I started my first faculty position in Sept 1982 when I was 25 years old. At the end of the current semester, I hit 40 years in the profession (yes, you can do that other math, too).

January 2021: Books A and B are ready to be produced. Book C is barely underway. And it is now pretty clear that the publisher has cold feet about investing at all – as it becomes a lot clearer what I am doing with it as a Creator-owned property. That’s OK, I have worked as the editor for a quarterly publication since 1998, and I trust my production person there for advice.

February 2021: That self-same production person offered to take on the project (at roughly 1/3 the net cost that the publisher would have been looking for). Starting now, I moved from toggling between author and development editor to also being production manager. I like understanding how things work.

At right about this time, the Grand Calendar was set. Some of my colleagues were interested in starting with the books in fall 2021 (a year early and estimated pre-covid). Because the fall term would only have been Books A and B, pulling this trigger would set a series of related events in motion if Books A and B were to be in student hands at the end of August and Books C and D in hands on January 4, 2022.

June 15: Books A and B press ready
Oct 15: Books C and D press ready

It’s February. Books A and B are Word files with pasted in art and questions (although the art is 100% final form, and the text is complete… it’s about 95% of a book). Book C was, I think, about 3 chapters in (of 4 plus 5 appendices), and Book D was a sparkle in my eye. That is easy math: I needed to start hitting about 3 weeks per chapter while dealing with whatever was going to be needed during production (responding to questions and proofing inquiries, at least). I also needed to commission the covers from the wonderful art studio that does some spectacular scientific illustration (Ella Maru).

No pain. No gain. I was going to be doing a lot of bike riding in 2021, and no travel anyhow.

Without that time loss from covid, this would have been easier. On the other hand, work fills the available space, so it might not have been that different.

It was clear in April that Book A would be ready for press by Jun 15 but Book B was not. I was this|close to pulling the trigger on 2021 when Plan B hit me. Book B is already 95% OK. Send it to press as a one-time, collector’s as an ashcan or bootleg version, printed from my own Word files.

And that is what happened.

June 15: Book A and bootleg B went to press. Book B was ready at the end of July. So close.

Aug 1: I wrote the last word in Book D. If you take from this that I wrote the entire thing linearly from chapter 1, page 1, through to the end, without changing the outline, you would be correct.

Aug 15: started the first page of the answer key – 2 weeks before it might conceivably be needed. Why do anything the easy way?

Aug 30: books were in hand, and within days they were being used – vociferously. A design prediction from 2018 was being tested for the first time.

I was staying about 2-3 weeks ahead on the answer key. The fact that the future slots on the web site were blank went almost completely unnoticed.

Oct 15: Book C ready for press, but Book D in as a bootleg.

Nov 20: Book D done.

Jan 5: Books C and D in hand as the second term begins. I was now about a month ahead on the answer key thanks to the holiday break. Some supply chain hiccups and learning more than I wanted to know about how quote/unquote bookstores work these days (managing editor work).

Mar 1, 2022: answer key completed. The first edition was finally “done” in a real sense, and we had been using it for 7 months already thanks to a little luck and the idiosyncratic design.

How much of the original Ege text remains? A couple of homages… a few bits of its DNA linger. There were, I think, 3 passages that I lifted and only needed to edit slightly, which I simply wanted to do in a few places, so her voice was there in the background as a guest speaker. Getting permissions for using spectral data (and anything else) is a giant pain in the ass. So I already had secured permission to continue using those items from the 5th edition in as many new works as I created after I took ownership (playing the long game). We had also generated our own NMR spectra for the 5th edition, so that whole permissions issue was off the table (and if you can tell which of those images I fabricated from the raw materials I had to work with, pat yourself on the back).

As I wrote elsewhere at this site:

The books are designed to expand the pedagogical mission of a standard textbook with detailed explanations, a guided analysis of important ideas, and scaffolded set of open response questions to be worked on and filled in as the learner progresses. The approach is practical and to the point, reflecting the benefits of learning from thousands of students over 40 years. The writing style favors a more personal story-telling narrative that emphasizes explanation.

The text is the singular vision of its author. The project was self-funded and self-produced without changes being dictated by market forces or editorial demands. The book is a wholly owned property of the author.

I had two points I wanted to make upon starting this project.

First, that what constitutes a “textbook” could be different and it would promote student engagement.

Second, that what constitutes “authorship” and the issues surrounding Creator’s Rights could be different and still work.

I think the jury is still out, despite the early positive returns. The book appears to be at least one of the factors leading to an extreme polarization of the students. The A/B end is skewing positive (which is amazing) and the C/D/E end is skewing negative (not really moving negatively, just not advancing like the others). There are multiple contributing factors, including the post-covid bad habits.

Let’s see how this plays out over the next few years.

I’m satisfied that the real experiment is getting done. If it works, great; if it does not, it was not for lack of trying or from compromising the design.

We get these expensive graduate educations to identify and think about new solutions to vexing problems. I’ve always been interested in taking my education and thinking about the vexing problems in education. Not everyone understood or agreed with my decision.

Fortunately, I am singularly bad at both listening and at normative behavior.