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I want to write a book and get it published

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I want to write a book and get it published Empty I want to write a book and get it published

Post by Hirundo Bos Mon Jan 23, 2017 2:45 pm

And I have kind of a plan to get it done. But it's missing a few pieces still, and some of those are the most immediate ones.

I know what I'm going to write about. It's going to a collection of personal essays, around 5000 words each, where I use my diagnosis as a lens to examine my own life, and maybe the human condition. I have two or three chapters I'm more or less halfway through.

I know how to write. I've been writing steadily for about 7 years, almost daily, in sessions between 30 and 60 minutes each. I am starting to acquire a pretty good toolbox for the task.
The one thing I haven't done a lot of, is completing projects larger than a blog entry, forum post, or unpaid amateur erotic short story. Besides that, I coauthored a role-playing game back in 2008, and that's more or less it.

So finishing a project is the next thing I need to learn, and that's where I'm going to need a plan.
When I'm doing a project all on my own, the structure tends to erode along the way. I get lost in some detail, or I get caught up in another project, you know, something new and shiny… the stamina to see something through has to be learned, and I haven't quite gotten to that point yet.

The solution is to find some sort of external commitment. When I have someone to look over my shoulder, someone to report to regularly, someone to nag at me until I deliver, I'm able to finish stuff. My time at work training, and then my internship, has showed me that. But at the same time, I'm pretty resistant to outside demands, and I can get quite cranky about it. It could potentially be a lot of emotional work for someone to apply pressure in the exact way that helps me structure myself.

At some point, when I have a few chapters, I plan to write a proposal, take it to a publisher, maybe apply for a grant from some fund or other, and if I can get those things done, I have enough external commitment to do the rest.

But before I get that far… I could really use someone to help me stay on course, someone who could meet me from time to time in physical space and talk about ideas and help me set some goals… and I don't know how to ask, or who to ask, or how to reduce the amount of work it would take, or how to make the remaining work worth their while…

so that's the part of my plan that I need to work out next, and I thought I could ask for some guidance or some suggestions…

(This is by the way my post #500)
Hirundo Bos
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Post by Enail Mon Jan 23, 2017 3:10 pm

Congratulations on 500!

It sounds like maybe you need a critique partner, someone who's also writing who you could meet up with regularly to exchange feedback and hold each other accountable. What you do to make it worth their while is to do the same for them. There seem to be lots of sites for online match-ups, but maybe there's also something to help find local partners. Alternatively, look for a writers' group that sets regular goals and has some kind of critique schedule or plan.
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Post by Hirundo Bos Tue Jan 31, 2017 9:55 am

Hi. It's taken me a while to reply to this... I'm working to improve my online response rate, but last week I ran out of mental resources because I had an overdose of change in my life, and haven't quite got things started up again since then. Which is part of the problem I'm writing about... when I'm moving in a certain direction and then lose my track for whatever reason, I have a very hard time getting back on.

Finding someone who needs a similar sort of help, or partnership, sounds like a good solution. I'm not so sure about exchanging critiques, or going deeply into each other's work... can't quite put my finger on why, except my own challenge here is less about the actual writing and more about maintaining progress. So the ideal conversation with a partner of this sort would sound something like "this is the work I've done since last, this is my plan for the next period, do you have any input? Now how about your project?".

It could maybe be interesting to find someone who's working on something other than writing...

But going out there to search for someone still feels like a quite a large operation, and something I should break up into smaller steps.

Anyway, one thing I worry about is that if a partnership of accountability for some reason ends prematurely, it might take me a step back from not having had one at all. For the same reason I mentioned above... once I lose track of a certain path, it's all that harder to get back on.

Which means the person I find should be someone likely to not give up on their own project for a while, likely to turn up when we have scheduled meetings, willing to meet one final time and wrap things up if a premature can't be avoided... I'll of course offer the same level of commitment myself... but it's a lot of making my own plans dependant on someone else's actions. So I should probably have a plan B of some sort, something I can do for myself to avoid losing track completely.
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Post by Hirundo Bos Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:07 pm

Short update: I've been working steadily on two separate essays, one about work and one about communication. They're growing larger than I had planned, each reaching towards 10 000 words. I'm still not sure how to round off either of them, and a bit afraid that I'll just remain stuck on these to chapters for so long that I'll give up before I get to the rest of the book, but that could be just because of how immersed I am. And when I look at it, I have kind of managed to get to the core of one essay – the part that's hardest to write because it's the part that matters the most – and in the process maybe discovered the answer to why I'm not quite suited for academic research or at least wasn't at the time I wrote my Master's thesis. And on the other one I might be headed towards a conclusion. So maybe I'm just underestimating myself.
Anyway, I haven't quite found a partner for mutual accountability-keeping yet, and I'm still pretty afraid to ask… I still go to the monthly rest-of-the-year-NaNo-meetings and talk about my projects there, though, and the other day I talked with someone at work about getting together out of work and talk about our respective writing projects for a bit. (They're work-related enough, anyway. It concerns mental health, which is the name of my organization.)

So things are moving forward, in this and many other areas of my life. I'm just a bit impatient, after 25 years of writing, to start producing more than one book per decade…
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Post by littlebluedove Sun May 13, 2018 1:19 am

I admit that I don't know enough about writing or collaboration yet to give you advice. However, I think that your book sounds very interesting, and I'd be happy to read more posts about this if you want to keep sharing, and encourage you.

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Post by Hirundo Bos Sun May 27, 2018 11:40 am

Hi, and thanks for replying. I'm sorry it's taken a while to return to the reply, but it's kind of part of my general problem with writing: I don't do enough of it, and it's hard to get it done at all without making very particular rules for myself. Those rules let me work on long-term projects, but make it harder to write stuff outside the framework – stuff like social media posts.

Anyway, the project I outlined above, I'm afraid, has been overtaken by my tendency to drop things before they're done – or maybe, spend so much time getting certain details straight that I lose sight of the whole, and then it stays lost. So this year, I'm working on even smaller texts, things I can finish in at most a couple of months … so far, they've included

* A grant application for the organization where I was an intern through a government work program (and where I still hang out as a volunteer). The application is for a collection of texts about autism spectrum disorders, aimed at the newly diagnosed and written by people who've had the diagnosis for a while. The aim is to give encouragement, and some advice, towards navigating that new landscape. If the application goes through, I'll probably get further involved with that project.

* An article about a science fiction work (the Helliconia trilogy), for a high-brow literary magazine; it's been through many rounds of revision and is now nearly ready for print.

* Right now I'm working on a playable story for a surreal RPG I'm the co-author of, to be played at an upcoming Norwegian convention. Later I plan to translate it into English, together with some earlier written material, and ask if our publisher would be interested in, well, having it published.

* Next up is an article about my time as an intern, about my problems fitting in on a workplace, even a good one (which the workplace I worked on was), and about some of the solutions we came up with.

And after that … I'm not sure. Translating those RPG-things, maybe, or find some other literary stuff to write about, work on some more applications, maybe have a new look at the poetry collection I was encouraged to work more on some five years ago … anyway, I am making progress as a writer, although I get a little impatient at times, and hope it won't be too many years before I can tackle some projects of greater length.
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Post by littlebluedove Fri Jun 22, 2018 7:35 pm

Lol I took even longer myself, sorry about that, too. I love the idea of setting smaller goals if a big one gets too overwhelming at the time. I hope that application goes through so that people with autism will have an additional resource to use. Writing about books etc is fun Smile When I do it, I divide it into two parts: the first as a review for people who haven't read/watched it, the second as a deeper exploration for people who have (or who don't care about spoilers. Lol). Although I have barely any work experience, am not working and may never be able to do it again, I still like to read workplace stuff. Partly to see what a facet of life I don't know much about is like for other people, and partly for preparation in case I ever try going back to work. Ask a Manger's site is one of my favorite resources for that. Good luck with your projects!

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