Randy Blythe Has Finished Writing His Book!
When Randy Blythe first embarked upon the massive undertaking of writing a memoir earlier this year, focusing on his incarceration and trial in the Czech Republic, he launched a companion Tumblr blog that would serve as a “behind the scenes” look into the writing of the book. The first two entries at that blog, Dark Days, were riveting, as if you’d expect any less from Blythe.
But then Dark Days fell dark because, well, Blythe was busy writing a friggin’ book. Finally, nearly eight months later, Blythe has resurfaced with a MAMMOTH blog entry that makes up for lost time by explaining just how hard the process was for him, why he stopped updating the blog and, yes, this very exciting tidbit announcing that the first draft of his memoir is finally complete:
So while I did become a real writer (because there is a huge difference between real writers and those who dick around with words sometimes, as I had done before- more on that in a different post), I didn’t write about writing as I had planned. I just worked on my book, surfed when I couldn’t take looking at the screen anymore, and slept about six hours a night. And eventually I got the thing done. To be precise, I typed the last period at exactly 2:09 pm on October 1, 2014. Then I drove to one of the best seafood shacks on the East Coast and treated myself to a well-deserved dinner of locally caught wild shrimp and crispy crab cakes. I sat there by myself, eating steamed shrimp and drinking pink lemonade while Queen’s “We Are the Champions” played over the restaurant’s stereo, and I must admit- I felt pretty damn majestic. Over the next four days I tightened up the last three chapters of my book and the epilogue, and emailed them to my editor one by one as I finished them. After the last of it had been sent off, I printed out the final pages of the book and added them to the thick manuscript I kept in a plain black binder. I picked up my book, straightened all the pages by banging them on the kitchen counter, and just held it for moment. Damn- the thing was heavy. My contract required me to turn in a manuscript of 80,000 to 100,000 words in length; I was pretty sure I had blown past that long before the book was finished, but I decided to do a quick word count just to make sure I was in the clear.
I had written 234,022 words. Holy crap.
I called my editor Ben, told him how long the book was, and asked him what happened next.
Huzzah! Like many of you I absolutely cannot wait to read this thing.
So what’s next? Blythe’s manuscript gets sent off to his editor and the chainsaw and scalpel come out to cut it down. To Blythe’s delight it’ll be done the old school way with pen, paper and snail mail, not with fancy-pants Microsoft Word redlining that’s standard nowadays. I can only imagine how tough it’ll be to stare down some of those edits in bright red pen and to let them go after the eight months of blood, sweat and tears that went into the first draft. At this point is seems really unlikely that Blythe’s original prediction of a late 2014 release for the book will hold true, but the first quarter of 2015 seems reasonable.
Read Blythe’s entire blog post here; it is absolutely worthy of the five minutes it’ll take you. He promises more soon.
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