Today I sent the full manuscript of Machine Learning from Scratch — all twelve chapters — to an editor, along with the proposal. First complete draft, out the door.
It’s a strange feeling. For months the book was entirely mine: my pace, my decisions, my endlessly rearranged outline. I could open any chapter at 2 a.m. and change a derivation on a whim. Now a complete draft sits in someone else’s inbox, and for the first time the next move isn’t mine to make.
The writing happened faster than I expected once the editor I was building — texspark — got out of my way. Twelve chapters of equations, figures, and derivations, typeset in LaTeX, written in an app that grew up alongside the manuscript. At some point the tool stopped being the project and became just the thing I wrote in, which was always the goal.
There’s a lot still ahead: an editor’s read, revisions, the whole publishing pipeline that turns a folder of .tex files into something with a spine. But a first complete draft is a real threshold, and it’s crossed.
For now, the book is out of my hands. Back to refreshing my email.
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