Strategy to make the book manuscript
I have to keep posting every day until April, but will be winding down the book posts in some way, as was scheduled.
I am happy to say that I have a plan around creating the first version of the manuscript. I will go through this spreadsheet, and put the elements I want in my book from each of these blogposts into an organized google doc, organized in the schema I came up with a few days ago. I will check them off as I do them, and then when I am done, that is the new “saved state” for the project. Getting my projects to a saved state for future me, who may be having different priorities and different feelings, is something I learned from Tee Barnett.
I have so far not begun to execute on this extremely straightforward plan. Perhaps because I am sick with some kind of cold/flu. Perhaps for some other reason.
Perhaps because I am not not taking Sasha Chapin’s advice, in one of his several really good writing posts, which is, “Just write it down, without changing it.” I think that I have a fear that “copy pasting them into the manuscript” will end up being “rewriting everything” and thus each single post will take an hour or more to copy over, as I attempt to revise it, add to it, etc.
In reality, most posts will likely take substantially less than an hour, and a few posts will likely take substantially more. But then the ones that are taking too long, or that I suspect I will have to deeply look at, I can mark in a different way. I do not actually have to go in order. I have a spreadsheet. I can skip around.
In fact, if “skipping around” feels more manageable and more fun, I might encourage myself to do that. I might have a random number generator generate a number for me, and that’s the entry I look at next. I can make it more like a game I play with myself, than a laborious project management task, which is probably how it should be.
Hmm with this bit of troubleshooting I am much more excited about this specific task.
I think I fear, that in writing everything over, it will still not be good in some way. This is the same “don’t try to edit while you are writing” situation, but on a scale one level up, and so it feels like there might be some more complicated problem, or some new bespoke laziness. But really it just is this same thing. Don’t edit when you are writing (mostly). And don’t edit when you transcribe (mostly).
The rule should be “do not edit.” If I find myself editing because I am so deeply inspired and possessed to, that’s okay. But that’s different from it being a requirement of this current stage. The rule for this current stage is DO NOT EDIT. ONLY TRANSCRIBE. Once I have transcribed a certain number, I should get a little treat. This would inspire me to go fast.
I think my treat should be a literal treat.