Hello, it is about midnight right now on Wednesday December 6th. Well... it's going to be Thursday December 7th in just a few minutes. I had a lot of interruptions during my workday today, so that has led me to want to try something that's probably a little bit stupid.

I want to try and write as many words as possible (specifically on the Python for Beginner Data Scientists course) between now and like like 5:00 p.m. tomorrow night. My wife says that I've got the green light to do that as long as I take out the trash in the morning and make sure that my oldest gets to school in the morning. So I intend to stay up pretty late writing as much as I humanly can. I'm just going to try and pretend that I have a midterm paper due sometime tomorrow afternoon, and I'm just going to write feverishly between now and then.

My brain will probably stop working efficiently sometime in the middle of the night, and I'll have to sleep or else I won't be able to string together a coherent sentence –even if I'm just typing it. So I'll sleep for a while, but then I'm going to get up and I'm going to write for the rest of the day until 5:00pm. That's my deadline, my cut-off time. I want to see how far I can get. I want to see how many lessons I can get through.

I find that for me, the hardest part of the writing process is just getting that initial draft down on paper. So for whatever reason, once I'm past that hurdle it takes me way less mental effort to come back and rewrite and improve on things as long as there's something already there. So I'm going to try and freewrite. I'm going to try and self-edit as little as possible, and I want to get through as many lessons as I can. I might wake up on Friday morning (two nights from now) and really hate a lot of what I've written during this time, but I'll be able to fix that and make it good later. It's going to be easier for me. I will dread that process a lot less than I'll dread, you know, the writing of stuff in the first place.

I'll keep track of how many words I write and I'll keep you updated on if I think this is a successful experiment or not.

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The Next Day...

So, it is about 5:00 p.m. now, the next day. I'm pretty tired. Things went well. Over six-ish thousand words been added to the site. I only wrote about half of that manually. I discovered some old drafts –that I don't know how I forgot about– but I spent some of the time pulling those up, polishing them a little bit, and publishing those.

I've decided that I'm not going to record any more videos for the course until I've written the rest of it, because I'm worried that I'm going to get to the projects or more advanced topics where I will have realized that I should have introduced some small detail or a prerequisite earlier on, and we'll have to play catchup. I want to get all the way through and make sure I don't miss something really important that's going to be needed in some of the more advanced content before I record any more videos, and then I'll just record the whole rest of the course –not exactly in one go– but... kind of in one go. Not on the same day, because it's too exhausting, but over just a few days I'll do all of the final recordings.

I probably wrote about 3,000 words, which is solid. Like 2,000 words in a day is what some of the most prolific fiction writers do, so 3,000 is pretty good. I'm pretty tired, I don't want to do this consistently, but I do feel better about the week at this point. Probably the biggest negative is that, when I'm super tired in the middle of night, my self-control goes away. I ate an entire can of Pringles in one sitting and then somehow weighed in at my lowest weight in the last six months the next day –it doesn't make any sense, but I'll take it. I'm just going to ignore the counterfactual here about what I would have weighed if I hadn't done that.

I feel better about the week now. It's end of day Thursday, I've still got all day tomorrow to write as well and get some stuff going. I've got another draft that's around 2,000 words that I'm not including in those 6,000 words, and there's also going to be the transcript for this vlog which is technically going to get counted on the dashboard, but is way easier to write because I'm just speaking off the cuff and then just using dictation software to pull the text out.

It would be better if I could just write more consistently during the day. Occasionally these kind of "revenge writing" sessions –revenge on past me. It's okay... I can't make a big habit of it though because it's probably not great for my health. Anyway, you may not hear from me tomorrow, but I'll give another update next week on how the writing is going. It's just writing, writing, write some more –which is good– that's what I should be doing, and that's that's what the job is more or less. So, I'll see you next week.