I got stalled for a while this year working on my new e-book. I’ve just resumed work on it, and although I feel a sense of procrastination in ‘how am I going to convey [insert any concept I wish to discuss]’ with the reader, things are surprisingly going very smoothly.

It ‘should’ be much easier second time round is the theory. I’ve written about aspect ratios before, and although it would have been tempting to work with the original text, I know in my heart that this would have caused so much work and given me so much pain. It would most likely have confused things.

You see, I think that as you get better at explaining things, it’s because you’ve gained more clarity about the subject yourself. Upon looking back on my original e-book, I feel I went for a much longer walk than was necessary. As Brian Eno once said ‘sometimes you find yourself saying something that you didn’t know you knew’. This is similar to the idea that if you can’t explain something well that you think you understand, you maybe don’t know it as well as you thought you do. So too, returning to aspect ratios after a decade of thinking long and hard about why aspect ratios really matter and are, in my view, the very first specification I would check when buying a new camera. I have found that my own sense of clarity about the subject is, well, just more clear :-)

If you’ve got a good sense of what you think are the pro’s and con’s about a subject, then it’s going to be a lot easier to work on.

So I think the little book is coming on well. I will just have to see how it goes over the next few months as I have a few trips on the go which may cause me to pause my work on it.