6  Nine Hundred Lines

Red’s emails kept saying “Checking in.” I kept answering them.

By the month the tool got its name, my answers had run out of ways to describe a chapter that was not changing.

So this time, I decided, I would send Red something. Not an answer: an outline for chapter twelve, a list of everything the chapter would say, in order. An outline would show him the book was still moving, and show me where to.

I opened a new document and typed “Chapter twelve” at the top. Then I sat with it.

The README was open in the next window. It was usually open in the next window.

It had started a page long, the morning after the name. Every evening since, the tool had learned to do something, and every new thing it did needed a paragraph. Some of the paragraphs needed an example. The examples needed a section to explain them. There was a section on the settings file. There was a longer section on the second settings file, which I had written to explain the first, and which no longer did. There was a table of contents. There was a list of known problems, in order of how much they embarrassed me.

It was the longest thing I had written that year. It had headings, and headings look like progress.

The outline for chapter twelve was two words long, and one of them was a number.

I sent Red the README. Above it I wrote three lines saying this was what I had been working on, for the book. I did not say it was instead of the book. I did not have to. It was nine hundred lines.

I still think it was the best thing I wrote in those three years. It was clear. It was in order. It said what the tool did, and the tool did it. Nothing in it disagreed with anything else in it. I could not say that about anything else I had ever sent Red.

It was a page explaining how a piece of software works. Writing those pages is my job. That is the problem.

Red read all of it. I know because months later, in an email about something else, he quoted line six hundred and twelve back to me.

That day he wrote back one line.

“Is there a chapter in here?”

I read the README again, top to bottom, the way he would have, looking for one.

There wasn’t. There was a section called Getting Started.