How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment.

That’s why I do it. When I have this insatiable desire, this want to write something, something not written down as a paragraph in a piece somewhere, but rather as a poem.

Why Are There So Few Books About Mothers and Sons?

Stories, my mother believed, have healing power. The story we choose to tell of our life, she believed, has a profound effect on our happiness and our health. She worked as a holistic health practitioner, drawing on training in psychology, nutrition, meditation, and a wide range of wellness practices to help other people develop more intentional relationships to their health. She taught that an essential part of our well-being is the story we tell of our lives. She believed that a negative story of the self undermines our relationship to our bodies, diets, selves, and other people, while a positive story of self nourishes all aspects of our well-being.

Walk away or dance by Seth Godin

The first is to walk away from the tools.
You’re probably not going to persuade your competitors and your clients to have as much animosity for AI automation as you do, and time spent ranting about it is time wasted. But, you can walk away. There’s a long history of creative professionals refusing to use the technology of the moment and thriving.

The other option is to dance. 
Outsource all relevant tasks to an AI to put yourself on the hook for judgment, taste and decision-making instead. Give yourself a promotion, becoming the arbiter and the publisher, not the ink-stained wretch. Dramatically increase your pace and your output, and create work that scares you.

I am on the lookout for more things AI (Claude at present) can do. So I guess I’m dancing?

All writing continues to be personal. I find that I lose my voice when I ask the LLMs to do anything.

I do ask it to describe things or search for things, which triggers something in me - an idea, a way to say something. I think it is useful that way.

Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist

I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.

I love reading about writing. Not just the technical stuff on scenes and structure and so on. But more meandering things like this.

I write about writing too. I used to do it more often earlier. The thing that I’ve realised is reading about writing is fun about someone who has done the said writing already.

To become that, then.

you do not have to use generative ai "art" in your blogs because there are websites where you can get real, nice images for free by

too many people are doing a great disservice to their writing by garnishing it with generative-ai (artificial intelligence) - ethics and values aside (lol), it looks tacky and it cheapens the words around it.

For my poems I had tried to use these at one point, when this was just starting, a couple of years ago.

But then I decided I did not want it. It did not look right. I could make it to look right, but did not want to.

I was using Ghost then, so I used images from unsplash instead. It was great!

Everything I Know about Self-Publishing by Kevin Kelly

You are expected to bring your audience.

So when an author today pitches a book to an established publisher, the second question from the publishers after “what is the book about” is “do you have an audience?” Because they don’t have an audience. They need the author and creators to bring their own audiences. So, the number of followers an author has, and how engaged they are, becomes central to whether the publisher will be interested in your project.

About promotion:

The short version: it is not hard to produce a book. It is much harder to find the audience for it and deliver the book to them. At least 50% of your energy will be devoted to selling the book. This is true whether you publish or self-publish.

The rule of thumb in publishing is that how well a book sells in its first two weeks determines whether it is a bestseller or not. You want to concentrate most of the sales as pre-sales – either on a crowdfunding platform, or on your own, or as pre-sales for a publisher. One way or another this promotion job will be your job, and can end up being at least half of your total effort on a book.

The Why of Substack 

John Gruber of Daring fireball wrote a lot about substack over the past couple of days, arguing that purely as a newsletter service, it’s not that great.

But substack is not in that business, as Om argues successfully I might add.

Around that same time, I remember Jeff Bezos saying that books were in competition with everything because it was all about attention. Netflix’s Reed Hastings said his company was in competition with sleep. What they are essentially saying is that all media platforms exist to sell “attention.”

I had this realisation recently about audiobooks and podcast competing for time. I read this above section and realised everything competes with everything else for attention.

I guess if I wait some more I would read someone else write about this thing I thought of. Nothing is original though. So that’s ok. But I will write about it none the less.

I am happy on my own though. There are no costs at present. Emails will start to cost if I grow out of the 50 subscriber count.

Good Writing

How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better.

This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good. The writing in textbooks and popular surveys can be bad for the same reason: the author isn't developing the ideas, merely describing other people's. It's only when you're writing to develop ideas that there's such a close connection between the two senses of doing it well.

I have noticed that I tend not to finish a thought later if I did not write anything about it when the thought came. This burning desire to write, when I actually write something, comes to me once, and if I let it pass, if I get into a state where I am not excited about the thing, then I just am not able to write about it later.

In those scenarios,

1. I need to either scrap the note altogether, or
2. Get excited about the idea again.

There is a third option too, but what's the point of writing a half-assed thing?