State of the book, 2/28/13

Since the book is moving along fairly well lately--that is, I'm running out of things to research and actually writing it--I thought I'd start giving regular updates. Regular readers know how much my life sucked last year. It was basically a lost year for me. Except for a few weeks, the year was taken up by either by dealing with or being curled up in a ball because of end-to-end personal catastrophes  Things quieted down toward the end of the year and I was finally able to do useful work again in mid-January.

So, here we are. It's the last day of February. Over the last couple weeks I have completed and polished my book proposal. Unlike article proposals, non-fiction book proposals can be quite long. The usual advice for articles is that the proposal should be no longer than two pages. Book proposals, on the other hand need to go into a number of issues such as marketing, illustrations, and include at least one polished sample chapter. When I researched proposals I discovered that a forty page proposal wasn't unusual. "Holy crap!" I thought, "do I have that much to say about the book?" My current draft is forty-one pages long. I'm still wondering if I should have said more. For example, my author's biography is two sentences long.

That's the state of the book. The proposal and chapter are written and rewritten and going to my trusted reviewer/editors for comments. I've started into another chapter. The next big deadline will be sending it out the door a little over a year later than I had expected.