So, Anybody Want To Pre-Read My Book?

A funny thing happened the other day while discussing with my daughter.   I discovered a book I’d written on the subject and completely forgotten about.

For years I’ve daydreamed about writing my own “intro to Shakespeare,” a fantasy that has evolved over time.  My hard drives are littered with half-hearted starts that never went anywhere because I always talked myself out of it. Either I didn’t have the audience, the audience I wanted was already saturated, or I just plain wasn’t qualified.  Finding excuses not to do something is easy.

But at some point, I sat at the keyboard long enough and wrote a complete-ish guide to The Tempest. It only goes about 17 PDF pages and is maybe 5000 words. But it has an introduction, a conclusion, and some actual structure in the middle.  It’s even got pictures 🙂

Now I’m trying to decide what to do with it.  I don’t expect that, by itself, I can just say “Here world, enjoy!” But I also know that I don’t need 50,000 words to throw something out on Amazon that people might find worth reading.

That’s where you come in. I’d like to send it to a few people who’d be willing to give some constructive criticism about what I might do with it – content to add, mistakes to correct, fine-tuning to …tune.  I do not need an academic redlining, believe me. I’ve already got 99 reasons to forget the whole idea.  I’m looking for supportive folks who’ll help me actually do something with this instead of giving me more reasons to forget the whole idea.

My real motivation for doing this is because both my girls want to be writers, and both of them suffer from terrible anxiety about letting the world see their work. I’m using this as an opportunity to throw something out there and show them that not only does the world not come to an end when other people read your stuff, but they might actually get some value out of it.

If you’re interested, please drop me a line at duane@shakespearegeek.com and I’ll send you the PDF. I’d like to get into an email correspondence with anybody that’s got feedback to offer, I’m not looking for just comments here on the blog post.

Thanks so much to everybody in advance!