cellini's Diaryland Diary

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I Love My New Book

I am totally in love with my new book. Earlier this week I wrote the proposal for it and outlined the chapters. Reading my own proposal, I am now realizing that the concept for this book and the size of the market for it are so very much better than I had ever thought. I've been kicking around this idea for a second book since around last October and now it looks better than ever.

There is a huge temptation to dive totally into it right now and try to bang out the first chapter today, but I really shouldn't do that. I have 3 books that I need to read for research purposes for that chapter and it would be stupid to even take a stab at it before I've gotten through them. I want to be precise and accurate. On Monday morning I'll have some money from this course I'm teaching all weekend and I can use some of it to buy the books that I need. I'll plow through the books in a few days and then really get going.

If this book and the one I've already written will sell, then I feel like I can do this indefinitely. Writing non-fiction is almost as instinctive as breathing to me. I wrote like mad when I was a kid. I wrote what must have been terrible science fiction in elementary and middle school. Essays and research papers in high school, some for classes and far more just because I felt like it. 10 years of writing in this and a previous diary. About 4 years of rather good blogging on politics, hunting and conservation issues. Various short stories, a collection of absurd Aesop fable spoofs, a 40 page book about African clawed frogs that I never made any attempt at getting published, etc. etc. Oddly enough, my most barren period of good writing was probably college.

Throughout most of my life, there have been very few weeks in which I did not write at least 10 pages of something. I expect that I have produced, in the course of my life, easily over 12,000 pages of text. Not to say that the sheer lifetime volume of words is necessarily an indication of its quality, but I do think that a lot of regular practice at writing helps one to become better at it.

The point is that I've now got enough experience in writing a wide enough variety of stuff, very quickly, that there is no reason why I shouldn't be doing it for a living. The real question is why I didn't start writing books in a serious way years ago. I find that I like writing non-fiction books very much and I could do this happily for the rest of my life.

10:00 a.m. - 2010-02-18

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