The Draft I'm Not Ready to Talk About Yet

I've been sitting on a draft for a few months now, and I'm still not sure what to call it publicly, so for now it's just "the thing I open after dinner."

What I can say is that it's fiction, it's the longest sustained thing I've written, and it's teaching me how differently my brain works when there's no spec to follow.

Code vs. Prose

With code, I usually know the shape of the solution before I start typing; the hard part is execution. Fiction has been the opposite. I sit down knowing a scene needs to happen and genuinely don't know how the characters get there until I write my way through it.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

That's been true more often than I expected. Whole sections have gone places I didn't plan, and the ones that work best are usually the ones I didn't outline too carefully.

Why I'm Doing It Anyway

I don't have a tidy answer for why a developer spends his evenings writing fiction instead of shipping another side project. Closest I've got: code is how I solve problems for other people, and this is the one thing I'm making purely because I want to know how it ends.

More on this once there's actually something shareable. For now, it stays the project I mention and then change the subject on.