Writing blog articles on the concept and need for prison reform feels much easier to me than initiating the steps for a 100,000 word manuscript. I’ve been working on the book proposal for three days now. The sample chapter has been a lot of work and it continues to challenge me. I spent several hours writing the chapter today, and I feel the weight of the work ahead of me.
This book will differ from the previous books I’ve written. The other books described various aspects of prison, focusing especially on the adjustment patterns of others. This new manuscript, I hope, will appeal to a broader audience. Rather than discussing prison exclusively, I intend to use the context of my experiences to describe strategies I’ve found useful for self-empowerment through adversity.
Although our criminal justice system processes more than 13 million people each year, all human beings experience adversity on some level. I feel strongly that the strategies that have guided me through decades of imprisonment can help others triumph over the adversities they encounter in their own lives.
I intend to spend several hours each day working on the proposal. The effort requires labor, as I cannot access a word processor. Such time my thoughts move in a separate direction, I have to cross sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes entire pages out. That means writing and more rewriting, as there is no way that Carole could piece together a coherent whole from all the draft pages I’ve written. By next week I ought to have an initial portion ready for her to type.
I’m grateful that I have several mentors I can rely upon for guidance. Before I submit the proposal to the literary agent who has represented my previous writing, I will have benefitted from the guidance of educators who have much stronger writing skills than mine.
Other than putting down words on a page, my only other activity today was running. I added 10 more miles to my tally, boosting it to 1,043 miles over the past 118 consecutive days. It is this type of deliberate will that I want others to embrace when they encounter struggle. In setting incremental goals that lead to something greater, experience convinces me that we can empower ourselves.
Thursday, 9 April 2009
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