This Project Management Step Is Complete. Next Up: Faces, Nodes, Edges
I put all the blogposts in the document! Hurray!
I realized why I was able to work on it while sick. I had it set up so that I get a very straightforward dopamine hit, while completing it, such that doing it, I know I will feel good about it. There won’t be unique weird humiliations about it, after I’d resolved around not feeling weird about it and trying to rewrite stuff, etc. Looking at my old work just made me straightforwardly happy.
What next?
I am thinking about yesterday’s post. Working on it in various ways every day to prepare it for a “CAMP” step, where I work on it a lot on some weekend, in some fun way, seems like a really motivating idea to me. But I haven’t figured out what that’ll be yet.
It is clear to me that the issue for the next step wouldn’t be “writing a bad book” — it would be “writing any book.” A lot of my stuff right now is notes. Turning it from “notes” to “essays” will be a step.
Right now it’s not a bad book or a good book. It’s just not a book. It doesn’t meet the minimum requirements of being a book. If I handed it to somebody to read like, oh hey read this book, they would go erm it’s not a book tho, but it’s interesting. They would ask me a lot of questions.
“Questions that the reader would ask, that I would have to answer” is kind of the thing. It’s a process potentially, imagining the reader going “erm why is this like this” or “can you explain why this is like this” and filling in all the gaps.
It’s like I put a lot of nodes in there, but not even that many faces, and definitely not that many edges.
“Making the faces, nodes, and edges obvious such that the reader can follow along what I have in mind — in mind, in my mind” IS the work of writing the book.
So long as I am making myself more legible, I know I’m on the right track.
What is striking to me about this chart is that so many parts of the book are covered, over me writing over 63 days, without me putting “effort” into “thinking about making sure different parts are covered.” And then the order of them being covered being kind of random! You can see that in the beginning, more posts are relevant to the “introduction” but not all of them! And then a cluster of more posts relevant to the “introduction” come up again in the middle and then again near the end!
I thought it was an interesting visual to share about how different moods affect what you are writing. Also almost every post I wrote is making it into the book! There were just a few “meta-thinking” ones that aren’t going to be in it. Even if there was a ratio of 1:1, posts that make it into the book versus “meta-thinking” I’d think that was a fine ratio, and so I am surprised that almost all of them have content that is suitable material that I want in it.
Another interesting aspect that the “title” for each blogpost, given the content, is much more “obvious” way after writing it. Even after writing it that same day, and giving it a title, I ended up giving these posts very nondescript titles, that looking back now, the blogpost is quite coherent and probably deserves a more descriptive title 🫠 I find it interesting that inherent organization can indeed be discovered later.
It was a leap of faith for me, this process, to see if “organization” will be uncovered later, and it has been the case for me that the leaps of faith paid off
