Shitty Book Development

It’s Sunday. I’m sitting in a hotel, doing some work on jewellery.

Learning how other jewellery founders operate. Getting AI to pull out the underlying principles. Looking at the maths of the business, figuring out what we should do ourselves and what someone else might be better at.

Then the thought comes.

It’s Sunday, for God’s sake. Enjoy yourself.

Fair enough. What would actually be fun?

I like playing sport. TV doesn’t do much for me these days. And I’ve had this book idea hanging around in my head for a while.

I thought, you know what? Maybe we should just make a shitty version.

Shitty book development.

Take a bit of software development principle and apply it to a book. Make something rough. Get feedback. See what’s there. Change it.

I like being able to try something and get something back quickly. It gives me something to work with.

So I end up doing a ten-minute dictation into my little microphone in a hotel.

It’s cool, isn’t it? Bit different.

Then I start wondering what the book is for.

Is it for me? For someone else? For money? What am I hoping happens?

I don’t think it has to be entirely one thing. But at its core, it has to be for me.

I want to explore something more deeply. Understand it. Get clearer about what I actually think.

And yes, I’ll use a ton of AI to help.

I’m interested in where the originality lives in that. If I hired an editor, I’d have help too. But saying that doesn’t quite answer what makes the finished thing mine.

I want my voice in it. My thinking. Including the bits I haven’t worked out.

The raw rambles matter. There’s nuance in them. There are little turns and connections that happen while I’m talking, which I might never have arrived at by sitting down and trying to write a sensible paragraph.

I’d like to preserve that.

Then research things. Question them. Find out where I’m wrong. Being original doesn’t automatically make a thought correct.

So there’s a balance to work out. How much can I hand over while keeping the exploration alive?

That’s interesting to me too.

As for the book itself, the thing I keep circling is this feeling of not being enough.

Insecurity. Inadequacy. All the different ways those feelings might show up in a life.

I’m curious what changes if you really feel that you’re enough, exactly as you are. Including the beautiful, weird, eccentric man who makes stupid cartoons of himself on the internet.

Regardless of whether somebody likes the cartoons.

I don’t know how far that idea goes. I want to explore it.

And I quite like the idea of the book being funny and fucking stupid.

A comedy about something that feels quite fundamental to me.

Make the absurdities absurdly obvious. Some of the things we explored while trying to make a learning app might find a home in it. That didn’t quite work, but maybe a few of those dots connect here.

I don’t know yet.

The book doesn’t need to change anyone’s life.

If somebody I love gets something from it, lovely. If someone else enjoys it, lovely too. But I don’t need either of those things before I can enjoy making it.

It may be a complete piece of shit.

There’s still something in the idea that makes me want to follow it. Talk about it. See what comes out.

So that’s where I’ve got to.

A hotel. A little microphone. Ten minutes of rambling about a book I might make.

I wanted something fun to do on Sunday.

Apparently, this is it.