19 June 2014
“Hmm… honey, is this non-fiction, or fiction? I don’t know. Maybe the bookstore made a mistake.”
Pause. Rewind. Fast forward. Jumping around and around the book’s contents, editing and fact-checking.
Perhaps some would wonder why I am doing this. The book idea has lingered in the back of my mind since 2006 or 2007.
Now, I’ve had a tendency toward writing for almost as long as I can remember, from my early elementary school poem “What Is White?” (published in Poetry 101 in 2010 under my pseudonym “Snowflake”) to that novel I never published because it was more of a way to cope with life.
The tendency for authors in the modern day is supposed to be to write a new book every two or three years. So why then is it going to take me at least five? I didn’t originally intend it to be this way. The pesky bachelor’s degree got in the way! Okay, okay. I had to change gears. And the degree was in a related field––Journalism and Mass Communication. Any who, while at college earning that degree, I became known as a research guy. For the university’s campus media, I researched public domain cartoons, and, to my delight, had discovered that some Popeye the Sailor Man cartoons were already public domain. My class notes were so copious that they struck a cord of horror in one of my classmates who happened to glance on two pages of notes. My surveys for campus media earned me the Mad Researcher certificate.
Oh, and I should probably mention something about Facebook forums, and being a part of several of them. The wide variety of topics helped me expand my research as well. You end up learning that places like JSTOR and Archive.org are our friends, not to mention PLoS ONE, ScienceDaily, and a host of other sites.
But for the research behind the book in question– –the one I’d like to release sometime 2015 – –I learned that places like webcitation.org and blogs on life in the bush (no relation to George W. Bush) could be of help. News websites. Interviews. Audio recordings. Facebook messages. Twitter tweets. Electronic letters. Yearbooks. Photos. Videos, online and on disk. Blogs. Emails. My previously written works. Oh, and a school newspaper. All of the above in bold dark red italic I have drawn upon in the development of this upcoming book. My goal? To make the non-fiction book appear to be fiction. What do I mean by that? Something a little like this blog post, actually.
Engaging. Filled with details. Impressionary language. The truth is the limit.
The title? As of this blog post, I’d rather not divulge that information. Let’s just say I could imagine an inspirational novel having this title. Lord and publisher willing, I would even prefer that the photo credits come as end notes in the end of the book, so that the body of the book appears more like a novel.
Now it’s time to go back to the drawing board, one byte at a time.
And yes, for all of you who have seen the Out of Print documentary, as of this writing, there’s still such a thing as bookstores.
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