She picked me up a copy of Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao of RibbonFarm.com fame. It's a neat high-concept book. In concept, it's a rethinking of the popular idea of logic and decision-making, and it's as hard to summarize as that sounds like. Like all the very best books, I read it until I get a headache and then take a break until my head clears a bit. And like all the very best books, it's going to take a fair bit of applied usage in day-to-day life before I discover how useful it is or isn't. Tempo feels like it's going to require a lot of application and refinement to really be explainable to the layman, and I suspect Venkatesh doesn't have the attention span to make that happen.
Every so often I think I ought to write a very conceptual, rethinking-something-fundamental type book. Tempo is exactly the sort of book that keeps me from doing so, as I think, "I'd be competing with that."
And as of today, I have done a full editing pass through my book and completed all the relevant sections. It's "done", by which I mean there will be errata and responses to readers for awhile, but it's useful, polished and usable now.
Quite a relief.
