writing

This morning I launched The Writer's Technology Companion, a new blog covering the tools of the writer's trade. This is a project I've been working on for several months, now -- I wanted to make absolutely sure I could keep it up for the long haul with everything else that's on my plate. So a lot of planning went into the site, with several dozen posts written and "in the can" so I don't have to worry about running short on content anytime soon.

Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA went on sale a couple of days ago. As far as I can tell, it's now available worldwide, wherever fine books are sold.

Order your copy today!

A while back, I mentioned that I was putting together some material on writing and technology and thinking about launching a new site around it.

I decided to go ahead with that project, and am well into getting the site up and running. The site is called The Writer's Technology Companion and will be launching sometime in March at www.writerstechnology.com. There's a launch page there now, where you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe to the RSS feed so you'll be informed when the site officially goes live.

Every semester, I spend a lot of time explaining the term paper assignments to students. I talk about them when I hand out my syllabus, I spend a good half-hour discussing the assignment about 3 weeks into the course, and I revisit the topic several times up until the last week before the due date.

Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. "Does it have to be typed?" "What size margins should I use?" "What style do you want the references in?"

I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas -- which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.

Last August, I wrote about the high price of textbooks and what I feel is an exploitative relationship between authors and publishers on one hand and the students we serve on the other. An officer of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA), to which I belong, came across the post and asked me to write up my argument for the TAA Newsletter. The piece is coming out in print next month, but is already up on the TAA website. The post itself is in the member's only section of the site, but I'll post it to my portfolio once it's out in hard copy.

I'm mulling the idea of starting a new site devoted to writing and technology. I've got a name, a likely domain name, and am building a nice chunk of content to launch with. The idea is to discuss the particular technology needs of writers (of all sorts) using the web to promote their work and develop their audience.

The question is, am I better off starting a new blog devoted solely to that niche or to start integrating that content into this site?

The advantage to posting it here is that I already have a decent amount of traffic, I have a good position in Google, and I wouldn't be splitting my attention and time off to yet another project.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what direction my career is headed in and whether I'm happy with that. At the moment, I have a kind of split career. In one career, I teach college students about important stuff like race, class, gender, and culture. In the other career, I write for several websites and other outlets, including some commercial writing. Both make me happy while I'm doing them, and both are incredibly rewarding.

I read a lot of other people's writing, in both my role as a teacher, grading papers students hand in, and as an editor at lifehack.org, preparing contributors' work for publication on the site. Lately, I've been noticing a strange phonemenon: the gratuitous Capitalization of random Words.

It's as if suddenly we've returned to the days of Pilgrim's Progress, where Words are capitalized to show that they represent Important Concepts -- except the words That are capitalized are often not All that important. Or it's like we suddenly adopted German Grammar, where all the Nouns are capitalized -- except it's not Just nouns. In fact, I've searched in vain for a pattern, and can't find one.

I just heard from my publisher that my book, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA, has just arrived from the printer and is ready for release! They're mailing me my copies tomorrow.

I just finished a 3-part series of long articles detailing how I put together and got published my forthcoming edited volume, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA.  If you'd like to see how an academic work gets from idea to published (technically, "almost published" since it's not quite out yet -- but soon!) check it out at the anthropology blog Read the rest of this entry »