Some of the research ends in me knowing almost nothing. At other times I find I have enough interesting material for a post here at Bear Alley. A few times now, and this has happened more frequently this year, I've researched something, gone to write up my notes, and discovered that I've already written up that particular author in the past.
That's what happened on Wednesday and I get the feeling I'm going to have to do something about it. There are things I wrote ten years ago that, thanks to the increased amount of information available on the internet, I could probably do with revisiting. I'm starting to doodle around the idea of revising the text and putting them into some kind of collection that would be available through Kindle or as a nice fat book, but relatively cheap as I'm not necessarily out to make a profit on some of this—if you haven't noticed, it doesn't cost you a dime to visit Bear Alley and you're not charged for visiting any of the 3,830 articles published here.
Putting some of this old material together in book form might give me a chance to include stuff I have discovered since, stuff that didn't fit the blog, link some of the authors who I may have written about many years apart, and generally tidy things up.
It's going to be a long process—I barely have the time to keep up with the new research, let alone revisit pieces written a decade ago—but I'm going to give it a shot. What I'm basically saying is that there might be some old features that you've bookmarked that disappear or move, or they might get a radical overhaul as I fiddle with the text and try to sort out a few images.
Just what I need... another new project!
Having picked Herbert Shappiro as an example of someone I wrote up ten years ago, here are a few more covers from the same author.
You really have produced a remarkable resource here Steve. I've noticed that the comments are always worth checking too as, more than once, new information has turned up when the son or daughter of one of your subjects responds - sometimes several years after the original posting.
ReplyDeleteIt's one of the reasons I'm thinking of revising some of the material, as not everyone will look at the comments. I tend to fix factual errors in the text, but there are some additions that would require a bit of rewriting, and I don't always have the time. Hence the notion of putting a book together, which will force my hand! :-)
ReplyDeleteDue to my deep interest in the bio infos about long forgotten authors (most of all of western novels) it'd be very interesting that you print some fat book with all the results of your research. By the way do you've posted some tag about an author of westerns by the name of William Lee Hopson. I'm trying to prepare a complete bio/bibliography of his works.
ReplyDeleteGod job, Mister Holland!
Greetings from Italy,
Tiziano Agnelli