I’m really struggling. I have a sprawling multi-volume book in my mind and I can’t get it out. It’s that genre and voice problem again. It took me almost two decades years to get nine pages into an acceptable form. But I have 991 pages still jammed up in there.
Susan suggested that maybe I write what I have to say as chapbooks, maybe they’ll coagulate into an actual book. Or maybe they’ll expand into respectable-length essays that could be published as a collection.
I do find it inspiring, though, to think of what I’m doing as making pretty books — physical artifacts made out of ideas, words, letters, layouts, paper, ink and thread. I love the object-quality of books.
Three chapbooks I could get out are:
- Exnihilist Manifesto
- Shells and Pearls
- Enworldment
Do you use any particular software? I wonder if something like Tiddlywiki would work – where you put all your ideas and thoughts in the smallest form possible and link them with tags, categories, etc. Check out https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/ . It’s absolutely my favorite platform for anything that I need to record and organize data.