I was convinced to write a book on curling after writing most of one by accident.
There is a lot that you can cover on the topic of curling. Once deciding to make it a book, a big, recurring question became what to include and what to exclude — what was the scope of the book, what could I fit and how much detail could I go into within reason for the format?

To be fair, “book length” has quite a bit of slack in its definition: there is some rough minimum of pages/word count below which a book becomes a novella or short guide or somesuch, and some upper limit where it has to be broken up and becomes a series. This book (and VoS) come in closer to that lower limit — I wanted a quick read on topics that can easily become slogs. But there are books of up to 1000 pages out there, and each of those are still “a book” (though likely well past the point where most editors would have suggested breaking it into two or three volumes).

So when I decided to write a curling book, I started by thinking of who my reader was going to be (my target audience), and what (at least in my best estimation) they would definitely need out of a book, what they might likely want, and what would be just going down a rabbithole and unnecessary for most.

I wanted to focus on, as the title ended up being, “beginners and improvers” — people who maybe never curled or just came out of a learn to curl through to those who have maybe played for a few years but might just now be looking to play skip or vice for the first time, or improve their game now that they had some time for the basics to settle in. So very much the club-level curler — I had no illusions about someone picking up my book on their way to the Olympic trials.

My philosophy was to try to make it as useful as possible for that audience while being as fun to and quick to read as possible. So of course I wanted to include anything under the “definitely need” section of skills, and touch on a lot of “likely want”, and judiciously cut out any attempts to fall down rabbitholes and include advanced information that only a small percentage would understand or use. That judicious approach does mean there are some fairly popular topics that I don’t touch on.

The book does cover all the basics on actually playing: throwing, sweeping, calling line, communicating on the ice. Directional sweeping was a super easy one to decide to include: so many people are interested in it, but there are so few sources of accessible information on it (especially for the club curler — a lot of webinars out there focus on what’s possible with the WCF fabric because that’s a constraint the pros face, but for recreational play the physics may be different!).

The decisions got harder as we got into aspects of playing skip. I definitely wanted enough information for someone to be able to start at that position, but there can be a whole separate book on calling the game in curling — indeed, there are books just on the strategy aspect! So I focused on the parts that I see people struggling with the most, and which are essential to getting started as a skip: how to communicate non-verbally, how to decide and then call line, how to approach reading the ice, and a very short quick-start guide on strategy.

That still left a fair bit on the proverbial cutting room floor. For example, there’s all the non-playing aspects. Plenty of curling books start off with trying to trace the history of the game, which I personally find pretty boring and off-topic in a how-to guide. Then there’s info on the ice itself. And while I do find that fascinating personally, and while curling ice is a pretty magical surface, you really don’t need to know anything other than that “it’s pebbled” to be playing on it.

It was the stuff on playing back-end that I found served as my edge cases. Angles in particular were so borderline that even as I’m writing this I’m having anxiety that I made the wrong call and should stop the presses to go back and put it in. To help alleviate that I’ve fished out my draft for that section and will throw up a post in two days on that topic as my first bit of bonus content here.

The drag effect was another: it’s kind of cool, and they’ll talk about it enough on TV that people might wonder more about it. However, I don’t notice it much in regular club play (our stones don’t exhibit a very strong drag effect — nowhere near what the lively stones in national competitions see — though that could be just our club).

Every guide on curling seems to have a section where they go through specific strategy scenarios. As a reader, they’re a decent enough way to teach, but with my editor hat on, they use a lot of space relative to the info they convey. They’re also hard to set up in print to make it easy to follow — I figure pointing people to Chess on Ice’s YouTube channel is much more useful for that, or What’s Your Call?

Then some things really only apply when you get to pretty rarefied air in the curling world. Matching rocks and keeping a rock book, for instance: I get the principle. It sounds like a good thing to do if you get to play at that high level where the small differences between stones matters and you get some practice time before a competition to suss those out. But most of us don’t get that practice time, and aren’t consistent enough anyway to say whether the difference between two throws was us or the rock.

Mental performance can matter, as can team psychology… but again, for most of us the time we have with our team is the time on the ice and some broomstacking afterwards. We’re not generally holding team meetings or off-ice teambuilding sessions with our coach at the recreational level.

One last topic that again I’m having anxiety about leaving out was on how to watch curling on TV as a fan. This was a harder one because it would apply to more people, and was cut because honestly the first draft sucked and I didn’t know how to improve it, and could justify just cutting it entirely because it didn’t relate to playing the game.

Anyway, that hopefully helps give you some insight into my thought process with my editor hat on, and good idea of where the book puts its focus.

A side benefit of aiming to keep it brief and snappy that I didn’t think of until getting the final PDFs ready for the printer is that the threshold where a book can be sent in the mail in Canada as lettermail vs. being too large for a mail slot and having to be sent as a package (for substantially more money for someone who isn’t Amazon) is right around 220 pgs. That will make it possible to sell and ship directly myself, for anyone that wants a signed copy.