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Now what

You've spent this past month developing your habit of daily writing. Next week when you reach your goal you can stop and be fully satisfied with what you've accomplished. I want you to keep writing.

Stop holding back

In the end, you are on every page of your book. People will know things about you that you never knew you were revealing.

Characters to believe in

Even in a book about coding, I do think of my code examples as characters. They grow in a way that, I hope, the reader will be interested in following.

It’s alive

At some point you'll find that your book has a life of its own.

Landmarks

Help your readers out by setting the context. You are helping them fill in a map. You know the entire lay of the land and how everything fits together.

An occasional curve

Every once in a while lead your readers into a brick wall. Show them how this example that should have worked didn't work and what they need to do to fix it.

Show me

What parts of your prose would benefit from an image? What images do you use that you could just as easily remove?

Mix it up

You need a dynamic range—you need to mix things up.

Sign posts

What kind of hooks do you leave for your readers. Let them know where you are heading and where you've been. Remind them that they've seen something before or reassure them that they don't have to understand something completely now because you'll come back to it later.

You write the songs

Remember that what you've written over two weeks, your reader will read in a couple of hours. The material you wrote yesterday followed two weeks of thinking intensely about your topic. You are familiar and maybe getting a little tired of your topic. The reader is still fresh.

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