On Writing This Particular Book

By Jose Vilson | February 25, 2011

On Writing This Particular Book

By Jose Vilson | February 25, 2011

Join 10.6K other subscribers
Fuck That Shit

What About Our Dreams? (Had to use this again)

I‘ve learned a few things about writing this particular book. It’s definitely not like other books, but it is my book. I’m writing it because it’s about time I culminate the 1000+ blogs I’ve written in between my earlier private site, a few other sites, and this one, which accounts for about 741 of my meatiest, most elucidating work about and through me. It hasn’t always been pristine, educational, or profound, but it let me transparently fine-tune my thoughts about everything and anything with varying degrees of participation from all of you. Now, it’s time to take some of these thoughts, polish them, and bind them up into a product that encapsulates a wedge of my being, in a form that gives everyone a peek into the process and the project that is my growth. It’s not like writing a blog where I consciously limit how deep I go into any topic for the sake of readability and context. People can’t stare at desktop screens too long before getting the weird flashing lights effects in their eyes. Rather, I’m venturing into a space where I’m given a little more land to fertilize, but with that comes a new responsibility towards that space. It still needs the efficacy of a blog post but the length of a drawn-out soliloquy. And it needs to be relevant to the material I’ve already written before, because anyone who’s ever subscribed to this or would want to needs to have a train of thought to follow. Books do that for people, and often serve as the landmarks we refer to when people ask about the trip from one place to another and how we got there. If one book is hardly distinguishable from the other, then the point of writing it is nullified. I want this particular book to meet all those expectations at this time with this pace and without too much interruption. Whenever I finish this process, exhausted, sweating and bleeding on the manuscript’s imaginary binds, I send it to a cabal of my most well-informed colleagues, ask if the message is clear, send it to a publisher or two and see which one agrees with the rest of you reading this now.

Then the fun part comes. As with all of these rants, my book will be nothing like this, but this is what I’m thinking while writing it.

Jose, who has had fun while doing this …


Support my work as I share stories, insights, and advice with research from a sociological perspective that will (hopefully) transform and inspire educational systems now and forever.