Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 18 September 2004
Gloomy day of rain, so no soccer match for son #2, but contemplating a 5K with son #1 tomorrow in Providence—rain or shine. Quality time is quality time.
While watching a DVD last night with the boys, I started reviewing the 10 inches of weblog I’ve built since March. Yes, it stacks about that high.
The good news is, there are ideas and snippets I want to clip from about half the pages so far (and I’m only deep into April, when I was still constructing a lot of background material for PNM’s publication date). The bad news is: how to organize. That’s what Putnam is going to want to see most in a book proposal: clear organization.
This is what I find myself leaning toward right off the bat, understanding that I always—as a top-down thinker—put together the entire package in my head before I can even start thinking about the content. In short, I love to make lists, grids, X-Ys, etc. ad nauseum. I will do probably a hundred versions of this outline in the next week, before writing something up late next week and sending it off to my agent for review.
Best news yet is that Mark Warren is up for the notion. Spoke to him briefly last night as he was sweating out yet another Esquire deadline (middle of the month is a bad time for people in magazine business, I discover). If we get the proposal approved in October, then we’ll spend a weekend together in Wisconsin at a Packers game, so plenty of time to banter around what needs to be done in the book.
Already, I get a number of emails about the second book. All full of good ideas, but I will confess I tend to skim them with an eye to discounting any idea that takes me away from what I know best, which is the big picture. In short, my drill-down is not the same as everyone else’s. If it was, there’d be little point in writing the book.
My first cut at chapters would look like this:
Preface) to link first book to purposes of this book
1) What the world needs now (what the world system lacks—e.g., the A-to-Z rule set on successfully processing politically-bankrupt states done up big time beyond the cursory reference in PNM; different style of leadership from US; different unified command plan for US military)
2) How we grow the Core (with emphasis on securing New Core’s permanent integration [so China goes here]; drawing on Ten Steps to a Future Worth Creating [from concluding chapter] list that speak to Core expansion)
3) How we shrink the Gap (likewise drawing on Ten Steps; emphasis on competing scenarios and disaggregating the host of key scenario timelines)
4) Villains that stand in the way (both inside the Core and the Gap—building off TM Lutas’ good phrase “implicit villains”)
5) Heroes yet identified (this would simultaneously be my “signposts” and “how to” chapter, using the construct of identifying—in advance—important people who would necessarily arise in this grand historical process, such as “the four-star military police general”)
Conclusion) would probably be a “what can you—the reader—do in your daily life to make this future come true”—so very advocacy oriented.
Those are the yellow-sticky notes now arrayed on a cupboard in the kitchen. I keep generating section notes and arraying them underneath the various columns, with the whole thing naturally mutating simultaneously across all parameters and I wind my way through the blog database and keep coming up with new and often conflicting ideas. This is a very sloppy phase of the work, but I enjoy it. It is the crunching time.
Noting two reviews today. First one is a non-review from magazine The Futurist. In the Sept-Oct issue they review only one book formally (The Cheating Culture), which has nothing to do with the future whatsoever, but really is just a social diagnosis for today. PNM just gets a blurb under “world affairs,” which I won’t repeat here or comment upon because it’s a straight lift from Putnam’s own “book description” that’s on both Amazon and B&N.com. Might have hoped for more from The Futurist, but there you have it.
So review I’ll offer today is another library-oriented one, this time from the Library Journal. It's a concise little piece from an academic.
Following that, here is today's catch:
•No grand jury yet on Iran and its nuke effort
•NATO wants a winning hand before committing any more to Afghanistan
•You can't join the Core if your president is also your uniformed military leader
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