on writing

How do you render your consciousness honestly? How can you transcend mere fact without getting lost in fanciful prose? Is all mundanity worth logging? Stop by stop, a robot announcer drone-talks the time, and my pointer finger feels foreign as I scratch its side. Who will be at the meetup tonight?

134k words published from January-April. If I turn this up slightly, I could hit 500k words published in one year. For context, I did 500k words in the the 3.5 years before this one.

I got this comment in a Google Doc, and strive for this to be my north star in essay writing.

"I'm finding each paragraph so rich with revelations, saying yes, I hadn't realized this, but I agree."

This comes from battle testing drafts with “flash feedback.” I ask readers to comment as precisely as they can with—effectively—good vs. bad. Then after

I started writing online in July 2020, posted a few essays, and then deleted my website 2-3 months later. There were probably a few reasons for this: 1) I felt like I had to always outdo the quality of my last essay, 2) I was getting caught in “scope balloon” essays and disappearing for long stretches, 3) I was publishing under my full-name, and th

Types of first drafts: printer method, bulleted outline, multiple options, tangent w/ explainer.

BOOK REVIEWS: this is a whole genre. During my last time at the Strand bookstore, as I looked through the essay section, I found a few that were compilations of book reviews by the same author. I have a Le Guin book of mostly reviews. What would I review? Ideas: Food of the Gods, Road to Eleusis, Sovereign Individual, Be Here Now, Sapiens, The Orig

Took a break from restructuring a long-form essay and meditated for a bit. The mind naturally went back to essay form. Instead of trying to “center,” I just let it run, and it was neat to see how I could resolve knots in the flow by stepping away. I could come back to the page with some concrete steps: ah, do A, B, C, etc.

“phenomenological citation” — A scientific word for a personal story. Observational and academic writers give evidence, sources, and citations to back up their thesis. But essays are unique in that the writer is a character that matters. An essay writer needs to put themselves on the page to show that their wisdom is earned. You need stories, confe