Yep… no life.

Except for a few hours out to ski in the woods on Tuesday, I have literally been working from after breakfast to bedtime every day. I have basically been on this new schedule for a few months now and it is really unusual for me to be so focused.

Everyone warned me it would be like this.

It gets to the point where you just can’t invent time and don’t know what else to do but keep working until you just can’t any more. One thing I won’t do (and am not physically capable of doing) is cut back on my sleep.

I am definitely impressed that I can focus this well and be so driven. I just wish the pages would churn out more quickly.

When Michele Leroux Bustamante was writing Learning WCF, she told me that she felt she learned WCF at a depth which she never would have achieved if it hadn’t been for the “exercise” of writing the book. I totally understand this now. Before I started, there were things that I knew well about Entity Framework, things that I had heard of but hadn’t played with yet, things that I kinda knew but not really and obviously lots of things that I had no clue at all about.

So the first item in that list is easy to write about. Everything else is belaboured as I cannot bear to write a sentence unless I’m 150% sure of its accuracy.

I have had (rare) days where I wrote 20+ pages. On the other hand there have also been days (thankfully these are also rare) on which, if it weren’t for screen shots, I managed to produce only 4 pages over the course of 12  hours. I have spent so much time turning over every stone, every pebble and every grain of sand in between.

It is definitely an amazing process.

The strangest and most unexpected thing is that I have actually lost weight because I’m not lingering in the kitchen or running upstairs for snacks. Or for that matter going to the store. Rich is away for a few days and the fridge is running low. I just eat what I can find and get back to work. If nothing else, I can always be grateful for losing a few pounds. 😉 Good thing I started out with plenty of extra.

And like they say about the Army, it’s not a job (at least not a paying one), it’s an adventure.

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