Day 22 - Second Structuring day

I had many thoughts today, many unstructured, ah!

I must sleep. I cannot sleep. I must blog post.

I had a thought today, about what do I want the audience to do with my material.

I imagined them having a little palate. “put food on your plate, different colors”

I imagined my book as something like a food guide. “Here are proteins, here are vegetables, here are fruits”

And then the reader takes some proteins, takes some vegetables, takes some fruits,

notices what is missing in their life. puts it on their plate. joyously!

I was thinking of the sections of my book

Negotiation

Self-awareness

Inventories

Rituals

Self-knowledge

Self-intimacy

I was thinking how the spine of the book, legibility, and that chapter I like, legibility with self, legibility with partner, legibility with society, legibility with values.

And how the content of the book is different foods for doing that. different proteins, different fruits.

and so reading the book is like adding colors to your life.

and that can be a nice action, that i want for my reader

i can keep the title, relationship borderlands

or i can give it some other title

“The colors of seduction”

or something that is a meme like that

“The colors of intimacy”

there is what a book IS and what a book DOES culturally and also what a book COMPELS for the reader to do

and this last bit is a large part of what i was missing

and then, does the title get the people you want to pick up the book to pick up the book — that’s a different question too

What i like about this also is that the different buckets i have

can make good sense as different buckets under this schema.

part of what i am going for also

is i am not going for “ethical” in a standard way of absolving accountability for harm because you “did everything right”. I am going for a higher standard of ethics.

i am going at this with an engineering mindset

it is about what is functional

that i am coming into this with an engineering mindset

and this is stuff i can say in the pages, versus in my head, or something implicit about the properties of the book

i remember my blogpost, “treat your husband like a cat”

it is about enrichment. creating an environment of enrichment.

making sure that “problems” or “talking about problems” is not all you have.

making it so there are other things.

if you need 4 positive experiences for every 1 bad one, and not only positive experiences because then you’re not having serious conversations, how do you have those positive experiences?

what colors can you add to your relationship?

negotiation —> clarity —> green

intimate play —> pink

see and be seen —> yellow

and the idea is you add more of them to your life. that’s what the person reading the book “does” — they can notice which they aren’t doing so much of, and do more of that one