so yesterday I was writing about how a city and a corpus are a collection of stories. and I think my followup here has to be, what are the stories of 1000wordvomits? first, without referencing. I started it because I was inspired by several things– the parable of the pottery class, and murakami talking about endurance. i knew that i wanted to get better at writing over the course of my lifetime, and i figured that having a project where i set out to do it deliberately would help, and would be fun in some ways, and would feel like a real accomplishment, which i was quite desperate for when i started.
i did stream-of-consciousness ramblings, initially they were quite fragmented and disjointed, like slice-of-life updates, but over time i got a bit annoyed at how that made it difficult to have meaningful titles, and i’d try for a while to write about some particular topic. the majority of my writing quickly became a kind of emergent self-help, i tried to give myself good advice and directives, tried to support, challenge and encourage myself. looking back from 2024, it’s striking how the earlier years had so much… self-disdain. even as i tried to ‘fix myself’, the language i would use was quite punitive and bleak, at least up until around 2015-2016 or so. I seemed to have made an identity for myself as a procrastinator back then. I’m now retitling the ‘procrastination’ tag to be ‘copes’. I just prefer that, as a word it feels more… malleable? It feels like something I can do something about, rather than something I suffer from.
ah, I just stumbled onto 0449 – how to think about categorizing blogposts, published 2015-aug-29. “you have to power through… keep writing through the shitty moods…” “What do I want at the end of this project?” “Strong understanding of my own personal beliefs, interests, motivations. I’d like something simple, succinct, compresses the compelling bits into something I can quickly glance at and revisit.” “Want a strong set of learnings, particularly HOWTOs (inspired by Matt Might)”. “I want to work on substantial things. ” “Lack of proper bookkeeping– didnt have the habit, found it difficult to do properly, parallel with problems with scheduling and breaking down big tasks into littler subtasks, never found it rewarding.” “I’d have things like ‘meditations’ and ‘reflections’ and ‘thoughts’ and they’d all really be pretty much the same thing.” “We need to solve the problem of bad bookkeeping…” there’s a bit where I bring up being worried about pigeonholing myself, then calling that BS. “I want my writing to function as a tool of inquiry…. ask questions… research topics… make hypotheses…” ‘”Questions, hypotheses, observations” are good categories…’… “I’m excited again.”
My goal for my entire corpus is to have better circulation, more animating spirit, a sense of aliveness, a sense of “It’s so fun to just explore this space” rather than “here is a deadzone, don’t go there”. What’s the first difference between two such spaces? It’s never just one thing, it’s a collection of things that add up into coziness, liveliness. Maybe this is somewhere that minimalism doesn’t actually help. I made some small changes to my tags and that feels better, changing procrastination to copes, and looking at the other big tags.
So, that was interesting to revisit. I noticed a particular mistake I was making (meditations, reflections, thoughts) and figured out slightly better framings (questions, hypotheses, observations) that were more precise. But from my current vantage point, even that is… not as good as it could be. I now feel like my idea of what good categories would be, would be things that have a narrative thrust to them. For example, on my current main blog at visakanv.com, I’ve come up with things like ‘desirepaths’, ‘dominos’, ‘knowable’, ‘wordmagic’. Each of these imply a story, and could be a book with their own aesthetic and vibe and so on. I could imagine putting together a moodboard and/or a playlist based on that theme. I now see these as valuable and important things. I understood this in the past in the domain of marketing and branding and such, and in a sense this is the same thing applied internally.
Let’s circle back around… what stories? Eventually my wordvomits started to fall off as I began switching gears to tweeting, and did most of my thinking and freestyling on twitter, where I could build relationships with people and grow an audience more readily. I’ve been piecing together the enduring stories of my tweets by looking at my most self-quoted tweets.
0515-2016goals — “i want to troubleshoot myself, remove bugs and inefficiencies so I can spend more time feeling happy, satisfied, fulfilled, so I can grow and contribute more and not feel guilty or ashamed about anything.” I think that’s gone very well. It’s been quite some time since I really felt guilty or ashamed about things. I have some creative frustration, but I think of that as part of the process rather than a moral failing on my part. I can say that I’m a good husband, good dad, good friend, a good citizen of the communities that I participate in. I’ve solved that earlier class of problems, and now I think I’m looking to, 1, try to be of service to others, and 2, enjoy myself more thoroughly, more fully
I wrote “I need to spend less time on social media and reddit, less time avoiding difficult things…” in hindsight now I don’t think I would even bother with that. A few extra minutes of focusing on cultivating positive deviance/variance is more powerful than trying to minimize a few minutes of filler, which may not even lead to the better work that needs/wants doing. I used to keep trying to institute some sort of review process or tracking process and I never quite found a system that worked for me, not at the ‘object-level’. I think the lesson of my long history of failed attempts is that I should probably weave failure into my system, and maybe in a sense I have, I’ve just never quite updated my narrative or my model about how I do it. Because I DO ultimately get things done, so I DO have a system, even if I can’t describe it well, even if it’s not perfectly efficient. I think what works well for me is to start something small, local, simple, finish it, and then delete it or consolidate it somewhere. I might dump it in my iOS notes or google docs or something.
anyway, got a lil sidetracked (good), let’s return to the original thing. Oh, I remember I have a google drive where I did a wordvomit analysis, let’s pull that up… I had a category of ‘comfy’ (make yourself comfortable), ‘collab’ (collaborate better with yourself and others), ‘copes’… I don’t have time/energy to get into much more detail, but I notice that it’s more of a pleasure to navigate this google doc, than the blog itself. that’s an interesting sign. I should further tinker with the doc to make it livelier, and then I think there will be new posts that emerge from it. Maybe not for 1000wordvomits or substack, maybe it’ll be on my tumblr or my archives blog or something… but I think we can piece together some interesting clusters that will make it all nicer to inhabit. pretty exciting.