The full version of Working with Stories, with all twelve chapters complete, is now up on the web site. I started working on the third edition of the book when I started this blog, in October of 2009, so that makes four years I've been working on the rewrite. It's hard to believe I've been working on this project for so long; the time has flown by. Honestly, I thought the whole thing would take six months. The full rewrite isn't even finished yet, because I've still got another 50-100 pages left to write in More Work with Stories. But the first of the two books is now officially complete. If you are one of the dozens of people who have helped me during this project, please accept my profuse thanks.
As I did for the Intervention chapter, I'll pique your interest with a table of contents for the Return chapter.
Chapter 12: Narrative Return
- - - Why support the return phase?
- - - How return happens
- - - Ideas for supporting return
- - - - - - Supporting return in your PNI practice
- - - - - - Supporting return with your steering committee
- - - - - - Supporting return in your entire community or organization
- - - Supporting ongoing story sharing
- - - - - - Why story sharing happens
- - - - - - Why story sharing matters
- - - - - - Assessing story sharing
- - - - - - Ideas for supporting in-person story sharing
- - - - - - Ideas for supporting mediated story sharing
What's next? Some last-minute tweaks for clarity based on reader comments I've been putting off reading (for fear of scaring away the part of me that writes new chapters), and then a daredevil plunge into the rapids of LaTeX and CreateSpace for final formatting and publication. "My" indexer has been working on a comprehensive, professional index over the past few months, and I'll be incorporating that into the final versions (with live links in the PDF, ePub and Kindle versions). Hopefully the end result of all this work will look, talk, walk and run like a real book.
By the way, in the misty future when this whole project is finally over, I would like to start writing in the blog again. I miss it. I've actually started several blog posts that followed interesting mental perambulations in the past year, but every time I slapped my hand and got back to book writing. I have -- believe it or not -- two ideas for essay compilations based on posts I've written here and posts I have in mind to write here when I'm done with the books. Since this blog used to be about more than book progress updates, I thought some might like to ponder the eventual return of essay writing.
I can still accept feedback for about another week or two, so if you would like me to correct or clarify anything in the book, speak now or forever hold your peace.
