One Writer, Dozens of Editors

Not quite back from vacation I foolishly moved my crackberry from stun, to loud, and shortly thereafter received an invite to join an unscheduled (for me) conference call with the internal publishing group. I was a couple minutes late to the call but quickly learned that there is a lump of process to follow, none of which I had been aware of earlier. Yikes!

I'm about 50% complete with the first draft, of which such status I share when asked. I never expected to hear "Stop right now! You can't start writing until your outline is approved!" She was serious! Apparently, they expect he process to be followed and there was some concern that I would be wasting time writing now, when the outline my very well be changed.

I don't see this as much of a concern. Frankly, I would prefer to cut-n-paste from too much material, rather than come up short and have to write new material from scratch. The whole purpose of this projects was to re-purpose the work I had already done, in presentation and white paper form, and bring it all together into a single, cohesive book experience. So I'm wondering what the editors will come up with, to strengthen or reduce the outline. So far, some internal reviewers of the outline have simply determined that "It looks good. Get-er done!". My simple goal is to not be the bottleneck in this part of the process - the writing. Whatever it takes to get it into book form - I don't have any control over that. But metering the pace of writing - that doesn't seem very sportsmanlike.

But it was concluded that I needed to prepare and submit a book proposal, which would include a detailed outline, resume, and a whole lot of other stuff that the marketing folks will need when this project goes to press. And it needed to be done ASAP. So I got it together, updated my resume (which I hadn't done for over six years) and pushed out the goods Monday night.

Silence.

So far.

On the contractor front, that seems to be going well. I've chatted with my so-to-be-anointed collaborator/editor/I've_done_books-before dude. We have the first draft of their services proposal. I have that into our internal team for review and comment. The 'hot potatoes' are off in other hands. And I keep chugging along.

Part of the book proposal application was a couple of questions along the due diligence theme. Has someone else covered this topic? What publications have a similar theme? What makes your book different.

I took a moment to pause and reflect. This could be a useful bit of exercise. I've always popped off a google search, from time to time, to see if anyone has done something significant for APM and never came back with much. But them I was a little bit more biased towards performance of distributed architectures and not simply Application Performance Management.

After a concentrated effort, I starting finding a few leads. I had a moment of panic - "Crap! Has someone beat me to the punch?" But on further review, a couple of good ideas but not at all the message I'm planning to drop on the Industry. So what am I finding? I'll lay that out over the next couple blog entries.