Air gap

There’s a strange gap between having written the thing and having published the thing (for whatever value of “publish” is applicable). I’m writing a newsletter, and in the draft I had a reference to something else I’d written in another newsletter, a sort of “I don’t need to unpack this because I already have elsewhere” thing. And then I realized that the newsletter I was referencing wasn’t actually ever sent out; it was too flat, more technical manual than analysis, and it’s sitting in my drafts folder. But in my mind, because I had written it, it was In The World.

This is related, I think, to a thing that powers the distinction between Pantsers and Plotters in fiction writing. Sometimes, when you’ve written the outline, it’s hard to write the actual text, because, to that part of your unconscious that wants to create a thing, it’s already In The World. The rest is just implementation.