Benne W. Holwerda is an associate professor at the University of Louisville and specializes in galaxies and galaxy morphology. He has worked on three continents and loves working with students on research and teaching. He is a proud part of the parenting team for a 7th and a 5th grader. Hobbies include running, reading, and not having time for a third thing. Having always struggled to write both fast and well enough, he took on writing a book.
“I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of sh*t. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.” – Amy Poehler
I thought of this quote a lot while I was wrapping up my book Galaxy Morphology.
The other was “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” attributed to Douglas Adams. I also remembered that his agent asked him to “just finish the page (he) was on and let them have the damn thing.”
Here’s the timeline. I was asked just before and at the January 2020 AAS meeting (the Before Times) if I’d be interested in writing a book on galaxy morphology for IOP science. I was flattered and interested but I was focused on maxing out my scientific output. I was mindful of this since I was struggling to write up all the paper ideas, even the ones that were associated with grants. Oh and I had grant writing to do. So this seemed like a summer of 2022 (i.e., when I would have tenure) kind of project. I liked it though. A new kind of writing challenge, more ambitious in scope and time scale. The idea kept percolating through my brain and I found myself arranging topics for chapters in my head on the flight back.
We all know what happened next. March 2020 rearranged everything. Suddenly writing a book seemed like a good idea. I agreed to the book proposal and set out to put loose chapter topic ideas in order and write a sample chapter.
I found this to be a key exercise for the book. It delineates the work and you write the *easiest* chapter first. This gives you something between a false confidence that you can do the whole thing and a realistic idea of how much time each chapter might take. That first run at it may be a sprint but you realize you’re in for a marathon. The book organization pretty much came together during my regular 5k runs, 30 minutes at a time. I wrote my thoughts down in a note and this outline ended up being one of two components for the book proposal.
A sample chapter and outline of chapter topics are what constitutes a book proposal. But just because you were asked to write a book and said yes does not mean the publisher will publish your work. The proposal is first peer-reviewed, and once you get the go-ahead (as I did in summer 2020), then you get a deadline (mine was July 1, 2021).
Now you can blow past that deadline. It will cost you two things: a clear end date and some $500 of your writing fee. I resolved that the book would be finished on the deadline. Not done, not complete, not perfect, but FINISHED. Sure I wanted the cash bonus, but the main goal was not to have a lingering project.
During the summer of 2020, I tried to write a paragraph each day. Yep. Nothing more. A paragraph costs about 30 minutes to write (either a brain-dump plus editing, or by carefully writing it all out, it comes out to about 30 minutes). This approach was to ensure I would a) keep at it since I was clearly not writing this thing in one go, b) keep the threshold low for me to get started, and c) allow myself to proofread and check as I went along. I kept it up for most of the summer and wrote a bunch during the fall semester in the same way, sneaking in a paragraph. Writing a paragraph often led to a second, and then I wanted to illustrate what I was writing, so I would add the figures I needed. So while I wrote only a paragraph, I often added a page or more to the manuscript’s length. I would return and start this way pretty easily because I had added the topics and structure for each chapter already in the template. So inspired by a recent paper or a random thought (thanks brain) I would add to a chapter here and there. And I could start marking off chapters as “done.” The book grew steadily.
Fall of 2020 I was back in the classroom, teaching hybrid modality for astro 101 and computational physics 300 class. Hybrid is a LOT more work and meanwhile I tried to keep my own and student research going. My kids had online school, the pandemic continued to stress us all out to the point of burn out. Book writing suffered and then stopped.
The spring semester came (astro labs and research methods class for graduate students for the first time) and all book writing activity ceased. I could not process new information well (for example, I started reading The Disordered Cosmos and I was really enjoying it, but I have no impression of the latter half of the book. Brain just went “brrrr” after Chapter 5 or so. After I returned it to the library, I reread the Murderbot series instead).
The end of the spring semester came and the July deadline was looming, and my brain was out of spoons from a year that was A LOT. But the book was about 70% done at this point and it became time to push it over the finish line. I restarted the paragraph-a-day habit (but with a much stronger “or more” feeling in the back of my head). I found a bit that I had written twice in two different chapters and started connecting chapters together and adding references to my “want to know more?” end of chapter lists. A big part of the effort here was recognizing that the book would be comprehensive but never, ever compete.
I realized this over and over as I kept seeing new interesting papers and figures, and more ideas popped up. Stick with the plan. And this was another pass I gave myself: do not attempt completeness with an astronomical book. You’ll never reach it. The trick I used was: “Well that can go into the next edition.”
I turned in the book on time and sort of collapsed. But we were not quite done. A book involves permissions for the figures (this means it’s a good habit to spell out the origin of the figure in the caption when you include it and Latex generates a figure list for you), and it had to go through an editorial process. That turned out to be much less work than I thought it would be (I suspected my spelling was horrid, it may still be, but it got passed to an editor).
All in all, the final cleaning up and back and forth with the editor/publisher, all of which was not “writing,” and more “paperwork” meant that we actually managed to publish this book by the end of 2021. Just in time to count towards my tenure and promotion file as “officially published.”