture allows for a certain (shall we say) relaxing of tone, the overarching goal remains the same - take a solid background in the scholarship in the field and use it, along with your own independent research, to stake out and defend your particular position.

As you can imagine, these books tend to not crack the New York Times bestseller lists.  Oh, well. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be written. I'm quite proud of Faith & Choice in the Works of Joss Whedon, as well as my other publications (and really, they make wonderful additions to any holiday gift list!  Just sayin'). 

It's been great to write so freely and to express opinions without having to exhaustively support each and every contention, but I have to admit, it's also been a bit daunting.  I'm used to "well, so-and-so agrees with me right here on page 47 of the treatise Philosophers Take On Television* (published by Oh-So-Important Press 2008), so I must be right.  Took me six hours to find that quote so I have to be right!" Instead, this is much more "when you see something pop up four times in six episodes and the camera lingers on the item each time, that's no coincidence.  This is what I think it means."

Post Meth Walt - do what I say, or else.
A Very Bad Else.

However, it's a good idea to test-drive your theories.  So this past week, my co-author and I hied ourselves to the annual Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association in the South conference to present some ideas about Breaking Bad that will likely turn into longer pieces in the finished book.  We were fortunate to present alongside David Lavery (presenting on showrunner Vince Gilligan) and Jeffery Frame (presenting on secondary characters in the show), both of whom gave polished, artful talks.  (Keep in mind at these conferences, you're limited to a maximum of 20 minutes speaking time and that's with any clips you want to use. With a four person panel, your time is cut to a mere 15 minutes, so there's no time to fool around here.) My co-author has written about the panel over on his blog, so I won't duplicate it here, other than to say that the reception to our ideas was positive and it gives me hope that Wanna Cook? will be well-received and have some useful, creative, fun things to say.

In the next few weeks, I dive into the work of annotating and organizing Season 4, as well as re-writing the conference presentation into a book "extra." I daresay these weekly posts will show a focus on Season 4 as I work my way through that material - and what a season it was! Join me here on Wednesdays and I know Ensley F. Guffey would like to see you over at his place for the weekly "Meth Monday." Until then, stay safe and avoid angry chemistry teachers.

* Please note that, to my knowledge, neither this book nor the press actually exists, although I think the name of the press is especially cool and it probably should.

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Well, well, well - for the first time since high summer, I don't have a new Breaking Bad episode to recap and speculate upon. I can deal with that - "Gliding Over All" left me with plenty to chew on - but I will admit to wishing that it wasn't going to be the better part of an ENTIRE YEAR before I learn how Walt goes from serenely watching his children play around the backyard pool to buying a heavy machine gun in the men's room of a Denny's on his birthday.

Damn you, Gilligan! (An oath I'm sure Skipper wanted to scream to the skies from time to time on that island, by the way.)

So what's going on in the meantime? Wanna Cook? The Unofficial Companion Guide to Breaking Bad continues to take shape. The first three seasons are drafted and my co-author and I are taking a short break to prepare papers for presentation at the annual Popular/American Culture Association in the South conference, which is due to be held in Nashville, TN at the end of September.  Ensley F. Guffey will be presenting on how Breaking Bad uses space and place (think of the transformations the house we first see Jesse living in goes through to become Jesse's house as Jesse himself transforms) and I'll be presenting on how the show uses nonverbal communication (think dingdingdingding along with creepy-crawly  Cousins, among other examples). It'll take us until the conference to put these ideas down on paper and prepare our clips, so Season Four won't really get rolling into draft form until early October.

I have to say, I think you're going to be pleased with the final book. Wanna Cook? was always planned to be far more than a recap or episode summary guide. The book is full of notes about ongoing themes in Breaking Bad, camera shots, episode titles, and lots of extras about everything from Pablo Escobar and money laundering to Ted's heated floor and Walt Whitman.

We both plan on continuing our weekly posts about Breaking Bad - you can find "Meth Monday" over at Ensley's site and I hope you'll keep coming back here for "Walter White Wednesday." There's plenty for us to talk about!

Throughout the run of Breaking Bad, fans of the show have put together some amazing fan-work centered around the show - here's a link to a re-imagining of the opening credits that I think is well worth a look! Maybe this will help tide you over until we get our answers about Walt, Hank, Jesse, and the rest!

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. . . in which I digress from talking about the show to talking about the project.

As readers of this blog know, "Walter White Wednesday" is being done to support the upcoming book Wanna Cook? The Unofficial Guide to Breaking Bad.  A question I get asked a lot is some variation of "So how do you get a book published?"  Here's at least part of the answer.  Actual mileage may vary.

1. Everyone will tell you that it's all about luck.  It's not.  What it IS about is hard, grinding work done consistently.  Since it involves hard, grinding work done over a long period of time, for the love of all the angels, pick a topic you absolutely LOVE - you're going to be living with it for a long time.
2. For my first book, I became fixated on finding the answer to the question, "If  Joss Whedon's a hard-core atheist, how come he cares so much about redemption?"  Seriously - that one question got the whole ball rolling - and the answers I found surprised me.  I then started reading what other people had written, making notes on what I agreed with and where I thought people ignored the overall evidence to support only their own ideas.  Read the show sites, but also read the critical sites - trust me, there's a critical site (which features more academic writing and fewer straight recaps) for everything.  Whedon, science fiction, film, soap operas, commercials - everything is someone's darling to study.  Go find it.  Read, comment, and when something truly clicks for you (for me, it was the fact that I couldn't find the stuff I wanted to read, so I thought, Well, I'll write it myself.), it's time to start writing.  Writers write.  They don't sit on the couch and whine about how great they'd be if they only had a publishing contract.  You start writing without one.
3. Now you start presenting and getting your work out there into the world.  Regardless of what you're writing - fiction, poetry, non-fiction, criticism, you name it - you need a reader.  This is someone who will read your material critically.  Warning - they will, very occasionally, bruise your feelings.  But, if they're any good at all, their comments will make you a better writer.  Maintaining a blog or writing some sort of online column is also a great idea, but you have to be consistent about it (I think once a week is the absolute minimum yet you have to also be careful about how much you give away.)  
4. With a few posts and pages under your belt, it's time to see how your work stacks up.  Get on the list for a conference that caters to your area.  There are conferences for writers of romance novels, academic criticism, sportswriting, and so on.  I found popular culture conferences and I haven't looked back.  Go, meet people who write what you want to write, and go hear people who write in other areas, too.  When you're ready, present your own work - it'll usually be a 20 minute reading, so you don't have to have an entire manuscript done.  Ask questions.  Collect business cards.  Have coffee with people.  Go have dinner.  Grab a sandwich between sessions.  Most people are friendly and quite willing to talk about their work.  Also, in my experience, most of these people are funny and it's never a bad idea to spend time with such folk.

5.  Conferences also have publishing reps.  Look over the book tables and see what they brought with them.  Chat with the reps, who probably have a "so you want to send us a proposal?" handout with them.  You can get this information online, but it's good to wander and see who's publishing what.  Also, having ten minutes to just chat with someone in publishing about you and what you're interested in writing about - that's gold.  Thank them for their time and after you get home, drop anyone who was generous with their time or whose work you especially liked a quick note.  No - this probably won't fling open the doors of the publishing house; it's simply good manners.
6.  Now you write a proposal following the guidelines.  You make it strong, you make it pretty, and you accept that you probably won't get asked to the prom right off.  My first book, Faith & Choice in the Works of Joss Whedon (you've got that on your bookshelf, right?) came about with some major tweaking on the proposal.  It's a academic book - I'll never get rich off of it, but I wrote (or so I believe) a solid, well-researched, yet still readable book about a subject I cared a great deal about.  Further, the book has opened doors for me - as people read my work and heard me present, they kept me in mind for other projects.

It's not luck.  It's work and setting deadlines and making them and turning in work that doesn't have to be salvaged by an editor.  Learn the basics of grammar and don't be so sensitive to criticism that you don't let anyone read your work before you seek a wider audience.

I'm really enjoying co-writing the first part of Wanna Cook?  With the fifth and final season not airing as one unified season, I don't know what that's going to do to publication date - I imagine it's pushed back a bit, especially if the second half of Season 5 doesn't air until early (or, heaven forbid, mid-) 2013, but we'll have to see.  That's the other thing about writing - you have to roll with the punches, because - oh, boy! - there will be some.

Now go write!