From the Editor’s Desk: 25 Hours (Premium)

This past weekend, I spent over 25 hours completing the first preview version of a new book my wife and I are writing together, a marathon session that's difficult to explain, let alone believe. And I experienced it.

Here's how it went down. On Saturday, I woke up at 6 am and worked straight through to 11 pm, pausing only to eat, twice, taking an hour off the clock. On Sunday, I woke up at 5:30 am and worked straight through until 5:30 pm, pausing only once to eat, taking 30 minutes off the clock. And I would have gone longer: We had dinner plans that night, pushed back from Friday, and arrived 30 minutes late because I needed to shave, shower, and compose myself from a weekend that was utterly lost to work.

I know this seems almost impossible. But if you add that all up, and maybe remove another 30 minutes for assorted coffee and bathroom breaks, and an hour for reading each morning, it works out to a solid, unexaggerated 25 hours or more. Not being able to sleep helps, I guess.

The new book, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City (Preview) is available now on Leanpub, sitting there all innocent-like, as if it weren't the result of the most difficult birth of my life. Getting it there required several months of work, during which my wife and I discovered new ways to argue about new topics to argue about, scrapped and then rebuilt the project multiple times, and worked both together and apart on content and back-end tasks, some of which consumed me for weeks at a time.

As the author of roughly 30 books, I was positive I could make this one happen, too. But it was challenging. My wife, who is also an award-winning writer, has such a different--one might say, incompatible--writing style from me that it almost broke us. And she wasn't prepared for the ADHD-fueled rigor I imposed on this project, demanding multiple times that we not move forward until we figured out exactly how things would be structured, only to go on and keep changing those structures as the work progressed. It was a mess.

But there were epiphanies, too.

I spent time on maps, so much time, building them from scratch again and again and again, testing different services, and then finally arriving at a place I feel good about. In early October, we recorded three videos for our YouTube channel back-to-back, but after publishing the second of the three, I realized we could never publish the third, which was about the then ready-to-be released first preview of the book. The reason? It wasn't ready, to my mind, and I couldn't allow it to ship in the state it was in at the time. And then one night, it happened. I was tossing and turning, dreaming, as I do, about the book, and how it was structured, and in these bizarre machinations, I was suddenly awake. Not just awake, fully and utterly awake with no chance of going back to sleep. It was 3:30 am. And my brain, during a brief and fitful sleep, had suddenly found an answer.

So I got out of bed, left the bedroom...