I have a great editor. I’m so thankful for her. She’s doing a great job on my manuscript. I have the first half back… I forgot… how could I? Nevertheless, I did forget what drudgery editing is. And there is nothing else to be done, except do it.

It reminds of that poem,

Have you come to the Red Sea place in your life,

Where in spite of all you can do,

There is no way out, There is no way back,

There is no other way, but through.

That’s just the first part of a lovely poem by Annie Johnson Flint.

Now I’m not saying that writing a book is equivalent to parting the Red Sea… I’m not saying that… exactly. I’m just sayin’. Writing a book is hard work. Some of it is tedious, some of it is great fun, but it’s all work. It’s very different from writing a paper for school, although it’s been about a hundred years since I did that. It’s not the same as writing letters or articles or even technical documents.

After I published my first couple of books, I would sometimes meet people who seemed in awe of me because I had published a book. I sort of felt silly. I mean… it’s not like I did something really major. I didn’t save any lives or anything like that. However, now that I’m doing this for the third time, I am beginning to think, yes it is a big deal. And it’s not for everybody either.

Writing is hard work. That’s all there is to it. It’s like any other project I did while in my 30 years as a career programmer, sometimes it all goes south and it’s a lot of work to fix it. Sometimes, only part of it goes south, but you still have to weed through all of it to fix the not so good parts and/or salvage the things you want to keep.

Will all this work be worth it? I truly hope so. It’s a story that I have to tell. I hope people enjoy it and I hope reading it is effortless, but I have to tell the truth, writing is tough work.

It doesn’t really matter though, I have to tell the stories. I don’t know why. Just trust me on that.