It is finished!

I just finished writing my first full length book. It's just over 61,000 words. I've done quite a bit of editing as I was writing, mainly when I hit writers block with respect to new material. About half of it is edited close to completion (I think) but I might have to do some more editing on the other portions. It's non-fiction so I think most of the cutting was pretty obvious. There were occasional section that felt clunky that I decided fairly quickly couldn't work. (I don't even want to know how many words I have written in the various drafts and previous attempts I've made at writing this book... more than 61,000 though.)

The feeling of accomplishment has been slowly arriving. At first it felt really anti-climactic. For about a half hour, I felt less of a sense of completion than I typically do after finishing a blog post or an essay. But for the last fifteen minutes the realization that I actually finished writing what I'd set out to write is has finally been setting in.

The prose itself probably isn't the most elegant I've ever written. It's actually much easier to write elegant prose with fiction and platitude-style philosophy than it is to write elegant prose with heavier subject matter. But the content was the most ambitious subject matter that I've ever written about, and probably is the most ambitious I ever will write about. It's all very applied, specific, and object-level. Unlike this blog post... I doubt I will ever writie anything this applied and specific again. It's just the one book I had to write to give myself an internal license to focus my future on the more theoretical, abstract, meta-level stuff I prefer to think about and write about.

I'm too close to it right now to really re-read it and think about. But I do plan to review my own book, on my book review blog eventually. :)

What's the point of becoming a literary critic if you're not going to critique your own work?

And after dinner tonight, I'm going to smoke a cigar.

Then tomorrow, I suppose I start looking for an agent, looking for a job, and starting work on the coding project that should be my primary companion until I figure out what city I'll be living in and working in... at which point I should also begin seeking out having a social life again. And possibly begin building one that's a bit more digital than my social life in the past has been.

Yippee!

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I got called away to dinner while I was writing this, so I've now spent quite a bit of time eating, smoking, going for a walk, relaxing and otherwise celebrating being done with my project. I should resume my book-reviewing in a little more force tomorrow or the next day, since I don't have much else to do other than send a few emails, update my resume a little, and submit a couple of applications.

RescueTime does not work nearly as well as I had hoped. I don't think it does a good job of picking up on time when my only interaction with the computer is through the mouse. It wasn't working at all with the browser the first few days (Chrome on Ubuntu). I was running the full program as well as the browser extension with the box checked in the browser extension to say I was running the full program. When I unchecked that box and started running only the browser extension without the native program it started picking up more, but it tells me that I'm only at my computer about two hours a day... which is simply not true. (Also, if I trusted it's estimates for how long I spend writing, it would tell me that I write a ridiculously high number of words per minute, well over 100 some days, which I know is simply false. When I'm pretty much writing stream of conscious as I am right now, my progress is less than 40 words per minute, and my ordinary writing is a lot slower).

On the beeminder front, my habits have changed in ways that I did not anticipate since I started using beeminder. I've started skipping breakfast and showering a lot more frequently (never two days in a row for showering) so that I can keep my time down. While this is technically keeping my total time spending in these activities well below my target amounts, it's not really in the spirit of what I meant to do. I'll get up some mornings and think that if I'm not going to take a long shower, I might as well not shower at all, because it kind of kills the enjoyment of the whole experience for me whenever I rush it.

This is why I don't really like making goals typically. They seem like such a good idea at the time, but then I often regret making them. When I ate no added sugar January a year ago, that was a good goal. Eating sugar again after taking a month of abstinence actually produced a high that was way more intense than I would ever have anticipated. A couple weeks into the fast I pretty much got used to it. I was only able to do that because I was living alone, so I could avoid having any added sugar in the apartment. No way I could have had that much willpower just on my own.

But even that had some negative consequences. I lost some weight and lost some enthusiasm for eating as a result of it. And that wasn't particularly healthy for me

Pushing towards the goal of being able to run from Hyde Park to downtown and back without stopping was another good goal, with pretty much only positive consequences. I can't think of any negative side effects of that one. (Other than not being able to really walk much the day after I actually did that run. I really didn't think I would make it the last couple miles on the return.) Springs coming, so I should probably start running again.

So basically, I'm not really feeling too much love for beeminder. It might be great for people who are really good at making the right goals, if having some mechanism to hold them to the letter of those goals is all they need to preserve their motivation, but the spirit of the thing is easier to keep (I think) when you aren't aiming to keep the letter of the law.

Also, you really have to think about exactly what you want your goal to be. I wanted to waste less time as I ate breakfast (which basically meant not reading the newspaper with breakfast when I really think about what I was doing that was causing me to spend a sillily long time at the table.) But an appropriate time goal for when I'm eating alone is very different from one that's appropriate for eating with other people and talking, so again, if I'm aiming to keep that goal to the letter, it interferes with my life in dumb ways.

I'm not good at making beeminder style goals, so I just don't think beeminder is the tool for me. I like the concept. It just doesn't fit me.

I love the concept of RescueTime. It just doesn't work.

So both of those experiments are somewhat of a failure. Alas and alack, and oh well.