We are just days away from that new MacBook Air arriving. A lot of writing is going to happen on that new device over the next few months. Something is going to have to give here shortly. I’m feeling like I need to refocus my efforts on a new direction to incrementally build something great. Within that pursuit of the perfect possible future something exists on the edge of being created. It’s that time to push just beyond that edge and make it happen. A long time ago, I’m talking about maybe 20 years ago I fancied myself a future essayist. From time to time I would sit down and write a 5,000 word take on something that had struck me as being worth the time to consider. Over the years, I have noticed that the number of things that strike me as worth spending time on has diminished to the point that those essays just stopped arriving. I’m given to spend time writing a research note or maybe some academic coverage on a more regular basis, but those deeper essay based creations became elusive.
We are going to now circle back to the idea that something is going to give at this point in time as a new focus gets placed on the nexus of creation. Waiting for that spark is going to have to be thrown into reverse and I’m going to have to just create the spark on the daily to build something into a great and interesting pile of prose. Right now I’m at the peak of my writing skills as that mercurial writing muscle has been in training for enough years to take the training wheels off the process and just break on through to the edge of reasonability. Part of it is about sitting down to write without the expectation of hitting publish within a weblog post at the conclusion of that writing session. It has to be about building something that is a longer form effort. I certainly considered the idea of putting each block of content into a packaged form and shipping it out on social media in a bunch of different places.
Building something bigger will involve packaging a lot of blocks together into a more permanent and lasting content delivery. Maybe I’m interested in working on building some larger blocks of fiction and non-fiction to create bigger content delivery experiences. Right now I can look back at hundreds (maybe even thousands) of single serving missives written for the weblog that have no cumulative advantage as the count of words grows. They sink back into the mushy background of things that happen, but do not amount to much as they could have built into something so much more profound. I’m sure some internet archive somewhere has a curation of millions of those notes of extremely undesirable mushy musings. Maybe at some point reading that type of derivative daily reflection will have a renaissance, but it probably won’t be lasting as the culmination of all that writing and reading is simply nothing more than the passage of time.
Maybe I’m somewhat aware that the arrival of that MacBook Air won’t change my writing patterns, routines, or motivations. Investing in making the switch to that device is really just about mentally ringing the bell and saying that it is time to focus my writing efforts on a different type of content creation. Even right now as these words are being created they are more or less the product of a stream of consciousness style of prose creation. About 500 words ago I sat down to just capture some thoughts. At that point, writing for the sake of writing started to happen and the feel of hammering keys and unleashing thoughts took over to create this most unstructured stream of thoughts. That is really where things have to diverge for the next stage in the process. Maybe some door has to be left open to just writing about the things that are appearing one at a time as a stream of things. Within the writing process a shift has to be given to working on two distinctly different types of products. One of them has to be an ongoing daily reflective narrative that is not devoid of process coverage and insights. The second has to be contributions to larger works of prose or put more blunting chapters or sections of something larger as a cumulative output.
Let’s reflect on that last thought for just a moment and linger. It’s the wholesale vibe shift from writing single serving content blocks to building a more cumulative string of blocks that build up to something more meaningful. At the current intersection of technology and modernity, nothing could be more important than making that last contribution of something more meaningful than the pure flooding of content that is about to be known as the great digital flood. Our answer to the upcoming onslaught of digital content flooding will be a return to books. Investing in well crafted organically created content will be the centerpiece of curating meaningful content going forward. My argument would be that the derivative generating of language model based content will inherently raise the value of the best books, articles, and manuscripts. Some value probably exists in creating a clearinghouse for that type of content curation. This missive lacks the single minded purpose to be a solid essay. It’s a more wandering and exploratory piece of content.
