Blog into book
For more than I year I’ve been brainstorming ways to get some of the content from my blog into book form. I don’t just want to dump it straight from livejournal. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it has to do with the fact that some of the cool ideas in the blog are only half realized. The obvious solution is to use the raw material in the blog to create essays. I definitely plan to do that. But crafting essays is a lot of work and I wanted to get things into print faster.
So I tried just grabbing the first 5000 words of my blog and deleting out the entries that seemed boring or irrelevant. Then I put in a few editorial comments which expanded on details that did not actually make it into the blog. The result was about 3600 words long. As an experiment, I submitted that to my writer’s group. The blog entries I left were primarily about parenting or personal growth. My writer’s group contains exactly one other parent. A couple of them are expecting their first baby, another couple are getting married soon, the remaining three are all single and male. I was not sure that some of them would enjoy reading my rambles about my kids.
The good news is that, without exception, they all found my submission interesting. Several of them said that they were worried they would not like it, but by the end they were enjoying the read. This makes me really happy. Somehow I took something outside the range of their usual interests and managed to make it work. This confirms my feeling that there are some really good thoughts in my blog entries, things that are worthy of print.
The discouraging news is that half of the writer’s group said that I should either make it be a book of essays or I should leave the blog completely intact with no editing. I don’t mind the work that creating essays would entail. I like working at writing. But I have only so much time and energy. I would really like to be submitting something to writers group every single week. My blog contains hundreds of thousands of words. I could submit for a long time and not run out. Then as I finished fiction pieces I could submit those.
No one else in the group minds that I submit sporadically. There are several in the group who only submit sometimes. I would just like to submit more. If I were submitting more, that would be because I was writing more. I would like to write more. But I won’t write more at the expense of my family or of the business that pays our bills. And so I will continue to snatch my slivers of writing time and be a little jealous of people who have somehow managed their lives so that they have vast swathes of time for writing.