Once Again, I’m Feeling Positive About the Book

I’m still working on the first chunk of the book. Recently I printed and edited this first piece - which was greatly needed. When I returned to the computer I still felt a little aprehensive about how good it would be.

The trouble is that I don’t want to give too much away in the beginning, even though lots of wacky things are going on. They’re explained as the book goes on, but if this first part is too confusing for people, they’re not going to want to keep reading in the hope that things will get better.

But I’ve made a shift in direction as I’m going through these edits that I think will help to pull everything together. My hope is that people will buy into the events that are taking place if they don’t quite understand them.

But having no real experience or training in this type of writing I don’t have much to draw on to make this all happen. I can dream up a good story, but formatting it in such a way that makes sense and is entertaining is fairly difficult. Maybe for my first major creative writing effort I should have written a few short stories?

There’s no turning back now though.

Outside Factors

I’ve purposely kept out all other aspects of my life from this project (written in a blog, I’m not sure if this really should be called a documentary). But there are several things besides my writing ability and work ethic that will help determine the outcome of this effort.

I purchased an older house a few years back. Beyond the normal issues that older house bring with them, the house had not been given regular maintenance for a number of years. I’ve also been working to convert the basements and kitchen spaces into rooms that look nice (as opposed to old and depressing). This has required the majority of my free time.

My wife is in graduate school and working full time, so I’ve taken on most of the joint tasks. I’m also studying for a series of exams that will benefit my professional (completely unrelated to writing) career.

Each hour that I am not at work then becomes a precious thing. Three major tasks, now, take up most of my time: studying, working on the house, and writing. Along with that are everything that comes up with life. It had become very easy lately to not work on the book.

Then there are occasions when I have no confidence in the book, so it almost makes sense for me not to write the thing. It would be very easy just to give up on the whole project. The one reason I haven’t done so is that I have a closet full of unfinished projects and I’m tired of wondering if I could ever be anything. So I keep plugging away.

Back to the computer

I’ve finished revising the printed portion of book - the first section. I’ve tried to give it some structure and rythm that it was missing desparately before. Much of that structure was in the form of written notes to myself. So I’ll have to do most of the hard work now. Ideas are easier to come up with than they are to make into reality.

I’ve lost some confidence in the project. Some of the things I wrote were absolute garbage and I’m not sure if I can really improve them. I know realize the importance of an editor. That will be coming up shortly.

I’m at a log jam of sorts. I don’t really know how to make the text noticably better. I’ve always struggled to make the vision a reality. The whole work just doesn’t sing yet, but maybe that’s the point of the process. I suppose, if I was a brilliant author, I would have been paid for it by now. [read: False hope in which I thought the book might actually make something of itself is being worn away by the increasing reality that the project will truly be a failure]

Back to Writing

I think I had about a month off from actively working on the book, but now I’m back into it. The first piece of the book is supposed to generate some questions and interest and build a little suspense. Though, rewriting some of the original pieces of the book, it was clear that most of it was worthless.

The whole structure of the thing was wrong. I used too many goofy words and kept repeating them over and over (I’ve since purchased a thesarus). Plus the angle I was taking wasn’t correct as to how it related to the rest of the book.

To correct this I printed the first chunk off and am now attacking it. The editor side of me has made several nasty remarks to the writing side of me. I would say they were deserved. No one would have made it through the opening how it stood. I can’t convey to you how awful it was. Just garbage. When everything is done, I’ll post it somewhere on this site for reading. People will be amazed at the progress that was made (hopefully).

I’ve reorganized how the opening lays out and reformated the plot lines a bit. It’s not really different, just clarified a bit.

A bit of foreshadowing: There is a lot of red on the pages. I need to do a better job of onscreen editing the rest of the book, because I’m looking at maybe 10% of the whole thing right now. I’d never make it through the hand and digital editing if the rest of the book is this bad.

A final note. I did an official word count of the book as I had to move the digital file to another computer to print. Just over 100,000 words. It came out to be 174 words per kilobyte of .rtf file. I was using a previous number of 172 words per kilobyte. Pretty close. Just what 100,000 words means? I’m not sure, but they’re all there.