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Alan J. Porter's Journal  A quick run down of what I picked up at Austin Books this week: Comic Books - Batman #688 (DC) - Booster Gold #22 (DC) - once again for Matt Sturge's Blue Beetle back up story - Dark X-Men #1 (Marvel) - for Paul Cornell's story. - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly #1 (Dynamite) - House of Mystery #15 (DC/Vertigo) - North 40 #1 (Wildstorm) - hearing great things about this title - Red Robin #2 (DC) - Wednesday Comics #1 - looking forward to this ever since it was announced. Trade Paperbacks - Bat Lash Showcase (DC) - Ministry of Space (Image) Over on his blog, the always entertaining and informative Mark Evanier posted a link to a list of the All Time Box office top grossing movies, when adjusted for inflation. It was interesting, although not unexpected, that when you even the $ value out that Gone With The Wind tops the list instead of Titanic. What caught my eye was the number of SF/F and Comics movies that still made the list even after the monetary adjustment. #2 - Star Wars #4 - E.T. #12 - The Empire Strikes Back #14 - Return of the Jedi #16 - Raiders of the Lost Ark #17 - Jurassic Park #19 - The Phantom Menace #27 - The Dark Knight #31 - Ghostbusters #34 - Spider-Man #35 - Independence Day #48 - Batman (1989) #50 - LotR: Return of the King #52 - Spider-Man 2 #57 - Revenge of the Sith #58 - Back to the Future #59 - LotR: The Two Towers #61 - Superman #66 - Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone #68 - Close Encounters of the Third Kind #74 - LotR: Fellowship of the Ring #76 - Men in Black #82 - Temple of Doom #83 - Attack of the Clones #91 - The Lost World: Jurassic Park #92 - The Last Crusade #93 - Spider-man 3 #94 - Terminator 2: Judgement Day Seems we geeks have been pretty consistent spenders since Star Wars burst on the screen... Interesting to note that Lord of the Rings was the only franchise to pick up more ticket sales with each installment of the franchise, rather than have them fall off. I was also delighted to see a couple of Bond movies made he list too - Thunderball (at #26) and Goldfinger (at #40) For reasons that I hope will become apparent at some point in the not too distant future, I've been doing a lot of reading recently about the history of space exploration. My good friend budgie_uk posted this today and I just had to repost it..On 27th January 1967, three astronauts - Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee - died when pure oxygen in the capsule of what would have been Apollo 1 ignited. On the following Monday, flight director Eugene Kranz (the bloke portrayed by Ed Harris in the movie Apollo 13) called a meeting of his branch and flight control team. During that meeting , he said the following, what became known in NASA as The Kranz Dictum: "Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!' I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough' and 'Competent.' Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control." ===================================== A few weekends ago I was at the Space Museum an Hall of Fame in New Mexico and got chatting to a somewhat aged museum volunteer, who casually mentioned he had been a friend of Gus Grissom's. I asked him what his memories of Grissom were and he answered in a single sentence - "Best damned engineer I ever knew." Then he paused and drooped his head slightly in silent remembrance. Nothing more needed to be said. Earlier today someone reminded me of this feature article I wrote for the Techcomm Manager e-zine last year. Rereading it, I think everything I said still holds up, so decided to rerun it here for those that may not have seen it before. ======================================== Why Technical Publishing Shouldn't Be Art by Alan J. Porter “Writing is a solitary occupation. Publication is a group exercise,” so stated novelist Madeline Robbins in her February 25, 2008 blog entry on the DeepGenre Web site. And she’s correct. The work may start with the author, but to get it from the author to the end reader means it also has to go through an editor, copy editor, book designer, typesetter, printer, sales and marketing team, distributor, book buyer, and, eventually, a retail store. It’s a model that the book market developed centuries ago and still works today. Although it could be argued that the Web and print-on-demand are altering the delivery mechanisms slightly, the same basic process still applies. The book trade is based on the fact that the artistic elements, the creation of the content, and the design of the book are small parts of the overall process, and that the publishing process is a business that only flourishes through being scalable and repeatable. Yet the more I write books and the more I become involved in the book business the more I am struck by the differences between it and what has been my “day job” for over twenty years, technical publications. Over the years, I’ve been trained and worked as a writer, editor, document designer, coder, formatting expert, content management specialist, and workflow designer. I’ve used software tools that applied to every one of those disciplines. And here’s the point: often at the same time. As I talk to people in the tech pubs industry today, I still find that in most cases it’s the same person who writes the content, designs the documents, and uses special tools to publish the material -- be it for Web, online help, or print (again, often managing multiple deliverables simultaneously). Not only is one person doing the whole job, but often several people are all doing the same thing in parallel. (See Fig. 1.)  In other words, instead of several people contributing to an overall process, we have individuals each creating individual results. It could be argued that with this individualistic approach, what they are delivering isn’t a complete product but instead individual pieces of “art.” The problem with art is that the results vary. Give a canvas and a box of watercolors to a landscape painter and a second-grader. The same materials, the same process, but you get very different results. Install an editing tool, a help design tool, and a deployment tool on two computers. Give them to two equally experienced technical authors -- one who is great at writing content and one who is passionate about typography and usability design. Same tools, same process. Again, two completely different results. The problem inherent in the artistic approach of having every technical author have full access to every tool in the production process is that it isn’t only the best who impact the quality of what you deliver, it’s also the worst. Natural tendencies toward areas of greatest comfort and skill also permeate. When I ran a large technical publications shop, I could open any document at random and tell from the page layout and language who produced that particular book, even though they all complied with both corporate and industry standards. The “author as artist” paradigm increases training costs, as every person has to become knowledgeable about every tool used in the process. Cost of ownership of those tools also becomes high as in a multi-author environment any updates to tools or changes to style templates, business process models, new standards, etc., have to be simultaneously propagated across all machines, and everyone must be retrained. Such parallel production also makes it difficult to measure progress and quality and tends to focus time and resources on getting consistent results. So why not borrow from an allied profession that has been using a well-developed system for a couple hundred years? If we design the process rather than the result, it can reap dividends in quality, proficiency, speed, and overall costs. By separating each of the processes into separate stages, each handled by a specialist with the applicable tools, just like the book industry, we can streamline and even automate the business of technical publishing. In fact, thinking of what we do as a “business” rather than just a necessary “overhead” will go a long way toward not only improving the way we do things, but also help tech pubs gain recognition in the corporate structure (but that’s probably fodder for a future column). So let’s take a look at how we can transform our group of artistic “technical authors” into a more efficient “publishing business.” Everyone on staff is different. They have different skills and interests. Find out what those skills and interests are and focus them in that area. · Have a couple of great content developers who have a real knack for talking to SMEs and translating geek speak into easy-to-follow user instructions? Focus them on content development and the use of your preferred editing tool. · Got someone who is passionate about page layout and typography? Have them design the WYSIWYG templates for the editing environment. · Got someone who loves to get into the taxonomy of what you produce? They could be a great information architect, and if you are going to a structured environment like XML or DITA, have them design and maintain your schemas and specializations. · How about that usability expert who is passionate about the way your customers navigate their way through your documentation set? Have them design the look and feel of your deliverables. By doing this, you are basically building a “modular” production system. Place them in a particular order for the way you work and you have your own publishing production line. Now each individual only needs to be an expert in the area they work and enjoy. Yes, it’s a good idea for everyone to still maintain an overview of the whole process so they can anticipate the impact of their work, but they no longer need to know everything. By having the best people working on centralized tools related to their particular role (See Fig. 2), you are leveraging their skills and enthusiasm and making them available to everyone. The result is that quality improves and your deliverables become consistent. The best work impacts everyone, not just a select few.  The modular process also means that you can introduce new steps in parallel, and test and troubleshoot without impacting everyone, before bringing them online into the full process. With areas of specialization, you can have people continue to work with the tools they are comfortable with, reduce training costs, and lower costs of deploying updates and changes. Now the authors may just have the editing tools and a review tool on their desktops, using schemas and templates developed by others and stored on the network. The design and behavior of the deliverables has been done by usability experts who have saved off those business rules in a place where they can be accessed by a centralized publishing application. Deployment can be automated to better utilize IT resources so that publishing could be done overnight in a “hands-off / lights-out” environment. The whole process is now measurable, scalable, repeatable, and manageable. Everyone is still a valued contributor, but no one is an artist. ======================================== Cover art for the James Bond comic book story, The Comdemned, published in Chile in 1970  Find out more on the history of James Bond in comics, check out JAMES BOND: A history of the illustrated 007, now on sale through a good bookstore near you! Just found out that there is a Wiki devoted to Disney Comics (of course there would be - I just hadn't thought about it before) and look what they have as the main illustration on the front page? 
Seems that I have been picked as July's "Creator of the Month" and each comic in the BOOM! Kids line shipping in July carries a short interview with me. Not sure about seeing my mug shot in all those comics this month - won't that scare away the kids? Last weekend I spent some time at the Writers League of Texas Agents Conference. While I didn't get to talk to many agents I did enjoy meeting a several local writers, some of whom I'd only known about from online before. I was delighted to finally meet former WLoT Director John Pipkin, who a few years ago hired me to teach a business writing course for WLoT members. John was signing copies of his debut novel "Woodsburner" at the Barnes & Noble table in the conference exhibit area. B&N also had a generous stock of "JAMES BOND: The history of the illustrated 007" so I took some time out to scribble my name in a few copies as well. Highlight of the conference was appearing on the panel Beyond the Strip: Inside the World of Comics & Graphic Novels, with my good friends Rick Klaw and Tony Salvaggio. The job of trying to keep us under control and on-topic fell to local crime novelist Kit Frazier, who regaled us all with some amazing funny stories at the Saturday evening reception in the bar. Rick has written about the panel for his Nexus Graphica column over at sfsite.com, and you can read it here. He also recorded the full panel and if you want to listen to our full ramblings you can listen to them here.. The panel seemed well received with several people saying that it had been the most useful session of the conference. A look at what I picked up at Austin Books this week: - Amazing Spider-Man Family #8 (Marvel) - Batman & Robin #2 (DC) - Captain America Reborn #1 (Marvel) - Finding Nemo #1 (BOOM! Studios) - Echo #13 (Abstract) - Justice League of America: Cry for Justice #1 (DC) - Muppet Robin Hood #2 (BOOM! Studios) - The Muppet Show #4 (BOOM! Studios) - RUN! #3 (DC) - Savage Dragon #150 (Image) - Sire Edward Grey: Witchfinder #1 (Dark Horse) - The Unwritten #1 (DC/Vertigo) Cover art for the James Bond comic book story, Mystery on TV, published in Chile in 1970  Find out more on the history of James Bond in comics, check out JAMES BOND: A history of the illustrated 007, now on sale through a good bookstore near you! |
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