{"id":363,"date":"2016-05-21T16:10:04","date_gmt":"2016-05-21T21:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/?p=363"},"modified":"2016-06-06T14:14:09","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T19:14:09","slug":"im-writing-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/?p=363","title":{"rendered":"I’m Writing a Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m writing a book. It is a technical book on developing web applications using the Grails<\/a> framework. I won’t get any more technical than that in this post because what I want to talk about is what I have learned so far from the experience of taking on a project of this scope. So all of my non-technical readers can read on without fear of your eyes glazing over.<\/p>\n

It all started when I discovered that a new major version of the Grails software was being released. As I read the description of the new release I began to realize that it was quite different from the version that I\u00a0 had been using. I did what I always do when confronted with new software, I looked for a tutorial book to read on it. This time there wasn’t one.<\/p>\n

The books covering the previous release of the software had not been out for that long and I imagine the authors of those works were taking a much needed break before taking on such a substantial rewrite. It occurred to me that since I was going to have to learn the new software anyway, I should take it as an opportunity to write a tutorial book about it.<\/p>\n

I have wanted to write, and publish, books for quite a while. Four years ago I started writing a daily journal entry at 750 Words<\/a>. At first I spent a lot of time writing about how many words I had written and how hard I was finding it to sit and write seven hundred and fifty words at one sitting. But slowly, day after day, week after week, I started to write about more interesting things. I wrote about what happened the day before. I wrote about my plans for the day. I wrote snippets of stories, I like to call them sketches.<\/p>\n

One year I took on the Nation Novel Writing Month<\/a> challenge to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. The first time I tried I got the flu the second week and got hopelessly behind the 1,700 word\/day pace necessary to complete the challenge. The next year I was too busy with other commitments but the year after I completed the first draft of a novel of the requisite size within the month allowed. It needs a lot of work before I would want anyone else to read it but I proved to myself that I could do it.<\/p>\n

I follow the blog of Dave Winer<\/a>, the creator of both blogging and podcasting. Dave often talks about how he goes about writing software. One of the things he recommends is that you Narrate Your Work<\/em>. I have made a practice of doing that professionally for many years now. I have used several writing tools to keep my log. Everything from plain text editors like notepad to outline processors. Lately at work I have been using a small wiki similar to the software behind Wikipedia<\/a> to keep my work log.<\/p>\n

When I decided to write this book I had just discovered Michael Hartl’s book Ruby on Rails Tutorial (3rd Ed.)<\/a>. While reading the book I poked around Michael’s site and discovered that he was making his publishing software, Softcover<\/a>, available free for other authors to use to write their books. And, to make a good deal better, he was offering to provide a bookstore framework with which to sell your product at a deal that is unheard of in the publishing business.<\/p>\n

That was when I decided that I would write my book using the Softcover software. I would Narrate My Work<\/em> by documenting my experience as I learned all of the details of the new version of Grails.<\/p>\n

I did a quick estimation of how much work was involved. I looked at the tutorial books that I had read lately. They were all about twelve chapters long. I, naively, estimated that I could write a chapter a week. So, I estimated I could write the book in three months.<\/p>\n

I have subsequently determined that there are a lot of factors that I didn’t take into account. It has taken me about a month to get everything set up and write the first chapter. I also neglected to include the time for learning how to do the things that I was writing about. My revised estimate is that it will take me about six months to write. That may still be optimistic but if I take much longer than that, I may face stiff competition from others who have been writing their own Grails tutorials.<\/p>\n

I have learned a lot this last month. I have gained a lot of confidence in my ability both as a programmer and a writer. I am enjoying myself and learning a lot of interesting new things. Even if the book never sells a single copy, it will have been worth the effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m writing a book. It is a technical book on developing web applications using the Grails framework. I won’t get any more technical than that in this post because what I want to talk about is what I have learned so far from the experience of taking on a project of this scope. So all … Continue reading “I’m Writing a Book”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":367,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions\/367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}