Day 5 - Second Feedback

I had hoped to complete the second feedback cycle today, but had some competing writing.

First of all — wow! Getting feedback this early is completely generative. I am very grateful to my readers, and for the thoughtfulness of their comments.

It did change this from feeling like a private project to something that might actually end up being in the world, in some capacity.

I was surprised with what people really engaged with (stopping reading it for the sake of giving me edits, and actually going and being distracted and completing the exercises. That was extremely cool.)

I was also surprised that even though I thought I was slowing down, and going into detail, there is still a desire to slow down, zoom in, and describe even more, which I am thrilled by. I had a hypothesis that trying to meet any “word count” would not be necessary as the size would expand to people’s interests, and would hit the minimum respectable book length relatively easily.

• people like doing the exercises

• I need to add to my introduction, why I am using a mono/poly framework at all — that is, why I am mentioning the other, if I am mentioning either, why that is central. Some comments were why mention monogamy if it’s a poly book. Some were why mention poly at all. And so why I wanted to have both isn’t clear. I have explainers of this in some of my blog posts from the first 30 days, and so I can just collect those and put those in the introduction. For some reason I thought I would not need that.

  • I think I had just one sentence, there, something like “coordination problems are structurally similar whether partners are aiming at exclusivity or not” — but I think I underestimated how different the two cultures see each other. The main claim of the book, one might notice after a reader has finished the book, is that the two are not actually so different. The book sets up this argument pretty well, I believe. But then insofar as an introduction “introduces” I really should introduce this part more. Actually I should reread the introductions and first few chapters of books of this type that I really like.

• I am not sure what of myself to put in the content. I have been told that “more of me” would be better. But I do not know where to put myself as a narrator, or as a commentator. If I go with the route I came up with yesterday, in which a collection of characters is visiting some sort of makeshift guide/guru/therapist person, I am not putting myself in that character at all.

  • I probably should reread other books I like, and see how the authors of those books structured their involvement. This feels intimidating somehow, to be rereading books I have loved for this specific thing to see how they did it — but it probably should not feel very intimidating.

  • I don’t know how to be neither bloodless nor self-indulgent. I am alright with waxing too much in the over-indulgent direction, and get some negative feedback and pivot. But it’s still hard to imagine what to do!

  • I am “myself” in the introduction, but sort of a bloodless version of myself. It can be not too hard to imagine being a character of sorts, for the purpose of creating a narrator I like.

Tomorrow will be an attempt at implementing this feedback! Today I have been stewing on it!