I’ve decided to reboot my “themes for study and learning” blogs, with a couple of twists:
- Weekly instead of Monthly. I wasn’t getting much of anywhere with the monthly themes; they were too diffuse and too easy to put off. A weekly rhythm is more actionable?
- The Theme is tied to my weekly main goal.
So this week the main goal is vomitout a section for my book proposal on “Why I’m the Right Person to Write ‘7 Hard Problems.”
Perhaps some context is in order.
I’ve decided to get serious this fall about a book project I’ve blogged about in the past: “7 Hard Problems”, a book about solving a bevy of difficult personal and societal problems — the contradiction between individual wealth and the common wealth, for example, or global vs. local. You can read the one-pager if you like.
The first order of business was to finish the one-pager, which I did early in the summer. This fall I’m trying to put together a book proposal. I’ve got an outline and a fair amount of sample material, so it’s time to work on other sections of the book proposal.
I’ve put off working on what I call the braggables section of the proposal — how many followers I have, how peerless my insights are, why any publisher would be foolish to refuse me — because I have a hard time bragging about myself, but it is time to put it off no longer.
So I’m starting this week with an easier braggable section, something about why I’m the right person to write this book.
That’s the work theme for the week. I’m going to slog away at it Monday through Thursday.
Part of slogging away is reading some stuff about publicity, about self-promotion, and about platforms online and off-. So I’ll be digging into the publishing/TED talk/platform/persona literature this week, starting with stuff about how to do TED talks and how they help the publicity effort. If you have suggestions in this area, please comment.
In addition to working away at the theme, I’m continuing my reading for the book itself. I’ve been reading Lenin and Philosophy (or, rather, re-reading it, since I read it many years ago under circumstances I explain in “7 Hard”). There’s a handsome new edition out now with a generous preface by Frederic Jameson. So that’s reading objective #2 for the week: finish Althusser.
Finally, I’m wrapping up a book I’ve been reading before bed, “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life…” by James Hollis, a Jungian shrink. I’ve been reading about a book a week on the topic of “what the hell to do with myself in ‘retirement'”, and picked this one because I’ve always had a soft spot for Jung and because it was recommended by another book I read in this area. Hollis has taken much more than a week to finish, partly because his style is a little ponderous, but partly because it doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep at the end of a day.
So that’s it. This week, trying to set out why I’m the right person to write “7 Hard Problems”.
I’ll sum up how things went on Thursday.