Over the weekend I finally finished the draft of my memoirs. 137,000 some words covering the last 30 years of playing pirate – the good, the bad and the downright ugly.
As I poured through the 435 pages this weekend, getting it ready to send off to be proofed, I marveled at the journey. Not the pirating one mind you, though it is quite the tale in itself. I think it will create a bit of an uproar in the pirate community, for I did not pull punches, especially ones that were aimed at me.
But this isn’t about this journey, but the one of being a writer. As someone who has put millions of words down on paper over the years, turning out a book proved a bit of a chore. It’s not because I haven’t written a book before – I probably have a dozen or so under my belt. You would never know this of course, because I have ghostwritten them for others over the years.
If you’ve ever read a book by someone famous, they didn’t write it. They hire a hired gun like me to do the dirty work. It doesn’t matter if it is a tell all book about their rise to fame or a business tome about search engine strategies. Few people of any note actually write their own books.
So when it came time to write a book of my own, one that is about about me and my life, it proved a bigger undertaking that I thought. Bearing one’s soul onto printed pages can be both cathartic and terrifying. It is also, I can say, extremely freeing.
I actually started the upcoming book, Memoirs of a Buccaneer: 30 Years Before the Mast when it should have really been Memoirs of a Buccaneer: 25 Years Before the Mast. Yes, I started this book five years ago, back when I thought I was still happily married.
Thankfully, I procrastinated. For it now has a very different ending than it would have had in 2006. The ending would have been very different back then, my pirate mojo having been shanghaied.
If you’ve never written a book before, I can tell you that it takes a lot of discipline. I have another one in the cue that has been in process since 1982. And you thought the memoirs took a lot of time. It’s on again, off again progress was stymied by a 10,000 word writing fervor in Key West about a decade ago. As I went to save it, the words disappeared from the screen. In it was the plot, subplot, the motive and the murderer. Brewster McCade: Ace Private Eye, had been gutted by a computer glitch.
Of course, there’s another reason why it has been on the back shelf. It too is as much about my life as it is Brewster and his film noir murder mystery. As my life is unfinished, so is the book in many respects.
That said, completing Memoirs of a Buccaneer has given me reason to plow ahead once again into Brewster’s life. And thankfully, I have a muse to help me on it who has actually read more than one detective book and can provide me with what has been missing – an actual thread for the plot that leads to a mystery solved. Thank you muse!!!!
I have a couple others waiting in the wings, too, as well as a kick-arse movie script. Unfortunately, these things always seem to be back burnered as I continue to eek out a living as a writer in my normal life. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day.
And right now any free hours are being consumed by the details of bringing my pirate memoirs to finished form. There’s a cover to design (done), an ISBN number to purchase (on the list), math (to confirm the thickness of the spine you have to multiply number of pages by .0025 – who’d have guessed writers have to do math), set up a website and then start promoting the thing, beginning at Pirates in Paradise in five weeks. Oh, and then I have to turn it into a Kindle book and an iBook for the iPad. No rest for the wicked.
This brings me to the title of today’s RobZerrvation. A long time ago, I wanted to write a book that eventually runs out of words. In the Renton library once, I saw a book that had the frequency of all the words we use – for example, “the” if I recall, is the number one word used in the English language. I always thought it would be a fun premise to assume that we are only born with ‘X’ number of words we can use in our lifetimes – 1,103,004 “the’s”, 1,98,146 “a’s”, etc., but perhaps only a dozen “proclivity” to tide you over for the rest of your life. Once you hit your limit, BOOM! – the word doesn’t come to mind anymore – lost forever.
Now, as a writer I know that there’s no such thing as a limit to the number of words you can have. At least I think I do. I have noticed in recent years that I have started to use a lot more 25¢ words than I used to in my conversations and writing. When I begin to wonder why, it occurs to me that I may have an unused surplus of these words – sort of like having unused minutes on your phone. So up they pop into my head, begging to be used right there and then. Sometimes I will use them, sometimes I return them to their proper place, the repository of words writers can tap into at any time. Sure, I could waste them now, but what if later on it was the perfect word in a sentence, but I had used my already up my supply?
Will I ever run out of words? I hope not. I think I’ve popped through 201,000 or so just in RobZerrvations since the beginning of the year. Add that to the 137,000 plus in my memoirs and I’m really chewing up the available word count. I can only hope that somewhere there’s a filling station so that if I’m ever about to run out, I can refill my vocabulary again.
Otherwise, I fear I may run of words some point in the . Damn it’s happening already to …
Out on the Treasure Coast, looking for a filling station is close to ,
Robb