Books

What's your favorite part of drafting a new full-length written work?

I'm putting a new book together about distributed cognition, a concept I've been on the trail of since about a decade ago. The idea was really pretty vague back then, but is developing a nice amount of detail as time goes by! 

I think the best part is slowing down, taking account of the evidence, and writing the idea from blurriness to clarity. 

The massaging you do as you take the concept and work with it sticks around, like layers of paint dried into the idea's description. And if you do it well enough, people will cite it and it will have an impact.

You could call this the honeymoon phase - the book exists, and people like it, and the cover and the contract and it's just a matter of putting the finishing touches on and releasing it to the wild.

Here's a sneak peek at the cover of the new book from yours truly. I think seeing it for the first time was my favorite part of the process thus far.

Hey! I'm a cofounder of the PageDAO [ https://pagedao.org ] and I do a lot of wild Web3 stuff. [ https://dylan.cent.co ] also: PhD candidate in neuroscience. 

Great description! I've only written relatively short form content, from the perspective of books, but I love the moment you push past the abstract idea stage and first step into the shell of the eventual completed work for the first time. It's the moment you first go: "that'll do, pig".