I wrote 25 pages yesterday. I worked on it from when I got up at 9am, to when I went to sleep around 2am, with a break from 6pm to 9pm for dinner and family. I did other things during the day, of course, but nothing major.
25 pages, in about 14 hours. It seems like when you look at a page, that page would take you about 5 minutes to type out. But writing it and typing it are apparently two different things.
I never cease to be amazed at how slow writing goes. I have such unrealistic expectations, and that too amazes me. You'd think by now I'd know, but I guess not.
That's not to say I have much patience with the people who take two years to write a book. I'm churning out a chapter every day or two, people, working full-time on it. Even part-time it shouldn't take you two years!
Oh well, back to the grind ...
Nat
Re:Speed
gnat on 2002-01-24T09:56:39
Right. I'm doing 25 pages a day because they're straight documentation, with very little research involved. I bog right down as soon as I get to something that doesn't work as advertised, or I need to scruffle through the source.--Nat
Re:Various question on writing...
gnat on 2002-01-24T10:04:32
I don't have specific memories in mind, but my gut feeling is that I turn to jelly when my life isn't going well, and writing suffers. I remember freaking out about work stuff at my last job, and became a totally dysfunctional wreck for a week or two. I've since learned the importance of blood sugar levels and that doesn't happen nearly so often now:-) I'm putting off questions about the work I'll do after this book, in case the answer is "straight into another with no rest for you!", because I don't want to get bummed out about that and be unable to finish this book. So I guess, yes, mood does affect writing. I knew it was time to write when I looked at the production deadline and saw the work I needed to do on the chapters I had. If you're talking in the wider sense of "how did you get the balls to write a book?", it was more just that I've always been a wordy bastard and didn't stop long enough to think about what I was doing until the book was done.
A quiet house improved my ability to write. During the daytime, with kids and noise and distraction, I run at maybe 40% of peak. During the night, though (so long as I can keep myself off use.perl and other web distractions) I'm a lean mean writing machine. Hence the 3:30am and 4:30am bedtimes I've had this and last week.
Writing's fun, but I don't get caught up in the chase the way I do with programming. Editing, I sometimes do--what's the best order for these concepts, what's the key that will unravel this contorted sentence,
.... I like programming, but I hate it when I have to deal with things that aren't my program--I've recompiled PHP more times than man should ever have to, mostly because of messed up libraries on my system. Recompiling and trying to work out whether the bug is in the larger environment or in my own code ... that's not fun. Ah, I must be putting off work, I'm prattling about myself
:-) --Nat
