The New Year always provides the traditional milestone to evaluate our life's progress and set goals for the future. While the amount of polished content I collected last year for my intended first publication falls well short, I found considerable solace in what was accomplished in 2009. Making the leap and commitment to writing as a profession took a lot of planning, saving and support from my wife Meghan. Having addressed the vast majority of the "around the house" tasks last year, the way has been cleared for more reading and writing than ever. Pay no attention to the garage that still can't quite shelter a Honda Civic. Hey, it *IS* a four-door, that's got to be at least eight inches longer than if we had the coupe!
As I mentioned in the previous post, my pursuit of knowledge has expanded beyond just books. I joined a Buddhist Discussion Group that meets monthly to discuss, well, books on Buddhism. I was even told that you don't need to read the current book to attend the group. It's like having someone else do your homework for you! Okay, that is if you trust them to do your homework. Given that I don't select the books for review, it will be hit-or-miss with applicable titles anyway. Turns out though that it was a great source of information on recommended books on Buddhism as well as a place to meet people who are also interested in both Buddhism and meditation practices.
While the discussion group is only once a month, I've managed to collect a few weekly activities to keep me sane and healthy. The specifics aren't important, but I did start to notice that my evenings have more structure than my days. Sure, I have a list of things that I generally accomplish every day, but they don't always seem to happen in the same order or at any prescribed time. I've already written about structure and how I've been fleshing out the chapters of the book. I have a complete chapter outline and individual Word documents for each chapter. To keep the stream of thoughts ordered properly, I've even gone to sub-chapter topic organization. One of the challenges I have is a tendency to transition from topic to topic rather quickly as part of my standard "sit and write" sessions. Typically I find that both the ideas and writing are okay, but they move too quickly and need to be reworked. All too often content which probably would fit better a few pages ahead is being introduced too early.
So I'm trying a new approach. I take a particular chapter and then select a certain sub-topic within that chapter that might be interesting at the moment and focus on it. By focus, I mean first think carefully (and generally for more than a day) about what should be said (written) with regard to that sub-topic. Sometimes what comes to mind ends up being ideas for additional sub-topics or the rearrangement of existing material after deeper thinking on a specific area. This angle has two noticeable benefits. It further reigns in the "write whatever comes to mind" method which can produce word count but ends up needing rework or chopping to stay within a workable storyline. Perhaps more interesting to me though is how it's forcing me to learn the art of storytelling on the fly. Sure, I could just spew it all over the page and get the ideas out there, but that doesn't make for very good reading. We're shooting for at least mildly engaging and entertaining here. Who am I kidding? If someone tells me it was "mildly engaging" when I'm done I'll take that about as well as an F on a Master's Thesis.
I continue to benefit from meeting people that have an interest or ability to help me along my chosen path. That, accompanied with the various encouragements, goes a long way to feeling as though I'm doing the right thing. Or should I say the "write thing?" [chuckle] As a quick tangent, some of my time is focused on elements outside the writing of the book that are "mildly interesting" but definitely outside the scope of this blog. Those efforts will come to light soon enough, but for now you'll all just have to wait and see.
"The Blog is Not Enough"
That comes across the sexiest if you think of James Bond and the film of a similar name. Stay Tuned!
