The Four-Editor Milestone

At a party a few days ago, someone asked me what I do for a living. When I told him that I get the bulk of my income from freelance writing, he asked whether I found it nerve-wracking to wonder if or when the next writing assignment would come in. I said that was the least of my worries—I have far more writing jobs than I have time for, and that’s been true for nearly a year now. Most writers, consultants, and other freelancers are happiest when jobs line up sequentially, with as few gaps as possible. For the past many months, I’ve had the dubious fortune of having as many as half a dozen jobs stacked up at the same time. This is my very least favorite work state, because I don’t believe in multitasking. But that’s another story.

I’ve been making my way through this long list, which included four different new or updated ebooks in the 140-plus page range, some smaller updates, and a bunch of longish Macworld articles. Today, I reached an interesting milestone. Counting the article I sent in today, I now have the first drafts of four different manuscripts sitting on four different editors’ desks—three different Take Control editors and a Macworld editor. (If they’re all really slow, I might get as high as six manuscripts out to five editors, but I’m not counting on that.)

All of these, of course, will come back to me marked up with all sorts of edits and queries, and will have to be rewritten to some extent. (Generally, there are two or more iterations of that process, and then the manuscripts go on to technical reviewers and copy editors.) But rewrites of this sort are, for me, a far easier and quicker task than the initial draft.

I’m not saying I’ve been an especially fast writer, or that my editors have been especially slow. This is just the way things happened to pan out right now. Still, I’m feeling pretty good about the fact that my current list is down to just a couple of not-so-huge projects, and then, after the rewrites, I have at least a slight shot at returning to my ideal situation of working on just one project at a time.

For those of you keeping track, the manuscripts that are now well on their way to ebookhood (ebookdom?) are Take Control of .Mac, Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, and a fairly significant update to Take Control of Mac OS X Backups. Next on my list: a minor update to Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail, mainly to address some changes in Tiger. Later (as in, early next year), there’ll be a larger rewrite of that ebook to cover spam management in all Mac OS X email clients. Last but not least, look for a minor update to Take Control of Now Up-to-Date & Contact around the time Now Software ships version 5.1.

October 26, 2005 by Books Mac Stuff

The Lost Notebook

Tragedy struck this evening. I lost my Moleskine notebook. I was on my way to meet Morgen after work, pick up a bite to eat, check out a new bookstore, and then go to the 2005 San Francisco kick-off party for National Novel Writing Month, which begins on November 1. I’d brought my trusty notebook along to record the inevitable flashes of inspiration. Instead, my notebook and I parted company along the way—I’m guessing probably on the subway or in the station somewhere.

Following Bruce Chatwin’s advice, I put my name and contact information in the front of the notebook, along with the promise of a reward if the notebook is found and returned. No one has contacted me yet, and BART’s lost-and-found office was closed, so there is yet hope that some kind soul—or, hey, some greedy soul who wants to pick up an easy $100 reward—will yet come through with it. But I find it hard to be sanguine.

It feels a little bit creepy to have lost it, sort of like losing a wallet, or maybe a diary. It didn’t contain any money, or big secrets, or million-dollar business ideas, or details of sordid affairs. In fact, I think it had nothing in it of any value whatsoever to anyone but me. Still, those were personal thoughts and ideas, dreams and observations. I would be annoyed if it had been destroyed, but I’m much more disturbed that someone else could be reading through that little corner of my brain right now. That stuff wasn’t meant for public consumption, or even for private consumption. It was just for me.

Ironically, I’ve been working the past few days on updating my ebook about backups, and this data (analog as it is) was not backed up. I’m not even entirely sure what all was in this particular notebook. At the party, when I mentioned my loss to a couple of fellow novelists-to-be, they sympathetically suggested getting into the habit of photographing each page as it’s filled or faxing myself copies of the pages. Those sorts of tactics would, of course, provide the necessary backup (albeit at a significant inconvenience), but they still don’t protect the information already in the notebook from prying eyes.

It’s funny, too—I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit worried about losing my computer. Everything important on it is heavily encrypted (and religiously backed up) and the hardware is insured, so I’d simply report it to the insurance company, go buy a new one, reload my data, and continue on my merry way. But paper, for all its virtues, denies me that security. I could write in code, but that’s way too much bother. I could use a PDA, but I’ve found them just too cumbersome for taking notes. I did buy a replacement notebook, but there’s no way to replace the lost ideas, or the lost privacy.

October 20, 2005 by Books Travel

Pursuit by Happyness

One evening last week, Morgen and I went to a theater in downtown San Francisco—just a few blocks from where she works—to see a play featuring our friend Christopher in the role of (among other things) a homeless man. On our way, we walked down a block that had been closed to traffic and was full of moviemaking apparatus. Someone said they’d heard Will Smith was filming a movie there. Other than the barricades and a few glimpses of lights and cranes and so on, we didn’t see much, and I didn’t think anything of it. I’m not a particularly big Will Smith fan, and I’ve seen other movies being filmed here in town. Walked right past Robin Williams on the street one day, for example.

Then yesterday afternoon we noticed that all the billboards in our local BART station had been replaced with ads from ca. 1980. And in the evening, we saw tons of large white trucks unloading equipment, setting up tents and porta-potties, and generally taking over that block of our neighborhood. Today, we happened to pass through the station a couple of times, as the subway is our usual mode of transit around the city. And sure enough, the entire Glen Park station, just a few blocks from our home, had been converted into a movie set—with loads of cameras, lights, cables, and other gadgetry. It was quite fascinating (from a purely gadgety point of view, of course). The directors’ chairs were all silk-screened with the logo for The Pursuit of Happyness, coming next year to a theater near you. Will Smith stars as (among other things) a homeless man named—I’m not making this up—Christopher.

I might also mention, just as a passing observation, that the last name of Smith’s character in this movie is Gardner, and our two visits to the BART station today were on our way to and from watching The Constant Gardener.

In yet another random coincidence, today’s entry on my friend’s blog But She’s a Girl, titled “Imagining Nothing,” concerns both Bill Bryson (one of Morgen’s favorite authors) and the Big Bang, a topic I’ve been discussing a fair bit recently. And on our way down the street from our home this morning (right after reading that entry), we passed a garage sale where one of the featured items was a huge children’s book called Big Bang: The Story of the Universe.

These are the sorts of events that really shake my faith in the indeterminacy of life. I can only take so many coincidences without suspecting someone, or something, is behind them. In this case, I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on. I’m being pursued by Happyness. Or Will Smith is stalking me.

October 16, 2005 by Entertainment

Taking/Losing Control of .Mac

Last Saturday, after months of writing interrupted regularly by delays of all sorts, I finally breathed a deep sigh of relief as I submitted to my editor a manuscript for my next ebook, Take Control of .Mac. This is a project I’d hoped to complete during the first few months of the year, and which was getting in the way of finishing some long-overdue updates to my other ebooks. What with my ebooks on upgrading to Tiger and Now Up-to-Date & Contact, Macworld articles, Interesting Thing of the Day, and other interruptions too numerous to mention, I simply couldn’t make it happen sooner.

So this morning I woke up, sat down at my computer, and discovered within the first 30 seconds that I now have a major revision ahead of me, before the first edition even goes out! Not to mention the fact that I’ll need to revise Take Control of Mac OS X Backups more significantly than I already knew I needed to.

The main reason for these revisions is that Apple has done something truly unexpected: they’ve actually made Backup a useful backup application. I can’t overemphasize the significance of this move. I’ve made no secret of my disdain for earlier versions of Backup, which lacked basic features I consider crucial. Although I’ve only spent about an hour so far testing Backup 3.0, I have to say that so far I actually like it. I might even use it. In fact, I might even go so far as to recommend it—for certain kinds of users in certain situations—in lieu of my old favorite, Retrospect.

Most importantly, Backup now performs additive incremental archives, which means that (a) it keeps old copies of files when they change, so that you can choose which one you want when it comes time to restore; and (b) it copies only new or changed files—not every single file—when performing a backup. It has other useful new features too, but I haven’t worked with them enough to say how much I like them.

Added to this is the fact that Apple has quadrupled storage space available to .Mac users for email and iDisk (from 250 MB to 1 GB); you can still buy another gigabyte if you want for $50 per year. Now, 1 GB still isn’t enough to back up your entire hard disk online (and it’s far behind the 2 GB+ limit of Gmail), but it’s certainly way better than before, and at least beginning to get into the territory of practicality. Limited storage space is yet another thing I complained about in the first draft of my ebook on .Mac, and about which I will now have to say somewhat nicer things.

Apple has made some really great steps in the right direction, and this makes me quite upset happy. (I’d like to think that my criticisms played some small part in their decision, but who am I kidding?) I now have to squeeze a few more days of writing into this week, which definitely makes me unhappy, but at least it’s for a good cause.

September 20, 2005 by Books Mac Stuff
Joe Kissell is a best-selling, award-winning, hyphen-overusing author and technologist, and the publisher of Take Control Books. He enjoys making complicated topics easy to understand. He’s also a husband, dad, and dreamer. Having lived in numerous places in the U.S., Canada, and France, Joe has now settled in Saskatoon.

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