The focus of my writing attention over the last couple of weeks has been on editing a collection of my blog posts that I will publish as books.
I have gathered all my posts on the emergence of my writing voice, cultural decay, political disorder, social fragmentation, imperial rivalries, history and literature. I will publish them probably as two books later in the year. The working titles of these are From the Burning Archive, Volumes 1 and 2. Pretty imaginative titles there.
Similarly, I have gathered together all my writings on life as a bureaucrat and the dilemmas of governing, including the extended series Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat which was inspired by the nearly named poem about a blackbird by Wallace Stevens. This volume I will title Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat and Other Essays.
From the Burning Archive, Volumes 1 and 2 are probably two to three months away. I may publish the two volumes as one, and am still deciding on that. This collection will present the lightly edited versions of the blog posts. In working through them over recent weeks I have enjoyed reconnecting with the themes and range of material I have covered over the years. There have been many surprises and thankfully few horrors. I have sought to clean up some of the writing and to remove any heavy blog feel to the pieces, but have largely preserved what I have said here, with light editing of style and minimal content changes.
The Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat and Other Essays collection will require a bit more work and I would be looking to release towards the end of the year. A few of the pieces in the original series, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, were a bit short and abrupt. I am also including here a couple of the conference papers I have presented over the years, and some longer essays on the ordinary virtues of governing. There will be a bit more writing and rewriting to do for this collection then.
I don’t know how common it is to republish blogs as books, if in edited and curated form. It seems little different to me to the many collections of op-eds, short essays, book reviews and occasional pieces that do get published quite often.
Let me know in a comment below or on twitter or by email (theburningarchive@gmail.com) about your experience publishing or reading blogs as books.
I will keep you posted on when these new collections are published.
Also don’t forget you can buy my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Minds: Collected Poems 1996-2020, as both a print and e-book via all good online retailers, with more information here. It would be wonderful if you could support me in this way, and I think you will enjoy the over 100 poems I have published here.