It’s been 6 weeks since I wrote a post here on the website about writing a book about my riding adventures so I thought today I would post a quick update.
To date I’ve only written about 2,500 words for the new book. I let Kristen take a look at it the other night and she gave me a proverbial “thumbs up” so I think I’m on the right track.
Though 2,500 words isn’t a lot it is enough to give me a decent gauge to figure out how long the book will end up being. I stated before that I thought the new book would end up being about 50,000 words (10,000 more words than Motorcyclist’s Guide to Travel). However, I think I grossly underestimated the length. With 2,500 words currently written, I’ve only made it to lunch on the first day of riding so I’m figuring each day will end up being around 5,000 words. Even if I take a conservative estimate of 4,000 words per day of travel, I don’t see how this book will be any less than 90,000 words.
You may be wondering how I came up with the total of 90,000 words but it’s actually quite simple. At the time of this post, Kristen and I have taken 1 overnight trip to Beckley, WV (so 2 days), one 4.5 day long trip to Louisiana and we have a 16 day cross country trip coming up. If I add up those travel days (22.5) and multiple by 4,000 words per day (22.5 x 4,000), the total is 90,000.
Writing about my travels takes a lot of time. I spend more time researching places I’ve visited than I do actually writing. That’s what’s going to make the book much different than my travel videos. The book is going to provide a LOT more information including exact routes, history, and lots of small details that get left out of the videos you see on YouTube.
Because it does take so much time to write and research things for the book I obviously don’t want to forget key details about my trips so I have taken the time to type outlines of each days travels with notes about things I don’t want to forget and be sure to mention. I’ll rely on these outlines to help me write my stories.
On the big cross country trip, I’ll be carrying a small notebook in my tank bag that I’ll use to write down notes throughout the day and at the end of each day. Then when we return I’ll type everything back into outline format as I’ve done with the other trips.
Currently I’m just working on the book when I have time (which isn’t often). Once things so down a little this fall/winter I’ll set up a daily or weekly word goal for the book and hopefully start knocking out the pages pretty quickly.
