Book Editing

I Hate It, Plus a request & a question

I received the technical feedback for Tidy First? on May 22 (I just checked). I didn’t touch the book until last week. Two months of nothing.

It’s not that there’s so much work to do. I’m nearly done with this round of edits (I still have copy-editing to go). It’s the emotional impact of editing that gets to me.

My sleep is disrupted. My skin is breaking out. My partner is commenting on my changed behavior. This is not good.

Request

The good news is that I’m almost done. The only big chunk I have left to do is I would like to include examples of Reading Order & Cohesion Order. I don’t have recent examples & I haven’t been able to find good candidates for re-ordering on GitHub in a few hours. If you want eternal fame or at least a mention in the acknowledgements, send me a PR applying one of these tidyings to an open source project. But it’ll have to be soon because I can’t do this much longer.

Question

I’m summarizing the planned Empirical Software Design series of books. I laid out the 3 books row-wise & column-wise & I can’t decide which one I like better. If you have a preference, please respond in the comments.

Why?

The personal growth question is, “Why does editing bother me so much?” Of my 8 books, I think this is the best I’ve ever done with this phase of book writing & it’s awful. But what’s my deal?

Losing control is one of my biggest fears. Actually publishing a book is the ultimate loss of control. All of those words are stuck there on that page forever. Well, not forever, just for a few years that they are relevant. And not infinitely many copies, just a few thousand copies if I’m lucky. And only the physical books are unchangeable.

What I’m confronting is the fear that my words will be misused. I spoke at an Agile Africa event & had someone come up to me & say, “I just want to talk to users & program. All this ‘agile’ stuff is getting in the way of that.” I burst into tears. I wanted users to know that they mattered & programmers to know that they mattered & what I had written was being used to squash them both.

I think I need to accept this. Some people will get nothing from what I write. Others will take what I write & learn & grow. And others will take what I write & use it to oppress others. I can’t control how people use what I publish.

I can control how clearly & carefully I think before & as I write. I can control how clearly I express myself. I can control how honestly I see my own intentions. That’s it. The rest is up to y’all.

I cost myself 2 months out of the next book stewing on this. Okay. I can’t get those 2 months back. I can finish the bits & bobs I have left. So that’s what I’m going to do now. Peace, friends.

Discounts

To thank you all for your support & feedback during the writing process I will have a discount code for you to order Tidy First? when it officially appears (the draft is already available). More on that when the book is released in October.