"So how's the book coming along?"
I do feel like every now and then I should give you that update. And this is where my internal voice says "it's been more than six months, you should be further along than this."
I need to keep reminding that voice what I've been up to.
Book proposal
Over the summer, I wrote about half of my book proposal.
However, a lot of the book proposal is driven by being clear about what you are and aren't writing about. I was struggling to pin down my focus for the book.
What exactly was I writing about? Was this a book about how to get promoted? Was it a book about being happier at work? Was this about processes and ways of working? Was it about soft skills development (ho hum)?
Reading
Over the summer, I started reading the stack of books that I've been meaning to read, several of which I think are required reading for me before I can write the book I want to write.
Unfortunately, I'm taking in book recommendations faster than I can read them. The stack of books is just getting longer.
Conferences
In September, I went to Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit in Las Vegas. It was there that I finally decided that my book can't just ignore AI.
Besides, if I'm writing about humanity in software development, AI only makes that an especially relevant concern.
But the next thing to do was to prepare for speaking at LeadDev StaffPlus in NYC in October, so all things book were on hold while I made my talk the best it could be.
That said, I did come up with question cards. Originally a way of getting my business card into people's hands, it also got me to generate 100 questions for reflection about life as a developer. These are proving a great source of stories for the book.
I went on vacation, and then I was off to the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) in Chicago. That's where I am now. (Wish me luck getting home.)
One of the takeaways from Grace Hopper is that things are often better as collaborative efforts. The idea of writing a book with others keeps coming up. I don't really want a co-author, I'm more interested in having either a long list of guest contributors on specific topics, or doing original research and reporting on that.
I'll admit I'm intimidated by either path towards making it a group effort. Collaboration sounds a lot harder than just writing on my own. After all, as people who have been reading the hundreds of pages of documentation that I've written over the past 20 years can attest, writing is just What I Do.
Then again, I've often joked that my job title ought to be "cat wrangler," because herding the cats to get a large project done is also What I Do.
AI for brainstorming
When I haven't been traveling, I've been trying out some new tools for working with ideas for the book.
I won't use AI to write, but I've been finding it useful for helping me get clarity on my ideas. I set it up so I could talk to it, and then I just blathered at it for a while as I was on one of my daily walks. I had it summarize, suggest things I might be missing, ask me questions, and try to incorporate disparate ideas into a cohesive plan.
Capacities for getting the stories
Capacities is a flexible note-taking tool of sorts. You create "objects" in it, and then you can link objects to each other. A book object might be linked to a person (the author, say), or to some of its main ideas. Then the person and the ideas could in turn be linked to other objects (maybe to a talk the person gave, or a blog post.
I've been blathering at this too - I'll turn on dictation and just tell it one of the stories I'm trying to capture. The dictation has the annoying habit of deciding to just eliminate anything it wasn't sure it "heard" correctly, so the stories wind up with words missing. But at least I'm getting them drafted.
What's next?
I want to reach out to a few other authors to find out what their experiences have been with doing research or collaboration for the books they've written.
I am also going to review my notes from my interactive sessions with AI to see if I can start to get more clarity on the book's direction.
And, as I've been saying for a few months now, I need to write more. I think ultimately I'm going to know what my book is about once I see what I've written.
Drop me a note
No pictures from Unsplash this week, and not a lot of editing... this is an update written while in the middle of a busy conference.
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