There Weren't Always Chapters

There weren’t always chapters in this book.  It was originally conceived, and executed, as one long unwavering piece without separation, from opening sentence to final epilogue.  Maybe it wasn’t exactly like Jack Kerouac’s endless single scroll for the initial version of On the Road, but close to it.  (No resemblance intended to our common approach.)  It’s just that I thought this travel story, which floats along in a linear way, needed to be presented in its purest form.  My wife was the one who suggested, “You’ve already written it in diary form. Why don’t you split it up into chapters by day?  It’s too much to take your way.”  That seemed reasonable. My manuscript in all its various editions went from a short length of 140 pages to a top-heavy 700 pages, before settling in at under 400 (currently 376). Chapters would make it easier for people to bite off. Slowly I came around to that viewpoint. So I chopped it down.  That made sense because I wanted to highlight the idea that this trip was “40 days and 40 nights,” sort of Biblical in nature. By showing that the trip rounded out into EXACTLY forty days seemed noteworthy . . . something I could highlight. So I divided it into 40 chapters.  Done deal. Maybe it’s even too abstract in its current form, but my chapters are in place.