Next Life in the Afternoon

I have had to put off writing as much as I had planned to because of some circumstances that have eaten away at my free time. Namely, I am referring to my day job. I recently started working full time so I can have things like money and insurance and means to support my habit of living under a roof and eating every day.

What this means is that the completion of my book will likely not be at the end of the year. I have not had time to work on it much in the last several weeks, as I work during the day and at night and on weekends, and when I do have time to write I am mostly too tired to do much more than sit around.

My old pal and teacher Tim McLaurin used to talk about his days of writing his first novel. He was working construction, an early-riser’s gig, and had to be at work by 7 a.m. He would start writing at 4 a.m. and get done what he could before he had to leave home. Every day was like this until he finished the manuscript and got the book published.

I think I could take a page from his book, so to speak, in more than just this example. Tim’s life was intense in many ways. He was a dedicated writer and teacher and did not do much halfway. He was straightforward when he spoke and honest as well, an honorable man who nonetheless had faults, many of which he wrote about in an effort to show his children and the rest of the world that the past we have is not something to hide from or be ashamed about. The past has brought us to where we are and where we are now is a gift. We may not like where we are but the gift inside the present moment is opportunity.

Tim was like a non-celibate monk who sometimes liked to drink to excess. He understood that the past was gone and that the future had not yet arisen, and that all we had was the present moment.

As I think about this, I am reminded that I have the opportunity to be more stringent with my writing schedule, to mark times to do the important work I have in front of me and not defer my dreams due to a simple lack of time.

Langston Hughes Wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Technorati Tags: working, book, Tim McLaurin, writing, monk, Langston Hughes

I won’t say I am nearing completion on the book but I am getting pretty close to being done. I guess that means the same thing but it seems more noncommittal to frame it in these terms.

When you tell someone you are almost done with something, that person expects to see the finished product in rather short order. Well, don’t hold your breath. I am working on it but it takes quite a while to write and edit this much content.

Currently I am in the editing phase, having created probably about 90% of the content that will be in the book. That’s a lot. Now I am editing, which is a process of tweaking, rewriting, fact-checking, deleting, adding, expanding, contracting, massaging and watching my hair get more and more gray every morning.

Editing is an important process but one that is a little too revealing sometimes, showing where I have lost sight of the ultimate story, where I strayed from my path of storytelling and trod along wandering roads, abandoning the straight and narrow razor’s edge for the meandering stream. It is important to follow the stream from time to time. I suppose that is why writers have to go through an editing phase with any project.

My goal is to be absolutely done and have the manuscript handed off to an agent or publisher by the end of the year. At very least the book will be in final form and will have been submitted to a number of folks. That I can guarantee.

So am I nearing completion? Of the writing, yes. Of the editing, maybe. Of the process? Not by a long shot. The next step is to start researching literary agents and publishers. Know one? Hook me up.

The journey is long but I think I am almost there. I can just about taste completion from where I sit. Or maybe that’s the coffee I just had.

Technorati Tags: editing, writing, writer, manuscript, publisher, literary agent

I was just working on editing the book and came across this interchange I had while in northeast Thailand. Read on:

In the daytime, mosquitoes zoomed around my head, although they rarely bit. My mosquito repellent was 100% DEET, which is about three times stronger than anything I have seen recommended for regular use. Slathering this stuff on my skin made me wonder whether I was better off getting dengue and malaria rather than being exposed to such chemicals. The trade-off was between a damaged liver and spleen from the diseases or else possibly chemical-induced cancers. Who’s to know which would have the more serious implication in the long run?

I have read that the daytime mosquitoes apparently spread dengue, while the nighttime ones spread malaria, so even if you want to limit your exposure to chemicals by applying them for only half a day, you still do not have a very good chance of timing it right to avoid the type of mosquitoes you want to avoid. When I think of malaria, the first thing that pops into my head is the image of a sweaty, lethargic Humphrey Bogart from “The African Queen.” How bad could the disease be, I wondered. Bogart was cured in ten minutes, nursed back to health by a young, beautiful Katherine Hepburn. If that’s malaria, then sign me up.

I had met a man in Udon Thani who had gotten dengue twice – once in Guatemala and once in Thailand. He was staying at a temple and studying Buddhism, on the path to ordination as a monk. “I’ve never met anyone in Thailand who had malaria, but dengue is a different story,” he said.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Dengue is pretty common, but it isn’t that bad. All your joints ache for a couple weeks and you get a bad headache, but you only really want to die for about a day.” Thus my comfort with mosquito-borne disease was ever weakened and I made sure to apply my carcinogenic salve more diligently, even compulsively at times.

So that’s that. Enjoy. Current count: about 45,000 words.

Technorati Tags: Thailand, mosquitoes, DEET, dengue, malaria, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Udon Thani, carcinogen

The measure I use to mark the amount of work I have done is number of words. Certainly, this is not the best metric to use but it is one that is easily quantifiable. I would love to be able to use some sort of formula to figure this out, perhaps attaching one value to the number of words and another value – some sort of sliding scale – to the quality of the writing.

I am thinking of some sort of equation like this:

W_effective = N_words * Q_section
Where W is work done and Q_section is the numerical quality of the section being examined.

The ideal is not to simply churn out more words. That’s easy. I could hire a well-trained chicken to push keys on the laptop all day. The key is to have lots of words with a high quality density when strung together.

But then there’s the problem of how to measure quality, since it is really a subjective judgment. Different styles appeal to different people and even calculating grade levels or using “ease of reading” scales does not give a lot of information. Something that is easy to read, like Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, is not necessarily worse or better than something written on a very high level, such as the various writings of Umberto Eco.

Does anyone have an idea how to do something like this?

I don’t suppose I would adopt such a measure right off but I would love to see how someone else calculates it.

Until then, I will be going by quantity to measure my progress, knowing that I write at a certain level of quality on first pass. By the way, I recently passed 42,000 words, for what that means.

Technorati Tags: work, metric, formula, quality, writing, equation, well-trained chicken, judgment, Ernest Hemingway, Umberto Eco, quantity

I get a lot of folks asking what I talk about in the book. I suppose if I had to simmer it down to cocktail hour chit-chat I might say that Next Life in the Afternoon is a first-person anthropological look at the cultural dichotomies that are broken down and reformed upon stepping out of one culture and into another.

Or something like that. I would never really claim that, partly because I could never get all those syllables out of my mouth while sipping highballs.

Really what’s in the book are some views of one culture in light of another. It all comes down to this: what we learn from traveling is less about other cultures and more about our own and ourselves.

Also I discuss things such as Buddhism, giant bats, elephant spoor along the road, getting held up in highway traffic by wandering cows, tiger attacks, being assaulted by Thais and other farangs, living in monasteries and with monks and even Thai children singing a Barry Manilow song to me when I stood in for a teacher.

No joke.

It’s an exciting tale and it’s been a lot of fun to put this together. Thinking back on that journey, I miss Thailand for some reasons and really don’t miss it for other reasons. Why the two-sided feelings? Keep reading here. Subscribe to the blog and get updated on each new post. Better yet, call up your cousin, who is an acquisitions editor somewhere, and tell her to call me about my book.

Technorati Tags: book, Next Life in the Afternoon, culture, travel, Buddhism, bats, spoor, cows, assault, farang, monk, Thai, Thailand, acquisitions editor

So far the manuscript is a bit beyond 40,000 words. I will be posting updates here from time to time as I pass key mile markers. You have to understand that one of the points of this blog is to publicly shame myself into actually writing and finishing the book.

Folks often ask how long it will be by the end. I don’t know. It will be precisely long enough to tell the story. I figure it should be at least 50,000 words. At this point that looks about right but we will see how it fleshes out. Right now I am on the second round of content creation, having finished the first round of the same and done a round of editing. At 50,000 words I will stop and edit again, then likely pick up the content creation once again.

Writers are never happy. We are editing creatures, like knife sharpeners who insist that they can get a blade just a tiny bit sharper with one more pass along the grindstone.

Here is my visual tracking I do in my office on the white board:

The dates are on the left and the corresponding number of words on the right. As you can tell, I had quite a bit of time to work on the project in late February and early March. That was a mixed blessing, as my main market was in its seasonal slump. Now I have less time but more work. It’s like my father used to say – you either have time or money; you rarely have both at once.

So the book continues. When I have time I can often sit down for a few hours and be super concentrated and hammer out 750 words in an hour or so but those times are not common nowadays.

Technorati Tags: manuscript, book, content creation, Writers