It’s a snow day in northwest Arkansas. Only about 2 inches fell, with some sleet coming down now. But I decided not to go to work today. In any of the three directions I could go to work, I have hills and curves to negotiate. My pick-up doesn’t handle well in snow, and handles even worse in ice. One route isn’t too bad. If I park up the hill, I can get about eight miles before I have the hills and curves. And if others have gone before me and cleared the road, I can get through it okay. But I decided to stay home. If the office doesn’t count it as a legitimate snow day for salaried employees, I’ll just take it as a day of vacation.

So I’m in The Dungeon, writing away on The Candy Store Generation. I spent some time each of the last few days on it. I think it was Wednesday and Thursday that I wrote out three pages of manuscript. I typed them Friday, and on Saturday and Sunday tried to add more to it. I wasn’t able to add much, perhaps 1,000 words. That’s not a good production amount on weekend days. I was at just short of 7,000 words on a book that I want to be somewhere around 40,000.

The problem wasn’t writers block, per se. I knew what I wanted to say. I had chapters outlined and eight or nine out of fourteen chapters started. Chapter 1 was done, and chapter 2 well along but not finished. For each of the chapters, I know what I want to say. Yet, the writing is lagging.

Yesterday I think I finally figured out what the problem is. I’m not sure what tone I want to write in. I’m doing research, but certainly not enough to make this a scholarly work. No, it’s a “popular” work. If I have any footnotes they will be few. This is mainly about my opinions on how the Baby Boomers have screwed up America. I’ve thought about it a lot, and can easily write my opinions.

But what language to use? My first non-fiction book, Documenting America, is written with quite casual language. It reads more like a series of blog posts than a book. That was my original plan for TCSG: to write casually. These are my opinions, so if I use “I” a lot, so what?

But I started questioning that decision. I began to think that I should write it as a semi-scholarly work. It would still be opinion, but written more like a factual survey of the subject matter.

I struggled with this for a while. I added a few sentences and then reread to see how it sounded. I rewrote and reread to see how it now sounded. I made a little progress, sentence by sentence. But to make any kind of publication schedule, I need to be producing a minimum of 500 words a day, more on the weekend.

Thinking about the book and my target audience, and what type of language they would like to read, I finally decided last night that they won’t be offended by “blog language”. The professors won’t like it. And the professional political workers might laugh at it. But I think many people will like it. Blog language is common speech, relaxed speech.

I decided to just go with relaxed language, for better or for worse, and not try to make it semi-scholarly. So today I’ve been writing away. So far I’ve written about 1850 words, in three different chapters. I’m at a total of 8850 words, and feeling much better about the project. On to 2000 or 2500 today, and 11,000 by the end of the week.