I was planning on writing a fairly lengthy post tonight, but late this afternoon my equilibrium was upset by a company that is supposed to be providing me service, for which I’m paying top dollar, but which doesn’t give me service. I’m upset, and don’t really feel like writing a post. But it won’t be any easier in the morning, so I’d better do it now.

My current writing project is Documenting America: The Civil War Edition. I know I’ve written about it before. I had set it aside for a while, even after I finished Preserve The Revelation, while I was working on income taxes and home projects. I finally got back to it last weekend—that is, around April 22. It will be the second book written in my Documenting America series.

For each chapter in the book, I have the following items to do.

• Identify the subject matter I want to cover;
• identify the source document(s) for that chapter;
• Load the source document(s) into my book file;
• Excerpt the source document(s) down to a manageable length;
• Write a historical summary about the document(s)/subject;
• Write how the document(s) ties into an issue we deal with today, typically political or social; and
• Format the chapter properly.

These are discrete tasks for each chapter, except some tasks have to wait on another. Obviously I have to identify the document I want to use before I can find it/load it/excerpt it. Writing the historical and political/social sections must follow from the documents. But, I have the choice of finishing all parts of a chapter, or work on like tasks regardless of the chapter, or a mixture of these. I’ve been proceeding along the latter path. Sometimes I work on finding a document. Sometimes I do the excerpts. Sometimes, instead, I write the perspectives for chapters I’ve already done the excerpts for.

As of Wednesday night, I had:

• Identified all but one chapter subject;
• Identified the documents for all but that chapter;
• Loaded the documents into my Word file for all but that chapter;
• Done the excerpting work for all but two chapters;
• Written the perspectives for 20 of 30 chapters; and
• Properly formatted about 15 chapters.

This tells me I’m somewhere beyond 50 percent done with the book, but it’s hard to tell, working on it as I am.

About a week ago, as I was proceeding along my hybrid path, I came to realize that what I had was just like ingredients, dumped in a bowl, according to some recipe. I’ve never done baking, and most of the things I cook are simple. Cut, chop, saute, mix in a few spices, fry or cook in the over till done. All nice and safe, nice and easy both to cook and look at.

A few years back, however, I watched my wife fix something—tortilla soup, I think, same as we had the last three nights. She followed the recipe, which she had memorized, and dumped everything in Dutch oven. Chicken breasts, frozen chopped spinach, frozen mixed vegetables, cans of diced tomatoes, cans of two different types of beans, can of green chilies, and a teaspoon each of chili powder and cumin. There they sat, in the pan, a non-homogenous jumble. How does this come out as soup, I wondered?

But I then saw an amazing thing. A little bit of mixing with a strong spoon, and the ingredients were soon a homogenous mixture, suitable for cooking as soup.

I also watched her do this with a cake, or something like that. The ingredients just sat there, in their un-mixed state, an ugly, impossible to understand mess. Then the mixing occurred; it went in the oven, and it came out a beautiful, calorie-laced confection, perfect for whatever the celebration was.

I hope my book turns out the same. Right now it feels like ingredients dumped in a bowl. Most of the research is done, with about 1/3 of the writing yet to go.  The ingredients are all just sitting there, waiting to be “mixed”, i.e. completed. It’s hard to see exactly where I stand in the writing, how the book will come together.

But come together it shall. Wednesday night I made the decision to delete the unstarted chapter. The other chapters seem to be running longer than I expected, so I’ll be okay as to length. I’ve typed all the excerpting edits, but still have the one chapter to go with excerpting, and it looks to be a hard one. I should finish that this weekend, and hopefully write the perspectives on three or four other chapters.

I’m at the point where I really, really want to get those ingredients mixed, get the thing finished, let it sit for a week or two, and then edit and publish it.