Book Update From the Throes of Writing Hell
Work on the unauthorized story of the Skyline GT-R continues...
A friend asked me the other day how progress on the book was coming.
I wanted to say it’s like pulling teeth. But that’s not the truth.
It’s actually like breaking bones.
I finished writing the first rough draft of my book on the history and culture of the Nissan Skyline GT-R back in late June. After that it took a couple of weeks to make revisions and prep the manuscript for its first round of edits.
Once I got those edits back, it’s been all about making the suggested changes to get the new draft ready for my second editor. This is the really, truly exciting part — the book is close. It’s sooo close. But it’s also where the real trouble lies.
Getting to the next step, taking an okay first draft and turning it into a pretty good second draft and then making the revisions to get to a capital-G Good third draft, is brutal.
Imagine sculpting a body, with muscles and joints and ligaments and all, just the way you want it. But then you take a step back and realize there’s a foot on the end of an arm. One hand has seven fingers. There’s an ankle on the neck and an ear on the shinbone. You technically succeeded — you did make a body.
But it can’t walk or talk or use opposable thumbs. To make this thing work, you’re gonna have to take out all the bones and move them around until they fit into the right places. Good freaking luck, buddy.
So that’s how progress is going.
We are currently breaking bones. We are rearranging limbs bit by bit and trashing other misshapen, miscellaneous limbs altogether. Then we’ll put them all in the right places, reattach joints and ligaments, and see if it walks. God I hope it walks.
I needed a break from the newsletter. I may need some more. I had a little bit of time to visit some GT-R shows recently, including the one in the video above that I hope shows some of the magic these cars provide. LIKE and SUBSCRIBE por favor!
There’s been lots of running around, lots of follow-up calls and deep dives into obscure documents to make sure I’m getting things right. And then believe it or not there’s been some real life thrown in too, just for fun.
But if I’m being truly honest, as much as I can physically feel the exhaustion seeping behind my eye sockets and embedding itself under my face bones, I freaking love this part. This part that makes me want to quit, when I can see the finish line but know I’m going to have to drag this bizarre assemblage of parts across a Class V rapid to get there, with no idea whether it’ll bang its head on a boulder or slip and get carried off down a treacherous waterfall, this is the good stuff.
This is the part that makes a lot of people turn back. And I get it. There’s a lot of days I want to turn back, too. Attaching joints and ligaments sucks. But if you can do it, if you can throw that weird-ass body into the current and wade in deeper and keep moving forward and keep your head above water and refuse to ever, ever, ever turn back around, then making it the other side of that rapid is… well it’s everything.
And I ain’t turning back for shit. Thank god for these bones.
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