Today is Sunday. The weather is terrible outside.

I went to bed early last night because I want to get off with my bike before sun rise. But the winds were too strong and it was raining. So, no riding today.

It was almost 5 when I decided to sit in the office and finish the manuscript of my book. I’m writing this blog post at quarter to 1 in the afternoon.

It took me all those hours to complete the two final chapters of the book. It’s amazing how fast the time goes by when we’re writing.

I started this project back in September 2025, also on a Sunday, laying down in the living room’s sofa and typing it on my phone.

I worked mostly on Sundays. I think I have worked only twice on other days, that I can remember them: once at my daughter’s school library and then on a shopping mall cafe. I don’t recommend doing it in public spaces. There’s simply too much destraction.

The initial idea was to write a technical guide on privacy tools for computers and freedom. After a handful of chapters presenting characters and setting the context, the book felt extremely boring. So boring that I almost ditched it.

But since I wasn’t in a hurry — didn’t have a deadline or anything like that. I gave it some time and many second thoughts about how I could be approaching those topics without torturing the reader to their death.

It was when “The Phoenix Project” and “The Goal” came to mind. Books which have a clear intention to pass a message, a technical one by the way, but the format resembles a kind of a novel.

Ok, so I thought that if I could lean towards the novel side and add elements of a futuristic science fiction, topics would be part of the plot and, hopefully, less boring.

The more I got into the fiction, the more comfortable I felt in talking about pressing topics like IA taking over the world, centralized credit system, extreme globalization etc.

It didn’t take much time until the second existential crisis afflicted the book. It was in February this year (2026), which put the book on a halt for at least three weeks.

I went to the country side for a family gathering and commented with my uncle about the book. I don’t think he’s got much of the idea around a “sci-fi futuristic tech novel”, but he said something that changed everything till that moment:

Son, do you know that Acknowledgments sections of books always have a couple of names down there at the bottom that are the people who were first readers of the draft and commented, encouraged the author to keep going forward even when things were really bad?

Do you have that people around now?

In case you don’t, I can be one. Share the draft with me.

The motivational kick from that ask was phenomenal. Of course I shared the first chapters with him and kept sending more as they were coming out.

Grammar and typos were really bad — I was writing in Portuguese, of course — but he made it clear since the beginning that I shouldn’t care about anything but developing the plot.

And from that point onward I realized how interesting writing a novel really was. Here are some of the thoughts I would like to share.

• Characters’ development is the coolest part. They become real people living the story in your head.
• It’s hard to keep facts linked together and concise.
• Managing different personalities, slangs, mannerisms between characters is also hard.
• While in the writing process, any contact with classical literature, great authors etc. is a humbling experience. Feels like your are beginning to play football and then Cristiano Ronaldo shows up to play with you.
• It’s important to have a nice typing equipment. In my case it was a 2012 Lenovo laptop whose keyboard I simply loved. I took it to the technician for a keyboard change, same kind of keyboard, but brand new. It made a lot of difference.
• I started typing the book on an Evernote note but then changed to LibreOffice Writer, here’s why:
  • Better font settings.
  • Autocomplete words
  • Automatic first capital letter in new sentences
  • Page settings (I could get a sense of how many pages I had written)

Stopping here for elaborating a bit more on that point.

Once I went to a shopping mall — not for writing, just visiting the book store — and I found a group of kids that looked like the typical “target audience” I imagine for the book. So I approached them. I presented myself as someone writing his first book and who has tons of questions. Well, true.

Key findings from the chat:

• 150 pages is enough
• Must have illustrations, especially to define characters
• Must be mostly dialogs and less narration.

Okay, so that was some feedback to digest, but not for that moment and even not for now at the manuscript done stage.

I tried to write the Introduction when I was half way through the book. In vain. I think I tried to do that as a way to escape the existential crisis. Like: this is the book and why it is important. Ugh, without the book done, the task is impossible. It’s like talking about how cool it is to visit your house on the beach while it is still under construction.

One key point was adding AI and all the tensions around it possibly killing jobs or out smarting us in many ways. That’s fertile soil for the plot.

My uncle asked one day: “You are adding elements from our time now as they develop in the news, aren’t you?”

Oh yeah. I was and it was something cool to be done in the process.

Two weeks ago I thought I could be finishing the manuscript. I was mistaken. It takes much longer than anything one can anticipate.

Today, I woke up super early, the weather was bad, the keyboard was nice and smooth, so I went and finished it.

Phase 1, check!

May 10 update

I remembered I could check the total edit time by looking at the file properties pane.

80 hours total.

Today I worked on a partial review. 70 pages. It took me 7 hours to go through.

May 16 update

I’ve been trying to review one chapter per day since May 10. It’s a lot of work.

I’ve approached an editor. She asked me to send her a one-page executive summary of the book. Waiting on her feedback now with fingers crossed.

May 22 update

Completed the review. Printed a copy to wife. Need to send one to my uncle. Visited a nice bookstore in São Paulo to identify publishers that could be a match.

No word back from the first published I approached.