cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Stretch

Having been on the road for a week I needed at least a few hours to become re-acclimated to home. I have so much work to do but I needed to take most of the day to spend with the kids and dogs.

I tried going out into the woods and foraging but my foot still hurts too much to walk far.

Today I only wrote about 2,000 words. However, I did some important organizational stuff for the book. I took various disparate chapters and put them together, re-writing parts to make them flow together properly. Its starting to read like a proper book instead of just a bunch of long travel essays. Ensuring that characters are introduced and re-visited clearly, tidying up the clarity of the time-line, etc. Right now its about 47,000 words of a proper book. So I'm about half way done and the book is due to my editor in 3 days. Ouch.

Ok, in truth I'm way more than half way done. Because I've done all of the research and interviews and travel. Plus months of thinking about how it all goes together. The heavy lifting is done and its just a matter of getting the words typed on a screen now.

I still don't know for sure if its any good. The only people who have read any of it are Jenny and Trish and Trish is actually lying when she says she's read it. I know this, never mind how.

What I have is good but not as good as I wish it was. But not much writing *is* as good as I wish it was. I mean in most books that I've read. When I look at where the bar is, I think that I'm ok. Is this book as good as 'Tom Sawyer,' or 'Green Hills of Afr1ca?' No. But its better than most of the non-fiction I've seen in print in recent decades, including a lot of stuff that sold very well.

It isn't quite as good as Douglas Adams' 'Last Chance to See,' which was one of the books that inspired this one. Its in the same ballpark, but Adams' book is probably better writing.

Probably most people will read this and enjoy it as writing while also recognizing the environmental value of what I'm putting forth. Really good book reviewers will say that this shows promise but that the author (me) is still finding his way, fails to flesh out characters fully, and is sometimes inconsistent in the flow and direction of the book. Those aren't fatal flaws for a second book by a young writer. If I was 45 years old and this was my 5th book then I'd be worried.

Yes, this book isn't going to be perfect. I don't have enough time left to make it perfect and my publisher was far too slow in writing the checks for the travel for me to have had any hope of really honing the book. That's not the end of the world. A less than perfect book can still be of use to people and can still sell very well. I need it to sell well enough to get me a good offer for the third and fourth books. At that point I hope that I'll be able to really start writing the kind of books that I think I'm capable of.

'Speak of the Dead' could be on that level of really putting out the best that I'm capable of at this point in my life.

I went through a period for some months where I was reading everything I could find about how other professional authors go about things. How they schedule and what pace they write at and how they organize their lives and go about the business of being an author. I'm starting to get the impression that most of us are just sort of stumbling our way through this profession and there isn't much to learn from most of them.

These days I don't see or talk to other writers very often. I don't really see anyone. For months and months I've done very little except for work on this book and I've either been on the road or sitting at home, broke, waiting for money to get back on the road. Aside from my immediate family I live a very solitary, isolated life now. Not really by choice. I don't feel like much of a part of the things that happen in the world around me. When I watched the news on TV in my hotel room the other night I felt like a time traveler making a brief visit.

Stock market crashing? I lost everything years ago, so I don't really care about that in the slightest. Hurricane? Nothing I can do about that. Earthquake? I called 911 for the burning trailer and kept going. I pass the tabloids in the grocery store and I literally have no idea who any of the names plastered across the front pages are.

In a sense, becoming this disconnected from the world has made it more interesting on those occasions when I visit it. Going to an airport or a cocktail party is like visiting a foreign country.

12:27 a.m. - 2011-08-30

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