The next couple of days might feature posts on the shorter side of things. Striving to hit that 1,000 word mark at the start of each day takes a certain amount of time. That amount of time might not be available. My attention may be elsewhere. For the last 67 days a solid attempt at writing a page of prose at the start of the day has happened. It really has happened you can go back and look at the date and time stamps on the posts. Alternative posting methods exist. It does look like the WordPress application on my Google Pixel 4 XL smartphone is capable of posting something in a pinch. We will see if that proves to be necessary. I’m supposed to be staying on topic, but that does not seem to be where my thoughts are wondering this morning.
Yesterday at some point I started thinking about taking all these blog posts and compiling them into a publishable book format. That book could be an ongoing narrative about my life and times as a mostly digital writer during my 40th year on this planet. Naturally, that thought was highly self indulgent and I did not take the time to compile all the previous 67 posts into a single document for publication. Posting those thoughts online each day will have to be enough. At one point, I did try to use the same word processing document every day to help create that type of single document type use case, but that just did not work out very well and I went back to the one day one document format that has been the way I write every day.
Almost all of my weblog posts are essentially different takes on me writing about writing. The ongoing narrative is the march of time and the things that change in the world around me. Outside of those two things the ongoing constant part of my writing process is my ongoing need to write about writing over and over again. That is part of the process where I ramp up into writing and doing other things. Generally what gets published on this functional journal is a mix of the ramp up and a little bit of the other content that gets generated. For some reason it takes a little bit of writing and thinking for the deeper thoughts to start processing. Imagine a totally blank canvas where some type of foundation has to be set to build up layer after layer of deeper more focused arguments. Something like that ends up happening. Rarely do things start at a deeper level and continue along that way.
One of the things I did to reward myself this summer was to make a purchase of 3 new biographies written about the life and times of Warren Zevon. That purchase of 3 new physical books was made from the Barnes and Noble bookstore. Those books were written by Kushins, Campion, and Plasketes. They have been received and are sitting on my desk right now. I’m in the process of reading the book by C. M. Kushins. Normally during the course of reading a book I generally do not want or feel compelled to contact the author. Sometimes I send a thank you note after reading a book if the author deserves it, but that is about the extent of my correspondence. With this book I’m really curious how the content was pulled together and assembled into a coherent timeline.. The content of the book is written in a way that you almost feel the events occurring. I guess my point is that the writing style feels closer to narration than the typical biography. The key difference here is that the narration is insightful with a somewhat deeper knowledge of the subject than I expected. Generally the biography based style of writing is more observation after the fact filled with a bunch of surprised insights strung together.
