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.
- 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.
