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 second 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.