Bank Manuscript...
I finally copied and pasted all my banking articles into a single document. I expected it to rack up to 30,000 words or so. Instead, it is 70,000. Although some of that is text that has to be deleted, it is a definite overshoot of what I was targeting.
The ugly part is that the text is still missing some of the basic primer sections (e.g., how do bank balance sheets work?), as well as discussions of data (what do actual bank balance sheets look like?).
Of course, this puts me in the position of having two unfinished manuscripts. The inflation manuscript is now in much better shape, but I want to read it over again to see whether the trimmed down version hangs together better. About 80% of the text feels fine, but the other 20% was too disjointed. By the editorial trick of just deleting text wholesale I cleaned up that (shrinking) 20%, but my feeling is that it is best to let the text rest so I can re-read it with fresh eyes.
Although I will probably put any needed primer sections on the web, I will need to find other topics for my readers. It would certainly be a bad idea to start writing articles aimed at a third manuscript…