In case you’re wondering what I’ve been up to lately I can sum it up in one word: editing. My editors at Pearson have been awesome (I think I’ve said this before, but I don’t think I can say it enough frankly) making suggestions that will make this book much, much better than the one I wrote in the initial (submitted) drafts.
What all these suggestions have meant in reality is that I’ve rewritten large segments of several chapters. The biggest change from the initial outline has been splitting chapter 1 into two chapters. Chapter 1 is now more of an intro to blogging and a little history (I cut a lot of history which I will post here). Chapter 2 is now titled “Building Your First Blog” and fleshes out starting a blog and pulls in content from (now numbered) chapters 5-11. In those chapters I had replicated sections from chapters as I went, tweaking it a little, but over all it was almost entirely a copy-paste job.
That was a sucktastic idea. Pretty much book writing epic fail.
Yes it was my first book and I should cut myself some slack (I’m not beating myself up about it, really), but I think the idea was more than a little flawed. Regardless the good news is that I was able to wholesale delete most of that content from each chapter then replace it with specific, new content that applies to that type of blog (personal, business, podcasting, video blogging, portfolio, and lifestreaming). The end result is a much, much stronger book, IMHO.
Writing my first book has been an eye opening experience. Wow, it’s a lot of work (I kinda knew that), but I love it. I really and truly love it.
Between writing books and teaching I think I’ve found my calling. My teaching and writing are symbiotically linked as well. The more I teach a topic, the better I can write about it and vice versa. All I can hope is that I can just keep writing and teaching as my primary job with a little consulting to keep my skills sharp.
If you’re in Vancouver and want to attend one of my classes, my podcasting class (full day) is this Saturday (Oct 17) and my full-day WordPress class is Oct 31. I will be teaching more classes come January so if you can’t make it this month you’ll have another chance.
Also this week is Vancouver BookCamp which I believe is sold out, but there might be last minute tickets available the day of the event (Friday). I’m moderating a panel/talk on using digital editing tools. Yeah you can guess where I got the ideas for that topic huh?
Oh and my BCIT class starts this week too.
Yeah just a little busy. Coffee is my friend. Maybe my BFF.
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