Blog to Book – Part 4: Logistics, writing schedule and book brain

Read the other parts of this series:

• Blog to Book - Part 1: Starting a blog and generating interest
• Blog to Book - Part 2: Writing a book proposal
• Blog to Book - Part 3: Negotiating a contract
• Blog to Book - Part 4: Logistics, writing schedule and book brain
• Blog to Book – Part 5: A book is not a blog
• Blog to Book – Part 6: Revising and editing
• Blog to Book - Part 7: Copyediting and proofreading
• Blog to Book - Part 8: A title, an author photo, and a cover

Making a schedule

I had been hired to write, but I suddenly started doing a lot of math. I calculated how many copies I’d have to sell to earn out my advance and I figured out the rate at which I had to write. My book was supposed to be approximately 80,000 words, which is about 150 single-spaced pages in Microsoft Word. I had 9 months to give birth to this baby. That meant that I had to write at least 6666 words a month, or about 222 words a day. That was assuming everything flowed perfectly from my fingertips without need for revisions. I needed to start writing - yesterday.

In January I went on a writing blitzkrieg. I spent three hours every night working on the book. This was after I spent eight hours at my day job, came home, exercised and prepared a well-balanced dinner. (It would have been tragically ironic if the process of writing a weight-loss memoir caused me to gain weight.) I worked at my desktop computer, which sat on a metal desk…directly in front of a window…in the middle of January. I am obviously not a feng shui master. I threw a comforter over my legs, but even typing at 80 words per minute couldn’t keep my fingers completely warm. I thought about rearranging the furniture, but my desks are heavy and even I didn’t want that much of a work out.

I already had a rough draft of the first several chapters done at the end of January when I had my first telephone conversation with my editor. We’d never actually talked until this point. We went over what the process would be like. I suspect the process varies from publisher to publisher and depends a lot on the preferences of the editor and the author. My editor made a schedule of when each chapter needed to be completed to stay on schedule. She requested that I put each chapter in its own Word document, which made a lot more sense than writing everything in one huge document like I had been doing. I would FTP chapters to a server as I finished them and she would edit them as we went along. For those of you scratching your heads, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is simply a way to store files on a remote server. I backed up the chapters to my own remote server too because I am paranoid. I also bought a battery backup for my computer because the spring thunderstorm season was coming up. I didn’t want to lose pages of breathtaking, Pullitzer-Prize winning prose to a freak black-out.

Book Brain

For the next nine months, the book completely took over my brain. It also took over my life. I worked, slept, ate, exercised and wrote. Somehow I managed to update my blog as well, though in retrospect I have no idea how. I wanted to retain and grow my blog audience so I would have a good platform to launch the book. If my blog withered away, I wouldn’t be able to remind anyone to buy my book when it finally came out. This was all very exhausting, but who knows if I’ll ever write another book? I wanted it to be the best that I could make it. My reputation was on the line and I didn’t want to have any regrets.

Thankfully, my daytime job was not as demanding as it had been when I first started it. This was a boon because I didn’t feel drained at the end of the day. In fact, I came home and felt energized to write. The evenings were when my real life began. I spent the day itching to get home. After writing all evening, I’d go to bed, my body exhausted from running and my mind fatigued from writing.

No matter what I was doing, my mind was always attuned to the book. Whenever I had a thought tangentially related to weight-loss, health or fitness, I’d think “That should go in the book!” I’d suddenly turned on a filter in my brain that’s mission was to collect every single memory related to weight-loss. I was constantly jotting notes in notebooks. I set up a wiki so I could quickly enter notes on the computer from any location that had Internet access. On my 30-minute drive home from work I’d go over and over my fat thoughts in my head, writing sentences and paragraphs in my mind that I would later type into my word processor. Even when I was working out, I’d think about the chapter I was working on. I had a bad case of book brain.

After my January blitzkrieg, my rate of writing slowed down. I typically spent about 3-5 days writing a chapter. I had 18 chapters to write, so it took me about 3-4 months to finish a rough draft. I was really anxious to just get a draft done. It made me tense knowing I had so much more to write. For the most part, I wrote the book linearly, starting with chapter one and moving on to chapter two and then three. The only exception was the final chapter, which I worked on before some of the chapters preceding it. When I finally had a rough draft, I sat on the couch with a feeling of complete relief. Even though the book still needed a lot of revision, I’d constructed the skeleton on which to hang everything. Creating the outline in my book proposal was like writing a pattern for a sweater to knit. Even though I knew what I wanted to make, I had to actually sit there and construct it, row by row, sentence by sentence. I still needed to rip out some stitches, but the basic garment was there.

Emotional toll

I got sick of myself. I spent several hours every evening writing about myself. Then I’d write a blog entry all about me. Even when I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about weight and all the ways it had affected my life. Me, me, me, me, me. Some evenings I ditched writing all together just to veg out in front of the TV, turn off my brain, and get completely away from myself.

Writing about my early years was particularly grueling since I had to relive my fat and miserable days. I could only write about those times for an hour or so before getting up from the computer feeling depressed. I hadn’t thought much about my past. I hadn’t analyzed it much on my blog, which was mostly set in the present day. Sometimes my editor would give me feedback asking questions about why certain things were the way they were. I felt like I was in therapy, only I was the one getting paid.

One of the hardest things was that I didn’t know why I had gotten so fat in the first place. Yet I felt like I needed to give some sort of explanation, or at least explain why I didn’t know. Throughout the whole nine months of writing the book I struggled with that issue. It was difficult because you can’t just enter a search query into your brain and request that it return all the results having to do with “fat.” All my memories are stored in my grey matter somewhere, but they are only triggered by events that happen in present day. I had to turn on a filter that caught those memories when they were triggered, like a search agent monitoring the news for a keyword. If someone mentioned eating pizza, I suddenly remembered going to pizza parties as a kid. After a couple months of listening to this filter, I collected a lot of memories and got a better idea of what my early years were like.

My current years were still happening, too. I somehow managed to do some things other than eat, sleep, and write. Frequently I wanted to include these things in the book. I ran a 5K. I took a kickboxing class. I started eating new vegetables. I had to squeeze in these events where I could, since they obviously weren’t in my outline.

Then there was my weight. To their credit, my publisher never once pressured me to lose more weight. However, I really wanted to be able to say I’d lost half my weight on the blurb on the back cover. At the time I signed the contract, I was about 30 pounds away from my goal weight and five pounds away from losing half my weight. I was losing weight steadily and I still had at least a year until the book came out, so I didn’t pressure myself. I just kept doing what I’d been doing. I felt relieved when I officially did lose half my weight at the end of February. My next goal was to be able to say I’d lost 200 pounds, but now that I could say I’d lost half my weight, that other goal was just frosting on the cake I wasn’t eating. Eventually I did bounce down below the 200-pounds-lost mark when I had a cold. I figured a number was a number and it counted even if I’d lost 3 pounds of mucus.

Luckily, the stress of writing a book did not cause me to overeat. Or at least, it didn’t cause me to binge anymore than I occasionally did anyway. If anything, I was so focused on writing and thinking about writing, I had less time to think about food. I was also on such a strict schedule, cramming in work, exercise and writing, that I didn’t have much time to run out to the Dairy Queen.

Residual work ethic

The habits that helped me lose weight, helped me write a book. You don’t want to walk 3 miles tonight? Too bad! Get on the treadmill! You don’t want to write the last half of chapter four? Oh well, sit your ass in front of the computer. I set up a rewards schedule. If I wrote for two hours, I could then watch an hour of TV. If I wrote for another hour, I could have a bowl of pudding. This worked well to motivate me and to break up the work.

Even today, long after I’ve finished writing, I still experience affects of this residual work ethic. Dancing with the Stars used to be one of my favorite shows, but I just couldn’t justify sitting in front of the TV for two hours a night when I could be spending that time working on my book instead. These days I feel weird if I don’t come home and do something productive. If anything, I’m too hard on myself and feel guilty if I do just sit and watch a movie instead of make plans for world domination.

Writing a book was a lot of work and sucked up most of my free time. It was also a crash course in how to write a long-form work, which was very different from writing a blog. I’ll share what I learned next week, as soon as I finish drawing up plans for the Death Star.

Continued in Blog to Book – Part 5: A book is not a blog

Summary

• I made a schedule plotting out when each chapter needed to be done
• I got a case of “book brain” and constantly scribbled notes in journals or on the computer
• Writing a memoir took an emotional toll because I had to examine parts of my life I’d avoided
• Writing a book, working full time, and exercising regularly sucked up most of my time
• The same work ethic that helped me lose weight, helped me stay on task writing a book.