The Ultimate Snowcave (Silverton Style)
January 23, 2015
Appeasing Your Inner Adrenaline Junkie
February 20, 2015
This essay is short-n-sweet. Have fun!!
Word Count: 520
Collecting
The Laughs (part I)
(This is just the first of a three part series of essays chronicling the latest from my ongoing writing adventures)
The advent of 2015 has presented my writing odyssey with all sorts of new experiences. Among these is a re-write of an earlier novel manuscript based on an editor’s critique, jumping into scribbling the first draft of the next story while I’ve been waiting for the critique to get back to me, and collecting this (doubtful it’ll make the cut) and other essays to publish in a book. Theoretically the publication date will be sometime in early summer (“Theoretical” being a relative term in this instance).
That last one is turning out to be a really fun filled experience in and of itself. Right after I first met with the publisher back in November, it was mutually decided that the book’s main theme should be stories from my youth and growing up. An easy enough motif to pick for the book’s treatise since that’s allowed me to choose from a huge number of writing experiments.
Right off the bat I took fifty of the essays I’d written and eliminated twenty of them. Took a fairly liberal approach to the whole endeavor, and this made the cutting room job (as the saying goes in Hollywood) really easy to pull off.
Then I made an attempt to communicate with a select group of individuals that I figured might be interested in reading the essays. Asking them to further cull those thirty down to twenty, with the favorites making the cut and going into the book. Out of the twenty-five people I contacted, thirteen of them actually got back to me and said they’d be willing to become my lab rat subjects. Although reading the essays may involve some drug intake, it doesn’t entail any sort of extreme physical transformations that I know of at this time.
One of those readers is the superintendent at the local school. She told me she wanted to read all thirty of the essays during her Christmas break, and then break her choices down into three groups: Yes, Maybe, & No. She did precisely that, and even gave me little Post-itnotes accompanying each of her final selections.
Since then I’ve talked to most of the other readers and that Yes-Maybe-No method of choosing seems to be the preferred way to do things. I’ve already started getting feedback from some of them and the choices present a unique picture of the essay selection process.
Will I end up publishing a book of essays detailing methods for safely committing yourself to a hospital for emotional disorders? Doubtful since none of the essays actually chronicles that particular subject. Certain readers will conclude that I do indeed need to be locked up in a mental institution. The key being thrown into a river of course.
Additionally, the jury is still out concerning whether or not I should market the upcoming book as a sure-fire cure for extreme cases of insomnia. Possible since I really want to ensure substantial profit margins for the publication.
