Last week, after almost a year and a half of writing, I shipped my book proposal off to publishers. (Yes, my book proposal. The book itself will take about another 1.5 years to write.) My literary agent, David Miller, and I managed to cut it down from 28,000 words to 17,000. That’s long for a proposal, especially since I think the book itself will be about 70,000 words. So now I’m in the midst of the multi-week process of seeing if anyone actually wants to publish it. As we say in the writing trade: Ulp.

I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I want to handle blogging the writing of the book. I don’t think I want to put a blog at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com (there’s nothing there yet because I’ve had some domain issues) because researching and writing this book isn’t an isolated act for me. So, I’ll probably blog it here, using the tag “EverythingIsMiscellaneous.” Yes, it’s long, but tagging it “Miscellaneous” really would be misleading as an external tag.

I wrote my previous book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, completely in public, posting each day’s draft. Since I woke up every morning and, Penelope-like, undid what I’d written the previous day, that wasn’t a very useful way of getting readers involved. So, this time I’m thinking I’ll post drafts of chapters when I think they’re readable. And then I will beg for comments.

And I’ll certainly post bits and pieces as I think about them. See the next post.

All of this assumes — knock wood, toss salt over my shoulder, light a joss stick to Steve Johnson — that someone actually wants to publish the damn book.

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