I have been in heavy crunch writing mode these last couple of days.

Manning, you see, publishes early access electronic versions of their books called MEAPs, and we're trying to get them a top-quality version of the material that we've written thus far on the iPhone SDK for release on Friday, which is the day we expect the SDK's NDA to go away, and thus allow us to publish.

The result is that a ton of expansion, revision, and reworking of chapters is needed in a very short period of time. We got comments back on the chapters early last week and we've promised to revise things on Wednesday. It's going well so far, though I did 9 or 10 hours of writing today, writing about 10 new pages and revising another 20, which is a lot for a tech book.

And thus I've entered the writing trance where word after word goes down and nothing deters me from my single-minded work.

I was most humored today by how I could tell I was in a writing trance. It's because I was sitting here at my computer, and it would beep telling me that there was new mail. Then it would do so again in another 10 minutes, then again in another 15, etc.

And a few hours later I'd finally think, "Oh yeah, I got some mail, I should see what that was."

I mean, who doesn't run and check their mail as soon as they know that it's arrived?