Chop Time

Chop Time

I had a university publisher back East contact me to see if I had a book about Colonial gun manufacturing in the works; they were interested. Not written yet, but certainly researched. But would they be interested in this book, already written? Well, maybe, if I removed everything in the way of a memoir and turned it into just a scholarly history of deinstitutionalization.

My first reaction was, "But the memoir is what makes it moving, powerful, and likely to sell well." But since no one seems interested in a book like that, I'm now chopping it down to the scholarly history part.

UPDATE: Every major piece of writing needs to set and cool for a month or two. As I go through the manuscript, I find myself shaking my head at some of the scrambled sentences, and failures to properly transition between paragraphs. I also find that I have relied a bit more than I should on three secondary sources for my discussion of nineteenth century mental illness treatment, so I need to do a bit more digging.

UPDATE: As I work my way through the book, and I dig a little more for sources, I am grateful that I am doing so. It isn't just a matter of having a few more sources so that I don't appear overly dependent on Grob's work--I'm finding additional useful little aspects to this question. In one case, I discovered that either Grob misspelled the name of Manfred Sakel (the doctor who first used insulin shock therapy for psychosis), or I miscopied Sakel's name. Either way, I'm glad to find that out.