Hooray! At long last, I started writing.
Ironically, the part I wrote is the part I usually skip as a reader: the preface. (“Who cares what the author has to say, just get me into the action!” BAD reader!) And in the process, I learned the difference between a preface, a prologue and a foreword. A prologue is a part of the story that occurred before the real start of the story, often a flashback. A foreword is typically written by someone else, usually someone famous or recognizable, to lend credibility to the book. And a preface, which is what I wrote, is written directly to the reader to talk about the origin or scope or purpose of the book. Yay, me. Crafting five beautiful pages of words I would probably never read.
But alas, it’s a start. I think the actual chapters will be easier to write, since they’ll be based largely on material from interviews. The preface was based on stuff we pulled out of our own vacant keppies, and it was a little scary to write, but I felt like we needed to explain the genesis of the book. I pretended it was my blog on steroids. It was a great exercise to help us aggregate and elucidate a lot of points we’ve been discussing, and build a strong foundation for writing the rest of the book.
Today I’ll dive into Chapter 1. Tomorrow we have a speaking engagement at the middle school about the process of writing a book. And Thursday we’re off to the City for interview #3.
My mantras: “Keep hitting the SAVE button!”and“Praise the Lord for thesaurus.com!”