Chapter 6 has gone in a new direction
One of the amazing things about writing a book is that the process forces you to re-examine your beliefs and what you think you know about a subject. Especially a book about beliefs.
As I got into writing about focus and how it relates to beliefs, I realized that what I thought I knew was just one of my own personal beliefs.
I had intended to present a case for developing a strong ability to focus in order to make the process of changing beliefs easier, yet the more I wrote, the more it didn't feel right. The questions kept coming up in my mind "Isn't this just a belief? Can beliefs be changed easily without a clear, sharp focus?" I had to answer "Yes" to both questions.
So I took a day to ponder the questions and how I could best serve my readers. Eventually, I realized that what I had planned for chapters 6 and 7 had to be taken out.
Of course, this process led me to go over my notes again, and in so doing I found a couple of things that I had intended to include, but didn't seem to fit earlier. As I reworked my outline, I found that what had previously been a subsection in chapter 5 could be repackaged as a separate chapter itself - Useful Guidelines.
The new chapter 6 is talking about how to use the techniques of chapter 5 and how to decide which belief to work on, in what order, and how to think about the process as a whole. Overall, it's still going to be a short chapter, probably less than 20 pages, but with 11 pages written so far, it's a very POWERFUL chapter.
With the changes to the outline, it looks as if the book will now be less than 200 pages without the case histories I'm planning to add. So far, I haven't decided whether those will be in a separate chapter or if they will be distributed throughout the book. Right now, I'm leaning towards having them in a separate chapter.
Tomorrow, October 14th, my wife and I will be going out of town for our yearly visit to my mom, who lives in Southern Illinois. Benton, to be more precise.
I probably won't be able to get much work done on the book, nor will I be available to answer emails until we get back, which will be Thursday the 18th.