So Let It Be Written

Apr 15, 2010 by winjaw

Yesterday was a rather momentous day for yours truly.  And primarily why I haven’t posted much lately.

“The book” (lowercase) so as not to be confused with The Book, is done.  Well, at least the first phase is done.  I never realized how much is involved in writing a book. When you get down to it, the writing is/was the easy part. Now the fun begins.

Last night I sent off the manuscript to the publishers. As I said, the writing was the easy part.  I had to find someone to write the Forward, others to write short pithy reviews about how awesome the book is.  And there was a little cajoling on my part to get others to submit their portion of the book.

And now it really begins.  

The book comes in at 20,000 words, more of a novella if you will. It’s about seeking wisdom, and finding mentors – the ones who will guard your back, stand beside you and aren’t afraid to tell you to your face that you are about to make a colossal mistake.

I had to go back through and double-space everything. Switch it all to Times New Roman, put in the proper number of spaces to start each paragraph – just a lot of little “stuff.”

Now it goes to the typesetter. And then we discuss fonts and spacing and, oh yeah, the front cover design, back cover design, book size, getting the copyrights and so on and so forth.  Oh, and getting a web site designed to help promote and sell the book.

As I said, I think the actual writing was the easy part. An interesting side note was the spell/grammar check using Microsoft Word. That program just bites. In 20,000 words, it found three errors – basically typos where I had the same word twice – like the, the. Its “suggestions” were wrong more than 30 times. Simple things, like your/you’re. Scary.

But it’s done. And a big sigh of relief.

I’ll keep you posted as things progress.