Movement History Project Update

Earlier today I posted one of my occasional updates on the progress of my Canadian social movement history project. I thought I would share the update here:

And the months they just fly by...so here's where things are at: In terms of the queries to agents, I got a few responses from people that were not interested in seeing the full proposal and one that was. When I received this expression of interest I spent a little time further refining the proposal and sent it off. I have heard nothing yet, but it is still early. I may send out some more query letters in the near future. Chapter 4 has taken much, much longer than I had hoped, but it is largely done. There are still a few holes -- a paragraph missing here, a sentence there -- that depend on me receiving sources that are not locally available, and I will fill them when I can. And it still will require a bit of polishing I am sure. But it is essentially done and I am moving on. I had originally intended to work on Chapter 5 next, but I think I will jump forward to Chapter 10 because the sources it will require will overlap to a certain extent with the chapter I just completed. I am not far enough into it yet to say for sure, but I would imagine it will go quicker than Chapter 4 did -- 4 was a fairly complicated chapter in terms of the ideas I was presenting, whereas I think 10 will be quite a bit simpler. (An aside: I have occasionally been quite discouraged at the length of time this project is taking, as passionate as I am about it. Partly this is because it has always been something I have been pursuing in the context of other demands that have had to take priority in my life, like full-time paid work or full-time parenting. However, the slow pace of the writing -- and I am not generally a particularly slow writer, at least of non-fiction -- also has to do with the nature of the project. Rather than writing a book about one topic area in which I am already an expert, as most writers of non-fiction books do, I am writing a book that talks about a dozen different areas that I knew very little about when I started and that I hope to cover sufficiently well such that people who have devoted their lives to the areas in question will read what I write and think I have done a decent job. I am very much enjoying the opportunity to do this learning...I just wish it could happen a bit faster. :) )