Congratulations. That's huge. I'm proud of you and so happy for you. Now, what are you going to do with what you've written?

You could decide to do nothing with it. Your goal was to write and you've written. Sharing it is a whole other ball game. Not only that but most novelists will tell you about several books they have started that they had to put down because it just wasn't working out. This is hard for those who have written a bunch of books—it's even harder if it's your first book.

Look at the chapters you've written. Maybe you can continue to shape them into a book or maybe you should set them down and start fresh on another project now that you know more about yourself and about writing.

If you want to do something with it, the simplest thing might be to use your writing as blog posts. Before you share your writing with anyone realize that people can be really harsh. Even if you post it to your blog and give it away for free, there are people who will make comments that come out of left field or are hurtful.

You might have something between a blog and a book. Maybe you want to shape it into a pdf and distribute it on your own or post it to a site that has a community of people interested in your topic. 

You might have a book on the way but you don't want to work with a publisher. You can self-publish or use a site like Lulu. At the minute you cross the line into charging for your work, some of your readers will look at your work differently. Even if you aren't making any money off of your work, they have paid for it. They have expectations of you—and they aren't all good.

If you've chosen a topic that we might publish, feel free to submit it to us. Submissions for our mainline Pragmatic Bookshelf titles should be sent to proposals@pragprog.com and those for our Pragmatic life series should be sent to lifeproposals@pragprog.com. In any case, please read What we are looking for first.

We tend to respond more quickly than most publishers. Our most common reasons for rejecting a proposal have nothing to do with you. We often think a submitted book would be a great book—just not the sort of book we publish. Many times we don't see a market for the book in our existing audience and we're not sure how to reach the people your book would deserve to reach.

Sometimes it is you or your book. We just aren't sold on an idea and we look at that as a warning sign. If we're not getting the kernel of the book how will we explain it to our readers? I would suggest you do what movies do and create a log line. A short catchy sentence on what the book is and who it's for.

Maybe you want to submit your PragProWriMo book to one of our competitors. Cool. We want to see good books get published. Just because a book isn't right for us to publish doesn't mean it isn't a book we'd love to read. We think there are compelling reasons for writing for us but we know that different authors have different needs and we're not right for everyone.

Whether you end up signing with us or with one of our competitors, you probably have a lot of work left to do on your book. With us a development editor will work with you to help shape your story and get the best out of you. I recently edited a book that the author brought to me in a state that he thought was complete. We worked many months through many drafts to get it to the state where we were all happy with his work. It is still his voice, it is still his book, but it is much improved by the comments of tech reviewers, the copy editor, the indexer, the typesetter, Dave and Andy, and me.

Let me know what you decide to do. I hope this month has been a good experience for you and I hope these daily blog posts have been helpful. In the meantime I wrote 80 pages for my book. I'm pretty happy right now.

Congratulations.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

I talked to a woman yesterday who participated in NaNoWriMo. She planned to capture stories she had told her children when they were younger. Goofy entertaining stories with a message. She got twelve thousand words is and stopped.

Not to go all rose-colored-glasses on you, but she captured twelve thousand words of stories that would otherwise be lost. She, her husband, and her kids relived some of that time when they would tell each other stories. She doesn't have anything fit to publish—but she's had a writing based success.

Those of you writing along with PragProWriMo had a goal as well. Even if you missed that goal, I can't see any possible way that this month was a failure.

Some of you have written in to say that although you didn't get a book out of the experience, you did solidify some ideas in your head and you have a better idea about a certain topic than you did before. 

Others have written in to say that book writing is not for them and that they've gained a lot of respect for authors. They are not marathoners but they now understand more what it takes to write a book.

There are plenty of people in between. Those of you who wrote three chapters but not four — you were successful. I've always graded on a curve. You pass too.

Many times the world's rewards are binary. You either completed something or you didn't. With something like trying to write a book, even if you didn't manage to get very far, you got farther than most and you know more about yourself than you did a month ago.

You can stop saying that you always wanted to write a book and attempt one of the other things you've always wanted to do.

On this week's "On the Media" they devoted the entire program to the state of the book industry. Guests lamented that too many books are being written and that it's easier than ever to write a book. I don't think so. It may be easier than ever to take a book that you've written and make it look pretty enough that someone might say "it's a real book" and buy it. The writing part doesn't seem any easier today than in the days I used to watch my dad write books in long hand on a legal pad.

Failure? I don't think so. Congratulations and thank you for participating.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

What about your left overs?

There are examples and explanations that didn’t quite fit into one chapter that you are able to use in another chapter. But at some point enough is enough. If you insist on using your left over material you will be harming your book and not helping it.

Wrap those leftovers up carefully. Make sure you label them so that you know what you have. You don’t want to be staring at some odd shaped blob wrapped in aluminum foil not knowing what’s inside or how old it is.

After your book ships, you are going to need to promote it. These leftovers are ideal. That way you don’t have to keep using examples from your book. User your leftovers for a blog post or two to promote your book when it’s out. Write an article for an industry website with your leftovers and point them to your book. Create a screencast from the material.

Whatever you do, don’t throw out your leftovers. And don’t make the mistake I make with food leftovers—I forget that I have them when I need them. Keep a list of topics you can write or blog on to promote your book. Or maybe … just like food leftovers … your book leftovers are the launching point for your next book.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

What are the triggers you’re providing for your readers?

Connect with your reader. Think of what you know about your reader. Who are they? What do they like? How old are they? What experiences do they share?

You wouldn’t ask a kid if they remember the first time they saw "The Wizard of Oz" in color because they didn’t grow up with Black and White tv’s. For them "The Wizard of Oz" was always in color.

Are you writing a computer programming book for people new to programming? That’s very different than if you are writing a book on a language or framework for people who are experienced programmers but new to the technology you’re describing. In my Cocoa book I can mention objects, variables and for-loops confident that these trigger specific notions for my readers.

You also need to create new triggers. It’s like that dish that someone brings to Thanksgiving one year and it was so good that now you serve it every year. Six years later it’s one of those "we always serve that at Thanksgiving" foods.

You can’t set out to create a new tradition. You just write great examples that resonate with your readers and you wait and listen. You capture an idea in a simple story or phrase. Express it clearly and give it a name like "DRY" or the overused "stone soup". You’ll know you’ve created a new tradition when you see the name used as shorthand in tweets, blogs, and other books.

You can’t control what other people will pick up on—you can make sure that you give them material worth adopting and repeating. Whip up your literary batch of Chex Mix today and set a bowl out on the table.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

Throughout the meal people will make a show at initially declining seconds. They’ll shake their heads and say, "gotta save room for pie". I know that if I hold the serving dish in front of them they’ll go ahead and take a second helping anyway. I also know that I don’t need to save room for pie because I’ve already had some.

Friends of ours have a Thanksgiving morning "Pie First" tradition. This year one hundred and forty people came through their house to share Thanksgiving pies before their own family’s meal. I tasted a spinach quiche, a lemon tart, and a pecan pie. In a couple of hours I’ll be enjoying our Thanksgiving meal without thinking about saving room for pie.

Why don’t we serve the pie first in our books.

Not all the time. That could be bad for us. We might fill up on pie and never eat the vegetables or protein. But once in a while why not switch things up. Start your chapter with the fun stuff and then give the reader the background they need. This variety will help keep the reader’s attention and sometimes it’s fun to imagine the reader saying "That was cool, how did you do that." The pie has gotten their attention. Now you can give them the veggies and meat that they need.

Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t forget to write today.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

It could be that rule 5 caught my eye. After all, he is sucking up to people who do what I do for a living. Rule 5 is "Find an editor. Find an editor. Find an editor."

Coming in at number 10 is my second favorite. "Steal. A lot. Passing a stolen thought through your fingers makes it yours."

I assume that you know what he means. You know he isn’t telling you to plagiarize. Read, think, discuss, and then play with what you’ve learned. As a "what if" or "how does that apply to this other situation" and the thought is no longer what it was when you first picked it up and looked at it.

Credit where your ideas come from. Linking to your sources helps your readers — and they knew the idea probably wasn’t yours in the first place.

My very favorite piece of advice in the article is number 6. "Delete liberally, Anything important that is accidentally deleted will come back." When you first write, every idea seems to be sacred. You guard them as if you will never have a good thought again. You will.

You will be tempted to keep these discarded ideas somewhere. You can. I wouldn’t. Get rid of them. Every once in a while a good one will be gone forever. Mostly, you’re clearing your mind and your desk for the next good idea.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

That is so impressive. I can’t imagine writing fifty thousand words of a novel in three weeks when I was in eighth grade.

The two girls who are "done" are both having the same problem. They have reached fifty thousand words but their story isn’t finished yet. There are people to kill off and relationships to resolve. What should they do?

Keep writing, of course.

But it’s hard. A goal is a great way to focus. It’s motivating. You need to produce so many words or pages this month so you set about doing it. You figure out how much you need to write each day to stay on pace and you settle into a routine.

Really, the whole purpose of the goal was to establish and maintain a routine until it was — you know — routine.

And then you reach your goal and it’s hard to continue. The goal we set here at PragProWriMo was artificial. It was a trick to force you into a habit of writing. It was a device we used to turn your "someday I’ll write a book" into actually writing a book. For many of you it worked. Over at the mothership, NaNoWriMo, thousands of people who have always wanted to write a book will have written 50,000 words by the beginning of next week.

Then what?

Well, writers write. Even three weeks into this experiment you’ve proved to yourself that you can write. Now you need to keep finding time each day to do so. I’m warning you, it’s hard.

Someone I follow on Twitter wrote this morning that her gym had closed and her new gym is twice as far away. This is someone who went to the gym religiously and tweeted about how much she enjoyed it and about her success going. Now she tweets, "Getting remotivated is taking its toll."

My life is littered with habits I got out of—going to the gym is one of them. I loved going to the gym. I went a lot before I was married and continued the first few years of our marriage. Then my workout partner stopped going. Slowly I got out of the habit. Each year I go back for two or three weeks but it never becomes a full habit again.

So you’re coming to a very important point in your career as a writer. 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. You can be satisfied with what you’ve done and you need not ever work on a book again.

I want you to think this week, before you come to the end, of whether you want to continue or not. If you do, then it is time to start moving the finish line. If you want to be a writer then next Monday can not be an end.

Getting remotivated after you cross the finish line is tough.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

Yes and no.

I do believe that a work will take on a life of its own and that the characters you create, whether they be a hard-boiled detective with emotional baggage or code that is begging to be refactored using a sequence of well established design patterns, will steer you one way or another.

But in the end, it is you that is on every page. People will know things about you that you never knew you were revealing.

Dave Thomas recently did a podcast on software archaeology in which he talks about getting into the heads of the people writing a code base so that when he gets stuck he can figure out what they meant to say because he has a feel for who they are and how they work. In fact, he gets stuck less often because he has this sense of the team.

People will do this with your work as well. They will, consciously or not, get to know you. They will then be able to make conclusions based on what they know about you. It allows you to put less and less on the page. It helps you and the reader make the transition from author and novice to peers.

But the only way to do this is to make sure you put yourself on every page of the book. In "Zen in the Art of Writing", Ray Bradbury reminds you that "if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer." He cautions you against trying to out guess what people want to buy and write with excitement.

Tape this advice from Bradbury somewhere over your desk: "How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightening bolt?"

It all comes back to you and your passion.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

One of my measures of a solid principle is when you see it come up in different creative endeavors. Todd Bright recently blogged about this idea in an entry in his Studio Bright blog titled Belief. He advises that you "must get into the head of our characters and ask many questions about what they would do. We must BELIEVE they are real personalities and connect with them. Without this connection, we will never connect with our audience."

What are the characters in your story? Are they real to you? Does the way in which they grow and change help you connect to your audience?

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. I want the reader to be concerned with the future that my examples have.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

You hear fiction writers talk about this a lot. Their characters decide to do things that the author never planned. This may strike you as strange — isn’t the writer creating the work? This isn’t a scene from "The Purple Rose of Cairo". Characters must stay in their world — the world that you the author creates.

But they don’t. Even in non-fiction.

There are always parts of my books that are fighting me. They don’t want to be where they are. They want to come earlier or later. I struggle to make the examples work right. I agonize over the flow. And then at some point I listen to my characters and I break up one pairing and create another.

In my Cocoa book I had a nice chapter on Categories and Protocols. They seemed to work well together in the original version. And then I went back to update the book for Snow Leopard. Protocols kept asking me to come earlier. I insisted it stay where it was. I lost weeks over this struggle and finally gave up.

"OK," I said, "you can move earlier but there’s no way I’m moving Categories that early in the book. Categories sulked. I ignored it even more. I put it off way beyond where it was in the first edition. Categories pitched a real attitude. It threatened to walk from the book entirely—and I almost let it. And then a slot opened up and it fit perfectly. It became its own chapter. Because it had waited so long, it suggested other examples that I could and should use to explain it.

These specifics may not mean much to you, but there are elements of your book that are talking to you. Of course it’s really you that is talking to you. Listen. You might be right.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.