Keeping it real

So there’s this book idea, right, and I first pitched it in the 1990s but not only couldn’t get anywhere with it, someone else did. They got a book published on precisely the same non-fiction topic and all these years later, I still remember my first thought when I got it: they’ve queered the pitch for everyone else. Flash forward to now and it’s not as if I’ve sold that book proposal, but I am close. Close enough that all reason and logic says the pitch is done and the contract should be on its way soon. But partly because of previous bruising, partly because an old friend taught me never to assume something is happening until it already has, I am not yet convinced. But this means that for the first time I can remember, I’m in a rather detailed and protracted limbo. It’s not just waiting to see if this work happens, it is waiting to see if it happens but at the same time I’m already thirty hours into the research and I’m somewhere around 8,000 words into the book. That’s about 10% of…