First two chapters turned in

After a couple of months of deep writing, I’ve just turned in my first two chapters for the ActivityPub book for O’Reilly Media.

It’s been a really tough process for me. I’ve never written a book, or really any text of this size, before, so learning how to organise the process and my time has been a real challenge.

I mentioned in my birthday inventory that I’ve pretty much shifted my time from my graduate school work to working on this book. Unfortunately, that time wasn’t really directly transferrable. A lot of the work I did for studying was relatively passive — reading and watching lectures. These were things I could do while exercising, doing chores, or going to bed.

Writing requires a lot more focus, so I can’t really double up with other activities. It’s meant carving time out of my schedule, and putting off other tasks. Unfortunately, that scheduling has thrown off my other needs, like exercise or meditation. I’m only now figuring out how to fit everything into a single day, and still have time for sleep.

It was also difficult getting started because I was intimidated. Writing this book feels like a real life’s-purpose moment, bringing together many of the things that matter to me the most. Having high expectations like that makes it hard to put words on the page — and makes me doubt my own abilities.

Gradually, I overcame that reluctance by concentrating on tracking my word count over time. What I wrote didn’t need to be perfect; it just had to move my word count total up for the day. Having a set number of words to finish each day, and knowing how to hit that goal, made the process a lot easier.

As a technical book, it’s really required some programming effort on my side, too. I’ve created two major software projects just for this book: onepage.pub, an egregiously-misnamed ActivityPub API and protocol server, and ap, a command-line client for the ActivityPub API. Both have been a lot of fun to work on, and I’ve learned a lot that informs the content of the book.

Chapter 1, the introduction to the fediverse, has a lot of text about why ActivityPub was created, how the social web works, and what is coming down the pike for tomorrow. Chapter 3, the ActivityPub API, is primarily about creating API clients. It took the most technical work, and has a ton of code examples.

My next deadline is December 15; I’ll be working on Chapter 2 (Activity Streams 2.0) and Chapter 5 (Extensions). I think they’ll have less code, and I can leverage the work on onepage.pub and ap, as well as the great activitystrea.ms library James Snell built several years ago. I feel like my processes and tools are much better for this next period of development than they were for the first, but I’m going to have the added work of revisions and review for the first two chapters.