What I’ve been doing (the short version)

I realize I haven’t blogged since December 30. I believe January 2013 was the first month in the TEN YEARS that I’ve now been blogging in which I didn’t post anything at all.

Meantime, as many readers helpfully informed me, various nefarious forces (would that include you, Google, I wonder?) decided to either post malware on JWN, or to flag the blog so that readers would get scared there was malware there and would thus avoid it.

So, the CTO helped me move the blog over to another server– and also, toput it onto a WordPress platform. Potentially, that means it could end up looking better. But for me, the content will always be more important than the appearance, so I’m not going to spend too much time on redesigns, etc.

The MAIN thing I’ve been doing over these past seven weeks is work-work-work at the book-publishing business. I love the work! My company, Just World Books, has now published 14 titles! Almost none of them would even have existed– and certainly, none would have existed in anything like its present form– if I hadn’t founded the company and worked with this amazing bunch of authors.

I also made JWB’s first hire: the amazing Ms. Kim MacVaugh moved to Charlottesville to join JWB as Associate Publisher in early January. Just in time! the biggest thing we’ve been working on is the whole series of events to launch the ‘Gaza Kitchen’ cookbook…. events that, taken as a whole, I decided to dub the Gaza Cuisine Discovery Tour 2013. This tour will take/bring the book’s authors, Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, to multiple gigs in New York, Washington DC, Boston, and London between March 10 and May 10.

At the same time, JWB author Miko Peled is doing huge numbers of speaking engagements around his great ‘General’s Son’ memoir, on a number of different continents… we’ll be launching Amb. Chas Freeman’s second JWB title– ‘Interesting Times’, a very timely examination of China’s increasing role in the world– with an event in DC at the end of March… other JWB authors like Matt Zeller and Brant Rosen are continuing to do author events.. and we’re keeping in good touch with a whole range of other signed authors as they bring their work to completion…

We’ve put a unified event calendar onto the JWB website so you can keep up with all these happenings. If you look at it now, you’ll see that on Friday I’ll be in Paris– taking The Gaza Kitchen to the Paris International Cookbook Fair. So that’s pretty exciting…

Well, I feel really bummed that the actual tenth blogiversary of JWN (Feb.3) passed  at a time when i was really up to my eyeballs in these other things, so I didn’t even blog anything about it. I’d been meaning to write a big ‘ten-year anniversary retrospective’ on what blogging has meant to me– and also, I venture, to the whole global information environment– over the past ten years. That opportunity passed… But here we are, coming up to the tenth anniversary of George W. Bush’s launching of the disastrous war against Iraq.

Oh, so much to blog about. And so little time.

But the book publishing is a complete blast, too. This year could truly be a breakout year for Just World Books! We have a whole range of amazing titles scheduled to come out… Plus, I’ve learned a whole lot about all aspects of 21st-century book publishing over the past three years… So I’m feeling good about where the company’s heading. And I think it is already starting to make a bit of a difference. So I no longer feel as “guilty” as I used to, about not having enough time to blog.

I mean really, there are enough things in life to feel guilty about, without that, as well. So I’ll just tell anyone who’s reading this what I plan to do with JWN over the months ahead: I plan to blog when I darn well feel like it. And who knows how often that will be?

So anyway, folks. Welcome  to JWN 2.0 here. Stick around. Maybe we can make it fun again.