VC: "What made you commit pen to paper, as it were, to write this book? What was your writing process?"

When I started taking lessons in Go, from Paul Hu, the American champion at the time, the nuggets from the lessons were the rules of thumb that dictated better play when I would Go wrong. "Play away from strength" "Two meanings per move is better than one" "Don't play moves without purpose" "Eat what you can eat" "Safety First" "Attack from a distance." These "rules" appeared sporadically throughout my lessons.

As a linguist in school, I thought that I'd organize the rules into types. For instance, "Eat what you can eat" means to remove the opponent's position - on the verge of death - or prone to being eaten - from play by "eating" or capturing it. In Go, this is removing potential bad aji - the Japanese word for taste; that is, something that can linger and bite you later. In a sense, then, this rule is akin to other rules about extinguishing risk. Once you combine this with other rules like "Safety First" or "A stitch in time saves nine" (Go teachers are not adverse to using colloquial proverbs), you get a whole slew of rules around the term safety. In the book, it is part of the chapter Owe Save.