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Who is this gentle stranger with knees of melon and pecs of fringe
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Is a refusal to make a statement of intent a statement of intent?
I have a Blog. I am not sure what to do with a Blog.
I’ve been thinking a lot about forms of output recently. I have a few active right now, and they seem to be relatively easily classified in terms of time. Primarily the amount of time between them appearing to the world, but also, secondarily, amount of time I put into producing them (which is related but not isomorphic). In rough order from longest to shortest arcs, here are the things I’m actively working on as of right now:
You can see what I mean about the two different time scales here. A short story takes me anywhere from an hour to a few weeks to write, usually. But finding a market that wants to publish it, then waiting for the market to do all the things they need to do to publish it, can take considerably longer. I currently have seven stories out looking for homes, and if I got a mail as I was writing this that one had been accepted, it could be anywhere from a few weeks to a year until you saw it.
The other axis on the graph in my head is, roughly, “specificity of content”. In other words, to pick a particularly self-loathing example, I settled early that the format of my newsletter would be a ~1kw essay about something, trying to tie together some disparate ideas, and generally practicing writing things that are more explanatory and reminding myself how to communicate with human beings about complex ideas. This is part of why the newsletter comes out so infrequently, because I have a bunch of beginnings of newsletters that wind up being only interesting for a paragraph or being the introduction for a book that I don’t have space to write right now. I am not good at scale problems.
I’m hoping to position this blog somewhere on the scatter plot between Newsletter and Twitter. I just want a place where I can throw some ideas where I’m thinking out loud and not have it be an essay. And as I say that I realize I’m about to break 400 words.
Maybe I should just use this as an exercise in learning brevity.
Do want to say though that one other reason for doing this is an increased love affair with RSS, which I can now produce. I talk about this a bit in an upcoming newsletter , assuming that bit survives the edit. Also, I really like Blot so far as a platform, not least because 1) the name makes me think of the Old Norse blót for a sacrifice to the gods and 2) the fellow doing the introductory video was so casually soporific that learning about the service was like taking a warm bath. They take a bunch of markdown files on Dropbox or Git and make them into a static site, which is a thing that I’ve wanted for a while, and also means that I can bang things out here on my phone, as I did the first half of this one.
Ok 550 words. Let’s see where this goes.
