Saturday, February 1, 2025

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. 

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.


Sunday, November 3, 2024

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. 


Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Surgery

Major surgery. Not for me. For Working with Stories.

Lately I have been expanding my book Working with Stories into a four-book series:

  1. The fourth edition of the original book (Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry)
  2. Working with Stories Simplified -- a shorter, faster, cheat-sheet version of WWS
  3. The Working with Stories Sourcebook -- a reference book of questions and case studies 
  4. Working with Stories in Depth -- a catch-all repository of everything else I have written (and think is worth keeping) about the fine details of PNI 

Recently I finished writing Working with Stories Simplified, which I started working on two years ago when I was building my online courses. Next on my list was the updating of WWS into its fourth edition.

I have not touched the third edition of WWS since 2014. I thought I would only need to change a few things here and there. Ha!

Last week I went through the new and old books, comparing what I had written in each. I am happy to report that my embarrassment rule (that when I look back on older work I ought to be embarrassed) is working perfectly. I have learned so much more than I realized over the past ten years of doing PNI and talking to people about it. That's wonderful! But it also means I can't just tweak a few things in WWS. It needs major surgery.

So I have a dilemma. The most common negative comment I have gotten about WWS is that the book is too long. But I have so much more to say than I did ten years ago. I feel like WWS needs to double in length to be useful. That can't happen!

After much thinking, I have come up with a plan.

Simplified came out at 300 pages, which was twice as long as I wanted it to be. That partly happened because some of the new things I wanted to say about PNI slid into my writing for Simplified. So, having (I thought) finished the Simplified book, I am now going to move some of what I wrote in it to the main book, where it more correctly belongs.

I have begun to work section by section through both books, comparing what I wrote in Simplified to what I have in WWS.

  • In some cases, what I wrote in Simplified is still just a shorter version of what I have in WWS. I will not need to change those parts of WWS, though I will trim them down as much as I can.
  • In some cases, what I wrote in Simplified is not different in meaning from what I have in WWS, but I've come up with better ways to explain it since I wrote WWS. In those cases I'll update WWS to use my new explanations while I shorten the same explanations in Simplified.
  • In some cases, what I wrote in Simplified describes new ideas, concepts, or techniques that are not in WWS at all. In those cases I will add new sections to WWS. But when I can, I'll use what I wrote for Simplified and write new, shorter explanations there.
  • In some cases, I left sections out of Simplified that I have in WWS. In those cases I will consider moving the sections from WWS to the catch-all book (because maybe they aren't that necessary in either book).

My overall goal will be to update the entire book series to help people understand everything they need to know to do PNI without having to read more than they need to read. I hope to reduce the length of WWS proper to 500 pages and Simplified to 200 pages (and further if possible).

A few other decisions:

  • I plan to remove the double-column layout of WWS. I never liked it. I did it because it reduced the page count. I'll work on using fewer words instead.
  • Because I plan to change WWS so much, I have had to strip the index out of the book. It was a wonderful index! I paid a professional indexer to build it, and she did a great job. But its markers were spread all around the LaTeX writing/code, and I can't easily manipulate the book with it in place. I will write a new index. It will be shorter and simpler, but it will be adequate.
  • I might not publish the in-depth catch-all book on Amazon. It takes a lot of time to get books ready to publish, especially the Kindle versions. Only a handful of people have ever told me that they read More Work with Stories (the previous catch-all book). Making that book an online PDF-only e-book could save me a lot of time I can use for other things.

So that's the plan.

If you would like to tell me what parts of WWS you would like to see stay or go or change, drop me a note (cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com) and tell me about it.




Saturday, July 6, 2024

One down, three to go

I have just uploaded my finished book manuscript for Working with Stories Simplified. You can download it on the "More" page at workingwithstories.org. 

Now an update and an explanation.

When I wrote here last, I was looking for a job, having given up on making (enough) money from consulting and online courses. 

I looked for work full-time for about four months. It didn't work (difficult job market, weird resume), so about two months ago I decided to stop wasting my time. It looks like I will have to either reboot my consulting career or find a job unrelated to what I've been doing for the past 25 years. I've already tried the reboot option (that was the online courses), so I think it's time to do the second thing.

I'm fine with that, but I can't do it with all of this knowledge still stuck in my head! So I talked to my husband, and we decided to use some of our retirement savings to finish my four-book revision of Working with Stories. So I'm doing that, and unless I get a job (or a lot of consulting) doing PNI soon, this will be my final contribution to the field. It's time to hand PNI over to a new generation of thinkers and doers, and I'm enthused about getting all four books done at last. 

Next I will work on the fourth edition of Working with Stories, updating it to reflect everything I've learned over the past ten years and trimming out some of the less-used parts. When that's done, I'll finish the Sourcebook and the In Depth book. My plan is to finish all of this by the end of this year. Then I'll be ready to turn the page and see what comes next.

I do not plan to publish any of these books on Amazon (print or Kindle) until I have finished all of their content. But I'll be putting them up on my website in PDF format as soon as they are ready to read. (If necessary I can hire someone to do the technical parts of the publishing process.)

Wish me luck! If you have any comments on the new Simplified book, or if there is anything you think I should change (or add or remove) in any of the WWS books, now is the time to tell me.




Friday, February 23, 2024

New paper, new network name

Hey everybody. I wanted to tell you about a new paper on Participatory Narrative Inquiry that has just come out. Written mostly by my colleague Rachel Colla (though I helped a little), the paper makes a strong case for the use of PNI in Wellbeing Research. I was so impressed by how Rachel pulled together the growing body of research literature connected to PNI. It's worth a read!

Over at the Participatory Narrative Practitioner Network, we have decided to drop the last part of our name. Now we are just the Participatory Narrative Practitioners. We have also switched from Zulip to Discord for our ongoing chats. For the time being we are using Discord for our monthly meetings as well. The best thing about Discord is that the voice-chat line is always open, so we can meet up anytime anyone wants to. To join us, visit pnpnet.org and click the Discord link.

My job search is going pretty well so far. I sure hope people are reading my cover letters, because I am putting a lot of thought into them! If I have not already asked you for advice or to be a reference, and you'd be interested in either thing, please do drop me a line.