Book Fatigue

I'm in the last 30 days of the book and I'm tired.  If the "art" of my book is depicting my grief, then I've read one too many fragmented emails to my daughter or to friends.  I don't know whether my fatigue matches the Reader's, and I should pay editorial attention to it.  Or is it just that I've been at these two rewrites for a year?

Since the clear conventional wisdom says I have too many words, when in doubt, cut.

I'll try the incremental approach--much like I do everything else. First I'll prune the bush. As close as I can to the trunk. What dies will eventually fall to the ground.  A strategy.  One that keeps me in it until The End.

In my session today, my therapist John, said he'd read my memoir as if it was a novel. Rick Rofihe, one my fiction workshop teachers, said I used "novelistic" techniques to tell my story. I guess my new agent query letter should reflect something of this. In one of the many ways this memoir is unconventional, the narrator (I) tells a story, with a protagonist and an antagonist, a beginning, middle and end covering a specific period of time, the year after Jack was killed.

Book Length

My word count is ~150,000. A quick survey of blog posts recommends 110,000 as the top end that I should shoot for. That seems consistent with guidelines from a couple of book contests I'm looking at--a maximum 400 pages. Check out Blue's indefeasible blog for example word counts, for example, on PEN/Faulkner Award winners.  Coincidentally, this 2008 post from Blue seems like her final post.

If I cut the epilogue, my word count is 148,292.

If I were to do some book-wide deletions, among areas to consider are:

• all email (Libby/lawyers ...)
• fugue ... no I think the sensual/physical companionship is important
• all excerpts from books (Damasio ...)
• dramatic cuts redundancy and chit chat from letters
• Sadoff visit
• long letters on the Dad's and on anger
• Lucent stuff ... Craig said interesting
• rework the "long" stuff ... when I read it it feels like a slog even to me
• Houston Law Review article
• bail argument
• Munchhausen

Here is one argument for self-publishing.  I can make a Director's cut.  I can rage war on my manuscript to submit it to contests, and then add content back in.  It won't be a complete waste of time. I'm sure that forcing myself to 70 pages would yield some very good ideas.

Distracted

Last Wednesday the Seattle Public Library and Smashwords offered a workshop on self-publishing: I Typed "The End." Now What? How to Turn Your Manuscript Into a Book. This was as disruptive to my revision process as Tony Hoagland's workshop where he insisted our journal writing should be in complete sentences.  Tony is not someone one can ignore.

One of the first things I had to do was go through my manuscript and delete the double spaces at the ends of sentences. And learn to compose new sentences without them.

This morning I've been trying to decide what size book I should publish: 5 1/4 x 8, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, or 6 x 9.

Yesterday I activated the Kindle app on my phone and laptop. I downloaded calibre.

I can't stop pouring over the Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer blog.

I've barely noticed the S&P 500's decline (not true). Why am I doing these things instead of writing? I'm returning to Beth Jusino's self-publishing workshop Wednesday night in Ballard for Selling Your Self-Published Book: Getting Your E-Book in Front of Readers.  Will I see you there?