I bragged a couple days ago that I might crank out 50 pages this week. The heartening thing is that I’m pretty comfortable thinking I should be able to do this soon. The fact tugging ever so slightly at the back of my mind is that I only got four cranked out yesterday and two today.
As you noticed today I’ve got a new blog post feature – word of the day. I type a word into the search engine to see if or how often I might have used it in previous posts. I’ve got over 4,000 posts now stretching back to 2006 and I thought it would be fun to see how much I flex my vocabulary.
I tried a couple words out to see how it might work before settling on “apoplexy.” A couple words garnerned not a single post. “Amoral” popped up in two one of them being an early 2006 reference to the challenge of writing this book. I just decided amoral was too dull a word to use in my first word of the day.
Those difficulties still abound. I’ve got the material wonderfully organized. Finding what I need at any given time won’t be as fast as a Google search but for most materials should only take me a few minutes to gather up. I’ve also got a thick pile of hand written notes to go through dating back to 2006. The few I’ve waded through have reminded me of many fascinating tidbits I’d long forgotten about so I have no choice but to reread them all again. Sadly, I’m a slow note taker and I’ve got handwriting so bad that at times its hard for me to decipher them.
Yesterday I found some other long neglected bit of organizing to do. I think it was going through a number of files taken from the historical society to blend into my larger filing system. Today it was continuing to look up phone numbers of witnesses who have experienced something of a diaspora since they played their part 40 years ago in the pageant. I’m not quite done with that.
These last gasps of organizing are just that. Pretty soon I should be primed to type, type, type. That won’t be the end of my struggles. Yesterday’s content was very much a part of the story but didn’t fit neatly into the outline I’ve devised. At some point between now and publishing I’ll have to integrate similar parts into the whole rearranging the current outline to accomodate them. Its like a vast jigsaw puzzle. Fortunately I’m a very methodical organizer when I narrow my eyes and dig in.
I’ve also determined that I need to continue writing some of the earlier chapters while I wait to gather more phone numbers. the early stuff is largely historical to put later events in context.
I hope to have a fifty-page week yet. I think I managed it 20 years ago when I wrote my first ill considered book to pay for my first run for Congress. Today I’m a much more practiced writer.
Well, I’ve strung you along long enough. Here’s today’s tidbit. Its a little bit of history. The usual caveat applies:
Events that took place during the Great War from 1914 to 1918 and its aftermath gave rise to Minnesota’s Farmer Laborites. The Farm economy surged during the war as stressed European combatants purchased vast quantities of American grain to fuel their armies and war.
When the war ended the European economy was in tatters and the grain shipments ended. The price of grain withered and with it over leveraged farmers lost their lands to the banks.
