Yesterday involved channeling a lot of my energy into marching forward with positive intent. Actually doing that is much harder than it always seems to be when things break down. Every day I’m getting up and writing at the start of the day. That is a good way to get back into my routine of consequential prose production. You have to sit down and do the work. To that end a few years back I took the entire backlog of this weblog and put it into a Microsoft Word document. Oddly enough that backup actually has all the right photographs with the posts. I could use that backup to put the photos back with the right posts. I’m not sure if that is really what I should spend my time doing, but it is certainly something that I could do with my time. Really the only proper backup of the media is in those exported Microsoft Word backups from the “Print My Blog” WordPress plugin. The entire backup of my weblog writings would be an approximately 600 page tour of my writing from around 1998/1999 to 2022. 

That content could be exported and put into a hardback book for posterity. I have resisted doing that without taking the time to edit the entire project a little bit before sending it for publication. That big of an editing commitment is a really hard call to make. On the other side of the argument would be if all those posts are just sitting online why do they need to be edited before showing up in a print version. That is probably a decent question to consider. A little light editing for grammar and spelling would make it a lot more readable, but that is how I view the content with 20 years of writing experience and the power of hindsight. Given that anybody that would pickup that type of weighty tome of weblog nonsense should have the best possible experience sifting through the prose a little editing is probably warranted. Some egregious spelling errors can make things hard to read and are off putting. Oddly enough twenty years ago I would have clearly made the case that the argument itself remains regardless of the words supporting it. Really great truths and arguments do have a habit of standing on their own and being shared in terms of broader public mind and generally in the academy. My current views on it are a little different. I typically try to produce the cleanest prose possible even on the first draft. 

I’m going to potentially create a version of my weblog in hardcover and just take a look at it to see how it makes me feel to review it in person. That is probably the best way to judge what to do with it next in terms of editing or review. I could take the time to edit it by hand in printed form and that would be an interesting journey. I might do that this weekend or maybe even later tonight just for fun.