Walt at Random

Recently on FriendFeed, I noted my tendency to avoid memes–in this case, two of them:

1. An “ask me anything” meme happening on FriendFeed. I said that, if I wrote that, I would immediately disable comments on the note (which someone else had already done).
2. The “blog every day in June” meme, which is apparently specific to Australia and New Zealand.

I didn’t buy into #1 because I’m a fairly private person.

I didn’t buy into #2 not because I couldn’t make it happen–heck, I write every day and, since I’m currently not working on Cites & Insights at all, it wouldn’t be difficult. I could just harvest my Diigo account and comment on one item a day: Easy.

Do I think #2 is a bad thing? Actually, I don’t. As a general rule, I think bloggers should post when they have something to say, not out of a sense of obligation–but in this specific case, at least, I’m seeing a number of blogs that had pretty much gone dormant and where it looks as though the writers do have something to say. If signing up for the post-each-day meme gets them back in the habit of posting now and then, that’s a good thing. Of course, if the blog has 30 posts in June and then 3 posts between July 1 and next May 31…well, what the heck, things happen.

Which is another way of saying…

That it’s been longer than I’d intended since the last substantive post here–that is, the last post that says something as a blog post. Just over a week, actually, since May 24–and May had fewer posts than any previous month in 2011.

I’m following a number of interesting library-related conversation, but haven’t felt the urge to contribute more than a sentence or two on FriendFeed to them. I’m thinking about ALA (but have not, in fact, prepared a draft schedule yet–and if anyone wants to get together during the limited time I’ll be there, from Friday morning through Sunday night, this would be a good time to let me know: waltcrawford at gmail dot com, as always).

And I’m engrossed in the book project. My wife and I had dinner last night with one of our best friends (an odd dinner: the place we’d decided to meet was closed for an enormous bocce-related fundraiser, so we wound up driving across town to another favorite restaurant we’d been neglecting because it was so noisy–and it was not at all noisy this time). We were talking about various things going on. I got into where this book stood and the topic as a whole (low-cost/no-cost micropublishing and library involvement in it). The friend noted that I seemed fairly passionate about the concept and that it seemed like a concept most libraries could/should use. I agreed, and thought that I need to make sure that passion is reflected in the second draft of the book–that I add enough “why” to balance out the “how” that’s central to the book.

Second draft?

Yep. That’s where much of my time has been going. The first draft is complete, as of finishing the draft glossary on Tuesday. “First draft,” the way I work, really means heavily-revised formatted book that will go through at least one major editing round before I submit it as a manuscript. I think this one’s important and something literally every public library and probably quite a few academic libraries will find worthwhile.

Later today or tomorrow, I’ll start in on the primary revision process. With gusto.

And, maybe, I’ll have something to post about–not this project, probably, but something else–next week, or at least something before ALA.

As for C&I? Not thinking about it for now. I’m not sure where yesterday’s spike in sessions came from (it seems to relate mostly to volume 9, issue 9, which is a bit mysterious).

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 at 8:49 am and is filed under Books and publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.