An Update on the Book

I've been meaning to write this post for about a week, but I haven't been sure what exactly I'm looking to say.

Here's the update: a week ago I sent a completed draft to my editor. 80,000 words, which is about 270 book pages. Still needs some work, but it's a start-to-finish draft. The moment I pressed send was the first time it really hit me that I'm going to be able to do this. The first time I've been able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I haven't written that much about the process over the past few months, because there hasn't been that much to write. It's been very different writing the novel than it was writing the weblog. I think a lot of that is because when I've been writing the weblog, everything is fresh to me. I started writing Anonymous Lawyer because I had feelings I wanted to explore and ideas I needed to get out. Most of what I have to say about law firms and the law firm experience is either here or on Anonymous Lawyer, somewhere. There aren't that many emotions I haven't expressed somewhere in my writing. There aren't a ton of things burning to get out.

So while a lot of the weblog was driven by sheer inspiration -- no thought about how one part fit with another, no consideration for anything except what I was dying to express at that moment.

The book's different. The book needs to make sense. So a lot of it has been work, figuring out how to put things together in a way that feels fresh, in a way that tells a real story, and in a way that keeps the elements of the blog that work -- the voice, the humor, the shred of humanity that keeps Anonymous Lawyer from being truly irredeemable, and, frankly, keeps him being fun to write, and, hopefully, fun to read.

It's a book. If I'm doing my job right, you'll really like it. If I'm doing my job right, even the people who want to hate it will like it. I just need to do my job right.

It's getting there. I'll have another update soon.