First Real Look Backwards :)

Wow! I am in organic ecstatic happiness, so I will write from that place, here, now, quickly, and make sure to attach my diagrams.

I did get the courage to get organized. I have balanced my inner critic enough with my project manager to let the project manager take charge (thanks Supercycle.org and Tee Barnett!) The inner critic did not quiet completely, but did quiet enough to step aside.

I did end up borrowing a schema for a simple table of contents from another book I love, Atomic Habits, as I’d suggested to myself to do in a previous post, from my first major structuring exercise.

I did make the basic google doc, to fill in.

And today, after two days of not doing it, and after being inspired by yesterday’s reflection on why I wasn’t doing it, I finally did it. I did the thing of looking back, and simply putting my existing blogposts into the google doc. I am delighted that the reflection helped, because I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t doing it because I was sick, or for some other reason. I definitely am spacier doing it, and hungrier, but it’s a straightforward task and so I’m not making errors.

I had set myself an agenda of, just doing as many I want to, a small number, maybe 3, maybe 5, just to get started and see what it feels like.

And then, to just go as long as I want to be going, until my energy for it runs out.

It’s a strategy I started using in other domains, including practicing guitar. Have a pretty clear initiating structure for doing the activity, and then allow passion to take over and then run out.

I have been very pleased with the results of this strategy, and look! I have done many more than 5, today, and I have been so happy with them!

It almost feels like Christmas, getting to work on this today quietly. If I had a borscht on hand, or the ingredients to make it, or wasn’t sick today, it would be even better. But I’m shocked by how much joy I am feeling today, engaged in this activity.

I have decided in a previous structuring post, that I am going to use my system from the Chromatypes, or, more colloquially, from something like the Magic the Gathering colors, to organize the book.

One really interesting thing, about writing every day, whenever you feel like writing that day but not skipping a day, is how many moods you end up hitting.

I did end up getting the diversity of colors I was going for, and in no real order of when they would come up. Sometimes there would be a string of one color for a few days, but I’m impressed with how much variety there is.

I will continue to take notes on this, as I continue to update this spreadsheet and going through the posts.

These are at the beginning

And these are towards the end:

Another really funny thing I’d found, is that my hunch to not erase the old posts and not to try to refine them was a good hunch. I’m really delighted in rereading the old posts.

I might create new blogposts organizing these old ones later, similar to how they’d be organized in the book following the table of contents above — Introduction, Green, White, Blue, Black, Red, Conclusion — each one a giant blogpost, so that they are easier to read, while keeping everything up.

That way one can “read the book” in the original blogpost shapes pretty easily.

I am really thrilled with how much emotion ended up being in each one.

It’s my first real look backwards, and I really do like what I’d created. I definitely would not have been able to imagine and create all that content in one day, so I’m delighted I paced myself in this way, where it didn’t feel like work, and just felt like a good thing to be doing every day.

My estimate was that it would take me 5-10 days to do this. Just today I completed 42% of the process. I am ahead of schedule!

I was also surprised that looking backwards, the “metacommentary” about the writing process didn’t really get in the way of the reading, and put me in a pretty natural mindset. It didn’t feel like too many extra words for that effect of getting into a mode where I can actually write.

I also noticed that the number of entire posts that are reflections on the process are also not that many, which parallels my experience in person writing every day at Inkhaven. There were some posts about writing, but most of them were not. And then the posts about writing were interesting to look back on later.

I have also noticed that these “reflections” or “structuring posts” actually some of them did end up containing a lot of actual content for the book, that I would not have noticed until later, when I was fleshing out more of the content for the introduction, how to use this book, who this book is for, advance techniques……all these sections ended up being important sections for positioning the book to the reader, and actually the content from these various reflections ended up there.

I think I’m startled by how much I had to say. I am a fan of “Swedish Death Cleaning” and I don’t like the idea of my notes being very hard to find, or it feeling like my work was “never released” or was “unfinished.” And so this process of writing publicly has been pretty interesting, but I like it.

I like that either I am writing content every day, or I am wondering about why I am not writing the content every day, and now I see that both are actually really helpful, and neither is a pain for me to read later.