Took a micro-leap today and started @introspectVV, a twitter account for an ebook I’ve been meaning to research and write. It’s called INTROSPECT, and it’s about figuring out what you want. I’m giving myself until December to publish it – I think it would be great if I could publish early enough that people might feel like buying it because it’s New Year’s Resolutions season.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the books I want to write. I have the draft of a novel sitting in my hard drive – but I don’t feel like I’m ready to work on that one and publish it until I have several other notches in my belt. I have a book about productivity that I want to write. Then there’s INTROSPECT. Then there’s NAUGHTY BOY, a collection of memoirs + short essays. Then there’s that whole universe of cyberpunk-desi-fantasy novels that I’ve been thinking about writing, but am extremely far away from doing at the moment. (I know, I know, I should take some baby steps every day towards it).
I’m scanning through my existing word vomits and thinking, damnit, I really need to go through these and “process” them. What does that really mean? Basically I feel like I should stop trying to reinvent the wheel at this point and start working more with what I already have. (0006 – extract signals from the recurring ideas and experiences of your life.) I’ve tagged some of my vomits but not all of them. I feel like I’ve already written a couple of vomits about this – ‘0716 – make sense of your tags’.
I think there’s a decision that I’ve been mulling over – is it cheating if I write word vomits revisiting old word vomits? It’s entirely up to me. I feel like it dilutes the “write a million words” goal a little bit. But I know that I’ve already written over a million words anyway. So what if like 10-20% of the words in this project involve me quoting myself? It might not be “new words”, but it’s revisiting old words in a new light – and I think that counts. Especially since it’s starting to seem like the trade-off is not merely “new words vs old words”, but “new words that repeat myself vs old words being improved upon”.
So, in a way, choosing to build off of my old vomits is actually less derivative, less repetitive than me rambling the same thing over and over again.
Alright, it’s decided then. I’m going to start writing word vomits that are reviews and summarizations of old vomits. This is my project and I get to decide what I want to do.
Which now brings me to the question of what to do with the remaining 600 words of this vomit. Umm… this is about making decisions. It’s about clarifying intent. It’s about articulating what I want. It’s about project management. What would the title be? “Make the decisions you’ve been avoiding” is correct, but too abstract and general. “Dig deeper into the decisions you’re avoiding” is a little more precise, and a better directive.
But something still feels missing. What happens after you dig deeper? You identify what are the real trade-offs you’re looking at, and you figure out what it is that you really want. And you recognize that deferring the decision isn’t really making things any better, but really, causing a buildup of anxiety that’s making it harder to live your day to day life in peace.
Heh, maybe this could be like a bit in the book itself – about how it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to write… within the context of what I wanted to do… 🤔 Nah I’m not feeling it.
I think I want to circle back to the bit about project-based thinking. So basically 1000wordvomits is this mega-project. I don’t expect anybody to sit down and read all of it from start to finish. I’m not even sure if I’m going to. I might, but I think it’s likelier that I will read it in bits and pieces and fragments. It’s really a sort of orientation exercise. It’s about externalizing my mind, and seeing what comes out of it, and looking for patterns. Within this sprawling universe that is my word vomit project, I’m now able to discern mini-projects within it – or the potential to develop mini-projects within it.
This is interesting and exciting to me. I get to practice wrapping my head around smaller things and focus my attention on things at the word and phrase level. Focus on making things fit. The 1000 project is something that happens at a much larger scale. It makes no sense to worry about specific words and phrases or sentences or paragraphs at that scale. Rather, it’s about generating thoughts. I find it necessary that each vomit is titled well, in service of future-me searching and riffing through past vomits to look for relevant material.
So this is a vomit about project management. It’s about learning to identify where to cut things off, how to conceptualize things. It’s kind of an internal marketing department, an internal org chart. The world is too busy, messy and noisy to try and make sense of all of me, and it doesn’t care. If I want to make a living as a writer, I’m going to have to figure out how to frame and package things in a way that people care about. There’s some amount of trial-and-error in that process, and sometimes I’ll get lucky.
But I think there’s also something to be said about the role of taste and insight. I like to think that my taste and insight has gotten better. So… use your taste and insight to influence your conceptualizations of your projects. Work backwards from what makes sense in the marketplace. This is in fact the precise opposite of what I was originally going for with the word vomit project – I knew from the start that it was never going to make sense in the marketplace, that nobody would want to read it. I felt liberated by that prospect. Now I’m ready to switch things up, turn things around, start making things for public consumption. It feels good to deliberately, consciously, purposefully cross this threshold. I’m excited.