Book Update — August 3, 2013

I can't tell if it's running. It's running! Okay, it's running. Hi, I'm Tod Maffin. This is Mark Blevis. Hi. We are in a hallway in a restricted area of the Winnipeg Airport Hotel, and we're writing a book.

It's kind of an abandoned area.

It is. It's actually— we're not allowed in here.

We don't know that we're not. We assume we're not.

Well, look at it. So this is— they've got toilets and bedding and stuff, and we may have had to break a lock to get through here, but it's the only quiet place we could find, actually. So we are here working on a book together, which we can't talk about the title of the book or anything, but we just thought we'd give everyone an update on our respective Facebook, Twitter, all that kind of jazz. Why don't you introduce yourself?

Alright, I'm Mark Blevis. I blog at markblevis.com, which is easy enough to remember. M-A-R-K-B-L-E-V-I-S dot com. You'll have to spell your name now so I don't look like I was foolish.

Yeah.

And I focus on public affairs and relationship management and reputation management. So I guess that's me.

That's you, yeah. So we are—

But who are you?

Oh, oh, I'm Tod Maffin, and I, Mark and I know each other from way back from podcasting days.

And how many D's are in your name?

One D, one D, exactly. So we are in Winnipeg working on the book together. It's probably, we're aiming for completion around mid-September. Publication, who knows after that, maybe January. It's kind of a slow system the way publishers work. But fun nonetheless. Does that say 87%? Oh no, okay, good. Seconds. I thought we were running out of time. So the book writing process is kind of interesting. We've been doing like a little bit of like eating for a meal— meeting for a meal and then writing and then— how's it going so far? How you feel?

It's good. There are like two periods of my life where I've been so extraordinarily disciplined where I chunked off an extended period of time of, you know, working for a little while, stopping, working, stopping. And that's really what we've done. We're on day 3 now of solid work. And so tonight we, I think we're gonna probably go out for dinner and celebrate 3 solid days of hard work lining up pieces.

Brought an enormous cigar for that.

Oh, there you go. And then just chilling out a little bit tonight. Well, I don't know how much chilling you do. I want to knock off as many as I can while we're here before we scatter off. And what's actually— what's worked really well, what's really interesting is this idea of collaboration where you have, you know, you kind of feel like you have to step up your game, you have to amp up your game because you have somebody else who's relying on you to contribute your pieces. But also when you kind of feel like you're sluggish or whatever, the conversations really kind of re-energize your thought process. So having the person to go through to go through the process with has been really a lot of fun and helpful.

Yeah, and you know, we were sort of— it's the old system of break it up into a bunch of different chunks. And if an average book is, say, 50,000 words, and in each of these little writing blocks we each do 1,500 words, then each block we're getting either 3% or 6%. I think we're getting 6% of the book done every block that we go in. There's 3 writing blocks a day. So that's been pretty cool to just kind of like every time we meet, we're like, there's like a big chunk of stuff forward.

The other thing that's really been interesting, I don't know if you were about to say this, is the fact that we just kind of naturally ended up gravitating to these different sections, so we haven't been overlapping a lot, which is really good.

Yeah, we went on a field trip. We were trying to— the book has got 7, maybe 8, but probably 7 main chapters. We know what those are, we know how the book's going to be structured, but I was like fighting when we first arrived for this like substructure so that each chapter would have 3 or 4 sort of sub-things underneath. So we decided to take a field trip to Chapters and we looked at like 100 different business books.

Do you want to say some of the books? Yeah, sure. There's some really— and by the way, this puts a lot of pressure on us because there's some amazingly good titles out there too. Like Mitch Joel's latest book is Control Alt Delete.

Good book.

Fabulous title. Great book. Then we also looked at— oh shoot, what's the latest one from the Heath brothers? I can't remember the latest one, but they're the guys who put out Made to Stick, which are great authors. We looked at— oh shoot, I can't remember all the books.

And not the content, to be clear. Just the structure. Just like the table of contents to kind of see what did everyone— or some other models.

We read 3,000 pages and—

Yes, exactly. We took the books to the photocopier and asked if we could— but another model is Scott Stratton's book on marketing.

Oh, that's right.

A couple of books ago now, I think, for him. Where it's just one flat list of like 50 essentially blog posts. Seth Godin does that. He's got an enormous book like that. So that helped. It certainly helped me because it kind of— I think we came away from it realizing that my idea sucked and we should probably just do like a primary. And then it meant we didn't have to shoehorn stuff in. So I think that worked out OK. Yeah.

It worked out nicely.

Want to talk about writing tools?

Ah, yes. Yes. Well, the big one that we— we're using Scrivener, which is great because it's nonlinear, which is also good because we You know, when you edit audio, you don't necessarily edit linearly, and that's our—

And by nonlinear, you mean like, like we, like every chapter's got a folder and every little subpart of the chapter's got its own separate text file.

Well, you can break it down as much as you want to break it down, which makes it easy to move around. So if you have like a little anecdote that's only 2 paragraphs, you can almost drop it anywhere and you can move it around to wherever you want it to be. Rather than working like Word or Pages or whatever, where you have to write straight as an arrow, and if you go, "Okay, well, I'm kind of tired writing in this section, I want to go into the other section," you either have a separate document or you go to like 80 pages down, and so it becomes complicated to manage. So Scrivener is brilliant, except for collaboration.

Yeah, it sucks for collaboration.

So we use Dropbox, but we're in, the two of us, so Tod, you have your own file, which is Tod, do not save over, and I have Mark, which is implied, do not save over, and so we each work in our independent independent files, but we both have access to see what the other is working on.

Yeah, but if we— we did try to work off the same file in Dropbox and it all went to hell. Like it put—

Oh yeah, it was like corrupting it.

Well, yeah, it wasn't corrupting, but it was like putting— like I would write an article at the top level and then you'd open it up and it would be like in a sub-level or my stuff would be gone and moved over. Scrivener, if you're watching this, make a networked version that two authors at the same at the same time. But this seems to work so far where we can, you know, at the end of the writing block I usually just pop open your stuff and see how you're structuring things, and it seems to work OK. Have you seen the target functionality?

The target functionality?

This is one of the really cool— Scrivener is meant for writers, right? So I feel like I should be doing this because you're so damn tall. There we go.

But then if I do this, then I, you know—

Out of frame. Scrivener is really cool. You can set in the— it's in the very bottom right of the status bar. And it keeps track of your word count, which is really nice. So for each little article or subsection in your chapter— so if our target each is 1,500 words per block, and so, you know, you can see that. But we— we were about to get busted, I think, by security. But the— do you think she's gonna say anything?

Oh, I wonder.

We are literally in it. Oh yeah, she saw us. Oh yeah. I think we've got to wrap this up because security is probably coming. But you can say, "My target for this section is 1,500 words," and it keeps track of it. But it'll also, if you click that little thing, it'll show you a little progress meter to show you how, and it'll get closer to the green color as you get closer to your target.

Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

Yeah. Anyway, we should probably go because we really are not allowed in this part of the hotel. Like, it's really bad. So we'll probably do another update maybe tomorrow.

Or even later on tonight, maybe.

Or maybe even later on tonight.

Because you fly out tomorrow.

Yeah, good point. And I have my Churchill to smoke. If you want to find out about the book, be the first to learn about it once we release the title and the theme of it, just go to bit.ly/thebookalert. Bit.ly/thebookalert. Alright? Alright. Back to work. Back to work. This is the—

Don't forget your food!

Oh God, thanks. This is the walking off into the sunset closing here.

This, uh, are you still filming?