Returning to "second" book

This week marks my return to working on the book I set aside about 18 months ago to work on the children's book. This one was at one time known as the second book, but it hardly exists at all and the book I wrote in the meantime is in fact the second one I ever actually finished. Someday there will be first and second books that gets published, which won't correspond with this order either, and my reading public will understand my first and second books to be different ones entirely.

Well, for perversity's sake, in this journal at least, which is supposed to be in the spirit of how I talk to myself about my writing, I'll keep using the terms that feel right when I talk to myself. I'm working on my second book now. For the second time. That's how I think of it, and to hell with what makes sense.

I don't recall how much I've shared about it before. For the record. It's an adult novel, not children's. I started working in the sense of making notes on it in Sept. of 2009. I started working in the sense of drafting just about 2 years ago in Jan. of 2010 when I was overseas for extended period. That went very poorly for about 9 months and then I started working on the children's book. (i.e the third book.) I returned to work in the sense of making a lot of notes and thinking about it a lot a couple months ago, and my goal was to return to drafting this week. Which I am, though it's been a less than wonderful start. More on that in another post.

As in the past, I don't like sharing too much of the plot in this space, but I guess the working title doesn't give too much away. Let be known hereafter as Backroom Records.

Here is an arbitrary and therefore tentative timeline. I'm going to aim for 150 working days, which is about 7.5 months. Let's say August 31 is my intended deadline for a first draft. Before the fall semester begins. That's based on a really wild guess that I need about 150,000 words of new material and a feeling that I'm going to average about an hour of writing a day. There's no reason to think that any of these estimates will hold up for even a week, but it helps me to have them.

I can say this: it feels to me like it should be a long book. So I'm starting off by giving it one good reason never to be published, and that's just one of the ways I'm trying to make myself worry more about the writing than anything else.