Thanks!

Did you just start to write stuff or did you learn about writing?

We've all been learning about writing since kindergarten. All of those book reports and short stories are good practice for the fundamentals of grammar, imagery, etc.

I did blog for a couple of years before I started on the book. But, honestly, the most helpful thing was spending several years on reddit commenting very heavily. I wrote thousands of comments, and those are like writing bootcamp.

But there's definitely no dividing line between being able to "write" enough to write a book versus being able to write a comment here on HN. It's all just prose. The trick is just putting the time into writing and revising a lot of it.