Time to Move to a Different Project

Documenting America, Volume 1, is finished, all but the Introduction, which I started last night and should finish tonight. My attention will now turn in three directions.

One is to proofread Documenting America and get it ready for self-publishing. I intend to go through it slowly, both my text and the text I'm quoting, looking both for typos and better ways to say things. I'll also hope my beta readers give me some comments.

Second is income taxes. I need one evening to file trading papers for the year (those not yet done; I have some filed), one to assemble all my documentation, and a third to actually begin. I think all my spreadsheets are built, so I'm ready to go.

Third will be to turn to another writing project. Unfortunately I don't have time to rest on my success of completing Documenting America. Gotta keep writing, keep researching, keep pressing on. I will call the Buildipedia.com editor this week about my next batch of assignments, and I may write one or two articles for Suite101.com. Those are on-going freelance work and I don't count them as projects. I also have a prospect to write for a legal website, concerning construction law. Don't know if that will come through or not.

I have to decide on my next writing project I could divide my available hours between two project for a while, but one must eventually have supremacy. The projects I have going, in various degrees of completion, are the following.

• In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, my baseball novel. I've written around 15,000 words on the way to about 85,000 words. Haven't looked at this for at least two months.
• Screwtape's Good Advice, a small group study. I have the introduction and four chapters done, on the way to 32 chapters. Given that the Narnia movies are being rolled out, which gives a little increase in the interest of all things C.S. Lewis, maybe I should finish this and self-publish.
• A Harmony of the Gospels, a non-commercial project. Last week I gave a copy of this to our new pastor, which has renewed my interest. The harmony is done. I have about 40 pages (estimated) to write to complete the appendixes and passage notes. It's tempting to plow ahead with this, even though it's not for profit.
• Essential John Wesley, a small group study. I've done some of the research, and would love to get this done and teach it next time my turn to teach our Life Group comes around. We have about twenty-two weeks of lessons lined up, so that's the time frame for completing this. This would be partly a labor of love and partly a ministry/commercial project.
• To Exile and Back, a small group study. I've done "all" the research on this, and outlined the project. Time to start writing. I put "all" in quotes because I'm sure as I write it I'll find holes in the research.

So, what say you, faithful readers of this blog, and drop by readers? Does any of these look like a good direction for me to go next? Anything that sticks out, positively or negatively?

Shifting Gears

The month of June, what time I could spend on writing, was mostly on miscellaneous tasks that had fallen by the wayside for a while, and on pulling together the proposal for Screwtape's Good Advice. With that in the mail last Wednesday, I turned my attention to the proposal for In Front of Fifty-Thousand Screaming People, my baseball thriller. I first started on the proposal, and tidied up the synopsis and wrote the sell sheet. Actually, I did some of this overlapping the SGA proposal, while waiting on my beta readers to respond. I did some market research, and figured out what books out now would be reasonably like mine.

Then I turned to, or rather returned to, writing the book. I began FTSP in June 2004, after pitching the idea to an editor at a conference. At that time all I had was a concept with some plot outline. He liked the idea, and said to send him a few chapters. So I quickly pounded out a prologue an two chapters and sent them. He still liked the concept, but wasn't as thrilled with the writing as I would have liked. I set the book aside, partly not knowing what to do, and partly from the busyness of life.

Over the next three years I pulled it out and worked on it from time to time. I ditched the prologue, as the editor suggested, and polished the writing of the first two chapters. I added a third and polished it. I began a fourth. An idea came to me for a scene well into the book, which I thought would be about 2/3 the way through, and I wrote that. I worked on a plot outline and character development, writing page-long essays in the words of the four main characters, stating in their own words what their motivations were for the events in the book. But I did not do any serious writing, continuous writing for days in a row, as I had done with Doctor Luke's Assistant.

Friday night I decided I'd better get back to this. The agent wants the first thirty pages with the proposal, and when I merged chapters 1, 2, 3, and the partial 4 I had only twenty pages. I figured out what to do with Chapter 4, and finished it as a short chapter. The plot analysis I had done as part of writing the synopsis told me I had to move the scene I thought would be 2/3 the way through to become the first plot point, meaning it needs to be 1/4 to 1/3 the way through. I did that, and made a couple of related changes. Then I sat down on Friday, Independence Day, to write the fifth chapter, intending to do serious writing.

Lo and behold, I couldn't write it! I wrote "Chapter 5" at the top of a re-use page, then sat there, not sure what to do. My plotting did not get down to the level where I had to plan what the next chapter would be about. Yesterday (Saturday), I went back to it and managed to write about half a page. That was a start, but not the type of progress I needed to make. Was this a case of writer's block, my first? I have had times when I was not motivated to write for various reasons, usually the whirlwind of life causing my brain to shut down for a while, but never have the words not come to me when I wanted them to.

After a while the reason for this inability to add this chapter became clear. For the last seven months I have been concentrating on non-fiction as a probable easier way to break into publishing, and purposely laid fiction aside. I brainstormed the SGA book and began it. I turned my Elijah and Elisha study into a potential book and brainstormed it. I thought about ten other Bible/small group studies I could write as follow-ups. A fruitful career as a writer of Bible and small group studies danced before my eyes in waking moments, and through the subconscious in sleeping moments. I had done no fiction writing at all, until after the Blue Ridge conference, with the interest of an agent staring me in the face, I at least read my manuscript and made some edits. I shared chapters 1 and 2 with my new critique group, and received feedback. Now that I'm ready to return to fiction, I can't get my mind around it.

It's hard to change gears between fiction and non-fiction--at least it is for me, this first time to do so. What will the future hold? If my career goes the way I want it to (at this stage of my "career"), I will be switching regularly between fiction and non-fiction. I'd better learn to shift those gears effortlessly, on a day to day basis if necessary. This will be especially true if I follow-through with plans to market and publish the Documenting America newspaper column.

Help! I'm a prisoner of a career that hasn't even started yet.

The good news is that, as I fell asleep Saturday night, a scene late in the book came to me. I wrote it mentally lying in bed, then wrote it on paper Saturday morning. Today, while eating lunch, the way to write chapter 5 came to me, and I'll be hitting the keys for that after I finish this post. So maybe the gears shifted over the last couple of days. May it be so.