I used to hate outlining. It was frustrating and didn’t seem to help my writing at all. When I’d sit down to write, I’d scribble out a few bullet points that were related to what I wanted to write about. These points were usually a loose collection of thoughts that centered around a single theme […]
Continue readingIn college, I spent a semester in Washington, D.C. as an intern at the Washington Times. The department I worked with covered cultural trends, which gave me the opportunity to do my favorite kind of writing—in-depth features. I loved the newspaper atmosphere and I enjoyed my assignments. But looking back, I wasn’t very productive. I […]
Continue readingTo meet my ambitious publishing goals for the year, I’m going to have to step up my game. By this time next year, I plan to publish four non-fiction books in the 20,000- to 30,000-word range. Last year I spent about six months working on a book to get to around 15,000 to 18,000 words, […]
Continue readingMine isn’t the typical P90X results story. It started off normally—at least judging by the “before” photos that I dutifully snapped. The photos confirmed what I already knew: I was a skinny, inactive programmer with a slowly expanding waistline. But I was going to change all that. I’d never done anything as intense as P90X, […]
Continue readingI’ve set big writing goals for myself several times in the past. This year, my goal was to publish 100,000 words between books and blog posts. Prior to that, I’d tried setting daily word count goals, like writing 500 words a day, and time-based goals, like writing for one hour every morning. But I’d never […]
Continue readingWhen I sit down to start writing a new app, I don’t agonize over what files to create and what to call them. I don’t start at an empty project in my editor and wonder where to start. No, I click File | New Project in a menu, or I run a console command, and […]
Continue readingIf you search DuckDuckGo for “how to write a book,” you might be tempted to just give up on the whole idea. The top-ranking results are littered with words and phrases like “torture,” “horrible experience,” “didn’t make any money.” The conventional wisdom is that writing books is an arduous process and one that’s not really […]
Continue reading