My Current Writing Project
I’m working on compiling a book of essays. This is not a new project. I’ve been toying with it for quite awhile. Most of the essays are pulled from blog entries, but I am revising them so that they work better in a book format. Over the past year or so, I have been looking around for books similar to what I intend to create. They exist. This means that getting the book published is a possibility, although I expect the process of acquiring a publisher to be lengthy and full of rejection. I am not looking forward to the rejection.
Before I can begin sending out queries, I need to have something to send. With this in mind, I’ve been gathering essays and organizing them into categories. In the process I’ve discovered a few interesting statistics. My essays average 1000 words long. If I have five categories for my book, then 10 essays per category is 50,000 words. If I want 100,000 words, then I need to plan for 20 essays per category. Either way, it is a daunting number of essays. I was inclined to feel discouraged about it until I remembered that I’ve been writing this blog for five years now. During those five years I wrote at least 100 essay-type entries per year. (The remaining blog entries are valuable in context, but aren’t right for putting into a book.) This means that I should have 500 essays to select from. It isn’t quite as simple as just picking the blog entries to duplicate. There is revision and re-writing to be done, but the result is a daunting task instead of an impossible one.
The creation of this book feels important. It is the right thing for me to be doing with my spare hours. (I actually have spare hours these days. It’s amazing.) I’m not sure why the book is important. It may be that the organization of my thoughts into a book will be of value to me personally and that the book will never see print. It may be that the book will see print and will be helpful to others as well as to me. Obviously I want the second to be true, but I can not control the future. I can not control whether a publisher sees value in my words. I must shape my goals around what I do control. And so I will write, and revise, and organize. Then I will query.