I hope that you made it to these last few pages in the book only after you’ve read all of the preceding chapters, because taken together they form a comprehensive corpus of advice, guidance, and encouragement that should set you well on your way to starting—and finishing—one of a whole range of possible writing projects.
Of course, there’s always a good reason not to be writing. You have work to be done during the week and perhaps into the weekend. There are family and friends, obligations, events, chores and errands and responsibilities. Somewhere in the midst of a hectic twenty-first-century life you may be able to carve out some so-called free time, but perhaps the last thing anyone wants to do then is to be thinking about work again. And not only thinking about it but also analyzing your thoughts and fashioning them into clear, concise, comprehensible words.
However, if there’s a single theme that I could contrive to cover the nearly one hundred pieces in this book, it’s that this achievement is demonstrably possible. Yes, you have to start somewhere: pick your topic, do your research, and write your first sentence. And then you have to power through the temptation, the raging urge, to leave the thing unfinished, to do something else productive instead or just to relax a little. Persevere. Write a first draft, read it over, have an informed colleague read it over again for you. Stand back, give the process a little time, and then have at it again, writing, rewriting, editing, making your work the best it can be. Oh, and the end result: final draft submitted, the decision of the editor, and finally your hard-fought and well-wrought prose published. Or you could keep it simple and direct: start a blog and have your first posting on the Web before you go to bed tonight.
Before any of that, though, you need to do a little background reading to become more informed. If you haven’t read the chapters yet, go back and have a look at them all. I particularly recommend the one on page . . .
—Wayne Jones, head of Central Technical Services, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and editor of Access and E-Journals Access and Management