Not Writing Myself Off Just Yet

Finally, after some travelling, I’m back in Oz having spent some time in Ladakh (Northern India), France, U.K. and Canada, all the while trying to write my first technical book.

The book (yet to actually be published mind you) was handed to me by Jon Eaves, no doubt meant as a cruel joke or perhaps punishment for some as-yet unspecified crime I must have committed ;-)

It has been a bit disheartening at times. For a start, I knew that I knew nothing about writing before I started but I now know how little that actually was. I take some comfort in the knowledge that as a complete newbie to the whole writing game, I wasn’t supposed to have known anything anyway. Having never completed a degree (I left school at age 17 to start working) and thus never having written much if anything except for my occasional blog entries (and whatever is necessary for work), my capacity to fill pages with words was (and probably still is) severely limited.

Then of course there is the tragic development process that is book publishing. For a start, you have no idea what they actually want so you do your best and start handing in chapters. As the weeks go by and you hear nothing in the way of feedback, you start to worry so, inevitably you spend more time on each chapter trying to get it “right”. Eventually the chapters are returned to you. Some are great, some need a bit of work and others are unrecognisable, let alone unintelligible to even me, the original author! I’m not sure how to resolve this problem though as everyone I speak to complains about the same thing.

I should also never have travelled while writing my first book: I discovered that I’m a single-threading processor, just as the stereotype for my gender suggests. Though to be fair, I’m not sure this really contributed as much as simply Not Having a Clue™.

I learned that standing up in front of people and giving a talk, a presentation or even teaching a class, pales into insignificance when compared to writing a book (at least for me anyway). Get my gums a flappin’ and there’s no stopping me; put me in front of a computer to type out a chapter and ………………………………. Exactly! Nothing. Nada. Bupkis. Zero. Zilch. Nanimo. I found myself having to talk out loud to an imaginary person just to get my brain into gear.

Then of course there is the subject matter: Algorithms. A topic covered by so many books that surely only a mad-man would attempt another. This one is different though. It attempts to cover each algorithm at a conceptual level in a way that most people should understand. The code itself is unit-tested and the implementations are not merely a re-hashing of C-code just to get the word Java on the cover. So in that sense I’m quite proud of the effort - I’m yet to see the final product.

On another positive note, I think my coding has improved. I’d like to say that I experienced some epiphany and suddenly became a better `r but alas, the motivation was far more down-to-earth: I’m lazy. Having to explain code in words can be difficult and at times a little, shall we say, uninteresting so, the smaller and simpler I can make the code, the easier it is to explain. The down-side is that my coding style changed about 2/3 of the way through writing the chapters. Oh well.

Fortunately I also had James (another book-writing newbie) helping me out. Unfortunately we ended up on different sides of the planet. Fortunately, against all advice to the contrary, our friendship surived with flying colours; If anything it’s made me realise how much better it is to regularly pair on things.

And lastly, I think I’d like to write another book though my approach would be very different. We’ll see if anyone is willing to risk it a second time. In the meantime, it’s back to my greatly-missed training schedule, get a haircut, and get a real job.