Principled writing without the chatbot
Sunday weblog notes from November 30, 2025 that were compiled and shared.
It’s time for a weekly weblog missive. Quirky, fun, and adventurous writing awaits. Just take the time to sit down and make it happen. You just need to open a blank tab or word processing document and begin. Writing without the chatbot is easy enough. The process of writing is inherently about the act of writing. That writing can be chatbot free just like it was in the before times. Those times before the large language models made spitting out pages of prose as easy as a single click of a prompt. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for the before times. That may very well be the case.
Facilitating that writing process for me is always about kicking the tires on my backlog. Earlier this week I dumped my writing backlog from a Google Doc into Google Tasks and I’m feeling like this was a brilliant decision. It took one big old cut and paste to just move the whole thing over to that new app moving a very long list to a lot of tasks. We will see how that works going forward as I try to complete tasks from the list. You have to invest the time to make sure the backlog is meaningful or your continued direction will diverge from the perfect possible future. This is an ongoing and eternal struggle for the path to be the right path. You can in fact within the Google Tasks app grab and organize tasks by stacking them which is how I define priority. Thanks at the top of the backlog are going to get looked at first, but that does not guarantee I will take action on them. It is possible they might get ignored in favor of some other item.
Thanksgiving is always an interesting week of travel and festivities. Today I’m digging into the process of writing with some early Thursday morning writing. Adventure awaits those who are willing to focus and put in the work. My weblog post from last week was a really good start to this trend of spending some focused time on the process of writing. It’s about opening a word processing document and spending an hour or more with the keyboard. I really enjoyed this piece from Mike Elgan about the internet needing a toggle button to turn off the AI slop and return the reader to the world of thoughtful well crafted prose. Not only did I elect to add that part about the prose being thoughtful and well crafted to the argument, but also be thankful dear reader that I did not elect to write a treatise about Luddites and the push against technology generally. That was a very real possibility.
I’m actually going to take the time right now to read the post from last week again and maybe give it a little bit of editing. Waiting a week between writing something and digging back into it gives me just enough time that I will catch those little missing words or slight typos. I’m not entirely sure how exactly those same slight typos become illusive in the moment of writing, but later become so obvious they are generally off putting. Oh they are so generally off putting. A few updates were made to that post from last week, but for the most part it was fine and that is the thing about revisiting some bit of past writing. Most of it really is just fine, but some of it needs a complete rework. I’m really into the idea of locking into writing for a set amount of time and just working at the keyboard until the words go from being forced into flowing. Sometimes that works out splendidly and other times it falters. Those times when it falters can be just as off putting as those now obvious typos, but maybe in a different, more frustrating way.
Within the Google Docs word processing environment you cannot just turn on the display word count feature to always be a part of the journey. During the course of typing on this MacBook Air I have to either hit Command + Shift + C or select “Tools” then “Word count” from the menu each and every time which is just tedious. Maybe some type of plugin for Chrome could be vibecoded that would always turn this word count feature on going forward. That is something I should probably add to my backlog. That task has actually been added to the backlog. We will see what ends up happening with that one here in the next couple of weeks. I sat down here to write 1,000 words to kickstart the day into super awesome mode. Instead, I have edited a couple of documents and finished off my breakfast of Huel ready to drink nutritionally complete protein shake.
Today I spent about an hour cleaning up all the old posts from my LinkedIn profile. It was not something that needed to be done or was really worthwhile, but darn it if I did not feel accomplished after completing that post clean out task. I’m thinking about adding that to my task list just to be able to cross it off, but that seems ridiculous.