Book-writing progress report

In my experience, birthing a book is similar to publishing a family in the sense that, once you’ve done it, you look at the product– beautifully produced books that can stand as valued resources for years to come; or wonderful young(-ish) adults who are totally their own people with self-confidence, great projects and relationships, and an enduring sense of humor and family values– and you kind of forget all the nail-biting angst, sleepless nights, and just plain hard work that went into the production process.
If we didn’t have this capacity of selective forgetting, no woman would ever have a second child or publish a second book.
So regarding book-writing, JWN regulars are doubtless aware that between July and late September I was hard at work writing my next book.
By the way, we now have a firm title. It will be called Re-engage!: America and the World After Bush.
I worked really hard writing it; got a tight complete manuscript off to the publisher on about September 26th; caught up with a few other tasks; did a couple of things in New York; then went for a fabulous mainly-vacation in Spain with my daughter.
Ah, Spain. I still have so much I want to blog about the trip…
So I get back home, and discover that Jennifer Knerr, the VP at Paradigm Publishers with whom I’m principally working on this project, (1) has given the whole ms. a good, close read, (2) says she really likes it, and (3) has made some really helpful comments and suggestions about it.
I love working with an intelligent editor, and Jennifer is definitely one. (Another thing I like is having a blog where I can hand out public plaudits to good editors.)
But… All this now means another round of close, serious work on the manuscript for me. Plus, I need to pull together both the Resource Section I promised her for the end of the book and the framing Preface for the beginning. This is the part of book-writing that I’d kind of forgotten when I first proposed this project to Jennifer back in June.
So anyway, that’s why I haven’t been blogging much recently. By paying sustained close attention to the task I have now revised three of the book’s seven chapters, and just about sketched out two of the five parts of the Resource Section. (These track the “substantive” middle five chapters of the book, so I’m doing them more or less in parallel.)
My present goal is to get all the chapter-revising and the Resource Section done by the end of this week, and the Preface done shortly after that. Next spring I’ll get the pay-off: the volume in hand, the fully-formed new contribution to the public discourse. Ta-dum!
But now I’m still in angst and hard work. So maybe it’ll be adios here for a few more days.
But hey, who knows? At least I know that– like all the members of my great family– JWN is always here for me. (Plus, I know that people here can carry on an interesting conversation even without me.)

7 thoughts on “Book-writing progress report”

  1. Yes Helena we can chew some bone perfectly well amongst ourselves but we(I) didn’t quite know what had happened to you.
    Even if we were to polite and/or self-absorbed to ask, it started getting a little unneverving. I was somewaht fretfully logging on just to see if you had posted anything new.
    If it is possible, may I respectfully ask that you give us a heads-up before you disappear on such major missions, just as you are doing now, so we can be sure all is well when you are missing in despatches.

  2. Roland, you are so sweet to be concerned, and I am sorry i made you fretful. Thing is, I never actually intended to be AWOL all this time. i just kept adding items to my little list of “Must blog about this at the first opportunity” till the list became dauntingly long… at which point I felt overwhelmed by it and decided to post what i posted today. This other close-text work is quite tiring.
    I did, however, take time off this evening to go hear Obama speak here in Charlottesville. He was sensational. I must blog about that sometime!

  3. H,
    Is it possible to post your new Nation article here at JWN? Unless one is a paying subscriber, we cannot read your latest!
    Cheers,
    KDJ

  4. I hope this all goes in. The point is, the Spanish discussion about “memorialisation” has been overtaken – by the Pope. Here goes (from Gary Leupp, on Counterpunch):
    In Vatican City on Oct. 28, in the largest beatification ceremony ever held, Pope Benedict XVI placed 498 persons on the road to sainthood. They all died during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), and were presented as martyrs to their faith. This was just days before the Spanish Parliament was scheduled to debate the “Law of Historical Memory” requiring local governments in Spain to fund efforts to unearth mass graves of victims of that war containing thousands killed at the hands of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Is the timing not curious?
    Half a million people died in the war. On the one hand there were the partisans of a Republican government under a leftist Popular Front coalition that won parliamentary elections. They were leftist and anticlerical, hostile to the great wealth and power of the Catholic Church. (The Church, consisting of about 115,000 priests, monks and nuns in a country of 24 million, controlled over 15% of all arable land, and had large holdings in bank capital and other financial enterprises.) On the other were the Nationalists under Gen. Franco, “hero” of Spain’s colonial war in Morocco and devout son of the Church. The Republicans were supported by the Soviets, the Nationalists by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy—and the Church.
    The brutality of Franco’s fascists and foreign allies is immortalized in Picasso’s painting “Guernica,” depicting the German Luftwaffe bombing of a Basque town in 1937. While there was brutality on all sides, the Nationalist dead were treated with respect following Franco’s victory and during his long dictatorship to his death in 1975. (He enjoyed massive U.S. support during the Cold War, and continuing warm, grateful support from the Catholic Church.) There are tens of thousands of victims of the fascists whose remains have not yet been located, and some prominent clerics in Spain seem content with that. AP quotes Francisco Perez, the archbishop of Pamplona, as opposing the bill before the Spanish parliament. “You can’t change history,” he says, urging victims “to look for ways to forget.”
    In a Spanish language sermon in St. Peter’s Square Sunday, Benedict declared that the beatified ones were “motivated exclusively by their love for Christ.” “These martyrs,” added the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (the number two man at the Vatican, according to Reuters) “have not been proposed for veneration by the people of God because of their political implications nor to fight against anybody” but because they had been exemplary Christians.
    The Pope, meanwhile, has been an outspoken critic of the growing secularization of Spanish society. Church attendance has fallen dramatically since 1975, and according to a 2002 survey only 19 percent of Spaniards consider themselves practicing Catholics. Spain has under current President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero adopted a liberal divorce law and legalized gay marriage. An indignant Pope Benedict in 2005 urged Spaniards to firmly resist “secular tendencies,” and perhaps he associates these with the present attention given to “historical memory.”
    The Spanish state wants to dig up the victims of fascism. The Church wants to leave them buried, while launching its own remembered martyrs into the stratosphere for veneration. Whom do these include? Augustinian Fr. Gabino Olaso Zabala, executed by Republican forces. In 1896 he participated in the torture of a priest in the Philippines, a Filipino Fr. Mariano Dacanay, who was suspected of sympathy for anti-Spanish revolutionaries. He encouraged prison guards to kick the priest in the head.
    But as of Sunday, Catholics so inclined are authorized to seek his intercession between themselves and God.
    No political implications here, says the Vatican Secretary of State, although many Spaniards seem to disagree. I wonder what they’re saying in the Philippines.

  6. Whereas:
    1. This is a premier site for dialogue on matters relating to “transition to democracy”; “transitional justice”; peace; justice; truth.
    2. Notice has long been given by the host of the site, Helena Cobban, of an opening to discussion of the mother of all democratic “transitions” (let’s not put too fine a point on this for the moment) – Spain.
    3. Plenty of material is on offer and now the Pope has made his move.
    Nevertheless:
    1. You are all shtum. You don’t have a word to say for yourselves. Sure, Helena Cobban is busy, but what about the rest of you?
    2. Silence is not golden!
    What’s going on, people? Do you want to be accused of selective concern? Are you afraid of the Pope? How did that come about? Please explain.

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