I’ve just pitched into another draft of my next non-fiction book, which has the working title A Roman Small Fort on Alderney. It’s the result of research and excavations stretching back to 2008 and I’ve been picking up the text and working on it for the past eight years or so. It now has a publisher waiting so the text is being knocked into shape. This month I’ve been creating an illustration list, including those we have completed and those we still need to draw or obtain copyright permission for. It involves working through the text and adding temporary figure numbers where an illustration is needed and writing in the intended caption.
In fact I’ve referred back to my own advice published on this blog a couple of months ago.
Suddenly it has started to look like a book.
The same applies to a new novel I’ve been working on quietly between the others. Chiefly it has been typed on my laptop in hotels, in airports and in the excavation house during this year’s dig. Project MF has at last come to the end of the first draft at around 55000 words.
That may not sound like a lot, but my technique has always been to hack out a rough draft first, as explained in a very early blog. MF now has a beginning, middle and an end. I know who the victim(s) are, who the villain is and how the plot will be resolved. Pending the next draft it’s an unreadable mess that I’d never dare show anyone but, again, It looks like I have a book.
Best seasonal wishes to all my writer friends, with the hope that your manuscript will also soon look like a book.
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