This series of article rambles about the book I’ve written, Building Your Mouseless Development Environment.

1. Building A Book 01 - A Story
2. Building A Book 02 - Interest, Passion, and Work
3. Building A Book 03 - Idea and Maturation
4. Building A Book 04 - Fear and Success
5. Building A Book 05 - Strategy
6. Building A Book 06 - Marketing
7. Building A Book 07 - Fun, Fear, Pain, and Accomplishment

We were speaking about interest, passion, and work in the previous article of this series. Let’s look now at the concrete process and the roadblocks I had to face while writing the book.

It All Begin At The Beginning

As a child, as soon as I learned how to hold a pen, I began using it. Everywhere. Until my parents had antipathetic reactions, borderline violent. At the time, I thought they didn’t really grasp the well-known principle of entropy. “This wall will crumble down one day mom, you know? Who cares if I wrote stuff on it?”

Well, I accepted the hammer of authority above my head (kind of), and I began to scribble on paper from then on. Or so the legend tells.

I was using anything I was authorized to use: paper planners from the already consumed and lost years, one side printed sheets nobody wanted anymore, ads, you name it. My motto: writing! Writing more!

As I grew up a bit (I stopped there), I wanted to live the rich life of a writer. I wanted a typewriter. Computer were a thing (I’m not that old and wise), but they were really expensive; and I thought it was classy to have a typewriter. Because a computer is not as authentic, you know. I was a 10 years old hippy. Now, I think of myself as an inspiration for the modern hipster. It’s a pill difficult to swallow.

So I had a typewriter for Christmas. Thanks mom! It wasn’t like the real full-blown Smith Corona stuff, it was for kid. But I could write with it. I learned what a carriage return was, even before touching a terminal emulator. I’m a true OG writer, the kind of guy who rely on 50 years old tech. It’s still true nowadays.

I never stopped writing.

At that point, either you find my story extremely boring (I understand, I don’t know how you made it till here), or you also might think: “Oh great! Again somebody who had a passion at a very young age, nurtured it, now he’s doing weird stuff, he will be rich and famous one day, not like me, I’m not good in anything. I didn’t have a passion! It’s unfair! Life is scheiße! I hate you! You and your typewriter hipster fluff! Burn in hell with your family and everybody you love, on 5 generations! Alakazam!”.

Dear read, I think you’re wrong. I like writing, that’s true. I’m doing just that, right now, in case you didn’t notice. In Vim, by the way. I add a writing obsession at a very young age, that’s also true. But it’s because I’m obsessive and, believe me, it’s not only for the best. When you obsess toward bad stuff, it becomes bad raised to the power of ten compound-wise on the obsession scale.

This last sentence doesn’t make any sense? It’s because it doesn’t.

Here’s a secret I discovered in my short life: interest and passion come by doing stuff. Not the other way around.

You don’t like writing? Write more. You still don’t like it? Write even more. You still don’t like it? Well stop hurting yourself, and try something else.

You can write a bit, every day. You can’t? You lack self-discipline, I’m afraid.

Self-discipline is doing what you hate every day, until you begin to like it. Or until you understand that you really don’t like it, because of this and that. At least you get some good reasons. But you also learned that you might like this other stuff better.

When you try, everything can happen. You can discover something about yourself you didn’t know. But you need to try, and to try harder.

Do stuff. Experiment. Fail. Try again. Adapt. Learn. Life in one weirdly built sentence. Learning to appreciate each step is the key. It’s not easy, but it’s not hard either. It’s nothing. It’s everything. It’s just invention. It’s just imagination.

That’s the secret, right there. The secret of interest. The secret of passion. And so I said!

My First Books

We’ll go quickly on this one. It’s embarrassing, and we’re here to appreciate my glory.

I wrote books when I was an early teenager. Of course I did! The story of a mushroom in MushroomLand, because I was a fan of Mario Bros. The story of a guy with a sword who kill a monster with a shark head, ‘cause he’s the one, you know, the true hero, alone against everything, the Neo without Matrix and medication.

And then he goes back in the past, and in the center of the earth there is a bad spirit which consume everything, and the reader understand that Earth needs to go. Yeah, epic, I tell you. I was a big fan of Zelda, that’s how. You know, the first one. You don’t know? That’s the best one! Everything was better before! I hate 3D and the Playstation!

And Then: I Stopped

I stopped writing, at one point in my teenage years. I got more interested in computers, programming, and trying to create my own video games. Girls, also.

I stopped writing for years. I even forgot how much I liked it.

But it was in a little corner of my brain. My pen. My typewriter. MushroomLand. The shark-head-monster. We never really forget, we just lose the roads to our memories.

And then I began my blog, The Valuable Dev. I don’t really know why. I was sure of two things, though:

1. It would be in-depth article about software development.
2. There would be pictures with lego characters. Why? No idea.

BAM! My love for writing came back in 2.89 seconds! It’s my passion, you know, it’s normal and… What? If I’m lying? Well… how… yes… yes that’s not true; I’m lying to your face, right now. If this is not a good argument to stop reading my rambling, nothing can stop you at this point.

It was hard. Like uppercase HARD. I had to write a whole bunch of crappy stuff to reignite the passion of old. I put a lot of work to get back to my love of writing. You understand why I’m saying that you need to do the stuff to understand that you like the stuff? Yeah.

And I wasn’t even writing in my mother tongue ‘cause, you know, why doing simple when you can complicate everything? And I wanted to speak to the whole world, not only to these French-frog-eaters. I’m French, by the way, in case you didn’t get my accent.

On top that I didn’t like writing these stuff, nobody was reading them, at the beginning. Of course! But when you build something, you’re always sure, somewhere in a hidden place in your brain, that the world will come to you. It didn’t. To this day.

I didn’t care after a while. Because I liked writing again. That’s another secret: if you begin to like something, you’ve more chances you’ll do it. If you don’t like it, you’ll do it, but not enough to have some kind of success, or even results. It’s still useful to do it to discover more about what you want, though.

Ah! Success! We’ll come back to this one. Again.

The Idea of Building Your Mouseless Development Environment

I’ll let you on this one: after writing a couple of years for The Valuable Dev (which, by the way, merged quite well my interest in both writing and software development), I had this idea to come back writing books. That’s what I really wanted to write. But not about heroes, mushrooms and monsters, but something which could really interest people. Which could help them. The same things which helped me.