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My intention after episode 43 was to follow along the process of writing the book and share what I learned along the way. But, a few things happened that derailed me (in a good way).
Category Archives: Podcast
Video Ideas for a Podcast
I started a podcast in 2021, which has 43 episodes with writing exercises in it. I’m thinking of turning it into a YouTube channel, but I don’t want to just post the audio.
Here are some of the ideas I’ve had for adding video
- Rerecord the podcasts with a camera pointing at me: Each of my episodes is about 5-10 minutes long, so this isn’t as bad as it seems. I also have a transcript for each one, and with my janky teleprompter setup, I might be able to pull this off.
- Record myself sketchnoting the episode: I am not currently good at sketchnoting, but this might be a way to get better. I tried it out and it’s very hard to do this live. But, I can do it slow and fix it in my video editor.
- Make a presentation and record it: This is probably the easiest thing I could do. I’m guessing it would also be the least successful
- Show drawings in a presentation: This would use the drawings from the sketchnote, but instead of you watching me draw them, you see them in a deck.
- Stylized Transcript: Normally you see this as an overlay on TikToks or shorts. It can look nice—maybe someone has made a generator.
- AI: Just putting this here as placeholder. I’ve seen some videos that feel like they have been made by auto-generating (or matching) stock video to the audio. I hate them, but they aren’t horrible.
- Fiverr: There are people that can make nice looking videos from audio. There are also some that look like they use AI (see above)
Of all of these, the stylized transcript appeals to me the most because I think I can write a script to do it and then I can make it look like however I want.
Write While True is Returning Soon
In 2021, when I went independent, I decided to get serious about becoming a better writer, and so I started reading books about writing and using their exercises. Soon after that, I started a podcast to share what I learned. As of today, there have been four seasons and forty-three episodes. The last one was in April.
Write While True is a podcast about writing for software engineers who want to write better by a software engineer who wants to become a better writer. The title implies that writing is an infinite loop, which is how I think of it. You become a better writer by writing. Each episode is short and ends with an exercise.
I announced Season Four at the beginning of the year and published the first episode in March. The idea was to podcast while I was writing a book about tech debt so I could share tips along the way. The first four episodes were how I was applying The Four Disciplines of Execution to design a process that would help me finish a book by the end of the year.
It’s November, and I have 40,000 words of unedited text. I will definitely finish, but not by the end of the year. My original goal of 10,000 words in a pamphlet size book grew as I learned more about my topic by sharing my work with others. I was able to do this, in part, because I gave up things like the podcast.
Now that most of the book is written, I’m ready to podcast again. I am going to pick up Season Four where I left off. But, instead of sharing tips as I learned them, I can share them with the benefit of some hindsight. The script for episode forty-four is written, so I hope to get it done this weekend.
If you want to listen, subscribe to Write While True in your podcast player.
Write While True Episode 43: Accountability Groups
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There’s a hole in this process, and we need to fill that right now. This only works if you’re doing the lead activities consistently, and if they really do build up to the end goal. It’s true that working on the book is intrinsically fun and interesting. And if that’s all that happened, I’d probably be okay with it, but I really do want a book in the end.
Write While True Episode 42: Keeping Score
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As I mentioned in the past two episodes, I’m trying to write a short book, and I want to share the process as I’m going through it. For example, to help me structure my time, I’m using the book The Four Disciplines of Execution.
In the last episode, I shared how I’m applying the second discipline. I defined an activity that I could do every day and a lead measure, a metric of that activity, that I could have as a goal for every week.
The idea is that if I constantly achieve this lead measure, I believe that the larger goal will be achieved. My weekly goal is to spend at least one hour a day on five different days working on the book. It’s a goal that resets every week. That way, a bad week doesn’t derail me. Every Monday, I have a chance to try to win that week. But I have to remember to do it. Keeping this lead measure top of mind is what the third discipline is about. And that’s what I want to talk about next.
Write While True Episode 41: The Lead Measure
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My wildly important goal is to publish a fifty page book on a topic in my industry by the end of 2024. I defined it using the SMART goal format (S. M. A. R. T.), which means it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This is a good way to define goals, but the issue with SMART goals is that even though you can easily tell if you have reached them, they don’t drive day-to-day activities. That’s where the 2nd of the four disciplines comes in.
Transcripts for a Self-hosted Podcast
The latest Apple iOS update included an update to the Apple Podcasts app that added support for transcripts. They claim that they will auto-generate transcripts, but they allow you to provide your own. I have always provided a transcript for my episodes because I believe in accessibility. It’s also good for SEO, and my process starts from a script, so editing it to the transcript has never been a problem.
But, those transcripts are just text that I post on a web page. For the Podcast app, it’s much better to have a .srt file, which is a text file with the transcript and time codes. It looks like this:
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00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:15,060
I'm Lou Franco, and this is Episode 40 of Write While True.
2
00:00:15,060 --> 00:00:18,960
Write While True is an infinite loop, and that's because I think of writing as an
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00:00:18,960 --> 00:00:19,960
infinite game.
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00:00:19,960 --> 00:00:24,520
A game I play for fun and to get better at it, like a game of catch.This is a little harder to make manually, so I use whisper from OpenAI. Whisper can create the .srt file directly, and since the format is still text, I can make any corrections I need to. Whisper doesn’t make many mistakes, though, which is surprising because I have a New York accent that sometimes confounds AI.
From there, I just post the .srt file in S3 in the same bucket as my mp3. The Blubrry PowerPress plugin, which generates my podcast feed, lets me provide a URL to a transcript file.
Finally, to get Apple to use it, you need to login to your Podcast Connect account and go the the “Availability” section of your podcast and turn on the option that allows you to provide your own transcripts.
Write While True Episode 40: Let’s Write a Pamphlet
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For season four, which I’m starting right now, my plan is to take you through my process as I try to write a short, focused book. I expect it to be about 50 pages. I call this kind of book a pamphlet.
Announcing Season Four of Write While True
I have been planning out season four of the Write While True podcast. Here is a recap of the first three seasons
- Season One (Episodes 1- 15): Theme: The basics of a writing practice. Topics include first drafts, editing sweeps, keeping a schedule, and note taking.
- Season Two (Episodes 16 – 27): Theme: Not quitting. Topics include Stopping vs. Quitting, using your imperfections to generate work, and planning a break.
- Season Three (Episodes 28 – 39): Theme: The tools and materials of writing. Topics include complex sentences, words of the day, content-free sentences, and zombie nouns.
The theme of Season Four is writing a pamphlet (i.e. a short book). It will be 13 episodes to coincide with the first 13 weeks of the year. At the end I hope to have actually written a pamphlet and also to have explained the process I am using to do it. All episodes of Write While True end with a writing exercise. If you follow along with this season, I hope that you will also have a pamphlet to publish.
The first episode will be available this Sunday, January 7.
Write While True Episode 39: Dark and Light
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The white pastel can draw white on top of the charcoal, so now I can make white marks, which can also be smudged and mixed. It’s giving me a range of values I couldn’t get before. Throwing white highlights onto a dark drawing is a way of directing attention and makes it more interesting.
Black and white, on a drawing, are the extreme values. If I try to apply this idea to writing, it should also be a juxtaposition of opposite extremes.
- A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
- Prompted Morning Pages Journals