Manuscript Monday: Getting my thoughts together

Low resolution test printouts of some model photo pages

One might think that after the grand gesture of announcing that I'm cutting back on blogging to work on the manuscript for the E. L. Moore book I'd have a lot to show for myself. It turns out that when I stopped writing at the blog, I stopped writing period. 

For awhile I engaged in a lot of avoidance behaviour, but soon felt guilty and settled down to trying to figure out the most important things the book should focus on, while at the same time trying to make sure the book's cost wasn't going to be heart attack inducing. The thing will likely be an ebook with a small number of printed copies. Probably a very small number. Clearly this is a vanity project. I did lots of thinking, not much writing.

In an ideal world I'd like the book to be a one-stop, mammoth compendium of everything E. L. Moore. It would contain: reprints of all his published and unpublished articles; colour photos of all his known surviving models; a collection of all his surviving black-and-white photos; a complete collection of his correspondence; a thematic collection of all my blog posts on E. L. Moore; an introduction, table of contents, and index to tie it all together. As great as this would be, it would likely violate all known copyright laws, take me years to complete, and probably cost many hundreds of dollars per copy to print. I had to scale back :-)

Right now I'm thinking the book should be rather simple: no more than 100 pages; a collection of colour photos of all known surviving models (one model per 8 1/2 x 11 page) - there are around 65 models; a selected collection of E. L. Moore's black-and-white photos, which will be about 10 pages; a table listing all published articles along with a small number of short chapters outlining E. L. Moore's life and work as a model railroader edited so the book's page count doesn't exceed 100. The fewer pages the better. The text will be mainly blog posts edited for the book. 

As far as format is concerned, in the back of my mind I see this book as something of a hybrid of Sheperd Paine's How to Build Dioramas, published in 1980 by Kalmbach, and Sarah Suzuki's Bodys Isek Kingelez, published in 2018 by The Museum of Modern Art. If there's a physical version of the book, it'll be some sort of 8 1/2" x 11" paperback.

So, pictures of E. L. Moore's models will make up most of the content. I think it's the correct approach to let the models speak for themselves.

My task for the coming weeks will be to select the model photos to be used, and layout their associated display pages. Once that's done, it's on to creating chapters from blog posts, and then writing a new introduction to tie it all together.

As for blogging, I'll just continue to do as I please since consciously cutting back causes all those writing juices to stop flowing. Who'd have thought?