Hello everybody. I have just finished rewriting the 9th chapter of Working with Stories. I have 5 chapters left to go. The writing is going well, and I am gaining confidence in my hope that WWS4 will be more helpful to people than WWS3 has been. I'm wrapping up my gift to the world, and I'm grateful that I have the chance to do it.
When I am ready, possibly by the end of 2024, I will be posting a draft copy of WWS4 on workingwithstories.org to gather feedback before I begin to prepare the book for publication.
A very helpful reader has been sending me such useful feedback on the chapters I have rewritten so far. I want to thank that person with all my heart -- as should you, because they are making the book better for all of us.
I don't think I can handle any additional early readers at the moment,
but I will be in great need of your feedback when I post the draft
version of WWS4 (and the second draft of WWS-S). So watch this space, and watch workingwithstories.org, for updates.
The writing is going well, but it's also going slowly. That's because I am working on three books at the same time:
- Working with Stories, Fourth Edition (WWS4)
- Working with Stories Simplified (WWS-S)
- Working with Stories in Depth (WWS-D)
For those who are interested, here's what I am doing:
- I am working to trim the length of WWS4 down as much as I can. I have been shrinking my longer explanations and moving several whole sections to WWS-D.
- At the same time, I am reformatting WWS4 for easier reading, with one column, more white space, and more tables and lists. This adds pages, but it looks a lot better.
- I am also adding a lot of new content to WWS4 based on what I have learned over the last ten years. This is also a source of new pages! But I think it's making the book more useful.
- My original goal was to bring the length of WWS4 down from 650 to 500 pages. I'm not sure if I will be able to do that, but I will keep trying to balance brevity with clarity and utility.
- While I do this, I am also working to trim WWS-S down from its current draft length of 300 pages to 250 or 200. I am removing many of my longer explanations there (which would fit better in WWS4) and replacing them with shorter versions. I wanted WWS-S to be a quick-reference "cheat sheet" for the longer book, but I ended up putting too much into it, so I'm taking it out again.
- Right now I am just dumping sections from WWS into WWS-D. But when I'm finished with WWS4 and WWS-S, I will trim that book down as well. My plan is for it to include the most important "extra" stuff people are likely to want to read about PNI after they have finished reading WWS4 -- and not just everything else I have written about PNI ever. So I will be moving a lot of my older writing into a last-stop archive (not a book, just a PDF) for the few brave souls who want to rummage around in the dregs.
- Finally, when all of this is done, I will finish the Working with Stories Sourcebook, expanding it from 36 to 50 sets of questions and adding 50 case studies.
I would love to finish all of this by the spring of 2025, but I can't promise any particular date because ...
A large project that I have been hoping will happen for years is actually, finally going to happen. I have promised to work on it, part-time, for the next few years. I am very excited to have the opportunity to pour my heart into a new and exciting PNI project. This also means that I can keep doing what I've been doing for the past 25 years. That's amazing, and I am so grateful.
Starting soon, however, I will be fitting my work on book revisions around my work on the new project, so my writing progress will slow down even further. Luckily I'm used to doing that, so it should be fine.
If you want to see my new writing right now, my suggestion is to look at the draft version of Working with Stories Simplified, which is on the workingwithstories.org web site (look on the "More" page). Because I am moving some of what is in that draft to WWS4, you can consider it a sort of preview of my revisions to that book.
