Derailed and pos­it­ive #AcWriMo

In a change that sur­prises me, I actu­ally like this chapter. It’ll need re-​​writing, but per­haps not as much as the oth­ers. I’ve decided to fol­low Richard Poss’s model for art his­tory in archae­oastro­nomy. I have little empathy for art his­tory for vari­ous reas­ons, so this wasn’t the most inspired chapter. However, work­ing through Poss’s model helped under­score why I don’t find a lot of the spec­u­la­tion around the Nebra disc sat­is­fy­ing. I agree with every­one else that it looks astro­nom­ical, but I tend to find everything after that a bit too spec­u­lat­ive. Sitting down an work­ing through it gave me a bet­ter insight into what I need to do with some explan­a­tions of my own.

DBachman /​ Wikipedia

Proof that the smi­ley was inven­ted in Bronze Age Germany.

Regardless of whether this actu­ally gets to pub­lic­a­tion, I can now point how the pro­cess has now helped with some future papers I’d like to write. That makes the next week a nuisance.

I have a lot more work com­ing in. There’s a press release that needs to be writ­ten for Annals of Botany. There’s paper­work for UNESCO that needs to be done. There’s a meet­ing I need to be in Leicester for, which will tor­pedo the whole day as Leicester is quite dis­tant from where I live. My sched­ule says Ethnography live on Tuesday and Calendars on Thursday. That’s not going to happen.

I have noth­ing for Ethnography. The Art chapter has per­suaded me that I can do some­thing bet­ter than I had planned for Ethnography, but I can’t do it in two days. It’s only half-​​way through the month and stop­ping now because of that seems a bit of a pity. So what I might do instead is skip Ethnography and move on to Calendars. It means the final first draft will be miss­ing a chapter, but at this stage it’s the pro­cess that mat­ters more than the product. I’m not rul­ing out that get­ting the motive chapters down will change my mind about how some events work. That would be use­ful to have before writ­ing the paper I want to write in December.

I’ll admit I have been let­ting other things dis­tract me too.

At least I have win­dows in now.

As for dis­tri­bu­tion, much to my own sur­prise I’ve decided that if/​when Smashwords gets sub­mis­sions by ePub work­ing then I’ll dis­trib­ute with them exclus­ively for a brief period before releas­ing Kindle ver­sions of the books. The abil­ity to offer dis­count (or even free) coupons with down­loads in both ePub and Mobi seems like a bet­ter deal for read­ers. With Smashwords I could set up a coupon that works for a month before full price kicks in.

While I’m delighted if you do down­load the draft and com­ment on it, I’d be grate­ful if you didn’t re-​​distribute it as it is work in pro­gress. The book is ini­tially copy­right with all rights reserved while it’s a draft, but I’ll dis­cuss what I can do with a Creative Commons licence once the draft is complete.

You can fol­low the #AcWriMo tag on Twitter or Google+ to see how oth­ers are get­ting on. You can down­load the brief book so far as Mobi for Kindle or ePub for everything else.

Photo: Nebra Sky Disk by DBachman. This image licensed under a Creative Commons by-​​sa licence.