My Own Relationship to My Own Posts
My posts are not what I consider my best work, but I consider them work, and it is work I almost certainly would not be doing in a different format, and certainly would not be doing in a format that is just out for the public like this, where both other people and my future self can go find it, without this substack which makes that very easy.
obviously I can’t do my actual writing yet or I would be doing it. But I generally believe that doing something is better than doing nothing.
but all of that is the boring stuff
the real thing I care about is if I can’t think about the things I want to think about, then having larger pieces, put down here, might mean that I can do something with those pieces later.
if whatever I am thinking about that was a slurry of words I put into blog-post shapes, then the next round later I can look at multiple blog posts and “find” the blog posts I didn’t write because I could not conceptualize those blog posts because I could not see it in my mind.
I would like a better process for this. Some kind of fairly simple method for inter-blog-post mathematics that I can hang out with and think about, or if I am not sure what to write about, I can pick a few blog posts, run some process on them, and that produce something more complex and closer to whatever I envision my “real work” to be.
Maybe let’s think of an example.
The past few blog posts, including this one, were pretty math-y, but not really related to each other.
Actually the past 12 blog posts are all ones I care a fair deal about getting a “good” version of, but it feels pretty out of my current skillset to do that in a timely manner.
But that also doesn’t make sense to me as real. There are probably ways for me to think about those, and work on those.
Maybe I don’t want to edit old blog posts, because there are new blog posts to work on, every day!
But that doesn’t make sense to me either, because I can just make a new blog post that is a revision of an old blog post.
Anyway, I see my blog posts are building blocks for other blog posts, and also building blocks for their own best versions, and if I never get around for actually doing the good versions or writing the interblog-post-super-special-good blog posts, whatever I managed to do is still up on here.
that way I at least don’t feel this weird pressure in my head in which I am trying to do something that is way too hard for me, on some axis, without even making progress on figuring out the axis.
this blog post itself can be better, under my own complaints of my other blog posts. it is also unfinished.
it falls under the same rules and limitations as everything I am talking about here.
I can probably think more deeply about this “math between blog posts” I care about and this way of making my blog posts better that seems impossible
but my issue is conceptual, it’s not in the writing
it might be in the writing, the two can be coupled in unexpected ways