Entry 001 — writing it where people can see

The book has existed as a private folder for a while. From today it has a public record instead.

Not the manuscript — the manuscript stays where it is until it’s worth reading. What goes public is the process: what I decided, when, and why, plus an honest progress table that anybody can check.

Why bother

Two reasons, one noble and one not.

The noble one: books lie about their own construction. By the time you read a finished one, every wrong turn has been paved over. The structure that took eleven attempts reads as though it were obvious. That’s a disservice to anyone who’s trying to write one and concluding, from the smoothness of everything they’ve read, that they’re uniquely bad at it.

The unnoble one: I work better when someone might be watching. A private project can drift for months without anything visibly happening. A project with a public log has to answer for the months.

The rules for this log

• Decisions get written at the time, not after. Retrospective reasoning is almost always tidier and less true.
• Cuts get posted with their reasons. The reason a scene died is more useful than the scene.
• No word-count theatre. The progress table exists; that’s enough.
• No dates I can’t keep. There is no publication date. When there’s a real one, it’ll appear on the book page and nowhere before.
• Drafts are marked as drafts. Anything quoted from here is provisional by definition.

Where it stands right now

Part One is in draft. Part Two is outlined — beats in place, no prose. Part Three is a set of intentions. The progress table is the honest version, and it gets updated by hand, which means when it’s stale it’s visibly stale.

That’s the whole first entry. The next one will have something to report.