During the long development period our relationship becomes less predictably specific and a lot more open.  We can’t know for sure what help you need until you move forward and give me things to react to. Possibly, I may be the only person who actually knows a lot about your project and your aspirations for it.  But even when you’ve exhausted the attention and patience of your friends and family by talking too much about your project, I’ll still be there, and I’ll still be interested and ready to help with technical support, sympathetic criticism, hand-holding or as a companion in kicking around new ideas or deepening old ones.
  
One woman writer-client described some of what I do as “mid-husbandry.”  I wear the metaphor proudly, because writing a book is a lot like growing a baby: it takes time and, well, labor, and at the end, there is a sort of child, a being with an independent existence in the world. In such a process, it’s good to have concerned and competent people standing by. Of course, if you don’t need a lot of support or you have a “go-it-alone” sort of creative temperament, that’s fine, too. I’m here and ready when and if you need me.

Your book as self-creation
No matter what happens in the process of making your book you’ll be a different and better person for having written it. You’re developing a book, but you’re developing yourself as well. That’s what makes book writing so fulfilling and enriching. As you work on your book good things happen to you. You meet new people—intelligent, interesting, exciting people. You read new books and thus contact new ideas of enormous interest and value. Some of those ideas will be yours, so watch out for them, and enjoy and treasure them.  That’s book writing: an incubator of the self, a self constantly unfolding as knower, thinker, persuader, creator, and verbal artist. I look forward to meeting that new self and helping you make it.

Enhancing your intellect
I’ll also help you through the long process of thinking, musing, imagining, woolgathering, speculating, and just trying out ideas.  Preparing to write particular chapters or even paragraphs will reveal holes in your conceptualizations.  (If you’re writing fiction, you might discover that you don’t understand enough about a character, for example.)  We’ll talk regularly as you think your way through your subjects, and I’ll be the interactive partner you need to make your ideas more coherent and complete. I’ll also be there as intellectual support when we reach dead-ends and have to find bridges to new conceptual areas.

You’ll increase your knowledge store by acquiring the book writer’s habit of taking notes, notes, and more notes.  As you continue, I’ll help you find ways to turn notes into prose that may find an eventual place in the whole.  Later on, we’ll work on refining your outline, perhaps many times, or turning your 20-page sketch into a hundred-page, more worked-out picture that can be the clearer and fuller basis for the whole book.

Eventually, all this intellectual work will settle itself into chapters and finally into a whole book’s worth of knowledge and thought.  I’ll stay with you at each stage to make sure that you have something important to say in every part of your book and can thus move forward confidently and productively.