Secrecy

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To what extent is my Secret Project secret, and why is it so?

The first thing that strikes me is that this blog is damn near a perfect secret - to my knowledge only five people other than myself know about it and only one of those looks at it on occasion. Of course, my original intention was simply to document my progress throughout the writing - rewriting - querying - publishing process, and thereby have a journal of sorts to look back on when it is done. The blog is functioning just fine for that purpose, but I find myself in a kind of cyber-loneliness, looking wistfully at other blogs with tons of traffic (pub rants, for example) and wishing there was someone to talk to.

Enough of that. Why is the Secret Project a secret?

Because I like having a secret, because I like surprises, and because I don't want to be bothered with a lot of "how's the book going?" questions from well meaning friends and family. Also, I want to be able to quietly pull the plug on the whole project if I don't finish it or it doesn't meet my standards for going forth to face the world.

That said, its really not too secret. My wife and kids know about it, of course, and a close friend of mine, who is also an aspiring novelist. At work, when my colleague sees me typing away and he asks, "What are you doing, writing a book?" I simply answer, "Yes". So, quite a number of co-workers know about it, but as I see them very infrequently it hardly amounts to an expose'.

I'll come out of the closet with it after the Big Rewrite as I will then present copies of the manuscript to my parents, parents-in-law, my brother, my sister and my friend. I'm really, really looking forward to dropping them all into the mail and awaiting their reactions when they receive it. Then, even more so, their reactions as they read it. Perhaps I shouldn't look forward to that part so much.

Speaking of looking forward, I'm also looking forward to receiving my first rejection letters - that's part of the process, too.