Things taking shape

I'm rather enjoying blogging about writing a book, even though there has been a severe deficit in blogging about everything else.  Mark it up to pouring all of my writing energies into composing manuscript.  This is something that I have spent most of my waking hours doing, with varying degrees of activity, since May.  And now on the tail end of August I can look with some pride at more than 66,000 words of text composed for my little tome about having bipolar disorder.

I'm finally seeing the shape of it forming, coming together.  But there's still a lot of work to do.

My target is between 75,000 and 100,000 words.  And as I've been writing this the scope of it has shifted from my original intent.  There is now much more autobiographical information within it than I had initially thought would be included.  And I don't know if that's a good thing.  But friends I have shared that sentiment with have told me that anyone can read (or write) a textbook about manic-depressive illness, but only I can write about what bipolar has done to me personally.  I'm the only one who can convey the real pain and frustration that this disease brings with it.

So if you guys won't mind reading the life story of Robert Christopher Knight, I guess you will get to do that.

Things are still moving around though, and I don't know how much they will continue to do that.  There have been a lot of chapters that had false starts and wound up deleted.  Other chapters have been consolidated with each other.  There are a few that I'm considering tearing out completely.  I wouldn't be surprised if this book ended up radically different from how I first envisioned it to be.

I do have an ending for it, however.  It eluded me for the longest time but how to wrap it all up finally hit me earlier this week.  And the title has changed by one word.  Two if you count the subtitle.

And Lord willing, my first book will be completed by the end of this coming month.  And then we shall see what we will see...