Book update... and it's a good one

YYYYAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Well, this section of the book is now finished.  The first draft of Chapter 25 was completed a short while ago.  It follows the one that had stumped me since February, up until a week and a half or so ago.  The one that took me so long to crack and I couldn't have done it without a dear friend being here to give support and encouragement.

So the complete draft of Chapter 24 was done, but 25, well... I could see the shape of it, the general form, but the particulars were eluding me.  So I thought "maybe I should write the next chapter while waiting for 25 to really present itself".  And that's what I did.  So there was 24, followed by 26, with 25 in between still to be written.

This past hour, Chapter 25 was done.  I wound up waking up for some vague reason, and decided for the heck of it that I'd see if I could write anything.

And I did.  But man, that was tough.

Chapters 24 through 26 are somewhat a "triptych", in that they are a block of chapters complementing each other, and if this book gets published you'll see how that is.  This was THE hardest little part of the book to get through, but now it's done.  This was the end of Part 3 of the book, and apart from editing and polishing up it is more or less completed.

(Still a lot of work to do so far as editing goes, but I'm not really worried about that.)

Now comes the next section, which will be a collection of essays about bipolar disorder, and a lot of those have already been written.  Some as early as last summer.  There is at least one chapter which is darkly hilarious and had two friends cracking up laughing when they read it.  I don't mind that at all: you have to be able to laugh if you have a condition like this.

So that part is the next to be tackled.  And then the final section.  Which, I think will go much easier than the just-finished one was.

Who knows?  It's possible that this book might be finished by the end of June.  If so, it will have only taken 13 months to complete it.  Seems like a long time.  But be kind: this is my first time writing a book after all :-)

(The first.  Lord willing, not the last...)

Categories: bipolar disorder, book, mental illness