Writing My Book - Part One: The Beginning

That's right, a blog on writing. I can do that now that I'm a professional writer. Please ignore the obvious faux pas' (?) that I will be committing.

Well, here’s a blog. Here’s a blog on writing. And to start it off, shameless plug: https://www.packtpub.com/product/hands-on-python-for-devops/9781835081167 . And that’s how you do that.

But, getting a little more serious (and I mean a little), the experience of writing a book has been quite interesting for me. It has helped me grow as a person and has fulfilled a great ambition that I held in my life. It has taught me how to manage my time, how to adapt to situations, how to better receive feedback and many other things. It has been as much a journey of learning as it has been of sharing my own knowledge.

But share my knowledge I did, and in doing so I discovered the world and something about myself as well. I was challenged creatively, temporally and mentally at times. But the end product is something I can be proud of.

But before I get to the end, I must go to the beginning. I will - in this blog - show you the start of my journey into the world of authorship and give you some insight on how we got to this point.

How do you know what to write and how to write it?

Short answer is: I didn’t. I knew I had a lot of knowledge, I knew I had a lot of things to say, I also knew that I wanted to write. That’s all I knew. That’s all I had planned. If anyone tells you otherwise about endeavors such as this, that they had it all planned out from the beginning to the end: they are lying. That is not how this works.

It works like this: you have a vague idea of what you want to do and then you adapt yourself to the rest. That’s what happened with this book. My publisher, Packt, and I discussed several book ideas before we landed on one that worked for both of us. And honestly, it was for the best. A lot of my initial book ideas probably wouldn’t have resulted in as good a product as we got.

I contacted my publisher through a different book that they had published which had a link on it for where to go to apply to be an author. In fact, here it is: authors.packtpub.com , go ahead, give it your best shot. They contacted me a few days later and that’s where we began.

What it means to write a book

What it means is that it’s a lot of work. That’s even before the writing starts. Before you write a technical book, you need to have a gameplan on what you will be writing. It may not full reflect the final product that you produce, but it needs to be something you can follow in your writing. Then, of course, you have your team which includes: the project manager, the editor, the technical reviewers, proofreaders and the marketing team. All of them were integral in getting the book to where it is now.

It’s a team effort and it was great working in that team. But that required respect and an understanding from everyone of the deadlines for the book and the agreed contract for the book. Like I said, its a lot of effort. But this was only the beginning.

Getting started

I had a tough time ironing out the first chapter and what it had to say about the overall book, but that was probably the most fun I had had writing something up to that point. It was something that was completely mine and also something that would be reviewed and seen by professionals and serious people in general. So naturally, it is full of jokes and insider references.

But that first chapter set the tone in how I would work on the book along with everyone on the project and it helped us get into the groove regarding how we wanted to proceed with Python in DevOps. It still wasn’t smooth sailing from there though, there are always obstacles, but we will discuss them and how they made the book better later.

Conclusion

It is said that during an opening in chess, you have to be a robot. Do the right things that you have done thousands of times before in order to put yourself in the position to win. And that does apply to writing as well. Figuring out your team, setting the tone, all of this helps. But that doesn’t stop the challenges from coming and come they did. I will discuss the middle in the next installment of this blog.