Bill is Back!!!!!!!!!
My favorite essayist has been swamped with his day job and has been unable to post.
Now,
Bill Whittle breaks silence with this post letting us know what is up (and it's great news):
LINER NOTES
Hello, faithful, faithful reader! Thank you for continuing to check back, against all common sense. It’s been a long time.
As you probably know by now, I prefer not to get paid by the word, or the page, but by the pound. That said, I’ll try to make this brief because there is much work to be done at long last.
I have been meaning to return to these pages for months now – months! Everything I have written here so far has just shot out of me like a fighter jet off a carrier deck: one or two 3-4 hour sessions during which I contract a case of the vapors, then next thing I know I’m reading what the Invisible Hand wrote and out the door she goes.
But for months and months now I have been struggling with a single idea, an essay I wanted to call CIVILIZATION, and despite dozens of false starts, I tear it all up the next day because it reads like an okay parody of me. There was so much I wanted to say, so many bases to cover, that it was like drinking from a firehouse – no fun.
Finally, this morning, after another hacking attempt last night, it finally hit me what I was doing wrong. I was trying to avoid delving into areas I had planned to save for later, but I needed these foundations to make the case, and it was going to turn into a 400 page essay. But 400 pages is not an essay. 400 pages is a book.
Aha!
So, here is the plan: within 24 hours I will post the introductory chapter to a new book called AN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. Then, over the next several weeks, I will post a series of chapters, looking at the various building blocks of such a civilization. Then, when those have been written, I will write that final chapter – Civilization – that ties it all together, and in doing so I cut the Gordian knot that has kept me flummoxed al these long months.
I will soon be on hiatus from my day job, and have about three weeks more work to do between now and the first week in September. I would like the have an entire book finished by then. And, unlike SILENT AMERICA, which is collection of disparate essays, this is an actual book-worthy idea, with each chapter building on the last and setting up the next. I have been thinking about this for almost a year now, and I am loaded, cocked, sighted and my finger is inside the trigger guard. And I can tell you that a few moments after I had that revelation on the way to work this morning, I have felt like a genii let out of a long and painful isolation. I can now turn that fire house outward and try my best to put out some of the fires that distress us all.
If you are unfamiliar with Bill's work, check out these examples:
Tribes
Sanctuary (Part One) (Part Two)
Trinity (Part One) (Part Two)
Posted by DaveH at June 17, 2006 5:46 PM