Anyone who doubts my ability to put words together should remember that over the past five or six years I’ve probably strung 2 million of them together for this blog. I say that because the book I’m working on should be my highest non family priority right now. Sure, I’ve got a long frustrated political ambition and I’m using the writing of the book to drum up interest in both but its still a book that may never see print. The more I blog between now and May the more difficult it will be to meet that deadline.
So, like last night’s final post this one’s also about the book. I’ll continue to use this blog to flog the book and to shame myself to keep writing it and to back off of the blog. To that end I’m going to start enumerating the pages I’ve cranked out daily, I’d like to crank out about 25 (rough draft) pages at a time preferably once every two weeks. I really have no idea how many pages will be in the final book. To get anyone to read it it should be the size of a summer read or about 200 pages. At 25 pages every two weeks it would only take me two months to finish a rough draft. The first problem is that my typed 25 pages probably only equal about 12 paperback book pages. That means I’d need more like four months to come up with the full 200 pages.
A second problem is my suspicion that to fully flesh out the story I’ll need more like 400 pages. That’s not a summer read and it would require closer to 8 months of work, not counting editing.
This is very daunting.
So to encourage myself I’ve decided to make public my progress every day. I know its only my eight loyal readers who will follow this progress but knowing that I’m under someone else’s scrutiny may be what I need to hang in there. So here are today’s output. Two lousy pages.
I know that sounds pathetic but I’ve got an excuse. Its my birthday and will be for another three hours. I had family around all day and I took a grandson out to chop down a Christmas Tree followed by a huge meal. its a wonder I got any writing done at all. I woke up at 1:30am and couldn’t sleep!
I’ll also try to keep my eight loyal readers interest by posting a small snippet of each day’s output. Here’s a sample of today’s work which may or may not be altered or edited out of the final publication: PS. It’s Chapter two and tentatively titled Boy of the Zenith City. That could change too.
Like many other Jews in Duluth, a lot of whom were his neighbors in the Chester Park Neighborhood, Mr. _________ was a shrewd businessman. He’d learned some of his wiles in the old country where he had managed to conceal some confiscatable wealth in the form of gemstones swallowed for later recovery after passing border checkpoints. It was a trick his employee would recall years later as the whole world descended upon him to pick his bones clean.
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