A 1,000-word writing exercise turned into a complete 125k-word manuscript over the course of a year.
In year 1, I learned the sheer joy of unencumbered creative flow and authentic expression. A similar flow I used to get from coding (and more recently vibe coding). What made it effortless was a mindset that I was writing for the sake of it, not with the intention of publishing.
After a year of keeping it close to my chest, I decided to show it to a few close friends. They liked some of it, destroyed some of it. Some ultimately encouraged me to publish it.
In year 2, I learned about the chasm between writing for myself and writing for an audience. Nerdy stuff I thought were clever completely flew over my readers' heads. So I studied a dozen textbooks on literature, prose, poetry, voice, grammar, and completely rewrote the manuscript twice over, this time with the audience in mind. There is a lot more finesse to writing than I originally appreciated.
In year 3, I felt ready to pitch literary agents. The reason wasn't to make a career out of writing, but to learn from professionals. After 100 personalized pitches and 0 offers of representation, I learned that pitching agents was much harder than pitching VCs. Especially for a niche novel like mine; fellow startup founders was too small of a TAM.
In year 4, I engaged with a professional author/editor (Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse), who gave me essays worth of incredible developmental feedback. Lots of nuanced feedback I couldn't get from textbooks. Per his advice, I started back at chapter 1 and refactored the whole manuscript. I distilled it down to the best 88k words.
The tinkering never stops; when do you know it's done? I realized that I kept on tinkering because it was more comfortable than overcoming the fear of launching. Today, on 06/08/26, almost 5 years after that Stephen King writing exercise, I'm ready to say “ship it.”
Blockchained is a near-future startup sci-fi thriller that chronicles a struggling startup founder who meets a mysterious investor in Hong Kong. Little does he know that the too-good-to-be-true investor works for the Chinese government.
Blockchained was written for the fellow startup founders, engineers, and near-future sci-fi enthusiasts. In other words, HN community, you are my target audience
Sample chapters available at https://www.blockchainednovel.com/ — eBook and paperback available today. Hardcover edition coming soon.
I suppose we live in an era where it must be qualified that Blockchained was 99.9% lovingly handcrafted. No AI was used to write this novel aside from research, spellcheck, grammar, and the occasional phrasing checks.