A Book

“Hello” he typed, in what he hoped were friendly letters.

I am working on a writing project! A few years ago my wife started a book, and I agreed to help her punch up the language and refine the message. I started doing just that, and somewhere along the way put it aside for other things and never quite picked it up again. Now, in light of my recent lay-off from a job, I decided to revisit the manuscript and finally get it into good shape.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been doing just that. Starting from chapter zero, the introduction, I have been trying to work on a chapter a day. Life still intervenes and I cannot sit and write for an entire day, but today I finished up work on chapter four (of eight-ish)!

It feels really, really good to sit down, light a scented candle (a Middle-Earth inspired scent created by my friend Alisha), put on some music, and write. In this case, most of the words are there already, but they need shaping, like a child using the sand of the beach to form a castle. I add a little water, cast the damp sand in a shaped bucket, and overturn it upon the dry sand beneath. Or something.

Really I poke at it, delete a little here, add some there, rearrange this or that, and read read read. I read each chapter again and again so that I retain the flow and higher order ideas of the chapter, rather than get bogged down in a particular sentence or paragraph. It is ok to really hammer out the grammar of a particular phrase, but not at the expense of the whole. My tendency is to want to be elegant and precise and highfalutin’ but sometimes I just need the damn thing to say what it needs to say, beautiful phrasing be damned. (See, I just used “damn” twice in one sentence, a thing I usually avoid, but hell, it just needed to be like that. So, too, the book sometimes just needs to be what it is.)

I am cognizant as well that my wife wrote most of what I am editing and shaping. If I change too much of that text, it won’t be what she wrote any longer (insert Ship of Theseus metaphor here). I don’t want to lose her voice, or too many of her words in adding my own. She says things in different ways than I would, and as I am becoming co-author there will be plenty of me in there as well, but I don’t want her to disappear either. It becomes a balancing act.

I think that is what I am loving most about this work: the act of balance. It requires much of my extant skill to pull off this balance of retaining my wife’s phrasing, adding my own, while fixing errors, adding missing bits, and removing extraneous information. I truly hope the end result will be worth reading, and accomplish the goal we now share in writing. It has been exciting and invigorating to sit down each day and shape the castle one sandy block at a time.

I will announce more what the book is about when it is much closer to completion. For now, it is a project that is allowing me to stretch my muscles and really get into some word-smithing.

“Anyway” he wrote, changing topics slightly, “this book project is consuming a lot of my writing energy.” He paused. Continuing he typed: “that means that my blogging may not continue as frequently, however, I will try to maintain my ‘two blog posts a month’ schedule that I have for a long time now.” He typed a period and closed his quotation marks, and felt good about that particular sentence. He decided that he had said what he needed to, and that he could hit publish and be okay.