Technical Editing in the 21st Century

Just published by Prentice Hall, Technical Editing in the 21st Century is the title of a new textbook I co-authored with Nicole Amare and Barry Nowlin. ISBN 978-0131196773. Available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (where the title and the description still include obsolete subtitles) and other sources.

New book: Self-publishing with OpenOffice.org 3 Writer

My new book Self-publishing with OpenOffice.org 3 Writer is now available in paperback from Lulu.com. Downloadable PDF is coming soon.

The online draft version of the book starts here. I will update the online version when I have time.

Publishing and life

Internet connection out for awhile this morning. Amazing how much thinking & writing gets done without the distraction of, uh, research.

Back to the self-publishing book. Finished revising another difficult chapter, in between writing a short article for an editors' group, formatting Lyn's book, painting bookshelves, and (yesterday evening) moving sprinklers and hoses to water the vast expanse of lawn and garden beds near us that the management's watering system isn't doing. (We've reported the latter problem, so some day it may get fixed.)

First cut at front cover design for Lyn McConchie's Rural Daze, using artwork by Judith Giddens, who also did the interior illos.

Wii research & book revision

Today we asked a salesperson in one store about connecting a Wii to a computer monitor, not a TV. She gave completely wrong info (claiming audio inputs weren't necessary), and was most emphatic about it. Eventually conceded she knew nothing about games consoles, only computers. Later, in Harvey Norman, we inspected the Wii gadgetry section and found the necessary cables. Not that we've decided to buy a Wii; just curious.

Later, did first-pass revision of Chapter 3 of my self-publishing with OOo book. More slash-and-burn. Can't believe I'd included so many irrelevant topics.

Lyn McConchie's next book

Cover art and interior illustrations for Lyn McConchie's next book in the Farming Daze series just arrived. I really like the work of Judith Giddens, the artist.

Progress on Self-pub book

Got the self-publishing book off to the editor this morning. Hooray!

Wallabies and writing

A mob of at least 7 wallabies (not counting the joeys still in pouch) are munching their way through the lush new grass near our house. We go out occasionally and shout "Eat weeds! Eat weeds!" but they don't seem to be paying attention.

Working on second draft of my book on self-publishing using OpenOffice.org Writer. Have done most of the content changes suggested by reviewers; now working on formatting. Still need to create a few more examples, with illustrations.

New book on technical editing

I have a chapter in a forthcoming book from Baywood, New Perspectives on Technical Editing. My chapter is titled "Copyediting and Beyond". I was allowed, even encouraged, to include some of my opinions on editing, which many editors find heretical—and others find liberating.

The Art Of Community

The Art Of Community is a new book being written by Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager, which will be published by O'Reilly in 2009. Topics include:

• Sustainable processes for management
• Tools and infrastructure
• Building buzz
• Measuring aspects of community success
• Conflict management
• Handling live events
• Scaling the community

The book will be available for purchase in print and will also be released online under a Creative Commons license. Read more about the book here. I'm following progress on the book (on its website) and looking forward to reading it when it's done, or parts of it as they become available online.

Support Creative Commons

I'm a Creative Commons fan; I like their philosophy. If you're not familiar with CC, you can read about it here. Browsing around their website reveals much of interest, including notes on which organisations and individuals are licensing some or all of their output under one of the several CC licenses available.

Writing another OpenOffice.org book

Although I “retired” at the end of 2007 from my role as lead editor of a group (OOoAuthors) writing OpenOffice.org user guides, I still have a lot I want to say about using the parts of OOo that I use everyday and think I understand fairly well. So I'm self-publishing again. My first project is a book with the working title of Self-publishing using OpenOffice.org Writer. The book is for beginners to intermediate users of OpenOffice.org Writer. It concentrates on the needs of people writing a book-length document such as a thesis, a novel, or a software user guide, including people who want to self-publish their book using one of the on-demand printing services like Lulu, Booksurge, or Lightning Source. I'm publishing the draft on one of my websites (Taming OpenOffice.org), using WordPress. This has been an interesting learning experience, because I wanted to make the navigation sidebar for the book’s pages different from the sidebar for the rest of the website. The simplest solution I could find (that I could understand) was to create and use a second page template, so that’s what I've done. I’m sure there are other ways (such as a conditional PHP statement) to make the sidebar show what I want, but at this point I don't want to distract myself too much from the writing by trying to learn enough PHP programming to get that done. I intend for the book to be available eventually in HTML, PDF, and printed forms. And when that's done, I have several other books in my mind, eager to get out.

Tiger Daze published

Today I published the lastest in Lyn McConchie's series of farming and animal tales, a volume titled Tiger Daze. It's published through Lulu and is available in paperback or PDF. Here's a direct link. The author lives in New Zealand. In 1989 she purchased a small farm and settled down to farm and write books. In both activities her cats have joyfully assisted her—not always when wanted. This is the story of Tiger and his feline friends—a tale of roistering cats and their frequently bemused human. Lyn has sold short work and novels to publishers in America, Canada, the UK, Russia, Poland, Australia and New Zealand. She is three times winner of New Zealand's Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best SF/Fantasy Book of the Year. I published two earlier books in the series through Lightning Source; they are available on Amazon.com: Farming Daze and Daze on the Land. Lyn's website is here. I need to update it.

Roadkill Australia

Last July I caught up with someone I haven't seen in nearly 30 years. Len Zell was then a nature photo­grapher and biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, north of where I live now. He is now a photographer and author, with a string of credits for his field research and ecotourism work. Len was one of the lecturers on board the Kimberley cruise boat. Like me, Len had moved away from Townsville some years ago to pursue his career interests. Turns out he was moving back to Townsville in September. In December I was invited to attend the launch of Len’s latest book, Roadkill Australia. The launch was fun, and as I suspected, several people there remem­bered me from 30 years ago, so we had a pleasant catch-up session over the champagne. Len had chosen his "launchers" well. One is a local media personality who did a hilarious introduction, insulting the book and half the audience, to everyone's delight. The other is a professor of marine biology at the local university, who also did a good job of the local jokes and references to Len's life, starting from the days when we had all met each other in 1974 or so, there in Townsville. The book is an interesting mixture of biological information, somewhat tongue-in-cheek recipes for cooking freshly-killed critters ("carefully remove the gravel..."), along with health warnings ("may contain parasites and be unsanitary"), anecdotes about the author's experiences, photos of dead animals, and other stuff. Find it on http://roadkillaustralia.com/.