David Weinberger ponders how to write his next book in public

Quoting from Everything is miscellaneous:

I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I want to handle blogging the writing of the book. I don’t think I want to put a blog at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com (there’s nothing there yet because I’ve had some domain issues) because researching and writing this book isn’t an isolated act for me. So, I’ll probably blog it here, using the tag “EverythingIsMiscellaneous.” Yes, it’s long, but tagging it “Miscellaneous” really would be misleading as an external tag.

I wrote my previous book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, completely in public, posting each day’s draft. Since I woke up every morning and, Penelope-like, undid what I’d written the previous day, that wasn’t a very useful way of getting readers involved. So, this time I’m thinking I’ll post drafts of chapters when I think they’re readable. And then I will beg for comments.

[Technorati tag:]

I was just talking to a publisher yesterday about some (very preliminary) ideas for what might turn out to be my next book. When the time comes, I will be sure to try to include as open a creative process as possible.

Of course David’s concern about how to tag book-related posts is interesting, as it implies a kind of meta-mobius entanglement based on the fact that (I suspect) his book will be to some extent about tagging and categorization itself, so the meaning of miscellaneous is relevant in several ways.


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