e-books "Janus Manhattan's Children"

I believe that today's personal blogs , such as this one , best reflect the timeliness and intimate informality of yesterday's one person (print) newsletters.

 I call that tone a sort of 'non-deathless' prose --- because what they lose in literary grace, they gain in their immediacy and naive honesty.

By contrast , journals (and magazines) tend to come out much less frequently and are both more formal in appearance than a newsletter and more measured & reflective in their tone.

The loss of an intimate personal tone inevitably comes with their decision to publish a multiplicity of authors writing on a multiplicity of topics.

Books come out even less frequently and the author and the publisher both aspire for these works to become 'deathless' prose --- work that will remains alive even decades later --- again the tone changes.

I will use a modified version of this three level schema in publishing my work.

DAILY BLOG POSTS

It will all start with the daily blog posts - some very short , some quite long - none laboured over greatly. They are free to read, free to download or re-post and very readable on every form of mobile device.

E-Books

Some multi-part posts, written in narrative non-fiction form to tell a story , will eventually be bundled together and made available as free e-books. 

Sometimes they will delivered in quite short (50 pages) lengths - think of them as offering a brief but complete vignette on one crucial incident in my overall story.

At other times, the various vignettes will be bundled together in one e-book will be much much longer, more like a conventional serious biography and designed how the individual incidents come together to show a developing theme.

And again these longer e-books will also be free and free to re-distribute. I call it Open Commensal publishing and it is designed to make concrete a key thesis of my book.

That is my claim that wartime Manhattan saw a gradual shift from closed commensality (reflected in the secrecy of the modern Manhattan nuclear Project) towards open commensality.

This was best reflected in the postmodern Manhattan penicillin Project, where freely-shared knowledge about non-patented/non-secret public domain natural penicillin allowed it to become the world's cheapest, most effective and most widely available life saver.