True crime writing

All writing takes planning and, to some degree, all writing takes research. True crime writing involves mountains of research and then culling through the mountains for "the book" within. "Walking Between The Raindrops" is a combination of first person accounts and documentation carefully woven together so that the reader will get a more 3D-version of the whole story. Putting it all together has been kind of like eating an elephant. Massive and overwhelming at times.

To give you an idea of how much research - check out the reference material I've collected over the past 5 years! This doesn't include books like, "The Executioner's Men", "Gangland", "Border Wars" and 5 years of Stratfor.com articles which are on another shelf.

My part of the editing is almost done. So far, of the nearly 800 pages I had when I finished the first draft, almost 100 pages have been cut! When I hand the manuscript off to the real editor, I expect it will get trimmed down even more. That sounds like a lot of pages still, right? Those pages are double-spaced, so, in reality, the book should end up between 300-400 pages - not so bad.