Writing a textbook

Blog on writing the textbook
Two and a half years ago now, I was finishing the first cohort of principals and teachers using participatory action research (PAR) to study issues of children experiencing homelessness or high mobility. I remember how proud I was of their efforts, of what they had learned and how much I wanted the world to hear and embrace their stories. So, being me and always being ready, if naively, to go for the top, I looked up the writers proposal guidelines for Sage Publications and sent off a quickie proposal to them.
Naïve is the word, although I am still very new to this business of books, at least now I know that this first proposal had no chance of being accepted. I hadn’t done my homework: I didn’t know that Sage is mostly the side of this business that produces textbooks, nor did I realize that this book had little chance of selling big numbers and therefore needed to be published by a publisher for whom little numbers would be fine. In other words there was never a match between the idea and the publisher.
The universe still supported the move, not by publishing the book as suggested, (later self published on the web by the company I worked for at the time) but rather by helping me birth my dream of becoming a writer. I received a call from an acquisitions editor (didn’t even know what her title meant at that time) who told me that Sage produced textbooks. She was calling, actually to ask if I would like to write one on PAR? She had some books she with which she wanted to compete. With this call, although I would not know it at the time, a new life for Margie and I was born.

Time zips ahead in chunks:

• During the first chunk Margie and I go to Dillon reservoir, having read the competition, and plot a textbook that makes the most of what we feel is important adding bits we don’t see in other’s work. With the help of a research assistant I craft a new proposal for Sage.
• During the second chunk I finish my dissertation and start the web based side of this work.
• During this segment I write the whole PAR process out for the first time. While I was proud of it, this writing later proves to be a really bad draft.
• Right after we move to Ireland I re-sort those bits of writing and send off three chapters to Sage for review. The reviewers varied widely from loving it (can’t think why in retrospect) to hating it. I redraft the first three chapters, learning a lot from the reviewers as I go.
• This last summer was spent drafting chapters 4-11. It was a good thing I didn’t know many people in Kinsale because I did not feel put out as I watched them play on the lawn while I wrote. Fortunately we had lots of visitors from the US so life was not completely dull.
• After two months rest, I picked up the final reviewers comments and started the final edits. This process began about a month ago and I expected to be done by the time we went to Budapest (where I am now writing this piece).

As the reader may have guessed, the book is not quite finished, but thanks to Alan Bucknam, our third author and the artist who did all the diagrams and figures we use, we have a timeline and are checking off items. The book will be in finished form to the publisher by Dec 7th. This means we are months ahead of the editor’s schedule, the timetable pushed up so it can be adopted by classes for the fall of 07.

This blog though is not meant to be a rehash of events, but more a discussion of the personal evolution during writing. Early on this summer, after receiving the first reviews I faced the idea that I had nothing to say, and felt totally inadequate to the task at hand. It seemed a miracle (it still does) that Sage wanted this book from such "a nobody" like me. After that phase came a bit of revival and I realized that I do have opinions (when have I ever not had opinions???) and that there were things that I wanted to say. The challenge there was that I was still trying to marry what others have said to those ideas and the output was garbled.

During this last push I have re-edited my first chapters and listened, with a fresh ear to the comments of my reviewers. Bless them; they had two consistent messages, which are probably the messages of all reviewers at some point. First they told me I ramble when I don’t know exactly what I want to say. Better to put the energy into knowing exactly how I want it to look and what I want to say at the beginning. And second, they told me that the whole needed to be crafted so that the reader knew at all times where they were in the book’s progression.
As we explore Budapest during our not quite celebratory vacation, I am beginning to plot my next couple of books. One is the story of our lives taking us those few years from the US to Ireland. Simultaneously I am looking at a self help book for people who want to reinvent their lives. Perhaps they are two books, perhaps one.

I am reading about proposals, and editors, and the process and learning in hind site how lucky I was all over again. And I am listening to the basic messages of our first reviewers. Don’t lose the forest for the trees, or the trees for the forest. This one is difficult because I have always loved knowing the whole and then wanted to shift to understanding the miniscule variations that make up the complexity that is that whole. The middle ground, the trees, is not the level to which I naturally attend. Perhaps this is the message of writing for me: to translate the way I see the world into a form which is accessible to others.