I’m writing a book!

Or at least attempting to write a book. I’ve been wanting to for a long time, but encountered a few obstacles:

• I thought I didn’t have the time
• I thought I didn’t know how to write a book
• I didn’t have an idea for the book

A lot of us fall into the trap of having a plethora of things we “want to do”, and feeling like we don’t have the time for them all. Without going into a ton of detail I’ll just say this:

You can’t do it all.

By saying that, I’m not trying to limit your potential. All I’m getting at it that there is only so much time in a day that you can focus your energies on something. Narrow your focus to a few things that you REALLY want to accomplish, while at the same time spend whatever free time you have on furthering those things. You’ll soon find that you CAN do what you want.

I narrowed my focus to a few things in life that I want to accomplish (aside from my software engineering career, which is already there):

• Improving my health and fitness
• Building my indie game dev company
• Writing a sci-fi novel

I am actively working on all three of these, and best of all, they feel achievable. Before I forget, an important aspect of having the time to put toward reaching your goals, is to learn to say no to things that do not serve you.

Now that I went off-topic a bit, I’ll get back to talking about the book.

It’s tentatively called “Monsoon”, and it is about the rise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), roughly 250 years from now, and the researcher who first notices it’s emergence. He finds himself in the center of the maelstrom that results as this intelligence grows in ability and awareness and starts to have effects on the world.

There is a lot more to it, that I might talk about more soon, but for now, that should give you a small idea of where I’m going with it.

One of the things I’m going for is that it is not the somewhat straightforward story arc you might imagine from a Hollywood movie. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the AGI is born, not from the current LLM revolution, or even anything purposefully built by humans for the end goal of making an AGI. In fact, humanity had given up at this point from the prospect of sentient machines, and actually passed laws banning the research into such things. Nonetheless, the AGI appears as the spark of emergent, distributed processes, and starts coalescing into something that humanity has never seen the likes of.

I’m planning on sharing some chapters along the way here, or at least excerpts of chapters, along with posts about my process. If you follow along, you’ll get insights into my journey and struggles toward getting this project to the finish line.