U.S. and Latin American Relations writing (Part 1)

Especially now that my Latin American politics textbook is very close to production, I've begun work in earnest on the 2nd edition of my U.S. and Latin American Relations textbook, which I greatly enjoy working on. My contractual deadline from Wiley is August 2014, which is a reasonable one. I really want to reach it, which would not only be on time but would take it off my plate as the Fall 2014 semester begins. As a public way of measuring my progress, I've been thinking about periodically blogging about the work as it goes. In part I hope this will keep me moving--if it is somehow useful/interesting to anyone else then all the better. Otherwise feel free to ignore it.

There are 12 chapters, one of which will be written from scratch (on challenges to U.S. hegemony, something I've been covering in great detail in this blog).

My strategy has been to print out the chapters one by one, then go over them in an old fashioned manner, namely with a red pen. I've done that for the first two, but I know they're easiest because the theoretical and historical stuff needs to be updated and tweaked, but is not "dated" per se the same way later chapters are. The last draft of these chapters was completed in March 2007! Once I'm done with the red pen, then it's time to get back into the Word file itself to make the changes, mess with formatting, etc. I haven't started any of that yet.

I've written two pages of the new chapter, which will be in the 45-50 page range. I need to choose two primary documents for the chapter (which is the same for all the rest). This could be speeches, or I've thought about seeing whether the founding documents of ALBA, UNASUR, et al might be interesting as a way to highlight the ways in which governments were trying to forge something that did not include the United States.

In sum:

Progress

Chapter 1 - edited but not revised
Chapter 2 - edited but not revised
Chapter 3 - editing
Chapter 7 - writing (2 pages)