writing for real [01/02/2007 06:50:45]

Happy new year, everyone! :)

It's time for me to start another blog.

I'm going to keep this one around, but looking at my goals, there is no way I'm going to reach my financial targets unless I make building an audience a priority. I already have two writing goals: the corporate goal of making my javascript game tutorial, and my personal goal of writing a novel. But I think for the long term what I really need is a regularly scheduled blog about programming. I can't handle a daily thing, but maybe a longer, higher quality article once a week.

This is going to be tough. I just printed out a gantt chart with all my goals. Each one seems so easy by itself, but cram them into a timeline and suddenly I see just how crazy it was to think I could do all this. But I'm not giving up.

The novel I've been kicking around was going to be a somewhat serious science fiction story. Basically, it was about a very rich man who scans himself into a computer every week as sort of a backup. Then one day he goes into the MRI thing to get scanned and then suddenly, at least from his point of view, he's inside the virtual world in the computer. Of course what really happened is that the man died and this is the backup running as a simulation on his private supercomputer.

That's still the premise, but... I don't have time to write a serious book, so I think he's just going to be one character in a much more lighthearted and somewhat cartoony world. I already have a few characters in mind. I figure I can spend january and march building up a good outline, and then write it as a series of a hundred 1000-word episodes, and publish it as a weekday serial over the course of five months.

So while I'm working on the outline for that, I'll also be turning the outline I have for the javascript gamer into actual text, and get that up on the web. I don't think I'm going to force people to get it through email. Just make that an option and people can go at their own pace. And then at the end if they want more, I'll just direct them to my new blog.

The blog will be about programming. It'll be very hands-on. How to do xxx with yyy. How to use pyrex to wrap CoreMIDI, or how to use generators for microthreads, or how the parrot virtual machine works, or how you can store any data structure with just two simple database tables, or how to get your mind around wxOGL. Basically just articles about things I've learned for my own projects - including, of course, whatever's left of my web framework when I get to the goal about releasing it to the world.

I think if I'm working from outlines, I could do one of these articles a week, and I think there's a good chance I could make a name for myself on reddit and build up a decent repeat audience. And of course I'll be sure to write about the features I'm working on for cornerhost and versionhost.

So that's the plan. I'm pretty sure I know what domain I'll be using for all this, but I'm gonna hold off saying it until I'm closer to the launch date.