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, closed the door behind me, and put on the coffee. Sitting at the little tray table that Stephanie had bought me for my birthday, I began typing away on my laptop. I recreated the book again, for the third or fourth time, I’ve lost track, building it up from scratch in a new structure, one that was more modular and would more easily accommodate whatever future updates and other changes. More importantly, one that would help us meet our self-imposed goal of getting the first preview out by the end of October. I had done it.

If you glance down at the date on whatever device you’re using, you’ll see that it’s December, not October, and that we did not make that schedule, just as we’ve missed every other date we’ve set. But my idea was sound, and in the three or four hours I had to myself that morning, as the darkness turned to light and my wife finally emerged from the bedroom at a normal time, I had pushed reset and could show her what I had done. And she got it. This was clearly the right way forward.

But we still couldn’t get the first release out. This is where having credibility places a role, a negative role, in making progress. We just didn’t want to put out something less than good. We knew it would be incomplete, but the issue was how incomplete. And so the schedule shifted. The end of October became the end of our trip, originally set for November 12. And then we extended our trip one week, to November 19, with me skipping Microsoft Ignite, in part so I could have more time to finish the initial book release.

But that didn’t happen either. So we figured we could make it happen by the end of November, until the Thanksgiving holiday and our kids visiting over a long weekend predictably screwed that up. And then it was December. We had to get this done. At some point, it came down, inevitably, to removing content: We had structured the book fully, but a lot of it was filler and placeholders, and so I began exorcising that. I asked my wife to stop writing and start editing, and she responded by coming back with a list of edits and other changes so long that it was an assault. But I pushed through that list, that entire f#$king list, making the changes while arguing over the ones I wasn’t sure I agreed with. And then it was a week ago. I was sure we were imminent.

So I did something I often to do to myself: I made it public, in part to make sure it really happened. It’s one thing to scheme with yourself or your wife in private, but in posting that we were almost ready to publish the first preview of our book on our Eternal Spring website, I knew what I was doing. And yet, I didn’t. The subsequent writing of an announcement post for the release made me realize how much there was still to do. And I ended up splitting that post into a series of shorter posts so I wouldn’t overwhelm anyone with a giant post when the book did ship. There are still three or four of those sitting here, unpublished. Did I mention the maps?

In any event, Wednesday turned into Friday. And then Friday turned into this past weekend. And it had to happen by the end of the weekend. I figured that even if it required a marathon sprint, I could pull it together for sometime on Saturday. When we finally broke for a dinner–the first time in several years we had food delivered to the house, my wife’s idea so we wouldn’t waste time driving back and forth to whatever restaurant–I figured it would happen that night. Which explains why we both worked up until 11 pm before calling it. I had literally spent 15 or 16 hours working that day and still didn’t get it done.

Exhausted, I figured I would at least sleep well that night.

Hilarious. As with my 3:30 am epiphany in Mexico City back in October, the book consumed my mind and invaded my dreams. This time, there was no epiphany, just a desire to put this behind me and get it done. And so when I finally looked at my watch and saw it was 5:30, not ideal, but not truly stupid, I just got up and got to work. The goal? To finish this thing by noon so I could have at least half of the day to myself.

That didn’t happen. The two of us kept finding more, more to do, more problems to solve. Looming behind it all were some back-end issues that I would have to resolve. We have paying subscribers who will get the book for free, and I had to figure that out, meaning I needed coupon codes, their email addresses, and an email message to send to them. I had to write that announcement post. I had to fill out all the book information on Leanpub before it could go live. To date, I had probably previewed the book many thousands of times. (On the laptop I’m using, only one of several, there are 156 book previews in PDF form, none older than mid-November.) And the clock was ticking.

What time do we need to be at our friends’ house?

By 6 pm.

I kept an eye on the clock, at first sure we could make it, and then sure we could not. But at some point, 4:45 pm or so, I had to call it. I still had a painfully long to-do list that needed completion, but we had to get over this hump. We had to go live. So I published the book, making it available on Leanpub. I wrote the emails. Collected the email addresses. Made the coupon codes. Wrote the announcement post, asking Stephanie for help. And then it was 5:30 pm and I had to clean up. We would be late. About 30 minutes late, to my friends’ minds. But more like months late to mine. I was a bit distracted last night.

In an interesting coincidence, I had just read a new interview with European travel guru Rick Steves, which prompted me to write a post on Eternal Spring. Like Jerry Pournelle, Julia Childs, and a handful of others, Steves is a big influence, and a big presence in my life still because of my love of travel. And in this interview, he mentions a quote from Thomas Jefferson that really cuts to my soul.

“Travel makes a person wiser if less happy.”

This quote is perfect because it’s not the rote pablum you get from most writing. That is, we’re drowning in nonsense and overly positive clichés, but this tells it like it is, and I love that. It’s similar to my comment that “children are the highest of highs in life, but also the lowest,” an explicit acknowledgement that the people you love the most and without condition are also the people that will cause you the most distress, and that never ends. It ties more directly to my thoughts on travel, which I simplify to “travel changes you,” this too is a more honest take than “travel makes you a better person” (or whatever). Life is more nuanced than that.

Reading it when it did, the Jefferson quote also made me think about writing, why I write, and why I this is how I choose to spend my time. And that’s it. Writing is fulfilling and brings a sense of accomplishment. It seems meaningful. But it also extracts a price. I am impacted by this thing I do. It’s not always positive. But I can’t stop.

I would have preferred to have some time to relax this past weekend. I had other things I wanted to write, too, other things I would like to have occupied my mind with. But this past weekend was a useful reminder that this is the work. I didn’t choose it, per se. As so many believe, writing seems to have chosen me. But I am at peace with it. I would have preferred to have completed this part of the project in a more timely manner, but what does it matter? It finally happened. Or, more to the point, I–we–finally made it happen.

That feels good. But now the real work begins, a reality that is both sobering and energizing. This is another reality of the work I chose, or was chosen for. It never ends.