[WWC #1] Welcome to the Winter of Word Craft
Hey, it's me Tom Critchlow - welcome to my pop-up newsletter to follow the progress as I write my book about independent consulting.
Ok since this is the first email let's set the stage. Where are we at?
- What's the book about: It's a guide for independent consultants to find better clients, do more interesting work and earn more money, ultimately creating a more sustainable indie consulting practice.
- Working title: The Strategic Independent
- Current word count: 71,288
- Publish strategy: Self-publish!
I've been writing the book in public on my blog for the past few years and so most of the writing is available to read here.
But, the master copy of the book is now a single Google Doc that is the "source of truth" and is increasingly diverging from what's on my website.
(Yes, the master file is called "The Strategic Independent - New Outline" - from the band that brought you the_strategic_independent_final_v2_may2022)
Progress this week?
Well, I wrote and published my chapter on narrative aircover and compound narrative which felt great. People seemed to like it. Nice to get things moving again.
But/and - umm. Actually I need fewer words, not more words.
Turns out - I don't know how to edit. I don't mean that figuratively, I mean that literally; how do you edit a piece of text you've written? What are you editing for? How do you know when you're "finished" editing a piece?
As a blogger, it might be no surprise to learn that detailed editing isn't a natural part of my process(!).
This week I tried editing the first chapter. My steps were:
- Read through the full chapter, making notes in the margins
- Re-write sections to better align the piece to the overall throughline. You could call this tightening or sharpening the piece.
This worked... fine? I think I improved the chapter. But I also unfortunately made it longer. The book is over 70,000 words already and it's too long.
Ok, so next week I'm going to write the last missing piece (working title: "don't give advice, be useful") and try and edit some chapters without adding more words.
Days until spring: 67 days, 7 hours, 55 minutes.
Wish me luck