A Draft In Progress: Intro and Chapter One

So one of the projects I mentioned I was working on was taking all my rambling blog entries and putting them together in one resource, ultimately creating a book on writing.

This is turning into an interesting experiment. After I added all the text of my related articles and blog entries on writing into a single Scrivener project file, I found I had 96,000 words about writing in there. I doubt anyone is interested in a 96K book on writing from me; that’s a lot to slog through.

Nonetheless, there’s some value to organizing it all, I think. So I am writing a slimmer, more accessible version of it by cutting and pasting the important stuff into a series of chapters and writing some framing material around it to create some sort of narrative.

My hope is that core document of 50-60 thousand words can become a book on writing. A couple of reasons I want to do this.

At 30, with 15 years of doing this, it’s kind of neat to be digging through my old journals, thoughts, emails, and blog entries as a retrospective to how far I’ve come. A personal reminiscence of my journey so far that is somewhat cathartic and a nice reminder that, yes, I have come far (and it is no doubt somewhat prompted by a milestone birthday and series of brushes with my own mortality, I’d imagine).

The second reason is pure business mind. Every time I appear somewhere as an author, speaking, reading, etc, I find a large part of the audience is interested in me not as a content provider (ie: buying my books), but as someone who’s gone down a road they’re interested in (they want to know how I became a writer, and how they might as well). I’m wondering if, in addition to my hardcovers and paperbacks for sale at an event, a book on writing might not be an additional way to add to my income.

The third reason is that I’ve found books on writing by authors at all stages of their careers so fascinating both to me as a writer who wants to figure out how they did it, what they think about it, and also as a reader (how did they become the writer they are).

So there were many reasons to create this book, which I decided would be called, after several drafts of the title: It’s All Just A Draft.

But since I had almost 100K of material, I thought it would be fun to use the internet (what initially created all this material), as a way to do something different.

So first off, I’ll be writing this somewhat live. The blog entries are all already there, so it’s not that unusual idea. The chapters will go up as they’re done on a wiki (that only I can edit). I will also be adding in pages that might not ever make it to the book (the original blog posts the chapters were compressed from, and so on). I might also post unfinished chapters comprised of cut/pasted blog posts as I go along. It’s an experiment. A draft.

You can find the introduction and first chapter (Writers Read) here. (at the moment all of google sites, the wiki I hosted it on, is down. Lucky me. I launch something new and hopefully cool, and the site goes down, *sigh*)…

Links back up and working

Filed under the topic My Writing on March 6th 2009 at 11:41 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.