Months and months are clogging up my message. My footprint has been quiet, guilty, distracted, writing, job hunting, working, plodding, procrastinating, knitting, moving, dreading…and now after five months of silence, I confess: I handed in my complete draft. Two hundred and ninety-nine pages of someone else’s horrible experience turned to prose in an effort to tell the world and expose the injustice. Any idea how thick 300 minus one pages can be? It’s thick. It’s got weight. Two hundred and ninety-nine pages telling about his three hundred and forty-seven days in an African prison. Now, I need to write about his first six months…after he got out of prison and came home to Canada…where to begin…his first six months…the last six months of the book. Due date: Jan.28/08
God help me.
I can hardly believe it myself. I’m at almost 62,000 words now. About 37,000 or so are what I call crafted. I start by translating from French to English, then I flesh out the sentences with new material and make sure the ‘old’ or translated material sounds like English. At least I’m still in the game. Progress is definitive.
How is it that to be a writer, you need to disappear sometimes? When it comes to being creative, I need to disappear inside and recharge. That’s where I’ve been. Now I’m back. I hope to report more regularly now, even if I feel like disappearing inside. Can you accept that? I understand if you can’t. But it’s going to get rather exciting rather soon. I’m at 59,402 words: 32,489 words are part of the draft, whereas 26,913 words are merely a direct translation from French to English and need to be finessed — the way I’ve done with the first 32,000. My aim was to reach about 100,000. By the time the finessing is done, I think I’ll be darn close to that.
Stay tuned as the light gets brighter from here…
I’m having difficulty concentrating on the writing lately. In fact, I’m not even sure what week I’m at. I know once I get back into it, I’ll cruise but right now it’s very slow. The hot weather doesn’t affect it. It’s a strange phenomenon really. Even writing this post is hard for me to do but I’m doing it anyway. I did rearrange my working area. Sometimes that helps. Let’s see if it does.
While I’m much improved in Week 5, I’m faltering, slowing inching my way back to a regular pattern of writing and producing. The written word waits while I make my excuses and hide under the covers. Soon enough, my gig will be up and I’ll have to face it: I must write on….on….to Week 6.
Last week I only managed a few words on the Monday. Have been struggling with my own personal demons. Head space is sought-after real estate, and yet I don’t feel like I’m off track. Also my day job was so so busy.
I’m well ahead of the game since the word counting I’m doing for this book is as if I started from scratch five weeks ago. Not so. I started out with about 16-20K words already written. But this self-imposed context I’ve masterminded forces me to keep writing.
Hopefully, my rest in week 4 will inspire productivity over the next while.
Still writing my daily word counts. I just feel some nights and some mornings, for that matter that it’s all crap what I’m writing. I know cognitively that this is the writer’s curse: sometimes nothing you write feels worthwhile but emotionally it’s a hard elephant to walk around. And sometimes the stuff is crap — you need to force yourself to make it better and turn it into something people will not just want to read but crave to finish and yet savour every moment. That’s what we all really want to write.
Someone on this blog asked me how long I’ve been writing. It’s taken me quite a few days to respond. I think it’s a tricky question. It’s like asking someone how long have they been eating: you mean, today? right now? eating what exactly? do mean eating stuff I’ve cooked or organic or do you mean baby food?
How long have I been writing? I got my first journal when I was 12. Does that count as the beginning? I got it for Christmas. It was a Holly Hobby recipe book that I wanted to write in. The book has long ago disappeared but my memory of it has always stayed. I may have written before that, but probably only stories in school.
I didn’t start publishing articles until I was 31 or 32 as a reporter after going to college for journalism. I published my first novel: Sing, Girls, Sing! in 2005. So if I do the math, I guess I can say I’ve been ‘writing’ for 26 years. I hope I’ve learned a thing or two because that’s an awfully long time to be doing something and not have learned anything.
Still counting years of writing, weeks of writing, words, words, words…
The subject of my book, the man who’s story I’m writing is “utterly impressed” with the first 10,000 pages and says it’s “exactly” what he was looking for. (Relief!) Well, how many times have I heard him say:
The French book didn’t do this.
The French book didn’t do that.
That’s what was missing from the French book.
That’s what I didn’t like about the French book.
While in fairness to the author of ‘the French book’ hindsight is 20-20, it wasn’t well written at all. Just awful, in fact. So it’s my job to make the English a whole new world. I’m adapting it quite a bit, though. I don’t know if you could call it the same story!
Anyway, I hit the mark the first week. Week 2 will be weaker but that’s okay. I’ll work through it.
So, the parcel I got was three of my Sing, Girls, Sing! books returned from an Ottawa bookstore and a cheque! Two of them sold. Great news. In other news, I had a school board lady tell me (indirectly through a grade 5 teacher) that my book SGS is “inappropriate for this age level” which is 10 years old. She claims some of the lingo isn’t suitable for this age group. Hmmmm… that makes me think it’s edgy and the kids would definitely want to read it now! ha.
Wrote 400 words this morning, or I should say I worked through 400 words. I had some to start with. Progress is progress. I’m a little concerned that I haven’t had any response about the deadline but it’s also possible that he took an extra long weekend and won’t check his email until tomorrow. I will wait and see.
I’m planning on working from home tonight instead of staying later at work. I’ve GOT to pick up a parcel at the post office or they’ll send it back! Tacking the writing onto the end of my day job (and the beginning) seems to be a productive way to get through the material. I’ll see how I do tonight at home. If I could get through another 700 words that would be just lovely.
So initially, I had hoped I could pull together a complete draft for this book by end of May which meant 8 weeks. I took this week to seriously examine that ambitious deadline and realized I don’t think it’s feasible. Instead, I believe my realistic deadline to be Sept14, which is in 24 weeks. I’m not sure all will be happy with this realization but I’d rather establish reality now than fling it at people mid-May saying, I don’t think I’ll make the deadline.
Plus, I’ve now established that every Sunday night, I send out a status report to my main subject letting him know how much I’ve written, what progress I’ve made, etc… and I’ll be attaching the work done for the week.
I think that’s a fair approach. He gets to see where I am on a weekly basis and I feel we then share that onus of reaching the deadline together. I think he’ll be disappointed that I’m suggesting Sept.14 (though I suspect it may be done sooner than that….just erring on the side of caution) but there’s not much I can do.
I don’t think May is realistic — I know it’s not possible.
So it looks like this week I wrote 4,748 words, yet I was able to send him 10,189. I think it’s because some stuff was already written and I just fleshed some of it out. Anyway, week 1 down, 23 to go.
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