This is a semi-regular update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.
Current book word count: 168,849
Writing
I am done with editing part 1 of the book. No, that does not mean I’m already working on the follow-up book. Instead, the book is divided into three parts:
- Telling the history
- Interpreting the history
- Interviews talking about the history
The interviews are already done – all interviews conducted for the book that might make it into the book have been published on this blog already: Interviews.
Part 1 is now also done. Ok, it’s not. In going through it I decided to add three new chapters that will fill some gaps in the timeline. I haven’t written those yet, but everything else is good enough to hand over to the editors.
Part 2 is currently work in progress. It features a model that is an evolution of my “Model to dissect and evaluate Metaverse narratives,” now representing an interpretive framework to qualitatively and comparatively analyse metaverse narratives. The framework looks at the underlying structure, intent, and potential implications of different metaverse narratives, with the aim to move from asking: “Is something a metaverse?” to discussing: “What kind of metaverse is this, and what does that imply?”
So far progress is good and my plan is to also make the framework public on this blog once it’s done.
Data
I started this project in earnest in December 2023. At that point I had copied over all relevant blog articles, presentations and notes into a Word document, organized into a very rough outline. Since then I have added, rewritten, edited and restructured the contents many times, keeping a steady progress. Looking at the pure word count, I have added around 1.500 words per week (300 words per day) that managed to end up in the book.
In actuality, I have written much more. This does not include the notes I have from the interviews I have conducted, many of which not (yet) published. I also have around 50.000 words sitting in my “snippets” folder that I wrote for the book but at some point cut because they didn’t fit for whatever reason. It turns out, writing words is not the problem, it’s creating an interesting narrative and keeping the attention throughout. Keeping things as concise as possible requires writing and discarding a lot of words to come up with a few you like.
As I don’t want to be a career author, I think this is fine – steady progress towards completion was more important to me than big bursts of numbers. But I think it’s also an interesting metric to share for others that are thinking about writing a book.