The outline complete, and a new title to boot
Barnett
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 5 January 2005
Got up early this morning (not easy, given baby's 3am visit to our bed) and pounded out a fairly detailed 8-page outline of the sequel, based on all the rethinking I had done over the holidays. Eighteen sections to average about 4k words a piece, and five chapter intros to average 600 words a piece for a total of 75,000 words.
This is my final outline prior to beginning, and it gave me a lot of confidence to spread out the various big points that I want to cover across the book, plus get down truly solid draft titles for each of the 5 chapters, the preface, the introduction and conclusion, and the three sub-sections in each of the five chapters. It may seem like a small thing, but getting the titles down means a lot to me, because it tells me what my plan is going into any day's writing. Now, once in, things can always change and often do, and I don't worry about that, because good writing takes you wherever you need to go, and adaptive planning is a forte of mine.
So I fired this whole thing off to Neil Nyren at Putnam and then heard back from him late in the day (we got sent home early for a snow storm that still hasn't appeared whatsoever at 8pm). He liked the outline, felt it was solid in terms of material, and then gave me a warning about one particularly tricky and ambitious early section that Mark and I have likewise spent some time talking about. Big thing for me was that it seemed like a real book to Neil, and a logical extension of PNM. For the first time for me, I didn't feel like I was stretching anything, as I knew exactly what I wanted to say in each section, knew which references or stories I would draw upon, and had a feel for the tone.
This is now officially a book I know I can write. Tonight, I go through all my meta-notes to search for major themes that I want to distribute among the 18 sections. This process may--in and of itself--force me to alter the outline a bit, but I'm going to try and maintain some content discipline unless something really jumps out at me. But as far as I'm concerned, this is all gravy and richness to be added on top of the existing structure. I had to get the outline to that sense of statefullness (I believe that is a Fukuyama term) prior to diving into my personal goody-bag of 1000-and-1 blogs, otherwise I feared I would feel like I was searching for filler instead of having a solid roster where only marginal bits would get shoved out to make room for better bits.
Neil and I also talked about his preferred title, which we three (he, Mark and I) have gone back and forth on for a while. Neil wanted to get PNM in the main title. At first, I was a bit surprised by this desire, but Neil's explanation was that PNM had reached a certain branding level that bode well for the sequel's marketing. That I couldn't deny, for PNM's emergence has been amazingly steady over its now almost 9-month run, and the fire it seems to light under so many readers gives it an aura that's bigger than both the text itself and me, the author. So, naturally, I'm very excited that a brand-maker of Putnam's stature is interested in continuing to invest in the PNM brand.
But it also made sense to me intrinsically. The first book was the great diagnosis and the enunciation of the logical scenario pathway, but in introducing such a broadband theory of damn near everything in national and international security, it left some key questions of implementation only hinted at. In short, it left open the sense of, "Here we have this operating theory of the world, now what can we do with it?"
Thus the main title of the sequel will be, "The Pentagon's New Map Blueprint for Action."
I held off on agreeing to that title until Neil had a chance to peruse the detailed outline, because I wanted him to see that promise suitably addressed by my plans. As with the first subtitle that he came up with ("War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century"), I take this main title as clear instruction from Neil regarding the main purpose of the book: "First he gave you the new map of the world, now here's the blueprint for action for getting from here to a future worth creating.
"A Future Worth Creating" becomes the subtitle, then. So it's PNM the brand on top, "Blueprint for Action" the purpose locked into the main title, and the promise of "A Future Worth Creating" for the subtitle.
A mouthful when all laid out (The Pentagon's New Map Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating), but the key marketing points are these: 1) getting the brand in the main title, which is all that's used 95% of the time; 2) getting BFA also in the main title, so as to indicate the extension of the first book into more specific and much-desired content (based on our collective reading of the positive responses to PNM); and 3) the cover art will accomodate all three phrases in a very strong visual way that makes clear The Brand, The Function, and The Promise of the volume.
What I like about the title is that it really pushes me in the same way that "War and Peace in the 21st Century" did the first time around. It gives me a strong sense of direction in the text.
I also like the sense of this book being an explicit sequel--that PNM was powerful enough to demand one. In short, I feel like PNM created something for me that will last my lifetime--it was my magnum opus. But based on the great response and how far the book has traveled both within the military and the world at large, it makes sense to fill in these remaining blanks in the sequel. As I said to Mark when we finished PNM: even then it seemed so densely packed that big portions of the text still came off too cryptically, as though I was still writing in the sort of dense matter/manner of the orignal article.
And frankly, realizing that I had still truncated so many concepts across a 150,000-word manuscript left me both proud of the book's heft (in combination with the desired career narrative) and nervous that some parts of its still needed further explanation.
Well, that's why I'm so happy to do the sequel. To me, this is my "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," and it's that simply because I couldn't possibly have written this far into the story in the first volume without having lost too many readers to the incredulity of trying to swallow all that strategy and vision from some unknown. In short, it would have been a bridge too far, and awfully sterile and academic in tone. I simply don't think I would have made the vision "sales" I did with PNM if it had been such a core data dump with no contextualization in terms of both the messenger and the journey involved in generating the message.
Now, with that bond established with the reader, what we want to do in the second book really seems quite plausible: lay out a roadmap for some radical change and some big steps in both rule-making and institution building.
I also like the sense of relief the PNM brand imparts to this sophomore effort (actually, my third book and my fourth manuscript), because it allows me to avoid feeling like I need to come up with another theory of everything less than two years later. As I've said before, once you lay out THE grand strategy, it's not like you can come out in the next work and simply ignore it. I mean, it's not like you can just pretend it's not there.
Obviously, if PNM had flopped and hadn't accrued the following and reach it has achieved within the national security community and the public at large ("believer" is a word I read a lot in the dozens of emails I still get each day), then I certainly could pretend it wasn't there. In fact, I'd feel quite obligated to do so!
But hell, if PNM's success was enough to effectively cost me my job at the college (you know damn well a flop wouldn't have cost me anything except my reputation!), then it should be important enough for me personally, as well as for the reading public, for the vision to be expanded and extended in the sequel.
I mean, you can't flaunt what you don't got and if you've got it, it ain't really flaunting.
So I end the day feeling at one with both Neil and Mark on the task that lies ahead. Roughly six weeks to pen the 75,000-word manuscript and then another 6-7 weeks to edit it for delivery to Neil the morning of 1 April.
Meanwhile, the sequel's title goes into the hopper of Putnam's fall list and the pre-release marketing begins far sooner than you'd think--not to the ultimate buyers but to the middle-marketers and ultimate sellers.
Meanwhile, PNM the hardcover sits at #173 almost nine months after release.
Meanwhile, PNM the paperback is already hovering in the range of 20,000 (21,979 at 8:44pm, it's been yo-yo-ing back and forth between 10 and 30k all day, but look at it this way, PNM the hardcover didn't reach such "heights" until about 10 days prior to release, while the paperback is roughly four months from release!).
Meanwhile, I've got another Esquire piece close to hitting stands as I type, and a Wired article to close out January (plus some other surprise from Wired regarding PNM that I was warned about this morning: no details released; just told to watch my mailbox for the "whatever").
Meanwhile, the interview I gave the Paula Zahn show regarding "Future Wars" should be on in coming days.
Meanwhile, you can hear a 55-minute radio interview I recently gave a San Diego station (Action Jack McClendon) played over the Internet this coming Saturday at 12 noon PST (3pm EST) at www.encouragemint.com/Radio/kksm_am.htm. Also, it will be simulcast on: AM 1320/ KKSM/ Oceanside-San Diego, Cox Digital
Cable TV Channel 958 and www.palomar.edu/kksm/live.html.
Meanwhile, I've got a bunch of research to get through before I hit the treadmill and then bed.
Expect to be shoveling first thing in the morning, but with any luck, I'll get the day off |
