Respite

For the past two weeks (and for two weeks hence), I've been teaching a summer class to a group of students who will be officially entering college in the fall. It's an academic boot camp for them: four weeks, six credit hours, total immersion.

And it's total immersion for both student and teacher. Putting together two hours of activity each day, followed by grading homework and quizzes, is more than a full-time job. It's rewarding work, though, and the students are both totally overwhelmed and rising to the challenge. Makes me appreciate how underworked ordinary college students are, and strengthens my resolve to be tougher on them during the school year.

While all of this has been going on, I've completely ignored THE BOOK. Up to this point, THE BOOK has been an all-consuming activity: when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing, or wondering about the prospects for THE BOOK or musing on what I might want the cover of THE BOOK to look like.

For the first time in a long time, I haven't had the time to do that, and it's been good for me. Instead, I'm field-testing the book with my summer students, and reading it myself as I go. And I have to say (though some might say I'm a biased source) that it's not awful. Different than most textbooks, and certainly different in both style and substance than the ones I'm directly competing with. But it reads well, and I find it interesting enough (though if I found it boring I think that would be a really bad sign).

What the summer has done, then, is buoy my spirits about the project and strengthen my resolve to see it published. I'm happy with what I've done so far, and ready, once summer school is over, to see this project through to the end.

In the meantime, it's been a great rest.

Reviews

I sent my manuscript to an acquisitions editor, whose job it is to screen proposals and pick likely looking proposals for further consideration. Part of that process is sending out manuscript submissions for review by people who teach the subject matter regularly.

My manuscript was sent out to five reviewers in June, and it took for-EVER for the reviews to come back! Well, it seemed like forever. But truthfully, each reviewer had about a hundred pages to look at and make detailed comments on, which is not a small undertaking.

When the reviews came back, sometime in October, the acquisitions editor and I spent about an hour on the phone dissecting them. The good news was that the reviews were generally positive. The bad news was that several of the reviews noted that my preliminary table of contents did not include coverage of a fairly major topic area.

That lack of coverage might turn out to be a deal breaker. More on this soon.