The Joys of Book Writing

Spent the morning at Kaldi's Coffeehouse outlining/writing on a new book project, and I have to confess how good it all felt to be working on something longer than a one-page reflection for class or a blog entry for the Internet. The best news is that I think some of what I came up with is even worth keeping (there's nothing worse than spending a morning working on something you know you're going to trash later), so that's nice.

For the past several months, I've been following Susan Wise Bauer's progress on the four-volume historical she's writing for W.W. Norton called Story of the Ancient World. Susan's last blog post made mention that the delivery date for the final volume of the project is September of 2012. Oh, and in between volumes, she's working on her dissertation.

Man. And I'm just happy to get a rough draft of a possible table of contents on paper...

I posted another review at Writers Read this morning: To Own a Dragon by Donald Miller. Don't be too impressed by my prolific posting: the same review appeared a few months ago at Common Grounds Online. Yes, I'm recycling a few reviews, but it's okay by all parties involved (it's amazing how nobody cares when there's no money involved). Click over and check it out.

5:30 p.m.

One last "joy" to share today: Ed just introduced me to Scrivener for the Mac, a very cool (and free) writing software program that lines up well with how I tend to think about project organization, research, and writing. Best of all, says Ed, it comes with a thorough and useable tutorial that walks you through its feature-set as you learn to use it. After playing with it a little this afternoon, he's right: it's cake to learn. This could be the end-of-the-world-as-I-know-it of perpetually opening/closing documents in Microsoft Word when writing. Glory, hallelujah.