Out with the old…

Gosh! It’s been a while hasn’t it? *checks corners for cobwebs*.

Rest assured that silence here has not meant no progress on the book! Due to a slight case of ‘taking on more stuff than I have time for’ (otherwise known as ‘chronic yesitis’), I haven’t managed to make much time for blogging. I’ve now built some time for updating this website into my schedule, which means I might manage to update it at least a third as often as I plan to…

So, what’s been going on? Well, quite a lot! The first big change is to the structure of the book, as you can see from the revised table of contents. Gone are my beloved ‘micro, macro, and meta’ divisions, in favour of a more straightforward 13-chapter structure.

My editor suggested the change, and, though I kicked against it a bit at first, I came to see that she was right. One of the problems was that 25 chapters was Just Too Many. My editor thought that readers might find that many chapters a bit daunting – and I had to agree! I was finding writing that many chapters daunting, too…

I was also having to be a bit contrived to get things to fit within the the ‘micro, macro, meta’ framework. In real life, of course, things don’t fit so neatly into those divisions – it’s perfectly possible for an activity to combine developing yourself, improving your service, and benefiting the profession.

The 3 Ms helped me a lot when I was planning the book – they helped me to think about what I needed to cover in different aspects of information work, and to make sure that I had a decent balance. (As it turns out, I’ve got rather too much personal/professional development material, leading to all sorts of difficult decisions – more about that in a later post). They’ve served their purpose, and done their time, and I shall retire them gratefully.

What else is new? Well, most of the book, for a start! It’s now starting to take shape as a proper book – all 56,000 words of it… There’s still a lot to be done (I’m not planning on sleeping in November), but I’m starting to believe that I can actually pull this off. A lot of thanks for that must go to the lovely Jaffne, who has set up a wiki to monitor my progress, and is setting me deadlines, giving me encouragement, and generally being an all-round good sort. I also owe a HUGE thank-you to all my contributors, who have written most of those words, and provided me with some amazing material.

I’ve got some more blog posts gently percolating in my head. Expect posts in the (fairly) near future on: choosing contributors; editing case studies; motivation & time management; indexing; and various other things as they come to mind. Hopefully some of these will appear on a new version of the website – I’m planning to move to a self-hosted wordpress install, at some point before publication.

Don’t expect anything too soon, though! This weekend is going to be given over to cake-making, cocktail-drinking, and library-idea-sharing. Yes, it’s Library Camp UK! If you’re there, do come say hi 🙂