Rants,Raves and Ruminations

Today is a special day.

The odd thing about is it is a day just like any other. The sun is shining, crocuses have bloomed in the land of the Living Brain Dead, the animals are pounding the doors to go outside and the robins seem to have found the nest they made in our stove’s exhaust vent and are making the usual racket fluffing their wings and screeching at all hours. My usual load of pre approved bank loans, Brunei princes offering me instant riches, newsletters and other stuff is sitting in my email waiting for their inevitable trip to the trash. A video tutorial needs doing. Students are whining at me about their mid term marks and the posts to a couple of newsgroups and other lists contain the usual stuff about elastic CSS, product features and other items that catch the writer’s fancy. It is Tuesday. It is my “day off” and it is the day I start pounding on a new book.

Hunter Thompson had it right when he said writing was a nasty business. In many respects it is very much akin to finding yourself in the middle of one king hell fire fight where mortar rounds rip through the jungle canopy overhead or some crazed jihadist with a .50 cal machine gun is laying the rounds down in your general direction. Before the start of the battle, you are fresh, alive, alert and ready to rock and roll. By the end of it you have that “Thousand Yard Stare” and, four or five months later when you emerge from the other side of the process, only another writer understands the volumes of nuance behind, “I just sent the manuscript off.”

One of the more common questions I am asked is: “Why do you write books?”

The answer is rather complicated.

I don’t do it because I am an adrenaline junkie who just can’t wait for his next book fix. It surely isn’t the financial rewards though I believe the publishers have a rather effective disinformation campaign going that says otherwise. It isn’t the fame because … there is none. I have yet to bump into any purchaser of a computer book who knows Joe Lowery, Colin Moock or Ben Forta as writers. They have solid technical reputations which tend to overshadow their writing efforts. It isn’t ego. Regularly subjecting yourself to this vicious, soul rending process because your ego needs a “hit” says to me you are one very strange, maladjusted individual with a rather twisted outlook on reality.

For me, writing books satisfies an intense curiosity about how things work. The one I start on today is an extension of the exploration of Flash Video and will surely push me into the dark corners of that subject. The interesting thing about that is the whole tone of the book will be “Here is what I learned…” If you read any computer book that is essentially the message the author is conveying and you can choose to listen to it or not.

The start of the process is rather innocuous.

For me it usually starts with my editor sending an email, the gist of which is: “I have an idea…” Conversely, it could be me sending that email. Once that “dance” is completed you write the Table of Contents which is usually subjected to a peer review and, this I have never understood, I have to make the marketing case as to why the book should be printed. How odd. I have always thought if a publisher is going to print a book then the publisher must have some pretty sharp marketing guys kicking around. Don’t they know what will sell and what won’t sell? Then again the only marketing guys I have met from a publisher are the sales reps at Conferences and their job is to “push the paper”. There have to be guys above them and so on up the food chain but I suspect they prefer living in shadows and being anonymous which isn’t typical for a marketing guy.

Once you start writing, you discover that pleasant meadow you have been strolling has become a “Red Hot Free Fire Zone” in Baghdad. It is at this point that your relationship with the publisher makes you wonder whether you are a writer or some form of simpleton who wears two left shoes and puts his pants on backwards.

You could, for example, wind up with an editor who, thinking he or she knows more about the subject than you ever will, starts imposing “my way of doing it” on you. This inevitably happens when the editor has an impressive coding background and your coauthor has one as well. When they collide… and they will… the rat fight that breaks out makes the collision of galaxies look like a minor fender bender.

While this is going on another editor will be beating on you to make deadlines and pulling every emotional lever he or she can yank to ensure your self worth is ground into the dust. You are then subjected to a flood of Author Reviews that are so plentiful you need a super computer simply to keep track of which one is more important that the others and requires immediate attention.

At the same time the artist is laying out the book and you start getting flooded with requests for screen shots - reshooting a hundred or so because you got the wrong spec to start with is the one rational reason I can present in support of serious substance abuse- and minor corrections that sometimes become major corrections which starts the whole process all over again.

The really strange thing about this nastiness is how much I enjoy it. To me it is not an adversarial game with guys in white (me) and guys in black (them). I find it to be intellectually stimulating which is sort of why I am regarded as a bit of a “weirdo” by my writing peers. (There are other reasons for that but let’s not go there.)

The thing is you learn a lot more about the subject at hand than you did when you first walked into the meadow. For me, that is the pay off. I am forced to upgrade my technical skills because I am surrounded by a group of pros whose whole reason for being is to make the book a success. So when you really look at the process, we all have the same goal. The problem is we all have different paths to it which is why the creation of a book , in many respects, is like trying to “herd cats”.