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.

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.

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.