Hello, my name is Dito Ferrer, I am a Cuban writer, psychologist and music producer. Today I want to update you on the progress I have made in the writing process of my first novel.

None.

Everything is practically in the same place where I left it 10 long months ago. I've let the project gather dust and the flame of creation go out. Now, before you stop reading this article, I want to explain something important, something that happens to all of us who write.

One of the challenges of the modern writer is to achieve the right balance between literary production and the maintenance of his or her social image. In other words, you have to write the best literature possible, but you also have to interact in social media, respond to messages, create content, look for job opportunities. A whole list of responsibilities that often takes away our time or concentration to do what we most want to do: write great stories.

Well, that's how I was, months ago, facing the biggest creative project I've ever faced, with 100% motivation but too worried about the social aspect and the promotion of something that didn't exist in the first place. The nature of social media often leads us to create an image that we are always winning, when really we are just pretending.

I quickly found myself more focused on creating content around my non-existent product than the story itself. Instead of researching the composition of the surface of the Red Planet or the climatic consequences of too much space junk, I spent my time delving into whether I was actually an architect or a gardener, or the different techniques of persuasive writing.

In other words, I found myself a pretext not to write. And I got it.

Now, I'm not saying that this knowledge is useless. Every writer should take some time to understand what triggers his creativity and how to manage it, also marketing techniques because they will be useful to promote himself. But, when these activities supplant writing they cannot be called anything but PROCRASTINATION.

I was in that dark hole until I stumbled upon a concept that shook off the cobwebs of apathy and brought me back to the right path.

Building In Public

Virtual space is full of pretenders (people who pretend they did this or accomplished that) but rarely share real information. This is a strategy: pretend to be successful in order to sell more. None of these pretenders care about authenticity, or that their audience knows the real obstacles to overcome. No, most of them keep quiet about all this. The reason? Fear of exposing their failure. No one likes others to realize that we couldn't, that we didn't reach our destination.

This is where this mentality comes in. Building in public means creating in a transparent way, sharing everything that happens behind the scenes. In literature, it means involving readers in the shaping of the story: the profiles of the main characters, why they are important to the plot, the main settings and the overall mood of the work. Communicate where you are in the project and what may be holding you back.

This can be dangerous for many, writing is a private and often chaotic process. But, thanks to the web3, the literary industry has changed forever. There are many ways we can communicate with our audience. And active communication.

NFTs are an opportunity for writers to create value beyond the literary product itself. Publishing on decentralized platforms (such as Paragraph, Mirror or Hive) gives us control, power, and this allows us to look for more creative ways to share our work, allows us to go beyond literature and engage in an unmediated conversation with our readers.

So I am announcing that my novel, La Comunidad de los Exiliados, will be WRITTEN IN PUBLIC and that I will share weekly updates in this newsletter.

It wouldn't be Building In Public if I didn't set a deadline for publication:

December 30, 2023. It is a special date. It is the day I started my journey in Web3.

On this date I will mint a limited amount of NFT (I'm evaluating Page Dao or ReadL) and token owners will have access to a playlist of original music created specifically for the novel. Also to artwork and graphic design, generated by artificial intelligence.

If you want to know more about the content of the novel in this article you can find out all about it. But remember, I'll be posting my progress weekly, follow me so you don't miss it.

Disclaimer: writing a novel in public does not mean revealing details of the plot or the outcome of the story; this would be counterproductive to the purposes of literature. The idea is to share the inner workings of creation and the reflections that come out of the practice.

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