Yesterday I wrote about the book writing process, how it’s structured and I said I would have written about my experience doing so.

First of all, I really liked the experience. But if you ask me if I’ll do it again, I’d probably say “no”, at least not now.

The main challenge for us was to keep up with all the other writers team that started they effort on their ASP.NET MVC books earlier last spring (and some even last winter): we (Keyvan and I) started writing the book at the beginning of August and last weekend we reached our 100% milestone. It means we completed the 20 chapters of book in 4 months (10 chapters each). And with only the author review missing, and with the ASP.NET MVC framework still to be RTM-ed I think we made it.

But the main point of this post should be “how I managed to be a book writer, a consultant, a husband, an opensource developer, a community speaker and an outdoor-loving guy”. And so it’s going to be.

First of all I want to thank Daniela for supporting me and for making this whole thing seems lighter than it really was. Unfortunately I’m not a freelance, so I couldn’t take hours off my job to write the book. I had to write it at night or during the weekends. And it turned out that I prefer working at night, maybe till 2-3am, but keep my weekends free (at least most of them) so that I could go biking, go at the lake, doing rock-climbing and trekking.

What else did I like about the whole thing? Pretty much everything besides the tight schedule. I liked having to really dive deep into some aspects of the technology in order to better understand and explain to users: this is something people don’t usually do just to “use” something. I liked testing the framework, reporting issues to the team, and see the problems reported fixed or at least “explained”. I also like helping the sales department marketing the book, at the events I took part at: the DotNetSide conference, the Agile Day (thanks to Pietro Brambati), the TechDays-WPC (thanks to Andrea Saltarello) and more I’ll be taking part in, in the next few months.

And what about being an opensource developer? Well, during these four months, I wasn’t really, and that’s one of reasons why Subtext is not going as fast as it should. But I’ve got plans for the next months, and they will be about opensource development, so, stay tuned.

If someone has specific questions about my experiences in writing the book, or the overall book writing process, just ask it in the comment section.