It’s November the 1st, 2018. I’ve been in a feral free agent state for four months now. What do I have to show for it? The main thing is probably my Twitter account. I’ve been tweeting a lot. I’ve made lots of new friends. I have a Twitter-friends group on Telegram. I’ve met a bunch of people – about 15 of them it seems, based on my twitter thread – for lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks – and I’ve been really enjoying that. I haven’t been posting on facebook all that much. I’ve written 30 word vomits, which is a lower number than I would’ve liked. For context, I’m planning to write at least 4 word vomits per day in the coming month, which means I would write 30 in a week – as opposed to over 4 months. But I don’t know. I don’t know myself as well as I’d like to think I do. And I want to find out.
I find myself thinking “I’ve surely written about this before” a lot – and this is something that I can discover very easily on Twitter. But not so much via my word vomits. Why is that? I think because each tweet is forced to be self-contained in a way that each word vomit isn’t necessarily. And… I’ve just gotten better at what I do over time, and most of my word vomits were written before I went feral. So… that’s just what it is.
So what’s next? I’ve been tweeting more from @IntrospectVV. I’m hoping to write an ebook and publish it in late December, before Christmas. I’m determined to clean up my notes more quickly. I’ve been saying “clean up my notes” for years now. But what does that even mean? A thing I tweeted was that I need to let go of high-potential opportunities in order to sustain a high-value process.
I paused for a moment to go through some of my pictures on my hard drive, and one of it was a screenshot of a rescuetime dashboard that revealed that I was spending basically all of my time on Facebook or Reddit. So… I barely spend any time on either Facebook or Reddit anymore these days. Sometimes I go days without checking my Facebook notifications now. But… I spend all of my time on Twitter now. I feel like I might be starting to get diminishing returns on that, too.
So… what’s going on here? Oh my god I am so repetitive 😂 Even that is something I have made my peace with before, and I seem to have to do it again – but alright, so it’s done. What is this vomit about? It’s me trying to consolidate my thoughts and figure out some clarity re: what I should be writing next. Should I be doing vomits entirely dedicated to creating content for my Introspect book? That could work, but doing that right now feels like it’s a bit of a… forced thing to do? I’m putting myself under some time pressure, but I don’t want the pressure to force me to churn out crap that I wouldn’t have any interest in re-reading later on. I think the smart thing to do at this point in time is to diversify. Write a thousand words for introspect. Write a thousand words for Naughty Boy. Write a thousand words of memoirs, just because. And… then the last one can be whatever. It can be meta if it has to be. This counts as a meta post – it’s a word vomit about the nature of word vomits, the structure of word vomits. It’s inevitable. This sort of thing might be cut from an actual book or something, but it’s an articulation of my thoughts anyway, and so in the context of this particular project, it’s a part of the project. Just that… the ink would be red. Or green.
So, if this is a red-ink or green-ink vomit – editor’s notes – what else should I be mindful of? I find myself thinking “I’m almost at the end”. But the end isn’t nearly as close as I think it is. We’ve still got ~260,000 words to go. That’s… not exactly a hop and skip and jump away. It requires lots of effort. What time did I start writing this…? About half an hour ago? And I’ve got 700 words here. So that’s my realistic rate – about 1,400 words per hour. Let’s assume it’s less than that. Say 1,200 words per hour. That’s… 216+ hours, or about 9 straight days of writing. “9 straight days” always sounds less than it actually is, because I underestimate how much I need sleep. I underestimate how much actual productive time I have in a day. I have maybe 4 good hours a day, if I’m honest with myself. 216 hours / 4 is 54 days… that’s 10+ weeks of intense, focused writing, that I’ve never done before. Put simply, to finish this project by the end of the year, if that’s even possible, requires me working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. I would like to do that. I don’t know if it’s possible. I need to set things up so that I’ll be able to succeed. What does that include? What does that entail?
I think one thing that’s been limiting me is… I’ve been spending too much time in my own head. This word vomit started out semi-private, but it wasn’t meant to be “entirely” private – there’s a reason why I was publishing it publicly. Because I knew that I would want to share it with people someday. I think as I approach the final quarter of it, I want to make it a lot more public facing. I’ve been building this iron man suit that is my writing style and consciousness, and in the final quarter I want to take it for a test drive. So… let’s do it. Let’s go for a test drive. I’m going to start asking people for prompts! Let’s do this.