With eleven months to go before my deadline of August 1, 2019, I’ve written approximately 28,000 words. My contract calls for a total of 50,000 to 60,000 words so I feel good about my progress. Ideally, I’d like to submit the work a month before my deadline, so that I do not procrastinate. Or, failing that, I can fill that last month with double checking telephone numbers and addresses, confirming permissions to use photographs and images, and making sure I’ve correctly spelled the names of all contributors. There is a tremendous amount of dreary detail work that accompanies non-fiction.

I’ve often thought that word processing software and the latest in computer gear does not make us any more productive. That’s because we can now endlessly edit. In the era of hand written drafts, manuscripts were so laborious to produce that an author would rewrite three or four times and then send the copy into the editor. Now, we can revise and edit a hundred times if a deadline is far enough away. Do we improve that much, though, with extra editing? And at what point do we say a work is finished?

Here’s a link to the site supporting the book: https://southwestrockhounding.com/