This is a weekly update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.

Current book word count: 102,228

Writing

Writing is hard. As with projects in general, the 80/20 rule also applies to writing books. It feels like I am 80% there for the book, and I am starting to struggle with the last 20%. I am all over the place, can’t focus on a single chapter or section, and it feels like I can’t write anything anymore without 10 or 20 revisions.

My current way of getting over it is to not worry about the quality or even coherency of the writing. I just add comments, notes and bullet points to the document. If I feel like it, I extend them into something resembling text. If that goes well, I maybe turn them into proper paragraphs. If it doesn’t, I just leave it and go somewhere else in the document. It might not be proper content, but it helps to get a feel for the things I want to say in each section, and then refine the talking points.

Wondering

I am also looking for a way to properly write and edit while on the move. Boy, I miss phones with proper keyboards. Maybe that’s just a misdirection, an anachronism fuelled by my head being focused on technology history. But there must be a way to better write on the move than these virtual on-screen keyboards. And I tried a lot of them. How come that LLMs get better all the time, while the technology they should excel at (auto-correct and text prediction) is still so bad?

Anyway, I need a better “traveling on the subway” workflow.

Also, I miss writing short form articles. Well, it’s funny how I now consider articles with only a couple thousand words “short form”, but I miss writing them. I keep a journal with article ideas and it keeps getting longer and longer. Then again, me struggling with the book makes me want to focus even more on it to get it done. I’ll get to the backlog eventually.

Talking

Speaking of backlogs, I still haven’t transcribed some interviews. I’m sorry dear interviewees, I know that some of you have been waiting to read your interviews for a while now. I’m working on it 🩵