I like writing, so here I am. I don’t have a particular thing in mind that I want to write about, so I’m going to improvise.

That feels good, “I’m going to improvise.” I don’t improvise nearly as much as I’d like. I feel like one of the annoying things about “having a substack”, for me, is thinking “oh, I should write some Proper Essays”, and then getting all swept up in the shoulds, and forgetting to just have fun with words. (Subsequently wrote that the only thing about Proper Essays is that it’s me writing with a stick up my ass.)

Now, I do believe that a part of me genuinely does want to write some Proper Essays – I have many, many drafts, and several of them are Proper Essay Drafts. I’d like to see them blossom and flourish, and I know in my heart of hearts that they’re going to be good, and people are going to enjoy them, get value out of them, It’s going to be great. But it’s a process that takes time, and frustratingly, me being impatient about it makes things go even slower. So working on my essays has become a kind of meditation practice for me, a lesson in gentle acceptance, finding balance, ayy lmao, all that jazz.

But also, I just want to write. I like writing! And sometimes all this Proper Essay business gets in the way of “just writing”. Tweeting is great, and I don’t intend to stop tweeting anytime soon, but I also think that there are limits to what you can do with Twitter, and having posted over 232,000 tweets, I think I’m justified in saying that I have brushed against some of the limits of what is possible for me on the birdsite.

Let me point at a couple of the best tweets I’ve ever written (top 100), which happened fairly recently:

The first one is my favorite current 1-tweet summary I have of my first book Friendly Ambitious Nerd (which I also recently summarized in ~750 words).

The second is a 4-5-word summary of a longer tweet that’s very foundational for me, about wanting to be a word-artist-magician:

These 3 tweets capture a lot of the mood of what I’m doing in a remarkably tiny amount of space. I’m proud of that. I think there’s an artistry to it that comes from years of practice.

And… I also want to do something else. I’m reminded of a 1996 quote from an interview with Brian Eno, talking about how he produced the Windows startup sound:

Q: How did you come to compose “The Microsoft Sound”?

A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.”

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

Yeah, so. Having produced hundreds of thousands of “tiny little jewels”, I’d like to now go back to working with “oceans of words”.

Earlier I said what my problem is: being overly fixated on the frame of “I should write Proper Essays”. There are many parts to this fixation. One is that I have a bunch of title ideas that I really like. Sometimes that’s excellent, and a good title leads to me writing a good essay. But sometimes the goodness of the title can be a trap. I end up putting the title on a pedestal and I struggle to live up to it. This is making me realize I gotta be naughtier, sillier, more subversive in my process. I’ve been straining and stretching too much. And to be fair, I’m trying to write better than I’ve ever written. I’m trying to lift more weight, go a longer distance, faster. It’s work! It’s tiresome, even if I love it! And all the important growth happens at the threshold of my competence, which means in uncharted territory, where the rules can be different than what I am accustomed to. As I type this out I can imagine my younger self gleefully going “Hell yeah, that’s exactly the life I want to live.” (Insert “yeah, I know, I know” GIF of the older Captain America responding to his past self saying “I can do this all day.”) He’s right. This is the life I want to live. I would be even more frustrated working a desk job. Worse than frustrated – I’d be depressed, despondent…

… that might be oversimplifying things. But I do have a very specific memory that always comes to mind when I think about these things. In 2012, I had no idea what I was going to do for a living. I was hoping to get a job as a flight steward with Singapore Airlines, so that I might pay the bills and hopefully do some blogging while sitting in quaint little cafes in exotic foreign countries. Around that time, I got an email from a guy who ran a software company selling referral programs to ecommerce stores. He liked my blog, and he asked me out for coffee, to see if I’d be interested in working on his marketing team. I actually said no at first, because I wanted to be a flight steward! But I didn’t make it past the first round of selection, and so by luck I ended up in a job that turned out to be better than I even imagined possible for me. The pay was better than I believed I deserved at the time. It was a small team…

25jul2023 I’ve spent the past month or so of my time – it feels like the past year, really – staying up late at night going through my notes, moving sentences and phrases around, trying to find some semblance of meaningful order. Part of the hope is that I might turn them into essays, but actually I think the deeper thing is just… I want my material to make deep sense to me.

I’ve sometimes talked about this in terms of learning songs as a musician. There are many different songs that follow similar patterns. A lot of pop music uses the same 4 chords, although they might be dressed up in slightly different disguises. Once you understand the pattern underlying the changes, you find that you don’t need to use as much mental effort to try and remember everything. Instead of remember dozens of seemingly arbitrary different structures, you have a deep understanding of the handful of deep structures that everything else is made up of.

Here I want to take a short break from this essay to continue sorting my drafts.

/// Of course that’s not the only thing I’ve been doing – sometimes I open up a blank page and just start writing, like I’m doing now. Sometimes it feels really good, like I’m making real progress on something. Sometimes it feels like I’m just killing time.