The Quiet is a Lie

It would appear there are not a lot of written words here recently. Appearances are deceiving. There are lots of words and they look like this:

I’m winding up a three-week vacation which has been focused on getting the next book in shape. My definition of “in shape” is “I can kind’a sort’a see the whole book in my head.” This poorly defined state involves, as you have already seen: my floor. A lot of different writing states exist right now including: writing new chapters, editing old ones, transferring completed ones into a template, sending those chapters to an editor, integrating editor feedback, and keeping track of this entire process in a spreadsheet.

Small Things, Done Well will not be complete at the end of this vacation, but from where I sit in my cave, I can see how it fits together.

There are other Rands-related shenanigans going down during this break:

randsinrepose.com is now HTTPS. Sorry that took so long.1

Lyle and I continue to record and publish the The Important Thing podcast on an almost weekly basis. Do you have feedback on the podcast? You should tell us.

I’ve re-jiggered the Rands in Repose newsletter. I’ve moved from tinyletter.com to mailchimp.com and the newsletter is now published much more frequently. Sound interesting? Sign-up here. Wondering why the guy who works at Slack is sending email? Short story is that different folks want to find and consume content in different ways which is why there’s a weblog (with RSS), a podcast, books, a Slack, tweets and now a regularly updated newsletter.2 If you want to see the type of newsletter I aspire to build, subscribe to The Morning News.

Finally, as I am fleeing MediaTemple, I needed to land a bunch of static sites on modern infrastructure. All the book sites, FriendDA, and my new skeletal personal site are now hosted on Netlify. Their basic set-up is each site is a GitHub repository and whenever I make a change to that repository, a new version of the site is deployed. #magic Thanks to Paul Campbell for the stellar recommendation of Netlify.3

Each time I told someone I was going on vacation, they’d ask, “Where are you going?” I responded, “I’m going to wake-up, put on my favorite hoodie, walk upstairs, grab some black coffee, walk into my cave, and stare at my floor… for days.”

This is a lie. Writing a book is a large complex project and while extensive floor staring is required, I must maintain a steady flow of other creative projects to feed the momentum. Yes, there is a fine line between working on other projects and procrastinating writing the book, but if you squint your eyes it all looks like a vacation to me.

The folks at WP Engine made this process super easy. The key was getting access to an SSH command line because life is always better on the command line. ↩

The folks at MailChimp made news lettering super intuitive. ↩

This lightweight web work was an excellent project to learn about Visual Studio Code which is unexpectedly excellent. More on that later. ↩