Blog!

Yeah, it’s been a little while since I’ve put anything up here. Sorry about that. I’m going to work on that some this week, but things are pretty wild around here. It’s my last week in Greenville–on Friday the family is heading to Wilmington, where we’ll stay for the week before my wedding, which will be July 11. I’ll be moving stuff into the condo there that weekend and throughout the week, plus I’m busting my tail to finish the first draft (of who knows how many) of my book by the wedding.

I’ve got exactly 10 days, really, to get it done and I’m close. I’m averaging between 4,000-5,000 words per day, so that’s eating up a lot of my time and writing energy. I’m at 65,000ish right now, as I take a break to write this, and plan to be at 68,000 by the end of the day.

Once I finish this draft, I’m going to print it out and shelve it for the five days I’m in St. Lucia with the wife, then come back to it, read over it, make notes in all the margins of who I need to call, what I need to clarify, what additional research I need, etc. I expect to work on my second round of interviews and research for about a month, then start writing my second draft.

My first draft is essentially compiling all the information I have in chronological order. The second draft I expect to be something I take more time on as far as making it read more poetically, more entertainingly, all that. (Basically, the first draft is written how these blogs are most of the time. The second will be written how I like to write my feature stories.) Then I’ll rewrite and rewrite and call people to clarify stuff and do more research for another couple of months until I get the thing perfect.

In the meantime, I need to start working on getting the attention of some agents or publishers. That’s going to be the hardest part for me. The research, the interviewing, the writing, it’s all hard work, but it’s hard work I know and even love to do. The business side of it is hard, mainly in that it’s pretty unfamiliar to me. Selling a book feels a lot different than selling a freelance story, for some reason.

But more on that as I get there. I mainly just needed to get a blog up here so the Bolivian TV anchor’s face wasn’t the first thing people see when they come here.

Peace!