I have a weakness for books about writing and am a fan of Sara Paretsky’s fiction, so her memoir, Writing in An Age of Silence, was a natural choice. While it was not at all what I expected it to be, it is a compelling read. Yes it’s a memoir, and it reveals much about Paretsky’s background and how she came to be a writer, but there’s much more going on here.

If you’ve read her books, you won’t be surprised to discover that Paretsky is an unapologetic liberal, with a strong sense of social justice. She rails against the then-current Bush administration (the book was published in 2007), and expresses her views on civil rights, Chicago politics, feminism, the Patriot Act, women writers, and mystery writing.

This slim (138 pages) volume is cogent and concise. It reminds me of Molly Ivins books, though Paretsky lacks Ivins’ wit. Both write clearly (or wrote, in the case of Ivins, who died in 2007) about politics, but without the maddening over-simplification that characterizes so much political writing these days. Paretsky uses her skills as a story-teller to create compelling, and sometimes hair-raising arguments. Her indictment of the Patriot Act is particularly effective. I’ll admit that about two-thirds of the way through, I got a bit bogged down in a somewhat repetitious argument about women’s reproductive rights, covering points she’d made more effectively earlier, but for the most part her arguments are to the point and strong.

Regarding writing, she talks more about her personal motivation for writing and how she created her characters than about writing per se. This is not the place to go to get tips on tightening your prose or step-by-step instructions on how to create a passionate protagonist. But, if you pay attention, the book itself is a case-study in both. And, along the way, she has some fascinating insights. Her analysis of Dashiell Hammett’s books and how they influenced her writing has put a re-reading of The Maltese Falcon high on my list, and she may have even convinced me to tackle a book that “real men” wouldn’t be caught dead reading, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

While I found the political arguments compelling, it was her personal story and her insights into literature that kept me reading and in the end lead me to recommend this book.

I’m just returning from WebWorks RoundUp 2009. It was a road trip (I drove to Austin from Colorado), my first solo road trip in years, and so far it has been a blast.

First of all, thanks to WebWorks for providing copies of two XML Press books to attendees. All attendees got complimentary copies of my Managing Writers and Anne Gentle’s Conversation and Community, and XML Press gave away a copy of Alan Porter’s forthcoming book, WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit.

I thought the conference was a model of the kind of conference a company should have for customers. While the conference is open to all, it is primarily focused on WebWorks customers, who are an interesting, enthusiastic group of people, who are not shy about expressing their opinions.

I was equally impressed with the management team; the top managers were there throughout, accessible to the audience, and participated in most of the sessions, as moderators and participants. They got some honest (i.e., tough) comments from the audience, and handled them well. That said, the positive out-weighed the negatives by a mile.

The conference was divided into two tracks. The first was a “Boot Camp,” which matched up customers with technical experts, with a loose focus (things like Automation and DITA) that as far as I could tell served mostly as ideas for discussion. The second was a more traditional panel-focused set of sessions, with some case studies. This is where I spent most of my time.

Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns, gave the opening talk and joined the first panel, which centered on wikis and social media. His talk and the panel set a direction to the conference around wikis and using wikis as part of documentation. He brought up, though no one really answered, the question of whether you can use a wiki as your complete documentation set. I suspect it will work with some, but not all, products.

XML Press authors Anne Gentle, Alan Porter, and I were all there, and we all participated in panels (not all together, unfortunately; that would have been interesting). Anne spoke about her book, Conversation and Community, and also joined a panel on DITA with Lisa Dyer and Georg Eck. Alan participated on several panels, including one that I also joined about content development best practice, which refreshingly concentrated on what goes between the tags, rather than the tags (the idea of concentrating on what goes on between the tags was from Bob Sima of Tedopres).

Tom Johnson, author of the I’d Rather Be Writing blog (a must read) gave the keynote for the second day, talking about the “Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging,” which has been the topic of several good, recent blog entries on his blog.

Overall, I found the conference interesting and entertaining. I also found my first real visit to Texas since living there in the late ’70s to be a lot of fun. I’d forgotten a lot about Texas. Here are a few tidbits:

• First barbecue place I passed headed south on I35 had the following billboard (approximately, though the name of the piece de resistance is literal):

  Big Fatty’s Barbecue, home of
  El Farto Grande

• Sign in the men’s room of two different places, including the conference hotel, warning you to not drink alcohol if you think you might be pregnant. Reliable sources tell me that the women’s room in the hotel did not have that sign
• Under the category of “2nd Amendment anomalies,” I visited friends in a new housing development in Texas that featured a prominent “No Firearms Allowed” sign at the entrance to the development. Clearly an enclave of Damn Yankees (I learned when I lived in Texas that there is no such thing as a Yankee; you’re either a Damn Yankee, or you’re ok).
• My favorite definition of the conference, courtesy of Mary Anthony, who gave a very interesting talk the first day. She defined agile methodologies as “Developers gone wild.”

In a word, hilarious. I haven’t laughed this much reading a book in years.

Peter Tarslaw is a recently graduated English major working for a fly-by-night college essay “polishing/editing/writing” company. Writing essays by day and drinking cheap beer by night, he might have settled in for years of the same. But, in quick succession, his former girlfriend, Polly, announces her wedding plans, his employer folds and lays him off, and he sees an interview with Preston Brooks, best selling author of books with titles like Kindness to Birds (description in a faux New York Times Book Review: “On a journey across the Midwest, a downsized factory worker named Gabriel touches the lives of several people wounded by life.”).

Peter takes this as a call to action and decides to manufacture a best seller. His adventures navigating a world of pharmaceutically enhanced writing, desperate book publishers, horny writers, book tours, campus visits, Polly’s wedding, and a meeting with Preston Brooks himself are both hilarious and sadly plausible. He is a wonderfully self-aware, but clueless narrator, and his journey to–well, you’ll need to judge for your self if it’s success or failure–is a hoot. Highly recommended.

Final Jeopardy:

Answer: Proof positive that Congress has come up with a health care bill that works for the people.

Question: What is a steep drop in the stock price of HMOs and health insurance companies?

I just spent an hour browsing through the SXSW 2010 Panel Picker voting site. If you haven’t seen this, it’s worth a look. The SXSW program team posts descriptions of proposed panels for the conference (where panel can also be a presentation). Anyone can view the proposals, but the cool part is that you can vote thumbs up or down on any proposal (to vote you need to register, but it’s free and fast).

I went over to the site because XML Press author Alan Porter has two panel proposals, Wikis are Wonderful – or Are They? and Spandex and Software: Can Comics Get You To Read The Manuals?. Both look very interesting and well worth voting for. Alan always has something interesting to say, and you can bet he will show some good comics as part of his panels.

In addition to Alan’s panels, which I urge you to check out and vote for, I was really pleased to see proposals by several other people whose work I respect, including:

Greening Your Content: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle by Rahel Bailie

Coauthoring Without Homicide by John Hedtke

All About Audience: Improving User Experience by Brenda Huettner.

Will User-Generated Content Wipe Out Technical Writers? by Sarah O’Keefe.

I was also pleased to see several panels on publishing, which curiously does not have its own category, but which is represented in categories like Writing. In addition to reading about, and voting on, several publishing related panels, I followed links to some interesting sites, including a blog by Richard Nash that’s now in “tight rotation” on my list of daily reads.

On a completely different note, after watching Julie/Julia yesterday, I started reading the original Julie/Julia Project blog, which is fascinating. I started with the first entry and am working my way through in the order it was written. Well worth checking out. I’m reading it in parallel with Julia Child’s My Life in France. I haven’t seen Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, yet, though if the blog and Julia don’t wear me out on butter-based food, I may give it a try, too.

We just got back into town after a short trip. When we left, our grape vines still bore green, unripe grapes, and we thought they would ripen after we returned. Because of that, and frankly because it’s a real pain, we didn’t put netting over the vines like we usually do.

We came back to a scene of mass bird destruction. The vines were completely stripped of grapes, and the surrounding deck and patio were covered with the inevitable “output” of well-fed birds. The result of inaction is that our crop of grapes is gone for this year, and we have an unpleasant clean-up ahead of us. Fortunately for us, we don’t depend on grapes for our livelihood, but the event brought home to me the importance of acting decisively when opportunity beckons.

As managers, we often look at the consequences of our actions, but I think we often ignore, or are completely oblivious to, the consequences of inaction. We get absorbed in the day-to-day business of being a manager, react to whatever comes our way, and leave opportunities unexplored. This is always dangerous, but with the massive changes going on in the technical communication world, the cost of watching from the sidelines can be your job.

Having just published Anne Gentle’s Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, I’m acutely aware of the opportunity Social Media provides for technical communicators, but even more aware of the danger of ignoring Social Media.

No one knows whether twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc., will be around in 5 years, or 5 months, but you can bet that Social Media in some form or another is here to stay. Even if you aren’t using Social Media, your customers are. They will learn about your company from others who use Social Media, and they will notice how you use, abuse, or ignore those venues.

The good news is that as Social Media evolves from its current immature beginnings, there is room for experimentation and there is an opportunity to be at the front of this trend. But, very quickly, the question will change from “How should I be using Social Media?” to “Why aren’t you using Social Media?” If you’re not acting now, you may soon discover that the grapes have been eaten and all you’re left with is bird droppings.

I was sad to get the news this morning of the demise of the DocTrain conferences. I’ve been to DocTrain West twice and was privileged to be able to present at this year’s conference. And, I was getting prepared to present two sessions at DocTrain/DITA, both on DocBook. Scott Abel, who was contracted by PUBSNET to market and run DocTrain, agreed with me that some sessions on DocBook would be a nice counterpoint to the incessant DITA drumbeat. I was especially looking forward to some spirited give and take on DITA and DocBook.

Scott’s involvement is the thing that distinguished DocTrain in my mind. He is an indefatigable organizer who kept the programs lively and attracted a broad base of presenters and attendees. Whenever someone posted the inevitable, perennial question, “which conference should I go to,” on a mailing list or news group, the inevitable, perennial reply was “go to DocTrain if you want substance and interaction.”

That was in no small part due to Scott. While the demise of DocTrain is bad news, the good news is that Scott is continuing to look for ways to connect people (Scott is a connector in the best Malcolm Gladwell sense; Gladwell detractors be damned, I think he’s spot on about connectors). You can be sure there will be new events, virtual and in-person, and I plan to be there.

Like many people, I periodically drop various key words and phrases into Google to see how well my sites (this one, plus xmlpress.net and managingwriters.com) fare. If you run a business, the “vanity search” is no longer a question of vanity; you need to be near the top of the first page of results for keywords that matter to you and your business.

To that end, I dropped “technical documentation” into Google, and was a little surprised to see that the first hit was docs.hp.com, a site I know well because at one time I managed writers who contributed content to it. Probing a bit deeper, I found that it also comes up first if you search for “HP documentation.”

Good job, Hewlett-Packard…. But, wait a minute. At the top of the page, there is a note, in red, that reads, “Documentation moving March 2009.” Following the link, here is what I found:

In March 2009 the documents on this website will begin to move to the HP Business Support Center (BSC) website. The move will be gradual and conducted in stages. During the move, you can expect uninterrupted access to documentation. After a group of documents moves, you will be redirected to the new location on the BSC. Use the Feedback to webmaster link below to submit any questions.

Click here for more information about the BSC. At the bottom of the BSC info page, click Visit the HP Business Support Center. On the Business Support Center page under Resources, click Manuals.

So, being a dogged fellow, I followed the link for Manuals and landed on a page with a potpourri of product categories and a search box. When I searched for hp-ux (that’s HP’s Unix operating system), I ended up on a page that contains links to a somewhat random collection of PDF files. In fairness, this is a work in progress, but two things disturbed me:

1. Why abandon a sub-domain (docs.hp.com) that gets superb positioning in Google? Companies pay big money to get good placement on Google (and often fail in the effort).
2. Why abandon HTML as a format? In fairness, maybe HTML will be part of the new solution, but so far, I see nothing but PDF on the new web site.

docs.hp.com has never been a perfect site, in particular, it never fully cracked the very difficult problem of making it easy to navigate very large documentation sets, but it is very popular (Google doesn’t lie) and offers a wide range of documentation in HTML and PDF form.

Burying it makes no sense (and I mean really burying it; the site (memorably named h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Home.jsp) where this information is going doesn’t show up on the first six pages of a search for “HP documentation”; I gave up after that). And, even with the smaller number of documents currently on the site, it is clear that they are no closer to cracking the very large documentation set problem. Abandoning HTML documents, if that is what happens, will just make things worse; PDF is great for print, not so good for online.

I’m no longer at HP, but I’m still disappointed that this is happening; I hope HP gets its act together and preserves both docs.hp.com and documentation in HTML (and it wouldn’t hurt if they took a serious swipe at the very large documentation set problem).

I’ll be headed to Indianapolis for the DocTrain/DITA conference (June 2-5) to talk about DocBook, of all things. More on that in a moment, but first a quick plug for the conference itself.

If you have been to any of the DocTrain conferences, you know they combine in depth pre- and post-conference workshops with excellent keynotes, demonstrations, and talks. I like the flexible format; talks and workshops range from an hour to all day, depending on the topic, so you can get a taste or full immersion in the topics of your choice. This one is devoted 95% to DITA (my DocBook presentations are the only exceptions I’m aware of).

Until April 30th, the organizers are offering a great hotel+conference offer that includes the full conference, workshops, several meals, and three nights hotel for $999. Details here, or call Eileen Savary at +1 978-649-8555 and use discount code “Conference Plus Hotel.”

I’ll be doing two sessions, the first titled: DocBook in the 21st Century: Yes, Virginia, There is a DocBook, and it is Alive and Well, which has the following blurb in the program:

The latest release of DocBook, V5.0, is a significant break with earlier releases. While the differences between DocBook V4.x and V5.0 are quite radical in some aspects, the basic ideas behind DocBook remain the same, so moving from earlier versions to V5.0 is straightforward.

DocBook V5.0 includes new markup for annotations, a unified markup for information sections, and a new and flexible system for linking. In addition, V5.0 is more extensible; it can be more easily modified, and it can be extended in separate namespaces to allow you to easily mix DocBook markup with SVG, MathML, XHTML, and other XML-based languages.

This talk will start with a quick orientation to DocBook for those who have not seen it before, then look in depth at V5.0.

I’ll also be doing a workshop titled Getting Started with DocBook, which is designed to do just that. Here is the blurb:

This workshop will get you up and running with DocBook. If you bring your laptop with you, by the end of the session you should be able to create and publish a DocBook document in html and pdf output formats. The workshop will include basic information about the DocBook schema, DocBook stylesheets, supporting software, and how to put it all together.

If you’ve wondered what DocBook is all about, if you are evaluating it alongside other schemas, or if you want to use DocBook for a new project, this workshop will get you started.

I’ll be interested to see how much, if any, interest there is in DocBook at a DITA conference. I’m cautiously optimistic that there will be enough curious folks to fill the room; we’ll see.

In one last moment of shameless promotion, there will be copies of Managing Writers for sale at the conference.

For the last two years, I have used this blog on wordpress.com to follow the development of my book, Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation.

Now that the book has been published, I will be changing the character of this blog to cover other topics. For those only interested in the book, I will continue to post updates at a new site, managingwriters.com. This site also contains all of the previous posts from this blog (but, please be patient with the formatting, which is still in progress).

You can also find information about the book and other publications (coming soon) at xmlpress.net.

Thanks to everyone who supported the development of the book.