Okay. When I started this I had a firm number in my head. I wanted to surpass 80,000 words; the generally accepted number of words for a book-length work. Today I came just shy of 70,000. And I’m starting to feel a little insecure about my goals.
Clearly, the source of most of the book is my childhood, but there are also stories from my adulthood that count toward that goal. About 25,000 to be more exact. So, I have a little goal tending to do. If I keep the subject limited to the first 25 years of my life, I’ve got a lot more to work on. If I want to include the stories from beyond 1988 or so, I’ve got to become very selective about what to keep and what to expand.
It’s a high-class problem, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s not sitting very comfortably with me. Here’s why: clearly there’s a lot more to “childhood” and being a child than meets the eye. There’s echoes of my childhood in almost everything I do. Everything I write. I guess it’s a matter of the strength of the bounce-back that I’m considering these days.
I have to admit, perhaps … maybe … I might have a second book already started.