Week 712

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week I was on holiday in the eastern part of the country, but I also managed to finish the first draft of De verdwijners, my apocalyptic novel about street interviewers. My wife was so kind to point out that this marks the first time in eight years that I finished a version of a book.

To get technical for a minute: I wrote the book in 13 separate Markdown files, one for each section, mainly using iA Writer. On Saturday at around midnight I compiled these, using Pandoc, into an industry standard 12 point Times New Roman, 1.5 × line distance Microsoft Word document, and sent it off to my editor, my agent and to one friend who is particularly excellent at dissecting and commenting on my first drafts. I also made a print-out for my wife, who so far has only seen the first chapter. The current word count is 44.791.

I’m happy, but also scared. At this point, it’s easy to see possible weaknesses and second-guess certain creative decisions. Having worked on a book for nearly two years, it’s hard to see how all that energy could possibly pay off. For now, I’ll just focus on other things and wait for the feedback to come in. It should help to let it all rest for a while, then pick it back up in October and do a kick-ass second draft.

That version should be very close to the final thing, though plans will change if my publisher doesn’t like the current draft. In case everything goes well, De verdwijners will come out in the first half of 2013.

Before I sign off: I also wrote a column for nrc.next, which was published on Friday, and can now be read on Bashers.nl. Speaking of Bashers.nl, on Monday I announced the slow start of the content season, as well as my new title there: webmaster.

Now, let’s climb out of the bomb shelter and see what else is going on!