Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I know exactly how you feel. In my case it's a 4-year investment of time between starting and finishing, knowing that there are probably dozens of people working on the same "solve the as-yet unsolved problem" as am I. I live in dread of picking up the next Harvard Business Review, or seeing a new book on the BusinessWeek bestseller list that obviates my dissertation research.

I suppose even worse would be discovering an article from a few years back that put my topic to bed. Ah, the things that go bump in the PhD candidate's night...

So why are you writing a book? After two books and a pile o' articles, I know I prefer articles (columns/essays/etc.) for their timeliness. Do you need to write a book?

It makes me fearful for the publishing model for non-fiction in general. I love books and the smells and the reading of them and the feel and the fonts and the saddlestitching and all of it. I know I'll buy yours.

But damn, that's a longass development cycle in web 2.0 terms. We might be to 3.2 by 01-07.

Has anyone tackled shellfish yet?

You're right. I just checked, and Dungeness crabs reach sexual maturity and their legal selling weight at three to four years of age. The analogies that come to mind make me dizzy.

Last year I decided I wanted to make a little web movie on podcasting and I had a title for it. I googled the title, and of course, someone had already done a web video with that title.

I was bummed out for awhile, but then I decided to go ahead and make my version anyway. I made up a new title, just so the two wouldn't get confused.

And you know what? My video kicks their video's ass.

No matter how many people do something, there's still always room to be the best.

I feel fairly confident that you can kick Parade Magazine's ass. You'll be wearing their masthead for a hat and doing a little dance.

kgs, why write a book? For the predictable reasons (definitely presented not in order of importance):

Because there are ideas that take longer than an article.

Because the connections between those ideas are rich enough that I want them to be a page-turn away.

Because I want to control the path through those ideas. Control freak? Only sort of. (And, yes, this makes the presentation of my ideas on the miscellaneous not very miscellaneous. Irony continues to be the most powerful force in the universe.)

Because reading long-form writing is really hard on today's computers.

Because I'm getting paid.

Because there is a craft to putting ideas in a way that will pull people through an entire book. It requires connecting the ideas not just with one another but with the reader. That enriches and contextualizes the ideas, one hopes in a useful way. (I'm writing this book offline mainly because writing it in public would get in the way of my learning that craft.)

Because I'm a child of the book culture and am still trying to make my dead parents proud.

Dear David-

I'm sorry that we caused you stress with our recent cover story.

As the woman with the highest IQ on the planet, once I learned that you were working on a book titled `Everything is Miscellaneous,' it became fairly obvious to me which topics would be included.

So we've assigned a series of 14 cover stories, to be published before January 2007, to familiarize our readers with each of the themes you plan to include in your book. (There are to be 14 chapters in your forthcoming book, yes?)

Best of luck to you in your publishing endeavors,

Marilyn V S

Dear David-

I'm sorry that we caused you stress with our recent cover story.

As the woman with the highest IQ on the planet, once I learned that you were working on a book titled `Everything is Miscellaneous,' it became fairly obvious to me which topics would be included.

So we've assigned a series of 14 cover stories, to be published before January 2007, to familiarize our readers with each of the themes you plan to include in your book. (There are to be 14 chapters in your forthcoming book, yes?)

Best of luck to you in your publishing endeavors,

Marilyn V S

I understand all of David's reasons for writing a book, particularly the part where he gets paid. But I spent some time today while driving separating out all the tentacles wiggling in this discussion.

First, we're not worried about David's competition, because David is a great thinker and writer. The problem--which David raised in the title of his post--is that his real competitor is time itself. He has a timely topic (pun sort of intended) that will be in its prime sooner than later. But the book publishing cycle--not to mention the book-writing cycle--is biased towards "later."

I understand that a book can cohere a set of thoughts in a particular Aristotelian unity. I wasn't proposing online text as an alternative. As an avid magazine and journal reader--I love serials so much my parents should have named me Wheaties--I am attuned to the balance that serial publication provides. Timeliness, but formalism. From little essays can mighty books grow, either as collections or as one theme developed from a strong idea well-presented. But essays also stand on their own. Perhaps I love good essays because it delights me to see the strength of small things reflected in this genre.

On the other hand, it seems that despite the anxiety that the book publishing cycle provokes, and regardless of the known limitations, you really want to write this book. Bravo, and we'll support you (and no, I wouldn't write a book online either, any more than I would want to webcast my next dental procedure).

Thanks, KG.

I have written a book online. I posted my daily draft, each and every day, when I was writing Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It was useful, but I'd tinker with my timing if I were to do that again, posting completed chapters rather than daily drafts.

But I'm not even doing that with this book. Instead, I'm blogging the topics of the book as they occur to me. That means that I'm usually blogging ahead of where I'm writing. So, I may be writing about Linnaeus when I have a thought about folksonomies; I'll blog the folksonomy idea but not the Linnaeus bits. I guess my blog feeels to me like a place for writing about ideas that are new to me and that I've only half baked at best. The stuff I feel more confident I generally am not blogging about, maybe because if I know what I think, then writing about it isn't nearly as much fun.