about this blog
For a while now, ever since finishing the ride on which it is based, I’ve been writing a book, Ride: a journey through cycling.
The writing process has been, shall we say, lumpy … I suspect like most writers, I always seem to have other things to do than write my book! I’ve got two young children, a proper job, my fingers in too many pies, and a hard-wired impulse to get out of doors, and especially onto my bike, at the least provocation.
So with my book not magically writing itself, and time moving on, I’ve recently been reflecting on the best way forward. And it struck me that if I started blogging bits of the book, then hopefully (this is the theory, we’ll have to see about the practice …) it’d provide me with some incentive to keep at it, whilst also ‘testing the waters’, to see if there’s anyone out there who might actually be interested.
My plan, then, is to post here excerpts from the work-in-progress Ride: a journey through cycling. The posts will start at the beginning of my ride/story, and if we (that’s you, and me) stay with it to the end, we should finish up, perhaps a year from now – hopefully no longer than that – with a cropped version of a journey through cycling.
If you do find yourself sitting back to enjoy the ride, or even watching it unfold with vague bemusement, do please let me know. Feedback, brutal as well as kind, is an important part of discovering whether it’s worth my sticking with the process (always a process …) of becoming (always becoming …) ‘a writer’.
Update (5th March 2010): well, time has moved on and my plan clearly isn’t working. My intention was to post the story in chronological order; this would – I thought – put pressure on me to write the unfinished sections, and thus get the job done. (Maybe some people write ‘in the right order’, but I don’t.) But try as I might I can’t, currently, find the time to write those unfinished sections.
So cycling into work this morning, I thought, ‘sod it, I should just start to post all the stuff I have already written, and which is currently sitting there, doing nothing’. So that’s the new plan. I will number the posts, according to where they fit in the overall story. So it’ll be a bit like a jigsaw puzzle – how confusing is that?!
Dave
I don’t know much about cycling, except that I do it to get to and from work and that, consequently, it is the wall between the two! However, I do know that we could, hopefully, maybe, possibly, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, be sharing the ‘writing a book’ ride. My book would be called ‘Geography and Judgement: A Study of Migration’ and I hope to write the first couple of chapters this term. Maybe we could share this process, even if the subject matter was very different?
Good luck with yours
Cheers Nick
That’d be good (to share the process in some way(s)). Any suggestions? I’d be happy to swap work-in-progress, though I assume you’re writing for an academic audience, whereas I’m trying to write for people interested in cycling, whoever they might be. But whoever your audience, some issues are the same, eh? For example, a key challenge I’m currently facing is how best to carve out the kind of chunks of time I need to really sink my teeth into the writing process. Doing blog posts is ‘easy’ – I just need to set aside a couple of hours, which I can generally do during any one week. But I find that, in order to make significant process with my book, I need to set aside at least a day, and ideally a few days. Which isn’t so easy to do.
But yes, even if it’s going for coffee every couple of weeks, to check each other’s progress (and to provide each other with ‘deadlines’), that’d be good.
Good luck with yours, too – I look forward to hearing more about it!
Dave