I tweet every day, very easily, without having to think or worry about it. It just happens. Earlier today I made a 15 minute youtube video improv-rehearsing a talk that I’m going to be giving in a few weeks. And then I made a lil tiktok real quick. I would like to be recording videos at a daily pace. I don’t think it’s necessary to publish a youtube video every day, and realistically I expect that I will eventually have dry spells – so what would be closer to ideal might be something like, record everyday, and publish every other day or every 3rd or 4th day.
I wrote one of the best essays of my life last month, which is Are you serious? – and very shortly after the initial joy and relief of “i’ve still got it”, within a couple of weeks I found myself feeling grumpy and dissatisfied about how I didn’t publish anything else last month. “I should publish more than one substack essay a month!” But at the same time… if I write just one “are you serious” or “we were voyagers” tier essay every month for a year, I would consider that a tremendous achievement. The Library Ethos was the only essay like that I wrote all year in 2021. And I’m not sure I wrote anything really worth mentioning until we go all the way back to 2016 with “One must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing“.
I must have written some good stuff. Most of it was probably twitter threads. And maybe at some point I will weave together a bunch of Twitter threads – you could say that my first ebook Friendly Ambitious Nerd was a weaving of some Twitter threads. My second book Introspect also includes a bunch of Twitter threads, reproduced and tidied up. I’m looking through some notes and links, and yeah there’s some stuff that stands out as better than the other stuff I was writing, but I almost… don’t want to think about it, don’t want to talk about it.
I want to honor all of myself and my process. I remember when I used to write the first few wordvomits at my parent’s house, which I then moved out of, and they then moved out of, which has since been renovated by someone else. I remember when I used to write them on Evernote on the commute to work, and every wordvomit felt like a protest against the rat race, a precious way of me keeping my flame alive. Now I no longer have a job and a commute, and a small part of me misses that… there’s something about being the underdog, the unknown, the challenger, there’s something romantic in that. It’s not so romantic once you’re the big guy. And I’m now “the big guy” to a bunch of people on Twitter. Which isn’t a huge context per se. I’m still unknown in most of the world. Phew.
But for the most part I am happy to be where I am. I am glad for the journey. I am glad for the stages and phases. And I am eager to move on to the next phase. A part of me is too eager, I think. To the point that it causes some internal friction within the rest of myself. I adamantly insisted to myself that I would be able to write excellent essays once my book was published. In retrospect, that was foolish. An essay is an entirely different medium than a book, or a tweet. The only real way to get good at writing essays, is to write essays. So perhaps it is time for me to return to writing these wordvomits again. Halfway through one of them, it feels like the correct decision. I am feeling my mind stretching to inhabit the space it is allotted, feeling out the walls of the container I’m in, imagining the possibilities, tracing patterns on the the floor. Yes, we can make something here. But I need to practice. I need to make a bunch of clumpy, clunky, failed prototypes in order to get to the real good stuff.
And maybe sometimes the bad prototypes are the point. When reviewing the writing that people have shared from my domain, I was somewhat surprised at how popular Letter to a young songwriter and Smart vs Kind were, neither of which I think I particularly meant for public consumption.
Having written two books, I can now say that I have “done my part”, in a sense, at providing readers with a way to compensate me financially if they wish. I have also “done my part” writing thousands of twitter threads and doing tremendous numbers of replies to build an audience. Both of those things are things that better essayists than me can lack. Now my task is different. I have these vertical monitors now, and I find it quite delightful how they fill out over 800+ words in a single screen. “Are you serious” was about 4,000 words, whereas “We were voyagers” was about 2,500. I don’t have a specific point that I’m making with this… I know that a lot of my good threads are somewhere around 7 to 12 tweets long. Occasionally I’ll have something that sprawls out much larger… but for the most part I think I came to an internal consensus re: 7-12.
I do also remember that with a lot of my word vomits, trying to make the 1,000 wordcount often felt a bit forced. It kinda seemed like wordvomits wanted to be either around 800 words or 1200 words. I’m not quite sure why that is. I’m not absolutely sure if it’s a real phenomenon… but I’m pretty sure. Here’s a thread.
I’m still sticking to 1000/wv for the rest of this project though so I got some words to fill. I suppose I could get into a habit – and I wonder if I attempted this habit before in the past, it seems likely – of just making a note for the next session. This felt nice to do. Just getting a bunch of words out. Doing a bit of a review. I remember when I used to get tired of how repetitive that was feeling, but it doesn’t feel repetitive here. I wouldn’t claim it feels fresh either. But I feel a bit more confidence about doing it again and trying something a little different. I’d like to finish this project, strongly and confidently, going through my notes and maybe doing a wordvomit a day just riffing about ideas. And from that I bet some of my substack essays will emerge. I like that idea. Let’s do it.