Progress Report - April 2009

[Daryl Kulak]

I don't know if you know this, but this book is seven years in the making (so far). My goal is to get it into print before we hit eight!

I thought it might be good to offer a quick progress report on where we are and what our next steps need to be.

We've identified 26 chapters. But we aren't writing the book chapter-by-chapter (which is kind of how Eamonn and I wrote the first book). Instead, the process is more like this:

• Hong and I meet once a week, usually on Sunday morning. I call it "the church of Hong." Anyway, we talk for about two hours about the issues of the day: problems either of us is encountering on the job, ideas we've had, things we've learned from our recent reading. With each issue, we try to link it back to the book. What is our solution? How does this relate to our work with systems thinking and Rosen's work? Then I write notes on this and put it into our chapter files. I'm using OpenOffice on my Mac. We were using Google Docs but it went down for about 4 weeks which caused me major concern, even though we had pretty decent backups. So I switched to local processing.
• After the meeting, my mind is usually buzzing. (Must be the green tea.) These meetings are like a recharge that gets me through another week of writing. When I was working, writing always occurred on weekend days. Now I write only on weekdays and leave the weekends for housework and yardwork (which was suffering before, believe me).
• I don't write 8 hours a day, but I set daily goals for my day, depending on what else is going on. (I am trying to get another job, after all!) Most days I can write between 1000-3000 words. But I have no problem setting the goal at 500 if I have a bunch of meetings. Something achievable.
• Each chapter is growing incrementally. Some chapters have a bunch of progress, some have almost none. Our biggest chapter right now is our Theory Chapter, which has 38,566 words, and our smallest is IT and Business Agility, which has 82. Our longest chapters (after Theory) are "Rethinking Project Management" (22,396), "Treat People Like People, Not Like Machines" (17,636) and "Employ and Reward Critical Systems Thinking" (9,712). But who knows how they'll end up? We might take a big section out of the PM chapter and it will be down to something manageable.
• We are writing like crazy and deleting nothing. We just keep adding more and more ideas, sections, topics and stories to each chapter.
• Every once in a while, I start to get confused about the ideas we have in a chapter. When this happens, I print the chapter out on paper, take it into the kitchen, and pull out each idea or story and put it on a yellow sticky. Then I put the yellow stickies up on the kitchen wall (my wife loves this) and rearrange them until I have a sensible order and structure. Then I go into OpenOffice and rearrange the topics and stories to match the yellow stickies on the wall. Here are some pictures of the yellow (and other color) stickies taking over various parts of our house):
  
  http://agileplusrigor.ning.com/photo
  
  
• So we continue with each chapter, bit by bit, word by word. We hope to be done this process by the end of May. At that time, we'll have around 200,000 words overall.
• Then we will start our own editing. We'll take out all the junk that we didn't delete earlier and reorganize the chapters so they make sense. Chapters will disappear, some new ones will emerge.
• After we've taken our edit knives to the manuscript, it should be back down to about 130,000 words, which is roughly 380 pages. We'd prefer a book to be below 300 pages (for readability and not to overwhelm the buyer), but may not be able to live by that for this book.
• Then we will submit it to a publisher. We will try my previous publisher, Addison Wesley, first, of course. They've asked for the right of first refusal. They did a great job with my first book, so I really don't mind going to them first.
• Let's say Addison Wesley accepts our manuscript. They send it out to some technical reviewers who look at it and decide if it is worth publishing. If they say yes, Addison Wesley gives us a contract, which we negotiate, and then we sign.
• Normally, this is when the writing begins. But for us, it will be rewriting and editing at this point. Then we put the manuscript to a copyeditor of Addison Wesley's choice. We make those fixes and then we're ready to submit to publishing.
• Eamonn and I thought that this publishing process took absurdly long with our Use Cases book. Four months, I think. Ridiculous. Anyway, once that is done, the book hits the shelves. The co-authors each get ten free copies of the book delivered to us.
• We have the biggest friggin' party you've even seen. My house. Be there.

That's all I can think of.
Questions (all you aspiring book authors)??