So tonight after work and before the St. Louis .Net User Group meeting I ran to Borders to see if I could find my book on the shelf. Well guess what, I did!

I was pretty stoked to find it, but was shocked to only see the DNN4 book on the shelf, not any of the other DNN books. Well after digging around for a while I found them on another section, so I took the opportunity to organize a little :D Here’s the result.

So it’s just after 1am on Monday March 9th, 2009. Pat Renner and I have wrapped up and submitted the final chapter of our DotNetNuke book. We are far from complete on the whole book writing process, but we are at least at the big milestone of being done with the majority of the writing of the book.

Now we begin the process of editing our chapters that we are getting back from the editor and technical editor. I got the first chapter back for author review before my trip to Orlando last week but had to set it aside and focus on finishing up the writing process before starting on it. Tonight (Monday) will begin the process of the author review and cleaning up the materials so that they can be sent off to the production department.

The book writing process is interesting, fun, painful, a great education experience. I’ve learned so much about DNN, but more importantly about how to communicate what I know about DNN in an easy to understand manner. At least I hope I have! I guess we will find out when people start reading the book!

I’ll post more about my trip to Orlando later this week, I wish I had stayed another night to watch the Kepler launch, but because the book wasn’t finished I had to get home.

So December 15th was our first book deadline. Pat and I met early Sunday morning and went through both of our chapters making some reviews. He ended up submitting his chapter on the 15th, mine was submitted late due to some pretty major overhauls we made to the structure of the chapter. I found the first chapter hard to write, I think the next few chapters will be easier. Chapter 1 was the intro/overview of all things, so it was hard to try to wrap all that information up into basic content that our intended reader will be able to understand.

We’re waiting on feedback from our editor for the submitted chapters, hopefully we’ll get some of that before our next deadline of 1/15, otherwise we feel like we’re writing blind. We’ve already started on the next chapters for the deadline, I’m dealing more with actual DNN content in these chapters, so I think they will be much easier to write now.

More updates in the future.

Pat and I have been meeting the past two weeks going over materials and thoughts for the book we are writing about DotNetNuke. I’ve worked on it quite a bit in that time frame, but with all my travelling in October and work as a result of that travelling I had only spent time flushing out the topics for my first chapter, trying to organize what I want to write about. But not actually starting the writing process around that content. My plan is to flush out as much as possible before hand and then write based on that assortment of information, I think this will help me organize my content and make sure I hit the topics I want to for each chapter and sections within those chapters.

So tonight I got into the actual writing process, and what did I write about? Something that wasn’t included in my flushed outline for the chapter. :) I did however go back and add that information to my outline so that I can look at my outlines for each chapter during and after the writing and locate exactly where I covered items for reference purposes.

It’s now 1:30am, far later than I had planned to go to sleep, but Natalie is out of town so I took the time to get started. Pat and I are meeting to go over where we are so far, my goal is to have my first chapter ready for submission by the 15th of the month, I think if I spend an hour or two each day, preferably more this weekend, working on it I can make that happen.

More updates later in the process!