Sent the first chapter of Wicked Cool Emacs

Posted on November 25th, 2007 by Sacha Chua

Operating on the principle that it’s better to have a terrible first
draft than none at all, I’ve sent 21 pages to my editor at No Starch
Press. =)

The past two weeks were incredibly packed, but I survived them and and
seem to be getting the hang of working on the book. It’s incredibly
fun. Emacs is such a crazy subject to write about. I mean, come on…
Mayan date conversions? Emacs geeks! I’m sure that if I dug a little
deeper, I’d figure out how to help W- keep track of his parents’
Chinese birthdays. Now that would be useful! <laugh> Writing
about Emacs gave me an excuse to explore. There’s a lot in here that I
haven’t tried before, and you know what? It’s pretty darn cool.

I was surprised to find that I had lots of material already. It didn’t
seem like it when I was writing, but the page count just kept growing
and growing as I assembled the chapter. I’m not too happy with the way
I wrote it, because it felt a little drier than I’m used to. I should
probably browse through No Starch Press books and see which books in
that line have been written really well so that I have role models.

I’ll tweak the draft a little bit more and send it out to beta readers
tomorrow. =)

On Technorati: WickedCoolEmacs, book, emacs

Random Emacs symbol: narrow-to-region – Command: Restrict editing in this buffer to the current region.

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Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/4471

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