Oh. Hi there! Gee, um… long time no see.

So I’ve just five minutes ago submitted the book manuscript that I’ve been working on for the last bit. (And just FYI, the deadline was today. And I took the last two days to fiddle with formatting, proofreading, screenshot collection, and the like. I’m stunned to be on time, because honestly, I never thought I’d make it.)

Anyhow, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking to myself, you know, one of the nice things about finishing the manuscript will be that I don’t know what I’m doing next. I’ve got some projects in the pipeline, don’t get me wrong, but no big, focused Project. Which means that I’m actually going to get to pay attention to the small things — which is to say that I’m going to get to be a blogger again.

The first order of business, however, is knocking a few things off the to-do list, where they’ve languished all summer while I sprinted for the finish line. And then I’m going to be working on getting the manuscript posted online, at MediaCommons, for open review. I hope that participating in the discussions coming out of that review process will constitute my primary scholarly work for the fall — and so I hope that you’ll come by and read and leave me whatever feedback you have to share.

Which is to say that I’ll be haranguing you to do so. But hopefully I’ll be able to pay attention to other things going on in the world, too…

I began the summer’s work yesterday morning by starting a read-through of the manuscript thus far, and was thrilled to discover that the introduction is not as far off as I thought it was. It needs a bit of tinkering, but a small enough bit that I’m comfortable putting it in the category of “revision.” So here’s what I think needs to be done between now and August 14:

– finish last section of Chapter 5 (on the university)
– research and write Chapter 4 (on the library)
– figure out how to turn CommentPress article into Chapter 3 (on networked publishing structures)
– possibly write a conclusion
– revise!

It’s not as bad as I feared, but it still makes me want to hyperventilate.

I’m in the midst of a section in the project in which I’m discussing the potential for strategic collaborations within universities around the issue of digital scholarly publishing. Among such collaborations, I point to a number between university presses and university libraries, including those at the University of Michigan and the University of California. Numerous other such library-press collaborations exist — but what I’m not currently finding is such a collaboration in which the university information technology center is an explicit and active participant. Do any of you know of such a program?

I finally got a chance at the very end of the MLA to sit down for coffee with Dave Parry, whom I’d tried but failed to catch up with at several earlier moments of the conference. Among the things we talked about (writing in public, digital scholarly publishing, etc.) was a brief bit of chat about our preferred writing technologies. Dave asked what I’m composing Planned Obsolescence in, and I told him that my initial chapter structures generally get put together as a massive text-editor brain dump, which at some point I import into Pages for finer writing and editing.

Dave mentioned doing a lot of writing in Scrivener, a drafting program I’d written about experimenting with some time back. The conversation made me ask myself why I’d decided not to draft in Scrivener, given how excited I remain about the package — and I never really came up with a good answer.

So I took a morning and imported the draft as it stood into a Scrivener document (or a “binder,” in fact, a cluster of documents and snippets that are working toward a draft), to see whether the interface might actually provide some benefits for the project as it stands.

Thus far, it has: being able to focus in on one section of the text, while maintaining a sense of the relationship between that section and the overall textual structure, works far better for me here than in the endless scrolling word processor window. And, as I mentioned in my last post, given my propensity for writing my way into holes, but my desire to keep writing and fill those holes later, Scrivenings’ annotation tools are quite useful.

Scrivenings is another system, like DEVONthink, that I’m pretty sure I’m not using to the fullest extent of its abilities, as yet, but I’m enjoying the process of figuring out how it can help me envision the structure of a big project, while keeping its bigness from becoming overwhelming.

1. I am writing my way into new holes far faster than I can do the research and reading necessary to fill them. On the one hand, this is great; I’m clearly making progress on the chapter. And what I need to be doing right now, more than anything else, really is writing, even of the broad strokes, fill in details later variety. On the other hand, I’m trying to do both some writing and some reading each day, and each day’s writing changes my sense of the most pressing thing for me to be reading, so I keep picking up new texts each day.

2. Attempting to keep the details of a complex project straight in one’s head becomes significantly harder when the head in question is so occluded by unspeakable substances as to cause significant degradation in one’s optimal oxygen intake. Which is to say that I have another cold, and I’m seriously annoyed about it. Stupid MLA.

If you’re a Facebook status watcher and a friend of mine, you may have seen the recent update in which I announced that I have a contract. It’s an advance contract for Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, which will, if all goes according to plan, be released in commentable draft form here and at MediaCommons, revised, and then published simultaneously in electronic form by MediaCommons and in print by NYU Press.

It’s phenomenal news, of course, and enormously exciting. As a friend of mine pointed out to me, though, all good news in academia comes with more work attached, a pricetag of sorts. This one’s a bit daunting: the entire thing is due in just about a year.

I’ve got my work cut out for me, needless to say, but it promises to be an exciting year. More about the project here, of course, as the process becomes clearer…

Just before plunging back into my chapter this morning, I took my usual tour of the RSS feeds, and discovered DR’s post about collaborative authorship and its benefits. And just in the nick of time: the section of the chapter that I’m working on today is about the benefits of collaboration and other forms of socially-situated scholarly writing.

Most of the time, when scholars (outside rhet-comp, at least) discuss the benefits of collaboration, the first claim that gets made for it is “increased productivity,” a phrase that cannot help but raise specters for me, on the one hand, of some old forgotten joke about the new tractor and the Soviet five-year plan, and on the other, of Bill Readings’s assessment of the Fordist enterprise that higher education has become: “Produce what knowledge you like, only produce more of it, so that the system can speculate on knowledge differentials, can profit from the accumulation of intellectual capital” (164).

So I resist thinking about collaboration as a means of getting more work done. What I’m interested in is the ways that collaboration and other social modes of writing, and particularly those enabled by digital networks, might allow us to get better work done. (I say “other social modes of writing” because I want to include in the category that I’m thinking about not just literal co-authorship but also electronic extensions of phenomena like writing groups, in which the input of respondents can become as important to the process as the work one does in solitude.)

I’d really like to hear about your experiences: if you’ve worked in such a collaborative environment, how did it improve your work, either on the level of process or of product? What were the benefits of working, as DR describes, in a conversational framework? What, if any, were the drawbacks?

(And if there’s particular stuff in the literature about collaborative writing that you would feel a section of a chapter on digital authorship to be incomplete without referencing, I’d really love to hear about them…)

I’m having one of those brilliant, and altogether too rare, periods in the writing process when everything that I’ve been up to, but didn’t really know on a conscious level that I was up to, has suddenly clarified, and what seemed like random bits of noise suddenly coalesce into message. And I don’t want to stay away from it too long, but I did want to make a note of it — I spend enough time whining about the difficult moments in writing that it seems like a good idea to celebrate the moments when it’s going well, too.

Good grief but it’s disheartening to look at today’s “five years ago” post and realize that I’m not only still asking many of the same questions, but also still need to look in many of the same places for the answers.

On the other hand, it’s nice to recognize that, given all the false starts and diversions it feels like I’ve encountered since the days of the INP, I was at least partly on the right track then, and things are moving forward in appropriate ways.

This post brought to you by my misplaced Protestant work ethic, which demands progress, progress, progress!

I eagerly anticipate at some as yet undetermined point in the future having a complex thought of which I do not later discover Jay David Bolter has already said a portion, both more intelligently and a decade earlier.

(I feel compelled, however, to note two attendant ironies:

1. The chapter on which I’m currently working makes as part of its argument the claim that one of the ideas about authorship that we’re going to need to loosen our grip on a teeny bit as we move into the digital future is that of originality.

2. One would think I’d already spent enough pages disagreeing with the notion of the anxiety of influence to suddenly find myself feeling it.)