"The Monks of War" goes to bed
Friday, January 13, 2006 at 4:54PM Rest of my day lost to the final tweaking of the Esquire piece, which I finally see in Second Pages (meaning all type-set by page, photos in, but call-out bits and photo captions not done yet). I spend two hours with Tom Colligan, fact-checker extraordinaire (he catches things that just blow my mind--I pity the fool that tries to sneak things past him!), and we work on his toughest remaining mysteries.
Piece looks great. Very cool photos of the generals. Six full pages, plus three "jump" pages in the back.
After that, tonight it's a series of calls with Mark to negotiate those last few sentences (Warren really lives and dies with this, and I like these exchanges the best). My guess is that the beast is gone from my hands/influence for good within the next couple of hours. I am very pleased with the outcome--really. It's amazing to start this thing as an email from Gen. Petraeus leading to a phonecon with Mark while driving from BWI to DC one afternoon ... and wham! All those trips, interviews, transcripts, writing, edits, fact-checking, photo-shoots (long talk with the photographer this time) and so on and so forth and four million issues later ... there it is.
Let me count: PNM in Mar 2003, Mr. President (Iraq) in June 04, then Mr. President (2nd Term) in Feb 05, Rumsfeld in July 05, and China in Nov 05. So this makes my 6th Esquire article, clocking it at roughly 6,000 words. I've probably written a good 30,000 words in the mag so far. When I hit 100k, I'm looking for a publisher.
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