On deadline

I learned my lesson a few years ago to never promise a book manuscript to a publisher or editing work to a writer just after Thanksgiving or Christmas. In other words, never tell someone, “just after the first of the year.” Bad decision. How easy is it to really get a manuscript done during the holidays? Doesn’t work for me anyway.

So I’ve promised to submit a manuscript Nov 21, just before Thanksgiving, for a book I’m hoping to publish in 2009. Now, I won’t expect to necessarily hear back till well in January or February on that manuscript for same reasons above.

So, I’ll try to give you some snippets of what I’m writing here and there in the next month . . . but for now it’s a secret. OK, one hint: the book is about a neighborhood that’s preparing to die.

Reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to get some ideas.

Ideas come from unexpected places. Was reading the new book by Karen Zacharias, Where’s your Jesus now? and made mistake of starting the first chapter standing up next to my desk. Couldn’t sit down till I finished that first breathless and stunning chapter. And it inspired just the kind of approach I was looking for for a section of the book I’m writing, which is same genre (based on true story).