Tobias Buckell—author of Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose—has decided, like other SF/F/H authors before him (Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Cory Doctorow, Orson Scott Card) to author a book on writing.
Using his last fifteen years of blog posts, journal entries, and emails as a starting point, he has already collected 96,000 words, though his intent is to bring that down to a more manageable 50-60,000 words. Rather than go the traditional route of trying to write a volume for print, Buckell plans to release the book online in installments, with possible print publication coming later.
Since I had almost 100K of material, I thought it would be fun to use the internet (what initially created all this material), as a way to do something different.
So first off, I’ll be writing this somewhat live. The blog entries are all already there, so it’s not that unusual idea. The chapters will go up as they’re done on a wiki (that only I can edit). I will also be adding in pages that might not ever make it to the book (the original blog posts the chapters were compressed from, and so on). I might also post unfinished chapters comprised of cut/pasted blog posts as I go along. It’s an experiment. A draft.
The introduction and first chapter of “A Draft in Progress” are already live.
