59 inspiring works in progress
I've met some inspiring people through the International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Book Club in the past year. It was founded by the amazing Kathy Murphy in a small Texas town where she ran a business, Beauty and the Book, that was a combination beauty salon and bookstore. A book club came out of that, and soon club chapters proliferated. Now it has 800 chapters, including chapters in 20 countries outside of the United States.
The range of work included in this collection is a feast.
One of the inspiring people I've met is author and publisher Mandy Haynes, who is also the club's executive director. She is the type of person who gets ideas and sets them in motion. No time for dithering in Mandy's universe. And one day, she got the idea to publish a collection of works in progress by club members who are also authors. (There are two types of club memberships, reader and author. Readers can join for free; authors pay a small yearly fee.) Mandy put out the idea in a email, and she was soon flooded with submissions. She did the editing, cover design and interior design. And she published the book, Work in Progress: A Collection of Excerpts From Some of Our International Pulpwood Queen and Timber Guy Author's Manuscripts.
Along with each excerpt is a little bit of the story behind the excerpt. Here's how Mandy describes it on her website, https://threedogswritepress.com:
"Have you ever finished a book and wondered, 'What made the author think of that?' Or wondered if there was a chapter in the original manuscript that didn’t make it through the final edits? Maybe you’d like to get a sneak peek at what an author is currently working on. "Work In Progress includes sixty excerpts from some talented authors’ works in progress in different stages of the writing process, followed up with the story behind the story of the piece, and the story behind the author who wrote it.
"Where did the idea come from? What were they thinking during the writing process? Why did they delete a chapter, or change a character?
"Find out the answers to these questions and more inside …"
And you've probably guessed by now that an excerpt from a novel I'm working on is included. In fact, it's the very first one you'll read when you open the book.