Book update – 1st Chapter…

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The manuscript is now finished.

I’ve sent it off for e-book formatting. I’m also getting a re-design for the cover.

I’m hoping all that will be done by the end of next week.

Keen to get it out there!

Here’s the first chapter –

Download… The Way, My Way – Ch 1

31 thoughts on “Book update – 1st Chapter…”

  1. Great, I love it!

    It will make a fabulous Camino read. Thank you in advance!

    I think we all have had similar experiences. I too thought I was going to die when I had to climb 3 flights of stairs to get to my hotel room in St. Jean.

    Arlene

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  4. Bill,

    I loved it as I knew I would! Cant wait to read the rest!! Just wait…it will be a huge success for you!

    Debbie

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  6. Hello Bill
    Thanks very much for Chapter 1 – it is even better than I expected, and I expected it to be wonderful. I really love the way you have articulated my own fears and misgivings about the Camino – if there’s 2 of us feeling like that, I’m guessing there are a whole lot more who will identify with you on this journey.
    I hope you don’t mind that I picked up a typo, on page 7 – ‘He introduced himself at Balazs, from Hungary.’ I’m guessing this is meant to be ‘as’ not ‘at’.
    (I’m a person who proofreads for enjoyment, did you guess that? I ask all my student friends and relations to send me their student papers before submitting them so I can proofread them. The last one I proofread was my son’s Law masters paper on international trusts – strangely interesting!)

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  8. Bravo! You had me in stitches 🙂 Weighing your underwear in your office so your wife didn’t see you, priceless LOL

    If the rest of your book is a good as the first chapter it will be a runaway best seller 🙂

    Emily xo

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    • Thank you Emily –

      I think the book is fairly consistent in tone.

      As for it being a success – who knows? I’m not expecting anything from it.

      Bill

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    • I loved that part, too Emily. The picture of Bill hiding away, weighing his underwear cracked me right up!

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  9. Hiya Bill

    This is great news.
    Im deliberately not going to download your chapter until the book is ready to buy.

    I want to savour it. There is a place in NZ that I go to on the west coast. Its isolated and remote. I plan on taking your book their to savour.

    Proud of you friend.

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  10. I love your first chapter, and your quirky sense of humour, as always, appeals to mine.

    Not many people have the excellent self-editing skills that you display, BTW, as likely the sole more technical comment I’ll make.

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  12. Hi Bill and PGS family, I am home for a few days and using a “real computer”… My android plays havoc with my spelling and most of the time, I cant scroll back to fix stuff, so when it gets posted, sometimes it is rather disjointed.

    Bill, I enjoyed your 1st chapter very much. I needed a good chuckle that morning. I love reading descriptive work… because, the words, in my mind paint a picture. It’s like a looking at a picture book or a slideshow. (numbers are the same way, I see them in my mind as I say or hear them – but it did not help me with equations in school 😦 ).

    Cookbooks are the other way around, I love them full of pictures and I can figure out the recipe (most of the time – there have been some interesting dishes on my table).

    So, I guess, I am a visual person… lol As I will be reading your chapters, I will be seeing you walk all over again. That staircase in Biarritz… I know it well… however, I took the 1 Euro busride to Bayonne, to sleep in a sleezy hotel and then miss the first train to SJPDP, because all the prilgrims were chatting and getting to know each other, but we were waiting on the wrong platform….lol

    Looking forward to the rest. Ingrid

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    • Thanks Ingrid!

      I’m just waiting for the formatter to get back with the manuscript all nicely ready for online publishing.

      Elizabeth on this blog very kindly (and swiftly) proof-read the manuscript yesterday and has come back with some notes, which I need to look at today.

      (again Elizabeth, thank you!!)

      Descriptive writing is hard. It’s one of the biggest things I’ve had to learn in transitioning from screenplay writing to book writing.

      In a screenplay, everything is so sparse, because Art Department and Wardrobe Department and Casting etc are going to fill in the spaces. This is how that scene would have worked as a screenplay:

      Bill approaches the stairs. There’s a crowd below, waiting. He looks around for Rosa. He hesitates, then carefully walks down the stairs, avoiding the handrail. A man, (70’s) tries to help him.

      Bill I’m okay thanks mate.

      The man looks at him a beat, then bounds down the stairs. Bill watches him go, then continues climbing down, slowly.

      No inner monologue, no information about the crowd, or what Rosa might look like. Sparse essential words. Words that will later be filled by hundreds of people working on the movie to make that scene “play” when we come to shoot it.

      Bill

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      • Yes, a pilgrim friend, Sue Kenney, who also has written 2 autobiographical accounts of her Camino and a short documentary “the women who walk”, also has a film waiting to go into production. This has been some years in coming, but she told me she was rather honoured when she was asked to write the screenplay as well. I understand that is rarely done.

        But I can see how the shorthand is necessary for the creative departments to be able to fill in the blanks.

        I guess also is why sometimes a book and a film of a book are not always the same.

        Ingrid

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        • hi Ingrid –

          it’s a truism of the industry that the best books don’t make the best films.

          And vice versa – bad books often make great films.

          The Bourne movies, whether you liked them or not, were terrific pieces of filmmaking – but they came from the Ludlum books that were quite ordinary, from a literature standpoint.

          There are exceptions of course – most recently Les Miserables being a case in point. But often what makes a great book – the inner monologue – is very hard to translate into a good movie, which requires action – and by action, I mean people DOING, rather than thinking.

          Bill

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        • Screenwriting is a whole other discipline, and I can tell you, it’s HARD.

          I write a good screenplay requires years of learning your craft – both writing skills and understanding production and the language of cinema – and then there’s the structure of a screenplay.

          It’s incredibly difficult.

          The screenplay which I’ve written for the indian movie has literally taken me five years to write. And about twenty drafts.

          But, it’s now good. And a very powerful piece of material.

          Bill

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  13. Dear Bill, my apologies, but I’ve not had a chance to read this first chapter until now during my lunch at the Cancer Council office … and of course I LOL on a number of occasions and had to explain myself to the lovely women I work with … trying to keep it short is not easy!! Like everyone else, I’m very excited to know that shortly we can read it all. It’s certainly a wonderful start. Thanks 🙂

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    • Hi Britta,

      So thrilled you liked it, and you thought it funny.

      I’m just waiting for the formatting and cover art before I send it out to you.

      It’s been fun to write!

      Bill

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