Updates

Book: I'm making good progress on my book. I've missed a couple of days, but I typically write much more than 237 words (or whatever it was) when I do "touch it." I've been carving out the middle of every day to put in a few hours on it. I'm now up to chapter four and 9,500 words of draft (and another 15,000 words of notes, "skeletons" of later chapters I guess you could call them). It's just first draft so I'm not too worried yet about the excessive word count. There's a lot to the story and I already see I might have trouble fitting it all into one book of normal length (an ordinary hardback is in the range of 80–120,000 words).

I'm starting to feel that it's not all that hard to write a book. You just have to know where you're going and keep after it. Brave words, maybe, considering it's still early going.

'It Must Be Color': I'm getting a lot of great submissions. Such a pleasure. I wonder if I've adequately conveyed how very nice it is for me to see your work. I probably haven't gotten more than 40 submissions or so thus far, but it's just a joy to open the email every morning and be able to see more pictures. Big thanks. I like cameras, but I've always liked pictures more.

Print sale: I've been talking to Matt Weber, street photographer extraordinaire, about a Winter print sale, and it looks like it might happen. We're still trying to work out a way to offer signed, artist-printed gelatin-silver prints. This might be a week or three away as yet, but watch this space. This sale will be different and distinctive, I think. Here's Matt's website, and here's his book (or buy it directly from him at his website).

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mike Peters: "Matt Weber! YES!!! I'm so happy to see that you're working with him to make a print sale. Matt is truly the embodiment of what a NYC street photographer is. His body of work is surely the deepest I've ever seen, and he's very prolific. He's been making amazing images for a very long time. TOP readers are in for a treat!"

[Mike Peters is no slouch as a photographer, either.

P.S. It probably seems like this post has gotten few comments, but the number of submissions for "It Must Be Color" just about doubled overnight. —Ed.]

Comments

[Speed]

Mike wrote, "I like cameras, but I've always liked pictures more."

Lest we forget, a camera is a just a tool we use to make pictures.

[Joe]

"You just have to know where you're going..."

Ah, well, that's the trick, isn't it?

[I'm helped in this case because it's a true story, but it's still tough to know what to put in and what to leave out. --Mike]

[David Boyce]

Keep writing, and reading, and writing. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

Glad to see you’ve scheduled some time to keep chipping away at the book. A large part of my work involves writing - admittedly business requirements for financial product & system changes, so no Pulitzer Prize candidates :)
I find the two main challenges are:
- Getting to the knub of what it is one is trying to do or say. Once this is determined, the rest is filling in the details, in one sense.
- Editting. For me this is the grind. My objectives are clarity of meaning, accuracy, completeness and coherence throughout the document.
Whatever one’s objectives, it can be very hard to read your own words objectively and with “fresh eyes”. In this sense TOP’s comments section is perfect for me. The preview pane presents the words just differently enough that I can effectively review and edit - when I have the time :)

[Timothy Auger]

The thing about writing a book is to keep going, and get something down on a regular basis. Chances are, as you have found, it will end up 50% too long. That's a good thing - cutting is easier than injecting additional substance. But at that stage you have only done half the work, and it's tempting to sit back, heave a sigh of relief, and approach the cutting and refining process in a grudging, almost reluctant frame of mind, due to exhaustion and (by then) boredom with the whole damn thing. Take a break and go back refreshed. Cutting, approached with the right attitude, is fun, and vastly improves almost any book. Then remember that captions are as important as (perhaps more important than) the main text, and take more time to get right than you expect. More than half your readers will pick up the book, look at the pictures, read some of the captions - and that's it. Sad but true.

Keep going!

[David Dyer-Bennet]

You write a book the same way you eat an elephant -- one bite at a time (I guess I was reminded of this by having just caught up and seen the B&W Baker's Dozen post with the lovely section about "the elephant problem"). (My community here contains a lot of professional writers, including my wife.)