If you don’t know, I wrote a book back before I started university as a “graduation project” and the “final thing” of my time as a homeschooler. It’s called Pembelajar Mandiri, and paints a picture of what life as a homeschool kid was like. An autobiography from the first memories I could remember, up to the announcement of my acceptance at my uni. Back when I finished the book I said to myself that I probably will write two more books at the very least, one is this one I’m thinking of writing, and the other one is a compilation book of my thoughts about education in Indonesia.

This book I wanna write is something akin to a sequel to the first book, this time about my time in uni. The title that showed up in my head was something like “A homeschooler’s view of university” and I wanted it to tell about the many hijinks that I find myself in while doing things around campus, seeing differences between my experience and my friend’s, how they differ, how they are the same, and all of that. But of course, things didn’t go as planned. I didn’t get my four years of uni life that I wanted. I had one and a half semester of uni, two years of covid, and then another year of trying to grapple with the loss of what could have been.

And I still want to write that book.

I don’t like my thesis. I’m finishing it just because I need to finish it in order to get my degree. I hate it so much to the point that I need to take three semesters to get it done with. But I also am not planning on doing things “the right way” once I get my degree, and I need closure for this period of time before I return back to the real world and become an adult. This is of course just one of the many things I’m planning on doing in the next few month, hopefully culminating as something during my 23rd Birthday.

The Process

I’m probably not going to be livetweeting the book as much as I think is good, mainly because I think books and tweets function very differently in my head, but I will be writing posts about it. Posts on the blog is something in the middle of books and tweets in my head, and I want to keep myself accountable in ways that I can just share to people who I want to keep me accountable without having to rewrite my progress report to all of them? (There’s like 4 to 10 people who I want to keep up to date on this book project in different level of scope)

At the moment the outline looks to be somewhat similar to what I said above, one and a half semester of uni, two years of covid, and then another year of trying to grapple with the loss of what could have been. Each of them having a few chapters inside, with each chapters having something to tell about the experience. I’m planning to have a rough first draft sometime in the middle of February, since I will have to scour the last five year of my life for tidbits and learnings to write down, as sadly unlike the first book I don’t have the luxury of scrolling through my parent’s documentation and asking them about stuff that happened in my life.

Framing the Story

I think the main bottleneck other than, y’know, doing the work, is defining who this book is for. The first book, for better or for worse, was created with a target audience in mind. The people who read my parent’s website, homeschool parents and wanna-be homeschool parents who want to see and read the perspective of a child, quite a rarity in the field. I’m not quite sure who this book is for, exactly. It’s for myself, sure, but that’s just everything that I do either way, and I need another reason to actually prioritize this instead of the many other things I could do for myself.

I think it’s mainly for my friends and collaborators, past present future. My life is weird enough that I think having good documentations of the things that led me to where I end up being at is a useful tool to have in my arsenal. I think. I don’t actually have concrete evidence for this to be quite honest, because as I’m aware of no one in my current life have read my book and therefore I’m not sure how useful it is, but maybe I’m just not looking at a large enough timescale and that it will be useful not now or five years from now, but ten, twenty, and thirty years from now.

For a larger public though, ones that does not have any qualms or much care for who I am in particular, why would they need to buy the book? This I do not know. I think anything worth saying I don’t have the words to say them yet, and why would anyone read the incomplete words of a nobody, especially when it’s just them reminiscing their life? I don’t know. Maybe this book will be less of a book than the first book. Maybe it’s closer to a diary more than a book. Maybe this book won’t be sold to the public, shared only to those who wants to know.

It is probably also for ease of remembering things, to have a thing to call back upon easily, the same way my first book helped me remember my homeschooled days for me in the last few years. Writing them down and retelling the story again and again reinforces the memory. Things will be lost and forgotten either way, and I might as well choose which parts I want future me to remember better.

If you are interested in this project, please give me a DM and let me know. I’ll keep you updated and hopefully it’ll give me motivations to get it done. Thanks.