ALMOST PAINLESS PROGRESS – - New book

September 18, 2012 7:35 am Published by admin 2 Comments

 

            This blog is in answer to a question/comment sent to me by Steve N.  The question was, “How are you coming with the Presque Isle and early Erie history book with Joe Root and when will it be out?”  The short answer isit is moving along very well.  I have 68,000 words done in a book that is planned to be about 90,000; in real –time that would be nearly 280-300 pages) I think the progress is great; however I am finding the research involved is massive. To confirm this, just talk to my wife. Books, papers with notes on them, articles, copies of old papers and maps and just about anything that I can lay my hands on is collecting in my  office and on the dining room table.

            As many of you know, I started this project in 2009 and it has been a work in progress since then. I only had one detour during that period and it was writing and publishing a book in the Images of America series about the history of Presque Isle in old photographs. Arcadia Publishing released the book in September of 2011 and it has been a huge success.  There has also been a minor detour in book writing due to this blog which is nearly one year old and takes a large block of my time. Yet all things considered, progress has been wonderful on the new book.

The book will bring Joe back to life so that we can meet each day and discuss when and what happened on Presque Isle and in early Erie.  I have included some history of Erie because the history of Presque Isle and Erie and intertwined.  I hope to have the book written and edited by December and to the publisher by mid-January.  That means that an April book release date is possible (though not guaranteed) if I can hold that schedule.

            I have found that by using an interesting management concept called Kaizen and applying it to my various writing projects, the writing seems to be becoming easier and less demanding. Kaizen is the process of continual improvement through small and incremental steps. It started as a Japanese management idea and continues to be used in writing, psychology and business.

Kaizen, as I use the concept, forces me to start with something easy that you can convert into steps.  I do this so that I can see immediate benefits which encourages me to keep working on the project.  It reinforces my belief that as long as I keep moving forward, even if it is in small steps, I will get the project done.

How this concept has helped me is that it makes me plan what and how I write. For example, one of the chapters in the new Presque Isle & Joe Root book will tell the story of how and why the Waterworks Park area was built.  In my planning this chapter was to be between 3,000 and 4,000 words, so when I and published my four part blog on Waterworks Park, about three month’s ago, I made sure it nearly 3.800 words long.  Now when I, in a few weeks, I get to the portion of the book that covers Waterworks Park, 80% of the writing and all of the research will have already been done because of my blog articles. 

The people who have read and/or are helping edit the book seem to like the way it is coming together, so I am very happy about that.  I will keep readers up-to-date on the progress of the new book.

See you on the park!!

Tags:

Categorised in: Books

This post was written by admin