How I Write: Windows 11 Field Guide (Premium)

I spent the entire 4th of July long weekend working on the Windows 11 Field Guide. And I mean that quite literally: I had expected to get some other work done, as I always do over weekends. But the book, suddenly, is consuming my time. And my life.

And that’s a good thing.

As I’ve remarked to Brad every so often, there’s an interesting dynamic with writing where you enter a zone of sorts—what Microsoft excruciatingly called “being in the flow”—and lose track of the outside world. The minutes turn into hours and then into several hours. You forget to eat. You forget to get up. And in Brad’s case, you forget you have a podcast to record: once a week or so, these days, Brad will ping me at 9:00 am on a Friday to record First Ring Daily and I’m so consumed with whatever I’m writing that I had temporarily forgotten that we do the same thing literally every workday at literally the same time.

But the Windows 11 Field Guide has been, until recently, a slow burn with a strange history. When Microsoft announced Windows 11 last summer, I immediately announced that I’d be writing this book. And given my long history of writing books—roughly 30 in all, the last several being self-published—I had no doubts about being able to do this.

What I did lack, back in mid-2021, was any interest or excitement about the topic. And that’s weird for me, given my also-long history of writing professionally about Windows. I weathered the bad—Longhorn/Vista—and the terrible—Windows 8—but there was something strangely off-putting about Windows 11. I’ve always liked the new look and feel, and even the initial version had a few neat new features, like Snap Layouts. But most of it just felt half-assed.

Over time, I’ve come to understand that while Windows 11 isn’t as big a problem as Vista or Windows 8, and won’t damage Windows as those releases did, it has a far more insidious problem, a kind of rot on the inside. Vista and Windows 8 were terrible, for sure, but the leadership and teams that created those releases at least cared, they were trying push the platform forward. We can’t say that for Windows 11: this team, this leadership, isn’t ambitious enough to do any damage, let alone drive real change. There’s a lot of lip service to design and details mattering, but you can’t tell no one really cares. And that, I think, is what wore on me the most, especially upfront. Microsoft has never announced a major new release of Windows and then released it just three months later. I mean, think about it.

I’ve perhaps overthought it. But I did plod along for months trying to make sense of the Windows 11 Field Guide. And while I had initially (sort of) joked that the book, like Windows 11 itself, would be released early and in an incomplete form, especially at first, I eventually decided that I wanted this book to be something more than just another update to the existing book, the Windows 10 Field Guide. I wanted it to be new, better. I was never happy with the basic style guide possibilities provided by Leanpub, the service I used for that book. I wanted something more interactive, more visually interesting.

I wasted a lot of time on that. And in the end, I had to compromise. The book will be visually improved over the Windows 10 Field Guide, and it is structured differently, as I noted last week. I’ve overhauled the look a bit, based on new and previously unused Leanpub styles, but it will still be similar in many ways to its predecessor. I will be identifiable as a follow-up, much as Windows 11 itself is to Windows 10.

One of the biggest changes I had hoped to incorporate was video content. But in the end, this was unwieldy, and while I will be doing something video-based soon, too, it will be separate from the book. This may be disappointing to those who purchase the book, or might have otherwise, but I can see now that it’s for the best. Writing and video are two very different things, and that’s true for both the creator and the consumer, even though it can largely be the same basic content. I’ll do both. But let’s start with the book.

My wife and daughter were in Mexico last week, which gave me a lot of extra time to work on the book, so that was good timing. By this point, I had settled on whatever style I’d be using, and so I was able to piece together all the content I had created previously, and mash it up into the first semblance of an incomplete version of the book. I divided out the content that won’t make the initial (pre)release version of the book, and I’ve been focusing on what will.

Among the many things I investigated before moving forward was where I would publish and the book and, related to that, which tools would be required. For the Windows 10 Field Guide, I had used Leanpub and mostly liked that service. It allows you to write and publish in a variety of ways, but I’ve been using Markdown for the chapter documents, which are hosted in and published to Leanpub with GitHub. In the end, I stuck with Leanpub, and for a variety of reasons. But the big thing was just to move forward and get it down, and stop getting bogged down with experimenting with other services and tools. Leanpub is at least familiar, and it works.

Also problematically, I’ve been using an application called MarkdownPad to write the books, and this application is no longer supported, and it requires a very particular and older version of an API called Awesomium that has likewise been abandoned by its makers. Put simply, this toolset is unsustainable and I should have replaced it years ago with something more modern (and supported). But from my perspective, MarkdownPad also works better, at least for the books, than do other Markdown editors, and despite years of trying, I can’t get off it. And so I have soldiered forward, for years, using this thing. I’m still using it for the Windows 11 Field Guide.

(There are various issues with MarkdownPad that I have to work around. For example, it has a decent Find function with highlighting. But what it doesn’t have is Find and Replace. And so I have to sometimes load documents into another text or Markdown editor to globally replace some term or whatever.)

One of the major time sucks with the books isn’t so much the writing, though that does take time, of course, but rather all the things that have to happen around the writing. Consider a topic like installing Windows 11. This is a big topic, and it involves a lot of installing and reinstall of Windows 11, not just on real PCs but in virtual machines so I can take screenshots. You have to look at both Home and Pro. And with Windows 11, you have to investigate, test (and retest) methods for getting around various limitations (the required MSA sign-in, for example) and make sure that what you come up with always works. I’ve paved and repaved so many PCs and virtual machines in the past two weeks I’ve lost count. (The article New in 22H2: Windows Setup came out of that work.) It’s astonishing how much time this all takes.

It’s also astonishing how many PCs it requires. I have whatever PCs I write on, of course, and that changes over time. Three PCs running Windows 11 22H2 that are dedicated to screenshots on which I sign-in with a fresh Microsoft account made just for the book. A PC with the original version of Windows 11 so I can compare that to 22H2. And a PC running Windows 10 so I can keep track of the differences between that system and Windows 11, as called out throughout the book (also signed in with that same fresh MSA).

From a process perspective, I have locally synced versions of the GitHub repositories in OneDrive, which means they are available from any PC I choose to use. This is huge for me since I move from PC to PC regularly. And I use a sequence of GitHub command-line commands to update, publish, and commit my changes with the source.

Then, I use a tool on Leanpub’s website to preview the new version of the book, which I can view in PDF form when the process completes.

And then I repeat this process over and over and over again. Someday soon, I’ll add publish passes to this process, which is what pushes new versions of the book out publicly to those who have purchased it. We’ve not yet turned that on.

As noted previously, there are lots of “Where did it go?” callouts throughout the book that explain where missing functionality from Windows 10 can be found and various workarounds. And I’m particularly excited by the intra-book links where readers can click a link to go a specific section. There are already hundreds of these, and they are very useful. Here’s an example of both new elements:

Structurally, the Windows 11 Field Guide is “bigger” than its predecessor in the sense that I’ve pulled sections out of what used to be chapters and into their own documents. As an example, where I might have had a single chapter called Install in the past, in a single document called Install.md, the new book has several separate files like Create Install Media.md, Clean Install.md, OOBE.md, and Overcome Setup Annoyances.md that cover very specific topics. The result is a proliferation of files. Where the Window 10 Field Guide has just 36 files, the new book already has 47, and it’s nowhere near complete. It may not even be 20 percent complete.

What this means to the reader is unclear in the long term: as noted, it should look familiar and read like a book as before. But it will matter a lot while the book is unfinished and being rapidly updated. And for me, this change is profound. It makes it much easier to move content around so that it’s organized as I’d like, and that can and will change over time. It makes it much easier to add new content out of order, which I know I’ll be doing. And it makes it easier to update the book, especially before it’s complete: I can add these smaller “section/chapters” more easily and quickly rather than wait for a longer chapter to be complete.

Right now, the book is about 130 pages long and only includes the first several sections, like Get to Know Windows 11, Install Windows 11, Upgrade to Windows 11, Personalize Windows 11, Desktop, Multitasking, and Files, plus one of what I hope will be at least 2 or 3 references, this one for Keyboard shortcuts. Most are still horribly incomplete, but I probably won’t wait until each of these is complete before I make it available publicly. As before, I’d like people to get started reading it and providing feedback as early as possible. So I’ll probably get that out there in the next week or so.

I’ll have more soon. But I made a lot of progress over the long weekend and feel good about where it’s at.