Word Count: 20,059

Several months back, I had dinner with my friend Lisa. I whined at her about how I was having a terribly hard time with a story I was — am still  — trying to write about a a week I spent in Hawaii at music camp. Actually, I whined at a lot of people about this particular story and the difficulty I was having writing it, hell, I whined at the entire Internet.  I got good advice from indulgent writer and editor friends but Lisa’s advice was markedly different than anyone else’s.

“Maybe you are thinking too small,” she said. “Maybe what you have is not a 600-1200 word essay, but part of something much bigger.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Then, about two months ago, I woke up in the morning with a fully formed idea in my head. I could see the framework for the whole thing, how it would play out over time, not exactly how it would end but where it would start to end. I could see the outline and the things I needed to do research on and the parts where I would just tell stories. I got up and went to my computer and started to write. I didn’t say much about it, I just published my word count on Twitter and Facebook in a weird bid to keep myself accountable, like people do with their workouts. When I hit 5000 words, I realized that my idea was solid. When I hit 10,000 I realized that I had the ability to write something that was more than 1500 words, tops. I realized was I genuinely compelled to write this thing and I started talking to people about my subject. Yesterday, when I hit 20,000 words and sent out my first research inquiry, I realized that, hey, I really AM writing a book! And I got super excited.

Bloggers get it a lot. “You should totally write a book!” The response I had been giving up until recently was, “Uh, yeah, I know. Uh, okay.” What I was thinking was something snarkier. “You write a book if you think it’s such a grand idea.” I have been supremely content with the essay, it’s a form I love. I didn’t want to write a book before not because I was not interested in writing, but because I was only passively interested in the idea of a compilation of my travel essays and that’s all I had. I enjoy reading good travel essays tremendously, but pushing a collection of my own stuff out the door felt like something I’d be doing because “people” told me I “should.” That is not a good reason to write a book.

What I’m doing now completely lacks obligation, it is a pleasure, a thrill. I won’t say the writing is effortless, because that’s just not true, but it’s easy so far because I know the story, I know what needs to happen, I have a very clear map in my head that shows me the way. I have trained for it for years, it is the big ride after a full season and then some of commuting. (Bike riding metaphor. I was a hard core commuter once, and rode the 200 mile Seattle to Portland ride one year almost as though it were just another ride to work. True story.) If I think about it too hard, I worry about how it will wrap up at the end, but right now, while I’m in the uphill part, I trust that I will know what to do when I cross the summit. And it’s so fun, I’m enjoying the writing tremendously, it’s all the stories I want to tell in the way I want to tell them, it’s my subject, it’s my story, and I’m writing it because why wouldn’t I? How could I not?

That is all a lot of build up. It probably helps explain why things are slow around the blog lately. It is not due to lack of writing, no sir, it’s just that the writing is over there, in a carefully saved and backed up word document. When folks ask me why I’m not traveling, I say, “I’m working on my book!” They shake their heads as though I’m missing out, but I don’t feel sorry for myself at all. This is my grand adventure right now and it’s just as exciting in exactly the same way as holding a plane ticket to a new place — and tickets that take me back to all the places I love, over and over again. I wish that I could tell you that it’s going to be great, but honestly, I have no idea right now as I am just writing and facing forward, and I haven’t actually read any of the work I’ve done thus far. That’s intentional, for now, I’m just trying to get it all down.

I suppose I could tell you what said book is about, no? My working title is “A Personal History of the Ukulele” though I have something cuter that I’m not sharing just yet. It’s about my relationship with the uke told through the history of my collection; I have ten, or maybe twelve ukuleles and they all have stories. (No, I don’t know the exact number, and some of them are in Austria and shut up, I do not have a hoarding problem.) It’s kind of a love story, but it’s anchored in ukulele history and culture and the revival of the uke as a pop cultural and social phenomenon. I’ve been asked if I’m working on a proposal and looking for an agent. Yes and no. I’m not sure I won’t publish it myself, but having an agent would allow me to do some things that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. I’m not actively seeking an agent, but I hope to chat with a few when I’m at Book Passage this summer to see if there’s some interest. I’m not writing a proposal, however. I’m not even thinking about it, not for now.

Because I am too busy writing a book.

Photo: Mine, old electric typewriter at a garage sale.