Well, that was an unintended break from the blog.
Little did I realize that I hadn’t posted for several days.
My bad.
I have been having a hard time blogging lately, though. Here and at my disc golf blog. Writing — like many other things — goes through cycles. Sometimes I have ideas and I just can’t get myself to pound out the words to make them make sense.
Such is life, eh?
I still don’t have much to say, in all honesty.
But I want to share something about writing.
For the past few years, I’ve been enamored with writing a book. Whether it be fiction or real, I want to write a book. In a perfect world, I’ll write a few during my lifetime. I have a couple I’ve been trying to push through in regard to real-life people. Doing books like this require a lot of time and research and interviews. So, it’s not so easy to set up the times to do these things. One of these could be a decent-sized book. The other I think would be more of something I’d look to publish on Amazon as a Kindle Single, if they accepted it.
I’ve also been trying to work a few ideas around in my head for some fiction books. For one of them, I have a basic idea, but I can’t get the meat all figured out. It’s an overcoming odds sort of story, so I need to get things all fixed in my head before I really get writing it.
Being I’ve never written a book, I needed to do some research on the process. I’ve written lengthy stories before and, in college, I did research papers. But going beyond that to book form is a total different world.
Talk about re-writes and edits and revisions and layout and …
You get the idea.
It’s no easy process to start and finish writing a book, let along getting it published and (gasp) trying to make a few bucks.
Either way, I have a hard time going into a project like this without having a good outline in my head. Then it hit me — a few years ago, I had written a screenplay. I think this was in 2004 or 2005. I did it, at the time, all by hand and then typed it in. I went and found that file and got it printed out last night.
My idea? Turn it into a book. I realize there’s going to have to be a lot of work to turn this into a novel. More description, more details and all that good stuff. But at least I have an outline, right?
I read the first 10 or 12 pages of the script last night before heading off to bed.
Sheesh!
I’d love to see this on the big screen one day, but it would require some serious re-writing. The idea is there and all, but the things that would need to be done to fix it up would be quite intense.
That being said, as I read that short snippet of this screenplay, I realized a book can come out of this. The story line is there. The characters are there (though a couple may need to be slashed) and there’s the premise of a book. There will still need to be research. And development of the characters. And details added.
But I could see this being a book.
It’s going to take time, that’s for sure. And, I’m sure, several re-writes and reads. But in the end, I might have something here. And maybe if I can plow through this, the other books and the ideas behind them could take shape, too.
Who knows?
I’ve never been this dreamer where I believed a book I write would get me millions of dollars, but it would be cool to write this book and see what happens. Maybe I can break even. Maybe I can self-publish and then get a look. Who knows? But in the end, this isn’t about making millions. It’s about doing something I’ve always wanted to do — write a book. And from there, we’ll see what happens.
Now to start going through this script and cringing some more…
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