I started, nearly finished, then abandoned two posts. I will get to them later, I promise. They were nice and meaty and thoughtful, maybe a little too thoughtful for comfort, so I just didn’t feel it was a good time to post them. They still need to marinate some. I think this might be what people call maturity. It’s annoying, honestly.

In the meantime, I thought you folks might appreciate some details on the progress toward the second collection.

The first step was to download all the posts, 2016 and onward. That was about 230,000 words, already excluding the posts that were mostly links and such. Yep, it’s a lot of words.

I organized all the posts into several Google Docs, one for each year. Then I created a Google Sheet, one sheet for each year within a single Google Sheet file devoted to the project. For each year, I created a table of contents in the Google Doc and pasted the TOC into the corresponding Google Sheet. Then I quickly read through each year’s posts and tagged them in the corresponding sheet with a few tags that  will serve to help organize posts into chapters. I also marked each post title in the sheet as hell no (crossed out so marked for deletion), maybe but probably not (changed font to gray), probably yes (black normal font), and hell yes (hot pink font).

After deleting those marked for deletion (again, this is all at the level of titles in the Google Sheet after a cursory read of the text from the Doc), I probably have about 2/3 of the titles left, which is still far too many. I am shooting for somewhere around 80k in the end, which is the size of a decent novel and the size of Academaze, IIRC. There are currently 50 hot pink titles, which alone probably gives me roughly 50k good words, given that my average post is circa 1k words. I will gather another 30k or so from the solid but not must-have posts, and the book will be lean and mean. A vast majority of those posts marked as maybe-but -probably-not will likely all be deleted; some that might survive will be there to flesh out a potentially skinny chapter.

By the way, I did a much less labor-intensive version of this process when I assembled my short-fiction collection a couple of weeks ago, and it was done in no time at all. I highly recommend it: use a Google Sheet or similar to tag and organize while working with titles alone, and only handle large amounts of text once you know the overall structure. There is a clear parallel here with moving furniture while redecorating.

The plan is to have the full draft ready in another week, then edit so it’s ready to work on the full wrap by the week of August 7th, when I am on schedule with the wonderful @UglyByProxy of Fabled Beast Design. I will be putting up a form to sign up for advanced review copies (ARC) around the middle of August. Electronic ARCs will be sent out early September and paperback ARCs mid-September for a November 1st book release.