Creating Interview Questions

I’m writing up the interview questions I’m going to submit to the Human Subjects Review Board for the interviews I’m going to conduct with the authors and editors, but all of the questions seem so trite and big:

Authors
Why did you start writing children’s nonfiction?
What do you need to know about children’s nonfiction publishing?
Who do you view as your audience?
Does that audience play a part in your writing process? If so, how?
If you were handed a resource on writing and publishing children’s nonfiction, what would you like to see covered in it?
(For experienced authors) When you first started writing children’s nonfiction, what questions did you have about…
the publishing process?
your audience?
how to write the book or series?

Editors
What do you look for when evaluating a new book or series?
What gets published under your watch? Why?
Do editors prefer query letters or a full manuscript for a book or series?
What is your publishing houses criteria for prospective authors? For prospective series or book?
What is your advice to new authors seeking to break into the field of children’s nonfiction?

I’m just not sure how to get my questions to stop leading to answers I’m looking for. That’s what I have so far. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Well, I’m back researching for my proposal (which is almost ready to go to my committee…yay!), which means I’m back posting to my research blog.

This also makes me impatient to transfer my blog to wordpress, but I would want to take all the archived posts with me from here, and I have no clue how to do that. I’m thinking this will take place some time this summer, when I’m squeaking in research time at 1 in the morning.

My mommy is not going to be pleased with my sleeping habits. But when I’m under deadline for two indexes, a design class (which I suck at, by the way–not terrible bad, but in comparison to the superb designer we have for Cellar Roots, it’s pretty bad), and Cellar Roots, not to mention my normal work for the JNT, this is the way it’s going to be until March 4th. That’s when our book release takes place for CR. I’m excited and happy and, to be completely honest, really ready for it to be done. Less than a month! Woohoo!

Back At It

As you can see, I’m back to work on the proposal, and the project, really. It’s kind of hard to separate the two. When I’m researching for the proposal, I’m really researching for the project.

Once I get this proposal accepted, the project feels like it should be a breeze! The proposal has been so much work–it’s been 3 credits all on its own.

I’m hoping the project will come together more smoothly now that I have a clearer focus on my project question. I didn’t mention that we changed it to fit what I really was interested in? I’ll tell you that story in the next posting…after I get more of these resources saved. Cheers!

Ann Wysocki is hard to find

Well, at least her work is. I finally found the online, hyper-text version of “Monitoring order: Visual desire, the organization of web pages, and teaching the rules of design here, but I still can’t find “With Eyes That Think, and Compose, and Think: On Visual Rhetoric,” which I know was published in Teaching Writing With Computers: An Introduction by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian Huot. But I can’t get a hold of their book (unless I buy it, and I’m just too cheap/poor to do that when I’m not sure I will get any use out of the other articles). Halle Library doesn’t have it and neither do any of the hundreds of libraries in the MelCat system. *sigh*

Ann Wysocki, if you’re reading this, do you happen to have a copy of this article around? I would really like to include it in my literature review for my master’s project. Thanks.

P.S. I will be e-mailing her if I can’t find it in the next couple of days. I sure hope she doesn’t mind!

I didn’t realize it was Super Bowl Sunday yesterday. Didn’t watch a lick of it because I had people over not for the Super Bowl. No commercial-viewing, etc., though it sounds like it was a pretty pathetic commercial turn-out this year.

I’m boring but busy. When I have something interesting to write about, I’ll let you know!