My book 'Why Cryptocurrencies?' is done
My first commit on my book Why Cryptocurrencies? is from Dec 19, 2018, and now about 17 months later and 1006 more commits I’m finally done!
Well, I’m done with the online version at least. I still plan to create an e-book, a PDF and a paperback and who knows how long that will take? It would be great to have a physical copy in my hands in 2020, but as I’ve never done these things before I don’t know if that’s a realistic expectation or not. Especially as I only work on it a little here and there—we did get our second kid in February after all!
Anyhow it’s available online for free and I’m actually quite proud of what I’ve accomplished. It doesn’t really matter if it’s not successful and if I won’t get financially rewarded for the time I’ve spent, because I did my best and I think it came out nicely.
I didn’t track exactly how much time I spent writing, I find it difficult to track my time on such a granular level, but I’ve tried hard to write an hour every weekday before work. I even started working 80% at my job so I could focus on writing a bit more and to be home with my family more.
And on that note working 1–2 hours less, which if you work from home and don’t have to commute can turn into 2–3 hours, is absolute gold. I honestly don’t know if I could ever go back to working full-time with a 30 min commute as I did before, the difference in quality of life is just so great.
At first I tried to work 4 days a week, and use the fifth to focus on writing, but I didn’t really feel it worked well for me. Sure I was very productive the day I focused on my project, but then I had to wait a whole week until I could do it again, and then it felt quite difficult to get my mind to it again. Of course I could’ve written before or after work as well, but my brain is just exhausted after working 8 hours so in practice it was too difficult to keep up.
It worked much better to always do something, even if it’s just small and if I just spent 30 min or even 15 min each day writing, I felt like I could go much further than when I tried to write in big batches. I know this isn’t unique and “write a little every day” is a very common advice for writers, and for good reason I’d say.
As a final note on word count: I never counted how many words I wrote each day, how many I had written and I never had a target I was aiming at. I just tried to write down what I had to say, without padding it too much or cutting my message short.
As I wrote my book in Pollen, which mixes text with markup and source code, it’s not so easy to get a reliable word count. When counting the output html files with sed "s/<[^>]*>//g" eli5.html | wc -c
I come up with these numbers:
31578 how_do_cryptocurrencies_work.html
29690 uncensorable_donations.html
29602 private_money.html
26867 a_defective_system.html
25799 financial_crisis.html
23652 voting.html
23361 what_is_money.html
21181 challenges.html
19292 protection_against_government_confiscation.html
17044 timestamping_service.html
16843 global_currency.html
16628 for_the_unbanked.html
16595 cryptography.html
16401 the_blind_leading_the_blind.html
15534 cashless_dystopia.html
15415 cheaper_faster.html
15151 are_cryptocurrencies_money.html
14922 swiss_bank_account_in_your_pocket.html
13174 darknet_markets.html
12088 undesirable_businesses.html
11909 tokens.html
10850 separation_of_money_and_state.html
9837 provably_fair_gambling.html
9733 uncensorable_twitter.html
8868 properties_of_a_cryptocurrency.html
8641 freezing_of_merchant_accounts.html
8418 about_the_book.html
7507 look_out_for_snake_oil.html
6403 extensions.html
4383 about_me.html
3885 brave_new_world.html
3849 eli5.html
3138 bitcoin_whitepaper.html
2933 how_to_use.html
2696 better_currency.html
2396 free.html
2360 better_digital_payments.html
2186 what_is_a_cryptocurrency.html
1323 index.html
1309 acknowledgements.html
845 appendix.html
712 error.html
514998
So according to this the book is 514 998 words long. That’s… really a lot. Advice on the internet seems to suggest around 100 000 words is the upper recommended limit for most, so I have a hard time believing I’m doing this correctly. This way of counting overestimates it, but I haven’t bothered to figure out how much. I guess I’ll see when I try to actually make a book or a PDF out of it.
How much source code did I write? That’s also difficult to say, as some of it is mixed in the chapter files, but for the pure code files this is the result:
> wc -l **.rkt
...
1735 total
> wc -l **.scss
...
1702 total
So around 1735 lines in Racket and 1702 lines in Sass. Kind of interesting how the styling corresponds to almost as much code as the layout formatting does.
My experience with the technologies I used has been quite positive, but I plan to write about it more in detail in a future post.