The long way around to writing

I'm writing a book.

I'm actually in the process of writing five books, which is a shame, because the only consistent writing I seem to manage is the Scalzi stories, and with even those, I'm not completely consistent.

Three of the books i'm writing are technical books. They're completely in text format right now, which fails for a lot of reasons, and succeeds for others. I decided about a month ago to switch them to Markdown so that I can format them nicely, add headings with styling instead of just two underscores:

__Chapter 2: Getting Started

Okay, so, Markdown. I have pretty much avoided using most formatting, even for this site, so, great, time to learn Markdown (it's really not that difficult to learn, and, well, really, after about 2 minutes, I learned enough to get going). Oh, but wait, editing the Markdown and seeing how it looks, okay, I should automate that, right? Given that one of the technical books is on automating the crap out of front-end development, makes sense. Let's see, I can install grunt and set up a watch on my text files; or I could run the conversion by hand each time I saved the change; or I could add the Markdown module to a drupal site and hit save each time, which would display it; or I could, well, shit, pick some other process.

Somewhere on Twitter in the last week (okay, three days ago, from Mark Otto), I heard about MacDown, an OSX-based Markdown editor, open source no less. Awesome, I'll give it a try.

So, I download it, and open it. Rejected, since the box I'm on is 10.7 and the app requires 10.8.

So, I download it on the next box, and open it. Rejected, since the box I'm on won't run unsigned software.

So, I download the source, open up Cocoapods, update the box, and....

Realize that I'm doing all this stuff to avoid working on the book. Given how much I enjoy writing, how much I enjoy being in the flow of the words, how much I love the end product, I have no idea why I am avoiding working on the book. Okay, books.

Maybe it's the fear of producing something crappy, that I'll write and no one will read it. Would that really matter, though? I mean, I write because the words need to get out, not because I expect someone to read them. Public speaking is different: I present because I believe I have something to share. My writing is different.

Or maybe it's not and I'm lying to myself when I think it is.

Yeah, so, enough of the delay and procrastinating. It's early enough in the day yet, I can get a couple hours of writing in.