Thursday, June 03, 2010

Building a Big Book

I realized while doing my revising yesterday that this book may be funnier than I thought. There was one line that made me laugh out loud, and I wrote it, so that's probably a good sign. I'm going to get really crazy today and try to work in the morning, since I have my first physical therapy appointment in the afternoon, and that will pretty much kill the whole afternoon. This is the assessment appointment, so I imagine it will mostly consist of them seeing the range of motion in the bad arm and saying, "This doesn't seem so bad," until they compare it to the range of motion in the good arm and go "Ohhh, now I get it." I'm normally really flexible, so it's a very sharp contrast. I'm still not sure how that joint got a chance to freeze because I didn't stop doing all the stuff I normally would do with that arm until it just wouldn't do it. When I was babying it because it was sore, I just quit sleeping on that side and doing heavy lifting with that arm. Ah well, soon I hope it will be back to normal, and I will make sure it never happens again.

Normally around this time of year I think about what my summer reading will be, but I suspect this year, aside from one new release I'm really looking forward to and a reread of the previous books in the series in preparation, most of my summer reading will be work-related. I checked a bunch of books out of the library yesterday, and they were all related to the next project. They were either reference books for research, novels written during and about the time period I'm dealing with, books that are the foundations for one of the genres I'm working in, or books that were published in the time period I'm dealing with and that are written in the style I'd like to imitate. There was one book that's somewhat tangential to the project, in that it's a modern book in approximately the same period and setting. I'm not using it as reference or research, but now that I've done a lot of research, I'm curious to see how another author has incorporated the facts into building the world. It's a book that probably would have interested me anyway, but I might not have found it if I hadn't been working on this project. It showed up in Amazon's "people who bought this also bought this" list for a reference book I was looking up.

I've made a list of things I need to research for this book, and the more I research, the more I find to add to the list. I may be indulging in a bit of overkill, but I have one of those tingly feelings that this could be A Big Book, so I want to get it right. I don't want to waste a good idea by not going all-out with it.

And now to go to work.

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