I just completed the first full draft of my book on the history and future of immersive experiences, so I wanted to jot down a few notes on what my research and writing routine was like before I forgot.
I’ve been working on the book more or less full time for the last two years, and in my spare time for around a year prior to that. Here’s what my day looked like:
- 9am: Sit down at computer, do emails, check RSS feeds
- 9:30am: Work
- 10:45am: Go for a swim or a run
- 12pm: Work
- 12:45pm: Lunch, then a walk
- 2pm: Work
- 3:45pm: Snack
- 4pm: Work
- 4:45pm: Snack 2.0
- 5pm: Work
- 6:30pm: Make dinner, watch TV or a film
- 9:30pm: Work
- 11:30pm: Get ready for bed
I did this pretty much every day, and also worked a few hours every Saturday and Sunday too.
Now, while I’m working, I am doing other stuff too, like checking my email and RSS feeds and chatting online. Sometimes this can eat up a bunch of time but usually not too much.
At the start of the research phase, I had a reading list of around one hundred books on installation art, medieval tournaments, pilgrimages, D&D, Happenings, Nordic Larp, panoramas, film history, environmental theatre, waxworks, virtual reality, theme parks, world’s fairs, things of that nature. I tried to get most as ebooks or PDFs so I could do full-text search on them, but this wasn’t possible for rarer texts.
Every time I finished a book, I created a new Apple Notes file. I reviewed every passage I’d highlighted or made notes on (ranging from a handful to a hundred), then summarised its ideas in a series of nested bullet points. After that, I reviewed the bullet points and summarised them again at top of the file. My goal was to assemble a collection of files that I could easily scan through on every topic I was interested in. No AI was involved in this process.
Inevitably I added more books to my reading list as I went along. I don’t have an exact count since some that relevant and I didn’t bother recording them, but I probably read two to three hundred books in total, most of them cover to cover. I also read a few hundred papers, conducted formal interviews with dozens of people, investigated primary documents, visited historic and modern sites, etc.
My files were very useful in assembling a highly detailed outline for my book proposal and the book itself, but unsurprisingly I ended up consulting all the original sources again to double-check things or answer new questions. On a good day, I could write a thousand words, though often I’d edit that down a fair bit. Sometimes I had to take a break from writing for a few days to read extra books on an unexpected new topic.
Around a third of the way into the manuscript, I decided to start putting references in as I went, since I remembered it was a huge pain doing so after the fact with my previous book. I used Zotero as my citation manager, which synced nicely with Google Docs – until my manuscript got too long. I realised that Zotero’s sync was doing way too many network calls which was putting a strain on my laptop’s weak wifi connection, so I installed Cat6 ethernet across the house largely to speed this up (which it did!). Right now, my manuscript has 992 references from around 700 or so individual sources. Maybe I’ll get to one thousand!
All of that said, the book is definitely not finished yet. There’s plenty of rewrites and editing to come! But this is the beginning of the end, I think. And to celebrate, I have a new immersive experience review coming soon!
mssv 