ramya bhaava chaitanyam

I came across the following quote of Churchill some time ago, when Rama and I were still working the SOA Security book.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

The key phrase here is - "reconciled to your servitude." After we first thought we were done, our publisher pointed out two problem areas and it took us some time to get over "Oh no, do we really have to fix these? Can’t we just push it out?" The two problem areas were:

1. Some of the middle chapters were way too long. 50+ pages per chapter was what we were talking. The publisher correctly pointed out that no one would have the patience to last that long and finish a chapter.
2. The first chapter was in a pretty poor shape. When we first wrote it in february 2005, SOA was still not widely understood, and hence, we devoted a substantial portion of the chapter to describing the historical evolution that led to the birth of SOA. This was a problem because:
   • Understanding of SOA was much more widespread by 2007 and the description of the historical evolution was no longer necessary.
   • More importantly, the rather long intro to SOA meant the focus was on SOA and not SOA Security.

It took us some time to accept the reality that we had to fix these two issues.

The first problem was easy to fix. We split chapters, moved out some topics to the appendices and introduced some topics in earlier chapters to make the middle chapters roughly the same size as all chapters.

The second problem took longer than it should have because we first tried to simply chop and adjust and the text became too mangled. As manning’s author guide predicted when we read it in 2005, we actually threw out the whole of the text for the first chapter and rewrote it from scratch all over again. Of course, we were now wiser by 2.5 years and that helped us in coming out with a much more crisper first chapter when we rewrote it.

This whole thing took way too much time as both Rama and I got into new lines of work that left very little bandwidth for us to focus on finishing the book. In the end, we were only successful because our editors at manning were just terrific. They would push us very gently once every couple of weeks and every time they did that, we some how found time to make some more progress before our jobs dragged us away once again. Thankfully, the editors persisted long enough for us to finish everything that needed to be done.

All along, it was not easy to answer our well-wishers who kept asking if the book was done. We kept saying - "we are almost there" - and that in itself added some pressure on us to take the end game seriously. Luckily, we are now done and can say - "yes, it is shipping from amazon.com"