On January 10, I finished the first draft of my first novel. Right now it's called The Harvester, though it's possible the title will change. The novel is about 85k words and took 70 days to write. That's a bit over one thousand words a day.
I am participating in National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org). I'm working on a story that I've wanted to write for the past few years. I'm pretty grateful for this whole nanowrimo thing which is something I didn't even know existed until I saw people tweeting about it like crazy in late October.
I write all of my prose in plain text. The format I use is markdown/multimarkdown for all of the reasons markdown became a thing; it's easy to read as-is and it's easy to parse and render into richer formats like HTML. As an aside, I may switch to ASCIIDOC after reading Scott Chacon's excellent piece on how he used it to revolutionize his technical writing. But that's another post for the future!
Like many programmers, I have a deep affinity for the command-line. In my head, all good backend systems start with a solid core driven by terminal commands. This core system runs "silently" outside of a GUI context and relies on configuration and signals received during runtime to dictate its behavior. GUI's have a lot of great characteristics, such as contextual linking, but they come later IMHO.
So, I'm reading Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce. The book has a good reputation as has been recommended to me a few times so I picked it up at one point and it's been gathering dust for a while. I decided I was going to tackle it.