Book first draft stands at 5 chapters and 34k words, 1 year in, and starting to feel book-shaped in my head. Serialization kinda works as a writing strategy. But it’s a nontrivial change from both blogging and offline book writing.
Conversation
Unlike a regular book constructed offline (I’ve only done Tempo that way) you can’t go back and forth too much. Chapters have to develop in order at better than first draft coherence and low chance of severe future refractors.
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But unlike an essay collection or blog series, there’s is too much compounding structure and back referencing to entirely wing it. It’s not pantsing improv. You need a Plan.™
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It’s a high-backtrack-cost depth-first search. Speculative execution where branch prediction errors are much more expensive than non-serialized first drafts.
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I’ve used a slightly arbitrary 7-layer stack structure to organize the material that is slightly forgiving to factorization errors. The core of the book is 7 chapters, 1 per stack layer, in order. I might not have chosen such a structure if I weren’t serializing it in real time.
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It’s oddly appropriate for a book about time though. A clockless clock of a book that’s about clockless clocks.
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Besides the core, I have a couple of more idiosyncratic chapters at beginning and end. Book feels about 1/3 done. I estimate it will weigh in around 110k, 2x as long as Tempo.
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Originally I planned to interleave a sort of GEB Achilles-tortoise style fiction through the book in alternate chapters. Had a whole Alice-in-wonderland type story figured out. But set it aside as too complex. I’d need near full-time attention on this to pull it off.
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Replying to
How the hell do people write dozens of books in one life? I can do the word count in essay-sized chunks, but 40x5000 is way easier than 4x50,000 or 2x100,000.
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I’ve done 7 loosely integrated essay collections, 2 medium integrated series ebooks, and 1 properly integrated book. On deck rn: 1 more book, 2 more medium integrated series.
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After that I’m probably done with nonfiction beyond essay length. Might do fiction at book length but remains to be seen if I can learn that bag of tricks faster than I appear to be going senile. Race!
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