Writing a Book

You know how it is, a conversation starts with a guy from a book company, and before you know it, I am republishing a 1906 issue of Mitchells Construction, then he says, “Fancy rewriting the current Edition” well, what can you say, sure, be interesting, without thinking of all the research and back reading you're going to have to do.

Add to that the academic papers you need to read and conversations you need to have with all those industry experts. Plus, the time I now need to spend collating all the information, the rereading and cutting, the links to pictures, and drawing work.

If I had only said no, but the draw the project had on me started the second I was asked, and it was not going to let go.

I now spend strict hours on the two books; oh, did I not tell you, the only way to get all I wanted was to split it into two separate books, an introduction, and the more meaty Advanced, so much for an easy life.

Now I have another problem, the vast amount of reading material now here I was lucky enough to have heard about Zotero, a really good Bibliography program that was not only easy to use but was a Mac program that worked with Pages, and in particular Safari; problem solved, a day, well actually three days work to add all my old construction books, a load of academic papers, and some trade magazine.

It was here I encountered some resistance from Zotero; it did not understand ISSN now, most books will have an ISBN reference, enter this into Zotero, and it will populate the record with all the data I need to Cite correctly, but magazines are not listed in ISBN, they have their own referencing system ISSN, which Zotero does not yet recognise, but it will allow me to drag a pdf of the said journal and half populate the register, allowing me to fill in the remaining info for edition and so on. Not a huge problem but time-consuming, given the number of trade and professional magazines I need to list.

Pictures of sites, details, and any other Architectural gems also needed collecting. Apple Photos is not bad, so here was another week or so spent pulling photos from Google, not easy, I might add, into Apple, and scrolling through the endless list of old photos, I have to add the relevant pictures to a subfolder that I can then use to drag into Pages.

You might be asking why Google; well, for a lot of reasons, I switched from a lifelong love of Apple to Google simply because of Moodle; Apple did not play well with this Academic interface the University used, so I used chrome books to solve this, and before I know it, I had a lot of photos in Google, getting them downloaded, is not hard, but it took time, by now I have retired from University life and move straight back to Apple, Oh joy, I can understand why Chrome books are so well-liked, but boy going back to Apple, was heaven.

That's the prep started, now, I can split time up between writing, and the inevitable reading, watching Youtube videos and zoom chats. All the ongoing stuff leaves little time for real writing.

So here I am, taking time out to gather my thoughts, and I have only an hour left of my allotted time. But it's a nessasery thing to do, and I need the distraction.