People, people! My completed book draft is now exactly TWO WORDS under the word limit. Eureka! And I’ve written my abstracts for each chapter. I still have a couple of things I want to check, and some other admin-type stuff – and we can’t go out to celebrate today. Anyway, that’s more appropriate when the manuscript gets sent off.
Nonetheless, we’ll celebrate modestly, with a McDonald’s Happy Meal …
There’s an introduction, eight chapters and a conclusion. (Chapter 7 is more of an interlude than a proper chapter, so maybe I could call it seven and a half chapters …. ) Anyway, I’ve taken two weeks’ annual leave to revise and prune this book draft, and after four days and evenings hard at it, I can now say I’ve only got three (two and a half) chapters and the conclusion left to deal with.
It seems punishing, but the idea is that I’ll spot inconsistencies if I’ve dealt with it all in a condensed space of time, so that earlier sections are still fresh in my mind as I come to the later chapters. This has proven to be the case, so far. Did they move to London in the late 1920s or the late 1930s? Ah, yes, THERE they are! Sorted.
All the while, snip, snipping and re-wording to get the word-count down by 11% across the board.
I had a tiny panic when I couldn’t actually find Chapter 5 this morning. For ten seconds I thought, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be there’, followed by fifteen seconds of, ‘Oh dear, it’s not in either folder where it ought to be’. Five seconds of ,’OH, SH**!!’, and then there it was. I’d renamed it at some point, but not in the Book Schedule document that’s meant to keep me on track. Phew!
I finally ground to a halt at 9.30 this evening. Chapter 5 is neatly tied up, and filed in two places on the cloud. I’m just feeling a bit frayed around the edges …
But just think how great tomorrow’s going to be! I wrote Chapters 6, 8 and the Conclusion so recently that they should be reasonably fresh in my mind. I just might get Chapter 6 and tiny Chapter 7 revised tomorrow – wouldn’t that be good?
It’s an expression known by novelists. But it might be applicable to this musicologist too, over the next fortnight!
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-kill-your-darlings
I do have a first draft of my second book, it’s true. But it’s a bit too long, and I am sure it can be tightened up. So, I’ve devised a formula. I need to lose 11%, and I’ll try to apply that across the whole manuscript. I’ve tried it on the introduction, and it worked a treat. Start with a word count, reduce every thousand words by 11%. But that’s just a small part of a much longer thing!
I’ve taken the next fortnight off as annual leave. It won’t be a holiday! Ideally, I’d like to do this in under a fortnight, to allow time for any extra fact-checking or writing. I really need to work out how much I need to get through per day, too, if I want that writing time. This morning, I reduced approximately 6.5k words to 5.8k, which is not enough to allow for the bibliography required at the end of each chapter.
It probably sounds very formulaic. But I timetabled the writing of my PhD, and the revision of my first monograph. It works for me! So … watch this space.
The official deadline is the end of July 2023. Luckily, my editor is quite forgiving!
MONDAY. Introduction done. Chapter 1 done. Chapter 2? Getting there. And there I had to stop. Tomorrow is another day!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 