I’m completely new to book-writing and it felt like a mountain to climb. I have five chapters of around 8 thousand words each to write for the book (I have co-authors, who are also lovely), and the general advice I got was to just take it all one step at a time. This sounds a lot like the way I teach project management and time management to developers, so I used those same skills and created a burndown chart (I blogged about creating these before):
As you can see, there have been some great days, and some quieter days. The flat lines are mostly weekends or days where I was out of the office with other clients. Although I feel slightly overwhelmed (and this doesn’t show the edits that come back after I submit each chapter), the graph is at least going in the right direction!
I’m coming up to my 5th anniversary of blogging and looking at my stats, I’ve written around 150 posts per year for most of that time, although in 2010 I “only” wrote 102 posts, possibly because one or two other things happened in my life. So many people tell me they want to blog, or they have a blog but can’t find the time to write, that I thought I’d try to give some pointers for those resolving to blog this New Year.
None of it is rocket science but these are important topics often skated over by writers wanting to get to the complicated bits! Hopefully these posts bridge the gap between the very dated introductory PHP content that is still lying around on the web and the tutorials about shiny new stuff that are more typically found elsewhere. The community over on Think Vitamin is great, the comments and retweets have been very constructive and I’m very excited to be involved.
I find I’m writing for a few outlets other than just my blog these days and often want to refer people to that content as well, so I’ve added a “Publications” page, linked from the left hand sidebar. This will keep up with the articles I’m posting elsewhere, interviews, and anything else along those lines, all in one place.
My post this year is aimed as a reminder to us all that we can all aspire to better things, and lots of “better” eventually adds up to “pretty damn good”! If you read the post and have comments, add them here – and if you’ve chosen what one thing you’d like to change next, I’d be delighted to hear it. Whatever your next step, good luck :)
When I write an email, I’m usually (mostly) doing that one thing, and the result is quite joined-up. Anyone who has had the experience of trying to carry on a conversation with me over messaging when I’m doing multiple things knows that I can easily lose the thread of an explanation and I often find I have to read back the logs of a conversation to be able to keep up.
When someone takes the time to write an email, the reader can’t interrupt or divert the writer and so the writer is able to express their points at their own pace. Email is also easier to re-read and reformat, if you are the kind of writer that doesn’t necessarily think of everything that needs to be said in quite the order it ought to be said.
When someone is emailing asking me to do something, I won’t lose an email (you’d be surprised how often I lose things people ask me to do on IRC, its on a par with asking me in the pub). Admittedly, my inbox can be several months deep but when I have time to attend to your query, I will – and that goes for social correspondence as well.
Finally, and most importantly, it enables me to stay in touch with people whose committments don’t fit around mine in terms of online availability due to work, life, or timezones.
I’m quite enjoying a slightly more formal exchange of the written word with those friends who are emailing me while I’m on these little jaunts – you know who you are and I don’t enjoy being away from home so those little messages are welcome, thanks :) And for everyone else – next time you are lurking online looking out for someone, take the time to write an email instead – and let me know how it works for you.