Sunday, January 20, 2008

Second Time Around

I'm about halfway through Draft # 2 of the Agile book. What that means is that I've started back at the beginning of the book, and am going through it, chapter by chapter, trying to make it better in terms of flow and continuity. In some cases, this is the first time that I'm re-reading sections (in others, I've been over the material a few times before). I haven't had to do as much corrective surgery as I'd expected, but then again I've only been looking at the earliest parts so far.

It's hard for me to imagine how anyone reading this book is going to receive it. Is it going to be at all interesting to someone who doesn't care about the subject matter as much as I do? Is it going to offend some people, because they'll pick the one sentence out of the 50,000 words that suggests that maybe they didn't do some aspect of their job as well as they think they did? (Not that anyone's named, because no one is... but I'm sure some references will be obvious.) I saw an example this week of someone reacting to an almost-universally positive blog post by choosing to attribute a negative tone to it because he interpreted one or two sentences in a particular way. This made it a big deal, in his mind. Imagine the field day that individual could have with my book, if he ever got his hands on a copy?!

Oh well... I suppose I could always just limit the print run to one copy and nip that problem in the bud!

2 comments:

Mike Marsman said...

looking forward to my signed copy :)

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

But then I'd have to print two copies!

OK, maybe I can swing a 2nd copy, as long as you don't take it into work!