My mum told me this evening that she watched a really interesting program on TV yesterday about the world football body [tag]FIFA[/tag] and how it was full of corruption. Timely of course because of the World Cup.
But, my mum explained, even though she was interested in the [tag]Panorama[/tag] programme, after a while, despite herself, she started getting a bit bored. The reporter clearly knew his stuff – he had been chasing it down for six years – but the fact was that she wasn’t *that* interested in FIFA to want to hear all the minutae. And when it reached the end, and it turned out that no one had actually been sent to jail for all the scams, you felt a little disappointed with the whole thing. She recognised it was a thorough piece of reporting though.
I mention this because I know exactly how that reporter feels. I am way, way over the deadline for my [tag]Sex.com[/tag] [tag]book[/tag] and I still have a way to go. It has started really impinging on my life. I have been hard at it almost solidly for four months. I have spent thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours learning everything about this extraordinary story, and I have written 90,000 words – and I still have not completed it.
I am desperate not to make the same mistake as the Panorama journalist (actually a guy called Andrew Jennings) and hit the perverse situation of disappointing through depth. There is always a problem with large investigations as a journalist – at some point you have to boil it down, and in so doing you have to cut out a huge amount of what you know.
The problem with the Sex.com tale is that the sheer wealth of tales making that boiling down extremely difficult. The simple fact, however, is that if the book is too fat, people won’t buy it, won’t read it, and so the whole point of it is wasted. People want to know about the amazing tale of Sex.com – how the Net’s most valuable property was stolen, how it was the centre of a multi-billion industry, how one man against all the odds took on the most extraordinary con-man and the Internet’s most powerful company and beat them both.
People want to know the amazing tale of Sex.com but not *that* much. It took me three days to read my book (as written so far). I have spent three days going through all the documents I have yet to make notes on so I have a final understanding of what there is. And now I have to embark on finishing the first draft and then rehashing it into a form where I am happy to hand it to the publishers.
And yet what I would really, really like to do is take it easy and watch some football. I strongly suspect Andrew Jennings can relate to that.
