Tamara L. Siuda, unplugged
The Big Project has a tentative name. We’re calling it 100 Gods of Egypt for now, and it is an encyclopedia of, well, gods of Egypt. I’ll be posting about my process in my Patreon (www.patreon.com/tsiuda) if you’re interested in that.
For some reason, a green notebook spoke to me on this one, and so this book begins its life in a five-subject wirebound notebook with a lime green cover. Maybe I’m old school, but when I start a big writing project I still plot/outline it on paper, even if the majority of my writing work ends up being digital. Over the years I’ve amassed a collection of notebooks for every book I’ve done, and often multiple books. For example, The Ancient Egyptian Daybook was written and plotted using two 5-subject notebooks.
This is the first or main book for 100 Gods, where I’m gathering snippets of data I want to make sure end up as references or footnotes for the text. This is where I’ll be scribbling in the pieces of good detail I pick up from reading source material, so it’s all in one place and I can find it once I’m working on a particular deity’s entry. I don’t intend to write in order necessarily, but we will see how that really goes as I get further into the work. Currently I have a handful of skeletal entries that need lots of work, two mostly completed ones (Anubis and Nephthys, if you want to know), and a couple dozen others in various stages of staging.
At this point in the work I’m also browsing through other encyclopedias of gods, trying to get a sense of my layout. Even though I won’t be the one to do the layout of this book, because I have done both editing and publishing in addition to writing, I find that it helps me to shape the work if I have some idea of how the writing is going to flow in the final version. I’m trying to get a sense of how data is broken up in various dictionaries, what’s considered important, and the differences between strictly academic lexicon type works and those that are more for general audiences. I’m trying to position 100 Gods into a place somewhere between something that’s only going to make sense to a specialized audience or something that is so broadly written as to be useless.
This process started last year, but now that the project is something I can talk about, I can talk about it. If you’re interested in reading more material like this, or actual drafts of the work, please consider joining us at the Patreon.