Right now 4 weeks of The Lindahl Letter are ready to go out: March 11, March 18, March 25, and April 1. Tomorrow morning a few hours will be spent working toward the next edition. One of the unintended consequences of switching to a podcast variant within Substack is that finality comes the moment the audio is locked. Taking the time to read the Substack post and then edit that audio down to be ready for upload pretty much creates a locked-in moment. Something would have to go wrong before I went and opened up the audio to make changes to what was created. That means for the most part on Sunday when I’m satisfied with the content I do one final major edit during the audio recording process. Nothing really helps you catch small errors in a draft like reading it out loud and then listening to it back while you are also reading it. I did stop formatting my footnotes into an APA style. At some point, I’ll probably switch back to that format as I prefer it for publication and beginning with the end in mind makes sense. From a practical perspective it just takes a lot longer and disrupts my flow while I’m working to jump back and forth between style guides and deeper thoughts about the subject at hand. 

We will see here over the next few weeks what will happen within the writing process. Some of the upcoming topics will deserve some deep consideration and might need about 20 hours of preparation time. Most of the time I have a pretty good general understanding going into the research rodeo and then I can build out my arguments in a very rapid way. Sometimes developing the foundation takes a good amount of time. Within the context of The Lindahl Letter it is ok to write about the process of building up research and collecting ideas so that helps compared to the more formal process of reviewing literature that goes into writing journal articles. Writing inherently is about the creative journey and the output. Very rarely do people sit down to create prose strictly for communicating an idea to distill a purpose more widely. Most of the time writing is not trying to get the listener to do something or compelling some type of agenda. Most of what gets created is about communication from a writer to a wider audience. Sometimes it is just about a writer putting words to a page that are really not going to an audience at all. 

This functional journal for example is entirely written from the perspective that I’m just collecting my thoughts and moving along. Only during that big year of writing where I was working toward producing a million words in a single year did each post start off considering the reader. Most of the time I’m just writing based on the ideas at hand. The journey is the valuable part. If somebody happens to enjoy the prose that was created, then it was a secondary benefit of the process.