One book

I wrote a quiz book that came out in 2022. I'm also the co-author of a couple of other books, but this is the book that is really mine. It contains 10,000 questions, which is a lot, and I wrote nearly all of them. I put all of the rounds together, decided on the format of the book, fact-checked it, edited it, proofread it ...

Other people did some of those things too. Jack was checking it, consulting, all along the way, Will, the publisher, likewise. Some of the questions were from our historic resources.

But it's mine. I worked on it when I could for several months, in between other projects. I wrote a great many new questions and also used a lot of questions I'd written down the years. I re-ordered and rewrote and gradually knocked it all together. I was quite chilled about the whole thing most of the way.

Then, there was a moment shortly before our first deadline, after colleagues had been assigned sections to check and pointed out plenty of little changes, that I had a bit of a panic. This is going out and staying out. It has my name on it and there are 10,000 places it could be wrong.

I realised I needed to try and make it perfect. 

It was sent back to me, and I went through it with a whole different set of eyes for a few weeks. Then again. It wasn't that there was much wrong. But there were dull questions, unbalanced rounds, inconsistencies of layout, things that were poorly worded. I improved it.

Just to be clear, there are various reasons why this isn't quite the same as what I feel about all the work I do. Obviously with TV shows you have verifiers. With a lot of other things, the stakes are lower, and there is less. And, bluntly, it doesn't usually have my name on it.

Eventually, I felt like I'd done pretty much what I could. I still worried. I still worry now, even though it's been out for 17 months and I managed to make it pretty good. No big mistakes. A couple of small ones, which, for a book of 10,000 questions without a budget for outside verifiers, is pretty good. It's had good reviews, including from several quiz masters,  it's had good sales and a good star rating on Amazon.

It's just a quiz book, and I've done lots of quiz work down the years, but the thing I treasure most from this was that moment when I realised "this is mine and it's on me and I need not to feel I could have made it any better".

One ought to feel that more in life.