Looking Forward :)

Still sick today. Still have to make a blogpost. What did I do today. I continued on with my spreadsheet. I have 22 left, so 1 or 2 more days to go to finish it.

And then what?

And then…then I don’t know. I guess then I will start editing it.

It’s occurred to me today, that with the ease of creating “polished, but AI sounding content” somebody actually writing their unhinged thoughts in a way that is obviously not AI will continue to have value, and so I should not be ashamed as my book continues to sound unhinged for a bit.

Editing just takes a long time, and it takes several passes, and currently I have made 0 editing passes through the whole book, and the number of editing passes I will take will be at least 3.

And then there will be diagrams and illustrations. But I am really really happy with it generally, and working on it has been…making me happy…and making me…more social.

After I get it all into the one document, it will feel a little bit scary. I will save it as its own copy as a saved state of just copying over the blogposts into their correct sections, start a new copy.

And then I will need a new process again. This here has been a “noun” process, which I have described in a previous post, and I might want a “verb” process.

It will probably require some kind of softening. This is a very soft book, and it’s got a lot of my love in it. I can’t really disappear into it, and can’t really disappear away from it. There is just a me, and a me happens to be soft, and happens to be working on this book.

What could the verb process be like? It could be like what I’m doing with the guitar. “Touch the document” every day, for as much time as makes me happy? Print out a random 5 pages, turn to those pages in the doc, and fiddle with them for as long as I want to?

I worry that “finishing the book” will stop being a priority. I can take a break from it, come back. Or I can “touch” it less frequently, only every other day.

I suppose now I have “touched” it every day since December 7, 2025. So far I’d been touching the book every day for 68 days.

And that has been fine I guess. That’s 2 months and a week. That tracks. It doesn’t feel like it’s been too long, doesn’t feel too short either. I suppose if I keep working on it every day, I will have some kind of result around what one can accomplish in 3,4,5,6 months, without paying too much attention to it. And so that is a motive to keep working on it every single day, “touching” it every single day.

But I am not sure what would be motivating, in the editing process. Editing is wonderful, as that is when your beautiful writing becomes even more clear and even more beautiful.

I think I worry I may end up being too much like myself in this process, or something like it. Or that doing “serious” writing in this way would make it feel like some kind of waste of time in an important way, like taking my writing seriously would make me feel like someone with way too much time, and I really should be spending my time in other ways.

But “editing” doesn’t have to be “serious” — who ever said so?

When I edit other people’s work, I certainly do not put on a “serious” hat. I don’t put on a “serious” hat when I edit my work too.

But so then why does editing a book like this feel suddenly “serious”? Editing other books of mine does not feel serious. For those books, I start at the beginning, and just keep going. To be fair though, none of those books are currently finished.

I like this idea of editing not being so serious. It’s just having a look at it and making it a bit better. It really is not that big a deal.

I think I will find the voice I want to “tell” the book in by staying aligned with what might feel important to me, in connection with the reader. I have a few readers who hope to read it, and so it’s not an imaginary connection.

But that’s easier said than done, somehow. I think I’m nervous by how much more writing is left, how much more editing, the size of the whole thing. How many essays it is, combined together coherently.

I can always print it out, or export it as a pretty pdf, when I get discouraged. I know it won’t feel like “no work.”

But I think this is maybe the kind of writer’s block people talk about when they talk about “perfectionist” writer’s block. I am scared to tinker with it because I am scared no amount of tinkering with it would actually make it any good, actually make it not a complete total fucking waste of time, or whatever the harsh feelings are.

And if one has nothing better to do, fine. But I do have things I need to do. And it can really be hard to do those things when I am thinking about this incomplete trash of a book.

But then to be fair I’d only been seriously working on it for 68 days. That’s not even the length of somebody’s summer coding internship. And I haven’t been working on it every day.

To be fair, if I work on the book, 8 hours a day, for 69 more days, it will probably be pretty good actually to be fair.

That’s a funny thing to think about.

I don’t know if that makes me more motivated, but it does quiet, the angry harsh thoughts. That if I spend 10 more weeks on this, every day, and not even treat it as a Tech Bootcamp, but treat it as, what I do in the evenings, after the gym and after dinner, before going to class for the Tech Bootcamp, it will probably be pretty good.

And then if I actually spend a Tech Bootcamp amount of time on it, it would really be good. If I spend 40 hours a week on it, for 10 weeks.

If I spent about 1 hour a day on this, for 68 days, then I actually so far only spent 68 hours on it. That’s like 1 week of working on it, on hard mode, full time. Maybe a bit more, maybe I spent between 1 and 2 hours on this a day, on average. But still.

Of course, those kinds of modes can be really painful, and that’s why I’m spreading it out. But if I really wanted to, I can put in “sprints” into the process, so that it feels spiritually profound somehow. One 8-hour day, on just the book, without any internet or social media, or something.

I think that’s why I wanted to do this spreadsheet activity pretty quickly, to get onto the next thing, faster.

But I should not think that I would not get some other intense activity I might want to do, sometime when I am in the next stage. I might want to go to a bar, or some other place, and sit there and be working on it, in public, while there are people around, or working on it in different places.

Or find cool quotes from different books, and collect the quotes. But there’s no reason I won’t find it “fun” by increasing its intensity, making it like my own sort of bootcamp.

I should keep working on this every day, instead of taking a break, and some of the days being small touches, and some of the days being really really intense.

Or one 10 hour day, with all of the David Lynch films playing in the background, or something.

There is a way to add profundity and heft to this, and maybe that would help.

To think about tomorrow…