The coolest writing project ever!

I’ve been teasing this project on Facebook for a few months and today it can finally be revealed!

Dave Hinchberger of The Overlook Connection Press has been working with artist Glenn Chadbourne to produce a series of new dust jackets for Stephen King’s novels. Each cover is limited to 500 copies and singed by Mr. Chadbourne. Each jacket also includes a new essay from King-world authors ranging from Rocky Wood, Stephen Spignesi, Bev Vincent and even Anthrax’s Scott Ian.

Guess who was asked to write the jacket text for Sai King’s Dreamcatcher. Yes, yours truly!

Let’s just say it was the most difficult and fun writing assignment I’ve ever had the honor of completing. The fact that it had to come in at approximately 450 words, was a challenge all on its own.

You can see all the covers currently available @  StephenKingCatalog.com and check out my contribution specifically there too.

Me, I’ll be framing one of my copies just as soon as it arrives.

And Dave, thanks for asking and having enough faith in me to give me the chance to participate in this project.

Posted in Books, Writing Tagged with: art, stephen king, writing

Friday Reads: Dreamcatcher by Stephen King

Those of you that know me well know that I don’t re-read books all that often. Let’s just say that re-reading this one is related to a recently acquired writing assignment…

Posted in Books Tagged with: #fridayreads, writing

More Library Mashups cover released

My first foreword. Thanks for inviting me to the party Nicole!

Posted in Books Tagged with: mashups, writing

Andrew Fitzgerald: Adventures in Twitter fiction

In the 1930s, broadcast radio introduced an entirely new form of storytelling; today, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter are changing the scene again. Andrew Fitzgerald takes a look at the (aptly) short but fascinating history of new forms of creative experimentation in fiction and storytelling.

Published on Oct 11, 2013

Posted in Tech, video Tagged with: fiction, TED, twitter, writing

SSP Board Decides to Reinstate Removed Posts

Yesterday, the Board of Directors of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) unanimously decided to restore the posts by Scholarly Kitchen chef Rick Anderson that had been removed after the Kitchen and SSP received correspondence from a publisher that didn’t like the content.

The posts (“When Sellers and Buyers Disagree” and “One Down, One to Go: Edwin Mellen Press Blinks One Eye“) have been restored without the comment quoted in the letter.

Read the full article @ Scholarly Kitchen.

Posted in Libraries Tagged with: publishing, writing

CPD23 Thing #5: Reflective Practice

OK, here’s the obligatory “I’m behind” introductory sentence considering that this thing was a few weeks ago. But then again, here in Nebraska we’ve not required participants to do each thing during it’s original week, just be done by the deadline in October. So, I guess I’m still on track. However, one of my goals for today (this week?) is to get all caught up. So, here we go…

Reflective practice. I get it but I don’t honestly believe that I do it all too much. So let’s see what sort of recent event I have that I can work with? Oh yeah! I just helped co-write a book. That might be an interesting thing to analyze. Granted, it’s not officially “done” as there’s still the outside review of the manuscript and an editor to get through but assuming we’ve not done anything horribly wrong, the hard parts of the project are behind us.

Now, you’d think that since this would be my eleventh published book I wouldn’t have anything to reflect upon. Well, you’d be wrong on that one bucko. The trouble is, I was brought in at the last minute (just two months ago) to help finish a book that wasn’t my idea in the first place, with an author that I didn’t know, on a book that was a third person’s idea in the first place. I not trying to slag on this project or on the book itself, I think what we’ve turned in is going to work within the context that it will be presented. But the scenario in which I became involved wasn’t exactly ideal and it was way more work than I expected.

What exactly have I learned from this experience? Two things.

First, I need to learn to say “no” a little more often. When I signed up for this project I was already under two other book contracts and figured I could slip this one in over a few weekends. That didn’t happen. In the end, I took a few vacation days and actually rearranged my weekday schedule just to find some time every day (6:30-7:30am to be exact) to be able to work on this project. In the end my new schedule will help me out with other projects but that wasn’t part of the plan going in.

Second, I need to be more direct more often. At first I was “send me whatever when you’ve got it.” By the end I was “I need X by tomorrow and Y by the day after.” I don’t like being that direct with colleagues, but I think getting over that when it came to this project helped us get it all done by the (third revised) deadline.

What’s the application of what I’ve learned? Well, I’ve got two more books I’m working on both due within the next 9-12 months. One deadline is known, one’s a little more flexible at this point. The one with the hard deadline is with a (different) co-author, the other is mine alone. I guess I can’t say no to either of these projects but I can say no to others that may arise while these are being completed. As for directness, I’ll guess I’ll just have to suck it up and be as direct as needed to get the work done.

Let’s see how it goes.

Posted in Learning 2.0 Tagged with: cpd23, writing

Blogging & RSS 2nd ed. now available on the Kindle

Blogging and RSS: A Librarian’s Guide Second Edition is now available for the Amazon Kindle. The vaguely annoying part is that the content was sent from the publisher to Amazon and Amazon created the Kindle version. If I want a copy of my book in this format, I need to buy one from Amazon.

Posted in Writing Tagged with: amazon.com, blogging, ebooks, publishing, rss, writing

On writing books

Source: Gaping Void

Tagged with: books, writing

Early review of my next book

The manuscript of my next book Searching 2.0 has been reviewed by an outside (non-publisher) reviewer and things are looking good. Although the reviewer agreed to allow her comments to be used in  pre-publicity I’ve not asked them about quoting here so I’ve removed identifiable details. This isn’t the full review but you’ll get the point.

Truly, this is one of the most useful books I’ve read this year… It came just in time for me personally to continue my own professional development. The information is accessible for Web 2.0 tool beginners. However, the application of the tools and the full information he provided about the ways in which the tools work was clear enough to give me the extra bits I need to know about and organize the ideas for me. I’m recommending this book to my friends at [a large well known academic institution] as I type this up. 

One thing I really found useful and will consider adapting for my own teaching are his ‘mental exercises’ to explain what he is trying to say.

He convinced me to try Delicious again – I’ve tried it but find it a pain to share so now with his instructions I’m going to re-attempt the idea.

…if this were a workshop I’d attend somehow. I really want a final copy of this book – I have printed out the draft rather than just reading it online because I want to go back through it and find some quotes and ideas that I will use in my own workshops. I will cite properly.

I will be adding it to the reading list for the…courses I teach. I will – and have – recommend it to my colleagues as well.

[ChapterOne] is a short workshop in the basics in itself. The discussion of folksonomies vs. taxonomies clarified the issue for me in a way I can make use of in my teaching and research. Convergence, Remixability, and Participation discussions place the whole big Web 2.0 snarl into neatly understandable justifications for using Web 2.0 tools in the providing library services. Most other justifications I’ve read or listened to at conferences emphasize only the participation piece and that is not enough to justify extensive time and labor spent on these tools. Convergence is a great concept for justifying it. Remixability gave me some neat ideas that I hope I have time to implement in my own work this winter.

[Chapter Three] will be very effective in clarifying for librarians when and why to use Web search engines and when and why to bookmark or otherwise create a knowledgebase of what they find when they do use them so they can more efficiently re-use good results.

Wikipedia [Chapter Four] is such a touchy subject for librarians – [a certain listserv] has an ongoing argument when the topic is re-broached. Next time it comes up I will post a citation for this book and chapter for those who are confused or being fed bad information to use to learn the facts.

[The rest of the book contains] good discussions of specific search tools. Again even though I am not a beginner at this I picked up either some new information about each tool that will be useful in my work and teaching, but also good thoughts and ideas to use in my teaching. I never thought about teaching students to search their own desktop… good idea. Not sure how I’d teach it web-based though.

Just when I thought the long dark tunnel that has been the writing of this book was never going to end I read this. This has totally made my day!

Tagged with: search2.0, writing

I’ve been peer-reviewed

My first peer-reviewed article “Firefox Search Plugins: Searching Your Library in the Browser” has just been published in Volume 1, Number 1 of The Journal of Web Librarianship. I’m not specifically excited over the fact that it’s a peer-reviewed journal. I’m not an academic so that’s not exactly a requirement for me. I’ve written eight previous books and dozens of articles so I’m not exactly lacking in the publication category. Yes, I’m glad to have another article published (it has been a while and no, Christie, I haven’t forgotten that podcasting article we talked about at CIL) as always, but the peer-reviewed thing at this point is just fitting into that “nice, added bonus” category.

However, I do have one, not so much complaint, as a concern over this whole experience: the fact that an article I submitted to the journal back in July 2006, wasn’t published until July 2007. One year for a technology article to see print. These day’s that’s not even vaguely fast enough. In my specific case, at the last minute (December 2006), I had to get an extra few sentences added to the beginning of the article to say that the code I’m talking about was replaced with a different code/method with the release of Firefox 2.0 but that my code would still work. (Given the opportunity I would have re-written the whole article but the process was too far along for that to happen.)

The world of peer-reviewed journals is not mine. I don’t have suggestions for fixing this, nor will I spend all that much time on it. I just needed to say all this, as I’m sure I’m not the only author with these concerns.

Tagged with: firefox, writing