I am very grateful for my successes as it has allowed me to speak freely of about my many failures.

Status
I am making a lot of progress and now have written about seventy pages so far.  I expect the book will about be about 300 pages when finished.  At first, I spent most of my time doing research. I have over a thousand documents. I have a research assistant helping me organize them including dating and tagging. I have done about 30 interviews, and I think I will do about a hundred interviews in total. I plan to spend part of the summer and fall in the USA conducting research and interviews. I have also been reading a lot of books both for study but also, insight into how others have written about business history and/or their own life stories.  Now I am into serious writing.

Structure
Importantly, I think I have found the structure for my book. It will be in three volumes. The first is my personal story. At first, I was a bit concerned about writing too much about my own life because I thought that would not be of interest to more than a few. But I realize that my life is unusual, and it contains a lot of lessons. I think it can be an inspiration to those like me that could not do it the “normal way” and also who dealt with serious illness along the way.  The second part of the book is about the stories and understanding that I have regarding the development of the computer industry primarily from the 1980s. The third part of the book are the lessons, and wisdom that I gained through my career. It is made up of the things I often share with entrepreneurs.

My goal is to complete a final draft by my 75th birthday in January of 2020. I think I can make it.

Tools
I have also found some great tools to use. My most important tool is an application called Scrivener, which is available on both the Mac which I use, Windows and IOS which I also use. It is a very effective way to manage writing. I can highly recommend it. There is a free trial. There are also a lot of great tutorials. The second tool I use is  Zotero  It is positioned as “Your Personal Research Assistant.” It is a tool I share with an actual human research assistant, David Richmond.

I am experimenting with AI voice transcriptions using a program called Temi.  I am using it to transcribe various recorded interviews I have done in the past. I am also using it to dictate sections of the book and am experimenting to see if this is more efficient than just writing from scratch. Don’t know yet. It certainly will be beneficial with the various interviews I hope to conduct.

Advisors
Many friends and former associates have offered their help on reviewing sections of the book. That will be very helpful to me.

Publisher
I have not engaged with any publishers. I want to do the first pass of the book on my own and then decided what the next step will be.