Old Boar's blog (Old Boars blog)

I spent part of yesterday evening working on the picture outlines for the new book. It is making reasonable progress, but I expect to encounter some form of "block" (you know, "writer's" or perhaps "draughtsman's") some time soon. Producing the drafts for the illustrations has been good in several ways:

• It has confirmed the general outline that I had laid out (that is good)


• It has (as planned) given me something to hang bits of text (bullet points) onto, and


• It has provided a first bottom-up estimate of the size of the whole production.

However, it has also identified a few weeknesses:

• I'm not sure the parts support the overall arguement well enough. I'll have to work on that


• Trying to crystalise the use of cross-references between "Business Rules" and "Processes" has shown me that I need to think hard about how this will be done and how the cross-reference will be applied. I know how I do it intuitively (at least I think I do), but that isn't good enough. This is another point which I will have to work on, and the one which may produce the "writer's block".

Of course, looking on the bright side, finding structural problems at this stage is certainly a good thing - especially if I fix them!

Finally, another subject altogether. I've got the reviewer comments back on that draft report. I guess that with that and the book I'm going to have busy weekend writing.