Charlotte’s Babblings

James Brausch’s new book came in today, The Voice Said “Obey.”  It is a fictionalized account of what he would do if he woke up one day having lost everything, based on his real life experience.  As the title suggests, his awakening was a personal experience of the Divine, edited to illustrate his business model and his personal life model. All the events are true, according to him, merely rearranged and time-compressed to make his point that there is no reason not to make your life happen the way you want it, starting now, no matter what.

I’ll be proofreading the book tonight, which won’t take long, as it is only 193 pages in a 4.25 x 6.75 format from lulu.com. I’m familiar with his writing voice, and his idiosyncrasies with sentence structure and punctuation. The book design is clean and readable, with the exception of the tiny print on the back of comments from the blog, some angry and critical, and others thoughtful and supportive.

I’ve read the blog posts already, and I am very interested in how the galley draft will be different from what I have already read.  He has also posted about how easy it is to write a book, and I can see that taking real events and revising them to make a point could be simpler than making it up from whole cloth. However the real secret is that this is at least the third draft of this work, the original having been posted to the web as it happened.  Writing is still re-writing, but as Dickens learned, it’s best to recycle as many times as possible. A review will be posted tomorrow.