it’s been a little bit over a month since the birth of my son. it’s been an incredible experience, and i have a lot to say about it, and have said a lot about it on twitter, but i don’t feel like saying much about it right here right now. right now i would like to take a few minutes to clear my mind.
i haven’t written essays in a while and i don’t feel too bad about it (compared to how i used to feel about) because, well i’ve been literally caring for a newborn. i think actually i might want to temporarily retire my idea of essays and write other things instead. sketches, vignettes.
i want to think about my wants. i want to update both of my books. then i want to have physical copies of them, at least for myself at first. then i want to advertise them, because if i believe that they’re good and help people then it’s worth reaching more people with them. i don’t currently do this because i’m not quite satisfied with the formatting, editing, etc. it feels unpolished. but maybe i could advertise that they’re unpolished? feels like a bit of a shitty cope. i’d rather simply fix them and then not have to explain.
i want to have a better map of my blog. said this multiple times over the years but it remains true. i want to have FAN1 and INT1 available as a set of blogposts.
i think deeper than all of the above is, i want to really dig into the core of my books and figure out how to translate them into questions worth answering. I recently had the idea for an essay title “do you want a medal” that I felt super strongly about. A few days have passed so the peak hype i had has also passed, but I recognize it as a strong idea. I suppose now that it’s been a month since i’ve been immersed in my ideas, i can look at them with a more dispassionate eye.
so lets think about this a little more. a candidate for “main quest” is update my books. it would feel good to make progress on those. but there’s another part of me that wants to do anything other than work on my books. and part of my annoyance with myself has been that i didn’t quite seem to have the capacity to decide that i would do one thing and then another, in sequence. it’s like there was this internal logjam between parts of myself that didn’t trust each other. and my mistake was getting grumpy and frustrated with both parts (and more, if there are others) and simply pleading that they behave and get along, I suppose like a tired parent who’s sick of the kids bickering. This mainly drives the bickering out of sight, but it doesn’t actually address the core issues. And this implies the solution, which strikes me as correct: just describe things, bro. I need to spend time with each of my desires, ask them what they’re about, understand them better, and have them talk to each other and arrive at a win-win compromise. I know I’m good at helping other people with this, so I’m surely pretty decent at doing it with my subselves.
So, okay. conflicting desires. want books to be updated. want FAN to be FAN2. want INT to be 1.0. which should I work on first? that’s not quite the right question, that’s a little premature. what do I want out of each thing? well, INT helps people. and also, I feel like if I get better with INT, I will help myself, and that will help me move more fluently in a lot of things. What else? What about these wordvomits? What about the substack? What about Twitter?
I was thinking recently about how I felt it was important to do my wordvomits when I was working a day job. I had this feeling that my creative spirit had to be protected, and that was how I protected it. After I left my job in 2018, i didn’t really feel a need to write wordvomits anymore. Though I suspect that actually ended a little earlier. I think 2015 was my peak wordvomit year, and then after that I increasingly started getting more and more out of twitter. Which I think was absolutely the right decision at the time. Twitter has been very, very good to me – it’s basically what allows me to write for a living and not have a job. I sell my books primarily through twitter.
but. I think– and i’ve said this a few times here and there– I’ve “done” most of what I hoped to get out of twitter. I don’t intend to quit, I hope to always be posting for as long as twitter exists, and I expect it’s possible that my best tweets and threads are yet to come. But I’m not excited about tweets the way I used to be in 2018, 2019. My body of work on Twitter started to feel kinda clunky and cumbersome. It’s fun to catch up with what’s going on day to day, but it doesn’t feel like i’ve done anything “exalted” in a while.The most exalted things I’ve done in recent times were my essays Voyagers and Are You Serious. I feel like Do You Want A Medal? could be another such essay. I’d like to do Exalted things. that’s what I was grasping at with Tavern and Temple.
alright so where are we at, what do I know? It would be great to update my books. But I don’t feel like I could do them right now. There’s some ground that needs softening. What are the books really about? Who are they really for? WHat’s missing from the books? How could they be better? Shall I try and write them from scratch? That might be fun. I did a couple of summaries before my son was born. What I think is a reasonable compromise is– if I can figure out vignette-sketch-essays about the topics in the books, then it will feel like I am publishing essays that I can share with the world, scratching the substack itch, the “i don’t just wanna be tweeting” itch, and the “i want to be making progress on my books” itch. that seems like an elegant solution. am I satisfied? i feel like i’m not engaging my full self here, that felt like a convenient little performance, like the kind of thing someone might do for a therapist. what’s the deeper thing? what’s not being said? what’s not being said is that there’s another voice that’s not in the room, a voice that says fuck all of yall, i don’t wanna do any of this shit. (Oh, and there’s another part that wants to work on the blog. But the blog has been a sort of forgotten child for so long, it can’t even really advocate well for itself, so its absence isn’t really noted.) Right, let’s make them people. So there’s FAN, INT, SUB, BLOG… there’s also my tiktok and youtube channels but those aren’t all that important either… I mean, I do want to continue making progress on youtube, but that’s like, the same way I want anything. What do I want most of all? Most of all I always want to have published something longform for my readers. I think that’s the truest of true things. Shipping something would make me happy. Threads are cool but too easy and people don’t read them closely enough. I want something in the temple.
I should wrap this up and go to bed now, but lets leave tomorrow-visa a directive to work with. pick something to describe and describe it. pick a question to answer and answer it. yeah. keep it simple, light, loose. gn, i love u
i could also go thru my existing substack essays, blogposts, look for stuff to link to… ok gn gn gn