Three down, one to go - And send me a blurb!

My pace is quickening. 

I have just posted my pre-publication draft of The Working with Stories Miscellany: Essays and Other Writings on Participatory Narrative Inquiry. It's on the "More" page of workingwithstories.org.

The new miscellany book (formerly called "In Depth") comes to about 420 pages. It brings together 38 pieces of writing that didn't make it into the third edition of Working with Stories, were removed from its fourth edition, or floated up from a blog post. I organized and updated all of the pieces of writing, leaving out another 25 or so pieces that didn't make the cut.

Next I will turn my attention to the last book in the series: The Working with Stories Sourcebook: Questions and Cases for Participatory Narrative Inquiry. For that I just have to write some more question sets and clean up some case studies. After that, I will begin to prepare all four books for publication: proofreading, adding indexes, finishing the book covers, and setting up the print and Kindle versions. 

I need blurbs!

On the back of the third edition of Working with Stories I put some blurbs written by anonymous readers of the book. All of them came to me unsolicited in emails. I did that because I'm not a fan of reciprocal blurb networks. I like blurbs to be about books, not about how famous blurbers are. 

I would love to put more anonymous reader blurbs on my new book covers. If you have read Working with Stories and would like to say something about it to its future readers, please send me a blurb (cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com). 

If I get ten blurbs, they will all go on the book covers. If I get 50 blurbs, I'll put some on the book covers and some inside the books. Either way, I'd like to ask for your help describing the value of these books to potential readers. Saying "I wrote these books because they wouldn't leave me alone until I did" doesn't sell books. Maybe you can help me say something better.

WWS4 is ready to read

I am happy to announce that I have just released my pre-publication drafts of Working with Stories (the 4th edition) and Working with Stories Simplified on the book's web site (on the More page).

I am also happy to report that, even though I greatly increased the white space (thus readability) of WWS4, and even though I added a ton of new content, I was able to bring the page count down to just over 500 pages. I will be adding another 10-20 pages back in when I build the index, but the book will still be 80+ pages slimmer than it was ten years ago.

This new edition of WWS will also be more helpful. I've learned a lot over the past ten years, and the new edition reflects that. Rewriting the book has been a long and difficult task, much more difficult than I expected, and this will probably be its last edition, but I am very glad that I got the chance to work on it again.

While I was revising Working with Stories, I also revised my first draft of Working with Stories Simplified, and I was able to bring its page count down from 300 pages to 155. Both books have the same chapter and section names, but every section in WWS-S is essentially a summary of the same section in WWS4. Because I want WWS-S to stand on its own, the parts of WWS4 that matter the most -- the exercise instructions, for example --- are identical in both books. 

At the moment, both book drafts are littered with typographical errors, clumsy pagination gaps, and imperfect sentences. That will all be ironed out during the proofreading phase. If you happen to read either book before then, and you spot any errors (or just get confused), I would very much appreciate a heads-up. It's amazing how many little typos can slip through the cracks. 

What's next

Next I will turn my attention to finishing Working with Stories In Depth. Right now it contains:

• More Work with Stories (the original "extra" book, which I never finished)
• All of the too-long-and-detailed sections I removed from WWS4 
• A lot of blog posts that don't have a good place to live

I don't want WWS-ID to be a mess, so I am going to be careful about what I keep in it. Probably about half of what is in it now will end up in a fifth document, which I will not publish (or even call a book) but will make available as an archive for the overly curious.

Then, when WWS-ID is done, I will finish The Working with Stories Sourcebook. I already wrote 36 sets of questions for it, so I have just 14 left to write. I also have a lot of case studies (in various forms of disarray) to clean up. And then that's done.

Finally, when those two books are done, I will be ready to prepare all four books for print and Kindle publication. I hope to have all of that done by the end of the summer, or if I am very lucky, sooner.

The future

What will I do after all four books are finished and published? I am not sure. The big exciting project I had started to work on is ... in limbo. It still might happen, and it might not. If it happens, I will do it, and if it doesn't, I will go back to looking for a job doing I-don't-know-what. I have been thinking about starting up some (paid) PNI Practicum courses again, and I'm not ruling that out, but I'm not sure if it's worth doing at this point. 

At the moment, I intend to focus on getting these books done. In the interim I am still available for consulting and coaching, so if you need some help, let me know.

 

 

More progress

Hello big crazy world. I have just finished updating the Sensemaking chapter of Working with Stories for its fourth edition. It took months, but it's done, and it's a lot better than it was.

Only three chapters left! After those are done, probably in March or April, I will release the first draft of WWS4 and the third draft of Working with Stories Simplified on workingwithstories.org.

After the first two books are done, I'll finish the last two books (WWS Sourcebook and WWS In Depth). I expect that to take until sometime in the summer. At that point all four books will be available on the web site.

Then it's on to publication: finalizing pagination, adding indexes, checking bibliographies, and so on. I always seem to need to read through proof copies of my books five times to find all the typos and imperfect sentences, so I guess I'll be doing that again. I hope to have all four books available on Amazon (in print and Kindle versions) by sometime in the fall. I don't make that much on Amazon purchases, but every little bit helps.

A nascent possibility

I am considering the prospect of rebooting my PNI Practicum courses, starting in the summer or fall, with a new open enrollment system. Instead of publishing course start dates, I would ask people to tell me which course they want to take and when they want to take it (in what months, on what days, at what times). I would keep track of these requests in a sort of waiting list. If and when any of the lists got up to eight people, we would all meet to decide when our course meetings would happen.

I would probably offer the courses at the same prices I used before, with a new price for the new short course (Prelude $600, Level I $1600, Level II $2000). If I could fill up one course of each type per year, I could probably keep giving the courses for some time. 

Of course, now that I've written and released the instructions for running the courses, nobody needs me to run them; they can just download the materials and take the courses on their own. I'm glad I did that. I hope people are using them. 

At the same time, I think it's at least possible that some people will want to take courses I run myself. That's the business model I've been using for a long time: information wants to be free, and bespoke advice wants to be compensated so it can continue to give information away for free.

Let me know if you have any suggestions about this idea. 

Some other changes

I have made two decisions that will impact how the WWS books will look and work, and I wonder if anyone would like to tell me how they feel about them.

WWS chapter-ending summaries, questions, and activities. I have been putting off updating these parts of Working with Stories until I finish rewriting all of the chapters. But I am starting to think that it would be better to leave them out of the next edition.

• Working with Stories Simplified is a chapter-by-chapter summary of Working with Stories. So I don't really need end-of-chapter summaries anymore.
  
• In the ~12 years since I wrote the chapter-ending questions and activities in WWS, nobody has ever mentioned them to  me. People mention lots of parts of the book, but nobody has ever mentioned those. So I think they must not be that pivotal.
• I can finish the book faster if I leave out those parts.
• People should not be doing "activities" when they are reading WWS. They should be doing projects. Also, there are many project-related activities (things to try) in the texts of the chapters themselves (and there are more now than there were then).
  
• Originally, I wanted to pose questions to get people to think about what they were reading (as opposed to following it by rote). But I do have lots of questions scattered throughout the chapters.
  
• Leaving out the chapter-ending parts would take about 20 pages off WWS. The page count is hovering around 600 pages right now. I was hoping it would go down to 500, but given the extra white space and the new writing, I don't think that's going to happen. Still, I would like to keep it down as much as I can.
  

WWS-S photographs. Ever since I start thinking about writing Working with Stories Simplified, about three years ago, I have called it "the picture book." Now that I am working on (the third draft of) WWS-S (as I work on the fourth edition of WWS), I am starting to hate its photographs.

• The basic idea of WWS-S was to write a book for people who hate long books so much that they can't bear to even begin to read WWS. (I have met quite a few of these people, and I want to respect and help them.) But photos add a lot of pages. I would like to get WWS-S down to 150 pages, or even 100. Right now, with photos, it's at 220.
  
• What looks right in a slide show doesn't look right in a book. For one thing, to fit the pictures into the book, I have to shrink them down a lot, and it is hard to see the details. For another thing, the visual style of the photos is all over the place. It looks messy and maybe even amateurish.
  
• Some of the photos are not very illustrative. I tried to find the best photos I could find to convey each concept, but I have to admit that I didn't always succeed. The overall effect is scattershot: sometimes helpful but sometimes confusing and distracting.
  
• To use the photos I will have to print the WWS-S interior in color, and that will reduce its benefit as a shorter, cheaper version of WWS. I was resigned to the extra cost when I thought the photos added a lot of value, but now I'm not so sure.
  
• I have been experimentally taking photos out. For roughly 80% of them, the removal feels like a relief, like an obstacle to understanding has been removed. For the other 20% it feels like a loss, like an aid to understanding has been removed. But if I print the book interior in black and white, I think that 20% will go down to 10%. So I am thinking that I will keep only the very best photos, the ones that still feel necessary in black and white.
  
• Of course the best solution, quality-wise, would be to replace the photos with drawings. I could do that, but it would take a long time. This is volunteer work, and I have a limited budget.
  

If you have any opinions or suggestions about these decisions, I would absolutely love to hear them. I am eager to get these books done and out into the world, all grown up, living their best lives, being read and used by people who want to make things better for everyone.

 

Finally, I'd like to say a special thanks to everyone who has been helping me out with feedback and encouragement so far. I appreciate it very much.