I've decided I'm going to live-tweet (for lack of a better term) my process for writing my PyCon AU talk.

Please understand that this isn't going to be *advice*, and you'll rapidly see why.

We're skipping past the talk-proposal stage, the talk-acceptance stage, and the eight or so weeks of "I-should-really-be-working-on-my-talk" stage, and start HERE, where I am now: at the "oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit-it's-only-ten-days-away" stage.

The first thing I do that's *actually* productive is open a document and just start writing. I write badly, write in no particular order, I take every idea that's bounced around my head as "that might be good to mention" and I start turning them into BAD paragraphs.

The most important lesson I've ever learned is that I cannot write a good talk.

But I *can* edit a big pile of nonsensical shit *into* a good talk. So it's time to write some shit!

That's where I am now. I'm one pomodoro in, I've written 600 words. Going back for more now.

(The clever people among you, and the people who know me, realise that this twitter thread is procrastination, in itself)

25m.2 (that is: second pomodoro complete)

1281 words in 'brain-dump.txt'.

Now, a finished talk is probably around 3k to 3.5k words, but this will have to get way bigger than that before i can cut it down to 3k ish GOOD words.

I've only written about a *fraction* of the things I actually hope to *speak* about, so I have a long way to go.

But, I've had an idea for a framing gimmick to use to have some structure that might work, and I've got at least one thing which I think is pretty funny.

Some things I'm keeping in mind as I write:

- My first ever online conference. I won't be able to see my audience.
- live demos might be easier in this context.
- live questions are impossible, but this'll be a talk I'd be happy to take questions on afterwards.

The possibility of pre-recording my talk was obviated this time by me, yesterday, checking to see what the deadline was for pre-recorded talks and discovering that it was, in fact, last week. https://twitter.com/xfxf/status/1297407113992396801

In my defense as well: The project I've been working on non-stop since February (80 percent of the time I've been at my new job) culminates in, like, days.

The prosecution would note that if work wasn't busy I'd have found another way to procrastinate. https://twitter.com/LapTop006/status/1297409404262785024

Third pomodoro: 1860 words.

I'm pretty sure I'm already repeating myself in places, but this is still all just brain dumping. I'm just going to keep squeezing until I honestly can't think of anything else I *might* want to add. That'll take longer than I've got today.

One advantage I have: Even though I still have a SHIT-TON more to do before this talk is ready. I already can see that I have interesting stuff to talk about. It's going to be a fun talk to give. It's gonna nitty-gritty tech details, anecdotes and genuine advice. It's gonna be ok

In other words, I already know that, if it were just a tech meetup, I could sit at the front and wing it and talk for 25 minutes with a beer in my hand and it'd be entertaining enough.

But obviously I'm aiming a wee bit higher :-)

More importantly, winging talks means you'll miss things you *wanted* to talk about, but forgot or ran out of time. If you've got stuff you just wanna talk about, you can wing it, but if you've got something you want to SAY, you'd better plan it out better :-)

Hell yes, the coherent narrative never shows up until you're over half-way done.

There's not a lot you can do about that, but one thing I've found that helps is to be thinking about how you want your audience to be *different*, once you're done. https://twitter.com/ExcitedLeigh/status/1297427173549039616

But don't think stuff like that at the start! You'll destroy your ability to write crap. And writing poor-quality crap is the most IMPORTANT thing. Don't let thinking about "the point of it all" get in the way of brain-dumping poor quality content!

Pomodoro 4 done: 2,200 poor-quality repetitive unstructured brain-farts in a text file after 100 minutes of writing and some procrastination.

And now I've gotta go, might not get more done tonight and have 5-year old's birthday party tomorrow so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ the panic will build..

"2,200 poor-quality repetitive unstructured brain-farts in a text file" would be a pretty good talk title in itself.