It turns out that there’s actually a small clause in the standard publishing contract that requires any author with a blog to post periodic updates on the progress of the current writing project. Who knew?
Well, OK, there’s no contractual obligation, but really, I have the blog, and I need to fill it with something, so why not the occasional progress report? I’m not going to commit to any particular schedule, but from time to time, I’ll post updates on how things are going– word counts, general impressions, out-of-context dialogue snippets.
So, how is it going?
The target here is around 40,000 words– I’m not sure how tight a limit that is, but we’ll call that the goal for now. The current plan is for that to be broken up into ten chapters, each consisting of a conversation with the dog followed by a more conventional explanation of some point of quantum physics. (One of those chapters may already have spawned a sub-chapter– we’ll see.)
It’s a little hard to decide how to count words for this, because I have a bunch of dialogues written, and fairly complete drafts of two chapters that will come kind of late in the book, that I wrote when I was in the proposal stage. I’m not going to count those, though, because a while back I started systematically going through in order, and there will probably be massive revisions needed by the time I get to that material again.
So, I’ve gone through two chapters on the in-order draft:
Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality
Current Revision: 5a
Total Words: 5,279
Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle
Current Revision: 5
Total Words: 3,978
“Current Revision” is because I’m renaming the file after every complete chapter draft. The “5a” for Chapter 1 reflects the fact that there are two slightly different ways I might present things, and I’m still not 100% sure that the “a” variant works. Chapter 2 is entirely in the “a” variant style, though it incorporates some earlier material, but it didn’t end up with a letter.
I’m calling these complete at the moment, though they may require rewriting to get the tone more consistent later on. I’m pushing on to Chapter 3 next, though, which will be written from scratch in the “a” variant style, which will probably go a long way toward determining whether I keep that. (I expect that I will, as it’s growing on me a bit.)
You may notice that 10-11 chapters at this pace will be well over 40,000 words. This is why editors get paid the big bucks.
And that’s where things stand at the moment.
Bonus Out-of-Context Dog Dialogue: “So, basically, nothing is defined in an absolute sense? Isn’t that kind of… postmodern?”