Well, I did it! Over the weekend I finished writing my book 5 Years in Hawaii: A True Saga of International Adventure and the U.S. Naval Intelligence Community. I started this project over three years ago in a tiny little apartment that sat catty-corner from what was then my college, Mesa State. I was attending their Political Science program back in the winter of 2004, though thanks to a bad girlfriend and a sneaky teacher I would only complete a single year of it. Anyway, the point is that it was during the early morning before classes that I began to sit in front of my old iMac DV and hammer out some of my favorite sea stories.
Before long I found myself working on a chronological memoir of at first one deployment, then eventually another. Before I knew it I was working on my very first book. I’m not new to the writing game mind you, I’ve been churning out poems, short stories, and scripts since my early teens. But never before had I sought to endeavor toward a full-length book manuscript. Because the project was growing under its own momentum and not due to some kind of external motivation on my part, it moved along slowly. Three years and a new computer later, I’ve written the final chapter in that story.
Now, I am not purporting that my manuscript is anywhere near ready for print. I’ve still got to read the beast in its entirety and make revisions for continuity, relevance of content, and length in general. At 577 pages (double spaced) and over 120,000 words, this book is not a small volume and because it is non-fiction I am concerned that this will tend to thwart a reader from finishing. I will be combing through it now to rip out any stray story lines that don’t contribute to the overall movement of the work. After all, there are some very important bits of information that I would like to convey to the public through my book and if the reader is getting caught up in too many mushy stories about women that I dated or cars that I owned then the value of my efforts here may go unnoticed by a larger audience.
Most of the spelling and grammar has already been edited by myself both on the fly and in a previous editing run. I printed a single copy out when the book was at around 400 pages and read through it with the intention of analyzing my storytelling but wound up spotting so many horribly obvious spelling and grammar errors that it was pretty much all I could do to fix them and ignore the storyline all together.
I also wrote this book in random order, mostly because I would get bored writing about a particular chapter and go skimming through the outline for something more vivacious to write about. As a result the continuity is probably in serious disrepair, something i will be remedying soon. Even though it sounds like a lot of work yet, and it is really, I’m so close to the finish now that I can smell the ink and glue of my new book as I type!
Once I’ve finished this rewrite I will be in the final stages of creation and begin moving on to marketing and selling the damn thing. It will be time then to get it into the hands of a few trusted readers in order to glean some initial feedback. Some tweaks will be necessary at this point, if not another rewrite altogether. But from there I will ready to load for big game and go stalking after an agent or an extremely open-minded editor that’s right for my project.
At the time of that earlier print and edit session I began contacting agents because everything I read had said that they almost never get back to you in less than a few months. What I discovered was that many Literary Agents will get back to you with a rejection much faster than that! I had four in my first week and I had only sent out five to begin with. One did come back sounding more positive however, and I was invited to send a full proposal. Of course, then I was invited to send a full proposal and they claimed not to remember requesting it the first time. Several months have since gone by and I’ve heard nothing from them, so it looks like the hunt will really be on now.
In the meantime, keep reading!
JMK
