New book cover designs (and a brick wall)

Five weeks ago, when I wrote my last blog post, I thought that by now I would have finished The Working with Stories Sourcebook, the last in my new book series. But I ran into a brick wall. 

The big exciting project I mentioned last fall has now had its funding fully rescinded (for political reasons). I cared a lot about it, and it would have provided me with an adequate and stable income (and the ability to keep doing PNI) for four more years. It was the kind of "anchor" project that consultants like me rely on.

New book covers

In the midst of this I was talking with my son about my need and inability to get back to working on my books. He asked me to show him what I had left to do, so I did. He suggested that proofreading the first three books might help me to finish writing the last book. I said I needed to improve my book cover designs before I could order my first proof copies, so he offered to help with the redesign.

These were the design constraints we discussed:

• Because I wanted to distribute the four photographs from WWS3 across the four books of the WWS4 expansion, each book cover had to accommodate a single black-and-white vintage photo, not too large (because of limited resolution) and not too small (because they are complicated photos).
  
• Because I wanted to tie the books together as a set, I wanted the words "Working with Stories" to be prominently featured across all four books.
• To avoid confusion, I wanted to give people an easy way to distinguish among the four books. 
• I wanted to come up with a more interesting and attractive version of the covers than the placeholders I threw together last year.

Working together, we came up with this.

The swooping lines frame the inset photographs and identify the books by their colors and positions. If you place the books together on a bookshelf, the colored boxes step down (from left to right) in the order I think most people will want to access the books. 

Redesigning the book covers helped a lot, and I'm now back to work on the Sourcebook, making slow but sure progress. I have 2-4 weeks of work left on that book, plus 2-3 months of proofreading, writing indexes, and preparing the print, PDF, and Kindle versions of all four books. I hope to finish the whole book project by the fall.

Where you come in 

If you look closely at my first picture above, you can see that each book has a "Reader praise" section on the back cover, as WWS3 did. You can also see that the space is blank on every book but WWS4. 

I would like to fill those blank spaces with blurbs from you. 

Please take a look at the new books and, if you like them, send me (via email) a one-or-two-sentence blurb. I will have room for three blurbs per cover, but I can put more inside the books. If you would prefer to send a blurb about the whole set of books, you can do that instead. I will put those blurbs on the first pages of WWS4. As with WWS3, all of the blurbs will be anonymous.

If anyone would like to help me out with some careful proofreading (of any of the four books), I would appreciate the help very much. 

Finally, I am including a chapter on published papers about PNI projects in the Sourcebook. 

If you wrote a paper (or dissertation) about a project that used PNI, and you want to make sure I mention your paper in my book, send me a note. I have twelve papers in the list now, but there may be more I haven't seen.

What comes next

After the books are published - unless by some miracle I get a lot of new consulting work - I will go back to looking for a full-time job. This time I plan to repackage my skills (in technical/educational writing, software development, research project management, and data analysis) without (much) reference to PNI. That seems to be the only realistic way forward, given the disastrous result of my I-can-do-PNI-for-you job search last year.

Of course, I have already started to look for jobs, but I've made a deal with myself. Until the books are done, I will allow myself to apply for "dream" jobs in which I might be able to do PNI, or at least PNI-adjacent, work. After the books are done, I will put that dream away and focus on finding a real job. 

To be clear, I do make money doing PNI. I have done so for decades. It's just that my consulting gigs (and other business ventures, like my courses) haven't added up to an adequate or stable income for some time. It looked for a while like the big new project was going to change all that, but now it's gone, and projects like it don't come around every day. So I'm back to square one. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

A milestone

I recently realized that by the time I finish this book project I will have donated ten person-years of work to the world: 2.5 years on WWS1-3, 5 years on NarraFirma, and 2.5 years on the PNI Practicum courses and WWS4. 

Does the world owe me something for all of this? It does not. Nobody asked me to do any of it. And I did what I wanted to do, not what the world wanted me to do. Sure, I was guided by what I thought people needed, and by what people said they needed. But people need all sorts of things. It's not like I was out digging ditches.

Besides, I have received some donations and software commissions, and sold some books, over the years. I have been grateful for every donation and purchase. They have added up to about 2-3 percent of the money I could have made in those ten years - but again, I chose to do the things I did.

I know that my work on PNI has helped people, because people have told me so. I have been proud of what I have done and grateful that I was able to do it (even though it has been difficult). And I have been overjoyed to see people around the world using PNI in many and varied ways. 

Even so, I have come to the end of what I can do. It will soon be time for me to pass on the baton of PNI to a new generation of thinkers and doers. I hope some of them will grow to love PNI as much as I have loved it, and I hope that some of them will support it as well as I have. 

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.

Progress + gratitude

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:

1. Working with Stories, Fourth Edition (WWS4)
   
2. Working with Stories Simplified (WWS-S)
   
3. 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.