Trying to go back through more than 13 years of political blogging to filter down enough articles to publish as a book is tough going.
I tried looking at pulling together as much of the stuff I'd blogged - hell, still blogging - about the nightmarish trump years, but I ended up with over 700 pages of the first draft, and an aggressive weeding still left me around 450 pages. If I'm trying to find an audience, overwhelming them with something the bulk and weight of a British encyclopedia is not the way to go. Even academic libraries will avoid ordering a copy.
So I decided to go through and do a Greatest Hits collection of the best blog articles I've done since 2006, except THAT was getting to 400 pages and I hadn't even gotten into 2019 at that point (my growing habit of writing long essays to impress the judges starts getting worse that year). Part of the problem was that I kept including extra blog articles to provide context to ongoing political issues or scandals I had been covering. /sigh
So, third stage of the project: I'm just going to limit myself. Just going to say "Thirty best articles, no matter what." If I need to provide context, I can add Author's introductory abstracts where needed. Just focus and get the good stuff to the readers.
Sorry for the distractions otherwise. If anything major happens on the trumpian front - say, more indictments - I will jump on that shit and blog some more stuff to add to the sequel book I've got planned BWHAHAHAHA.
In the meantime, any suggestions for a decent book title?
Update: Okay, I found my 30 articles. Page count at a respectable 159 right now. Anything I add for context shouldn't put me over 200 pages, so this is good. Still need a decent book title.
2 comments:
Editing is hard, and I've never been any good at it. "You Might Notice Thirty Greatest Hits"?
Apparently I'm not very good at titles, either...
-Doug in Sugar Pine
When I'm writing the blog article, most times I leave the title field blank until I've gotten most of it done, and *then* figure out a theme on which I've written the article and use that to make the title. Oft-times I go looking for a quote using a related keyword and use a line from that to make the title.
Headlines requires a specific skill set. When I studied journalism I found out quick that copy editing - which often handles the headline creation - can get stressful trying to come up with something eye-catching in as few words as possible.
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